Liu Jingyun: A New Model of Online Marketing under Baidu's Open Platform

Recently, the launch of Baidu's open platform has sparked intense discussions in the internet community. Experts have mixed opinions about its impact on related industries. On September 3rd, Baidu’s promotion backend was also upgraded, and many friends participating in Baidu’s promotion services reported a decrease in keyword quality scores, with many promotional ideas no longer able to be placed on the left side. These changes have affected our online marketing work. Here, Liu Jingyun shares some insights on exploring new online marketing models under Baidu's open platform:

One: Definition of Baidu Open Platform:

Baidu Open Platform is an open data sharing and对接platform based on advanced frame computing technology and service concepts. Through this platform, webmasters and developers can submit structured data or resources, which will be directly displayed in search results.

For users, simply inputting their service needs into the "frame" allows the system to accurately identify and allocate them to the most suitable content providers, ultimately returning the most precise results to the user. This intelligent interactive model for internet demand, along with its simple and reliable implementation mechanism, is called "frame computing."

Two: The Impact of Baidu Open Platform

1. Websites cooperating with Baidu will gain substantial traffic, creating a Matthew effect where the strong get stronger, directly impacting the industry landscape.

2. User engagement with Baidu will increase as they can "search and use immediately" through Baidu’s open platform, allowing direct gaming, movie watching, music listening, etc., within Baidu’s webpage, retaining users on Baidu and achieving one-stop internet services.

3. Personal webmasters' interests are directly affected; when searching for keywords, we find that the first page results include Baidu's bidding ads, Baidu Open Platform, Baidu Encyclopedia, etc., leaving less space for SEO optimization, making it harder to acquire traffic.

4. Baidu’s bidding promotion prices continue to rise. After the upgrade of Baidu’s promotion backend on September 3rd, participants in Baidu promotion generally reported increased keyword prices, decreased quality scores, fewer or no left-side promotion positions, leading to more intense bidding, giving companies with strong capital advantages more development space, potentially forming market monopolies, while smaller enterprises with insufficient competitiveness will see significantly reduced returns on investment in Baidu promotion.

5. Reduces the influence of false information, viruses, and malware on netizens. Now, when we search for terms like "antivirus software" or "NetEase customer service phone number," Baidu Open Platform provides officially certified, accurate, and safe information.

6. Combats piracy and protects intellectual property owners' interests. Intellectual property or piracy issues have always been problems troubling search engines and even the entire internet industry. When we search for "Three Gates" on Baidu, a paid reading page appears. Baidu Application Open Platform offers users various monetization channels such as payment, donation, and advertising display, maximizing the value of application providers participating in Baidu’s open platform.

Three: Exploring New Online Marketing Models Under Baidu Open Platform

Under Baidu’s open platform, Liu Jingyun believes that the development of new online marketing models has two directions: one is embracing cooperation, and the other is seeking alternative paths. Below are personal insights on these two directions:

One: Embracing Cooperation

When Baidu’s promotion backend was upgraded, keyword prices rose again, and the reduction in left-side promotion positions became apparent. Everyone understands that as a search engine, Baidu must balance the search experience of netizens with the return on investment of Baidu promotion clients. Losing users means losing the commercial value of the search engine. With more and more customers joining Baidu’s bidding promotion, the number of promotion positions remains limited, meaning that Baidu’s network marketing system itself has capacity restrictions. At this point, Baidu adopts a strategy of prioritizing large customers and eliminating small-to-medium-sized customers with insufficient competitiveness, following the classic 80/20 principle, focusing on serving the 20% of large customers who bring 80% of the company's profits. However, as a commercial company, Baidu cannot afford to lose those small-to-medium-sized enterprise customers, so the Baidu Open Platform was born. Although Baidu Open Platform improves some users’ experiences, it cannot conceal its commercial value and may become a new form of bidding ranking. For example, when we search for "ranking of gynecological hospitals," the search results show participation from "Good Doctor" in Baidu’s open platform, displaying several domestic gynecological hospitals. This will be the next contested ad position in hospital online marketing, changing the pattern into Baidu and third-party cooperative websites sharing profits. Therefore, the first path of our embrace-cooperation strategy is to choose cooperation with content provider websites on Baidu’s open platform.

An increasing number of netizens have noticed that when searching on Baidu, most of the first-page results are Baidu's own products or channels. Baidu is building its own content empire. Content is the foundation of a search engine. Events like "Campus Network blocking Baidu," "Taobao blocking Baidu," and the recent heatedly discussed "Sina Blog blocking Baidu spiders" clearly indicate that Baidu must establish its own content empire to avoid being at the mercy of others, while also facilitating controllable content. Supported by powerful SEO technical teams, Baidu's own products intercept a large amount of traffic from competitors like Google and Sogou. This is why when we search for many keywords on Google, Baidu products also rank very high. To summarize, make good use of Baidu’s suite of products for network promotion. Many SEO professionals have a limited mindset focused solely on optimizing their own website rankings on Baidu. Liu Jingyun believes this mindset is restrictive because even if we achieve the best SEO, the number of Baidu snapshots we can obtain for the same keyword on the first page of Baidu is still limited, usually just one. Yet, SEO professionals need to painstakingly create a lot of original content, internal and external links, etc., confining their thinking to site optimization. Outside this circle lies vast resources and platforms that are not fully utilized. Creating a Baidu Zhihu, Baidu Baike, or Baidu Wenku product is far easier and yields more stable rankings than trying to improve our own website’s ranking. The key to this method is how to effectively channel the traffic from these Baidu snapshot rankings to our own website. Since Baidu is currently very powerful, if we cannot beat it, we should learn to embrace and utilize it.

Two: Seeking Alternative Paths

The alternative path strategy involves finding other network promotion methods or offline promotion methods. There are numerous ways of online marketing, so why stick only to search engine marketing? Surely, Baidu alone cannot define our fate. Consider marketing on other search engines like Google, Sou, or Sogou. Each search engine has its specific user base and certain commercial value, so you can choose to promote or optimize your website on these search engines for secondary search engine marketing. Another path is other forms of online marketing or offline marketing. The launch of Baidu Union Promotion is actually another profit-making approach considered by Baidu due to the capacity limitations of search promotion. We can obtain effective traffic from websites and communities through union promotion. Regarding union promotion techniques, I've previously given a class in the Hospital Online Marketing Grand Lecture Hall, so I won't elaborate here.

Forum marketing, news hype, soft article promotion, blog marketing, database marketing, SNS marketing, and the recently popular microblogging marketing, among other non-search engine marketing methods, show the diversified development of online promotion methods. Recently, industry friends proposed the concept of self-media marketing regarding microblogging marketing, where information dissemination transforms into individuals influencing groups, opinion leaders mutually promoting each other, and every individual becoming a media entity. The key to such online marketing methods lies in interaction and propagation. Why can't our online marketing model adopt these emerging online marketing methods for viral promotion to form a powerful word-of-mouth effect?

There are diverse online promotion methods, and new ones will continue to emerge. I hope all colleagues can fully leverage imagination and creativity to integrate online promotion methods and create more classic cases of online marketing. If we only focus on Baidu's inclusion rankings and keyword prices every day, we will become frogs at the bottom of a well, never seeing the vast sky outside.

Personal Tencent Weibo is now available: http://t.qq.com/liujingyun. Welcome to follow!

Author Information: Liu Jingyun, one of the founders of 6asem, a member of Blue Flame, a certified Baidu SEM consultant, a member of the China E-commerce Professional Manager Association, mentored by Jiang Likun, the founder of Push One. For more articles by the author, please visit www.liujingyun.com. A new hospital online marketing exchange group 3 has been established (QQ Group No. 111721901), welcoming peers engaged in hospital online marketing to join.

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