Day 2 of the Internet Marketing Trade Show in Shenzhen China

Been a busy couple days here in Shenzhen, China office! We have been preparing for the Internet Trade show for a while now. We have a large saleslion logo and other items here to proudly display our product.

The sales and marketing department has been here each day, while our technology department Tommy Tang and Bas Sluitman paid a visit yesterday, Bas will also be here later this afternoon. They have a big deadline coming after the weekend and have been working late and harder then ever.

The majority of the companies showing here are b2c Chinese domestic companies. During the open forum they discussed the big opportunity in China will be B2C vertical markets. Niche product sites selling unique and focused goods, covering all industries and further extending the development of the chinese internet environment. I have also seens dating websites, C2c “outsourcing” connnecting freelancers to small businesses, and b2b

More pictures coming soon, cameraphones havebeen flashing from staff and friends for days.

Why social media?

Have you thought about why you should make social media marketing? what is the social medai for?

It comes down to gaining a competitive advantage. I like the quote from Oliver Young at Forrester Research:  “Marketers who embrace social media will outdistance competition, build community following, and boost loyalty” 

What better time to build better relationships with your customers than during a recession? Budgets are slim and purchasing decisions are often made based on relationships and connections right along with price. Word of mouth is powerful in good economic times and it’s even more impactful when economic pressures drive companies to be more creative and resourceful in purchasing products and services.

Here is six out of the top ten digital marketing tactics involving social media:

• blogging,
• microblogging,
• social networking,
• social media monitoring,
• blogger relations
• social media advertising.

Recently, Forrester & MarketingProfs published the results (eMarketer coverage) of a joint study of B-to-B Marketing in 2009 that ranked changes in marketing budget allocation. Of the top ten tactics, four were social media focused: online video, podcasts or rich media; discussion forums, social networks or communities; other web 2.0 media.

There’s reason for such optimism surrounding the social web. Companies that properly plan and implement social participation, can reap a variety of benefits:

• Build thought leadership
• Improve customer relationships
• Improve recruiting
• Reduce customer service costs
• Improve search engine rankings
• Increase media coverage
• Influence sales

NOW, COME ON, follow us on twitter @saleslion , try to begin your social media journey

Alibaba Group Launched New SNS

More and more Social Network website  are launched these days.

Last month the Bai community is launched by Sohu.com

and also the Taobao(Alibaba Group) SNS called Tao Jianghu.(Jianghu is a name to descripe a industry in china. )

the top 3 big site Sina.com is preparing its own social network, integrate with its wonderful blog system, But sina was making a kind of invitation marketing: only release the news of the product, but never open the registration, caused many people  excited to try.

and Yesterday Chinese B2B e-commerce group Alibaba  announced plans to launch a newly-developed product “Ren Mai Tong” today, integrating e-commerce and the social networking service functions to provide an online community for business people.

It will not only provide online gaming interactive functions, but also focus on the business networking activities to promote better business relations.

one of the chief engineer for the “Ren Mai Tong” product, told local media that the new service includes functions such as business card production, friends’ business cards holder, latest news, and customer news aggregation. In addition, if two parties reach an agreement on the website, they can realize online trading with Alibaba’s online payment platform Alipay.

I list some big SNS in china here.

Lately News in Search Engine industry

1, The Bing wave has caught Google’s attention. In a report published in the New York Post, Google has assembled a small team of top engineers to respond to the emergence of Bing, led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Is Google just being vigilant, or is the tech juggernaut genuinely concerned that Bing could be the entity that finally challenges it for market share?

Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing’s crucial search algorithm differs from that used by the company he founded in 1998 with Stanford University classmate Larry Page.

2, Google is addressing real-time problem and seems to be preparing to release its own microblogging search engine. This new product will sort results by relevancy, will be integrated with standard Google search, and will appear based on frequently-used keywords or current events. It also looks like its main source of results will come from Twitter .

While not an absolute confirmation of the microblogging search engine’s existence, it’s tough for us to believe that Google isn’t working on something to search Twitter and the other microblogs. This would drastically improve Google’s real-time results and shore up a weakness it currently possesses.

B2C Trade Merchant - Using Sales Lion

How would a b2c trade merchant company use saleslion?

First, whats a b2c trade merchant? I define this as a financial retail shop that is targeting consumers (households and high net worth individuals). They are usually known for cold calling and trying to set up appointments and meetings to teach potential clients the value of investing, saving, and having a strategy for their retirement.

Ok, so how would Sales Lion get them more business?

1) define what they want more of? Leads, phone numbers, emails, seminar attendees? How does this business currently handle its incoming inquiries. This will then be what they target, a page to get more leads, or emails, or seminar attendees.

2) landing page creation - working together, we’ll create a page to convert visitors, get them to understand what you’re selling, and how to get involved.

3) drive traffic to this page - obviously this is important step, but we work with keywords, online advertising, and social media. Targetting the traffic you want.

4) incoming leads go to the saleslion lead management platform. Incoming leads are sent to the queue at the admin level. As an admin, they would assign the incoming leads to select sales reps.

The sales rep logs into their account and sees the new leads. they follow up via phone, email, or any other communication medium they prefer. As they move through the sales funnel, they assign these leads to different statuses. Once a lead closes, he/she (sales rep) closes it for the amount it went down for.

China SNS community signing up

www.xiaonei.com people find classmate in junior middle school and senior middle school and university as well

www.kaixin001.com most of them are office people. a make friends social website.

www.kaixin.com copy from kaixin001.com, by the xiaonei group. hot as well

www.hainei.com made by the founder of xiaonei.com, but he sold xiaonei.com to a group, and make a new one.

www.5gme.com as the IT community, the founder is the famous chinese internet guy named KESO.

http://xiaoyou.qq.com made by QQ, copy from the concept of xiaonei.com. and based on the large amount of QQ user, now it is chasing the xiaonei.com

www.ajj.cc made by the famous webmaster in chengdu, Mike saw that guy with moustache in the 4th Internet summit.

bai.sohu.com. made by the top 3 big site named SOHU.com, now you can register from this links. http://bai.sohu.com/user/reg/invite.do?u=113432&type=0&t=1245035278212&s=08fa195d1d83c7e06fc73b51dd37d31d

the other top 3 big site Sina.com is preparing its own SNS as well, it’ll be ok with 1 month.

www.tonglou.com.cn facus on the people who are in the same building. it said there are 98,000 buildings, 87,000 life community , 3,000 university and 21060 compines

www.tonlo.com/ similar with the tonglou.com.cn, but they are competitor. and most of them are shenzhen buildings

www.51.com look at this domain, you can understand how important it is, but I think half of the user are teenager.

www.bajie.cn one of the biggest shenzhen community.

above list is what I konw and what I think big enough to push the marketing campaign for saleslion

and there are also hundreds of SNS community in china focus on the vertical industry.

so If you konw some communities, you can tell us. thank you.

Why Use SalesLion? Different User Cases

So people ask me, WHAT DOES SALES LION DO? Jia Gan and I have been chatting a lot, and he pushed me to write this post about how different types of companies can use, and benefit from, Sales Lion.

A Quick 1,2,3 is - Customer signs up, we get a quick analysis of their business, what they are trying to sell, create a sales page for them, drive traffic to this page, and then give them the tools (dashboard) to manage their incoming inquiries.

1) Create a optimized landing page - we work with you to create an expertly optimized landing page to push your visitors. OPTIMIZED is not only for search engines, but also for EYEBALLS on your site, to get them to do what you want them to do, CONVERT!

2) Drive qualified traffic to your page, and get more incoming inquiries - After we’ve created this page, we will push traffic to the site, through online marketing tactics, depending on your budget.

3) Platform to manage your leads - You and your sales staff will be able to login to your account and see your inquiries. The admin will assign the leads to his/her staff to follow up with and close. You can see how many leads you’ve received, how much you’ve spent online advertising, where your leads come from, how your sales staff has done closing the leads, and HOW MUCH MONEY YOU’VE MADE!

Different Client User Cases

Factory - You are manufacturing widgets and want more inquiries. You use alibaba and maybe global sources, with maybe some more niche b2b directories as well. You are attending trade shows and trying to have your current customers refer new business. Maybe you have a website, but the English text isn’t the greatest and you are clueless how to market it to foreigners (for export market)

With Sales Lion, we help you create an expert sales page on your website, market it online and give you your saleslion account to quickly login and see your statuses and your sales staff’s progress on the incoming leads.

Trading Company - Similar needs as above, except maybe they have more products they need to market. This client would need multiple landing (sales pages) targetting different industries or topics.

Service Company - This company may currently be advertising online, but having difficulties as it may be lacking an experienced online media expert. They come to sales lion to better define their business requirements, create a top notch sales page, and drive traffic there from multiple sources.

The company may or may not have multiple sales staff, but can have Sales Lion dasbboard allocate different types of leads into different specialized salespersons. That way, different specialists can cover the appropriate business inquiry, quickly and intelligently.

B2C Website While Sales Lion does not currently connect to a shopping cart, the B2C client may want to capture more wholesale and distributor level sales accounts. They will make a sales page for a wholesale or b2b section on their site, and then those customers who want to buy large quantity can leave their information here to be contacted.

Also, incoming phone sales and large client referrals can be tracked and managed in the online sales lead management platform Sales Lion provides.

B2B Website - In a way, similar to a trading company above, this site wants to drive larger business transactions through its website. While SalesLion, as in the B2C site, does not offer e-commerce shopping cart solutions at this time, those customers that need to submit custom or detailed transaction details would populate a form on the saleslion optimized landing page, and an internal company salesman will later follow up with the customers, using the easy to view, easy to manage saleslion dashboard console.

Software Company - This client is selling online or retail software and wants to increase its online exposure and internet inquiries. They import their inquiries online and have their sales staff check up with the potential and current customers.

The software client would also make a great, well written and optimized sales page that would drive traffic and get more internet inquiries. These would be potential customers and those who want to license large quantities of the companies and / or partnerships. Reseller account inquiries and exclusive or white label account sales pages would also be created.

Brand Company - This client would want to build up its online exposure and get more eyeballs on its logo and brand. They sign up for Sales Lion and create a catchy landing page with their brand, what they offer, and a newsletter signup letting interested customers who want to stay on top of the changes in the company and the product / service.

This brand would make specials and different deals to push the online visitor to give their email and contact details. Maybe they also want resellers or distributors, but that would not be a direct need for this client.

I hope these different user scenarios make it clear for those who want to give Sales Lion a try, and can look at their company above to see how it would fit and flow.

cheers
Mike

Development, Coding, Management and Cultures

After three months of super fast development to get our product up and running it is now time to do major bug tracking organizing code and documenting the system.

We have been working hard to get where we are but also see still some bugs in the technology and we need to reorganize and do a spring cleaning of the servers. The type of rapid development we do has advantages and also its disadvantages. In order to develop fast we have implemented a couple of  “Gung Ho” tactics. These allow us to speed things up but also means we need to control things pretty tight. QC is key in this part of the development process and this is one of the reasons  why Marco joined our team.

Being a very talented and experienced programmer Marco is doing an audit of the code and assisting Tommy and me to clean and reorganize.

Working with people in different places all over the world is always interesting especially to see different programming methods. An advantage of this is that we can see the positives and negatives of both cultures and learn how to manage these in different ways. Learning to develop fast and hard in China to get our system ready for sales, using the expertise and knowledge of an experienced programmer like Marco to identify key pieces of our code and database will tweak our system and make it more efficient and scalable for the future.

So now we have people working in Finland, The Netherlands and China with people offering to help us sell in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and the US. And with people working in the Philippines is is starting to become an interesting and complex project to manage.

This means we have to start implementing methods all creative minds and technical talents hate. Standard Operating Procedures, Workflows and strict project management!! We have been working on this for several weeks now and processes are starting to get more organized.

Especially for the people working outside of the China office it is sometimes hard to know who to contact and what the right procedure is etc…

Anyway we are implementing new methods and learning every day.

Thanks to everybody in the DBRShenzhen Team ! Keep up the good work !!

Saleslion Online Marketing Seminar

DBRshenzhen had its first seminar on June 5, 2009 at Intercontinental Hotel Shenzhen to officially introduce Saleslion into China. The event was also set up with the goal to give more online marketing information, about how the trendy internet goes, how to improve online marketing promotion, how the social media impact the commercial business, etc.

There were about 60 guests attended our event. Everyone was quite active and raised up lots of question about online marketing and Saleslion product, how it helped them. Saleslion team was very active as well, which gave a deep impression to the audience.    

new online offer network opened - bizual

Today I received an email that Bizual.com was taken out of private beta and now available to all for its public beta.

This system is pretty cool, and best of all, its free!

Create an account that will be your personal as well as business profile.
You can then talk a bit about yourself, but mainly your company and your product or service.
Upload images of yourself and the company
make an offer!

usually offer some sort of special incentive or offer for people to take you up on.

The userbase can then “take up your offer” and you receive their request in your profile inbox to follow up later.

The system has feedback and points as well, to self-serve the winners and losers.

check our saleslion offer there!

What I feel is interesting here is the fact that again, FACE, a person, is the driver here. People on the internet, more and more, want a human being behind the product or service they are looking for. They want to know it is someone they feel they can trust.

Just more on the trending social media.