Choosing a media platform is not that difficult.
For example, a North American marketer wants to promote his products in China. How will he choose a media platform? Baidu, Taobao, Tencent and other Chinese localized platforms will become their marketing tools, so I believe he will definitely choose these companies. Today, Baidu is the most successful company in China’s search engine marketing field, Taobao is the largest e-commerce platform, and Tencent is the media platform with the largest user scale and the strongest user stickiness among Chinese social media platforms. Whether from market share, user stickiness or activity indicators, Baidu and Tencent’s performance in China is better than that of Google and Facebook in China. Therefore, for this North American company, when entering the Chinese market, choosing Baidu and Tencent as new media platforms is an easy and correct decision.
If you are preparing to enter a new market, whether it is entering a country or region that has not been explored, entering an industry field that has not been involved, or a new target customer group, you can use research on market capacity, audience stickiness, user activity and other related metrics to help you make such a decision.
In most cases, the decision of whether to adopt a new media platform is not as simple and direct as the story of North American companies entering the Chinese market. The world is changing very fast, and it is necessary to “occupy a position” as early as possible.
In the business world, many choices are not black and white, or either this or that. Between black and white are different shades of gray from dark to light. This seemingly gradual choice is the most difficult. Especially in the field of social media marketing, the speed of change is particularly amazing, and marketers are often required to respond quickly to the rapidly changing world. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp is an example. WhatsApp is a new mobile social media marketing platform created in 2009. When the company was acquired by Facebook in March 2014, it was only five years old and had only 55 employees. Such a company would be a small or medium-sized company in the United States, European countries or China, but Facebook spent $19 billion to acquire this company.
Many social media platforms will have such a stage. Although the total number of users is not obvious, they have gathered a large number of high-quality active users. Marketing activities carried out in the early stages of the creation of such platforms usually yield very impressive returns on investment. Therefore, many marketers who started Facebook, Sina Weibo, and WeChat marketing very early on have achieved good returns on investment. The author once visited a game developer who expanded into the Taiwan and Southeast Asian markets only through Facebook. In the early days of Facebook’s booming development, they could easily achieve tens of thousands of new users every month, but the marketing costs were not high. This game developer was undoubtedly very lucky. Many domestic marketers also had similar stories in the early days of the rapid development of Weibo and WeChat.
Therefore, in the face of unknown environmental changes, if your marketing resources are sufficient to support your attempts, it is better to put the new platform into operation as soon as possible when it first emerges and “occupy a position” as soon as possible. Diving is always much easier than attacking from above. When your competitors enter, they can only sigh at your back.