Since Tim O’Reilly proposed the concept of Web 2.0 in 2004, we call it the Web 2.0 era. With the richness and popularity of Internet applications, the “Matthew effect” has become a hot word among Internet investors. The strong will always be strong, the winner takes all, and oligopoly seem to be inevitable. The generation that grew up with the Internet is naturally anti-monopoly. They began to dominate the Internet voice and promote the transfer of the discourse power of the network world from portal oligopolies to users. This is the most significant change of Web 2.0. Chinese netizens are no strangers to this. A book called “Sense of Participation” pushed Lei Jun and Xiaomi to the top. Xiaomi’s success is the success of “Mi fans”, a product of the era of “standing on the wind, even pigs can fly”, and a textbook innovation model of “Leibs” (Lei Jun’s nickname)’s deep understanding of the essence of We 2.0. Internet users’ right to speak is realized through UGC (User Generated Content). From Web 1.0, when content was mainly produced by enterprises, to Web 2.0, when content was produced by massive users, the number of content production entities has exploded, and the corresponding content itself has spread across the entire network with a more violent “explosion”. At the same time, users are also disseminators of content, and the speed of “fission” has exceeded people’s imagination. At this time, some psychological terms began to be known to people, such as the “herd effect” (a phenomenon caused by herd mentality). For example, on the Internet, users are willing to listen to the advice of netizens, such as netizens’ comments on a restaurant seem to be more trustworthy than the information presented by the merchant itself. The characteristics of netizens’ willingness to watch and spread hot events have pushed some events to become “hot searches”. The herd effect gave birth to KOL (Key Opinion Leader, opinion leader), ordinary public figures began to have a huge social influence. In the process of the public building a “personality” and striving to become a KOL, the term “Internet celebrity” was born, that is, a “small KOL” with a lower threshold than traditional KOLs and more niche fields than KOLs. They deeply studied interpersonal communication, and the “six degrees of separation theory” was widely mentioned. During this period, outstanding Internet companies further consolidated their monopoly and transformed into platform-based giants. Alibaba became an e-commerce platform, Twitter and WeChat became instant communication platforms, YouTube and TikTok became video social media platforms, and LinkedIn became a workplace social platform… Network effects and the six degrees of separation theory played an amazing role on these platforms. The user scale of each platform is hundreds of millions. They spend a lot of time on the platform every day, generating content and disseminating content, creating the best environment for the explosive growth of digital marketing.
Digital marketing has truly entered the golden age, and the following digital marketing models have emerged:
(1) Search engine marketing. Its representative models are display advertising based on CPM and CPC advertising. Paid search ads. Display ads are mainly used for brand promotion; search ads are considered to be a precise pay-per-performance model that focuses on measurable returns on investment. The representative platform is Google. (2) Social media marketing. There are many types of social media, and social media represented by Facebook follows the search engine marketing model. Social media is particularly suitable for broad content marketing (content of various media nature), such as photographers, podcasts, etc., which usually use high-quality content to achieve marketing goals. Directly forming a community and conducting continuous interaction allows event marketing to be creative.
(3) Live broadcast marketing. The live broadcast marketing that has emerged in recent years has surpassed all previous models in terms of monetization speed, and often occurs simultaneously with direct sales. Live broadcasts can be conducted without relying on search engines or social media platforms, and often integrate traffic from various channels, including offline traffic, to build a live broadcast marketing environment with highly concentrated resources and traffic. Well-known e-commerce anchors are motivating other anchors with sales of hundreds of millions.
The above three digital marketing models are particularly widely used in the field of cross-border e-commerce. The general feeling of practitioners in the cross-border e-commerce field in the Web 2.0 era is that: digital marketing tools are extremely rich, “gameplay” is flourishing, the switching speed is hard to keep up, and the money is endless.