In ancient China, there was a saying that “good wine is not afraid of in the depth of the alley”, “good news does not go out, but bad news spread far and wide”.For many people in China, our life circle is getting narrower and narrower.With the development of Internet economy,shopping online has become a part of our life. We can get the basic necessities of life online.Faced with a large amount of information noise every day, consumers also hope to reduce the interference of information noise through online word of mouth.In China, Meituan and dianping are leaders in group buying.If you want any kind of entertainment, you can almost have it covered by eating, living, traveling, playing and so on. More importantly, Meituan and dianping can fully see the detailed comments of other consumers.Meituan and dianping mainly use online word-of-mouth marketing, which is a common way of online marketing. The ultimate goal is to expose more consumers to the products and services of enterprises and stimulate their purchasing desire.

Why does Meituan focus on first- and second-tier cities in China, while dianping focuses on third – and fourth-tier cities?

• This is the necessity of information transmission mode.

As a group purchase website closely related to life, they do not choose TV, radio and other mass channels, but choose to focus on building advertising as the battlefield.And the strategy is very different.Meituan focuses on the first-tier and second-tier cities. The ads of “once beautiful, once regiment” are obviously fresh and artistic.Dazhongdianping focuses on third-tier and fourth-tier cities, and the advertisement of “what is the happiness of five yuan” is simple, direct and earthy.

The development of dazhongdianping in the past decade has established its position and threshold in the field of life services, especially in the first-tier and second-tier cities, where it enjoys an unshakable position and reputation.Since its establishment, Meituan has maintained an annual growth rate of 300% in terms of transaction volume, with third-tier and fourth-tier cities as its base areas.For dianping, after gaining access to traffic with WeChat, it becomes the top priority to vigorously expand the third-tier and fourth-tier markets. What about Meituan?Then it needs to “surround the cities with the countryside”, to deepen and harvest the population in the first and second-tier cities.

As we all know, both Meituan and dianping are typical O2O representatives. Connecting online and offline consumers is an important business form and a basic path for users to obtain and transform information.Therefore, hunting precise users online and offline becomes significant to them.

However, from the perspective of the pattern of consumers’ access to information, there are simply two kinds, one is called active and the other is called passive.Initiative is the way that this person obtains information, and passivity is the life space that this person is what.Round up a consumer, the left hand side is how to grasp his access to information, and the right hand side is how to grasp his most important living space.Between the two, the man could not get away.At present, the information platform represented by social media has obviously become the main way for consumers to actively obtain information, while the media channel represented by the focus circle is the latter.As typical O2O enterprises, Meituan and dianping are bound to combine online and offline marketing promotion if they want to capture consumers.

2. Key channels to compete for users

Both Meituan and dianping are major local life services, providing consumer information such as eating, drinking and entertainment.Their users are highly overlapping with the crowd in the focus building, and they are all aged between 20 and 45 years old. They are high-quality consumer groups mainly composed of urban white-collar workers, office workers and business elites.

In addition, the current TV media ratings continue to decline, and video website promotion type micro film is increasingly no one.Both are awash in information.But the focus of this kind of building advertising is different, it is a mandatory push.It captures the boredom and fragmentation of the masses.Because in the moment waiting for the elevator, looking at the building advertising is your best way to avoid embarrassment and eliminate boredom.

Therefore, if the prime time (commuting time) to its potential consumers to push advertising content, hunting effect is obvious.

The marketing strategies of Meituan and dianping have been very successful so far. The main reasons are as follows:

•     The first is marketing model analysis.

The positioning of Meituan platform — the website of urban life consumption guide.Dianping was founded in Shanghai in April 2003.Dianping is the leading local life information and transaction platform in China and the earliest independent third-party consumer review website in the world.Meituan is a group purchase website established on March 4, 2010.In 2015, Meituan and dianping merged.Meituan review has four sections: in-store catering, hotel tourism, online delivery and mobile travel, among which delivery is the most important support for the company’s valuation.Meituan review is the largest urban living and consumption guide website in China.It is mainly committed to providing local catering, leisure, entertainment and other life services for consumers and providing objective and accurate localized consumption information for the vast number of potential consumers. It is a comprehensive platform and guide for consumers to freely publish consumption comments and share consumption information.With the popularization of the Internet and the rapid development of e-commerce, the network media platform has been quickly recognized and accepted by people with its convenient and fast communication mode.

• The second is the use of word of mouth marketing, highlighting the third-party review model.

Dianping has observed the shortcoming of information asymmetry in the traditional mode of consumer guide websites, which goes against the trend and puts consumers in the dominant position. Compared with the traditional marketing mode of self-promotion, this proposition is undoubtedly recognized and loved by more consumer groups.It advocates to be a platform for consumers to share information with each other after they have their own tastes, and focuses on the neutral third-party review model, which is not the initiative of dianping but has been carried forward.

• The other is marketing landing, different industry alliance to achieve a win-win situation.

Dianping’s third-party review model has attracted more than 13 million users’ active participation and response, and it is also committed to strengthening cooperation with merchants and constantly launching various additional and convenient services to meet consumers’ needs.Even with mobile, unicom, telecom and other communications companies, with more efficient way of SMS, mobile phone or the Internet offers nearly 500 million mobile phone users in China anywhere in the consumer services such as catering, shopping and entertainment information, this depends on the big, informative and update information timely guide platform, urban consumption quickly caught the attention of the masses of consumers and businesses.

Believe in the near future, the public comment on nets will continue rapid development with its unique marketing model, meet the demand of times development, in the vast number of consumers and psychological the mood, not only loved by consumers and support, have given us a lot of convenience, at the same time both on the marketing and development plan is a success.