Why do those marketers make low-quality ads but make more money than you?

Let me introduce two people to you. Do you think they are familiar to you?

At 8:45 in the morning, Daniel , wearing a slim-fit shirt, strode into the luxurious office building. Coming out from the 21st floor, he saw the company’s big flashing logo. He opened his MacBook and chatted with his colleague Sammy about fashion and the latest urban art exhibitions.

They had a meeting at 10:30 and discussed marketing strategies. Daniel talked about the hottest new brand in the United States, and Sammy added popular marketing concepts. In the eyes of others, they were elite marketers .

But they were unhappy because product sales had been sluggish for several months . This is really weird. I listened to the master's paid course, used the latest marketing concepts, borrowed the copywriting of emerging American fashion brands, and hired a very expensive photographer to take the photos. Why - the products still don't sell?

Do you feel familiar with this? I'm not afraid of you laughing at me, but when I was working in a 4A advertising company, I felt like I was Daniel. If you also work in a high-end office building, you might also think, hey, that Sammy is me!

The most annoying thing happened at the dinner table. When you are worried about performance, your friend tells you that their company's sales have been booming in the past two years. He also sent you the product copy, and you almost fainted because it was so low! The packaging is ordinary, the pictures are rustic, and the copywriting is vulgar, but when you look at the sales, it’s incredible. The sales made in 3 days are more than what I made in half a month! sky!

As the conversation got heated, everyone started talking about salaries. When your friend told you about his bonus, you realized that the number was higher than your salary. You forced yourself to smile, but you were crying inside...

Working in the same field of marketing, the top student can’t beat the country bumpkin . What went wrong?

1.Daniel and Xiaogang

Marketers are always at the forefront of fashion.

There is a particularly vivid saying by marketers : "Coffee must be hand-brewed, and beer must be craft beer. Stir-fried tomatoes must have a sense of ritual, and milk tea must be eaten at Internet celebrity stores. When buying a cooking pan, you have to go to Zhihu to find a product with thousands of likes. " Even if you don’t understand what the middle class is, you must first bring a wave of middle-class luxury.

So what is written is also middle-class copywriting. I don’t know when it started, but many copywriting styles seem to be the same.

Let’s show off some English first . ABS environmentally friendly materials, GMP certification, German Red Dot Design Award, US cotton certification. Using English will make the tone stand out.

Add some professional terms , such as 304 stainless steel, integrated barrel-type filter element, 100% polyester fiber... Write some professional concepts that ordinary people have never heard of, so that people feel that the product is professional and high-end enough.

Finally, let me express my craftsmanship : 26 design drafts, 39 processes, 11 hours of carving, 85 days of polishing... plus words like "extreme", "craftsman", "careful polishing", and "changing the world", in an attempt to bring sincerity and touching feelings to consumers.

If you want to sell your product to enthusiasts or rich people , this may be useful, but if you want the mass market , it is really dangerous.

Because in the mass market, people like Daniel and Sammy who are fashionable and knowledgeable may account for less than 10%. 90% of consumers are ordinary people who live in second-tier and third-tier cities and are not in the marketing industry.

Xiaofang, a finance major, graduated from a university that few people had heard of. She took the bus and went to work in an ordinary and inconspicuous building. Just after 11 o'clock, she asked her colleagues to order takeout, discussing which one was delicious, and chatted with her colleagues about celebrity gossip at noon. Xiaogang, a network administrator, graduated from a junior college. Apart from computers, he doesn’t know much about other things. When the boss is not around, he will secretly play a game of King of Glory.

When Daniel was writing the copy, the consumers in his mind were another Daniel and another Sammy, but in fact, most of the consumers were Xiaogang and Xiaofang.

Xiaofang and Xiaogang couldn't understand all the English terms and parameters.

If you don’t believe me, go to Fuzhou or Nanning and stop a few passers-by on the street and ask them if they know about US COTTON and if they have ever heard of polyester fiber.

Xiaogang and Xiaofang have never thought about starting a business , nor do they have any desire to change the world. They just hope to get off work on time every day and have their boss give them mooncakes and bonuses during the holidays. When they see the " craftsmanship copywriting ", they don't resonate with it.

Daniel’s copywriting doesn’t sell products, and this is the problem.

At this point, you may be wondering, what kind of copy should we write to impress Xiaogang and Xiaofang?

I have thought about it for a long time and summarized three points. They are all very important. Please take notes.

• The first is that it must be popular.
• Second, it’s best to be simple.
• The third point is very, very simple.

Why is XX so successful? A very important point is that their copywriters Xiaogang and Xiaofang can understand it. A pair of slippers made by a certain MUJI manufacturer is 12.9 yuan, and a trolley case made by a certain Xinli manufacturer is 299 yuan. Even an elementary school graduate can understand this. Orders from second-tier and third-tier cities are pouring in.

A professional neck pillow, the copy also describes the gel cutting process and the comfort of memory foam, but the marketer is more cautious, he knows that a large number of consumers are laymen, they are novice users, so he wrote a special paragraph to emphasize:

Several five-star hotels, such as XXX, XXX and XXX, have purchased this type of pillow. You can get it at a special price during this promotion, which is cheaper than their purchase price!

Xiaogang and Xiaofang understood it immediately, and they entered the password and paid the order.

That’s right. If you want to conquer the vast mass market, your selling point copy must be very popular, popular enough to meet the following two conditions:

First, most ordinary Chinese people can understand it as soon as they hear it. Second, he was willing to tell his friends.

It sounds easy but is difficult to write. If you don’t believe me, try writing about the product you have on hand.

Before you fall into deep thinking, here is a case to inspire you. A ginger candy paste became a hot seller. Many of its copywritings looked very low-level, but they all met the above two conditions!

The copy begins with an appeal to fear.

According to relevant data, 90 percent of modern people have one symptom - dampness .

In traditional Chinese medicine, wind, cold, heat, dampness, dryness and fire are the six evil spirits that cause illness in the human body. Among the six evils, dampness is the most lethal. Dampness is also one of the main reasons why modern people suffer from weak spleen and stomach, lack of energy, and easy puffiness.

Drinking a bowl of authentic Huaijiangtangpaste every morning can save your body and drive away the heaviest moisture of the year.

Hey, this is really smart. Marketers are targeting the two most common needs of the public: refreshing and losing weight. Who can resist these two points? The question is, what can you use to prove that your ginger paste has this effect?

The marketer showed his skills.

XX County, XX City, Henan Province, is the core production area of ​​Huaijiang Sugar Paste. Because the production process has a history of hundreds of years. Its production process was even reported by CCTV.

Accompanied by a screenshot of a documentary, a simple old lady brought out a pot of ginger candy, which really had the ancient style of a century-old craft.

The XX Huai ginger we selected has a ginger essential oil content of up to 0.35%, while the ginger essential oil from ordinary places is only 0.2%. Therefore, XX Huai ginger has become a unique medicinal material in traditional Chinese medicine.

If there is only this text, it would still look quite suspicious, as if the seller is bragging about his own products. However, when coupled with the following introduction by an expert from CCTV, it suddenly feels authoritative and credible.

In order to stimulate the purchasing desire of female customers, the copy also wrote - " Women taking this ointment can warm the meridians and relieve pain, warm the uterus to aid pregnancy, regulate qi and blood, beautify the face and lose weight. " How to prove this? The tweet shows a Gif. If you search on Baidu, you will find a lot of articles about the health benefits of ginger paste. Many media have reported on it!

This kind of advertisement is neither cool nor flashy, but after watching it, Xiaogang and Xiaofang found it very believable! Not only will they buy the product themselves, but they will also recommend it to their friends because the selling point copy is very popular and easy to explain.

After a few days of promotion , the sales volume has reached 22,000. Multiplying this by the average customer spending of 48 yuan, it is calculated that the company has made a turnover of 1.056 million yuan. Although the advertisement is a bit crude, the products have actually been sold.

A brand in Guangdong was not well-known. When launching a new product, the boss asked a new girl who had just been working as a copywriter for 2 years to write it and gave her a framework.

• Major media outlets such as NetEase, Sina , and Sohu are reporting on this (with news screenshots)
• Stars in Hong Kong dramas all use this (props on the star's desk in a certain episode)
• All the Fortune 500 companies purchased this (actually, they just gave some gifts to their employees at their party)
• The country has issued a report to test and the quality is qualified (the original report with seal)

All of the above things can be done by finding news sources to publish some articles, doing some SEO , and getting some low-cost sponsorship, but it feels great when written down, and it is easy to understand. After the launch, the ROI reached 1:7. For every 1 yuan invested in advertising, 7 yuan in sales was earned. Even the girl who wrote the copy was shocked.

If we just want to go for the niche high-end route, it's fine for us to be Daniel and Sammy for the rest of our lives. But if we want a broad mass market, we must break away from the circle of marketers, raise our vision, look down at the vast map of China from the plane, see clearly who more than 80% of consumers are, and make advertisements that they can understand.

2. 10 yuan is a hurdle for consumers

The second thing Daniel and Sammy didn't expect was that Xiaogang and Xiaofang's income was very low, lower than they had imagined.

Without understanding this, it’s easy to make mistakes in pricing and copywriting.

Two months ago, Lao Guan shared a copy of a vice president of a new media company selling his new media courses . There was a paragraph that read:

The Matthew effect exists in any industry: the strong become stronger and the weak become weaker. A monthly salary of 10,000 yuan is the watershed for new media people. Once you cross this hurdle, you will achieve accelerated growth.

Readers in Beijing burst out laughing. If you hire any skilled new media employee now, the salary will be between 10,000 and 15,000 yuan. How can this be considered a watershed? This is the starting price!

You can open a recruitment website now and check. In second- and third-tier cities, the starting monthly salary for new media editors is 3,000-5,000, and you can recruit skilled people for 6,000. With a monthly income of 10,000, you are already at the level of a director or a top talent. In the eyes of newcomers in the workplace, that is a very impressive existence.

The vice president's copywriting was correct, and his insight into the mass market was very accurate.

Lao Guan would like to give a special reminder to marketers who work in high-end office buildings in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or second-tier cities that the mass consumers are not as wealthy as you, and they are very sensitive to prices.

Many marketers see advertisements, think the products are good, and then when they see the price is 100 yuan or even less than 300 yuan, they buy them without feeling any pressure. But for many ordinary people, something that costs 100 yuan is really not cheap.

For the recent products that have seen a surge in sales, without exception, they have made the portions smaller and priced very low . The ginger candy paste that I just mentioned with sales of 1 million is 48 yuan a jar, a farm honey with sales of over 200,000 is 49 yuan a jar, and a Taiwanese teeth whitening powder with a very high conversion rate is 36 yuan a box, all of which are less than 50 yuan.

One agricultural product owner even thought that 50 yuan was too expensive. He did several crowdfunding campaigns to test sales and came to the conclusion: If he wanted to sell high volumes, the product must be priced at 29 yuan. Once the price was set at 39 yuan, he would lose a large number of customers.

A few dozen dollars is nothing to Daniel and Sammy, but to Xiaofang and Xiaogang, it is enough to make them feel distressed. While elite marketers are discussing luxury goods, many ordinary office workers love to discuss where sales are taking place, how they can save 10 yuan on laundry detergent, and how to top up the lunch order so they can get a lunch box for only 8 yuan.

When you can’t sell a product very cheaply, you can sell it at a higher price, but it is very important that you make people feel it is “cheap” and “worth it”.

Many product copywriting emphasizes craftsmanship and the creation of a high-end style, but at the end of the article, they are too shy to talk about money and just say that the product is priced at X99 yuan. As for why it is sold at this price, they don’t say anything, as if they are embarrassed to talk about money.

An ordinary person earns three to five thousand a month. If you ask others to give you a few hundred dollars and you don’t explain clearly why, will they be willing to do so?

When selling things to the public, don’t be afraid to talk about money. Be proactive in the discussion so that consumers feel that you are getting a good deal.

How can we make consumers feel that they are getting a good deal? Use price anchor.

If you tell the customer that something is worth 100 and is now only sold for 50, he will think it is a great bargain.

A type of honey mainly comes from the northern Shaanxi Plateau, collected naturally by an old beekeeper, brewed for 10-15 days, and is pure wild mountain nectar.

At the end of the article, there is a call for purchase. How much is the appropriate price for a 500-gram can of honey? 30 yuan? 80 yuan? In fact, the consumer doesn’t understand either, he is an outsider.

The key here is to make him feel cheap. The text is written like this -

The original price of XX wild honey 500g is 99 yuan, and the current price is 49 yuan. Buy two bottles (500*2) and get a 9 yuan discount. Limited to 3,000 pieces! While stocks last.

This sentence is very common and many marketers use it, but the picture below shows the author's wisdom.

The same model on JD.com is 99 yuan.

(Different packaging, customized models are endorsed by Uncle Chen)

When consumers see that the price is half the price after the packaging has been changed, they buy it! Anyway, I don’t care about the packaging when I drink honey! You can save 50 yuan. Maybe in a corner of an office, a marketer is laughing secretly. The 99 is just a specially set product number that is never promoted and is used to prove that the product is worth 99 euros. This optimized copy helped the company earn 38.4% more in sales.

Let’s look at a more well-known company, which was born in Wuhu, Anhui. They have made nut e-commerce a national giant. A very important reason for this is that they are grassroots and they understand mass consumers better than marketers in first-tier cities.

You must be familiar with this brand, and you may often visit their mall. But have you noticed one detail: the theme of its activities is always changing, such as the early purchase of Mid-Autumn Festival gifts, rock-bottom prices in summer, and Dragon Boat Festival discount carnival... But no matter how the theme changes, there is one discount activity that cannot be changed, that is, 100 yuan off for purchases over 199 yuan .

When you click in, you won’t find many valuable nut products. Most of them are non-main snacks, or even some marginal products, such as biscuits and dried fruits. But it doesn't matter, he caters to the bargain-hunting mentality of the general consumers. Imagine that you add items to the shopping cart one by one, and when the total amount reaches 199 yuan, you only have to pay 99 yuan at checkout. That feeling is so great, as if the salesperson made a mistake in the calculation and charged you 100 yuan less.

This is their insight, there is a large group of consumers whose desire to get a bargain is greater than their desire to pursue quality.

This is also the current situation in China. While the media discusses consumption upgrades and debates whether earning 500,000 yuan a year is considered middle class or 1 million yuan a year, there are still a large number of ordinary people who only earn 3,000 or 5,000 yuan a month.

Their orders are placed with marketers who understand them.