How does a brand do marketing on Zhihu? There may be no answer to this question on Zhihu, but I do!

Almost everyone who works in public relations knows that it is difficult to do marketing on Zhihu. For example, the content you post can easily be identified as advertising by the authorities and deleted, or you can invite a Zhihu celebrity to say something good about you, but it may backfire because an anonymous negative revelation suddenly becomes more popular. Zhihu's strict review of marketing content and its special attributes as a knowledge question-and-answer community make it difficult for all PRs to directly copy the marketing methods of Weibo. But as a community recognized as having high-quality users, Zhihu's users are the ones that many brands particularly want to penetrate. What should we do? Let’s talk today.

Members of my 10,000 PR community often seek third-party suppliers for Zhihu marketing. I have also communicated with many members of the client group. Someone spent 1 million on marketing on Zhihu, but the number of readers was only 80,000. The third-party marketing company still talked about it with relish, thinking that they did a great job and bragging about it everywhere. I am often asked a question: Are there any reliable Zhihu marketing suppliers? I think the reason you asked this question shows that you don't understand the Zhihu platform at all. Zhihu's community mechanism determines that the marketing method of big Vs buying soft articles will not work at all. Instead of wasting so much money on suppliers, it is better to manage your own institutional account seriously. This is the correct approach to Zhihu marketing.

How to say it? Zhihu opened an institutional account in July 2016. Any organization, including brand owners and even media, can open an institutional account as long as they meet Zhihu's registration requirements. You may think that for brands, this is similar to opening a Weibo or WeChat account, but it is not. Zhihu's platform operating strategy focuses on interaction, winning the favor and trust of users by answering questions, rather than focusing on publishing content like Weibo and WeChat's operating strategies.

Although the strategies are different, the operational ideas of the official new media are the same. How to explain it? In the era of decentralized social media , brands must have their own channels and platforms for expressing their opinions. The traditional platforms have shifted from official websites to official Weibo and WeChat, while official new media platforms have extended to multiple platforms including Zhihu, Maimai, LinkedIn, portals and Toutiao . On the one hand, they play a role in content distribution , but more importantly, they must create topics based on the attributes of each platform and face users directly. Becoming a KOL is the most cost-effective marketing method.

After saying so much nonsense, let’s get some practical information . Let me show you 5 Zhihu institutional accounts that are doing well.

1. Mercer Consulting: B2B brands prefer the long tail effect

Mercer Consulting is a human resources management consulting firm whose core audience is corporate HR, which is the traditional B2B business. Generally speaking, for B2B brands, any social media operation is more difficult than for 2C brands.

But Mercer has a good entry point. In the role of "human resources consultant", it uses the Zhihu platform to help users solve any problems related to the workplace.

Mercer’s profile is very interesting, “What is the most important thing in the 21st century? Talent!” On the interactive platform of Zhihu, Mercer accepts all questions about career, salary and benefits, and workplace sharing and answers them one by one. For example, in response to the question, “What are some employee benefits that are easily overlooked?” Mercer sent consultant Scott He to answer the question and cleverly demonstrated the value of its consulting services.

Scott believes that benefits are overlooked because of poor communication from companies. He also gave an example. I once had a friend who was faced with two job choices, one with a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan and the other with a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan. Finally, he chose the position with a salary of 7,000 yuan. I asked him why he chose the one that paid less between two companies with similar reputations. He replied: Because when the company gave him the offer letter, in addition to the monthly salary of 7,000 yuan, it also marked: training plan: valued at xxxx yuan; medical insurance: valued at xxx yuan; travel allowance: valued at xxx yuan; parents' insurance: valued at xxx yuan; ...which adds up to more than 10,000 yuan... I took a look and found that the other company probably also had these benefits, but they did not advertise them, and thus missed out on talented people.

Therefore, Mercer began to use this topic to emphasize its own value: We have helped our clients design various welfare publicity plans, including health expositions, WeChat serial stories, and health tips emails, to form corporate welfare brands, help companies attract and retain talent, and better play the role of welfare. For companies, you spend so much money on welfare, but if you don’t promote it well, it will all be wasted if you fail in the end.

What’s more worth mentioning is that unlike Weibo, WeChat and other social platforms where the popularity of topics can only last for a day at most, Zhihu’s content has an extremely long-lasting long tail. According to Mercer, articles from the beginning of 2016 are still being liked from time to time. In addition, Zhihu has done a great job in SEO on Baidu. When users search for knowledge-related topics on Baidu , Zhihu will definitely appear in the upper part of the first page. This is undoubtedly a long-term and effective free promotion for Mercer. It is equivalent to the brand owner purchasing Baidu's SEM in disguise, but in fact it does not spend any money.

2. Alipay : Refuting rumors before the crisis breaks out

No one can deny Zhihu's important communication and agenda-setting capabilities in today's Chinese Internet circle. In many hot events (especially in the TMT field), the communication paths are mostly: brewing on Weibo, spreading on WeChat, fermenting on Zhihu, spreading in the media, and spreading across the entire network. Applying the concept in "The Tipping Point", Zhihu is the "tipping point".

As a financial platform serving more than 450 million real-name users, Alipay requires listening to users' voices through various channels and responding in a timely manner. Especially for some misunderstandings or even rumors, these need to be clarified as soon as possible. Zhihu institutional accounts are a very good carrier.

For example, at the end of last year, a user with no qualifications, no reputation, and no credit card posted a message on Zhihu titled "Alipay account used to steal 30,000 yuan!" I hope you can help me with this sad experience of seeking compensation! ”, saying that 30,000 yuan was stolen from the account, but Alipay refused to compensate. A day later, a big V who has been following Alibaba for many years liked this post, and the number of likes quickly exceeded a thousand. That night, Alipay published an article on its Zhihu account titled "What do we do when a user calls and says "Alipay has been stolen"? ”, gave an explanation to netizens and won the support of most of them.

We are in an unprecedented information age, especially with the popularization of self-media and UGC platforms. Hot spots come and go quickly. It may only take a few hours for a piece of news or rumor to go viral. And it may only take one day for a topic to go from being all over the screen to no media paying any more attention. That’s how fast brands react , especially when faced with major issues. I also found that many revelations from many brands and their leaders now come from Zhihu. In the past, people looked for clues on Zhihu, but now they look for answers directly on Zhihu. This is also the reason why the rumor-debunking value of brand agency accounts is becoming increasingly greater.

3. Hujiang: Clear positioning and deep content development to win user reputation

Hujiang.com's new media has always been doing well. It has entered more than 17 platforms including Zhihu, Weibo, WeChat, NetEase, Toutiao, Sohu, etc., and has more than 10 million fans. The main reason for joining Zhihu is its user value: Zhihu users have higher education, higher income, longer reading time, and are more fond of learning than ordinary Internet users.

As a learning platform, Hujiang has accurately positioned its institutional account on Zhihu: a counselor who helps everyone study well. Therefore, Hujiang has answered many questions about language learning on Zhihu, such as "Why are Japanese verbs divided into "first-class verbs, second-class verbs, and third-class verbs", and how to remember and use them? 》《How to prepare for IELTS? 》《How to learn Korean from scratch? 》《How to write application documents for studying abroad (PS, CV, WS, etc.)? 》《How to pass College English Test Band 4 and College English Test Band 6 within one month? 》……

I found that if you focus on a specific field on Zhihu and continuously produce high-quality content, you are likely to be awarded the badge of excellent answerer on this topic. Hujiang has been continuously deepening its efforts in areas such as language learning and topics, and has been operating the Zhihu institutional account for nearly a year. After long-term and stable content output, Hujiang has gained 160,000 fans, received 138,907 likes, 34,450 thanks, and 422,871 collections. It has been rated as the "Zhihu X New List Influential Institutional Account" for four consecutive times, and has contributed more than 130 pieces of content on topics related to language learning, culture, etc.

You may think that Hujiang’s Zhihu fans are not as high as those on Weibo. Here I would like to explain that Zhihu distributes followers based on user feedback and the weight of the answerer’s topic area. So even if the number of followers of an institutional account is not as high as that of Weibo and WeChat, Zhihu’s distribution mechanism can still easily allow an article to reach over 100,000 readers.

As of May 2017, Zhihu has 84 million registered users, 17 million questions, 63 million answers, and nearly 100,000 topics since Zhou Yuan started. Now it involves 250,000 different topics, with monthly PV reaching 14 billion.

In comparison, WeChat public accounts and Weibo have entered a winner-takes-all stage, with traffic basically occupied by large accounts. If you missed the golden period of Weibo and WeChat, it will be difficult to gain attention and traffic if you try to enter now. Other platforms cannot be compared with Zhihu in terms of size and development trends, especially in terms of user attributes, where Zhihu's advantages are also very obvious.

I think Hujiang provides a very good reference for many brands that hope to penetrate Zhihu's highly educated users and do marketing on Zhihu.

4. Tencent Technology : Discovering technology experts and reporting topics from Zhihu

Tencent Technology should be the most influential channel among all technology media at present. With the help of powerful distribution platforms such as WeChat and Tencent, Tencent Technology obviously has no shortage of content distribution platforms. Why would a technology media with such a great influence want to settle in the Zhihu platform?

Tencent Technology is mainly attracted by Zhihu's highly educated users, because this group of people is actually the most sensitive and professional about technology topics, which is different from the 265 million monthly active users of Tencent News client. Therefore, Tencent Technology hopes to use Zhihu to truly understand what users in the technology industry want to see, and use the question-and-answer method to spark ideas with this group of technology experts, observe which technology topics are the most popular on Zhihu, and then send reporters to follow up on interviews, which will then feed back into its own technology reports.

Tencent Technology does the same. For example, in "What are the profit models of shared power banks ? 》, Tencent Technology answered this question: “Do shared power banks really make money? Here we will analyze the business data announced by entrepreneurs , reference data provided by insiders, and data obtained from interviews with entrepreneurs . Maybe it is not rigorous, or maybe the consideration is too simple. If you have a better answer and more real data, you are welcome to discuss with us.” This way of communication is no longer a simple report, but from the perspective of an ordinary netizen, seeking help from other netizens.

Of course, in some major technological events, Tencent Technology can also convey its in-depth investigations in the form of "answers" to Zhihu users who are also concerned about the issue, such as "What do you think of the Bitcoin ransomware virus that broke out on May 12 in various colleges and universities?" ”, Tencent Technology’s answer was very professional and won the recognition of Zhihu users.

More and more technology media are joining Zhihu, which is not only beneficial to the richness and professionalism of Zhihu's content, but also demonstrates the uniqueness of Zhihu as a platform. I personally am very optimistic about this model. In fact, many technology brands can also play the role of "technology media" and popularize knowledge to everyone.

5. Travel Tips: Turn Marketing into a Tips for Users to Collect

I really like the case of the Travel Tips for Cheung Kong, but it’s still a problem of positioning. Helping netizens answer questions when traveling with a warm heart and professionalism is the way for brands to do new media that I highly recommend. You are actually sending "advertisements", but people who see them think they are tips and very valuable information. This is the ultimate goal of new media operations .

Let’s take a look at how the travel guide is implemented on Zhihu. Let’s talk about the data first. The Qiongyou Jinnang institutional account answered a total of 160 questions on Zhihu, published 146 articles, and hosted 38 Zhihu Lives . It was the first institutional account to receive the "Excellent Answerer" medal. At the same time, we received more than 260,000 followers, more than 140,000 likes and 40,000 thanks, and the content was collected more than 400,000 times! In the Zhihu institutional influence list jointly created by Zhihu and Xinbang, Qiongyou Jinnang has been ranked in the top 10 for four consecutive months.

The Zhihu institutional account of Qiongyou Jinnang has two positionings: sharing experiences brings travel inspiration, and sharing experiences brings practical information. In order to provide more professional and rich tips, Qyer invited its contracted authors in more than 50 countries around the world to participate in Zhihu Q&A. For example, the author of the guidebooks "Barcelona" and "Barcelona Fan Guide" is Teng Teng, a Chinese girl who works at Barcelona Club; the author of the guidebook "Iran" is A-Dai, a journalist who has worked and lived in Iran and Iraq for nearly 6 years; the author of the guidebook "Taiwan" is Taiwanese Liao Xinzhong, whose book "Our Taiwan in These Years" has had a huge impact on both sides of the Taiwan Strait...

Unlike WeChat subscription accounts that rely on coming up with catchy headlines every day, the most important thing on the Zhihu platform is questions and answers, which are what is most needed and most suitable for travel sharing platforms like Qunar, rather than just one-way one-to-many communication. Therefore, Qunar hopes that while solving users' travel "problems", the editors' carefully answered and organized content will become a guide for you to use and inspire inspiration. Therefore, the most important KPI is the number of collections, which means that the content is valuable to users.

By cultivating high-quality content to gain the trust of users and turning marketing into a trick, Qyer Tips has done a good job.

Through the above five cases, in fact, I have been repeatedly emphasizing one thing: what can Zhihu bring to the brand? For example, it brought a lot of accurate users to Hujiang.com, helped Tencent Technology find technology experts and report topics, helped Alipay to dispel rumors about user complaints and improve brand reputation, achieved long-tail promotion for traditional B2B brands, and distributed high-quality content from Qyer.com...

So, how can brands do a good job in Zhihu marketing? A brief summary:

1. Role. Zhihu institutional accounts are members of the Zhihu organizational ecosystem and are producers of valuable content. This role must be clearly defined by all brands that enter the Zhihu ecosystem. Only when the positioning is accurate can a brand produce valuable content, rather than constantly posting its own soft articles every day. "Content without value" obviously has no dissemination effect on Zhihu.

2. Content. Unlike other platforms, Zhihu institutional accounts must work hard on content creation. Only high-quality content can gain the long-term trust of users, win word of mouth, and enhance brand reputation. Content marketing is particularly important on Zhihu, but it cannot be measured by traditional "quantity", but should emphasize quality.

3. Long tail. Due to the nature of the platform, the content of answers on Zhihu has a very long long-tail effect. In turn, it actually forces institutional accounts to create high-quality content, thereby achieving continuous exposure on Zhihu and even search platforms such as Baidu. This is a feature that other social media platforms do not have.

4. Interaction. In addition to producing content, interaction is also the only way to do good marketing on Zhihu. The questions and answers between Zhihu institutional accounts and users are actually a deep interaction based on UGC content. The more help it provides to users, the higher the user favorability.