How to salvage a screwed holiday marketing campaign

How to make holiday marketing most effective in the Internet age? The author of this article will discuss the Dragon Boat Festival that just passed. Let’s take a look and prepare for the next holiday marketing.

Yesterday, during the annual Dragon Boat Festival, I watched my business friends downgrade their brands in front of their target users on WeChat.

An unattractive picture + a conspicuous brand logo + a forced homophonic "blessing"

Although some of them have QR codes, when you scan them you find they are just follow-up pages of the official accounts; and a large portion of them do not have QR codes, but only their own brand logos... In short, they all exude a sense of confidence that comes from nowhere. In their eyes, just appearing on camera can earn them favor.

For example, the clever “word-changing faction” – well, “zong” makes sense, but what do you want me to do?

Tall and stylish X-style outfit - it would be nice if you remove the brand logo~

Extremely cool and confident - um, I saw the word "group"...

This is a classic one, the continuous self-indulgence group - since you are so self-indulgent that you are too lazy to make conversions, why not poach your designer and let me use him?

Some visual designs are indeed good, but you are unwilling to shrink the brand so that users can show off their products, and you also don’t want to tell users what you are trying to do. In the end, the real experience of users can only be described by these two words - "boring" and "annoying" . Because these practices do not respect "traditional festivals" - this precious spiritual property that belongs to everyone and holds an important place in people's hearts.

And I believe that these business friends will continue in the upcoming "Children's Day":

1. Make it a routine, and the goal is to "not be without"
2. The team will not assign a dedicated person to track and optimize the results
3. I will do this again next time and continue to annoy users.

Who are these people who randomly screw up their own holiday marketing?

The behavior of every organization is directly influenced by its own driving forces. The rapidly changing connected marketing landscape has made it clear that two completely different types of organizations are emerging. They are respectively the resource-driven R-type organization and the user-driven U-type organization. Those who often mess up their holiday marketing are often typical R-type organizations, and some U-type organizations that rely on user-driven but blindly follow the trend.

If you can be “casual”, it means you can “not care”. Because for an R-type organization, its position is obviously more important than the market. Just like in this picture, you must be very "stylish" in order to express your unique superiority to the outside world. For them, it is enough to pursue constant exposure.

In the concept of R-type organization, everything is a resource, and every resource has an owner. That’s how they view the Internet, too. Therefore, compared with meticulous user operations, R-type organizations are more willing to officially approach the owners of Internet platforms to directly cooperate on "resources", and they often overestimate their own "resource" advantages, resulting in the failure of cooperation.

For the owners of Internet platforms, what users need is the most important - most Internet platforms are typical U-shaped organizations. In the concept of U-shaped organization, users must be turned into masters and themselves must be regarded as the caretakers of the platform in order to stimulate the overall activity of the platform, thereby reducing operating costs and gaining a larger business operation space. Therefore, whether the U-shaped organization can obtain feedback from target users faster and more authentically determines its vitality.

The following picture can more clearly contrast the difference between R-type organization and U-type organization.

Therefore, R-type organizations often do some "self-satisfaction" actions that do not consider the interests of ordinary people like us. They need to demonstrate their strength to their peers and higher-level resource owners in this way. In the real world, every inch of land is valuable. A gorgeous billboard standing at the intersection will make people think that you are rich. For resource-driven people, location is everything. Whether you like it or not is secondary. Even if it rapes your vision, it has nothing to do with you. Because it's hard to get out of your own way. Such ideas and the driving forces behind them lead them to exhibit the same behavior on the Internet. In other words, it is a kind of inertia.

In fact, a pure R-type organization could have avoided doing these things to deliberately please users. But right now, many R-type organizations have to go through "routine procedures" during holidays, while some real U-type organizations are very cautious. Because there are three kinds of organizations with ambiguous status:

1. To transform or not - the traditional monopoly advantage has been broken and the R-type organization has to face market transformation, but it cannot cut the umbilical cord and cannot let go of its arrogance for the time being.
2. Should you pretend or not? - A U-shaped organization that wants to quickly gain market share and believes it has established a firm foothold in front of users hopes to express its industry position and attitude more beyond actual services.
3. Smarty-gooey - a U-shaped organization that is extremely concerned about its reputation and thinks it can take shortcuts but actually has not figured out its own positioning.

There is no need to discuss the third category; just let them fend for themselves. But for the first and second categories, unless everyone is restricted from accessing the Internet and connecting to the Internet, they should always insist on being a pure U-shaped organization. Because there is neither an absolute path nor absolute ownership on the Internet. On the Internet, people are resources, and everyone is the owner of his own resources.

How to make holiday marketing most effective in the Internet age?

New features and new requirements

What marketing? Putting aside all the high-sounding concepts, I think it is just an effort to win the favor of users . Only when it is liked by users can there be word of mouth, dissemination and conversion. No matter what era it is, the essence of marketing will not change. It’s just that the Internet era has given it more requirements——

Of course there are many other characteristics, but these three points are enough to show that in the Internet age, organizations are far less responsive than users, and the initiative lies in the hands of users.

Restoring people’s expectations for the festival

Since it is from the user's perspective, an effective holiday marketing plan can first restore people's expectations for the festival and allow people to taste the unique flavor that the festival should have.

This is very simple. Ask your family, friends and yourself, and you will get a common answer from all kinds of expectations - "sense of participation" . Anything that can be called a "festival" is a spiritual and cultural product that is formed and recognized by the entire society and belongs to the entire collective. So during these special days, no matter what specific expectations we have, deep down we are all looking for some way to gain a sense of participation as a member of the collective.

This is an emotion buried in everyone's heart. If not properly released during the holiday season, it is often accompanied by depression and a sense of loss. In other words, it is a feeling of frustration of being left behind. Therefore, we not only have expectations for the festival, but also deeper anxiety. This is where the "holiday depression" comes from. It often has two direct causes:

1. Not receiving or being able to give a gift;
2. Lonely, without a partner to spend the holidays with. In the figure below, you can see three social psychology knowledge about festivals.

The goal of holiday marketing is to enable target users to be satisfied and avoid anxiety through our products or services at a lower cost, faster, more conveniently and at a lower cost. If we achieve this goal, we will receive sincere gratitude from our users and achieve positive communication effects.

Bringing the “minimal ritual” online

With the goals mentioned above, we can choose to move the "smallest ceremony" of the festival online. During festivals, gift giving is the “smallest ritual” through which everyone can feel a sense of participation. One thing you must remember is that you should not directly treat your own products or services as gifts, but provide a more convenient interactive method of "giving and receiving". Otherwise, it will become a promotion to take advantage of a hot topic, losing the extraordinary effect that holiday marketing should have.

The communication link of this "minimal ceremony" should be like this:

You can see that this picture only shows the behavior of "giving", but not the behavior of "receiving". This is because only continuous gifting can lead to sustained dissemination . This is exactly the same as our real life. Therefore, several important elements that constitute this link are as follows:

(1) WX: refers to the communication platform such as WeChat. You can use a picture with a QR code, H5 or a small program to provide users with a place for customer interaction. Because WeChat has been very strict about Moments recently, I suggest you use mini programs because they are very suitable for communication between groups.

(2) G: refers to the products or services you provide that can be used as gifts.

1. In fact, it doesn’t have to be expensive, as long as users can get some small benefits, the effect can be seen.
2. In addition, it is important to allow users to add their own self-expression when sending the gift. This is very important, after all, it is their own thoughts. 3. Merchant: It is up to you to open the source of gifting. If you are already running your own WeChat group, you will see results more quickly.

Finally, when designing this gift link, you must pay attention to this mechanism - the gift transfer mechanism. That is, the user can easily transfer the gift he received to others.

The above is the simplest closed loop of "minimum ritual". If you have further development capabilities, you can add the "Popularity Ranking" as a communication accelerator, or even add some group PK gameplay. We will not discuss this further here.

Best Applications

In fact, this is not a new way of playing, because the most typical U-shaped organization WeChat has provided us with a very good case - WeChat red envelope.

WeChat red envelopes are by no means a whimsical new invention. When I was at Tencent, people would line up in front of their leaders’ offices every year to receive red envelopes from them and their colleagues. The most amazing thing about the WeChat team is that they have moved the smallest ritual of the Spring Festival, "grabbing red envelopes", to the Internet in the most efficient and convenient way. Instead of sitting in the office brainstorming, hoping to come up with some blockbuster ideas.

Although Tencent’s 18th birthday is Tencent’s own holiday, the company still made it a very successful party that included all former employees. So far, no company has been able to mobilize almost all of its former employees to help spread the word. Tencent has carefully designed the entire process and customized red envelopes of different levels. The red envelopes for employees who are currently employed and those who are not are different.

Every festival has its most typical "minimal ritual". As long as you can discover and restore it, you can get unexpected results.

The new version of Koala Go I received today has some of this flavor, but there is still a flaw - it should encourage old users to attract new users.

So, from this perspective you can think about what is the smallest ceremony that can represent the Dragon Boat Festival?

If we look at the above-mentioned cases from the perspective of “sending zongzi”, we can also find the approach therein - for example, Minsheng Bank directly sends wealth zongzi, and after unwrapping the zongzi, you can get a random financial management interest rate; for example, after unwrapping a zongzi from Atour.com, you can get a discounted air ticket. Should I consider bringing my friends along for the trip? After all, unwrapping a rice dumpling is a ritualistic action, and it is also a widely recognized carrier with common expectations. Why do we have to go around in circles and play word games?

If you are preparing for related holiday marketing, the following table can help you sort out your ideas and put some of the above knowledge points into action:

I won’t go into more details, I’ll just sum it up in one word:

• Users are divided into new and old, and interests are separated;
• Display should be differentiated, aggregation would be better;
• Finally, remember to start preparing early.

Tomorrow is Children's Day, another day that I wish I could not celebrate, but I am still a little looking forward to it in my heart.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @王玨 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map