The logic and thinking behind Maimai’s “naked knowledge donation” marketing

The day before yesterday morning, a girl from Maimai found me on WeChat and sent me this message:

I opened the link she sent me and saw this:

I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, thinking it might just be an in-site topic for the operator to meet the KPI, so I just responded and participated, and then ignored it.

But starting from yesterday afternoon, I began to realize that Maimai seemed to be well prepared this time and wanted to do something big.

For example, I started to see a lot of mentions in WeChat Moments, official accounts , etc. yesterday afternoon that Maimai, Focus Media, Beijing News, etc. have all launched the so-called "screen domination marketing " around related topics.

Basically, for an APP, it is a big move to combine channels such as print media, social media, and targeted media to carry out a wave of marketing by land, sea and air.

So I suddenly became interested and wanted to talk about this.

We can look at it from the micro to the macro, first talking about execution, then talking about strategy and trading.

1. The marketing strategy

I have sorted it out preliminarily, and I should say that this is a marketing campaign with a high degree of complexity and a long front, and the core is the theme of "naked donation of knowledge" .

Let me explain here that the so-called "naked donation of knowledge" encourages everyone to share their knowledge and experience without reservation. It is just another conceptual packaging of "sharing" and "lectures" and is actually not new.

Around this concept, the basic strategy of this marketing is as follows:

We created a topic around "naked donation of knowledge", first using the word "naked" and the suspense caused by "naked" to attract attention and spread it, then through the creation of topics within the site to drive everyone's resonance and participation in the act of "naked donation of knowledge", and finally through a series of online live lectures by big names in the circle such as Wang Xiaochuan and Jiang Nanchun to bring the event to a climax, and ultimately further amplify the influence of the event.

Overall, the concept of "naked knowledge donation" that is the main focus of this strategy is sufficient in terms of arousing curiosity, but it may be insufficient in terms of how to continue to bring freshness to users in the future.

2. Execution of the entire marketing

The overall process and logic of marketing execution is as follows:

Based on this logic, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Maimai at each node one by one.

1. Preheat

First of all, let’s talk about the first part, warm-up + suspense creation. For this part, I give Maimai full marks.

In this stage, Maimai’s core action was to complete the placement of two channels, Focus Media + Beijing News, through a poster, and the content of the posters used in the two channels was the same.

Judging from the poster design and copy , it is extremely eye-catching. A big word "naked" catches the eye firmly, and the following copy: "You are born naked, you die naked, what do you leave for this world?" is enough to trigger a thought without a conclusion.

Finally, at the bottom is a search box - search for "Maimai" to see more truth about "nakedness".

Basically, this poster ad not only catches the eye at the first moment, but also cleverly leaves some suspense, while also providing very clear guidance for the user's next action. It is very clear from beginning to end.

In particular, after a user has read the text that is easy to trigger thinking but difficult to draw a conclusion, I guess the probability that he or she will follow the prompts in the search box at the bottom to search and try to uncover the mystery is very high.

2. Topic Amplification

The second step is to amplify the topic.

What Maimai did in this stage was to continue the suspense left by the "nakedness" above, and spread the event for the second time through Weibo, WeChat and other channels, which can be regarded as a revelation of the suspense on the first day. Here, part of the dissemination comes from Maimai’s own forwarding and publication through BD or even paid channels, while the other part comes from some self-media and big Vs’ proactive analysis and interpretation of the matter.

It can be seen that Maimai basically completed this part of the action on October 25th.

It can also be seen that Maimai has invested heavily in this part. Taking Weibo as an example, many big accounts including the Beijing News, Beijing Times, Vista, Beijing Youth Weekly, and the omnipotent Big Bear have participated in the reposting of Weibo - the total number of Weibo fans of these big accounts exceeds 40 million.

Of course, if you find so many big accounts to help you forward, would you have high expectations for the results?

Sadly, no. At least judging from Weibo, the topic popularity of Maimai that day was not very high. By comparing the two pictures below, we can see that Maimai's "Naked Donation of Knowledge" was read 10.77 million times, while another topic "Xiaomi MIX" that appeared at almost the same time had a reading number of nearly 67 million.

In addition, on WeChat, we can see that some big accounts have followed up and interpreted the incident, but the one with the highest number of readers seems to be the one released by "Advertising Industry" titled "Focus Media's first time was actually given to Maimai", with only 18,000+ readers.

Overall, Maimai’s execution in this link is very good - being able to expand into so many channels at the same time is actually not easy from an operational perspective. However, the content lacked interactivity and interest after it was released, resulting in unsatisfactory dissemination of Maimai in the second stage.

For social media platforms, "fun" and "interactivity" have always been two essential elements. Let me imagine a random idea. If it is still centered around the issue of "naked donation of knowledge", the second stage of Maimai is to let everyone choose the person whose knowledge you most want to "naked donate", and then Maimai will help you realize it, inviting him to come and share his experience, and reveal all the useful information without reservation. Would this be better in terms of the second round of dissemination and interaction?

3. Online acceptance & user participation

The third link is online acceptance and user participation.

It should be said that for an APP, whether it can successfully use a marketing campaign to actually increase product data is the key.

For Maimai, the paths of acceptance and guidance for this marketing for old users and new users are completely different. Let’s look at them one by one.

First, for old users , the process from old users being exposed to the topic to returning to the product to participate in the activity may be roughly as follows:

1. Understand the events;
2. Open the Maimai APP;
3. Find the event entrance in the Maimai APP and try to participate in the event.

It should be said that on this path, Maimai’s main job is to provide guidance within the APP. We can see that during the event, Maimai provided strong guidance for the "Naked Knowledge Donation" activity on the APP startup page. It should be said that this perception is still very strong.

However, strangely, after a user enters the Maimai website, he cannot find any entrance related to this topic.

In fact, Maimai officially organized a topic on the site - the topic that I mentioned at the beginning of this article that someone invited me to participate in. From this, we can also see that Maimai hopes to drive more influential big Vs on the site to join the discussion and interaction, thereby promoting the circulation and dissemination of the topic on the Maimai site. However, I was quite surprised that such a topic and activity were not recommended to all users of the site during the event.

In addition, as an ordinary user, when seeing such a topic, to be honest, I may not know how to participate - it is undoubtedly very difficult to let ordinary users think and express around such a lofty topic as "What have you left for the world". From this point of view, the threshold for taking over topics on the Maimai site is actually a bit high. Personally, I think it might be better to let users simply complete a few actions to express an attitude - for example, even forwarding a slogan or something like that.

As of 8:00 p.m. on October 26, we can see that this topic has received a total of 322 opinions and more than 3,000 likes, which is not a particularly high number.

The above is the takeover path for old users. Now let’s look at the one for new users.

For a new user who has never heard of "Maimai" before, the typical path for him to get in touch with the product and participate in activities may be like this:

1. Seeing the various posters and content on Maimai piqued my interest;
2. Search for "Maimai" through search engines or app stores and download the product;
3. Open the "Maimai" APP;
4. Look for relevant portals and try to discover and participate in activities;

Okay, let’s restore this process based on the real experience of a girl in our company - she happened to have never used Maimai before.

First look at the search engine results. After searching for "Maimai" on Baidu, the results are as follows:

It should be said that Maimai has basically achieved that the first screen of search results is mostly filled with its own related news through its own press releases and media reports . This aspect is quite solid. (Although the girl said she was expecting a pop-up ad explaining what "naked" meant.)

From now on, the experience of downloading the APP, downloading and launching it is exactly the same as that of previous old users, so it will not be discussed here.

But after the download is complete, open the entire APP interface, it looks like this——

It can be seen that there are almost no content recommendations or entrances related to "knowledge donation" on the homepage.

Look at the next few Tabs——

Yes, I still couldn’t find any relevant information... This made the girl in my company very confused for a while.

After another three minutes of careful reading, she finally found the "Job Broadcasting Plaza" in the "Network Services" and clicked on it to enter. Only then did she find the relevant content...

A new user who downloaded the product because of curiosity about activities and events actually had to spend more than 5 minutes to find the entrance to relevant content... This made me deeply question - before doing such a massive marketing campaign, did Maimai not even think about providing targeted guidance and conversions for new users? ? ?

Undoubtedly, in this section, Maimai can be given a failing grade.

4. Live Broadcast

Okay, now we can move on to the fourth part, which is the live broadcast by the big guys.

It should be said that in this part, Maimai has put in all its efforts and invited an extremely powerful lineup of big names to support it. Just look at the posters below and you will know.

However, perhaps due to reasons such as unclear guidance process, we can see that even for a big shot like Wang Xiaochuan, the number of people who signed up for his live broadcast is only more than 150,000 (according to experience, the actual number of participants is usually about half of the number of registrants). Although there are already many people, it is undoubtedly less popular than those live broadcasts on Yingke Huajiao that attract hundreds of thousands of participants.

Basically we can see that this series of live broadcasts continued until November. In this part, what is less certain is whether Maimai officials will release more Easter eggs during the live broadcast to trigger further spread. This needs to be observed. But it is difficult to estimate visually, after all, it is still difficult to influence and control all the live broadcasts of the big guys.

Basically, I think the data on the live broadcast part may be a little below expectations considering the huge investment made by Maimai officials.

3. Some thoughts behind this marketing campaign

Behind any large-scale marketing, there must be a purpose, either to attract new customers on a large scale, or to increase data financing, or to establish a brand image and set the tone, or to launch new products, at least one of the above.

In my personal opinion, Maimai's last round of financing was a 20 million Series B financing completed in August 2014. It has been two years so far, and the company does not have much commercial monetization ability. So judging from the time and rhythm, the possibility and demand for financing should exist.

Secondly, we can see that the final focus of Maimai’s marketing this time is on a product form such as “live streaming”. On its live streaming page, we can also see a large number of first-line bosses participating in it. For Maimai, whose internal products have not changed much in the past year, it is not ruled out that this live streaming that focuses on “industry knowledge sharing” will become a breakthrough point that it wants to focus on . From this perspective, it is not ruled out that Maimai will launch a series of actions around this function in the next few months. If we want to compare, this product form can perhaps be compared to a real-person version of Zhihu Live?

Finally, regarding this marketing, it should be said that it is an activity with huge investment, rich levels, and complex resources involved. Especially considering that so many actions need to be implemented in just one week, the challenge is still great.

In the face of such challenges, the Maimai team has achieved some outstanding results, but also has some shortcomings, both of which are worthy of our attention and reference.

Overall, it is quite enjoyable to review and think about such an event.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

The author of this article @黄有湛is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!