Chinese Valentine's Day, Olympics... 8 hot marketing tactics that operators must know!

In an era where marketing is rampant, whoever captures the user's attention will be able to take the initiative in industry competition. To this end, many companies try their best to use websites, WeChat, mobile applications and other platforms to carry out " hot marketing planning", hoping to obtain the maximum marketing return with the minimum investment cost.

With more and more Internet products and increasingly fierce competition, hot spot marketing has become a way of playing that operators can talk about at will. Now, as long as there is a slight opportunity to take advantage of the situation, the operators of various products will basically not miss it. The definition of hot topics has also extended from earlier social news, events, and celebrity gossip to traditional festivals. It can be said that apart from Qingming Festival, other traditional festivals are also being followed as hot topics by everyone.

Social Hotspot—Rio Olympics

Social Events—China's First Gold Medal at the Rio Olympics

Celebrity Gossip—Jay Chou Becomes a Father

Traditional Festival - Qixi Festival

No matter what kind of hot spot it is, the time effectiveness requirement is very high. From the moment the hot spot occurs to 1 hour is the golden period for marketing by leveraging the trend. During this stage, any action you take advantage of will become the material shared by others on social platforms such as WeChat Moments. A hot spot is basically outdated after 12 hours.

In the field of operations, I also like to call hot spot marketing as time-sensitive hot spot marketing. In this way, it can be divided into foreseeable time-sensitive hot spots and unforeseen time-sensitive hot spots based on the uncertainty of the hot spots. Among them, traditional festivals and social hot spots are predictable hot spots (the Chinese Valentine's Day and the Olympic Games are coming as scheduled), while social events and celebrity gossip are unpredictable hot spots (you don't know which celebrity will cheat in the next second).

There are festivals every month and hot spots occur at any time. As an operator fighting on the front line of the Internet, if you don’t understand some common methods of hot spot marketing, how can you survive in the operation circle? Here are 8 routines for operators to do hot spot marketing based on Xiaoxian’s own observations.

Routine 1: Hot spot poster

If you want to promote your product within an hour of the hot topic being generated, posters are the first choice for operators to do hot topic marketing. The operation is relatively simple. A sentence plus a beautiful picture can convey the relationship between the product and the hot topic in both text and pictures, achieving the effect of leveraging the hot topic. During the Olympics, images related to Olympic sports can trigger associations. For example, if there is swimming on competition day, the picture is a swimming pool and there is a gold medal opposite it. When the event is at its peak, it is easy to make the connection.

Durex is too dirty

The common planning ideas for hot spot-leveraging posters currently include warmth, data, humor, literature, chicken soup, homophonic, slogan, and metaphor. There are too many types of posters that we have seen, so I will not give examples here. The specific method to be adopted needs to be decided by the operator based on the characteristics of the hot spot and the product selling points that he wants to convey.

Routine 2: Soft article

When everyone generally believes that posters are the best carrier of information delivery to address the problem of short attention span of users, writing an interesting soft article may have a better effect. (On e-commerce product pages, long text has a higher conversion rate than short text). For example, when Sun Yang won the 200-meter freestyle championship, he showed his strength but also exposed his dental problems. So the products and hot topics about dental health can write a soft article about the dental health of Sun Yang and other Olympic champions.

Sun Yang won the championship, but foreign media and netizens focused on his teeth

For example, on the day when Uber China and Didi merged, the letter to users (soft article) written by Yidao Car Rental really made us, users who were about to be arbitrarily priced by the monopoly platform, feel relieved. For tips on how to write soft articles for operations, please reply to the keyword "soft article" in the official account "Product Rookies".

Trick 3: Startup Page

Whether it is hot marketing or ordinary brand promotion, the correct communication circle should start with existing users. When doing hotspot marketing for the operation of Internet products, the most important thing to consider is how to make existing users aware of the relationship between the hotspot and the product through the channels within the site, and then consider how to influence potential users on social media.

Marketing posters and soft articles are marketing methods that any company can use on new media platforms. The product startup page is a hot marketing privilege for Internet companies with mobile applications. Similar methods include home page recommendations, pop-ups, push notifications, and other in-site promotion methods.

Robam Appliances sponsors NetEase's Olympic column

In order to strengthen hot marketing channels, some non-Internet companies will also purchase some high-quality Internet product startup pages as promotional channels. For social hot spots that attract worldwide attention, such as the Olympics, well-funded companies will also participate in content marketing by means of sponsorship.

Trick 4: Product skin color

Just like using the startup page for hot spot marketing, this is also a unique way for Internet companies to do hot spot marketing. Operators only need to reserve a style adjustment interface for product buttons during the product development phase, and can call on special features at any time when encountering large hot spots.

Coca-Cola Olympic Games Suit

If traditional companies want to change the color and packaging of their products, they not only need to go through layers of processes, but also have to consider inventory and channel follow-up capabilities. Traditional companies may change the color of their products during predictable hot spots such as the Olympics, but the probability of changing product packaging during unpredictable hot spots is very small.

Routine 5: Content topic

I believe everyone is familiar with this hot marketing method. We can often see major Internet platforms doing content aggregation topics. It is also standard for major portals to aggregate content topics during the Olympic Games.

It is not difficult for operators to create content topics for predictable hot spots. For unpredictable hot spots, if you want to use content topics to leverage the hot spots, in addition to having sufficient content sensitivity, operators must also have good operation tools (voting tools, barrages, coupons, page generation tools) and product content mining mechanisms to see if they can help operators quickly find hot spot-related content and generate pages.

Baidu Post Bar Hot Topic Page

Trick 6: Coupon password

The inspiration for this gameplay comes from the dispute between Uber and Shenzhou Private Car last year. At that time, Shenzhou Private Car released a series of posters accusing Uber of being unsafe. As we all know, Shenzhou Private Car began to compromise due to pressure from public opinion. However, this incident had already become a hot topic in the Internet circle at that time. As the protagonist, Uber followed up on the hot topic and adopted a strategy of not only writing counterattack copy but also setting up a red envelope password at the bottom of the poster. Users could get ride discounts by replying to keywords. A lot of new users were acquired by using coupons and passwords.

Uber password

Setting passwords based on hot spots is the best, simplest and most effective way for operators to leverage hot spots for marketing. It not only makes users feel that you are close to the hot spots, but also increases product orders/users. For example, if you want to use slogans to promote the Olympics, you can actually let everyone know about this method before Sun Yang's competition begins, and tell them that as long as Sun Yang wins the championship, they can search for the keyword "Sun Yang" in the product search box to receive a red envelope of *** yuan.

Routine 7: Offline experience

After participating in too many activities on the Internet and being accustomed to being flooded with messages on WeChat Moments, participating in some offline experience activities may be a different kind of enjoyment for users. Now more and more products are using LBS as an offline O2O experience on mobile smart terminals. They plan interactive activities with strong participation and low barriers, such as walking competitions and sign-ins. A number of outstanding users are selected from these participants to participate in VIP experience activities, and secondary interactive dissemination is carried out on major live broadcast platforms .

Didi offline experience Olympic events

Routine 8: Integrated Marketing

For experienced operators, marketing based on hot topics is far more than just a poster or a startup page. Predictable hot events such as the Olympics, World Cup, Spring Festival, Valentine's Day, and Father's Day should actually be prepared early. Determine a creative theme, and then integrate the previous 7 individual hot marketing routines together, and add video, h5, games and other marketing standards. By expanding the entire operational front from the warm-up before the hot spot arrives to the main event on the day of the hot spot, the product will have a large-scale marketing lineup on the Internet.

For example, for a community product, various activities can be held before the Olympics, such as selections, competitions, and art exhibitions with the gimmick of going to Rio to watch the Olympics, which can attract target users to participate. During the Olympics, you can combine guessing and other methods: online you can guess the results of the game and guess the name of the sport by looking at pictures; offline you can guess the name of the sport based on the movements and be rewarded with related sports products, such as table tennis rackets, swimming coupons, footballs, etc.

Shared above are some common marketing strategies from easy to difficult that operations can use when facing hot spots. If you understand these routines, you won’t panic when your boss asks you how to follow up on hot spots. In the next issue, we will share what kind of marketing planning ideas can be used to assist in completing the entire planning when operations are faced with hot spots and have no idea what to do. This includes how to analyze hot spots, how to obtain creative points that can be combined with products from hot spots, and how to set up marketing plans based on such creative points.