How to advertise on public accounts? Case Analysis

The number of advertisements placed on official accounts in the first half of 2019 increased by 115% year-on-year compared with the second half of last year. This shows that there are already a large number of companies that have demand for public account advertising , and the number will increase.

Faced with increasingly strict regulations on the WeChat public platform, readers have higher and higher requirements for content, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for public accounts to increase their followers through self-operation. Advertising seems to be the best way to grab WeChat traffic at the moment.

So for advertisers, how to formulate an advertising strategy? How to find high-quality traffic suitable for you among many public accounts? How to improve the conversion rate of delivery? You must pay attention to every detail in order to achieve the ideal delivery effect.

I will make a summary based on the delivery data of a leading agency and my actual delivery experience of increasing ROI from 0 to 3 in the past 3 months. I hope to help everyone avoid pitfalls and waste less money during the advertising process.

1

A classic case study of a K12 education institution

I won’t reveal the name of this company here. In the two years from 2015 to 2017, this company has grown rapidly. It can be said that this organization has held on to the WeChat public account self-media.

And in the process they have mastered enough skills, which are enough to support their company's stable customer acquisition and business growth. So I think this case will be very inspiring to you.

Let’s first take a look at the total amount of his investment in the two years from 2015 to 2017:

From the above data, we can see that over the past two and a half years, his investment efforts have continued to increase very rapidly. There are three key data that we need to pay attention to and refer to: number of placements, placement locations, and soft articles placed.

1. First look at the number of delivery times

Let's first list the accounts and frequency of high-frequency placements of this agency:

There are more than 100 accounts here, and the reinvestment rate is very high, especially in the vertical parent public accounts. So you will find that accounts with good results and a large number of fans can actually reinvest at a high frequency.

Because parents will basically follow these public accounts that are vertically related to education. Even if the parents of elementary school students are about to enter junior high school, there will still be new groups of parents following the accounts. The accuracy of fans of this type of account is still extremely high.

Some educational institutions often have a misunderstanding:

Don’t invest again in an account that you have invested in. In fact, as long as we grasp the rhythm when launching, if you launch it within the specified time, or your competitor launches it, then if you launch it the next day, the effect will definitely not be very good.

However, if you wait a period of time before advertising (for accounts with more than 50,000 followers, you can wait for more than 20 days; for accounts with less than 50,000 followers, you can wait for more than 1 month), the advertising effect will still be very good. This depends on the activity of the account, the opening rate of the article, and the stimulation of your content, whether it can attract the user's attention.

2. Let’s look at the placement options

The distribution of placements for this educational institution is as follows:

From the above data, we can see that the total number of placements is more than 16,000, of which headlines account for 46.3%. The rest are distributed in 2-8. If you look closely, you will find that the proportions of 2, 5, and 6 are relatively high, while 3-4 and 7-8 are relatively weaker.

Here is another misunderstanding:

Usually we choose the placement. If the headline is too expensive or not scheduled, we will place it in the second headline. If the second headline doesn’t work, we will place it in the third headline, and so on. But this strategy is not the best.

The correct way to choose should be: if you can invest in headlines, try to invest in headlines, because headlines generally have the highest conversion rate. If the headline cannot be invested due to budget, scheduling and other factors, choose the 2nd, then the 5th, and then the 6th. The effects of 3-4 and 7-8 are relatively weak.

Because when people have multiple choices, the visual jump must conform to this rule, and this rule is also summarized based on real money. It will be a very important reference indicator for your future placements.

3. Finally, look at the soft copy

List the titles and times of some of the articles published by this agency:

What surprised me was that this agency chose to produce its own soft articles in order to ensure a stable output of articles.

We usually think that it is best to use self-media accounts to write articles when publishing soft articles, but in fact, when the self-media writes the articles themselves, it may not necessarily truly understand the psychology of the target user group you are targeting. Therefore, writing articles by yourself is also a very good and stable way to acquire customers.

If you read the content of each article, you will also find one of his tricks: these vertical accounts will cross-combine "the same title + different articles" or "different titles + the same article", and then efficiently re-invest to continuously and steadily bring in new traffic.

Well, let’s stop here and review the five advertising strategies used by this agency:

Through the above cases, we have learned how to formulate a marketing strategy suitable for our own products and some cognitive misunderstandings. Next, I will sort out the entire process of delivery from the execution level, as well as the skills and pitfalls of each process.

2

Complete delivery process summary

First, let me review the entire delivery process and some details that need to be paid attention to when I delivered the PMP®️ project management course.

Based on this process, my delivery strategy is as follows:

The execution phase follows the normal process, but sometimes the contract process is omitted.

During the review phase, the data I monitored mainly included the reading volume of each channel, reading conversion rate, single user acquisition cost, final paid conversion rate of traffic, ROI, and then optimized the content and channels before carrying out the next round of delivery.

In the following article, I will focus on the account screening, content preparation, manual comments, and review phase in the execution phase, which are relatively important and easily overlooked points.

1. About number selection

It is not easy to choose a public account that suits you among the vast number of public accounts. If you are not careful, it will become a "blind investment".

Usually you will pay attention to these two indicators, "How much does this account cost?", "Has the owner of this account heard of/is he well-known?". But this is actually a very narrow-minded concept. If you don't deeply analyze the data behind each account, the money you applied for with great difficulty may be wasted in an instant.

The process of selecting numbers is a very rational one. To put it bluntly, there are several key dimensions:

(Click to view original image)

1) Cost-effectiveness

In the industry, the average reading price of headlines is 1.3 yuan, so as long as it is lower than 1.3 yuan, the reading price is relatively reasonable. Secondly, when other dimensions are the same, the lower the better.

2) Fan accuracy

This includes fans’ age, geographical distribution, and gender ratio. You can directly ask the owner of the account to provide a screenshot of the background data. Another example is the fan industry, whether most of the fans are novices or senior experts in a certain field, etc. Some data can only be judged subjectively through the content of historical articles.

3) Fan stickiness

Mainly look at the average number of likes for headlines, the like rate for headline readings, the number of comments on headlines, and the comment rate for headline readings. Generally, these dimensions are sufficient for judgment. Other more in-depth dimensions include originality rate, number of advertisement readings, frequency of post deletions, etc. Accounts with high fan stickiness will definitely have a higher conversion rate.

4) Historical delivery

If you find that competing products have also been placed in historical articles, should you not place the bid? Absolutely not. If a competitor has invested in this ad, it must mean that the competitor has recognized the value of this account. You need to see what the reading data of this ad is. Is it close to the average number of views for this account? When was the last time it was served? If the readership of your competitor’s ads is close to the average readership of your account, and the last ad was placed one month ago, then you can run the ad normally.

5) Is there any inflated data?

1. Judging by single article reading trend

I used Xigua Data's "pre-investment analysis" function to view the historical article data of the selected accounts, and I could see the reading data of each article in each time period.

The normal reading trajectory is semicircular, as shown below:

The number of articles that have been sifted by machines will increase dramatically in a certain period of time, deviating from the fan-shaped trajectory, as shown in the following figure:

b. Compare the average reading of advertising articles

In addition to viewing reading data through tools, you can also find advertising articles with obvious titles from historical articles to see if the reading rate is higher than or equal to the average reading rate. According to normal user habits, the click-through rate of advertising articles will be very low. If advertising articles dominate the platform, it is very likely that they are fake.

Supplement: The number selection tools can be Xinbang, Xigua Data, Weixiaobao, etc., and the functions are not much different.

2. Content Production

After selecting an account, the next step is to prepare the content.

After multiple placements and surveys, the logic of the best articles is summarized as follows: Use a clear title to create suspense → The overall content direction revolves around the theme you want to convey → Introduce the story, which is highly readable → Introduce the advertising part

1) Should I choose to publish soft articles or hard advertisements?

The question that you will definitely be confused about before placing an advertisement is whether it is better to place soft articles or hard advertisements? Let’s first look at the obvious difference between hard advertising and soft advertising↓↓

Hard advertising:

Directly express what users can get from the title? What are the advantages of your product? Try every possible way to show it and stimulate users' desire to convert as much as possible. Hard ads usually have a low click-through rate, but once they are clicked, the conversion rate will be higher.

Soft advertising:

First, we use content or hot topics that the public is concerned about as the entry point. More than 60% of the content sections are progressive, guiding users to identify, discover existing problems, provide solutions, prove the effectiveness of my solutions, etc., to stimulate the desire to purchase and convert, and successfully achieve the purpose of the delivery.

Summarize:

Soft ads usually have higher reading rates than hard ads, but whether the readers can be successfully converted into paying users is a great test of the editor's soft writing skills.

Therefore, if you want to be safe, I suggest using hard advertising. If you have high copywriting skills and a strong ability to understand user needs, you can try soft articles to achieve high explosiveness. However, the specific effects vary from industry to industry, and A/B testing can be used to compare which method has a higher final ROI.

2) Title design

The first thing to consider about the title is the mood of the user when reading your article. For example, if the user reads the article seriously and immersively, then you will be more likely to inspire him to take action. If the user has a playful attitude, it will be difficult to encourage him to take action.

For example, take a look at the difference between these two titles:

Even if the content of the first article is the same as that of the second article, when users see the first article title and click to enter, they read it with an entertaining attitude. So when you guide users to take action in the article, they will not have much desire because they are just reading it as entertaining news.

Although the title of the second article is a bit clickbaity, please note: parents are not afraid of clickbaity, but they are afraid of "missing out on some cognition", so at this time they will look at it with a serious attitude, thinking how can they not delay their children. At this time, the persuasiveness of each node you design will easily lead to action.

In addition, the design of the title needs to be very directional, so that readers know clearly the purpose of reading the article when they read it. Also, do not finish what you want to say all at once, but create suspense appropriately. This will allow you to click into the article.

If your title makes users feel that it is irrelevant or uninteresting to them, then the efficiency of your delivery has already been lost when it comes to the title. So the title is obviously very important.

3) Content direction

When creating content, I fell into a misunderstanding at first. I often used some big principles to explain things in order to show the professionalism of our brand. But later you will find that when you use big principles to explain to users, you often cannot get users to focus. Most popular articles or big-name articles with strong writing skills use a small point to inspire users to continue reading, because users can often empathize and easily understand a small point.

If you can’t rely on your intuition to grasp the points of user attention, you can also use some methods, such as listing the titles with the highest number of recent readings on the account, and using semantic analysis tools (I usually use NLPIR) to select the most frequently appearing keywords. Based on these high-frequency keywords, dig deeper into what they are essentially concerned about? Understand more granular user segments based on their intrinsic interests.

The above two pictures are the keyword extractions of the highly read titles of a technical account. It can be seen that the two points that users of this account are most concerned about are salary (annual salary) and professional technical methods (experience, guides, entry).

4) Article structure and readability

When reading an article, most users will first look at the main points of the article and will not read it word by word. Therefore, it is very important that the key points in your article are clearly presented. In addition to using stories to attract users to continue reading, you can also use short sentences instead of long sentences to allow readers to understand what you want to express at the lowest cost.

5) Whether the advertisement can prompt user actions

The purpose of our campaign is usually to get users to take a certain action in the end, such as adding WeChat friends, purchasing lead-generating courses, or leaving sales leads, etc. In this process, advertising placement is very important.

However, the advertising part is often where the user bounce rate is the highest, so if you cannot quickly and clearly explain the advantages of your product, there is no way to create a "click" moment in the user's mind, which will not lead to action. There are many techniques here, among which the ones marked in red are the key ones. Which areas must be marked in red?

Free items must be marked in red. When users are not so impressed with your brand, whether you can provide it for free, whether you can add product advantages on top of the free service, whether you can make users want to act in the moment, and whether you can minimize the user's decision-making cost, will determine whether users can take immediate action.

Therefore, you must use the shortest and most conspicuous way to let users see “free”. Since it doesn’t cost much anyway, users will take action.

The parts containing numbers must be marked in red. People's vision is usually more sensitive to numbers and easier to focus. When users see that tens of thousands of people have received it, they will think, why not receive it too? This will increase their sense of trust and make subsequent actions smoother.

6) Optimization of message

This part is actually very easy to be overlooked by everyone. You will find that after reading an article, we often go back to read the comments, and in many cases, the comments are as interesting as the article itself. At this point, if you finish reading this article, you will usually have three actions:

First, enter the landing page by reading the original text

Second, jump through a QR code

Third, exit the article

So in this case, what is the most prominent thing at the bottom of the article? It’s the message part, right? So leaving a message at this time must be very important. When users see other people’s feedback on your products (especially educational products, where user feedback has a huge impact on purchasing decisions), it will reduce their decision-making costs.

Therefore, the messages must be carefully crafted, especially the first one or two messages. These one or two messages should express the user's pain points in a very vivid tone. As long as the reader sees this message, his path back to the landing page is the shortest and the action is the fastest.

The power of this message lies in the fact that it speaks to the thoughts of parents and encourages everyone to take action. When this message can allow some users who have not converted to see this message, go back and click to read the original text or scan the QR code, the message will serve the purpose.

3. ROI Review

In addition to the form selected before the launch, there is also a data tracking form to review the channels and content. The following is the data tracking table of my training camp course for your reference.

(Put data tracking table, click to see the original image)

My usual review dimensions are: looking at the title from the opening rate, looking at the article content from the fan conversion rate, judging the channel quality from the customer acquisition cost and ROI, and looking at the product launch strategy from the conversion rate after acquiring traffic.

In addition, if there is a channel with particularly good ROI, I will go back and analyze carefully what makes this channel different from other channels, is it the user stickiness? Value for money? What are the characteristics of the content? If the content of this account is more professional compared to other accounts, then I will look for more accounts with more professional historical articles and more valuable content.

After each review after the launch, it is necessary to optimize the strategy for the next stage of launch. If there are channels with good results, you can also consider reinvesting, or choose other ways of cooperation, such as menu bars, follow-up reminders, bottom of articles, continuous tweets, etc.

In general, in the final review phase, the first thing to do is to clarify the final results you want to analyze, and then record the basic data to support it. I believe that through constant review and summary, the effectiveness of your public account will get better and better.

Well, as long as each of the above details is repeatedly refined, your conversion rate can be increased by at least 20%, which can help you save a lot of advertising costs and increase your efficiency many times.

Author: A Meng

Source: Interesting Notes