Analysis of Zhihu marketing in men’s skin care products

"Male beauty economy" is an industry term that has been discussed a lot recently. In 2021, many domestic emerging brands have emerged, and international brands such as Armani, Chanel, and SK-II have also launched men's skin care and makeup products. Suddenly, titles such as "Men's skin care is in fashion" and "Hidden new blue ocean" are everywhere.

As I recall, when Li Jiaqi was promoting a men's skin care set in his live broadcast room two years ago, the barrage of comments was still filled with comments like "He doesn't deserve it." Have men, who have always been ridiculed by the marketing circle as having the lowest purchasing power, really risen?

According to incomplete statistics, in the men's care track in 2020 alone, 8 brands received financing. Among them, Li Ran has received 6 rounds of financing so far, and the most recent round has reached an amount of nearly 300 million yuan. It is also the leader among the emerging domestic men's skin care brands with annual sales exceeding 100 million yuan.

Most of these brands that have emerged in the capital market have only been established for a few months to more than a year, but the capital's sense of smell is always more sensitive. As those born in the 1990s and 2000s become the backbone of consumption and men's self-aesthetic values ​​change, the entire men's skincare industry seems to have ushered in spring. Although the growth rate slowed down in 2020 due to the impact of the epidemic, the overall trend is still linear growth, and it is expected that the market size may exceed 10 billion in 2021.

Among them, the more eye-catching Li Ran and Dear Boyfriend, as representative brands, have already occupied a considerable market share. During the 12 months from August 2020 to July 2021, the total transaction volume of the Li Ran brand flagship store reached 230 million, with sales exceeding 2.3 million, and hot-selling SKUs with monthly sales of over 10,000 have been formed; the total brand sales of the Dear Boyfriend brand flagship store in the past year have also reached more than 70 million. How did these two new domestic brands, which were only established in 2019, achieve the leap from zero to 100 million in this male consumer field that has always been unpopular?

I have seen such a hot comment under the topic of men's skin care before: "Youth without using 'volcanic mud' is not perfect." To this day, basic men's skin care products from traditional international brands still occupy a high position among the vast male consumer groups.

Long-term market cultivation has been deeply rooted, and men's consumption concepts are generally more stubborn and their brand loyalty is higher. Therefore, if new domestic brands want to break through, they must find a new approach.

In addition to accurate brand positioning, opening up omni-channel marketing channels is also an important strategy for them to quickly capture the market. In addition to Douyin and Xiaohongshu, Zhihu has also become a new battlefield for these brand implants.

For example, under questions such as "How do boys take care of their skin and what skin care products are worth recommending" and "What are some men's perfumes that girls will become addicted to", products such as men's skin care sets and perfumes were implanted.

For these popular questions with millions or even tens of millions of views, even if the answers have product links embedded in them, as long as the content is high-quality enough, they can gain user recognition, become highly praised answers, and occupy an excellent exposure position at the top of the rankings.

In addition to embedding one's own products in category-related content, creating brand-related content and establishing a good product promotion atmosphere are also essential.

For example, when searching for the keyword "理然" on Zhihu, positive product promotion content occupies the top position and all come with conversion plug-ins. The search behavior of "brand words" is often generated by users at the consumption decision-making stage after seeing the seeding content, so the content atmosphere and conversion guidance of this part are crucial to improving the transaction rate.

I have always believed that under the new consumption model, brand marketing must combine traffic gameplay with content gameplay in order to better achieve product and effect integration. As a high-quality question-and-answer community, Zhihu not only has a huge active user base, but is also a natural content pool, making it particularly suitable for brands to accumulate content.

Why are these men’s skin care brands able to achieve success through content marketing on Zhihu?

Although the user population portrait released by Zhihu shows that the ratio of men to women is tending to be balanced, the name "male version of Xiaohongshu" is not groundless. Zhihu does indeed have a large number of male users who have purchasing power and are accustomed to searching Zhihu before placing an order.

"Good content brings good products". Solve their needs and pain points with content that users like, convey the product's efficacy and characteristics to users in a scenario-based mode, maintain a good public opinion atmosphere in the comment area, and finally complete the planting of grass and conversion.

On Zhihu, the topic of men's skin care has generated more than 400 million views, and the number of views is still increasing by millions every day. There are more than 8,000 questions on related topics.

One of the most relevant popular questions is "What good men's skin care brands do you recommend?" It has generated nearly 500 answers, 20,000 followers and more than 7 million views.

This is just one of more than 8,000 questions and answers. There are many questions like this with hundreds of thousands or millions of views, so the attention and traffic of men's skin care products on Zhihu are evident.

With such considerable traffic, most people are more concerned about how much of the cake is left to be divided? We will roughly evaluate the content quantity, content coverage, and content quality:

1. Number of contents

Taking Li Ran, a brand in the men's skin care category that has done relatively good content marketing on Zhihu, as an example, according to preliminary statistics, there are about 15 questions directly related to the keyword Li Ran, and the number of answers to the related questions is 70+; the total number of contents that embed Li Ran product information or links in the category-related answers is 230+.

Compared with traditional big brands, emerging brands have lower awareness and very little native content on the platform. Most of them only involve implantation and have not yet fully invested in brand content delivery; and the few brands that have begun to fully deploy Zhihu content marketing are basically in the process of transitioning from content delivery to the first stage of content maintenance, so the amount of brand marketing content at this stage is not large.

2. Content coverage

In fact, there are not many men's skin care products that have truly formed a brand effect on Zhihu. Most brands only implant products in more popular questions and answers, and a considerable number of questions with commercial value have not been occupied. Using the short-term high-frequency question screening tool to search for the keyword "men's skin care", nearly half of the questions did not have any product content.

3. Content quality:

The quality of the content here should be viewed in conjunction with the tone of the Zhihu platform itself. As a knowledge community dominated by long texts and medium videos, users are willing to spend a long time researching a category or product, with the main purpose of finding scientific knowledge and avoiding pitfalls.

However, judging from the content launched by brands, many brands are confined to the strong promotion and recommendation of Xiaohongshu. On the Zhihu platform, where user characteristics are different, such content is difficult to reach the minds of users.

So what kind of content is more likely to be recognized by Zhihu users? In my opinion, the core of this type of content is whether it helps users solve problems and whether users can have a sense of "gain" after reading it.

Content that can make users feel a sense of gain is not limited to professional scientific knowledge. Valuable sharing of amateur experiences and in-depth comparison of homogeneous products can also make readers feel that the content is valuable after reading it.

Many brands often fall into a misunderstanding and treat the content posted on Zhihu as advertisements, listing a bunch of product selling points and confidently showing off various authoritative certifications, core ingredients, etc. But what users actually care about is not how great your product is, but whether they can feel how great “I” am when using this product.

Judging from these three aspects, there is still a lot of room for optimization in the content marketing of men's skin care brands on Zhihu. Zhihu itself has just completed its commercial transformation, and most brands here are still feeling their way forward, which leaves room for imagination for other excellent brands in many industries.

1. Number of questions followed and answered

The more attention a question receives, the more traffic it has; the more answers it has, the more difficult the competition is. If you are publishing content yourself, it is recommended to choose questions with more than 200 followers and less than 100 answers. For highly competitive and extremely large traffic questions, it is more suitable to find KOLs in the same field to cooperate in publishing, so as to have a chance to grab the front row.

2. The long tail effect of the problem

Questions with a long tail effect can continuously bring in follow-up traffic. Generally speaking, there are three reference points for questions with this characteristic: questions that rank high in keyword searches, questions that are included in topic indexes, and long-term questions that have stage-by-stage discussion value.

3. The accuracy of the question

Whether the question can accurately match your product is also an important criterion that needs to be measured. For example, if a brand is promoting a men's facial cleanser that costs only a few dozen yuan, then don't ask questions that refer to it as "high-end" or "big brand", as these irrelevant answers may lead to controversy.

Questions such as "affordable price" and "student party" can obviously more accurately match the product's needs to users.

STEP 2. Keyword optimization

As mentioned earlier, we should give priority to answering the questions that are searched at the top of the site. Then there are two ways to occupy the top-ranked articles:

• Create high-quality articles and optimize them to the front row through operations;
• Contact the authors of the top-ranked articles for first-pit implantation.

The former has higher requirements on the quality of article content and requires a professional operation team to do long-term data optimization, which cannot be achieved overnight. Then the most direct and simple way is the latter, which can quickly expose the product.

This area is still relatively easy for brands to overlook on Zhihu, but the popularity of brand topics largely reflects the brand's professionalism, popularity and user attention, and is an important image display of the brand on the Zhihu platform. Topics on Zhihu itself are also a section that can continuously generate long-tail traffic, which is conducive to the long-term conversion of products.

Finally, let’s talk about an interesting “flight effect” on Zhihu. ——Users will search for advertisements they see on other platforms on Zhihu. If a user sees negative content about the brand, he or she will basically leave.

The professionalism accumulated by Zhihu is itself a direct reflection of strong endorsement in the minds of a large number of users. Therefore, compared with other traffic-generating platforms, Zhihu may not bring short-term growth in traffic conversion. Its greatest advantage is that it can allow brand content to precipitate user value and have a profound impact on brand building.

Author: kevlo

Source: kevlo