Keep user growth tips

The sports and fitness app - Keep, has registered over 140 million users in just three years. How did Keep achieve such rapid user growth? In this article, the author analyzes and discusses Keep's operations based on the four theories of growth hacking.

Many people don’t like reading and think that reading is the most anti-human product in history. Some people don’t like running or fitness. Some people have to ask for leave from physical education classes in elementary school. They think that running or going to the gym is more anti-human than reading.

However, behind anti-human products, there is always the birth of super popular products, such as Himalaya and Logical Thinking in the learning category.

Today we are going to talk about the newcomer in the field of sports and fitness - keep. This app has registered over 140 million users in just three years. For a tool software in the field of fitness, it definitely has immeasurable magic, but what exactly is this magic?

Ranked first in fitness and health in the app store for many years

The usage habits formed by users of their products are the foundation for the survival and development of some companies, but not all companies are subject to this.

Let’s first look at the development history of Keep, which coincided with the entrepreneurial boom in 2014 and 2015, and its financing broke the historical record.

Picture from the Internet

Growth Hacker 1: Brand Growth

Brand Growth 1: Videos That Cost Millions of Dollars

No matter how hard you try, you may not see any results. Only fitness can produce the most obvious effects. First, let’s take a look at the “Self-discipline gives me freedom” video released by Keep in 2016 to burn your calories.

Just a short video is enough to give you the idea of ​​exercise: https://v.qq.com/x/page/z0306p1o55p.html

After watching the video, do you feel excited?

Yes, this is the video shot by Keep in 2016, with inspiring narration, majestic background music, foreign scenes and high-quality special effects, and fitness enthusiasts "training" in various life scenes.

The video ends with the quote “Self-discipline gives me freedom”. Does it give you goosebumps? Are you looking at your own "extra fat" again, feeling ashamed of yourself, wanting to exercise and shape your body but not knowing how to do it?

The video’s great images create a scenario where everyone can exercise, away from the traditional gym, with just a phone and persistence.

Summarize:

It is said that the production cost of this video is as high as 10 million. After surveying 10 people around me, the unanimous response was: the more you watch the video, the more shocked you feel. Your nerves are tense with the melody. It feels that every video screen has a strong penetrating power.

Especially the last sentence “Self-discipline gives me freedom” is particularly impactful. It allows me to see the victory of others after persistence and the consequences of my own laziness. The hormones in my body are stirring and I have an urge to exercise immediately.

This video adopts the external trigger mode, and the last sentence "make self-discipline more free" is the boiling point.

According to relevant statistics, the video was launched in June 2016 and was broadcast on online platforms such as Weibo, Tencent, and Youku, major local satellite TV stations, and even in the Chinese Super League. In less than three months, the number of users increased by 20 million, and the cost was well worth it.

Brand growth 2: Sponsorship of variety shows

In the entertainment industry, the prices of stars will rise along with the effects of movies and TV shows, but Keep is very good at leveraging the power of celebrities to endorse its products.

In October 2015, Keep had cooperated with Zhu Yawen. Initially, the intention was for the popular star Lu Han, but Lu Han became famous because of Running Man, and the endorsement fee increased significantly as a result.

The choice of working with Zhu Yawen was made indirectly due to business expense issues. In addition, Du Haitao is also a user of Keep (Du Haitao has also demonstrated Keep training on Weibo), so it was natural to showcase Keep on the screen during the show.

The cost of investing in this program was between 400,000 and 600,000 yuan, but it gained more than 1 million users one month after the program. By leveraging Lu Han's super high traffic effect, it chose to cooperate with Zhu Yawen and chose to cooperate on Happy Camp. With user word-of-mouth + celebrity effect + interactive implantation, and multiple forced traffic together, it's no wonder that it didn't become popular.

Summarize:

Being willing to "spend money", accurately positioning users, choosing the right strategy, and losing fat and exercising are the pain points of many users, and they are the "pain" that many users want to experience by spending money to buy diet pills and drink diet tea.

We have heard of too many weight loss series endorsed by "celebrity", but it is really rare to find a product that relies on perseverance to lose weight. Keep's wave of products has captured the minds of many users, and has also made it more and more stable in surpassing its competitors.

Once a company successfully makes users form the habit of using its products, it can benefit greatly, including: higher user lifetime value, greater pricing flexibility, faster growth, and stronger competitive advantage.

Brand Growth 3: Advertising

Keep's advertising covers all land, sea and air, using themes such as "Self-discipline gives me freedom" to visually surround the general public. The advertising channels include light box ads, subway ads and other media, which made Keep instantly well-known.

Summarize:

The advertising of the keep brand does not adopt a simple offline advertising "formula", but is linked with online advertising.

From June 4 to June 30, 2016, during the period when Keep’s city light boxes and stadium advertisements were put on display, users took photos with the advertisements and posted the topic #自论给自由# on Weibo, and prizes were given out every day.

From June 13 to June 20, 2016, users posted before-and-after fitness photos on Weibo and added the hashtag #Self-discipline gives me freedom# to participate in the draw for prizes. The coordinated dispatch allows the maximum energy burst of traffic.

Brand growth 4: cross-border cooperation

2016.5.14-5.20 Keep and Uniqlo launched cross-border cooperation;

Activity rules: Users can use the Keep running function to run out a "U-shaped" track map, share the track map under the community topic #跑出优功能#, and win a prize from Uniqlo.

It can be seen that the reading volume of this topic exceeds 1.36 million times (of course, this data is too old, and the adoption rate is not credible)

Summarize:

I remember that there is a detailed explanation of cross-border in the book "Traffic Pool". Cross-border will become an important source of traffic in the future. Keep has combined cross-border cooperation to obtain multiple batches of user traffic. This batch of traffic triggers the addiction mechanism through the use of its products, allowing users to continue to fission and spread by word of mouth.

Cross-border cooperation has become an important way to increase user growth, such as "Ele.me and Durex" and "Uber and McDonald's". In fact, I have also been experimenting with cross-border cooperative traffic recently. I started with a small amount of capital, but the benefits are still good.

Growth Hacker 2: User Growth

People who have put in the work will add more value to their origami works. Ariely calls this phenomenon the "IKEA effect."

Let’s first get familiar with the five different development stages of keep products:

1. From February 2014 to July 2015, the Keep community was in its cold start phase, mainly focusing on polishing product logic. The core function "training course" is polished to guide users to post updates only after completing training. Overall, it is still a product with a weak community and strong tools.
2. From July 2015 to May 2016, Keep introduced capital several times, embarking on a path of rapid growth; it launched training plans and group functions. The user data accumulated in the first phase began to establish user levels, gradually forming the prototype of a community, and at the same time adapted many unique features of the iOS platform;
3. In May 2016 and March 2017, we began to try e-commerce monetization, taking the B2C route, while also tapping into the running user group and strengthening the community function;
4. From March 2017 to March 2018, we strengthened the functions related to outdoor sports scenes, optimized the support for outdoor walking, cycling, yoga and other activities, and provided a reward mechanism for users, creating a "free sports field" while establishing a "user growth system";
5. From March 2018 to date, Keep has launched smart hardware and offline sports spaces, and started to build a technological sports ecosystem.

User Growth 1: Aha Moments

The "Aha Moment" is the moment when the product makes the user's eyes light up, the moment when the user truly discovers the core value of the product - why the product exists, why they need it, and what they can get from it.

When users are attracted by Keep's various advertisements and even word of mouth, this part of users has become Keep's very precise group. Losing weight, shaping the body and self-realization are their common goals.

By opening the sports function of keep, users can quickly find the fitness (training) courses they need, and the training time and difficulty are clearly marked on the course page. This novel course training method completely breaks the original mindset of fitness users (long fitness time and unclear fitness difficulty), allowing users to have a new understanding of fitness courses and keep.

Summarize:

Keep's "aha moment" mechanism is great. It uses small pictures to clearly mark the time and difficulty of fitness, so that fitness users or novice users are no longer afraid of fitness (if I am suddenly asked to work out for 30 minutes, I will still think about it, after all, it is an inhumane product). Users will choose courses that are more suitable for themselves based on their own fitness venues and current plan needs.

When the muscles expand and tear after exercise, you will instantly feel that your muscles are burning. That sense of accomplishment, touching and taking pictures of them, will create a lasting sense of addiction.

User Growth 2: Addictive Mode

There are three types of user addiction design models: social rewards, prey rewards, and self-rewards.

The "aha moment" of Keep mentioned above is only one part of the addiction formula, but what allows its fitness users to continue to be addicted is another set of product mechanisms used by Keep, which belongs to the self-reward in the addiction model. The so-called self-reward refers to the sense of control, accomplishment and finality that people experience from the product.

The length of time spent on fitness using Keep, as well as the pain and tearing sensation after fitness, will allow users to quickly experience the "sense of accomplishment" after fitness in the product. Accompanied by temporary muscle tightness and sweating, they will be more confident in the effectiveness of their exercise. Such a sense of accomplishment will subconsciously mobilize the "social currency" sharing gene in the brain, and such a drive will definitely bring in more users.

Summarize:

Every product has a very different hidden addiction model, but they must all abide by one rule: while gaining users, they must also satisfy their needs for the product (service).

For businesses, addiction may not mean direct growth, but from the user's perspective, addiction is an amplification of growth. The addiction of TikTok is that it puts users in a flow state, making them want to share "good-looking" video content with their friends. This is the social reward among addictions, which refers to the interpersonal rewards people get from the product through interaction with others.

User Growth 3: Creating Halo

"No community, no activity" has become an iron formula for C-end products.

Keep’s aha moment is “exercise”. Simply using exercise tools can no longer allow users to contribute value and increase activity within the product for a long time.

After introducing capital, Keep launched training plans and group functions, and began to establish user levels, gradually taking shape as a community. The seemingly simple community building has contributed infinite value to the current growth and activity of Keep.

Many people choose fitness, body shaping or self-realization. Whether in the direction of diet or exercise, there are certain blind spots, and community content just meets such needs.

If my goal is to have attractive chest and abdominal muscles, I will definitely pay more attention to similar users to see their fitness routines, fitness techniques, and diet culture.

In addition, if I want to have a perfect pair of abs, I will definitely pay more attention to the content posted by similar successful users.

Keep's community system:

Summarize:

The benefits that communities bring to enterprises:

1. Provide users with sustainable and active scenarios.
2. The community is the Internet product with the highest user participation, no doubt about it.
3. Enterprises can efficiently reach users, get close to users, and serve users in the community.
4. UGC content has a very high conversion rate for users and is highly endorseable
5. The most direct feedback channel for product upgrades and operations.

Growth Hacker 3: Core Fission

"Users' investment in products can act like hooks to hold users tightly. In order to hold users tightly, habit-forming technologies use each time users go through an addiction cycle to increase product value. Through continuous addiction cycles, the connection between users and products will become closer and closer. Users will rely more and more on products to solve their problems until new habits and new daily behaviors are formed" - user addiction and triggers.

Core fission 1: tutorial driven

The term “tutorial-driven” appears too many times in this article. This term can be classified as an “aha moment” experience.

From the exercise time, you can see the fat (calories) consumed and choose your own course. The fool-proof exercise following the tutorial can make the time counted, make fitness more scientific, and make different degrees of tearing and stretching a good source of calories consumed.

In short, tutorial-driven development is an integral part of Keep’s business operation system and an important part of its growth.

Summarize:

Because of curiosity, the bottleneck of no coaches in the fitness field was broken, which made Keep go smoothly after its launch. This is indeed due to good product thinking and bold user innovation. The tutorial-driven approach is a sharp knife for Keep, which penetrates directly into new areas of the user's mind.

Core fission 2: Trigger mechanism

In every product that we become addicted to, there are internal triggers and external triggers.

(1) Trigger mechanism: external trigger

In the fitness tool Keep, external triggers are more driving than internal triggers. External triggers guide users to take the next step by permeating information into every aspect of their lives.

External triggers are a means to continuously stimulate long-term user usage and sustainable user growth.

There are many scenarios for the external trigger mechanism of keep. For example, in an office environment where you see each other every day, if a colleague has strong muscles or a perfect sexy body, such a colleague is definitely an important factor in stimulating you, because the effect of persistent fitness can be seen. This is an external trigger.

Another factor is the environment. The four seasons of the year, spring, summer, autumn and winter, are different environments that stimulate fitness. The cool weather in spring, autumn and winter is a very good time for fitness.

But summer is a very important factor in stimulating incentives. In summer, people wear light and thin clothes to show off their figures. All regular friends start to exercise before the summer comes. The weather environment is also a very good "weapon" to trigger users to exercise.

Summarize:

As we said at the beginning, Keep has invested heavily in advertising, brand cooperation, and business cooperation. A large part of this is to stimulate those users who are not satisfied with their current body shape, and only through exercise can they become better.

The invisible implantation of Keep in advertisements will continuously attract new users, and new users will be successfully converted into potential users of Keep under the "pre-set" of the operating mechanism.

(2) Trigger mechanism: internal trigger

Internal triggering and external triggering are two completely different methods. Internal triggers remind users to take the next action by creating associations in their memory.

In order to constantly stimulate "emotions", Keep established the community as an Internet product (perhaps, before the establishment of Keep, it did not think that the community could be used as a stimulating trigger, but simply as a means of user retention). If you carefully dig into the content of the Keep community, you will obviously find that the content is "filled" with various "works" that stimulate your hormone secretion.

Summarize:

If you want to have a desired body shape, immediate action and long-term persistence are inseparable. It will make you envious, inspire you, constantly encourage you, stimulate you with emotions, and trigger your next action.

In the mechanism of internal triggering, Weibo and WeChat Moments are very good examples. We check or post content on Weibo or Moments because we are driven by habit. Most of these habits are driven by emotions. Seeing beautiful scenery, delicious food, and encountering sad things are all internal emotional triggers. Once developed, they will become lasting habits.

Growth Hacker 4: Internet Fitness

Whether exercising in a limited space or in a public space with many people, the promotion is centered around "socializing" because fitness itself has social attributes.

Just imagine, when you are sweating profusely after working out, when you feel your muscles are tight after working out, when you have a six-pack and your biceps are bulging, would you choose to take a photo to your Moments and show off yourself in a "low-key" way?

Keep's offline fitness also needs to satisfy its closed business model loop. As for whether it can be profitable, it is not within the scope of our discussion this time.

Keep's Internet offline stores have a very different "structure" from traditional gyms. The overall floor space is smaller than that of traditional gyms. Secondly, there are not too many fitness coaches, and there is no gym membership promotion at any time.

The picture below shows the characteristics of keep's Internet-based gym. Just as mentioned at the beginning of the article, fitness is like reading or even learning English psychology. For example, after exercising for 3 hours, my muscles began to take shape and my vocabulary increased. Such obvious changes are constantly driving me to work harder or invest more experience.

Keep's fitness adopts more technological and "comparative" design principles. By wearing a bracelet, it collects the calories consumed by fitness participants at all times and displays the data on a large screen. This process greatly stimulates people's sense of comparison and honor.

The first place wants to maintain the first place, and the last place wants to get rid of the psychological "constraints". This psychological game process will greatly stimulate the overall effect of training.

In addition, the calorie consumption data displayed on the big screen will also have a very intuitive "traffic". You will always post a circle of friends to prove your "labor results", record a TikTok, and use traffic media similar to Xiaohongshu.

Summarize:

From early user acquisition to user communication communities, we are constantly cultivating users' fitness and regular habits. As users persist in fitness, their understanding of fitness products gradually deepens. The establishment of offline gyms and online and offline guidance provide users with more scientific fitness exercises that are more in line with user habits.

Curiosity will also drive a large number of fitness enthusiasts to come inexplicably, and the strong online traffic entrance will continuously bring users to offline gyms, which is something traditional gyms cannot do. Of course, the final core growth is the product in essence, not marketing.

Conclusion

Humans are social animals, and their happiness depends to a large extent on their relationships with others.

Whether it is Keep’s offline advertising or online growth mechanism, fitness is still inseparable from social interaction.

However, we have to admit that Keep is indeed very professional in attracting new customers. In just a few years, it has acquired more than 100 million customers. With such strong operations, there may be few such excellent products in China.

Product operation mechanisms such as "aha moment", "addiction mode" and "internal and external triggers" allow Keep to launch a combination of punches.

In my opinion, the success of Keep is the result of the dual benefits of time and capital, coupled with its "unique" operating mechanism, which has made Keep famous all over the world and has enabled it to continue to grow. Internal and external triggers are the main content of our study in this section.

Let me tell you another secret. According to relevant statistics, not everyone can succeed in fitness and weight loss. Those who succeed in losing weight must have persisted for a long time. Persistence is really extremely difficult, and the people who can persist must be a minority. We all think that we are among the minority, and I hope you are that minority.

Author: Post-95s Talking About Technology

Source: Post-95s Talking About Technology