How to acquire customers at low cost through Zhihu promotion?

Before doing promotion, I think you should at least ask yourself 5 questions:

1. What (promotional resources) are available : how much is the monthly promotion budget, how many promotional materials, how many promotional staff, etc.

2. What to promote (promote products) : App, public account, Taobao store, mini program, virtual course, physical goods...

3. Who should I promote it to (target users) : men, women, middle school students, college students, middle-aged people, game enthusiasts, mothers, housewives...

4. Where to promote (target users’ active channels or places) : high-traffic online channels such as Baidu, Toutiao, Alibaba, Tencent, App Store, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Weibo, Douban, TapTap Community, Mayu Menstrual Assistant, Babytree Pregnancy, (offline) stationery stores, fast food restaurants, convenience stores, schools, bookstores, hospitals, vegetable markets…

5. How to promote (promotion methods) : (pictures, texts, audio and video) soft advertising, hard advertising, activities

6. Who will promote it : Officials, media celebrities, KOLs, passers-by...

Of course, it would be best to add the promotion period and goals, but this is not the focus of this article, so you can leave it aside for now.

Everyone needs to list the answers to each question as clearly as possible, and then determine the target users, appropriate promotion channels and methods based on their actual situation, so that the promotion will be more effective.

I don’t know your specific situation at the moment, so I will assume that you have no money, no resources, and only one person . You may also have other miscellaneous tasks to do, one of which is to promote your own app. I will give you a very general promotion idea based on this most (miserable) clean (miserable) situation. As long as you read it, think about it carefully and implement it, the effect will be great.

First, let's list the clear points in this column for easy analysis:

1. What do I have? I am alone and don’t have much time to do promotion.

2. What to promote: App (It is unknown what type of App it is, you can add more details based on your specific situation)

3. To whom: The type of app is unknown, and we can only confirm that it is a live person with a smartphone and internet access.

4. Where to promote: The type of app and target users are unknown. All the online channels listed above can be used as references.

5. How to promote: Based on the existing human and material resources, give priority to soft advertising with pictures and texts. If you are particularly capable and your own products are more suitable for promotion with videos, making videos is also OK

6. Who will promote it? If you don’t have money or resources, there is basically no hope for media celebrities and KOLs. Use your official identity or pretend to be a passerby to promote it.

According to the above situation, this article first selects Zhihu, which is super simple to promote and familiar to everyone, as a promotion channel to share the promotion ideas:

1. Collect some topics that target users are interested in based on their characteristics. For example, if you are promoting a fitness app, you can focus on sports topics.

2. Click on the topic of fitness to enter the homepage. On the essence page, you can see many answers with high attention and views. The corresponding questions are where you should answer to expose your own app. If there are not many questions on the essence page, there are still many sub-topics on the right, and you can slowly collect more suitable questions from there to answer;

There are also related questions on the right side of each question for you to choose from. As for how to write soft ads, here's a suggestion: refer to the top 10 answers and learn their answer patterns.

Questions like the one above that answer precise topics and can directly reach target users have the highest conversion rate . In addition, there is a more general method, which is to collect all the App recommendation questions in Zhihu, summarize the App recommendations on it, and then mix in your own apps.

How effective is Zhihu’s promotion? Depending on the quality of the advertorial and the location of the App, on average 1-5 likes will result in one App download/public account follower . If you have money and resources, what do you imagine the results will be?

The above is a brief sharing of Zhihu promotion ideas:

Select topics/issues that the target group is concerned about and implant soft and hard ads to increase product exposure and ultimately achieve conversions.

Some friends who are just starting to try will find it easy to get hundreds or thousands of likes and they will feel very satisfied, but most will find that they only get a few likes after answering a dozen questions. What is wrong with their approach?

If your target users do not use Zhihu/are subject to regional restrictions/have a small user base, it is really not easy to achieve results on Zhihu. For example, for some local life services and offline training, it is more important to do a good job in local offline promotion and word of mouth.

Therefore, before you execute, you need to first clarify your own product positioning, target group and scale, and whether your own product is suitable for Zhihu promotion. If it is suitable, try and persist according to the promotion method shared by Mili. It should not be a problem to go from zero to one million readings in one month. It is not impossible to make niche products. If there are users gathering on certain topics on Zhihu, you can give it a try. Just set reasonable goals based on the actual situation (for example, diving topics are quite suitable for diving suit stores to use them to expose their own products).

Now that we are sure that we can do Zhihu promotion, where can we ultimately use operational means to expose our products/brands?

01 Home page attention and hot list

Follow: This section will display the dynamic information of the people the user follows, including but not limited to following questions, publishing articles, answering questions and agreeing with answers/e-books, etc. We can observe which big, medium and small Vs the target user follows, and cooperate with the Vs that the user follows, especially those that they share a common interest in, to ask them to like our answers and publish answers or articles containing our soft ads (of course, rich dads can also try to run Zhihu information flow ads)

Hot List: This section will display some issues that are currently being hotly discussed or that Zhihu hopes we will discuss hotly. The issues on the hot list have a huge number of views. The questions at the top of the hot list can receive thousands of new page views per minute. It would be great if your answer could be ranked among the top questions in the hot list (it is a rare opportunity to be on the hot list, especially if the relevant questions are on the hot list and your answer is ranked at the top)

02 Search Results Page

The search results page will prioritize topics with this keyword (exact match), followed by live lectures, private lessons, high-authority questions and answers, etc.

We can collect the search terms commonly used by target users, enter these search terms on Zhihu to search, and carefully answer all the questions displayed on the first screen so that the answers have a chance to appear on the user's search results page. If the product is suitable for Live and private lessons, you can also post a free class to increase brand exposure in searches.

03 Topic details page

There are mainly two sections: discussion and highlights. The discussion section shows the latest answers to each question, and the highlights section shows the top-rated answers to each question. Not only are highly praised answers useful, but the latest answers also have a chance to be exposed. Zhihu's algorithm is relatively friendly to new answers. Every new answer has the opportunity to be seen by more or different people, and has the opportunity to be highly praised.

04 Message Page

Actively answer questions that your target users are concerned about, and your answers will be pushed to your followers by Zhihu. Continuously answering questions and using multiple accounts to continuously answer questions is very effective for brand/product exposure

Let me share some tips on execution

1. In the early stage, the content should be as vertical, professional and user-friendly as possible, so that the users reached are more accurate; the content should be continuously updated. If necessary and possible, it is best to update it continuously on multiple accounts, so that the coverage of the audience is more comprehensive and wider;

For example, fitness apps can choose many sports and fitness topics such as running, swimming, basketball and even weight loss for exposure. Looking back at the main points of our previous article, we can create an official account to post fitness-related content; we can create multiple small accounts to simply promote fitness apps and share some stories or usage experiences of the fitness apps; if human and financial resources permit, we can also create multiple KOL accounts, set up small accounts to set people as running enthusiasts, swimming enthusiasts, basketball enthusiasts, and young ladies who have successfully lost weight, and publish stories/content of corresponding professions on several accounts (but it is very time-consuming, and generally companies will not choose this path but directly cooperate with the ready-made KOLs on the platform for promotion)

2. For products with a large user base, even if you choose precise topics and questions, the number is still not small. We can sort out the number of followers and the number of answers to a question. If manpower is limited, we will give priority to answering questions with many followers but fewer answers or fewer highly-praised answers. After answering them, we will go back and answer questions with many followers and more competition. If it is a to C product, the issue with less than 30 followers can basically be ignored.

3. When answering questions, remember to check the question log, which contains the editing and hot list records of this question. We should take the questions that are on the hot list seriously, and answer them as comprehensively, professionally, and helpfully as possible to users. We should use multiple accounts to answer them, and strive to have at least one answer that is among the top 5 most praised. Because there is an 80% chance that a question that has been on the hot list will be on the hot list again in the second month, and it is even possible to be on the hot list twice in a month. One time on the hot list can offset the effect of a month or even multiple months of hard work.

At the beginning of the year, a question was on the hot list, and the answer was ranked in the top 2. The number of readings of the answer exceeded one million in just a few days. When it was ranked around 2nd on the hot list, the number of views increased by 2,000 to 3,000 per second, and when it was ranked around 20th on the hot list, the number of views increased by several hundred per second.

If you still don’t know how to do it after reading these two Zhihu promotion experience sharings, the simplest and most direct way is to imitate and learn from successful friends in competitors or similar fields, summarize the questions they answered, and pick out the ones you can answer and reply carefully.

Author: Mi Li

Source: Rice Grain