How to do marketing if the budget is not enough?

We all know that how many people can be promoted to by information flow advertising depends on how much money the advertiser can spend. There was once a rumor in the industry that if you have limited promotion funds, you should not play with information flow, because "it is difficult to place, and you may burn through your money before you learn how to place it."

No matter how small the budget is, promotion is still a must. Today we will share with you how to distribute content with hidden advertising purposes without spending a penny, and achieve the same or even better promotion effect as information flow advertising.

The initial budget for promotion is very small. How to promote it?

If you don't have enough financial resources, you can make up for it with intelligence.

In this era where mobile phone addiction is rampant and mobile Internet is becoming more and more popular, self-media is a good choice. For example, the article you are reading now is essentially an advertisement for marketing services:

I write articles to share my experience on how to do marketing , information flow advertising, etc., and publish them on Toutiao. I use Toutiao's big data algorithm to find users who may be interested in marketing, information flow advertising, etc., and attract them to follow my Toutiao account and add me on WeChat. If we get along well, we can discuss cooperation. During the whole process, I achieved publicity, traffic generation, and even sales without spending any money.

There are many self-media platforms, why do you choose Toutiao?

Let’s look at an example:

This is the first article published on both Toutiao and WeChat official accounts after the new account of "Precision Delivery of Information Stream Ads" was opened:

The following picture is the headline number:

The picture below is the official account:

With the same zero fan base, the articles published on Toutiao far exceed those of public accounts in terms of reading volume, number of comments, share, number of reposts, and number of collections.

In other words, what makes Toutiao different from public accounts and other self-media platforms is its greater ability to spread. As long as the Toutiao robot determines that the content of the article is useful to users, even with zero budget and zero fan base, the content can reach the target users and achieve effective dissemination.

Because of this, Toutiao is particularly suitable for promoting projects that are short of funds and budget in the early stages of development.

If you want to use Toutiao for promotion, what issues should you pay attention to? In our communication with consultants, we found that there are three issues that have received a lot of attention:

1. Is it suitable to use Toutiao to promote an industry (product) like mine?

2. Where will users see my content?

3. How to achieve better posting results?

These three questions all involve Toutiao’s product logic and article publishing strategy. Let’s discuss these three issues in detail: How to use Toutiao to achieve free promotion effects during practical operations.

1. Who is more suitable for promotion through Toutiao?

Suitability has nothing to do with industry or product.

The criterion for evaluating whether your content is appropriate is whether it is what Toutiao users need. As long as your content is needed by users, you are valuable.

Let’s take an example of a headline account in a niche industry: Zhuguan Baba.

This is an expert in answering questions about agriculture, rural areas and farmers. Judging from the content he has published in the past, he mainly talks about various issues related to pigs.

If such highly industry-specific articles were published in traditional mass media (note, mass media, not specially classified media), such as urban newspapers, radio, and television, many people would probably jump away after seeing them, right? How much will it cost if you want the target audience to see it? It's really unpredictable.

But what if it is published on Toutiao, which has 700 million users?

You don't need to rack your brains to think about where your target users are, such as those who want to buy pork, want to learn about pork, want to invest in pig farming, want financing, want to learn technology, etc. The recommendation algorithm robot will automatically help you match them. The clearer the title and article content, the easier it will be for the robot to help you find users. The more interesting the content is to users, the more interested users you will find.

The reason I use such a niche industry as an example is to tell you that no matter what industry you are in or what product you make, as long as you provide quality content, users will give you feedback, and feedback will have commercial value. As for how valuable the feedback is, it depends on the sincerity of the content producer (i.e. the author of the Toutiao account).

2. Where will users see my content?

When a Toutiao author writes an article with full sincerity, the question he cares about arises: where can users see it? Which users will see it? How many people can see it?

We first need to distinguish whether the article has been marked as "recommended" by the Toutiao robot (for articles not marked with the "recommended" label, Toutiao's recommendation algorithm does not intervene in content distribution).

Once the "Recommended" label is added, it means that the Toutiao recommendation algorithm robot will do the following two actions:

Prioritize display to users who have followed this headline account

This action should be distinguished from following WeChat public accounts:

When there is an update in a WeChat public account, users can only see the update in the following situations if they have already followed the public account:

1. Go to the account homepage to view the latest updates;

2. Or, it just so happens that someone in your circle of friends follows the same public account as you, discovers that it is updated earlier than you, sees it earlier than you, and coincidentally thinks it is valuable and shares it in the circle of friends, and it just so happens that you see it, then you will know the existence of this article.

But on Toutiao, as long as you have followed a Toutiao account, the updated status of that account will be automatically pushed to the users it follows, attracting the user's attention in a more obvious and direct way.

If a user does not follow the official account, unless he clicks on the repost from a friend in the circle of friends to learn about it, it will be impossible for him to see it through other channels, and the dissemination of the information will be greatly limited.

But on Toutiao, even if you don’t follow a Toutiao account, but have been pushed to it and clicked on it to read it, the next time the account posts a similar article, the Toutiao system will test your interest again, list you as a more precise group of people, and push it to you to read as soon as possible. This is equivalent to giving the Toutiao account one more chance to see if it can win you over in this article.

Randomly grab a wave of users with relevant interest tags to test the distribution effect and decide whether to spread it out

The Toutiao robot will list some keyword tags based on the content of the article, and then make the first wave of targeted distribution based on these tags. It will also predict the popularity of the article based on the opening rate, bounce rate, and reading completion rate of the first wave of sample users, to determine whether to quickly recommend it to target users at a level of 10 times, 20 times, or 50 times the number of samples, or to stop recommending it.

Taking the first article on "Precise Delivery of Information Stream Advertising" as an example, the keyword tags determined by the machine are: marketing, mobile Internet, advertising design, etc. The first wave of sample users of the article will also be randomly generated from users who usually pay attention to marketing, mobile Internet, advertising design and other content. The reaction of this wave of sample users to the article also determines whether the article we worked hard to write has the possibility of being promoted for free on a larger scale.

In addition, you can view the article like this regardless of whether it is marked as recommended:

(1) View all posts in the Toutiao account. This is the same as the display logic of the official account, so I won’t go into details.

(2) You can also forward it to a platform supported by the system for off-site reading. As shown in the figure below, you can forward it to multiple platforms such as Moments and WeChat friends.

After talking about the industry, product applicability and content distribution methods of Toutiao. I believe that everyone has a basic understanding of Toutiao promotion. The next step is a very important one, which is also the third question that everyone is most concerned about - how to use the characteristics of the platform to promote ourselves without spending a penny.

author: IC Lab

source: IC Lab