There is only bad strategy, no bad traffic

In the past, traffic was king and growth hackers were the key. Now traffic has become the opposite of brand and the knockout drug given by a beautiful woman.

To a certain extent, I am also against traffic swallowing up brands. If you can build a brand by buying traffic, then marketing would be too easy. Similarly, if reverse traffic is good marketing, it would be too easy.

First, be wary of correct nonsense.

It is certainly wrong to rely solely on traffic for growth. Then what? After saying a piece of correct nonsense without any innovation, what next?

Second, we must be wary of oversimplifying issues and be wary of moralists.

Now everyone who can speak is overwhelmingly against traffic. Being against traffic is politically correct and has become the moral high ground. Some people who are doing business are criticizing while buying, while others are achieving brand growth through traffic. So, it’s not as simple as a question of good or bad.

Today I will be politically incorrect and complicate the issue a bit, and let’s talk rationally about what traffic is and what does traffic mean to a brand?

Below, enjoy:

Opinion: There is only bad strategy, not bad traffic

Let me first state my point of view: traffic is neutral, there is no good or bad.

What differentiates good from bad are strategic approaches and creative content.

I used to often see and even got annoyed by similar advertisements: Social apps say: "Make friends in your city, connect quickly"; P2P says: "Borrow money without collateral, and the money will be in your account within 3 seconds"; online education, web games, including many e-commerce companies, etc., are full of misleading slogans. Can users who are lured by these contents reflect the value of advertising?

These traffic advertisements that are widely criticized are all extreme cases, and now they have basically disappeared after strict investigation. Two things have become supporting cases for anti-traffic.

First, a few years ago, a director of Adidas Europe said that they invested about 3 billion yuan in traffic advertising budget every year, but this did not promote stable growth of the brand and they were ready to stop. Second, recent reports say that many new consumer brands have seen their sales drop sharply or even be halved after they stopped using advertising to buy traffic.

The first direct logic is that if traffic advertising is stopped, sales will decline, which just shows the effectiveness of traffic. If hundreds of millions of dollars in traffic advertising expenses are stopped but sales do not change, then it means there is a problem with the traffic.

Then you will find that they have turned traffic advertising into a daily routine, buying continuously for a long time, and complaining that the price is getting higher and higher. It is definitely unhealthy to maintain growth only by relying on traffic.

If there is a problem with the traffic strategy, the results will be problematic.

First of all, it is a problem of decision makers, who are eager for growth and want rapid growth. Many decision makers may believe that rapid sales growth can quickly lead to a high valuation, and then they can obtain more financing and buy more traffic. As long as the snowball is big enough in the end, they can eventually get rid of the traffic. But the result is often not the case.

Then there is the general strategic issue of not thinking clearly about why you should buy traffic. Questions such as when to buy, how to buy, how to retain the purchased assets, why to grow, and how to maintain growth in the long term.

It’s not that traffic cannot be bought. The key is to think clearly about the purpose of the traffic and then decide how to buy it.

Strategy: Traffic enters the marketing ecosystem

What is the purpose of traffic?

We cannot look at traffic from a single dimension, we must think about the value of traffic from a larger dimension. If traffic is a piece of a puzzle, it is necessary to find its appropriate position in the entire brand marketing ecosystem.

From the perspective of a brand operator, looking at traffic from the perspective of the overall marketing picture, different conclusions will be drawn.

Putting traffic into the marketing ecosystem and, at the organizational level, assigning traffic purchasing to the marketing department may produce better results.

I have recently discussed this topic with many friends, including traffic suppliers, brand marketers, and those who firmly hold anti-traffic views.

Based on my thoughts, I would like to give some constructive suggestions from three aspects: the value of traffic, the location of traffic, and the acceptance of traffic. I hope it will be inspiring to everyone.

The value of traffic: goal conversion

First, let’s understand the shape of the “traffic” puzzle. Instead of talking about everything being traffic, let’s talk about the value of performance advertising.

Performance advertising has existed since the birth of the Internet and is still thriving today. It must have a set of core methods and values.

I talked to one of the leading players in the market, Pangolin, a subsidiary of ByteDance, to talk to them about what traffic can do.

First of all, where does the traffic come from? Taking Pangolin as an example, it covers more than 110 vertical industries and integrates billions of traffic resources from more than 100,000 APPs, including large traffic pools such as Mango TV and iQiyi, as well as many selected traffic pools for small and medium-sized vertical categories.

For marketing, vertical traffic is more precise. For example, Xiachufang is a pure food scene, and Keep is a precise fitness scene. Pangolin’s ability is to match precise traffic for brands based on its own technological accumulation and service experience.

Then comes the question of what can be done. In essence, performance advertising serves a purpose, which can be large-scale exposure or rapid conversion while keeping costs relatively controllable.

To summarize the core value of performance advertising: it allows advertisers to achieve their goals more directly.

Fast and accurate traffic matching, importing traffic from N traffic pools into the brand traffic pool, and converting the results.

Traffic location: key nodes

Based on the value of traffic, the second point is how to use traffic.

From the perspective of vertical brand growth and horizontal marketing campaigns, let’s talk about the position of “traffic” in the entire marketing ecosystem.

Looking at the brand stage vertically, a new brand from 0 to 1 verifies the logical possibilities of the product and gains recognition in the core circle.

Next, to start growing beyond the circle, you can do performance advertising for a period of time to allow enough users to experience the product in a short period of time.

But decision makers must know that this is a nodal explosive growth.

Looking at brand campaigns horizontally, in large-scale brand campaigns, brand advertising is combined with performance advertising to jointly achieve marketing goals. For example, during large-scale events, such as when launching new products, large-scale exposure and strong conversion effects can be achieved in a short period of time.

Some of the cases I have come across this year have already included "performance advertising" in their strategic plans.

In 2020, a certain fast-moving consumer goods brand went back to JD.com for promotions during the Double Eleven period. It used the strategy of large traffic + celebrity endorsements and explosive promotion, targeting the core circle of beauty products. On the day of the promotion, the promotion results were impressive.

The biggest difference between traffic strategy and general marketing strategy is that you need product and technical support.

For example, on Double Eleven, everyone wants to do big promotions to attract new customers. Pangolin has prepared a product portfolio of "product advertising" and "programmatic data docking" for platform e-commerce. Using Pangolin's technology, it can differentiate the display of advertising spaces with different traffic values, and make differentiated bids through point data and sales data analysis.

Traffic Transfer: User Operation

How to handle the traffic and what to do after selling the goods?

After effect conversion comes user conversion.

Many people complain about performance-based advertising that it loses its effect once it is stopped, and the essence is that users cannot be retained. This is obviously not a problem of traffic, but a problem of marketing strategy.

Once traffic comes and even a transaction is generated, how to retain users and turn them into loyal consumers or highly sticky users basically depends on the product side, whether your product is attractive and whether your operating strategy can meet the needs.

The first thing is to take over the traffic and the content of the performance advertising. We must do a good job of expectation management. After the traffic comes in, we should give users bigger surprises instead of making them feel cheated. What can continue to attract users are greater surprises and better experiences, constantly exceeding user expectations and turning them into brand users.

Then, the results of the brand’s management of users can also be fed back to the traffic side. Pangolin is working with many brands on joint modeling, which is based on advertisers' user management conditions, combined with Pangolin's own data and technology to train brand-specific delivery models.

In other words, which of the attracted users become loyal fans of the brand and what commonalities they have can all be discovered in the process, which can feed back and optimize your traffic strategy and delivery.

Buying traffic is not a one-time deal, but a process of continuously finding the optimal solution from the end to the beginning.

To sum up

Someone asked me today what is the most important thing for a new brand from stage 1 to 10. My answer is: sell, sell, sell.

First, distribute the products to more people, allow them to be used, generate more social content, become an Internet celebrity brand, and then think about more long-term strategies.

So I am not against new brands buying traffic at all, but when the marginal effect of buying traffic decreases, it is necessary to switch from effect-traffic driven to brand power driven.

The numerous vertical APP traffic covered by Pangolin is a relatively high-quality traffic source. Compared with the general scene traffic of comprehensive platforms, the scenes and minds of vertical traffic are more focused and easier to convert.

It is actually a more reasonable layout for mass platforms to generate topics and public opinion, and for vertical platforms to generate conversion results.

Regarding the politically correct anti-traffic remarks, my core point is that there are only bad strategies, not bad traffic.

So, what is a good strategy.

First, we need to understand the core capabilities of traffic . Performance advertising has been very mature over the years. In essence, it is the most direct way to meet your goals, whether it is high exposure, precise traffic diversion, or promoting effective conversions. This is very important and an indispensable capability for the entire marketing ecosystem.

The second is how to make good use of traffic. My opinion is that traffic advertising should be restrained. The marginal effect of continuous use will definitely decrease, and then you will feel that traffic is becoming more and more expensive. Use it at key nodes, and each time you use traffic, there must be a clear marketing purpose.

At critical points where a quick burst of activity is required, purchasing performance advertising is the best option. For example, new brands from 1-10, new product launches, and large-scale events.

To sum up, when a brand has new incremental information or products, large-scale exposure and conversion effects will be better.

The third is to take over the traffic, from converting effects to user operations. Most brands buy traffic, achieve results, and then nothing happens. This is a huge waste. The essence of this is still an organizational problem. If performance advertising and brand advertising are two independent departments, performance advertising will not be able to be effectively taken over in the end.

To do a good job of taking over, it is important to manage user expectations and whether you can give users a sense of surprise. Then comes word-of-mouth feedback. Once the effect is achieved, can the brand be promoted on social media?

If we do a good job of user acceptance, these users will be converted into brand users, and the driving force for growth will switch from traffic-driven to brand-driven.

So, think more about strategy and complain less about traffic.

above.

Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai (ID: yangbuhuai01)