APP operation and promotion: How to attract 20,000 new users in January at 0 cost?

Some time ago, I wrote an article titled "Independently Operated Mini Program Growth from 0 to 500,000 (Sharing of Actual Case Studies)", which attracted the attention of many readers. In fact, for products that are in the growth stage, what operators should do is to dig a traffic pool and amplify the fission effect; but under realistic conditions, most of us do not have such a keen business sense to seize such opportunities. More people are facing fierce competition and are wondering how to bring growth to their products.

Background: The author is currently working in product operations in a red ocean industry. In this industry, there are currently three or four listed companies such as NetEase and Tencent whose products control the top traffic (products are 3-5 years old), and 5-8 products in the middle are the kings (products are 2-3 years old). On average, new products appear in the industry every 2-3 months. Our team was established in March and currently consists of 4 technicians and 1 UI. I am responsible for product and operations work.

Current progress: The technical development was completed and the product was delivered on July 5; the product entered the cold start phase and 20,000 new launches were completed with zero budget within one month . During the product growth transition stage, we completed 50,000 new additions with 0 budget. Now the product has entered the growth period and is on a normal track. I will share the growth during this period later. Here I will only share the cases of the cold start stage.

Zero cost means that the product has no promotion budget and internal resource support, and the above work can be completed by one person, not excluding labor costs.

1. Plan the basic work of the product and prepare for the cold start

After reading the background introduction, I believe everyone will be more concerned about why the author joined such a team? Secondly, facing such a fierce competitive environment, how can new products pass project review and planning?

Regarding these two issues, it is actually the same as the team you are in: there is no smooth product planning route, and there is no rapid growth.

The most fundamental point that attracts me is that the business models of the top ten products in the industry are basically the same and have been running for 3-5 years. Whether the latecomers can have the ability to change the landscape, just like 360 ​​subverted the anti-virus software market, and come up with a new model is worth a try.

When the product enters the R&D stage, the operational work will revolve around the product launch and do the preliminary preparation work.

I suggest: At this time, the operation work should be planned in the long term, with a timeline of at least 2 months, and several important operational milestones should be planned, including preparation before going online - cold start after going online - growing traffic pool - fission growth, etc.

Preparation before launch: As an operator, the content that needs to be prepared before the product is launched includes software certification, developer registration in major app stores, product PR draft after launch, cold start activity publicity, preparation of warm-up articles and release arrangements, opening of official account and Weibo player groups, product FQA and online cold start activity arrangements, etc.

Operational thinking: During this period, the most important thing for operations is to determine the following issues:

1. What form of activities is used to carry out the main direction of product cold start?
2. How to plan the subsequent business model and time nodes of the product? (This is related to whether to imply subsequent charges during product operation and how to plan the transition of operational activities to the charging stage, etc.)
3. What is an additional cost to the industry today?
4. At this stage of the product, what resources and expenses can the company support?

These operations must be clear, otherwise it will cause great obstacles and uncertainties to the subsequent work progress.

It should be noted that the issue here does not mean that once something is determined it cannot be changed, but rather that a cyclical plan is made for the product. Under this planning framework, everyone has a clear plan and then assigns their respective tasks. By doing so, the team will have a clear goal - to achieve output indicators and results.

2. Product cold start activities, simple, fast and spreadable

Currently, common cold start solutions on the Internet include but are not limited to: internal resource linkage (cooperation between brother products), invitation system (classic), celebrity V communication effect (common community type products), hot-selling traffic (common e-commerce products), hacker growth, self-media publicity, etc.

Based on the current market situation in the industry (industry products provide a maximum of three days of trial, and payment must be activated after the trial); payment is a sensitive point for users, and our early products themselves could not be charged, so this point can be magnified and utilized.

Finally, it was decided to adopt an invitation system to attract the first batch of users.

Our product itself has no internal brother resources to guide traffic, and the company has no budget support. Compared with the traditional invitation system: the official website issues limited codes-external diversion consumption routine

I tried some new ways to use the invitation code. By inviting users to try the product for free, I let them experience the product as product appreciators (many Internet companies used to invite celebrities to serve as product creative officers, experience officers, etc. to attract attention . If I want to do this and can't invite celebrities, why not give this title and freshness to users and let them spread the word?)

First, the process is streamlined:

The official website issues codes in limited quantities at regular intervals every day - users receive them - download the product and activate it. After the user activates the product, an appraiser icon and name will be given on the product to show the identity.

Operational thinking: The author of the invitation title here did not do more development, and deliberately left a loophole for users to discuss and operations to play. For example, users may curiously ask, what benefits will be available in the future as an appraiser? Then the operation can collect the points that users are most interested in and make use of them. (Activity benefits are like meals. If they are cooked to the taste, they will naturally invite their friends to come and try them.) Therefore, I only made simple icons and names here to display them in the early days. Later, when the product entered the growth transition stage, I enlarged the gameplay of this connoisseur and developed it into a user growth system to drive fission, which will be discussed in the next section.

The operation department selects the appropriate cold start activity plan based on the characteristics of its own products, and guides a small group of users to use the product in a controlled manner. The cold start stage is still in the product internal testing period, and the purpose of attracting users is to experience the product, collect bugs and usage suggestions, etc.

Back to the invitation-based activities, after the invitation-based activities were launched, the company's sister departments did not have any traffic resource support, and the company had no promotion budget support. It was basically equivalent to digging a pool for user traffic and then finding ways to maintain it on their own. The only budget applied for was 3,708 yuan, which was spent on PR manuscripts, including product promotion, event warm-up and publicity.

Then I tried many methods alone, such as hooking up with QQ group owners, Weibo celebrities, and live broadcast UP hosts. If I couldn’t hook up with them, I would leave comments on Weibo, follow industry events and hot spots to get traffic, etc.

The most effective method is to hook up with QQ group owners and Weibo comments - although when I went there, they all said that other competitors had already approached them before, and some large group owners had already signed cooperation agreements with other competitors and could no longer cooperate with external parties (this is something everyone can learn from, and monopolize group owners of thousands of people), but they still hooked up with several groups, and gained more than 3,000 fans on Weibo by leaving comments, integrating this traffic and directing it to the official website; letting users see the invitation activities on the official website, and then using him to help promote it.

Second, the smaller the traffic volume, the more we need to mobilize the masses :

If I rely on myself to pull traffic every day, it will definitely not work, so I have to design the dissemination factor from the beginning; the invitation code activity also deliberately leaves a small BUG, ​​that is, the official rule is to limit the number of distribution per day; but there is no limit on the number of times each person can receive it, nor is there any login restriction - every time the user refreshes the webpage, they can receive it again, click to receive it, and attach a sharing button on the left side of the official website (the sharing text is also automatically attached to reduce user operations), leaving enough convenience for user dissemination.

After ten days of spreading the word on my own, the official website was able to consume 300-1000 invitation codes every day. Users were already aware of the bug and were spreading the word among themselves.

3. Conduct user research to lay the foundation for the next growth

During the product cold start phase, operations need to explore the portraits of typical seed users. Common user portraits such as age, work, education, etc. are actually like ordinary survey questionnaires and have little development and reference value.

As an operator, you must learn to communicate with users. Compared with researching users' work hobbies, I will pay more attention to operational issues. I will take half an hour to communicate with one or two users before get off work every Wednesday and Friday:

1. What are your feelings and suggestions after experiencing our products?
2. What benefits and activities do you hope we can provide in the future?
3. Find out which products they frequently browse that are in the same industry as ours but are not direct competitors?
4. Which product have you played with recently, or which activity have you been interested in participating in?

Operational thinking: Such one-on-one communication can arouse users' favor, and users will be more willing to confide in you. They may also give you a lot of creative suggestions. For example, if the users you communicate with have all participated in an event for a certain product, then I will find this event and then look for examples of other products doing similar events online. Think about it: If users are interested in such an event, how can I apply it to my own product?

Let me give you another practical example that I have applied: Through communicating with users, I learned that some users came through the videos shared by UP on Bilibili, so I went to find out more, learned how to download recording software, and recorded a promotional introduction to our product.

As a result, more than a thousand people were diverted over the weekend - this is a huge traffic pool!

At this point, many operators may think that they should post it every day or once a week to attract some traffic. This is actually a low-level approach.

First , I marked it as a long-term developable traffic pool and included it in my list of high-quality channels. Secondly, for such a traffic pool, the ecology must be maintained in order to divert traffic in the long term. Since the traffic diversion is considerable, don't do it yourself. How many users can one person dig out?

Thirdly, if you do it yourself, you will face the emptiness and lack of innovation in the recorded content. Moreover, if one account is full of promotional content for the product, it is easy to cause disgust among users or official rules, which may be counterproductive.

So, I tried to hold a creative competition event called "I'll Give You a Card", asking players to help me record videos for dissemination. The official only needs to formulate viewing rules and corresponding product monthly and annual card rewards, and give recommendations for video recording software and several official cases at the event to guide users.

Secondly, control the activity cycle. I usually start the activity on Friday, release rewards based on the number of views on the following Monday, and then close the activity. I wait for the popularity of this batch of videos to die down before starting the second round. In the meantime, I gradually optimize the activity, such as selecting awards for brain hole, creativity, and the coolest subtitles, etc. The event has attracted nearly 20,000 visitors so far.

What I want to say is: I believe that few people would think of and carry out such an operation. If I ask you now, what other product do your users use most? What kind of activity will lead to the highest user sharing? What is a typical user profile of your core users (such as member users, long-term active users)?

From the above, we can see that during the product cold start phase, a lot of work is done to prepare for the next phase (product growth transition period), and operations must not be taken lightly.

Related reading:

1. APP promotion and operation: How to maximize the effect of your activities?

2. APP promotion planning: 60,000 paying users increased within 7 days of beta testing!

3. APP promotion activities: How to plan a screen-sweeping event?

4. A complete list of APP promotion methods in 2019, take it and don’t thank me!

5. How to carry out APP promotion and marketing? What are the common methods?

6. APP promotion case: How to go from 0 to millions of users?

Author: Mao Li

Source: Operational Growth