How to do content marketing on Zhihu?

With the disappearance of the demographic dividend, the growth of Internet companies has reached a bottleneck, while foreign SaaS is very popular. As a result, capital has pushed the B-side to a new trend, and related SaaS company financing news has continued. However, the domestic environment is completely different from that abroad, and how to promote SaaS products has become a difficult problem for many companies!

I have previously written an article about how the best way to promote SaaS products is through content marketing . Now many of my friends have new questions: Which platform does content marketing? What to do? So here is this article, I will share my practical experience with you.

Zhihu Data

Channels determine reach, and choosing the right channel for content marketing is the most important thing. I often recommend Zhihu and Bilibili, and I can talk about Bilibili later. Zhihu can be said to be the channel with the largest traffic and the highest quality users in China. We can look at some data released on Zhihu’s tenth anniversary:

Zhihu’s total number of users exceeded 400 million in 2021, with an average monthly active user number of 85 million in the first quarter.

This data can be said to be very astonishing, ranking around fifth in domestic website traffic. Such a large amount of traffic means that the upper limit of your promotion here is very high. What is even more surprising is that the quality of Zhihu users is also very high:

66% are from first-tier cities

80% have a bachelor's degree

The user profile of many other domestic communities is that 20% of users have a college degree. The proportion of undergraduate users on Zhihu is the opposite of that on other domestic websites, which means that most of the high-quality users in China are on Zhihu. From a realistic perspective, whether it is the self-introductions of Zhihu users or the customer cases obtained from Zhihu, it shows that these users are high-quality people.

The clients that the company has obtained on Zhihu include state-owned enterprises, traditional industries, manufacturing, Internet companies, and so on, and their intentions are relatively high. Of course, this is related to the content, but breaking through the circle, which is difficult for many companies, is relatively easy to achieve on Zhihu.

Now that we know the basic situation of Zhihu's channels, we do marketing for conversion, and what determines conversion is content. So how do we make Zhihu's content good? I have summarized three major modules:

1. Account System

Zhihu is a platform, and we just use this platform for marketing. There is only one medium between the platform and the company, and that is the account. Therefore, the foundation of content operation is the account. If the account is good, the content traffic will be high. If the account is not well done, it may face traffic restrictions or even account suspension.

Zhihu's account system has rich levels, and different levels have different functions. If you are an individual, you can just use your personal account. If you are a company, it is strongly recommended to use an institutional account. There are many differences. Institutional accounts are more suitable for corporate product promotion and have more promotional functions. Personal accounts will be blocked if they promote products too directly.

Zhihu's rating system is based on a score, called salt value, which has six dimensions: content quality, creativity, task rewards, reputation rating, activity and influence. We can improve our levels by increasing our scores in these six dimensions.

Content quality is easy to understand, which means you have to output high-quality content, which is also the top priority of Zhihu operations.

There is also the creation of the account personality. The various information of the account must be complete, with a good name, a stylish personal profile, and precise positioning to make it easier to increase followers.

Generally speaking, if you output high-quality content at a certain frequency and report some illegal content, you can basically maintain a good score.

There are some other rules by the way:

1. Don’t cheat on the posts with likes. Zhihu will judge this as cheating and it will be difficult for your content to gain popularity.

2. Do not include external links or QR codes, as they may result in a flow restriction warning.

3. Remember not to output repetitive, straightforward, or purely advertising content, as it will easily be folded, and in serious cases your account may be deleted or blocked.

2. Traffic

Traffic is the guarantee of conversion. No matter how high your conversion is, it cannot be higher than the traffic. Everyone who creates content should understand that good content does not necessarily equate to high traffic. Sometimes, an article you spend half a day writing only gets a few reads, which can be instantly discouraging. This is a common situation on most websites, because most websites use an article recommendation system, and the content topics are thought up by the authors themselves, while Zhihu uses a question-and-answer system, and the content topics are all questions about users' real needs. That is to say, a question on Zhihu may be searched by millions of people, and these millions of people must want to know the answer to the question. At this time, when you output content, you will get a part of these millions of traffic. The better your content is, the more shares you will get. Other websites are written by the author based on his or her own experience, and may only be of interest to a small number of people.

Therefore, the way Zhihu works is very different from other websites. Zhihu focuses on traffic. You can see the traffic of questions through the data. The focus of our operation is to find those questions with large traffic, and then output good content. This is a safe method. The data of answers following this path are generally good.

Of course, we can also adopt similar operating methods on Zhihu as on other websites. That is, the articles on Zhihu have similar mechanisms to other websites. It mainly depends on the ability of the operator. If the ability is good, the article data may be good.

Zhihu’s traffic is divided into on-site and off-site traffic. The on-site traffic refers to Zhihu’s recommendations and internal searches, while the external traffic refers to the search results indexed by major search engines, among which Baidu has a very high weight.

In terms of site traffic, generally speaking, answers have more traffic than articles, because questions are usually the real needs of users. Users usually search for relevant questions and ask questions if none exist. Since articles are not generated by user demand, they can only be pushed through tags, and you can only have 3 tags, so if your title and content are not very good, the reading rate will be relatively low.

The question push mechanism mainly relies on question tags. Zhihu will recommend questions to relevant users based on question tags. A question can have 5 tags, but sometimes the question creator fails to add all the tags or adds the wrong tags, which results in low question traffic and inaccuracy. A high-level account can modify questions and tags, so if you are an institutional account operator, it is best to have a high-level personal account so that you can modify tags so that the questions you find can get accurate traffic.

Zhihu has a large number of questions, and many of them are very classic, but it is a difficult task to filter out high-quality questions because Zhihu's search does not have filtering and sorting functions. If you are an institutional account, there is a popular question recommendation tool that can easily help you find popular questions in related fields.

We found popular questions, there are several situations:

The ideal situation is that there is a large amount of traffic but few answerers. If the content is good enough, it will get a lot of exposure and it is easy to rank at the top, and it is even possible to be on the Zhihu hot list. The author has been on the hot list several times, and the number of likes and comments has increased at an alarming rate. Every time I open it, there are 999 likes, which is really cool.

Of course, most questions have large traffic and many answerers, so this is when the quality of the content matters.

As for the problem of low traffic, you need to judge the potential, which mainly depends on your sensitivity to the content. Then you can observe the growth in the number of views of the question. If it grows a lot within one day and keeps increasing, follow up immediately! Of course the reality is that views of most questions are growing slowly, especially in niche areas.

As for off-site traffic, everyone should know that Zhihu has received investment from Baidu. Zhihu should not be short of money. The main reason for receiving investment from Baidu is to obtain Baidu's weight. The weight of Zhihu content in Baidu search is very high. Zhihu content basically appears on the first page of various keywords and ranks high.

Therefore, we can do Baidu SEO for Zhihu based on this point, select keywords according to our own field, and then find Zhihu content with high Baidu search rankings under these keywords. If the question is ranked high and few people answer it, that would be perfect. You can get passive Baidu search traffic, dozens or hundreds of passive traffic every day. If the passive traffic is large, it may also drive in-site traffic and make it to the Zhihu hot list.

3. Content

Now that you know which question has the most traffic, the next thing is to output high-quality content. There are two conversions in this link. One is the likes, collections, and comments on the answers, and the other is what determines the conversion from Zhihu to your product. So how do you create high-quality, high-conversion answers?

1. Have height

As a platform with a strong sense of gain, Zhihu’s content must be of high quality so that readers can learn something. It’s like meeting a famous teacher who stands at a higher position and gives you guidance. At this level, you can combine the product's points and promote the product in passing. You can talk about the product's advantages, but it must be in line with the actual situation.

2. Choose an angle

Sometimes it is difficult to increase the height of the content, so you can choose the angle. If others write about this angle, you can write about other angles. In short, let the highlights of your product be displayed through different angles.

3. Advanced written expression

Every writer has a different writing style, and the most obvious is their written expression.

For example, Lu Xun’s classic words: There are two trees, one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree ! This sentence directly distinguishes Lu Xun from other writers.

Zhihu also has its own style, also known as the Zhihu style, and some words are even used as memes, such as: thank you for the invitation, I'm in the United States, just got off the plane, etc.

Unique words and unique written expressions are a unique style that can make you stand out!

4. Answers should be structured

The recommended answer structure is a general-to-specific structure. Most papers have a general-to-specific structure, with an incisive summary at the beginning, which can easily attract users to click.

IV. Conclusion

In addition to the key points summarized above, Zhihu also has many modules, such as circles, videos, hot lists, information flow ads, round tables and Zhi+. Some are free, while others require market cooperation. You can try them according to your own situation. There are two recommendations. One is Zhi+, which can accelerate the growth of content, of course, the premise is that the content is good enough. Another one is video. After all, Zhihu is a picture and text community, and video is a relatively heavy form. Zhihu focuses on video in a relatively light way, so there are not many videos. However, if the quality is good enough, there is a high possibility that it will appear first on the homepage.

In general, Zhihu is a good platform with both internal and external traffic, long-term value, and is very suitable for promoting high-end products. Programmers, working men and women, and students are all precise user groups.

Author: Operation Little Devil

Source: Operation Little Devil