Zhihu Marketing Promotion Strategy for 2019!

It is becoming increasingly difficult to promote!

In traditional SEM, the cost per click is not low, and the cost of acquiring customers has been rising year after year.

The information flow that was particularly effective in the past few years has begun to decline year by year, and users are becoming increasingly immune to advertisements.

Some high-quality channels are simply not playable without enough money...

It was in this situation that we achieved tens of millions of sales through Zhihu's content marketing alone . Today, I would like to share our Zhihu's operating methodology.

01. Clarify the target users of the product

The product is a short-term rental homestay app that focuses on tourism. Its target users are women aged 18-30 in first- and second-tier cities who like to try new things and pursue individuality.

02. After going online, we explored various promotion methods

At the beginning, we tried many things, including information flow advertising, KOL cooperation on Weibo, and offline bus advertising, but the promotion costs remained high. The cost of re-activation was almost more than 10 yuan, and we could not even get back the money we spent.

03. After many attempts, we decided to take a different approach

After trying all the above methods with little success, we plan to first acquire a group of seed users through low-cost means, and then conduct research on these seed users to find the most effective promotion method.

The first channel we tried was Zhihu for two reasons.

1. Successful experience in other fields

Before me, two friends had already achieved good results through Zhihu.

One of them is engaged in online education. Through assignments, it allows students to share their learning experiences on Zhihu. Combined with the company's own operations in this process, it can achieve sales of tens of millions in one year through Zhihu alone.

The other one is a recruitment app. By cooperating with some workplace KOLs, the activation cost can be controlled below 1 yuan, which is very cost-effective.

And there is another very important point. Zhihu gives users a more professional feeling, so the quality of Zhihu users will be relatively higher.

2. The attributes of the Zhihu platform itself

From its inception to now, Zhihu has approximately 50 million monthly active users. Combined with the high authority of search engines and the exclusive support of WeChat's Soso, Zhihu's overall traffic is still very impressive.

Another point is that the content on Zhihu can continue to be exposed. Many answers from one or two years ago are still growing in number of readings by thousands or even tens of thousands every day, which is unique on other platforms.

Weibo’s exposure cycle is basically 3-5 days, and as long as the user scrolls past it, it counts as a read, which is no different from exposure on other platforms;

For headlines, whether to recommend or not is entirely up to the official, and the recommended group may not be accurate, and the cycle is only 48 hours.

Facts have proved that we made the right bet by choosing Zhihu.

In order to accurately acquire users from different regions, we have compiled statistics on topics that users may be concerned about:

For a single-city tourism topic like this, the number of views on Zhihu in one month is approximately between 1 and 2 million. If it is laid out for multiple tourist cities and occupies high praise, first, and second positions, it can generally divert more than 90% of the traffic. As long as the copy is appropriate, it can obtain quite good traffic, and there is absolutely no problem in supporting an App to tens or even millions of users.

04. From trial to implementation, the results surprised us

The first time we tried to distribute content, we did not choose to look for KOLs directly, but instead created the content ourselves.

The Zhihu ecosystem was pretty good at the time, and you could get rankings and exposure by manually liking posts through a small account (machine brushing had been completely banned at the time), so we created several contents targeting Chongqing, and got very good results.

At that time, there were several answers, which together had about 200,000 to 300,000 readings. Through user follow-up and monitoring, the product brought 3,000 activations and generated hundreds of thousands of sales, with almost no money spent.

After this wave of successful attempts, we immediately started large-scale operations. Through the joint operation of an institutional main account + other small accounts , we quickly occupied the top spot of similar topics. The growth brought by Zhihu also increased from a few thousand per month to tens of thousands per month.

Later, when Zhihu's hot list just came out (around March 2018), the team quickly developed a mechanism for the Zhihu hot list. By using the hot list mechanism and small accounts to like many of the posts, the number of registered users also increased rapidly.

At that time, Zhihu could bring in about 20,000 activations per month (contributed by topics from only the two cities of Chengdu and Chongqing), and the sales volume it brought in exceeded 1 million per month.

Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last long.

With the update of Zhihu's Wukong anti-cheating mechanism, the number of likes for small accounts has collapsed completely. Not only that, the number of likes for answers that were previously liked by small accounts will be reduced, and there may even be a risk of account being blocked.

I felt almost desperate at that time, and thought that the marketing method on Zhihu was almost useless.

But, fortunately, we have found another way:

Still only spent a little money and maintained a good effect. It is mainly divided into two parts:

1. Cooperation with Zhihu KOL Advertising

At that time, we thought, since we couldn’t use Zhihu’s mechanism to gain higher exposure, why not cooperate with other answerers?

We acted immediately and quickly communicated and cooperated with the top answerers on a series of travel questions. In the end, most of them paid based on the number of likes (for example, for an old answer with 3,000 likes, we paid the answerer based on 3,000 likes), allowing our content to occupy the first place in many super topics.

We embed a piece of text that we have already edited into their existing answers and configure a download link with monitoring, so that we can see the daily click and activation data more clearly, making it easier to calculate the input-output ratio.

Through this cooperation mechanism, our content reading volume can basically reach more than 2 million people per month, and the UV download conversion rate can reach nearly 20% (with the endorsement of the answerer's content, the conversion is still very accurate).

2. KOLs jointly promote the hot list

It is very easy for a question to become a hot topic when multiple Zhihu KOLs interact or answer on the same topic.

When we discovered this situation, we quickly organized a number of topics to go online, planned several hot lists within a month, and even produced a single article with 8,000 likes (as everyone should know, 8,000 likes is already very rare on Zhihu).

This answer brought the App more than 20,000 activations.

Finally, what’s surprising is that the popularity on Zhihu did not stop, but continued to spread to other channels.

Mafengwo's travel guide accounts and self-media accounts from various channels began to reprint our content. These contents then became more popular in other places, and some of them were read more than 100,000 times and were reposted more than 10,000 times on Weibo.

My ex is a top-notch forward

Mafengwo homepage recommended strategies

Monthly growth

In the end, Zhihu spent less than 20,000 yuan to bring in more than 100,000 users. After figuring out these two sets of strategies, Zhihu has become one of the important means of low-cost product growth.

Summarize:

1. Zhihu's current users are mainly students, white-collar workers and high-income groups in first- and second-tier cities, which makes it more suitable for product promotion in various fields such as tourism, online education, life, and food.

2. With the changes in Zhihu's mechanism, the exposure and weight of Zhihu KOLs have been greatly improved. KOL marketing has become an important part of Zhihu's marketing. The era of relying solely on single-handed efforts has passed.

3. Zhihu is still one of the channels with the best user conversion and quality, and it will remain so for a long time in the future. Moreover, most industries currently do not pay enough attention to Zhihu marketing, and there is still plenty of traffic and opportunities.

4. Accurately positioning the target users of the product and converting them with high-quality content is the key to Zhihu marketing.

5. Combining copywriting and content well to ensure that users’ trust is not lost is a crucial point in Zhihu marketing.

6. How to find the right account for you:

Looking at the number of likes and readings every day, Zhihu is different from WeChat in that it recommends content based on the Wilson algorithm. Simply put, it determines whether the content has continuous exposure and ranking based on the approval and disapproval rates of the answers. So having more fans is not necessarily better (of course, having more fans also has a very high weighting), but we pay more attention to the number of likes and readings every day.

For example: Before, when we judged whether an answer had been exposed, we usually looked at the daily increase in likes of the answer (generally, the like rate of Zhihu is between 1%-2%). If an answer increases by 10 likes a day, it means that the answer has about 1,000+ traffic a day, which is 30,000 a month.

Now many answerers have opened creator centers, which allow them to directly view the daily exposure and reading data of their answers, making cooperation more transparent.

Q&A:

1. User attributes of Zhihu:

2. How to do Zhihu marketing?

There are hundreds of millions of professional questions in various fields on Zhihu. Brands can select appropriate questions to answer and then promote their own brands.

For example: What are some amazing apps on your phone?

This question has received more than 30 million views. Brands can answer this question and indirectly promote their own apps, gaining the attention of Zhihu netizens who are interested in such topics, and it can also serve as content for SEO.

Generally speaking, there are several marketing methods for Zhihu Q&A:

(1) Inventory-type answers: For example, what good things can you recommend that are worth buying? What are some marketing websites worth visiting?

Entry point: Brands need to prepare multiple products in this field for analysis, indirectly highlighting the advantages of their own products

Difficulty: Average (the key point is the uniqueness of the content)

(2) Sharing-type answers: For example, how to make a travel plan? How to make a good-looking mind map?

Entry point: Share excellent experience in this field, and naturally mention the tools (products) you use

Difficulty: Medium (Zhihu mainly focuses on content in this field, and a lot of useful information is needed)

(3) Story-based answer: How did you change your career? What travel stories do you have to share?

Entry point: Share your own story and promote it in the process

Difficulty: High (you need to write a story that resonates with people, and this type of question is generally not very precise)

Therefore, we generally recommend that brands choose the first two marketing methods. In addition to accurate customer targeting, they are also relatively easy to use.

3. Which products are suitable for Zhihu marketing?

There are hundreds of millions of questions in various fields on Zhihu. Generally speaking:

Online education/offline education, traditional national chain stores - such as restaurants, clothing, bookstores, handicraft stores, etc. (preferably with their own distinctive products), pure Internet products (social, also including travel, local life and other O2O fields), job recruitment, WeChat e-commerce (WeChat products such as weight loss, fitness, specialty products, etc.), To B services can all obtain traffic through Zhihu.

Not suitable for: second-tier e-commerce, medical and health products, etc.

Source:luqiang4.