How to find the lever to leverage traffic dividends?

The so-called traffic means acquiring new users. Students in product and operations all know that there are many ways to obtain traffic, such as cross-direction, third-party channel distribution, advertising, etc. Today my analysis will give you some new ideas from the following perspectives: dividends, placeholders, hooks, scenarios, and monetization.

First, let’s talk about “dividends”. What is the biggest feature of dividends? There is a time limit, and at the same time, there is also the law of diminishing marginal returns.

Looking back to 2015, there were many KOLs on Weibo who posted recommendations for fun apps, and they all posted pictures in a nine-square grid , which meant they recommended 9 apps.

Why 9? There are exactly 9 positions, 9 companies, and the companies behind the 9 apps all pooled money together. The price of a large-scale push is shared by 9 companies, and then the cost of acquiring users behind an application is calculated. The cheapest time is 0.5 cents per user, which can be said to be a very low price. Many products also grow through those early traffic. But before long, the same method was used more and more, and the cost of acquiring a single customer rose to a few dollars, which was on par with other promotion channels .

This example tells us that there is a basic principle in economics, the law of diminishing marginal returns. When resources are continuously invested, the benefits obtained per unit of investment will gradually decrease after a period of time. The earlier you discover these traffic dividends , the lower the cost you can harvest this traffic at.

The second example is to tell everyone that opportunities for traffic dividends are everywhere and need to be explored in a timely manner. I have a friend who saw an overseas emoticon input method on the Google Play Store . It was very popular and many people downloaded it. It was developed by individual teams, so my friend started to try this out.

You may be surprised that people in many overseas countries input in English. Mobile phones have built-in input methods, so why do we need to download input methods? In fact, many users just think it's fun. The product made by my friend did not spend a penny on promotion in the early days, but it gained 700,000 to 800,000 users a day. But everyone knows that the bonus has passed, and it is more difficult to enter this market again.

Let’s talk about some current cases . For example, now everyone is talking about a lot of users in the sinking market. Let’s not talk about the rural market for now. In fact, in third- and fourth-tier cities, each circle has particularly large differences, and there are still many dividends.

In recent years, people have been saying that there are no new opportunities on the Internet , but we still see many new products emerging. Some products have achieved rapid growth precisely because they happened to capture these circles or time difference dividends. People who work on Internet products are sometimes like a flock of sheep on the grassland, constantly looking for where there is traffic and rushing there. Of course, there may be a group of wolves behind us watching us.

To give an interesting example, there was a kid on Facebook who did something very interesting. Every time a popular movie or game was about to be released, he would create a page on Facebook before the release, whether it was "Star Wars" or "Devils". After creating it, when the movie or game came out, there were always many people searching for it, and when they searched, they would go to the page created by this kid to visit it.

He built hundreds of web pages, attracted a lot of traffic, and then continued to place advertisements on them to monetize them. After calculation, he found that the traffic and advertising revenue was very good. This was the strategic advantage before these traffic channels were formed.

Let’s talk about ASO , which we are more familiar with. How to do search optimization in the app store ? Take Suning.com’s Fever Shopping Festival in August as an example.

ASO strategies for brand activities usually include:

1. Select brand words, activity words and industry keywords in advance, and change basic information such as titles and icons to match brand activities

2. Determine the keyword placement plan to ensure that the ranking is in place during the event

3. Prevent risks in advance and prevent product risks

4. Use keywords to boost rankings

5. Keep a close eye on your competitors and adjust your delivery strategy in a timely manner if they appear to be taking advantage of your sales

Let’s focus on the issue of competitors piggybacking on the sales volume. The following figure shows Suning.com’s ranking in AOS during the event.

When searching for similar keywords of "Suning.com", the first one is Suning.com itself, the second one is Suning Pingou, and the third one is Suning Mini Store. But everyone can see that Gome 's products are constantly moving forward during this promotion period. This is how competitors take advantage of the volume. The ranking reflected in this picture may seem simple, but there is actually a team behind it that keeps an eye on the data every day and uses various methods and strategies to compete.

When we look at the entire traffic acquisition path, every link is actually a battle. Not only should we place advertisements externally, but also in various channels in the circle of friends , while attracting users' attention, we should also pay attention to the conversion at each step in the middle. A difference of a few percentage points in any place will result in a huge loss.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of traffic hooks. Let’s take the campus promotion case of the second-hand trading platform “Zhuan Zhuan” as an example.

When doing campus promotion, Zhuan Zhuan’s goal is to cover the students on campus and let them become users of the Zhuan Zhuan APP or mini program . During graduation season every year, students have a large number of second-hand books to sell. Zhuan Zhuan launched a "10% off recycling" policy and set up offline stalls on campus to collect books.

If students want to sell books, they need to first download Zhuanzhuan, register, submit an order, and complete a special process. Through this low-cost method (the customer acquisition cost is much higher than other promotion channels), Zhuan Zhuan quickly acquired many new users on campus.

Offline promotion is a common method used by many platforms, but in fact, offline promotion itself is only a part of marketing promotion. What is more important is how to build a hook in the product and get good exposure offline. In the above case, ground promotion can easily bring users to the second-hand transaction scenario, allowing users to get accustomed to this scenario. The retention rate will be very high afterwards, leaving a deep impression on the product.

Why do we need to do campus promotion? It can be summarized into three major advantages: first, huge market potential, second, long-term promotion and dissemination, and third, relatively low cost.

There are nearly 40 million college students in the country, which is a considerable scale. Why do we need to do campus promotion? First of all, college students spend more than 685 billion yuan a year. The change in consumption concepts has made many students pursue quality consumption. The university market is future-oriented. Enterprises occupying universities will not only bring short-term product benefits, but will also be more conducive to the promotion and dissemination of long-term brand strategies.

But at the same time, campus promotion also has certain minefields.

First, there is a lack of effective regulatory measures. The execution process is highly flexible, and it is difficult to supervise whether it is carried out completely according to the plan. It is difficult for the product end to distinguish the authenticity of the quantity.

Second, there are huge differences between campuses. There are differences in academic atmosphere and degree of openness between campuses, and there are differences between campuses in different regions of the same province. From planning to implementation, we need to fully understand the campus situation and make flexible adjustments.

Third, students have high uncertainty. The students responsible for the specific implementation lack qualitative knowledge, there are high uncertainties, there are large changes during the implementation period, and the communication costs for students are also relatively high.

How to grasp the importance of “scene”? A few years ago, there was a hot concept in the capital circle called "super application distribution ". Many people believed that there were already many super application APPs with very large user scale in the market at that time. Such super applications should be able to distribute other applications (at that time, native advertising models such as information flow had not yet appeared). At that time, many giants had products with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of daily active users, but was it really feasible to distribute advertisements and applications of other products to obtain traffic? Of course not.

Why? The reason behind this is that the application scenario is not convenient for users. If a user opens a photo-taking product, takes a photo and is ready to edit it, but if a game is pushed to the user at this time, it will make the user very inconvenient when using the product. To put it bluntly, it excessively destroys the usage scenario and affects the user experience .

Let’s take another negative example related to the scenario. When a product reaches millions of daily active users and wants to transform into another product, the first thing that comes to mind is user diversion, but the functional positioning of the two products is very different. In the end, we really did divert traffic, but basically all the users were distracted.

Traffic is dynamic, and your so-called users may not always be your users. Users should be guided in various ways rather than being intercepted by a tough and rough attitude.

The points you see in various application products are a form of monetization.

What is the principle behind monetization? In the early days, there was a very famous product called Dropbox, which was an online storage tool . This product has a sharing game. Please invite friends to register by sharing the link. Once your friends register successfully, the invited people will be able to get 500MB of extra network disk space. And these 500 terabytes are the monetization of resources. This currency is used to guide user behavior , thereby generating a large amount of viral transmission .

We try our best to standardize and measure the resources that the product can use. Users can only obtain corresponding benefits by completing tasks and accumulating "currency".

Take Didi as an example. When we use Didi to hail a taxi , the phenomenon of refusal to pick up passengers is very rare. But in the past taxi era, the phenomenon of refusal to pick up passengers was very common. So how does Didi prevent drivers from picking and choosing jobs? Didi drivers have a Dimi system. When drivers get "not so good" orders, they will get Dimi rewards, and when they get good jobs, they will pay some Dimi. Didi has established an economic system in this way.

Source: Duiba Operation Help