Business strategy for marketing promotion layout: user behavior trajectory!

When conducting a marketing promotion activity , no matter you are a startup doing cold start promotion or a large company spending money on event marketing, you need to sort out two things first: user behavior trajectory; user decision trajectory.

Why do we sometimes get more anxious when learning something new? Because this new knowledge impacts my own cognition. You may even feel that all your previous efforts are worthless, but you can’t find the direction.

Why is my cognition impacted? It is because I have not established my own cognitive system. So when faced with new things, I don’t know how to place them, and this uncertainty brings a huge sense of fear.

Many entrepreneurs or people in the workplace, facing the growth bottleneck of their companies, have attended many marketing courses. The final result is that you either completely overthrow all the good and bad things that happened to you and fall into a state of self-denial. Or just bury your head in the ground like an ostrich and pretend you see nothing.

Many entrepreneurs have come to me before and asked me for advice on community operations.

Then I asked him why he wanted to create a community, and he said he wanted to build a circle in this field and realize resource sharing.

Then he talked to me about the concept of sharing economy.

I asked him directly, you probably just want to find customers to sell goods, right?

He thought about it and said yes.

I asked, have you done Baidu promotion, have you done full-network marketing, and have you done some placements?

He said no.

This is a typical case of treating a course as a lifeline while ignoring some basic marketing knowledge at the business management level.

Why do so many people do this? It’s not that there’s something wrong with the course itself, but that you don’t have a holistic understanding of your own marketing. So you don’t know what position your work occupies in the entire company’s management system and what role it plays.

For example: event marketing. For a marketing planning company, this is everything, and it is its entire marketing strategy. But for you, it's just a tactic in the marketing system.

When you don’t realize this concept, you will strategically turn tactical matters into big news all day long.

Today, I will focus on the topic of marketing and give you a systematic and global understanding of marketing, so that you can look at various marketing and promotion issues from the perspective of the business management level. When you have this holistic view of marketing, you will no longer be anxious or panic, because your cognitive system allows you to be open-minded. For any new things you can know how to place them and how to use them.

Gaowei’s understanding can also help you quickly find your role in the company and know your position in the organization and the role you should play. This also has a profound impact on personal career development.

The foundation of the entire marketing system is user behavior and user psychology. All your marketing activities are based on these two points. Whether it is Baidu promotion, information flow advertising, new media operation, or practical marketing, brand positioning, and public relations marketing, these two points are indispensable.

So when conducting a marketing promotion activity, whether you are a startup doing cold start promotion or a large company spending money on event marketing, you need to sort out two things first:

• User behavior trajectory;
• User decision trajectory.

User behavior trajectory is the user's tangible actions, which determines the distribution of marketing channels. How to understand, for example, if you want to buy a computer behavior track:

If your computer breaks down and you need to replace it - go to Baidu and search for better gaming laptops - if you see a certain brand that you think is good, check the overall reviews of this brand of computers online - go to Taobao or an offline store to buy it.

Few people emphasize this aspect, probably because in the eyes of many marketing experts, this is too simple, so they basically just pass it over. But this is what many poor entrepreneurs need to pay most attention to. Because when you know the user's behavior trajectory, even if you don't have any creative ability, you can use many simple and crude ways to hunt down and intercept the user, and produce pretty good results.

We started our business in Kunshan in 2017 with a makeshift team. No one had copywriting skills or knowledge background in marketing promotion. We used simple and crude promotion methods such as posting on Zhihu and forums, and made a profit of several million in a year.

The user decision-making trajectory is the user's psychological activity, which determines the content level of marketing. The social marketing, public relations, branding, conclusion theory, and conversion rate that we see all belong to this section. For example, Chen Yong, a big shot in the field of traffic conversion rate, has a six-factor theory: stimulate interest—mild trust—trust transfer—herd mentality—principle of pain—guide transactions.

This kind of content and courses should occupy the mainstream of content sharing in the entire industry, and they have the most say in the marketing field. But for start-ups, especially those that do not receive financing, their content often has great limitations.

Okay, next we will focus on the first part, the marketing system based on user behavior trajectories.

1. User behavior tracks are used to connect various promotion channels

Many articles or courses are trying to do one thing, which is to complicate simple issues and make marketing seem mysterious in order to highlight their own sense of value. What I want to do today is to simplify the macro issue of marketing.

Whether it is new media, Baidu promotion, information flow, Douyin, Zhihu, or growth fission, we can define them as promotion channels. If you position yourself as a marketing and promotion practitioner, it would be great if you can learn one of them well. I rarely see marketers who can do both Baidu promotion and branding very well at the same time.

If you are an entrepreneur, you have no chance to learn all of these, but you need to understand the properties of these marketing promotion methods and the relationship between them. The user behavior trajectory is the basis for connecting these promotion channels to form an overall marketing strategy.

The user's behavior trajectory can be classified into three steps:

1. Where users see you;
2. How users trust you;
3. Where the user places the order to make the purchase.

As shown in the figure, we can see that based on the user behavior trajectory, there is a set of channels behind each behavior. This mind map covers almost all the marketing and promotion systems you can use, and the amount of information is very large. The operational strategy for each of the drama promotion channels in the diagram needs to be written separately and cannot be laid out in detail.

Why do we have to list the user order entrances? Compared with the few words above, it seems top-heavy. It has to be listed because it is indeed very important. The user's order entry directly determines the previous weapon selection strategy.

For example: your users’ order entry point is the official online website, then you have many methods available to you, including Baidu promotion, SEO, and full-network marketing.

If your users’ ordering portal is WeChat, what you may need to do is WeChat friend marketing, community operation, and self-media marketing within the WeChat ecosystem. If your users’ ordering entry point is offline and regional, Baidu promotion may not be suitable for you. What you need to do is WeChat social fission, offline ground promotion methods and Meituan Dianping.

In the picture, I have listed all the mainstream promotion tools. When you need to carry out marketing promotion, you don’t have to blindly bring all the things I have listed with you. Instead, we should combine our own industry and our own advantages and select several promotion methods.

2. Evaluation Dimensions of Promotion Channels

The quality of the overall marketing effect depends on the selection and operation quality of various marketing channels. Different industries, different backgrounds, and different development stages require different marketing means and operating methods.

So how do you find the promotion channel that suits you?

I think it can be analyzed mainly from the following dimensions: presentation form, technical threshold, quantifiability of results, effectiveness cycle, capital investment threshold, input-output ratio, and traffic bottleneck.

(1) The role of “presentation form” as an indicator

The presentation form determines how the channel will ultimately be operated, whether it will be mainly based on writing, chatting, or drawing.

From the figure we can also see that most of the marketing and promotion channels are finally implemented in the form of copywriting. This is what I have always emphasized to many people. To learn marketing, you must be able to write copywriting. Copywriting is the basic skill of marketing promotion.

(2) The role of “technical threshold” as an indicator

Many channel promotion methods seem to involve copywriting, but the difficulty levels are completely different. For example, if you are operating your own media, you will need very professional copywriters to operate it.

If your writing skills are average, you may only have a hundred or so fans after writing a thousand Zhihu questions, while others may have over ten thousand fans with just a dozen answers. Some people may never be able to write more than 100,000 words in their entire life, while for some people, more than 100,000 words has become the minimum standard for writing.

The "technical threshold" determines whether you can make reasonable choices based on your team's capabilities when the traffic is cold-started. For example, a makeshift team, everyone has no basic copywriting skills. However, as long as you write a large number of forum posts and word-of-mouth copywriting, you can still produce good results.

(3) The role of the indicator of “quantifiable results”

The quantifiability of results is directly related to the difficulty of managing the matter, because the marketing promotion methods that are more difficult to quantify results are also very difficult to manage. This requires very high professional capabilities from managers. If the boss himself does not have this professional ability, the situation can easily get out of control.

(4) The role of the “effectiveness period” indicator

When starting a business project, you must first choose a promotion method with a short effect cycle. After these channels have produced stable results, try some promotion methods with longer effectiveness cycles. Because once you try a promotion method that takes a long time to take effect, the cost of silence will be extremely high. In the end, it is easy to make directional errors, delaying the development window for more than half a year.

(5) The role of the “capital investment threshold” indicator

In this economic downturn, it is time for most companies to consider tightening their belts and starting a lean business. Many channel promotion methods have a very high capital investment threshold. For example, if you advertise on Douyin, the starting price is hundreds of thousands. Poor entrepreneurs cannot afford such hardships. If they don’t see results after one round, they may never recover.

Therefore, for most poor entrepreneurs, the indicator of "capital investment threshold" is what they need to pay close attention to. You can't bet all your chips on one thing like a gambler. The key to the survival of small and medium-sized enterprises is how to verify channels at low cost and survive longer.

(6) The role of the “input-output ratio” indicator

Everyone should have a concept of this. If you spend 1 dollar, of course you want to earn 10 dollars back, or at least you can't lose money. The input-output ratio must also be divided into stages, because the input-output ratio cannot achieve a very good effect all at once and requires gradual adjustment.

Therefore, during the exploration period, the first thing to consider is whether it can bring in customers, and then consider optimizing the input-output ratio. Otherwise, it will be easy for you to get stuck.

(7) The role of the “traffic bottleneck” indicator

During the Diaosi entrepreneurial stage, the traffic input-output ratio of some channels is extremely high. But he has reached a stage where no matter how much you invest, it is difficult to break through. This is because the channel’s traffic bottleneck is very limited. His limit may be 3 customers a day.

Therefore, when an enterprise breaks through a stage of development, it can no longer rely on small traffic channels with high input-output ratios, but must find a large traffic platform.

Due to limited space, we will discuss later how to formulate specific marketing strategies based on the company's development stage or industry characteristics.

Source: Feng Jian (fengjianroom)