3 elements for beginners of APP operation and promotion strategy!

Operation and promotion require the most user resources, and most of the user resources are concentrated in a few channels. How to obtain the most effective users at the optimal cost is a question that APP operation and promotion professionals often have to think about in their career path. This article mainly gives you a brief introduction to some promotion strategies, I hope it will be helpful to you.

All resources have a focusing effect.

For products, users are crucial resources. There are thousands of Internet products, but most user resources are concentrated in a few channels. It is impossible to get a piece of the pie from resource oligarchs without paying some costs.

For APP products, the promotion methods are no different from application markets, information flow platforms, searches, alliances, point walls, communities... and so on. How to obtain the most effective users at the optimal cost is a question that APP operators and promoters often have to think about in their career path. For the same channel, the cost of acquiring customers may be 3 yuan for some operations and 10 yuan for others. The difference between them sometimes requires some skill.

Below I will give you a brief summary of some promotion strategies, which are good from the small details. I hope you will benefit from it.

The first factor: the general trend

This factor is by no means nonsense. To give a simple example, it is currently the Double Eleven and Double Twelve period, and all major media resources, including application markets, are leaning towards e-commerce. During this period, if you increase your investment and grab resources, your costs will naturally increase.

Of course, if you have money, it's right to aim high and get quick exposure, but a storm comes and goes quickly. You don't feel bad about spending investors' money, but it will eventually run out. For ordinary products, the company does not have money to invest in channels, so the first thing to consider is to understand the industry, the market, and the peculiarities of promotion channels.

No reasoning, just practicality. For example, for products targeting college students, holidays are relatively the best time for promotion, especially summer vacation. There is no need to explain this principle in detail, the key point is as follows. Is it a good idea to focus on online promotion during the start of the school season?

The answer is no. The start of the school year is the busiest time for students. Freshmen are busy with military training, while old students are busy welcoming new students, choosing courses, etc. In fact, there is a vacuum period of half a month to one month for products for college students. It was originally expected that the number of student users would increase dramatically, but in the end, there were huge investments but not many users. This is a miscalculation of the situation.

There is no need to give many examples of this kind. If you do not truly understand the habits of your users and just make decisions based on your own instincts, you will be the one who pays the bill in the end.

The situation is stronger than people, but how to judge the general trend?

Experience + practice!

As a newbie with zero experience, the first thing to do is to understand the industry trends of your products. Even if you don’t know, your boss will always know something. If your boss is also an entrepreneur, the Internet is so transparent that he will always be able to dig up the information you need.

If you really don't know how to start, it is not undesirable to make subjective assumptions during the promotion period. The subjective speculation promotion method also requires us to continuously iterate and test quickly. If it is not appropriate, we must make adjustments immediately. The main purpose of Wang Yangming's philosophy of mind is to integrate knowledge and action, which means that you should constantly practice in the world.

The second factor: environment

Let's talk about environmental factors. Here we should focus on our competitors. In China, it is impossible to make products without competitors. Sometimes the success or failure of your product is completely determined by your competitors. Sina's accidental opportunity led to the rapid rise of Baidu Search. Chen Yizhou of Renren.com registered the domain name kaixin.com first, which slowed down the growth of Kaixin.com. Lei Jun's MiTalk was released before WeChat, but Zhang Xiaolong only gave Lei Jun 40 days. After WeChat went online, Lei Jun threw in the towel and focused on making mobile phones.

How far you can see into the past determines how far you can see into the future. When making products, you will inevitably enter the competition track. Every industry has its own golden period, and the product launch strategy sometimes also has to take into account the products of the same industry.

If you are a small second-tier product and the top products are spending money to build channels, it may not be the best promotion period for you. Taking the Guangdiantong channel as an example, it is very necessary to remain sensitive to market changes. If the exposure continues to increase over a period of time, it is possible that the advertisers who are competing with you for resources have reduced their investment in the near future, which is actually a good opportunity for you to increase the volume.

Another point is to keep in good contact with the channels in real time. If the channels have new ways to increase sales, you can be the first to test them. The bonus period of new channels and new methods is so short. If you don’t grab it now, you will miss the chance in the future. Take the 360 ​​Hand-Assisted PMP channel where our product was previously launched. The initial price was 30 yuan, with a daily sales volume of several hundred. Now the bid has been raised to over 100, and it still only brings in a few orders a day. There are limited resources, and the first one to try something new often reaps the biggest benefits.

Communicate more with competitors and distribution channels so that you can grasp the latest market changes and often be one step ahead of others.

Since the birth of the Internet, homogeneous competition among Internet products has become increasingly fierce. Sometimes there are no less than a hundred APPs in the same field, and most products are "born to die" because the leading products have already established the rules of the industry and cultivated user usage habits! Imitating the leader often ends up trapping yourself.

Only by breaking the rules can you gain the greatest benefits; this is the truth of how the world works. But looking at the entire Internet, how many Qutoutiao and Pinduoduo are there? Perhaps focusing on the things that the top products disdain to do is the key to success?

The third element: channel

Promotion is inseparable from channels. There is a lot of information online about how to create APP channels. Here I will focus on some details. If APP does not have an application market, your losses will be absolutely unimaginable!

There are two levels of application markets: free and paid. I believe that paying is still a minority of most companies, but the volume brought by free methods is not necessarily worse than paid CPA!

To run an application market, the prerequisite is to have a thorough understanding of the application market. Every application market has free resources. Don’t underestimate these. We have tested almost all the functions of the application market more than 5 times, including the content cooperation of App Store and the welfare activities of 360. The content cooperation between Xiaomi Card Wallet and Baidu in Xiaomi Market alone has brought us more than 50,000 users in half a year.

The key is that these have almost no cost investment, so why not make good use of them?

Every other market has its own free resources that can be mined.

Another focus is ASO. One of our traffic words rose from fifth to first, and Baidu market adds about 300 new activated users every day. This is just a change in one word and one market. You can imagine how great the potential is here.

Of course, ASO cannot be short-sighted. If we don’t have a budget, we can guide users little by little. Once our scale reaches a certain level, there will be a qualitative change. Of course, if the budget is sufficient, the most direct way to speed up your ranking progress is to participate in the ranking, buy rankings, or find a third party to do some ASO work.

Each app market has official channels for payment methods. The strategies for launching the app have been mentioned above. Those who have worked in this field may understand that it is a complicated system. The most appropriate bid for each app market depends not only on the market but also on the KPI, ROI and other factors of the product itself.

A one-time bid cannot solve long-term problems. To determine the appropriate price, you need to constantly change it according to the situation and environment, find the best solution for your product, and get the highest profit at the lowest cost.

When we tested 360's mobile assistant, we adjusted the bid by one cent at a time and observed the ranking changes and traffic changes of traffic keywords every day. After more than a month of testing, we finally found a temporary optimal solution.

There are many channels for APP distribution. The application market is just one example and only the tip of the iceberg in this promotion system. If all the channels are described in detail, I can probably write a book.

Finally, I would like to add one more point, which is the ability of data mining. We will not go into details about the basics such as product activation rate, registration rate, and retention rate. The core data requirement for our product is user payment efficiency (total payment amount/total number of users: cost per single user).

I suggest that you expand the time dimension when comparing data. Our users through 360 channels are higher than those through App Store within a quarter, but the user quality is not as good as that of App Store after three months. By comparing the data, you can find out the quality of the channels your users come from, and thus plan the entire promotion system.

The brief description above is just to help you find a direction in promotion. Think more and I hope you will gain something!

Source: Tongliyu