How to use content to grow products?

Let me explain it simply and literally. What does “X+content=growth” mean?

• X: A tool -type product, as long as your product itself is not just about content, can be a tool application in the community, tourism, system application, securities , etc.
• Content: Some online consumer content includes articles, pictures, videos, music, jokes, etc.
• Growth: The main core is customer acquisition, activation, retention, monetization and communication.

1. How to make a good product?

A good tool-type product must have a very simple, easy-to-use and concise core process, and users will come back to use it again after using it.

1. Core + content, providing refined products and operations

The number of monthly active devices of mobile apps has entered a stock market competition from an incremental market. The traffic dividend has gradually disappeared, the cost of acquiring customers has greatly increased, and traffic has become more and more expensive.

According to a market statistic of daily use of mobile apps, the situation we face is very complicated:

From 2014 to 2017, the time spent on communication and content accounted for more than 70% of the total time. It can be seen that there is very little room for competition left for tool-type products.

Now, it is very difficult for tool-type products to achieve rapid growth. Homogeneity is very serious, and we have entered a stage of overcapacity. It is difficult to impress users.

Growth hacking is a good solution. I focus on adding content to the core functions of the product to provide refined and systematic product and operational ideas to solve the problem of growth.

“X+Content” example:

The picture below shows some typical tool products that are popular on the market, namely system tools, weather applications and calendar applications.

Basically, a new time is opened, and then it is divided into many channels. There is an information flow under the channel, and the information flow looks similar.

Let's imagine that when a user opens the app and sees this information, if he is interested in the content and clicks in to read it, the user time will increase, and user stickiness will also increase;

When users see ads that interest them, they will click on them, which generates advertising revenue.

When users share good articles on WeChat Moments , their friends see the articles, and growth is achieved.

If you have tens of millions or millions of daily active users, the monetization effect, that is, the advertising effect, will be good. The user market may have increased a little, but in terms of activation, customer acquisition and communication, the increase is actually not much.

Growth is hot, and many product managers will jump into the growth pit. When the product has not been verified in the PMF stage, we are very focused on doing some more detailed A/B tests.

"X+content", if the core value of X is not clear, then the above content will be useless no matter how fancy it is.

2. Establish the “Four Modernizations”

Some key factors for improving retention through content:

(1) Coreization: making content a core part of the product

For example, in a stock app, there are some news, financial or other reports about the company under each stock, which is equivalent to binding the content very closely with the core of the product to create a better user perception.

For example, in the e-commerce field, if you want to buy a mobile phone, TV or computer, you can combine the review content with the e-commerce services to increase the conversion rate of this e-commerce.

(2) Consistency: the content and product positioning tend to be consistent

For example, a weather app is not suitable for displaying news such as the World Cup . Instead, it should display some information about health and wellness or clothing matching, which is more appropriate.

(3) Scenario-based delivery of the right content at the right time

What would the user scenario be like for a bus-riding app? You may be waiting for the bus at the bus stop, and it may still be three to five minutes before it arrives. During this time, you may have nothing to do except staring at your phone.

At this point, if some content related to local life or more fragmented content can be presented on this interface, the length of time users stay may increase significantly.

(4) Personalization: creating personalized content based on user profiles

How does NetEase make personalized recommendations? First, the system needs to recognize the user and determine his interests, region, device, income, etc. through his operations. Then we ourselves also need to understand our content, including articles, pictures, and videos.

In fact, it is a user portrait and a content portrait.

User portraits are led and implemented by our product managers. They are typical virtual users that represent the target users . They are relatively vague and subjective, and they come from some of our qualitative research and user research.

User portrait is a business-meaningful numerical value assigned to a single user through data modeling. The key word here is data modeling, and the source is intelligent algorithm.

It can be an individual user or a user in a small group. We can achieve refined operations and accurately define a certain user. The scope of application of this user portrait is definitely broader and more accurate.

Data modeling gives data values ​​that have business meaning to individual users. Where are our opportunities? Still in this business sense, this requires our product managers to have a keen sense of smell and insight into human needs and the market.

In this era, keep up with the trend and don't forget your original intention. We need to understand things like user portrait big data and artificial intelligence , and know how they work, because we are doing more in-depth research on the user's psychological market.

3. Extension of A/B testing: self-evolving product system

After the “four transformations” are established, how can we conduct some specific and detailed A/B tests through some growth methods?

The system of data- driven content construction requires that we have a very powerful data analysis system and capabilities.

On this basis, we need a system and capabilities for rapid iteration so that our product managers can make a lot of assumptions based on their judgment, and then make some improvements through A/B testing. Repeat this cycle to achieve our goal.

In terms of content, test some points, such as how to balance the interest trends, vulgarity and elegance of the content? Vulgarity and elegance have different requirements for products with different definitions.

How to balance timeliness and quality? If too much emphasis is placed on the timeliness of news, the total output of news will be relatively small and the quality will certainly decline.

Suppose we want to test what kind of information flow has the highest conversion rate. Based on such a topic, we need to conduct manual experiments step by step and complete a series of operations to solve this problem.

When we set up an A/B test, we first need to conduct multiple experiments. After reaching a conclusion the first time, we will do the second experiment.

This information flow requires a certain amount of text summaries to make the information richer, but the output of displayed content becomes less. It’s not easy to judge now, and we need data to tell us.

If there is a new self-evolving system, our product managers may only need to input some variable ranges into the system, such as the size of the thumbnail, the number of lines in the summary, the size of the supervisor, which can be a continuous value, and the system will automatically make some distributions based on the predicted conditions.

There may be multiple methods such as ABCDEF, and ultimately based on the click-through rate indicator, of course, other indicators can also be used to automatically output some data results to optimize some solutions.

The system already knows which solution is better and can automatically expand and apply this solution directly to a larger range, just like a self-purifying product system.

2. Communication and customer acquisition

Customer acquisition is a very important part of growth. In terms of content, communication and customer acquisition are basically combined together.

1. Dissemination

What is communication? The simplest one is an article on NetEase News . Just click to share and users will spread it. After sharing to Moments and being opened by others, our product can do a lot of work in acquiring customers.

What is the effective transmission rate? See the figure below:

What we want to do to spread content and acquire customers is to increase the sharing conversion rate and download conversion rate and create a data-driven growth pyramid .

So what can we do in terms of communication and customer acquisition? For example, the location and style of the sharing button, the setting of the sharing text , etc.

If your product can provide users with some benefit feedback, you must make the benefit points very clear in the copy.

Set sharing channels , channel order, timing and scenarios for guiding sharing, and guide users to share when they are most willing to share.

2. Customer Acquisition

What is the setting format of the customer acquisition content landing page and the landing copy? It is best to use the first person to speak in human language, because many of the copywriting used for this kind of communication and customer acquisition is too official and sounds like a robot speaking.

You can put an activity like grabbing red envelopes or lucky draw on the sharing landing page. Many product managers may think that this method is too low-level and not very relevant to the core of the product, so they are not willing to do it.

But this is an era of growth hacking, where everything is data-centric and uses data to speak.

As long as activities such as grabbing red envelopes do not affect the user's core experience, they can be done, especially for users in fourth- and fifth-tier cities or rural areas.

Guide users to share when they are most likely to do so. For example, if a video on TikTok is played more than twice, the small sharing icon will become brighter, and users should be more motivated to share at this time.

Emphasize giving rather than taking.

When stimulating users to share, if you only tell them that they can get something by sharing with their friends, users will often feel disgusted, as if they are taking advantage of their friends.

If we change the focus to giving something to friends, we can effectively stimulate users to share, explore more sharing scenarios, and then download it themselves.

3. Monetization

In the content scenario, monetization is a relatively simple topic because content itself is a natural monetization carrier.

What are the characteristics of the content? The native ones can be inserted into the information flow without popping up. This will result in higher click-through rates and user acceptance.

You can take a look at the results of a survey in 2016. There is context, many ad spaces , and richer formats, including graphics, text, video stickers, etc., and then multiple exposures.

There are now a wide variety of advertising SSP platforms, and there are also a wide variety of platforms that can provide advertising materials, which can match personalized recommendation contexts.

What else can we do in terms of monetization?

• The first step is to access the performance advertising platform to complete the intelligent recommendation of advertising ideas;
• The second step is to use a refined advertising data monitoring platform and configuration platform to select the optimal advertising configuration plan through AB testing;
• The third step is to establish a self-evolving advertising system and allow the system to automatically select the best options.

3. Blockchain + Content Industry

Regarding the blockchain and content industry, my view is that we should keep up with the times and see how blockchain and the content industry can be combined.

First of all, we need to understand what problems exist in the content industry now.

First, it is difficult to protect rights.

Once a self-media author writes an article, it is easy for it to be copied to various platforms for free, and there is no guarantee of income.

Second, the ecological environment is closed.

There are a lot of different accounts in the entire industry, but each is closed and separated, causing great trouble and increasing operating costs.

If an author wants to publish an article, he may have to go to many platforms and register multiple accounts. If a traffic provider wants to use content, it must go to many places to get the content.

Third, platform centralization.

Because all rights are in the hands of the platform, we have also heard of many self-media authors whose articles were not recommended, were removed from the shelves, had their entire accounts blocked, and were unable to withdraw cash after making profits.

So how can we solve these problems through blockchain?

• First, use the blockchain’s tamper-proof information traceability and smart contract features to help users protect their rights.
• Second, decentralization/distributed management/information openness and transparency. Connect the content ecosystem of the entire network so that this ecosystem is no longer fragmented or closed.

Giving power to the authors, so that self-media authors can have voting rights, elect their own chairmen, and choose their own committee members to manage this content alliance, is one of our bigger visions.

Author: Dong An, authorized to be published by Qinggua Media .

Source: Noteman