How to get big exposure through content at zero cost?

Marketing and promotion are always the pain points for small and medium-sized companies. Unlike big brands in the eyes of the media, the promotion budgets of small and medium-sized companies are never enough. Other large companies often spend tens of millions on media advertising, not to mention lightweight activities such as lucky draws on Weibo and interactive gift giving on public accounts that take place almost every day. Every marketing budget of small and medium-sized enterprises requires strict calculation of the input-output ratio. Marketing and promotion is the pain point for every small and medium-sized enterprise.

But for small and medium-sized content companies, there is actually an effective low-cost marketing technique that is very simple to operate and the principle is not complicated, but it is ignored by most companies. This technique is not only applicable to content-based companies, but can also be reused in most 2C companies.

Where does low-cost traffic come from?

The brand exposure channels of enterprises basically come from two aspects: the first is from advertising resources, such as various paid placements, resource exchanges and promotions, etc.; the second is from information content platforms, mainly from the content distribution of the platform and the active search of users. These content platforms are various information, videos, and content media. The former requires resources to leverage, while the latter can seek active exposure through content.

For a content company, if it wants to get enough traffic exposure on the platform, it needs to provide the content platform with corresponding high-quality content. This is also what the vast majority of content-based companies and new media /brand departments of various companies are doing.

Anyone familiar with the content industry should know that if there is no obvious resource advantage and if you want to rely on pure content to attract traffic , you will need to go through an extremely long, inefficient and "obscure" period. Most companies have been left to fend for themselves before they can harvest the long-tail traffic formed by long-term content accumulation. At the same time, waiting for traffic from the platform to shift through content is actually a very passive approach, similar to sitting back and waiting for something to happen, and it is difficult to take the initiative in marketing promotion.

But on the other hand, vertical high-quality content is always scarce for platforms. Currently, the competition for content among content platforms is becoming increasingly fierce. Various platforms have launched corresponding MCN cooperation plans in the vertical content field, attracting outstanding content teams and institutions through resource flow and policy inclination. Whether it is Weibo MCN (V Influence Summit), Taobao (Taobao Image Festival), or Baidu's Miaodong Video (Cheese Producer Alliance) and other MCN platforms, all of them extend olive branches of traffic and monetization to high-quality content teams.

Therefore, we can form a content-platform cooperation mechanism by providing high-quality content to corresponding content platforms, seek joint promotion and concentrated exposure through multiple media channels, and seize the initiative of promotion in the form of content business cooperation. While channel platforms are harvesting high-quality content, content producers (brands) can also obtain a large amount of platform exposure at a low cost.

When brands cooperate with large-traffic platforms, they can not only ensure their own traffic and brand influence, but they can even aggregate more high-quality content internally through incubation and signing at the downstream of the platform, making themselves an MCN organization .

The idea is simple, but it is ignored by most companies. Let’s look at a review of a practical case:

Interesting videos of the World Cup , low cost for high exposure

The World Cup is the period with the most concentrated traffic in 2018 except for the Spring Festival, but it is also the period with the most intense marketing competition. How can small and medium-sized enterprises obtain low-cost and wide-ranging exposure during such a fiercely competitive period?

The conventional routine of many companies is to make World Cup test H5, change the team flag avatar mini program , or shoot short videos, make emoticons and write jokes, etc. These are actually all correct, but the biggest flaw is that it is impossible to predict the platform's recommendation volume and the final dissemination effect. It almost depends on the user's spontaneous forwarding (or induced sharing) to spread. In other words, small and medium-sized enterprises have no high-traffic exposure channels except their own self-media and user groups.

Laihua is an online hand-drawn video production tool that has the advantage of content production. Moreover, for the form of hand-drawn animation, there is less problem of copyright disputes over materials. However, its weakness is that it does not have a strong traffic pool.

So the main problem facing brands is: how to ensure that high-quality content receives concentrated and massive exposure across the entire network?

Laihua’s plan is to cooperate in producing the “World Cup·Laihua Fans’ Guide” video content, find leading media channels online and offline for joint promotion, and focus on replacement delivery during the World Cup.

The entire joint promotion planning is not mysterious. First, the brand team plans the content selection for the World Cup. After producing video samples, they negotiate cooperation with various head channels , and then conduct concentrated delivery and continuous content output during the World Cup. In addition, in order to ensure the effectiveness of the delivery, Laihua packaged the videos into a series of columns, which not only avoided the risk of excessive delivery of single-product videos, but also ensured that it could continue to speak out on the progress and results of the games during the World Cup.

Content platforms need high-quality content to attract users and follow hot topics, and brands can also expand their brand awareness through content. According to the brand, during the entire World Cup communication period, the 11 episodes of hand-drawn animation videos produced had a total online viewing number of over 23 million, and offline subway media coverage exceeded 28 million people.

For a company that does not have massive traffic resources, it is not easy to achieve this scale of exposure. More importantly, this wave of operations is almost zero cost, because the planning and production of video content is originally part of the regular brand content output action.

The cooperation model between content and platform can actually be played out in many ways. In addition to the conventional content ending patches, creative inserts, plot implants, and even user activities can be cooperated in the content. And this is not limited to video content. All content presentation forms such as series of in-depth pictures and texts, complaints and comments, pictures and texts, comics, short videos ... can be applied.

The overall marketing routine can be summarized as follows: content theme planning - content sample production - channel cooperation negotiation - centralized joint promotion

In fact, the specific implementation is not complicated, and the threshold is not high for content creation teams, so most companies can reuse it directly, but most small and medium-sized enterprises ignore it.

Although this is a low-cost way to obtain high platform traffic, it does not mean that it is a universal shortcut. There are several aspects that need to be paid attention to:

1. Suggestion: Brand is sufficient, conversion is enhanced

The exposure of brand content is more about the exposure of brand image, because highly sales-oriented content is unlikely to obtain channel promotion cooperation from the platform. Therefore, the exposure is more about improving the perception of brand image, and the effect on promoting short-term sales and increasing the number of users will not be particularly obvious.

In addition, although the content cooperation and promotion model can concentrate on obtaining massive traffic, in essence, these traffics are still scattered across various platforms. Unless there is a particularly clever design, it is difficult to settle the massive traffic and to include it in the brand’s own traffic pool.

2. Opportunity: Take the opportunity to create a benchmark case

Although small and medium-sized enterprises usually do not pay much attention to brand building (compared with sales and customer acquisition), large-scale exposure at the brand level can also carry out a wave of public relations packaging and publicity even if it cannot bring in a considerable number of users.

When it comes to foreign business cooperation, the biggest disadvantage for small and medium-sized enterprises is that they do not have enough influential marketing cases . Through the above-mentioned content-platform joint promotion, small businesses can quickly create industry benchmark cases and save a lot of effort for subsequent brand promotion and business negotiations.

3. Future - Helps build corporate IP

The rise of self-media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo has turned every company into a media. The mediatization of enterprises is an important task for each corporate brand/marketing department. Each corporate media will gather its own traffic pool through specific brand characteristics. The creation of corporate IP is an obvious trend in corporate promotion.

Corporate IP needs to rely on a large amount of relevant content for support. Therefore, from this perspective, every 2C company will have the attributes of a content company, constantly creating high-quality content, retaining users (through corporate self-media such as WeChat and Weibo), and cultivating brand loyalty and product stickiness.

This is why this content-platform cooperation promotion model is not only suitable for content companies, but also has wider reusability. It is suitable for every company that is in the cold start stage of corporate IP construction. Through a light and low-cost cooperation model, it can obtain a large amount of user perception and attention.

Conclusion

Through the joint promotion model of content-platform cooperation, start-ups/small and medium-sized enterprises can achieve low-cost, large-scale brand exposure, quickly gain brand awareness in the market, and build brand IP from zero to one.

author: Zheng Zhuoran , authorized by Qinggua Media to publish.

source: Spreading gymnastics