How to attract traffic to products? How to get users hooked?

In traffic diversion , we not only need to pursue being seen by more people, but also need to study how to get more people to "take the bait" while being seen. In today's article, we will mainly study the latter.

We often hear the concept of traffic generation in our daily lives, and what everyone talks about is basically how to let more potential customers know about our products.

In fact, drainage is everywhere. for example:

• Psoriasis ads on toilets, lamp posts, and shared bikes
• Large events held in shopping malls
• The scumbag Hui that often appears on the web
• Through train ads on Taobao homepage

Oftentimes, when we are doing traffic generation, we usually put attractive information in places where as many potential customers as possible can access it. This method is not wrong, but it is not all about traffic generation. It is just like when we go fishing, it does not mean that we can catch a lot of fish by putting the fishhook in a river with a lot of fish. In fact, the choice of fishing spot, bait and fishhook are also very important.

The traditional business customer model is funnel-shaped.

Traffic generation is the initial part of the funnel, and its purpose is to get more people interested in our products or services and “hooked” them. The concept of being circumscribed manifests itself differently in different businesses, for example:

• In today’s retail, “hooking up” means a customer walks into a store;
• Online Taobao stores are when customers click on pictures of products or stores;
• For web games , it means that the player clicks on the game’s web page.

So in drainage, we need to do two steps. We not only need to pursue being seen by more people, but also need to study how to get more people to "take the bait" while being seen. In today’s article we will focus on the latter.

1. Consumers see, but don’t see

In previous articles, we have mentioned that the human brain works mainly to save energy, which leads to the fact that we are exposed to a lot of information all the time in our lives, but more than 90% of this information is blocked by our brain.

For example, try to recall now: When you were taking the bus or subway to work today, what color clothes were the people next to you wearing? Or is the street shop that you often pass by on your way to and from get off work open today?

Yes, in fact, this information is received by our sensory organs unconsciously, but although we see the image composed of light, it does not remain in our consciousness. When we are doing traffic diversion, we must first know what kind of information will be blocked by the potential consumers' brains, and then make our information penetrate the barriers in the consumers' brains.

In cognitive psychology, our brain goes through a series of steps when receiving information: sensation->perception->cognition->emotion. When the sensory organs receive various external stimuli, they use perception to combine these disorganized information into something we can understand with our existing cognition.

For example, when we look up at the sky, what we actually see is blue light and white light composed of multiple colors. This is how we feel. Then based on this feeling our perception tells our brain that this is the sky and the sun.

Then, if this feeling happens to break through the barrier of our brain, for example, we start to think seriously, we will connect the sun and the blue sky to our existing cognition, such as there is an atmosphere and a universe above the blue sky, and the sun is a star in the solar system, etc.

Since the ultimate goal of our traffic generation is to change the behavior of potential consumers, we need to make our information enter the consumer's cognitive model. In other words, we need to avoid the information blockade of consumers' brains.

1. Unchanging information is easily blocked

Now let's do a simple experiment: take your eyes off the mobile phone screen, stare at a certain place without moving your eyes for 30 seconds. You will find that the scene that was clear at the beginning gradually becomes blurred, and even becomes completely white in the end.

This is because although we always see the information in front of us, since it has not changed, our brain slowly helps us block out the impact.

Our sensitivity to changing information comes from the result of genetic selection during our evolution from primitive humans to the present. In the primeval forest, danger often needs to be detected in advance from very subtle changes in the environment. For example, subtle sounds, gentle breezes, and slightly swaying leaves may indicate the presence of ferocious beasts not far away. At this time, only the genes of those who can escape in time can survive.

Therefore, unchanging information is most likely to be blocked. There are many examples in our lives where drainage ends up being neglected due to lack of variety.

The most typical example is that furniture stores are selling "last three days of lease, clearance sales at rock bottom prices" every day.

Also, when we watch video websites, there are often car advertisements. The images in the advertisements mostly show a car running on mountains, beaches, or roads.

This kind of drainage is generally not very effective, it is just casting a wide net without sincerity. Such traffic generally cannot penetrate the shielding wall of our brain, so when we see such an advertisement, we either finish watching it as if we have not seen it at all, or we directly switch to other software.

Therefore, when you find that your traffic-generating method or content has been used by many peers for a long time, you should try other traffic-generating content, otherwise it will be difficult to attract attention.

2. Overly familiar information is easily blocked

Compared to unchanging information, overly familiar information means that the correlation of key elements in the information is too common, which causes the consumer's brain to feel that "it should be like this" and then be blocked.

In cognitive psychology research, our brain has a potential system that operates continuously (also called "System 1"). This system will string all the received perceptions together into key words through our past experiences.

For example, when we see a bus, System 1 will naturally associate it with information such as bus cards, change, giving up seats, drivers, bus stops, etc. based on different people's past experiences.

So when we really see the information of these keywords that emerge in the brain in the following process, such as seeing people using bus cards, someone giving up their seats, drivers driving, bus stop signs, etc., our brains will block them.

What can cross this shielding line is information that does not match our associations. For example, when we see passengers wearing suits on a bus, the two incoherent keywords, suits and buses, will attract our attention, and we can't help but think about what the connection is behind them:

• Is this guy an insurance broker or a real estate agent?
• Did this guy forget to bring his wallet when he went out?
• This guy is being romantic and waiting for a girl on the bus?

Therefore, if the information we direct is too relevant to our industry, it will not easily attract the attention of potential customers.

For example, physical retail stores like to put discount information directly at the door of the store, mostly "XX off for purchases over XX" or "X discount". This way, consumers can easily associate retail with discounts, which makes the traffic-driving effect weak.

Another example is the attraction of shopping malls. The traditional activities at the main entrance are no longer able to attract the attention of passers-by, because outdoor activities and shopping malls also have a very common correlation. On the contrary, K11 shopping mall combines the concepts of museum (art, humanities) and shopping mall, and successfully attracts a large number of customers.

In fact, this is why Taobao uses different discount methods every time during Double Eleven , from the initial coupons, to the later red envelope fission, lottery tickets, and now the doubling of prepayments, all in order to maintain the traffic-generating effect.

Therefore, if we want to achieve better traffic-generating effects, we need to connect our information with unusual associated words in the minds of consumers to create the effect of "it turns out it can be done this way."

2. Consumers don’t care to see

After we have prepared the content of our lead generation information, we should pay attention to the channels and scenarios through which this information should reach potential consumers. There is a trap here. Sometimes when we provide traffic-generating information, consumers are not interested in reading it.

Psychologist Daniel Simons once conducted a famous "invisible gorilla" experiment: in the experiment, the subjects were asked to watch a short video in which three people in black and white clothes passed a basketball to each other, and then count how many times the people in white clothes passed the ball in the video.

In the middle of this short video, a black gorilla will come out and dance among the crowd. After watching the video, the participants were asked if they noticed the gorilla appear. The results showed that although most of the subjects could clearly tell the number of times the ball was passed, they did not notice the gorilla.

This experiment proves that the human brain actually has two modes that switch between different

• One is the high cognitive mode, when we focus on a task and easily ignore a lot of obvious information around us.
• The other is the low cognitive mode, when our brain is very relaxed and more likely to pay attention to surrounding information.

Therefore, our traffic generation activities should be carried out when potential consumers are in a low cognitive mode to be more effective.

In offline retail, we often see stores in shopping malls displaying various discount information at the door to attract consumers into the store. But these stores sometimes overlook one point: will consumers really pay attention to your information?

For example, if the signs in a shopping mall are confusing, it will be difficult for consumers to find their original purpose ( a movie theater , a restaurant, or even the stairs, etc.). When consumers are shopping in the mall in a mode that requires maintaining high cognitive ability, they often do not notice the traffic information of the shops they pass by.

Alternatively, in a shopping mall with clear signs, if a store is on a route that leads to highly purposeful functional businesses (cinemas, restaurants, large supermarkets), and the route is long and straight, consumers may use the time walking to check their phones and reply to WeChat messages , and will not notice the traffic-enhancing information nearby.

In these two examples, what the former shops need to do is to try to connect themselves with destinations with high consumer cognition patterns, such as placing traffic-generating information at movie theaters, or doing cross-industry alliance promotions with restaurants. The latter requires that the traffic information be delivered to potential consumers in a digital way.

For example, on Taobao. When consumers browse discount venues such as Juhuasuan, most of them are in a low-cognitive mode because they have no purpose; but when consumers search for products using keywords, they are in a high-cognitive mode because they are browsing with the purpose of completing a task. Therefore, it will be more effective to place traffic-generating information at the promotion venue, while the traffic-generating information on the product’s homepage needs to be more differentiated and targeted.

Therefore, when we deliver traffic-generating information, we need to understand the consumer’s purpose in this browsing scenario, identify the level of cognitive patterns, and then select information and touchpoints in a targeted manner.

Conclusion

When we are doing traffic generation, it is not just as simple as putting information in front of as many potential users as possible.

Our ultimate goal is to get our message through the consumer's brain shield so that they notice it and "take the bait", which requires us to:

• Use a different way of expression from your peers and associate your business information with unusual concepts to attract consumers' attention.
• Understand consumers’ cognitive patterns in browsing scenarios and use appropriate touchpoints in the selected channels.

The author of this article @呵先生 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games