Brand marketing strategy leveraging festival hot spots!

There are many festivals in these two months, including Teachers' Day, Mid-Autumn Festival, and National Day in early October, and all kinds of marketing are flooding the Internet. However, the brands' awkward and pale marketing efforts only moved themselves and caused discomfort to consumers. The author of this article expressed his own views on this, let’s take a look.

On September 10th, Teacher's Day, when I opened my circle of friends, I was flooded with messages like "Teacher, thank you for your hard work and I wish you a happy holiday."

What's more, some people even go so far as to say "Once a teacher, always a father."

Faced with embarrassment and pale leverage, I would like to say a few words on behalf of the teachers, "I am very happy and don't need your pale and inexplicable blessings", "Who wants to be a father? I, a teacher, can't bear this gift out of the blue."

Whether it is brands or platforms, they are all trying to get this meager traffic and attention. Can you really take advantage of the momentum just to express your feelings of being moved?

I don’t think so. Rather than taking advantage of the situation, another way of looking at it might be self-pleasure. Today, I would like to share with you some of my humble opinions on marketing.

01 What is leverage marketing?

Leverage marketing is a marketing method that uses various means to leverage external forces and resources for one's own benefit.

Compared with other communication methods such as advertising, leveraging marketing can achieve great results with small efforts and accomplish great things with little money, and can often achieve a multiplier effect.

Taking advantage of the situation is not just about being self-satisfied. It requires considering one's own situation and designing the content, actions, and communication trajectory based on the purpose.

The era of expecting a hot topic to go viral is gone. You can understand this by looking at the declining popularity of Durex, the originator of hot topic riding, on SNS.

02 Why do we need to do leverage marketing?

Low-cost brand exposure:

People often say that content acquisition is the lowest-cost way to acquire precise target users. Taking advantage of a situation to spread information is also a form of content creation.

Compared with the rough marketing model of burning money, the cost of leveraging the market is lower and is suitable for large and small brands, regardless of size.

A piece of copy that triggers users' imagination, a poster that triggers users' discussion, combined with good creativity, are both the lowest cost marketing.

Get user attention:

In an age of information overload, what element of marketing is most important? It belongs to user attention.

A good way to leverage a situation is to take advantage of the wind. If you cleverly link it to your own products, you can capture the user's attention to a certain extent.

A good poster or even a good piece of copy can become a hot topic, and if used cleverly it can be like a blow to the user's head.

Laying the ground for virus spread:

Viral transmission is a systematic thing, and taking advantage of the situation is not just about taking advantage of content associations. We need to think holistically about how to turn users into communicators.

For example: B=MAT triggers the user behavior model. The triggering of motivation, ability and appropriate scenarios can better promote the occurrence of behavior. We need to consider leveraging the North Star indicator K factor, which is the viral coefficient to measure the recommendation effect.

K factor = number of users who initiated invitations * conversion rate. If we break it down further, there are two necessary factors for successfully leveraging momentum: expanding the user base that speaks for the "momentum" and improving the quality of the "momentum" to increase conversion rates.

03 What are the characteristics of the viral marketing campaign?

Meeting the "weak propagation" concept:

In the world of natural selection, the weak survive. Public opinion is the opposite of the real world. Strong people in life will often be criticized to pieces in public opinion.

In reality, you can't always be strong. Sometimes showing weakness can make life better.

The same is true for leveraging momentum. Bottom-up design is more likely to resonate.

Take Teachers' Day as an example. Compared with the pure brand wishing you a happy Teachers' Day, the scenario-based communication of weakness such as "school will be dismissed if I delay you for another 5 minutes" can remind you of a teacher who used to stay in class for 5 minutes.

Satisfy users' curiosity:

Human beings are curious creatures by nature, and the monotony of life makes our curiosity grow.

Curiosity stimulates people's thirst for knowledge, allowing them to discover something unique and then eagerly share it.

By embedding a hotspot, the title is designed to whet the user's appetite in order to increase the opening rate. This is a trend. Although it is not desirable to a certain extent, the first step is achieved and at least a relationship is established with the user.

Start with the user, not yourself:

What do users want to see? In what scenarios do users view your leveraged content? What is the user’s emotional state when they look at the ability to leverage the situation?

These are things you need to think about clearly before creating content to take advantage of a trend. Otherwise, simply riding on the trend for your own pleasure will not lead to its dissemination.

Taking Teacher's Day as an example, while linking to the hot topics of Teacher's Day, have you ever thought about what tone to use when creating content? Simply speaking of the tone of the teachers, have you ever thought about how many teachers in your target user group will read it?

Instead of making a self-touching blessing of “Once a teacher, always a father”, it is better to change the tone and create from the relationship between the goal and potential point of “teacher”.

For example, if your target group is mothers, you can start from the point that "mothers are the best teachers for children", which may resonate with the mothers.

04 Why are most of the marketing leveraging strategies so useless nowadays?

Leverage marketing has been divided into sufficiently detailed categories, for example, these 6 common leverage marketing techniques.

Hot search leverages the trend:

Dig out related topics from the search rankings, for example, "Today's Hot List" can check the comprehensive and vertical platform hot search top lists.

Calendar leverage:

Fixed timeline, 24 solar terms and 18 traditional festivals per year. There is overlap, such as Qingming is both a solar term and a festival.

Competitive products take advantage of:

Do you still remember the case of Zhen Gongfu taking advantage of the situation? One of the initial principles for store location selection was to open a store near people.

Group together to take advantage of the situation:

Haier and Durex became the blue V brand accounts on Weibo. They are so naughty that they don't seem like a brand. They even add fuel to the fire around a hot topic, allowing the potential energy to merge and increase the communication effect.

Multi-layer leverage:

Let’s take Durex as an example. In June 2012, when Beijing was hit by heavy rain, Durex overshoes were spread by users for the second and multiple times. Users not only forward the content, but also create secondary works and spread them based on the original potential. The effect is comparable to the level of fermentation of Erke's donations to Henan Dashui.

Taking advantage of the situation:

The Beginning of Autumn comes every year, but users have gradually become numb to it and are no longer moved by it as an ordinary solar term. However, since 2020, the first cup of milk tea after autumn has become popular in the circle of friends, prompting users to actively post pictures.

Skills are, after all, just surface accumulation. We have to think about it from the essence, why should we take advantage of the situation?

Is it to keep the user's attention? Is it to acquire customers at low cost? Is it to achieve a transformation of a certain behavioral action? Different starting points will lead to very different design actions.

But, in the end, they must be quantifiable and evaluable. If you cannot achieve a certain goal, it is self-indulgence, which is a big taboo.

05 In today’s era, how can brands leverage marketing to achieve success?

Think about why you should do leverage marketing:

Taking advantage of the situation is just a supporting role, not a panacea. It has been proven thousands of times that a small brand wants to gain free traffic by leveraging its market, and this is not feasible. Even if the traffic explodes in the short term, if the systematic retention in the later stage does not keep up, it will still be short-lived.

Therefore, brands must distinguish between the primary and the secondary, and it is even more impossible to borrow all the power. If they borrow the wrong power, it will be harmful to themselves and the effect will be counterproductive.

Consider whether it is worth doing from the perspective of investment-to-output ratio:

A leveraged opportunity may be a sentence, a poster, an event, or a meeting. Different forms of output have different requirements for corresponding personnel.

As a controller of communication, you have to consider whether it is worthwhile to invest time and resources in leveraging the momentum of one person or five people. If the evaluation shows that the investment-output ratio is reasonable, you can fully mobilize all people, financial resources and materials to carry out the work.

Systematized output content and dissemination paths:

In terms of content creation, for example, the 24 solar terms, 18 traditional festivals, daily sensitive related hot spots, etc., continuous output will form your own brand potential style and cultivate users' habits. Over time, users will unconsciously look forward to your leveraged content.

In terms of the dissemination path, you have to think about whether there will be enough private traffic to promote the content after it is ready. For example, as a brand, if you have enough distributors, large B-end users, small B-end users, and loyal C-end users, quantification is the foundation for expanding the K factor.

From PGC fermentation to UGC dissemination:

It still ends with the "Happy Holidays" joke. The brand wishes the teacher a happy holiday. It is purely top-down content. Apart from the brand sending it out and forcibly exposing it, no teacher will be moved when seeing it, and there will be no secondary spread by users.

How about asking questions to users? Through the target group and the keywords of Teacher's Day, we guide users to spontaneously say interesting things about Teacher's Day. This is to make PGC look like UGC, and the communication psychology is also in line with the concept of weak communication. It may be more interesting and have better effects.

Author: Zheng Huohuo

Source: Black Box of 炏 (zydsgj)