How to do soft promotion for APP operation?

Have you noticed that there is a new business recently: attracting old users, which costs from a few cents to more than one dollar to attract a user. The existence of this kind of business was unimaginable in the first half of the Internet , and it also reflects from another perspective that it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new business nowadays . Soft promotion that affects the effect of attracting new customers becomes increasingly important, because once a good marketing event is carried out, it will greatly promote the company's brand and user acquisition. Soft promotion is the only one that can truly achieve the desired effect.

As an operator , in addition to user maintenance, data analysis , and event operations , you also need to understand something about soft promotion. After all, the number of new users has a great impact on KPI.

In this article, I will introduce the general gameplay of soft promotion from the following aspects:

1. The purpose of soft promotion
2. Soft production
3. Soft promotion channels
4. Soft promotion experience

These four links are enough for us to have a comprehensive understanding of soft promotion as a whole. This article starts with two links to explain to you how to play soft promotion.

1. The purpose of soft promotion

Brand exposure is the primary purpose of soft promotion. In fact, conversely, soft promotion is the most helpful for brand exposure, so brand exposure is more suitable for soft promotion. If we look at the effect, soft promotion is a bit too much. From the perspective of brand exposure, large companies have this demand, and small companies that have received financing and are in urgent need of exposure also have this demand. Startup companies with only a few partners have a weaker demand for soft promotion due to cost pressure. Operations students who want to do marketing promotion can screen companies based on this point.

The effect is a byproduct of soft promotion. This is not entirely correct. When we were promoting mobile games before, the volume brought in by soft promotion was quite large, estimated to be hundreds of thousands. However, it was difficult to evaluate which users came from advertisements and which came from market recommendations, so there was no accurate assessment of the effect of soft promotion on new users. From this point of view, if you have sufficient funds, you still have to do soft promotion. Although it may not be effective, it will definitely be ineffective if you don’t do it.

You can't have both brand exposure and effect. A piece of material can either be used to promote the brand or to create an effect. If you want both, the result is that you get neither. The best approach is to do two sets of advertising: place brand advertising in places where brands can be promoted, such as on TV and portals, and place performance advertising in places where effects can be achieved, such as on WeChat Moments and Zhihu. Choose ads based on the channel.

2. Soft production

There are two aspects to consider when producing soft content: one is the selling point, the other is the form of expression. The selling point is what you want to say to the users, and the perception that the users will develop about your product in their minds after hearing it. The form of expression is to express the selling points in the form of text, pictures, videos or H5. Soft production is more time-consuming and energy-consuming, and has the greatest impact on the final effect. Those marketing events that go viral almost all win by being creative, while some also gain popularity by taking advantage of human nature. For example, the recently popular scrambled eggs with tomatoes.

Refinement of selling points

Extracting selling points should not be unfamiliar to operations. Products will have some differences from competing products when developing functions. These differences can often be used as selling points, such as smaller package, clearer picture quality, more advanced technology, smoother experience, etc.

Here I will tell you another way to extract selling points, using the Android desktop I made before as an example. First, brainstorm what words come to users’ minds when talking about Android desktop? There may be words like system, beautiful, many wallpapers, Xiaomi, neat, Apple desktop, easy to find things, etc. List these words on the blackboard. Then find out the keywords of competitors and list them next to them, including DIY themes, millions of themes, personality, small but powerful, thoughtful tools , smooth experience, etc. Then write the selling points of their own products at the top, including safety, cleaning function, and small size. By combining these three factors for analysis, it is easy to accurately extract your own selling points.

You can have several selling points of your own. One selling point can be presented in the form of pictures, texts, videos, etc. You can promote multiple selling points in turn, find the selling point that impresses users the most, and focus on promoting it. Any product description we see is their refined selling point.

text

The most common form of expression is soft articles, and most public accounts are presented in the form of text. Everyone can write an article. When we were in school, anyone could write an 800-word essay. However, people who can write articles well are extremely rare. In the several companies I have worked in, I have hardly met anyone with good writing skills. Some companies will hold a writing competition and ask everyone to write. I have collected some of them. If you want to read them yourself, they are okay, but if you put them outside and let users read them, they will not be presentable. Therefore, people who are good at copywriting are actually very popular, and many companies are in need of good copywriters.

There are generally two types of articles: one is a product introduction, which is pure hard advertising. Another type is soft advertising, which involves embedding products into news releases.

Hard advertising is relatively easy to write. All you need to do is explain the functions and gameplay clearly. It does not require great literary talent. But news is different. It must be well-reasoned and make users feel involved. I have looked for some soft article writing platforms before, but the quality was not very good. What does this mean? This shows that people who can write copy are as precious as giant pandas .

Good copywriting can impress people and prompt users to make purchases, such as Jiang Xiaobai . Bad copywriting can cause the boss to beat people up, such as the overly negative copywriting that Taobao previously did.

picture

Pictures are another form of monetization of selling points, and are also the most common form. Articles are generally either pure text or a combination of text and pictures. When I write articles for the "Tiger Talks about Operations" public account, I sometimes include some pictures to relieve people's reading fatigue.

Image design is quite particular, because it requires the cooperation of two people to complete (someone has the wrong idea), these two people are the operation and design, and sometimes there is a third person: the boss. There are many examples where operations and design teams have worked hard to complete a design, only to have the boss reject it and start over with just one sentence. According to my years of experience, the quality and beauty of a picture cannot be changed by human will. In human terms, it is the boss, operation and design. Even the optimization suggestions for the picture by passers-by can be ignored.

There is no right or wrong in pictures, only good or bad. The difference between good and bad can only be judged through data. People's subjective judgment is not accurate (except for senior experts). So, what should you do when your boss makes some demands that seem reasonable but are actually unreasonable? Of course, you have to do what the boss says. Otherwise, if the effect is not good, the blame will be borne by the operation department.

The pictures I have made are of two types: effects and brand exposure. When placing information flow ads, the main focus is on effects, and LTV is the king. For brand pictures, the main focus is on aesthetics to increase user recognition. In other words, the first point is that they must look good, and the second point is that they must be remembered by users. These two points are actually the most difficult.

video

The video has one flaw: it's difficult to produce. A small promotional video will cost at least tens of thousands of dollars. If it is a CG video, the cost will be even higher because people charge by the second. In terms of promotional effects, video ads are the most effective, with six-second videos being the best. Now many app stores allow you to insert videos into product introductions. Compared with narrative methods such as pictures and text, videos are more direct and more impactful.

As traffic costs decrease and WiFi becomes more popular, people's reading habits are slowly shifting from text and pictures to videos. For example, Toutiao has increased the recommendation of short videos . Given the current popularity of short videos, it is foreseeable that the threshold for video production will be lowered, just like many websites that can generate posters with one click, videos can be generated with one click.

Another way of video promotion is product placement, which is most commonly used by big brands. After all, the cost of product placement is not low. The most common one is movie placement, such as milk, mobile phones, computers, etc. Just show a little face, and that’s the effect!

H5

Many of the things that have been popular in the circle of friends recently are H5s, such as Wu Yifan joining the army, Are you asleep late at night, Calabash Brothers, Autumn Johns, etc. Let’s not talk about the quality of the content, but the form of presentation is eye-catching. Coupled with the blessing of the content, even if people know that it is an advertisement, they will still be happy to forward it. What they are thinking in their hearts is: there are such interesting advertisements.

The production of H5 is relatively not as difficult as that of video, and there are many fool-proof H5 production platforms with ready-made templates. You only need to change the text and pictures to your own ones. However, some still charge fees, which are unscrupulous profiteers.

The above discusses two aspects of App soft promotion, promotional materials and soft production. I hope everyone can gain something from it. In the next article, I will talk about the channels and some experiences of soft promotion.