Taking Cloud Music as an example, how to acquire a large number of target users at low cost and high efficiency

How can we quickly acquire a large number of target users at a low cost instead of engaging in a protracted war with competitors?

This is not common on the Internet today. Nowadays, most industries have become red oceans with long-standing competition, while the technology and resource barriers in the blue ocean market are extremely high, which are beyond the reach of ordinary products. In the fiercely competitive red ocean market, how can you achieve great results with little effort?

This is usually a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that requires competitors to leave significant flaws. In the rapidly developing Internet environment, product managers need to be keenly aware of such opportunities and make product plans and decisions quickly.

A good product is not created by piling up demands. Even if all the important demands reported by users are met, the number of users may still not increase. Product managers need to find those with the greatest demand for product value, and quickly acquiring a large number of target users at low cost is one of the important thinking paths.

The concept of differentiated competition is now quite popular. Except for a very small number of companies that rely on strong resources to copy other products to compete, most teams already know that they need to make products that are different from their competitors. But this is just a basic idea, and "different" is only the most basic requirement. A more effective way is to think deeply about the user's key needs, the competitors' real weaknesses, and where you can exert great advantages, and combine these three.

• User demand focus: usually the user's demand pain points when choosing a product, or the main cost when the user migrates to a product.
• Competitors’ weaknesses: Competitors may have advantages in certain areas, but don’t miss every weakness of your competitors and magnify them.
• Advantages of your own products: By combining the above two considerations and turning them into advantages of your own products, you can influence the user base of your competitors.

NetEase Cloud Music ’s playlist import function is a typical example of using little effort to achieve great results. While competitors are competing for market share through copyright investment and promotional resources, NetEase Cloud Music is using a relatively lower-cost feature to attract users who want to change music apps. Ultimately, this feature brought nearly one million active users to NetEase Cloud Music. If calculated based on the market price of 10 to 20 yuan for acquiring an active user, this feature is worth tens of millions in marketing costs. We can review the imported playlist of NetEase Cloud Music and see what we can find.

In 2013, shortly after NetEase Cloud Music was launched, the online music app market was a fiercely competitive red ocean market. At that time, mobile Internet had entered a period of rapid development, smartphone shipments reached their peak, and almost every Internet user owned a smartphone. As one of the top five needs of smartphone users ( social , news, shopping, video, and music), music is an application that smartphone users will definitely install. There are many choices on the market: the old-fashioned players Kugou Music, Kuwo Music, QQ Music, and Baidu Music that have been around for many years; Tiantian Dongting and Duomi Music that have gradually emerged with the mobile Internet ; and the higher-level Xiami Music and Douban FM. Therefore, the situation faced by NetEase Cloud Music is that every new user is very likely to have migrated from other products.

The user migration cost is exactly the headache that every music app has when it wants to acquire users from its competitors. Among the top five user demands, social and music have the highest migration costs. The migration cost of social media is user relationships. The established user relationships are very stable and difficult to migrate. The migration cost of music is the copyright of the music content and the collection of music lists left by users after long-term use of the product.

The former is usually a competitive barrier calculated in hundreds of millions of RMB. At a time when piracy was rampant, this approach was indeed not cost-effective. In addition to purchasing music copyrights, the NetEase Cloud Music team also set a requirement for themselves: is there a more cost-effective way to acquire competitors' users? We focus on the user's favorite music list. If there are dozens or hundreds of songs in the collection, and they have to be added one by one after changing the product migration list, the cost will be prohibitive for most users. Even if a product experience is good and the content is exclusive, it is very difficult for users to switch products.

So our problem becomes:

• How can users overcome the difficulties in migrating their existing music collections?
• Are there users who don’t have a large collection of music lists? where are they?

This is a typical goal-problem-solution logical thinking process, which is basically the most commonly used way of thinking by product managers. It has the following key points:

The goals are clearly defined. Make sure this goal is an important goal in the product strategy and can be clearly described in one sentence. In this case, the goal is: to acquire new users from competitors.

The decomposition from goal to problem has a rigorous derivation path, for example, the problems finally decomposed are mutually exclusive and the entire set of problems is complete. The deduction path in this case is: acquire new users from competitors - the migration cost of new users is high - how to reduce the migration cost of users, or are there users with low migration costs?

After clarifying the problem to be solved, designing a solution is the most basic job of a product manager.

Let’s look at the first question first: how can users overcome the difficulties in migrating their existing music collection lists? Most directly, we would think of the user being able to transfer the music playlist from the original product to the new product. This function is quite common in other Internet fields, such as blogs, email, browser favorites, etc., all have similar functions. The migration list can indeed hit the user's pain points. As long as the user operation is simple and the migration is completed with one click, it will be very convenient for the user.

Let’s consider it from the perspective of competitors’ weaknesses and the advantages of our own products. Let’s take Douban FM and Xiami Music as examples. In 2013 and 2014, Douban FM users were able to accumulate hundreds of Red Heart Music, but it had a big problem: users could not download the Red Heart Music, nor could they request a specific Red Heart Music, which was limited by Douban FM's copyright factors. Similarly, users of Xiami Music will accumulate a lot of their favorite music, but it also has a hidden danger, which is that users need to pay Xiami coins to download music, which is also limited by Xiami's copyright factors and revenue considerations. The fact that users’ collected music cannot be downloaded for free is a weak point of these two products.

When NetEase Cloud Music was first established, its positioning was to encourage users to listen to good music from all over the world. The music library provided 320KB of high-quality music, and users could download it for free. The product has a rich playlist, and users with all kinds of tastes can find the music they like. There are no restrictions from playback to downloading, and the experience is very smooth. This closed loop is the advantage of NetEase Cloud Music. And this advantage happens to target the weaknesses of competitors.

When we consider users migrating their existing music collections, we will also take the above two factors into consideration. How can we combine them together to effectively meet user needs and acquire a large number of users? After this analysis, the answer is actually obvious. NetEase Cloud Music guides new users to import their collection music lists from other products, and the main feature is that after importing the music, they can download 320KB of high-quality music for free.

Users only need to simply authenticate their account to import the original product's collection music list with one click and form a new playlist in NetEase Cloud Music.

320KB of high-quality music can be downloaded for free in the playlist. This benefit is embedded in this function dissemination point.

Those who make playlists can also easily import the high-quality content they have published on the original products.

In these links, NetEase Cloud Music did not actively promote the function of importing playlists, but relied on users to spread it spontaneously. On Weibo, Tieba , Zhihu, and WeChat Moments , users promote the benefits of NetEase Cloud Music: "The music accumulated in other music products can be easily migrated over with one click, and 320KB of high-quality music can be downloaded for free. It's simply amazing." The more music a user has in his or her collection, the more likely he or she is to be an opinion leader among the music crowd, and the more influence he or she will have on the people around him or her, and thus the wider the spread.

Let’s look at the second question. Do users who don’t have a large collection of music lists exist? In the process of thinking about this question, I first started with myself and recalled my experience of listening to music from childhood to adulthood.

When I was in junior high school, my first exposure to pop music was by listening to Jay Chou’s tapes.

A friend of my parents gave me an MP3 player with more than 200 songs stored in it, most of which were in English, which really opened my ears. The first time I knew about M2M, Backstreet Boys and The Cranberries.

But before high school, I didn’t have my own musical preferences, I just listened to whatever was available. I listened to some songs with my classmates. At that time, all the boys were fans of Jay Chou. We also got together to discuss the first Super Boy.

When I was in high school, influenced by my classmates, I gradually came into contact with Hong Kong and Taiwan pop music and began to admire idols such as Beyond and Leslie Cheung. At this time, I had a clearer musical preference.

When I was in my third year of high school, influenced by my girlfriend, I came into contact with European and American rock and metal bands, and my musical taste became more determined. At this time, I got to know LinkinPark, Guns N'Roses, and Nightwish, and the latter two became bands that I have loved for more than a decade. During this stage, I formed a musical taste that has continued ever since: European and American rock music. I also began to remember the names of bands and favorite songs, and developed the intention to collect them. Before this, I only collected albums by Eason Chan, Leslie Cheung and Beyond. After that, I collected a lot of music from bands, and as Kugou P2P music became popular that year, I began to download and store them on my computer.

After entering college and working, my music taste and collection habits continued without much change from high school. I like more and more music and artists, but my behavioral habits remain basically the same.

In the process of thinking about myself, I summarized some rules:

• The formation of users' musical tastes may be influenced by their surroundings.
• As your tastes develop, start making a habit of collecting music you like.
• Once your taste is formed, you will have your own favorite artists. This taste will develop later, but it is difficult to completely change, it is more of an expansion.
• The longer it takes for your taste to form, the more music you will accumulate in your collection.

After that, I did some qualitative user research to verify it, and basically users do follow this rule and it is logically coherent. Therefore, there are users who have not yet formed a large collection of music lists. A large proportion of them are young people whose musical tastes have not yet been formed. These users are mainly college students, high school students, and junior high school students.

In addition, young users have not yet been educated by existing music products to form inherent usage habits. Users with fixed music tastes have a weaker demand for discovering music and are more likely to play music that they have already collected and downloaded. Young people have more possibilities and plasticity. If NetEase Cloud Music focuses on this group of users, on the one hand, it can avoid the problem of high costs in migrating existing music collection lists; on the other hand, it can also use the characteristics of its own products to cultivate the habit of this group of users to better discover music. The new habits developed by the young people who grew up with NetEase Cloud Music will be difficult to change by other competitors. Other products compete with NetEase Cloud Music for young users. In this user group, the first-mover advantage of competitors is not so obvious, and the relatively outdated product positioning and system have become their own disadvantages.

In this case, instead of competing with its rivals for the entire user base, NetEase Cloud Music chose to focus on the user demand segment where it could achieve great results with little effort. The key point is to think in terms of the pain points of user needs, the weaknesses of competitors, and the advantages of your own products to find a breakthrough.