Analysis of Pinduoduo’s marketing activities!

I think everyone is familiar with the product Pinduoduo. After all, this year Pinduoduo is even catching up with Taobao and taking the first place, which shows its strong momentum. Thinking back on how Pinduoduo developed, five words came to my mind: help me cut the price! Hahaha...but it is undeniable that buying this is an extremely successful marketing!

In fact, the essence of e-commerce is traffic + logistics + user experience (quality control, after-sales, customer service). The online experience is more controllable, but offline logistics and quality control are difficult to handle; and the early stage is actually dominated by marketing, and marketing dominates the design and its products.

Marketing is actually extremely important for product promotion.

At present, platform activities can be divided into four categories: marketing activities , social activities, bidding activities and promotion activities.

Marketing promotion methods can also be divided into three categories: online, offline, and information-related hot promotions, such as Weibo hot spots.

I agree with the statement that at present, the workflow and basic features of marketing automation have been basically formed, and it has officially entered the 3.0 stage dominated by behavior-triggered marketing. And I also think that Pinduoduo is a product of this era and a product of marketing methods.

I have always felt that Pinduoduo was based on the ideas of WeChat and was also experimenting based on the diffusion logic of WeChat.

It can be said that Pinduoduo is actually a social e-commerce, because on the one hand, Pinduoduo is based on users' social relationships, preferences and people who are similar to their consumer class, and on the other hand, it attracts users through low prices and helps expand the extended circle through sharing; these two aspects are combined to truly achieve "birds of a feather flock together", and at the same time, the same demands can be accumulated and pushed upstream, using demand to drive production.

Just like Pinduoduo's four main promotional tactics - flash sales, group buying, bargaining, and red envelope programs, all of them implicitly cater to the human nature of spending less money and gaining more. If the promotion caters to the user's pain points, it will be successful.

Since its launch in 2015, in just a few years, it has grown from an unknown small application to an e-commerce giant. If you can survive under the two giants of JD.com and Taobao, you will know the importance of marketing.

1. What is the key to successful marketing?

First of all, we need to know where the marketing is going to land.

There are basically three:

1. Attract new users, that is, increase the number of user registrations;
2. User stickiness, that is, increasing activity participation;
3. Commodity closing loop means increasing the transaction rate of commodities.

Then we can find that Pinduoduo’s marketing is aimed at these. Let’s give a few examples.

1. Activate users and seize the most lethal points for users

Pinduoduo has many activities, such as the 9.9 yuan special zone, the discount zone, the share-to-help free order, and many more.

For a newly established company to gain more users as quickly as possible, I think there is no faster way than spending money, but there are ways to spend money.

Pinduoduo seized on the word "free" to attract new users.

Why do I say so? Because Pinduoduo initially focused on group buying of fruits and fresh produce, and most of these users are housewives. The circle of this type of users is also very wide, which allows users to invite friends to group orders through social platforms such as WeChat groups and Moments. When the specified number of people is reached, the group order will take effect, and users can buy fresh fruits and vegetables at low prices.

In this way, Pinduoduo also uses users' resources to create viral spread in a short period of time, achieving the effect of efficiently attracting new users and promoting activation. Quickly attract new customers and promote activation. In other words, it is like a supermarket. By offering discounts, the supermarket always attracts a bunch of old men and women to queue up early in the morning to increase the supermarket’s customer flow and merchandise sales!

2. Revitalize merchants and continuously organize flash sales

The marketing method of flash sales is mainly divided into limited-time flash sales and brand flash sales. Just like the name suggests, flash sales are activities that help products ship quickly. Available while stocks last, first come first served. And this advantage is obvious.

The first thing is to increase sales quickly.

If your product inventory is unsaleable or you want to boost sales, I think this is the fastest way. In fact, to put it bluntly, it is a streamlined and upgraded version of the Double 11 event, because the flash sale time is short and the effect is quick. Tens of thousands of orders are shipped every minute. It can not only help products to quickly increase sales in the early stages, but also help stores to effectively clear inventory and recover funds at the end of the season. Shorten consumers' purchasing decision time and improve product conversion rate.

Another thing is the large amount of exposure.

In app page design, the homepage has the most important proportion. Basically, key activities are displayed on the banner of the homepage, and the flash sale module is often located in the first position of the Pinduoduo APP homepage activity. Such a design obviously represents the super high shopping efficiency of the Pinduoduo platform - no other display methods are required, only the products and prices need to be displayed, which is enough for users to place orders. With high exposure rate, concentrated traffic increase, and increased weight of personalized recommendations, it is one of Pinduoduo's activity modules with the best traffic and conversion rate.

3. Accumulate a large number of primary users and cultivate seed users

As the cost of acquiring customers continues to rise, e-commerce platforms have begun looking for new ways and channels to acquire customers, and so has Pinduoduo's marketing.

How to cultivate seed users? That is to constantly stimulate them and constantly cultivate them.

Maybe we will feel tired if we often participate in these activities. It doesn’t matter. Just think in reverse. If you don’t want to be proactive, then be passive ; let your friends recommend them to you. By sharing the product with friends and forming a group with them, users can purchase the product at a price lower than that of individual buyers.

In fact, people have a psychological feeling of "getting a bargain". This method of buying things in a group among friends can continuously enhance and improve customers' trust.

At this time, uninterrupted promotional activities, free interactions, and interactive activities were born.

My mother is this type of person. She waters the orchard every day and urges us to water the fruits every day. Haha, we finally got a box of free fruits. Log in to Pinduoduo every day, buy low-priced goods to get water drops, and stay active.

To be honest, Pinduoduo's operational marketing is really very skilled in applying reverse thinking.

4. Establish direct contact with production factories to reduce intermediate links

It can be said that Pinduoduo has truly connected products to consumption, that is, factory direct supply in the true sense, and has truly made commercial trade a situation where consumption drives production.

Why is it cheap? It may be due to advertisement at the beginning, but to keep it cheap in the long run, it cannot be due to promotion, it can only be direct supply from the factory.

Because only direct supply from the factory can ensure the highest product cost performance and the best user experience. Only with factory direct supply can the products be priced at the lowest. Only with factory direct supply can the product survive.

Therefore, this is the reason why it can be supported and marketed successfully; Pinduoduo cuts down the price through the "group buying" method, and with the help of entertainment and social interaction, it reduces the buyers' concerns when paying, and also increases the sales of merchants' products; so cheapness is not a price reduction, but an adjustment of this link in the product chain.

5. Designed traffic expansion

When products are displayed online, in most cases they are mainly displayed through a combination of pictures and text. Therefore, the design of the product page carries too much task of converting traffic; Pinduoduo's interface design makes it easy to start, select functions, and make the shopping process convenient.

The product display on the interface is still a waterfall flow, but the main product logos in the secondary functional area are prominent and the path is short. The complex product information is classified and orderly through visual language, so that users can passively or actively pay attention to the classification.

2. What are the flaws in Pinduoduo’s marketing activities?

Although Pinduoduo is very successful and is a new platform that is still developing rapidly, it is far from reaching the stage of stable development.

1. Quality issues that come with “saving money”

Pinduoduo establishes a connection with its users through two key elements: saving and leisure. "Saving" is a characteristic of Pinduoduo users, and most users also have more free time. Because of their leisure time, they can spend more time on Pinduoduo to gain income and entertainment. "Saving" and "leisure" are the areas that can be focused on when designing a product in order to better meet user needs.

Of course, the positive reviews of each product are very important. People often say that good products are not cheap, and cheap products are not good. Therefore, it is inevitable that Pinduoduo's products will have quality questions when they are cheap.

From the perspective of product design analysis, both “good reviews” and “bad reviews” actually reflect users’ feelings about the product.

The "good reviews" for Pinduoduo are actually mainly concentrated in two aspects:

The first is the product dimension: low prices can save money and there are abundant products, etc.

The second is the entertainment dimension: the software is designed to be interesting and fun, and the activities are designed to be interesting to help you kill time.

Negative reviews for Pinduoduo:

This is mainly due to product quality problems caused by low prices. This is what I said above: good products are not cheap, and cheap products are not good.

In a word, the most critical and difficult problem of Pinduoduo's products is product quality.

This also means that it is impossible for Pinduoduo users to actually buy products worth thousands of yuan, because after all, price is often a direct reflection of the value of the product, and Pinduoduo's main selling point is cheapness, so high-end products do not sell well.

Recently, Pinduoduo has also begun to introduce flagship stores, which is undoubtedly an attempt to ensure product quality, but there is still a long way to go, after all, there are preconceived notions.

2. User fatigue with marketing tactics

1) I personally feel the disgust towards Pinduoduo’s user growth tactics, the constant price-cutting, assistance and other means of spreading and attracting new users, which has caused harassment from disseminators, and the frustration of users failing their tasks. At the beginning, the first price cut was very large, and in the end it was only 0.001% for each person. A difference of 0.001 can make you mad, but it’s also just this 0.001% difference that can make you angry.

2) Some free activities need to be shared, and the sharing model requires users to work hard to invite friends to buy with them in order to get the benefits; you may finally get a lot of friends to spend time to support your free activity, but it may also cause others to be annoyed with the sharer; and the software does not really state how many people can succeed (it often writes a certain number of people, but the actual number is not), which can easily make users feel deceived.

Therefore, marketing must also pay attention to balance, balancing the conditions and results of activities, and balancing the psychology and concepts of users.

Finally, I would like to say that just like the principle of price discrimination, price discrimination is essentially a price difference, which usually refers to the situation where the provider of goods or services provides goods or services of the same grade and quality to different recipients, and implements different sales prices or charging standards among recipients.

The same principle applies to marketing.

Author:liang

Source:liang