How to place a good advertisement? How to acquire customers at low cost?

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The purpose of advertising is either branding or conversion . Branding focuses on exposure and dissemination, while conversion focuses on precision and quantity. Different purposes mean different forms of advertising , and different stages of the company focus on different purposes.

When a company is in its start-up and development stages, conversion is the most important, and when it reaches a mature stage, the brand should be strengthened. Conversion brings stable cash flow to help you survive today; brand brings conversion rate and high premium to help you survive tomorrow.

When the purpose is a brand or event, a large amount of exposure is required. The effect will be best if it can also bring a large amount of dissemination, such as CPT and CPM forms. Common ones include splash screen, bananer, hard advertising, etc.

When the goal is conversion, you need to consider ROI, such as CPC, oCPC or CPA forms, the most common of which are SEM or information flow advertising .

After clarifying the purpose of advertising, the next step is to clarify the advertising budget and estimate the cost. Taking conversion-oriented advertising as an example, whether using the data reverse method, the peer reference method, the year-on-year and month-on-month method, or the ROI method, you can roughly estimate the cost of acquiring a single user and then calculate the budget.

A good advertisement should be pushed to the right people at the right time, in the right place (scene), and in the right format. Especially in the era of mobile Internet , with traffic fragmentation, users' attention span is only a few seconds.

Advertising requires clear media. Different media represent the needs of users in different scenarios. We choose advertising to buy media location traffic directly and user groups to purchase the media indirectly.

Therefore, it is very important to clarify the user scenarios and user groups of the medium. For example, video advertising space is usually used during users’ leisure time, especially during the evening rush hour, to meet the needs of entertainment and killing time. It is tried for leisure, entertainment, games , high-frequency e-commerce or brand advertising.

Another example is Moments ads , which meet users’ high-frequency social needs. This scenario has high stickiness, and because it involves social relationships, clicks, interactions, and forwarding are all strong.

Before choosing a media, you must understand your user base, describe your user base portrait, and then understand the media.

Good advertising = right time + right place (scene) + right format + right people

As a medium, here is an example of the currently popular form of information flow advertising. Whether it is worth investing, first of all, you have to examine the number of users of the APP. Only with a sufficient number of users can you obtain sufficient traffic. Secondly, examine whether you have a large user base.

Therefore, it is necessary to understand the user profile of the APP, including age, gender, region, education level, marital status, spending power, etc. Although both are information streams, Sohu Media and Momo are very different.

In addition, we also need to consider the user time and user activity of the APP. The time and activity determine the amount of advertising. There are also huge differences between WeChat Moments ads and WiFi information flow ads.

We also have to consider the data dimensions of the APP. The information flow is said to be precisely delivered, and the premise of precise delivery is that the platform has a large number of users, a large amount of multi-dimensional data, and the platform's algorithm capabilities.

Comparing Moments ads and Toutiao ads, leaving aside the algorithm capabilities of the two platforms themselves and the number of their respective users, Moments wins simply in terms of data dimensions. Toutiao ads mostly rely on reading to accumulate user data, but Moments ads have map data, payment consumption data, reading data, social data, account data, etc., and the data dimensions are still more than Toutiao. The more data dimensions there are, the more precise the targeting will be.

Once you have found the right people, you need to promote it in the right form. The form of advertising in the Weibo information flow and Zhihu information flow must also be suitable for the scenario. Weibo should appear more entertaining and interesting, using more Internet terms, while Zhihu can choose Zhihu style.

In fact, when it comes down to it, advertising is nothing more than spending money to buy users, but these costs are spent on the media.

Traffic = attracting new users + fission. Advertising has always been in the stage of attracting new users, and the effect is getting worse and worse. Therefore, how to acquire users at low cost is the main goal of various companies at present.

We want to acquire users, so why should we give money to the media? Because the media has its own traffic, but the conversion rates of different media are also different. Before, everyone believed in authoritative media. As long as you put an advertisement on CCTV, the centralized traffic comes with brand endorsement and the conversion rate is very high. But now everyone has begun to believe in authoritative media less, so what media is improving? They are the so-called internet celebrities , big Vs , and opinion leaders. Therefore, the conversion rate of self-media advertising is often higher than that of centralized media. This is a trend.

Another trend is the fission traffic mentioned earlier. Since the cost of attracting new customers is getting higher and higher, the traffic dividend is no longer there, and the conversion rate is also declining, what method can be used to tap the traffic dividend and improve the conversion rate? In fact, it is still social traffic and fission traffic. People believe in introductions from their own circle of friends and their own small circle.

This is the reason for Pinduoduo's rise. At first, it did not advertise or promote itself, but relied on the fission traffic of social group buying on WeChat to grow into a towering tree today, and it has poached third-, fourth- and fifth-tier users that neither Alibaba nor JD.com had expected.

Instead of giving advertising fees to media, it is better to give them directly to users, attract new users, and give cash back to both the attractors and the attracted users, and the conversion rate between friends is even higher. This may be a trend that all advertisers and business leaders should take into consideration. However, most of the current self-propagating apps for food delivery, taxi-hailing, and shopping all use this approach. The trick is to use advertising to accumulate seed users and serve as nodes for fission propagation and sharing.