How to make your product spread wildly?

Generally, marketing will plan a series of activities around the product, but often the efforts fail to please the users. Based on years of marketing experience, the author of this article shares with everyone a self-propagation system that he has summarized, allowing the product itself to speak for the product.

The concept of self-propagation is not unfamiliar to everyone, but there are still very few people in China who have conducted complete research on the entire system of self-propagation. This is why I want to share it with you. I worked at Baidu for about seven years. In the first three years of these seven years, I was in R&D. Including my graduate studies and previous work experience, all were related to R&D.

So, why can someone who has never studied brand marketing before, who works in R&D, and who has been coding for ten years do marketing and achieve some results of his own? Because the method I use is different from others.

The method I use is self-propagation, using products and technology for cross-border marketing - this is a cross-border thinking approach.

1. Rethink Marketing

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you see the word “self-propagation”? For example, WeChat , Moments , word of mouth, content, viral marketing , etc.? Yes, these are all correct. In fact, self-propagation means to trigger dissemination without spending money or spending as little money as possible. Why can this goal be achieved? Because your content is good.

The concept of self-propagation is: to inspire people to voluntarily forward and share based on the appeal of an event, a product or a marketing campaign .

With the concept of self-propagation, we will rethink the methodology and practice of the entire marketing industry.

Broad marketing can be divided into three categories:

• The first category is products with communication power;
• The second type is marketing with communication power;
• The third category is marketing without communication power;

Why is it called broad marketing? It’s because I included the product in the category of marketing.

The top of the pyramid is the best direction, it is a product with great spreadability. The logic is very simple: if a marketing campaign itself has no communication power, people will definitely not like it, so its communication power is weak.

Of course, the best marketing is often not marketing, but the product itself, so we should strive to the top of the pyramid.

1. Marketing without communication

Let’s look at these two ads. The left one is a liquor ad, and the right one is a construction ad:

In fact, more than 99% of the marketing works we have seen in life belong to this category. They are not attractive at all. This is still the traditional marketing approach. Because merchants think their products are not fun, they have to spend money to expand their market.

Regardless of whether it is online marketing , social marketing or traditional marketing, in fact, a lot of marketing is still at the bottom of the pyramid and has no highlights. This is the current situation of modern marketing.

2. Marketing with Dissemination Power

This case is a relatively successful marketing case in the past two years, called "300 Spartans":

One day I saw these handsome guys wearing such clothes in an advertisement, walking on the streets of Guomao. At the time, this news event was constantly circulating and everyone found it very interesting, but in fact the essence of this event was marketing, and it was marketing with spreadable power.

But there was a problem: people had no idea who the brand owner was. But this is normal, the point is that each of them holds a rock salad product in their hands. However, the product is only reflected in a small logo, or even the logo cannot be seen.

The brand owner may want to do several waves of marketing: the first wave of marketing should be more eye-catching, with many Spartan warriors appearing in the China World Trade Center to attract everyone's attention, without telling you what they are doing first; the secret will be revealed in the second wave of marketing, but unfortunately there were problems with the first wave.

3. Products with great appeal

In the past two years, I discovered a very innovative desk calendar product - the one-way calendar. This product is of a higher grade, more fashionable and cooler:

Its characteristic is that there is a sentence on each page, and this sentence is very interesting and philosophical.

For example: January 1st, today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Its novelty triggered its spread, and people forwarded it to their friends, which led to others buying it. Therefore, the essence of this product is actually to integrate marketing and product. Is there still a need for advertising when every page has good copy ? No need, this is the best state at the top of the pyramid, and this is called a product with spreadable power.

We must try every possible means to achieve self-propagation. First, let your marketing be small but achieve great results, and good ideas should lead to huge dissemination. At the same time, the most important thing is to let your product speak for itself. This is the best method.

2. From the product

We always focus on the core of the product. Let me introduce a methodology to you first:

I wrote a book called "Self-Propagation", in which I summarized a relatively systematic methodology - called the "Self-Propagation 486 Model".

As you can see, there is a pig in the core wind direction in the middle of this picture. Why is it placed like this?

First, you have to go with the trend. A product that goes against the trend will be difficult to promote no matter how strong its self-propagation ability is. Second, the core of everything is the product. No matter whether you are doing marketing or making products, the product determines everything. This is what this picture wants to express.

Let’s briefly talk about what “486” stands for.

• "Four prerequisites": For a product to spread itself, it must meet four prerequisites, which means that the demand for your product must be real and your experience must be reliable. If you have a particularly good brand name, you can get twice the result with half the effort. Ultimately, you need to have a strong organization to implement the self-propagation strategy in your company.
• "8 major tactics": eight major tactics for product self-propagation. Applying these eight methods to products means implanting marketing into products.
• "6 Always": There are 6 principles for creating self-propagating marketing, and it is enough to meet these 6 principles. What is its relationship with the product? The right side should come from the product. Our marketing is always related to the product. The left side should go into the product. We implant marketing into the product so that the product can speak for itself. This is called coming from the product and going into the product.

How does it come from the product? We just need to dig something out of the product. What should we dig out? Dig for three things: data, content, and stories.

We need to dig out a lot of things from it and use them directly as marketing ammunition.

1. Data mining (Case study: Baidu Maps )

Baidu Maps has hundreds of millions of users. Theoretically, there must be a lot of location data for these users. However, this data has existed in Baidu Maps for more than ten years, and no one has mined it.

The Spring Festival is the most important festival for the Chinese people and also the largest migration in human history. During the Spring Festival of 2014, we decided to use big data to report on the Spring Festival travel rush and created a project called “Baidu Migration Map”.

When we analyze the positioning data using big data methods, we form a description of the migration status of the Chinese people. For example, where did the most people who left Beijing go on a certain day before the Spring Festival? This is a very interesting dimension of attraction.

Another major event occurred during the Spring Festival of 2014, which was the "Dongguan Anti-pornography Incident". Baidu Migration Map happened to capture the scene of these people fleeing, and thus the later "Dongguan 8-hour escape map" was created.

Therefore, the essence of a product that can truly propagate itself lies in digging out the core information on the product side.

2. Mining content (Case: NetEase Cloud Music )

Many people say that the launch of NetEase Cloud Music in the Hangzhou subway is a very successful offline marketing case. Some people say that this is the success of the copywriting, but in fact this is not the most essential thing. If you are asked to think of a stronger copywriting now, can you think of it? It’s actually very difficult.

How to do planning traditionally? A bunch of us are locked in a room thinking of creative ideas. If we think this way, it will be difficult to come up with such touching copy.

On the other hand, one of the features of NetEase Cloud Music is that it has a community where there will be many comments from people. All they need to do is pick out the comments with the most likes.

Therefore, the essence of the success of this advertising case is that it has dug out excellent content materials from the product and directly used them as copywriting and a marketing tool.

3. Dig up stories (Case study: A dog that waited ten years for Google Street View)

Many people who build brands talk about creating brand stories. A brand must have a story, but most people who create brand stories are just making them up.

Why not dig out real stories in your product?

Google Street View records a lot of photos. One day, an American guy showed his girlfriend his old workplace. At this time, he found a familiar figure. After zooming in carefully, he saw a dog , which was very old and dirty. He then remembered that this was a stray dog ​​he had fed when he was working.

One day he drove back to that place, and to his surprise the dog was still waiting there. Then he went to ask the owner of the nearby store why the dog was still there? The boss told him that the dog had been waiting here for ten years.

Every time I tell this story to many people, especially those who have raised dogs, they are moved. People who have not raised dogs also feel very moved, because it is an emotion between humans and animals that transcends fields and time and space.

This is an excellent brand story. When you dig out a good story from the product, you will find that you don’t need to make any image films with large investments. It may be very simple but has a very wide influence. This is the power of digging out real user stories from the product.

We have come to the conclusion that the product itself is the ammunition depot for marketing, and the effect will definitely be great if the content is well-made.

3. Go to the product

Before I talk about the specific methods, let me review the marketing process of traditional products:

In the past, whether in traditional industries or the Internet , design was done first, then research and development, then online release, and finally handed over to operations for promotion.

But why does this approach fail today? The product itself has no ability to speak. Therefore, we need to change this mindset and use a new approach: putting marketing in the front burner.

Put marketing, which is at the end of the chain, as the first step, and consider marketing when designing products. When you do things with this mindset, your products will have marketability.

Where should marketing be embedded in the product? Here I want to mention the global distribution and the implantation of self-propagation throughout the entire chain. As long as you come into contact with users, there are some points of implantation of self-propagation.

Next, let’s talk about the “eight tactics” of product self-propagation , which are:

• Stick to the main line and let the product spread itself
• Add copywriting to add vitality to the product
• Visualization, visualize products and users
• Customization, private customization makes your personality stand out
• Planting Easter eggs, implanting Easter eggs into products
• Exceed expectations and create an experience beyond expectations
• Sense of participation, let users feel involved
• Grasp the hot spots and closely integrate with social hot spots

Today we will only talk about three of the more core and easy-to-operate methods: sticking to the main line, adding copywriting, and implanting easter eggs.

1. Stick to the main line

"Sticking to the main line" means implanting some self-propagation mechanisms into the core functions of your product. We call it "innate implantation." Because you are making changes to the core functionality, you must intervene at the very beginning.

Let me introduce to you a crush social networking site called Crushlink. How does this site use the main thread approach to make its products spread as soon as they go online?

First of all, it makes an action during the registration process. When registering, you need to fill in who you have a crush on, at least one, and you must write his (her) email address. After filling it out, submit it.

Then the system will send an email to the other party saying that someone has a crush on you. When the other party receives this email, he or she will be very excited and open it. Many people think that this is a routine of social networks and do not read on when they encounter such situations.

But they are very smart, they will mention some details in the email: for example, it will tell you that the person who secretly loves you is surnamed Chen, and you will think that it must be that person, so you will quickly click on it. But if you want to see who this person is, you have to register, and when registering you have to fill in who your secret crush is.

In this way, if you fill in another person, a chain will be formed, which will eventually lead to viral spread. This product soon had hundreds of thousands to millions of users, which is called "born for self-propagation."

2. Add the text

In marketing, we have absolutely underestimated the power of copywriting. Copywriting is everywhere, on bottles, posters, products, instructions, gifts, and brochures, but most of the copywriting does not reflect its self-propagation power.

Everyone loves to drink coffee. Starbucks ’ cup sizes include medium, large, and extra large, which are not attractive at all. But we found a coffee shop in Shanghai that had a different copy written on the coffee cups, which was both vivid and inspiring to spread the word: Yao Ming, Xiaoming, Jingming. It was very clever and very classic.

This is a photo of a colleague of mine who saw this store when he was on a business trip in Shanghai and posted it on WeChat Moments. This is a real example of how copywriting inspired self-propagation.

3. Plant Easter eggs

What are Easter eggs? Easter eggs are a trick that programmers often used many years ago in the early days of computer science. After they wrote the software, they would bury a small point inside it, which would be triggered under a specific condition.

Why make Easter eggs? Because 90% of the products are boring and dull.

For example, although search engine products like Baidu have high technical barriers and are very high-tech, ordinary users' perception of them is indeed "natural and unremarkable."

So, in 2012, we did a case called "2012 Doomsday".

On April 20, 2012, Earth Day, we launched a very realistic special effect on our website. The web page was collapsing and stones were falling off, and even magma was coming out. This was also the first time that the PC and mobile terminals were synchronized. As soon as everyone saw that this search was cool, they @ed their friends, and it eventually received 20 million searches.

The several methods we talked about above, whether adding copywriting, sticking to the main line, or implanting Easter eggs, all tell us one thing: the product itself is the advertising space .

Why spend money on advertising when there are ad spaces everywhere? I hope everyone will think about the resources at hand.

Finally, we also added an Easter egg to this sharing, "Increase the quantity without increasing the price, and give you five more sentences":

• Good advertising is advertising that doesn’t look like advertising, and the best advertising is no advertising at all. This sentence may sound a bit awkward, but it reveals the essence of advertising.
• If your marketing only consists of your logo, then your advertising is basically doomed. If the whole idea is very good, but the brand is only reflected in that little bit, it’s basically doomed. A lot of marketing looks very lively, but the relationship between the marketing and you is too weak, so you must avoid it.
• The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself, and the most overlooked thing in promotion is product advantages.
• Cross-border thinking is indeed reliable and can make the product speak for itself. Therefore, it is necessary to combine marketing with products. This not only saves money but is also effective.
• Self-propagation is the end point and self-propagation is also the starting point. If your marketing and product features cannot inspire self-propagation, I hope you will reconsider.

The author of this article @朱百宁 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games