Traffic thinking is dead, interaction and content marketing are immortal

Recently, I have received messages from some marketing managers. Everyone feels that the effect of online advertising is getting worse and worse. Whether it is search engines , information flow , ad networks , homepages, or opening screens, the conversion rate has declined significantly, user retention is not ideal, and ROI is far from meeting KPI requirements.

Just the day before yesterday, Xiao Ma Songge wrote an article titled "Where Did All the Traffic Go in 2016" pointing out that the growth of Internet users has slowed down, and we will shift from an incremental market to a stock market. What does it mean? With limited user growth, there are more and more competitors. From the television era, to the portal era, to the search era, to the social era, and then to the rise of self-media , users' attention has been gradually disrupted. There has never been an era like it is now, where we can neither capture users' eyes nor their hearts.

Traffic thinking from the early success of online marketing

If the portal era is regarded as 1.0, then the search era is 2.0, and the social era is 3.0. In the portal era, information is scarce and users will only see what you give them. At this time, the greatest value of advertising is to spread the word. You just need to clearly tell users about the product, what are the advantages of it, and what discounts are available, and the effect will be very good. In this era, all you need to do is create a website or a blog and move the content of traditional magazines or novels to the Internet. This will attract a lot of people, and once you have a certain number of users, you can sell advertising. But the premise is that users have very limited access to content. If we copy this approach to create a WeChat public account now, it will be difficult to survive because it is too easy for users to obtain content and users have already dominated the content and dissemination methods.

In the search era, users have a certain degree of information initiative and can use keywords to learn the information they want to know. Some people believe that Internet advertising has entered an interactive era, but this interaction is only between people and machines. The development of search has led to the rapid growth of Internet advertising. This type of advertising can accurately target user purchasing behavior, is more effective than portal advertising, and pay-per-click is more popular (early portal advertising mostly sold space on a daily basis). Education, medical care, and tourism have mostly caught up with the bonus period of search marketing . One boss said that he tried to recharge 1,000 yuan, but it ended up bringing in hundreds of thousands of sales, so he couldn't stop on the road of search marketing.

It can be said that most of the companies that placed advertisements on search engines, navigations, portals, and vertical websites in the early days achieved very good results. The most typical example is the Putian Hospital, which relied on the Baidu search engine to move small clinics from county-level cities to the CBDs of first-tier cities, turning them into magnificent chain specialty hospitals.

When we analyze the success of early online marketing, we find some common points, such as users have high trust in online advertising, competition is not fierce, and users have a great demand for information. Let’s take an example. In the early days, if you searched for hospitals on Baidu, Baidu might only display two or three hospitals. This was because the competition was not fierce, so the effect was of course good. More importantly, early media had a better trust-building effect. Although online advertising is not as good as TV, users have a certain degree of trust in the advertisements pushed to them by the four major portals and Baidu. But today, even CCTV has lost trust in endorsement. Secondly, users have a great demand for information, which means that competition is not fierce. It is a seller's market, and demand is greater than supply, so the advertising effect is good. When we summarize the success of early online marketing, we can find that the root of traffic thinking lies in the limited ability of users to obtain information, which leads to users being kidnapped by media and product information. Therefore, early companies and products can capture the eyes and hearts of users.

However, with the rise of mobile Internet and the popularity of Weibo and WeChat , the portals, alliances, and individual webmasters that originally relied on search engines have gradually been eliminated or declined. The reason is that the right to receive and publish information is in the hands of users. Users are creating their own content, self-media, and online circles. They casually post selfies, share them on WeChat Moments , open personal public accounts , and even start a live show . It is precisely because of this change in information discourse power that traffic thinking is no longer effective, and is replaced by deep interaction and trust marketing.

Social marketing brings changes in content and interaction

Early portals were based on strong push, search engines were based on human-computer interaction, and social media is based on human-human interaction. When people see BMW advertisements on WeChat Moments, they will compete to discuss them. Maybe because they saw many friends liked it, maybe because one friend didn’t receive it, or maybe because of the creative idea of ​​the advertisement.

More and more people rely on articles shared by friends to obtain information, and are gradually abandoning traditional mobile portals and even news apps. In the past, it was very difficult to become a self-media. For example, if you opened a blog, it was difficult to contact your family and friends to visit. But with the WeChat public account, everyone can become a star in the family or circle of friends. It is becoming increasingly popular among those born in the 1990s to use video apps like Meipai and Kuaishou , which allow them to share everything. Not long ago, a video of people eating corn went viral across the country.

It is precisely because users' rights to receive and publish information have undergone a radical change that the media and enterprises have lost their appeal to users. Users can almost do without the media and enterprises, but they are absolutely inseparable from social platforms.

In the past, traffic thinking only focused on four indicators, namely exposure, clicks, registrations, and purchases. This is completely different from social marketing.

First of all, traffic thinking always likes to buy positions with large traffic, such as buying the homepage of a portal in a large number, but will not pay attention to the channel page of the portal; social marketing is just the opposite. It is not necessary to buy a big IP, but it is better to buy a blogger in a certain niche field, or a community channel of a certain media.

Secondly, traffic thinking often only focuses on action buttons and forms and ignores content creation; social marketing does not pay attention to action buttons and forms at all, but only focuses on whether the content can resonate with users and generate interaction.

More fundamentally speaking, traffic thinking only focuses on how many users see me, that is, CPM, CPC; while social marketing only focuses on how many people recognize me. From this point of view, many companies currently put soft articles on large WeChat accounts, which still belongs to traffic thinking, that is, to wash the blogger's hundreds of thousands of fans. The “Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” campaign planned by Xin Shixiang on its official account is more in line with the concept of social marketing.

When we look back at the success of early online marketing, we can find that traffic thinking is "widely informed", that is, to maximize traffic purchases within the controllable range of CAC and continuously optimize the traffic conversion funnel. But why doesn’t it work now?

The key is that users' ability to obtain information and their trust in advertisements have changed. Users have more and more ways to obtain information, their awareness of advertising is decreasing, and they are more willing to choose brands with personality or brands shared by friends. Users' trust in traditional advertising is decreasing, while they are becoming more and more favorable to brands that interact on social media. For example, the Coca-Cola nickname bottle and Durex rainy night. Companies should be good at making use of social media, interacting with users through interesting content, posts, and videos, just like a real user, to shape the company's brand and personality.

The advertising effect of traffic thinking will become worse and worse. Even when the advertisements become more and more precise, it is no exaggeration to say that traffic thinking is dead, and interaction and content are immortal.

Only by paying attention to content and interaction can we rebuild user trust; and only trust can we capture the eyes and hearts of users in an era when users’ attention is fragmented. This may explain why the conversion rate of CPC hard advertising is getting lower and lower. Admittedly, fierce competition and media price increases are factors, but the culprit is that traffic thinking is no longer effective.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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