How to effectively promote the product in the early stage?

There is one thing you must know about marketing

This passage in the preface is excerpted from a book widely circulated in the entrepreneurial circle, "The Lean Startup". It says that if the purpose and direction are wrong when we make this plan, even if we follow the procedure step by step, the result will definitely be the worst.

Marketing promotion is not just about helping a boss or a company recommend its products to more people to download, use, install, activate and purchase. In the early stages, you must repeatedly test the market demand for your product, such as using Weibo, Tencent QQ, WeChat and other traffic with particularly wide coverage to test the cost of your product or the upper limit of the number of users you can obtain.

Xiaomi's initial product strategy

Three key elements of marketing

In fact, marketing promotion is nothing more than three things: connections, resources, and money .

Many founders say, “I don’t have money now, but I have a really good idea and a really good product. Can you help me promote it?”

The answer is that you need at least one of these three. Either you are very rich, and money can buy connections and hire very professional and experienced people in the market, or you can use money to buy a lot of top traffic or channels , etc.

If you don’t have a lot of capital operations or founding funds, but you have a lot of connections, you can use your connections to exchange for some resources. But you can’t say that you have neither connections nor resources, and no funds. Otherwise, it will be very, very difficult for you to do a good job in marketing.

As a high-level leader, your best bet is to find money and investors , or you should be able to hire talented people, or it would be best if the people you hire bring their own resources. Therefore, at least one or two of these three conditions must be met in order to succeed in this market.

Today, the editor has selected a client’s case. Let’s first look at the first screenshot. You may often browse Weibo or Moments and have seen similar advertisements. A girl is demonstrating to everyone how to catch four or five dolls in one go, or she puts four or five mobile phones on the table and catches several dolls at the same time.

The name of this product is Daily Claw Machine. People may pay more attention to the claw machine project recently. It was a very popular project in Q3 and Q4 of 2017.

What I want to share with you is a claw machine company in Shanghai called Tiantian, which ranks first in the entire claw machine project, and another company called Happy Claw Machine ranks second.

The project acquired approximately 5 million iOS users in six months. The mainstream method is to acquire new download users through methods such as Weibo and Moments.

As you can see from the picture above, the ranking of Tiantian Claw Doll in the entire app store has improved. On September 8, it was still ranked over a thousand in the overall list. Then in December, its highest ranking reached 139 in the overall list and 12th in the entertainment list.

Claw Machine is actually the second entrepreneurial project of this team, so everyone may be relatively familiar with its first entrepreneurial project.

I think everyone still remembers that between January and the Chinese New Year in 2016, you uploaded your photo to an APP and a soul painter drew a self-portrait for you. At that time, such promotional materials were all the rage on Weibo and WeChat Moments, and they were SAME in the picture above.

The "SAME" team was actually founded quite early, and received $20 million in Series B funding from Tencent in 2014. At that time, their team had an important need, hoping to acquire about 10 million new users within three months in order to seek better survival and the next round of investment .

So what should we do in terms of channel matching and marketing promotion?

The above pictures are screenshots of the materials released by SAME at that time. The first one is a screenshot of the Guangdiantong QQ space, the second one is a screenshot of the Weibo release, and the other one is a screenshot of the news client release.

This project was officially launched on January 14, 2016. After large-scale channel deployment, in about three months of deployment, iOS and Android combined brought about a thousand new users to the project, and during the Chinese New Year period, the app store ranking rose from more than 1,000 to No. 1.

Let me share another project. This project is a shopping guide platform for men, similar to the e-commerce shopping guide platform like Duitangbantang.

When providing marketing promotion for this project, we used traffic from Weibo and Tencent to test the user acceptance and liking of the product, and found that the cost of acquiring a male user was approximately RMB 20 to 30.

However, spending 20 or 30 yuan to download and activate an APP at the end of 2016 is relatively expensive, especially for a startup team.

Does that mean that the target audience of this project is relatively narrow? At that time, the team was also thinking about the transformation of the project. Should the product be a shopping guide platform, a tool , or a pure e-commerce in the future?

Later I found that there was a very interesting feature in this project, which is the filter, so I tried to make a set of filter materials.

Later, it was discovered that the cost of acquiring users on Weibo and Tencent using filters was about two to three yuan. So what does this set of data indicate?

This shows that users are very receptive to filters and beauty products. If we think about it and reflect on it further, we will realize that users’ aesthetic tastes will never get tired of this kind of product at any time.

You can imagine that a girl must have more than one beauty or filter editing software on her mobile phone. If you release a new and particularly useful filter function or beauty function, then this woman may download another one. However, there must not be too many news apps on everyone’s phone, because most of them are similar.

Having said that, I believe everyone has a certain concept of market channels, including which channels should be chosen for their own products, and also has some ideas. Because each company's products are different, the matching channels are relatively non-replicable, and there is no marketing routine that can be completely copied.

Successful projects also have many similarities, such as a mature marketing team, good project financing, or the team's high response efficiency and work efficiency, etc. The failed projects also have their own pain points, such as incorrect channel selection, failure to grasp the pain points of the product, etc.