Zhihu marketing promotion logic!

This article mainly focuses on the following 7 points:

1. Understand the current situation of Zhihu

2. Deeply understand the logic of Zhihu advertising

3. Answers to frequently asked questions on Zhihu

4. What kind of content is defined as account content by Zhihu?

5. Can you recommend a few Zhihu-style strategies?

6. The team structure that brands need for Zhihu advertising

7. Five classic case studies

The text is as follows:

01D2C understands the current situation of Zhihu

Now, many brands define Zhihu content marketing as the second half of the layout of consumer products. The second half is to start considering the real accumulation of brand assets and users. Because at the end of the day, all marketing ultimately revolves around people. So how can your content truly express the brand's ideas, the things behind the brand and the things it is proud of, how can you convey these things to consumers and make them identify with them? This is actually the value of Zhihu.

Everyone’s understanding of Zhihu is that it is a very high-quality question-and-answer community. Sometimes in daily life, we may come across some problems and search on Zhihu, so one of the great features of Zhihu is that it is a platform with a foundation.

Zhihu has a large amount of community content accumulated, which means that this platform integrates a lot of things in a wide range of fields, which can bring a sense of gain to users. This sense of gain comes from the Zhihu platform's control over content, and only high-quality content can be produced. This is also the biggest difference that Zhihu brings to users. When users see the volume and concentration of information on Zhihu, they feel different from what they feel on other platforms. And after reading this information, he will have some sense of self-identity. This is a feeling of Zhihu platform’s insight into user psychology.

Let me first share the population structure of Zhihu (as shown below): more than 76% of the population are under 30 years old, covering everyone from those born in the 1980s to those born in the 1990s and 2000s. It is a combination of young and middle-aged people, and the ratio of men to women is also quite balanced. It is not a male-dominated community as everyone imagines.

△Zhihu crowd structure

Then there is the change in Zhihu’s community attributes: As shown in the figure below, Zhihu has been a community attribute from the beginning, mainly focusing on attention and circles. This stage is defined as stage 1.0, which is mainly aimed at supporting everyone to share; then in the second half of 1.0, it began to have the attributes of a tool, which is the question and answer and search we see now.

Then this community entered the 2.0 stage and possessed the attributes of a media. It began to have some hot lists. Everyone can see the hottest information on Zhihu, and it is not very vertical. It also has things like celebrity gossip, and includes live broadcasts and recommendations. At this stage, a new service attribute has been added, which is the field of knowledge payment, namely, strictly selected membership, and some information-oriented content.

Then we entered the current 3.0 stage. After the accumulation of the first two stages, Zhihu's soil is very fertile and has accumulated a large amount of very in-depth and good content. At this stage, Zhihu defines itself as a super community. At this stage, the community has a very strong attribute of promoting products, because it is found that many consumers will come to Zhihu to take a look when they are buying a car or a house.

The above is the current situation of Zhihu. Next, we will have a deeper understanding of Zhihu from the following aspects, understand how brands play on the Zhihu platform, and refer to some good cases to understand the logic of Zhihu's delivery. This logic contains some points that are not unique to other platforms.

02D2C deeply understands Zhihu’s advertising logic

The first is that Zhihu does not follow the logic of purchasing accounts by experts. Unlike Xiaohongshu or Douyin, Zhihu follows the logic of creating content. It uses the performance of an account or the number of fans to buy a certain issue of its content. Brand advertisers themselves need to make investments.

First of all, the brand must have a very good understanding of its products and its users. So when it comes to actually launching the ad, the topic selection is based on the essence of Zhihu. Zhihu is a question-and-answer community, so choosing a good question can help the brand establish new category awareness. Then after selecting the topic, the brand needs to create its own answer. The answer here is the top priority for the brand to place an ad on Zhihu. This answer can be understood as the basic material of the brand on Zhihu, that is, the original content of the launch. If the answer is good, the effect of its launch will be better. Later, this answer can be upgraded to an article, or around this question, it can be answered from multiple angles. Finally, we will aggregate it into a special topic, and even make it into a roundtable discussion. This is Zhihu’s delivery logic.

The second is that Zhihu does not have a full-text logic. This is different from other platforms. Zhihu only needs to prepare a limited amount of PGC content or UGC content. Then use the excess budget to make large-scale delivery, that is, to expose your content more through these Zhihu content distribution tools, which is a budget allocation issue. Brands need to focus on how to better express your products, the culture and technology behind your brand, etc. Then use more of the budget to let more people know about your product and to refine your delivery model.

The third one is not the short-term ROI logic of a single platform, but the long-term integration of product and effect of offense and defense. The underlying logic is that now that we have entered the second half of the entire emerging consumer product industry, brands can no longer talk about the short-term ROI logic of a single platform. Instead, they need to look at the value of omni-channel marketing in the long term and see how the brand markets on all these platforms.

Of course, this is also related to the brand’s current stage of development. The focus of the brand is different at different stages. However, Zhihu’s concept of the second half is the concept of long-term integration of product and effect, which combines offense and defense.

The fourth is the logic of non-pure grass. This front line needs to be completely extended to basically complete the entire chain from planting grass to pulling out grass. The whole process from topic selection to answer writing is actually a process from planting seeds to removing seeds. Of course, this also requires the concentration of brand content to reach a certain level.

03D2C FAQs on Zhihu

The first question: Is Zhihu the male version of Xiaohongshu?

This is definitely not the case. As we can see from the population proportions in the above text, the male-to-female ratio is close to 1:1. Part of the logic behind this is the awakening of women's consciousness, which means that women will participate more and more in social life and play a more important role in family life. For example, they will start to buy cars and houses, and about 60-70% of the family's economic power is in the hands of women, so they must consider the issue of family asset appreciation. There are also women who have not yet started a family. When they are studying, they will consider whether they should take the postgraduate entrance examination, whether they should go abroad, what kind of institution they should choose, etc. These needs for knowledge and experience will all be there, which also makes the natural growth of female users very fast.

Due to the rapid growth of female users, the growth of fashion and beauty is now very fast (as shown in the figure below). Fashion and beauty is now the second highest MAU sector on Zhihu, followed closely by the maternal and child care sector, which also has a high proportion of female users.

According to the official data given by Zhihu, there are 37 main fields and more than 100 secondary fields. All this information proves that Zhihu is not the male version of Xiaohongshu, but a place that can give answers.

The second question: Are Zhihu used only in first-tier cities?

As shown in the figure below, according to Zhihu's data for the first quarter of 2021, first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities account for about half, and students from the remaining first-tier cities account for the other half, which is relatively balanced. According to Zhihu's internal statistics, half of the first- and second-tier users may be mainly creators on the Zhihu site, while the other half may be mainly consumers, consumers of content. Since Zhihu is a long-text and picture community, the requirements for the knowledge level and ability of creators will be higher. If a user can use Zhihu frequently, then he must be a user with high knowledge and great consumption potential.

The third question: Is Zhihu just a question-and-answer community?

Actually, it is not. Zhihu is essentially a question-and-answer platform. High-quality questions and answers. Zhihu provides a great reading experience on both the PC and app sides, and its current monthly active users are almost over 100 million. Then the number of devices used per month is also very high, with an average daily search volume of 25.7 million. This level is equivalent to nearly one-third of the daily request volume for search engines such as Sogou and 360.

The above three common questions have been answered, and the population portrait of Zhihu platform has become clearer. What kind of content can impress these users?

04D2C What kind of content is defined as good content by Zhihu?

Zhihu currently has six content formats: questions, answers, articles, roundtables, special topics, and videos. Except for videos, the first five types can be understood as asking questions is the beginning of everything. From answers to special topics, its information concentration and volume will increase successively.

1. Content matching platform:

In order to empower brands with this kind of content production capability, Zhihu now provides a cheese content matching platform. This platform allows advertisers and brands to directly publish some tasks, similar to Xiaohongshu's Dandelion and Douyin's Star Map.

Cheese combines the situation of the entire Zhihu experts and divides the cooperation into four categories:

The first one is special invitation, which can be understood as deep customization. For example, in the field of beauty and cosmetics, Guang Guang is a little sun who is very familiar to everyone. He is a top expert and brands can provide him with in-depth one-on-one customized services.

The second is reuse, which is content leasing, because nearly 30% of the content on Zhihu has commercial attributes and can bring goods, but it has not been commercialized. If what this person is talking about happens to be in line with your product, you can talk to him and rent his content, which is equivalent to commercializing his content.

The third is recruitment, which is open to all Zhihu creators. This is more suitable for laying the groundwork for a large amount of content in a short period of time. This amount is basically enough to meet all the basic content needs of the brand on Zhihu.

The fourth one is self-selection, which is to put links to good things in the content.

2. Topic selection platform:

Zhihu provides Toast, a content selection tool. Toast is an open tool that anyone can log in to and view the status of topics on Zhihu, including exposure, views, clicks, etc.

Another one is Zhihu Youshu, which allows you to check the trends and popularity of the entire topic. There are also some keyword situations.

3. Issues with commercial product delivery capabilities:

Zhihu divides questions with commercial sales potential into three categories: effectiveness questions, crowd questions, and category questions.

Functional questions: such as how to prevent hair loss, how to protect against the sun, etc.?

Category questions: For example, which sweeping robot is better to use?

Population-specific question: How can a 30-year-old mother manage to work and take care of her baby at the same time?

In actual advertising, these three types of issues are actually synergistic. When launching, brands can actually tend to distinguish these three types, and then find the user situation by trying product type issues and efficacy issues first. This is actually helping brands find the right audience on Zhihu.

The good content on Zhihu is actually equivalent to the concept of this answer. Because even a column article is upgraded from an answer. Columns and round tables are also aggregated from answers. So the so-called good content is good answers. The prerequisite for a good answer is to choose a good question first. It's similar to opening a store in real life. The first thing you need to do is to choose a location, which is also the most important thing.

To choose a good question, you can use the Toast tool (as shown in the picture above, the Toast topic interface) and refer to the number of views, attention, and answers of the question. If you want to do commercial promotion, it is recommended that the number of followers of this topic itself should be greater than 500 to prove that this topic has a certain degree of popularity. The number of answers should be less than 500, not too many. If there are too many, the difficulty of operation and maintenance will increase slightly, but it is not impossible to operate and maintain. These are a basic reference.

For example, a men’s personal care brand raises the question: How can boys look clean and refreshed? In fact, this question may seem ordinary, but it is very lifelike.

First of all, there is a crowd, and the final effect is clean and refreshing. This question just hits the nail on the head for the three types of people who want to sell products mentioned above: one is based on the crowd, and the other is based on the function. This question hits the nail on the head for two of them.

When answering this question, there are probably two directions. One is to write about personal changes, that is, I am a man, and how I have changed as the main line. The second one is to tell the change of my boyfriend from the perspective of a girlfriend. The brand focus here is to promote his eau de toilette, and then use the scene of him taking a bath to promote a bath perfume. This is the first content.

In the second update, if the basic data of the previous update is good, I will try the third product and start recommending oil-control shampoo, and then recommend a four-piece skin care set. Finally came the product of setting spray. In fact, in essence, this piece of content is constantly updated and released within a certain period of time (as shown in the figure below)

Here are a few indicators that influence exposure: First, the topic selection. Whether the topic is right or not, then look at the click-through rate of your answer, the planned bid, and the interactive data.

Indicators that affect the effect: First, the topic itself, and then the plug-in click rate, bid, and interaction data to comprehensively judge whether your answer is good or not.

After the content is ready, it needs to be distributed: Zhihu currently has two major content distribution tools, one is Zhijian and the other is Zhi+

Zhijian supports all content carriers on Zhihu. It is charged based on display. According to statistics, the average CTR is 2%. A good question plus a brief introduction can even reach 9% CTR

There are two main paths for promoting recommended traffic (as shown in the figure below). One is the homepage, which means that after clicking on the homepage, the user will be recommended a question. The second is the path of the answer page, where there is an area between the two answers specifically for commercial answers.

Zhi+ would be more suitable for effect-oriented delivery, or use native content as a supporting carrier. Zhi+ is charged by CPC. The recent CPC of the market is around 0.5, which may also be related to the major promotion nodes. For e-commerce content plug-ins, the CTR can achieve 5-8%.

Zhi+ has three recommendation paths, which are different from Zhijian and richer: the first is the homepage recommendation mode, which means that when a user clicks on the app, he or she may be recommended a question by default. Then the second type of recommendation flow comes from the next answer, because when a user comes to Zhihu to find an answer, he can only browse 6-7 answers on average.

This method will ensure that the answer is within the user's browsing range as much as possible. The third type is the search recommendation model, but this is not SEO. It actually still involves bidding, but the price may be slightly more expensive than the first two traffic paths. There is also another search bar, for example, the brand’s current basic content on the site has reached a good base volume. You can try this mode of search recommendation flow (as shown below)

05D2C recommends several Zhihu-style strategies?

Several Zhihu-style strategies can only be used as a reference. When investing in specific categories, you still need to find ways to study them more. Here, the products will be divided into two categories: cautious consumer goods and fast-moving consumer goods:

The first category is cautious consumer goods: these mean high customer orders and high mental involvement, which means that if you want to buy this thing, the decision cycle is relatively long. For example, consumer electronics, finance, insurance, buying a house, buying a car, decorating furniture, medical beauty and high-end nourishing foods, etc., all belong to this field.

When using Zhihu, people of this type generally do two things: First, they invite a special guest, who are relatively top-notch people and are generally called power users, to help define and set the tone for the brand. Its role is more towards product promotion, especially for brands of high-end nourishing products. The content is still in the form of answers or articles. For initial trial delivery, these two forms are sufficient. When choosing a delivery tool, it is recommended that both Zhi+ and Zhijian be used to deliver search flows. This is because in general, this is because people have been inspired by the idea in other places and come to Zhihu to verify it, so they must do a targeted search. The layout of this search flow is just the right way to test the content.

After the tone of the head is set, you can try to create some basic content. It is the content of koc items, such as unboxing, evaluation, experience and avoidance of pitfalls.

For the former, which is purely to set the tone, you don’t need to put a jump plug-in. For the latter, which is ordinary koc-oriented content, you can answer it directly in the form of a jump plug-in.

The second category of fast-moving consumer goods are products with low to medium customer orders and low mental involvement, which make decision-making very easy. Mainly food, beverages, and household chemicals, while beauty, skin care, mother and baby, and pets are semi-cautious consumer products. For fast-moving consumer goods, you can start making them right away. If it is a relatively well-known brand, you can start by co-creating with MCN. The content he creates is in the form of PGC, so he just sells the products directly. The content format is mainly in the form of answer + article. For the delivery tool, we choose Zhi+, and we can try all three traffic paths of Zhi+. After the basic content is done, it can be reused, that is, use the Cheese platform to distribute it to some people who can write answers, reuse, self-select, recruit, and do some UGC-oriented content. It is still mainly based on the evaluation experience to avoid pitfalls and improve word-of-mouth. The addition of plug-ins still depends on the form of content. You don’t have to add all of them. The recommendation flow, answer flow and search flow of this kind of content are all ok.

In the semi-cautious area, brands promote their efficacy, but consumers need to be educated about this efficacy. This strategy is a combination of the above two methods. It is recommended to try the form of special invitation, where the top creators can educate and set the tone without being linked, mainly to prove that you are not just an IQ tax. Amplify exposure through recommendation.

06The team structure required for D2C brands to place ads on Zhihu

The first angle is that of a partner. Because Zhihu itself has a relatively high content concentration and creation is relatively difficult, from the perspective of a partner, MCNs and agents must choose teams that can co-create content.

When advertising on Zhihu, you can use multiple agents and accounts to do it, and feed back to your own team through the horse racing mechanism. Currently, Zhihu's advertising agents all have certain content creation capabilities. Of course, the specific details also depend on the specific situation of the company.

For self-built teams, the recommended minimum size is two to three people. A person is defined as a Zhihu writer. He has a full-time identity. This requires long-term practice to cultivate the feel of a Zhihu writer. He must be aware of the content of Zhihu and identify with it.

Prepare 1-2 more pitchers, who are actually advertising optimizers. Brands can also decide whether to find partners, build their own team, or do both based on their own advertising needs.

07D2C five classic cases sharing

Zhi+ is a tool launched in May 2020. The following cases all occurred after Zhi+ was launched, and the data collected are from July 2021.

For example, a certain meal replacement brand consumed an average of 100,000 yuan per day on Zhi+ in July, but the total amount of content on the site was only 100 articles. The investment ratio is 1/3, which is enough for him to consume. And the ROI of a good plan can be above 3.

There is also a high-customer-order brand. It has only fifteen contents on the entire Zhihu site, but it has an account matrix, including an official account and several amateur accounts. The brand is invested in by both Douyin and Zhihu, and Zhihu's ROI is higher than that of Douyin. The most important point is that the number of people who receive the 5,000 yuan coupons is very high due to the traffic from Zhihu. This also indirectly confirms the purchasing power of Zhihu's customer base.

The third one is NetEase Yanxuan. It chose a topic "What things do you think are expensive but are actually very cheap?" It started by advertising by answering questions and found that the overall data was very good, with a content click-through rate of 9.8%, which is an excellent level. Then it upgraded the answer to an article and launched it again.

The fourth is a case that DJI once had. DJI once had its own answer, but stopped publishing it. After it launched new products, it took out the answer to this question, re-edited it, and then published it. This is an old question with a new answer.

The fifth case is that the Kangerxin brand created a concept of hotel home textiles on Zhihu, which is equivalent to establishing a new category on Zhihu. Hotel beds and bedding is a sub-category in a very specific scenario. The questions the brand chose at the time were also amazing, such as "Why do hotels have three to four pillows, right?" and "Why are the beds at Hilton Marriott and InterContinental hotels so comfortable to sleep on?"

These questions themselves will make you curious and want to click in, and then while you are looking at the answers, you will be recommended to such products, which will stimulate his consumption needs in this scenario.

Zhihu can now be regarded as a blue ocean that is worth competing in, and its current commercial value is yet to be explored by everyone. Especially when the brand has not yet launched a large-scale advertising campaign on other platforms, Zhihu can help you make this attempt.

The above is a partial sharing about content marketing on Zhihu platform.

Author: Nan Kaikou

Source: Nankaikou