How can gaming products increase their first batch of seed customers?

When operating seed users , the operation will have a purpose and an execution strategy. The purpose is needless to say, such as attracting new users , promoting activation or retention , and there will be many kinds of execution strategies, but the premise is inseparable from a few key words .

Content "attraction", "vest" first, "fan" culture creation, "B-side empowerment", in this article we will refine the keywords of different types of seed user operations , as well as those cases of successful seed user operations.

1. Content-driven products

The content-driven products mentioned here are products that require strong content operations , and users consume the content in the products. For such products, the content itself must be very attractive to users, otherwise users will not consume these contents; therefore, our operations colleagues can deploy these contents in advance and let the content "attract" the first batch of seed users. The keyword we are talking about here is "sucking".

Case 1: Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu was originally a content sharing community, so the shopping guides shared by users are the products that users consume. When Xiaohongshu was first created in 2013, it coincided with the bonus period of official accounts . They used WeChat official accounts as a base for importing seed users and attracted precise white-collar middle-class female fans by producing high-quality shopping guides. Now the official account of Xiaohongshu APP still maintains a high level of activity.

Case 2: Keep

For products like Keep, users consume the fitness courses provided. When they started development, they began to create high-quality content on WeChat and Weibo, and posted articles in forums and groups in the fitness field; for example, how to exercise to lose weight, before and after comparisons after weight loss, and how to eat to avoid obesity - many of these articles had a good dissemination effect, and finally attracted users who were interested in fitness to follow their WeChat and Weibo and become seed users.

From this we can see that you should deploy product content in advance and find channels for publishing your product content, such as Weibo, WeChat, communities, including offline, etc., so that the high-quality content of the product can attract your precise seed users.

2. Subculture Products

The subculture products mentioned here are aimed at a certain group of people who have the same life experiences and backgrounds and a common value system; such products can often form a culture and atmosphere, which is not only the quality of the product itself, but also a kind of value that makes users become fans of the product.

The keywords mentioned here are "professional users, super fans". When being a super fan, you often use the method of "restricting" the entry of non-fans.

Case 1: Gaming products

Heavy game users are people who share the same values ​​as others. Many users even find their self-worth in games and become "friends" or "marry" others in games. So for game products, big R (big paying players in RMB) and others are "super fans", and they are also the people who need to be promoted and attracted when the game is operated .

Many games will have dedicated operations for this group of users, and even provide 1:1 beautiful girls to play with them; these are the "professional users and super fans" mentioned here.

When big companies release blockbuster games, they will also create enough momentum to attract this part of users. For example, Tencent’s recent chicken-eating game "Glory Mission" (although it suffered a heavy blow, the operation method is the same). The first batch of crazy players were invited through internal testing, a sense of scarcity was created, and entry was restricted, making it the focus of attention.

Case 2: Shrimp

Xiami started out by gaining users from the literary and artistic Douban community, and literary and artistic groups are also a kind of subculture. On Zhihu, we saw the self-narration of the super fans cultivated by Xiami:

I posted three articles on the first day, and two of them were on the front page the next day. I wrote 12 pieces of copywriting , and 2 of them were selected to be posted on the homepage of the website. Two months after joining the website, I met with their operations, chatted, had meals, visited exhibitions, and received souvenirs, as well as handwritten messages from the bosses. Three months later, they put my introduction on the homepage of the website and kept it there for a month. Every time I posted something, the operators and editors came to praise me. The wind blew until I felt like I was floating in the air and didn't know which way was which.

This is how “professional users and super fans” operate. In many cases, the CEO will come out to dine, meet, and chat with super fans.

Case 3: Xiaomi

Xiaomi has taken the "Diaosi culture" to the extreme, bringing together subculture groups such as geeks and enthusiasts.

Lei Jun and Li Wanqiang have said on many occasions: Xiaomi initially posted on major mobile phone forums, screened and contacted one by one, and finally found 100 users to become the first batch of internal testers of the product; these 100 users were their professional users and super fans, the 100 dream sponsors on the phone's startup screen.

With the upgrading of consumption, niche cultures are constantly rising, such as hip-hop culture, talk show culture, etc. It is destined that more entrepreneurial projects will use this as a breakthrough. Therefore, it is very important to find senior fans of these niche cultures and then popularize the niche.

3. UGC Products

The purpose of UGC products is to get users involved and have fun, and to determine the proportion of UGC users who contribute (10%-20%) and the quality and quantity of their contributions. These 10%-20% of users must be found among the three types of seed users: "word-of-mouth users" and "non-staff operators (under a pseudonym)".

The keywords here are “word-of-mouth users” and “vests” who are willing to share.

Case 1: Hot Mom Gang

In the early days of Lamamabang, they recruited people in QQ groups. Their operators disguised themselves as mothers and registered many small accounts, or vests, and kept adding some mothers' groups, and then sent some information and soft advertisements to attract their first batch of users.

This group of users is very accurate, and the mothers who came from the QQ group already had the intention to speak in the QQ group, so they are a group of very good word-of-mouth users.

Case 2: Sina Weibo & Zhihu

Sina Weibo initially introduced a large number of KOLs and celebrities, including stars, entrepreneurs, and well-known media figures. These word-of-mouth users with their own traffic completed the content cold start for Sina Weibo and also brought in a large number of users; of course, the cost of inviting big Vs is relatively high. In comparison, Zhihu also adopts the model of inviting big Vs, but it invites more KOLs in the IT industry whose founders have resources, such as Li Kaifa, Lei Jun and other bigwigs to endorse them, which makes the cost lower.

For UGC products, it is very important for us to find word-of-mouth users in certain fields. Of course, it would be better if there is a method similar to Zhihu's "killing the familiar".

Case 3: Xiaohongshu

When Xiaohongshu's shopping notes were first launched, a group of high-quality users entered the community. The content of one super user even accounted for nearly a quarter of Xiaohongshu's total traffic at one point. Xiaohongshu also made many product adjustments based on her influence. On the one hand, it was worried that the user would dominate the community, and on the other hand, it was worried that restricting this user would lead to a decline in community activity. Until one day, this user was exposed for faking her celebrity identity, and her notes were all stolen pictures. Although this caused a lot of trouble to Xiaohongshu, it was precisely because of the initial activity brought to Xiaohongshu by this super vest (although it was not an official vest) that users continued to enter Xiaohongshu.

Case 4: Quora & Wumi

Quora is a question-and-answer community similar to Zhihu (Quora is also said to be an imitation of Zhihu). It is a high-level question-and-answer platform. When it first had no users and no money to spend on advertising, how did they do it? Ask and answer your own questions, and operate under a pseudonym, but they are all of high quality. Next, they invited test users to continue asking questions and answering them until the website's popularity gradually increased. They then opened the entire website to allow users to ask questions, answer questions, and maintain and modify content themselves.

The same is true for Wumi. During the cold start phase, all employees participated in the vest operation.

Many services or products are not positioned as communities at the beginning, but as the business develops, they may need such a UGC community. In fact, at this time we already have a user base, and what we need to do is to find the talkative users among them and then play with them, even if we start by playing with ourselves, we can let users feel it.

4. Bilateral Products

The two-sided products mentioned here are products that connect the B-end and the C-end. Typical examples include live streaming platforms , O2O platforms, etc. The service of this type of product is actually "combining B-end to serve C-end", which is a service formed by "platform + B-end". Therefore, in the cold start phase, the keyword is "B-end pain points", using "B-end capabilities", and using B-end to leverage C-end. As for when C-end can force B-end, that is another story.

Case 1: Lizhi FM

When Lizhi FM was cold-starting, its first focus was on finding high-quality content hosts, and they chose Chinese podcasts. Then they studied their pain points and found that podcast promotion services were all paid, and most of them were provided by foreign servers, which required a VPN , which was slow and difficult to operate. At the same time, they also needed to apply for a credit card to pay.

So Lizhi FM launched a lifetime free podcast promotion service; the anchors use our podcast management platform through this service, and then upload, share, and view the program data and effects through the platform; gradually these anchors stayed and continued to bring C-end users to Lizhi FM.

Case 2: Didi Taxi

Didi Taxi first needed to find drivers. After hard marketing and negotiations, it found a taxi company in the suburbs of Beijing that was willing to cooperate, so it first started B-side operations. At that time, the pain point of taxi drivers was that they "didn't know how to use this APP at all", so Didi taught them step by step, and gradually grew from 10 people to 100 people. And in this process, in order to motivate the drivers, they also have their own employees who go to hail taxis to let the drivers taste the sweetness.

Case 3: Alibaba New Retail

After the new retail concept was proposed, Alibaba expanded its business to include community convenience stores, regional supermarkets and large shopping malls, which actually meant it found the B-end first. From a specific implementation perspective, Alibaba's operations staff also do hard work. For example, for community convenience stores, operations staff go to offline mom-and-pop stores to teach them how to use the Alibaba system, and then understand what new retail is - this is actually what major e-commerce platforms keep talking about: "empowering merchants."

When making bilateral products, we must realize that the service we provide is "platform + B-end". When operating or making products, we must first make the B-end happy, including making various useful operational tools for the B-end, teaching the B-end how to use them, and continuously improving the operational efficiency of B-end customers. We must link the B-end to serve the C-end. Never isolate the B and C-end. We must believe that a well-performing B-end and C-end are not in an antagonistic relationship. A well-performing B-end must have provided high-quality C-end services.

This article was compiled and published by the author @ Xppcn (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services Advertising platform Longyou Century