Without the traffic from NetEase and Alipay, how can ordinary products spread themselves and go viral?

There are unknown secrets behind every screen-sweeping product. Today, I will divide the sharing content into 4 sections to tell you the communication secrets behind these screen-sweeping products!

1. Rethink Marketing

Broadly speaking, marketing can be divided into three categories:

1) Marketing without communication power

99% of the marketing on the market has no communication power.

Whether it is online marketing , social marketing or traditional marketing, many advertisements have neither highlights nor communication power. They rely entirely on businesses to spend money to increase the volume, rather than relying on their own interest to achieve communication effects.

2) Marketing with Dissemination Power

This year, Alipay ’s year-end “My Bill” H5 and NetEase Cloud Music ’s annual summary playlist have gone viral on WeChat Moments . Many people will post the results on WeChat Moments and spread the event spontaneously. This is marketing with spreadable power.

3) Products with great communication power

If a product can speak for itself, then it falls within the scope of broad marketing, and we call it a product with communication power.

So, what is a product with spreadable power?

Products with great communication power do not need print advertising, jokes, H5, videos or activities. Instead, communication points are embedded in the product itself. Once it is launched on the market, it will be spread immediately. This is self-communication of the product.

For example, the one-way calendar has been very popular in the past two years.

It improves the traditional calendar, not only enhancing the quality, but also adding particularly interesting quotes on each page :

"A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has something to say. - Plato"

These texts are either interesting, philosophical, or humorous, which move many people to take photos and post them on WeChat Moments, eventually forming self-propagation power.

This actually integrates marketing and products together, marketing self-communication + product self-communication, the combination of the two is called self-communication.

2. How to achieve self-propagation?

How to achieve self-propagation specifically? I summarized a 486 model:

①What is the self-propagating 486 model?

The “pig in the middle” corresponds to: For a product to achieve self-propagation, we must first be at the forefront of the trend and follow the trend.

“4” represents four prerequisites:

1. The demand for the product must be genuine;

2. The product experience must be good enough;

3. The product name must be memorable and contagious;

4. Because self-propagation involves cross-border factors, your products and marketing require collaboration among many departments of the company to complete.

"Piggy's Wings" means: 8 tactics that allow the pig to fly into the sky, that is, how to inject the mechanism of self-propagation into the product so that the product can speak for itself.

The "6" correspond to how to enable marketing activities , marketing events, etc. to have the ability to self-propagate.

The 486 model is widely applicable to all industries, including traditional industries.

So how do we inject the self-propagation mechanism into the product? This can be divided into two parts: from the product and to the product.

Coming from the product means digging out things from the product, digging out data, digging out content, digging out stories. These can all become marketing materials, and can also avoid separating marketing and products, ultimately failing to achieve the publicity effect.

The product itself is a marketing ammunition depot. If the content is well-crafted, the effect will definitely be good.

So, how do we get it into the product?

For a product to be self-propagating, it must add propagation points to the entire chain of user contact with the product.

For example, in addition to the APP itself, there are many points of contact between us and users, such as the customer service hotline that users call, offline stores, brand names... and the perceptual dimensions of vision, hearing, smell, and even touch, all of which can be implanted with self-propagation factors.

For example, there is a restaurant in Beijing called Xiaodiaolitang. One time when I was waiting for a table, I asked the waiter what their wifi password was, and the waiter directly said "Good luck to you". I was stunned at the time.

I said you're welcome and asked again what their wifi password was? He said it was the pinyin for "你吉祥".

Although this point is small, it has always been recorded in my mind. This shows that there are many points in the entire product chain, and as long as they involve technical points related to user experience , they can be implanted for self-propagation.

3. Eight tactics for product self-propagation

We know from the little pig above that there are eight tactics for product self-propagation, which are:

① Stick to the main line and let the product spread itself;

② Add copywriting to add vitality to the product;

③ Visualization, visualize products and users;

④Customization, private customization allows individuality to be highlighted;

⑤ Plant Easter eggs, implant Easter eggs into products;

⑥Exceed expectations and create an experience beyond expectations;

⑦ Sense of participation, let users feel involved;

⑧ Focus on hot topics and closely integrate with social hot topics.

The five more core and easy-to-operate methods are sticking to the main line, adding copywriting, visualization, planting easter eggs and sense of participation.

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 received this email, he opened it excitedly. 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, they will tell you that the person who secretly has a crush on you is surnamed Chen. 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 may have drunk Weiquan juice. If you pay attention, you will find some very interesting words on the bottle.

For example, if you didn’t sleep well last night, you want to drink juice; if you love beauty, you want to drink juice, etc., then these can easily attract everyone’s attention and spread.

Later, it made a spelling bottle, with a big word on each bottle, which could spell out many interesting words.

The copywriting made an originally very ordinary juice product attract everyone's attention and triggered self-propagation. This is a very typical case.

3. Visualization

What is visualization? What we are talking about now is to let the product speak for itself, but the premise for it to speak is to let people know that you have used its product and its services. If no one has discovered it, then the product naturally cannot speak for itself.

So this is the concept of visualization. When you use a method to make your business or product attract people's attention and be discovered by others, then there is the possibility of word-of-mouth communication.

Product visualization refers to the self-propagation of products through colors, logos, signatures, and sounds.

For example, the colors of the clothes worn by the popular shared bicycles and food delivery riders will attract everyone's attention.

Because their colors are brighter, Mobike is orange, OFO is yellow, Baidu Takeout is red, etc. These are all visualized through color, which draws your attention and ultimately triggers discussion.

4. 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, Baidu made a case called "2012 Doomsday".

On April 20, 2012, World Earth Day, Baidu launched a special effect on its web page that looked very realistic.

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.

5. Sense of participation

Let’s talk more about the sense of participation and how to introduce it so that our product can speak for itself and spread on its own.

When you are shopping in a mall, you will find that there are many activities such as making your own cakes, teaching you to draw on the spot, etc. There are interactive experiences and a sense of participation. People will be happy to participate in them and often take photos and post them on WeChat Moments.

This gives us an inspiration that we can also introduce a sense of participation in our business, allowing users to do it themselves and ultimately trigger self-propagation.

There is a seafood hotpot restaurant in Shanghai called Yule Aquatic Products. The entire restaurant has introduced a sense of participation in all aspects, which ultimately made it extremely popular. How did it do it?

For example, when ordering food, people don’t use the traditional method of flipping through a paper menu or looking at an iPad to order food. Instead, they treat the ordering process like chips in a casino.

When you are choosing dishes, you choose a chip in front of each dish, collect the chips, and finally go to the front desk to order. It is a very interesting and participatory process.

Then after you order the meal, he will give you a bag of sesame seeds and a small wooden hammer, and let you pound the sesame seeds yourself, because you may need to use this sesame ingredient for the hot pot later, so this is the process of grinding the sesame seeds yourself.

Many people must think it is interesting and novel, so they will take a photo and post it on WeChat Moments, which is very engaging. There is also the experience of slaughtering pine and willow seedlings on site and pressing noodles...

After this hotpot restaurant introduced a sense of participation in all aspects, it also made its restaurant's influence very strong.

IV. Conclusion

Finally, I would like to share with you the five sentences I have summarized regarding self-propagation.

1. 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 marketing is successful but the product is not, then the advertisement is basically doomed.

2. The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself; when doing promotion , the most overlooked thing is product advantages.

There are actually a lot of self-propagation materials in the product waiting to be explored, and there are many experience contact points waiting for us to implant self-propagation marketing points. This is easily overlooked.

3. Product design and marketing planning that cannot inspire self-propagation are just hooliganism.

When we are doing product design and marketing planning, we must ask ourselves whether such design and planning can trigger self-propagation. If not, we should iterate and think again.

4. Please don’t understand self-propagation, otherwise people engaged in marketing will not be able to survive!

5. 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.