What role does advertising play in the three processes of operation?

Recently, this advertisement of "999 Cold Relief", which is said to be the most heartfelt advertisement of 2017, seems to have taken over major social media such as WeChat Moments and Weibo, with many people discussing and forwarding it.

Similarly, there is the "You Should Be Proud" campaign by Pechoin that was widely circulated during the Double Eleven period, and the " Durex " campaign that teased more than a dozen brands at once on Thanksgiving.

However, while people are extremely excited, there is also a voice like this: "How high of a conversion rate does such a high transmission rate actually bring? Watching "There's Always Someone Secretly Loving You in This World" reminded me of the girl I had a crush on, but I seemed to have forgotten "999 Cold Relief". Is this a success?

It is undeniable that advertising plays a big role in a company’s revenue growth (many scholars have done a lot of research in both empirical and theoretical aspects), so I firmly believe in the positive effect of advertising on growth. Let us first think about such a first principle question:

What exactly is advertising? What is it doing?

Ultimately, advertising is the use of the communication media of "pictures, texts, audio and video" to convey information to target (potential) users , and the interaction between users and advertisements (likes, shares, comments, and re-creation) is also part of advertising. When creating ads, engagement should also be part of your strategic planning.

I think strategic goals, information delivery, and data feedback are the three key words of advertising. Now let’s put aside these high-end advertising cases above and return to our daily work. The promotional copy written to increase the sales of a single product, the version update instructions written for the newly launched App in the App Store , the notifications pushed to users to promote activation... In fact, they are all advertisements. Of course, the transmission of information without strategic goals is rogue .

This article will briefly analyze the role of advertising in the three most important operations processes: attracting new customers , retaining customers , and promoting activation.

First, let’s simulate the psychological cognitive process of users using/purchasing a product:

How do our products connect with users?

• The first step is the first sight , whether it is through subway billboards, recommendations in WeChat Moments, or even occasionally hearing other people talking about it... This lets users know about the product.
• The second step is understanding . After the initial encounter, interested users will learn about the information through searching, asking friends, and downloading (software products).
• The third step is experience . For physical goods, users may experience them through purchase or trial. For Internet products such as games , users can register for a trial experience (an increasing number of products allow users to experience almost all functions without registration in order to lower the threshold for participation). The experience mainly involves two areas of the brain, the nucleus accumbens and the insula, which will not be elaborated in this article.

These three steps form a funnel, and the number of interested users will decrease layer by layer. After the experience, the following three scenarios may occur:

1. Churn : Being disappointed with the product or having a bad experience due to some aspect of the experience. (The reasons need to be carefully analyzed, products need to be iterated, or processes need to be optimized)
2. Pre-churn : The biggest difference between pre-churn users and churned users is that they are not disappointed with the product itself, but have been inactive for a long period of time due to other reasons. Of course, the main reason is scarce energy . Everyone has 24 hours, and the time spent on all products is conserved, so one thing increases while the other decreases. Pre-churn users usually become inactive after the experience because they temporarily forget or don’t have time .
3. Repeat purchase : After experiencing the product, these users like it very much and keep repurchasing or being active. Of course, after repurchase, it is likely to turn into a pre-churn state.

Those who are in operations or product field must be very familiar with these, and there are many methodologies applied in various links, which will not be elaborated in this article. Back to the topic, what role does advertising play in this operational process?

The simple role of advertising in operations

Let's go back to the picture above. We can see that the four links in red are where we often use ads and user interactions:

1. How did you first meet and what did you first meet?

For a new user who doesn’t know our product, how can we motivate him to learn about it? This link must rely on advertising, and the first impression is crucial. So how can you make a good first impression?

One of the three key factors of advertising is "strategy". Before making an advertisement, we need to comprehensively sort out the product's internal information, external environment, user psychology and other factors, and then do a good job of positioning to determine what we need to convey to users? What do you want them to do after seeing the ad? Define the first indicator to verify the effectiveness of advertising. The next thing to consider is through what channels and when to deliver the content to consumers. These are specific channel operation details and will not be elaborated in this article.

For example, this heartwarming advertisement "In this world, there is always someone who secretly loves you" is very eye-catching in terms of its spreadability and has been widely spread. Touching the hearts of most people, describing the most ordinary life, and the contrast of the stories have made this advertisement highly popular and have a high reputation. Pechoin's "You Are Proud" follows the same pattern. The product was only shown at the end of the film, which can be considered a patch advertisement. It is difficult for us to associate "love and 999 Cold Relief" and it is also difficult to associate "pride and confidence with Pechoin". Therefore, I think it is difficult for these two advertisements to attract further understanding from new users. Ask ourselves: after watching the advertisements, have you searched for information about these two products? We were just moved!

But as a brand that everyone knows, using this method to increase brand exposure and convey brand values ​​will still be effective. If you want to induce users to learn more about the product after their first visit, you need to establish a strong link between the information you convey and the product itself, which means giving consumers a good reason to buy.

2. What reasons do you provide for purchase?

The advertisements that consumers see before seeing the product, whether they are pictures, text, audio or video, are all content. What we need to do is to provide consumers with a reason to buy through content. I once said in the article "E-commerce Industry: There is no off-season market, only off-season thinking" that " perception (the feeling created by the purchase reason in the consumer's mind) determines whether consumers buy or not, and products determine whether consumers continue to buy ."

I cut this ad from the Toutiao feed . This is the first time I’ve heard of this product. What reasons does it give me to buy it?

Target users : small retail stores; Product name: Retail Tong; Reasons for purchase: No worries about supply, and purchases are cost-effective.

Supply and cost are pain points for small retail stores. Small store owners who see this advertisement will be very motivated to learn more about the Retailtong product, which will quickly lead users to actively learn about it.

They may first download the app to get a preliminary understanding, search for information about Retailtong on Baidu , ask friends around them who have other small shops if they have used it, go to Zhihu and other Q&A communities to ask (young store owners)... The quality of the information they get will directly affect whether consumers proceed to the next stage.

3. How to achieve borderless marketing ? (Users, content, technology, data)

Boundaryless marketing has become a hot topic recently, and everyone has their own understanding of it. I think one of the application scenarios of borderless marketing is " When users want to know about my products, I can appear in any scene where users can go and convey product information through high-quality content ."

Let’s take the product Retail Link as an example. When a small shop owner first saw it through Toutiao, he was attracted by its reasons for buying. When users go to Baidu, Zhihu and other places to learn more about it, we will be able to provide further content to guide users to try and experience it.

Regarding borderless marketing, I would like to add one more sentence. I believe that the four factors of "users, content, technology and data" are the KSF (key success factors) of borderless marketing.

After experiencing the Retail Link product, what will happen next? Maybe our product has greatly helped this small shop owner, and he continues to use the product, which is what we want to achieve most; what we least want to see is users leaving without returning. If the loss data is too large, it often reflects that there is a problem with our product itself, and we need to optimize the product instead; there is also a state between the two, which I call "pre-churn", because of inactivity caused by temporary forgetfulness or lack of time , but these users may slowly become real lost users. Regarding this point, I think everyone should have a deeper feeling, using a product crazily for a period of time, and then never opening it again.

4. How to recall?

This is the fourth problem that advertising needs to solve: user recall and activation. For these "pre-churn" users, we need to establish a very sophisticated user management model so that we can know in a timely manner when the "pre-churn" risk warning is reached.

I haven't watched TV series for a long time. I was reading Mi Meng 's inspirational article in bed and saw the product placement of "A Love So Beautiful". I naturally opened Tencent Video and started my life of watching TV series every night after work.

I haven't shopped for a long time. When I was browsing Toutiao, I saw a particularly big promotion. I quickly opened JD.com to check it out. I accidentally found a lot of discounts and placed several orders.

I haven’t traveled for a long time. On the subway after work, I happened to see Ctrip ’s "Double 12 Travel Around the World, Limited Time Special Offers" advertisement. I went home and opened the Ctrip App to plan my Double 12 trip.

…………

There are many such scenarios, and we must have encountered them all. This is the important role of advertising, which is to conduct timely recall and activation when users enter the "pre-churn" period.

Are you too busy to have time? It doesn't matter, we use advertising to tell you that our products are more worthy of your current time;

Have you forgotten for a moment? It doesn’t matter, we’ll use advertising to tell you that our products are always there.

Conclusion

Advertising plays a very important role in the user's initial encounter, understanding, experience, and pre-churn operations. In our daily work, we are also using these techniques to operate users subtly. There are only four forms of advertising: pictures, text, audio, and video. What we need to do is to strategically use various forms of advertising to convey information to users and achieve our operational goals!

The author of this article @平章大人 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, information flow advertising, advertising platform