How was the Snake Battle that dominated the charts for over a week and went viral on WeChat Moments created?

The second hit product of 2016, Snake Wars, is here. At the end of August, a game called Snake Battle climbed all the way to second place on the free list and first place on the game list. Previously, the Youku video client firmly occupied the first place. (Thanks to the broadcast of the exclusive drama "Love O2O", the third and fourth app stores in the App Store rankings of "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "Vipshop" were related to this.) At 22:00 on August 28, 2016, "Snake" successfully topped the free list in China, dethroning Youku for the first place.

The promotion team of Snake Battle is the same as the promotion team of Faceu at the beginning of the year. The team that has operated killer apps twice will now talk about how to operate a killer app on new media .

In all product marketing issues, we must first consider three questions: what to say, to whom to say it, what to say, and how to say it.

1. What type of product is this?

Snake Wars and Faceu are similar products.

First, casual games are lightweight and have a wide user base.

Second, the category is new, and no similar products have been operating well in the domestic market before;

Snake comes with its own IP, which awakens the memories of the Nokia era of the post-80s generation and helps the post-90s generation discover the same fun as Battle of Balls.

I started discussing this product with the founding team. The gameplay of Snake Battle has been greatly improved compared to slither.io, and it also draws on the gameplay of Giant's popular product "Battle of Balls". The gameplay rules are relatively simple. The snake will die if its head touches the wall or the enemy. It is a kill when another snake's head touches you. Compared with the tense competitive mode of Battle of Balls, Snake Battle is more casual.

The game Snake can evoke the memories of most people born in the 1980s. Light and casual entertainment games have a wide audience and the market has grown significantly in recent years. For this product, we need to analyze how to leverage the market of people born in the 1990s and how to grasp the rhythm of operations.

2. To whom should we tell what the level and structure of our use is?

Snake has a wide range of users, with no obvious gender distinction. People born in the 1980s are the group most influenced by the Snake IP, and people born in the 1990s are the main target group for casual games. There is no obvious distinction between cities.

However, for blockbuster products, the market with active social media, easy to be influenced, and with great demand for casual games is our main market, so for this product, we have targeted the first group of users to be affected: those born after 1990 and those living in second- and third-tier cities.

Channel selection: WeChat, Weibo, short video influencers , etc.

3. What is our main marketing appeal?

We characterized the first batch of Faceu promotions as cute and poisonous. The way Faceu communicated about the word poisonous was a ghost-like animal spitting out rainbows. We also characterized the snake as poisonous. So what does the poisonousness of the snake mean?

The conventional definition of Snake game is "a poisonous and perverted game where the player grows by eating other people's excrement and corpses", "a game that easily leads to suicide, it's too long and extremely lonely", "playing Snake Wars, God knows what I went through" . The two forms of expression and communication of being addicted to playing games and unable to extricate oneself are more in line with user expectations.

Evil and poison are the core of the main push. The market strategy revolves around these two points.

Arouse their curiosity and post game pictures to stimulate players' desire to play the game.

The elements that lead to a hit: the friend circle principle, the popularity principle, the contempt principle, and the vanity principle.

4. How to say it and how to control the rhythm of communication

The winter and summer vacations every year are the time when it is easiest to create hit products. From Face Meng to Xiaokaxiu to Faceu, we believe that the golden promotion period is from June to August and from December to February.

There are two steps when testing channels. The first step is the conventional guiding channel to test product data feedback. The second step is the viral channel to strengthen the rhythm of communication.

In June, we started preparing for the promotion. As the conventional guiding channel, we chose WeChat public accounts and selected two WeChat accounts with millions of real fans (the main user group is students), and conducted a soft text guidance.

The first data showed that when the exposure and reading volume reached 200,000, the conversion rate reached tens of thousands. This game entered the top 500 of the iOS overall list for the first time and maintained this position for about a week.

Subsequent market data showed that retention and active usage time data performed very well. From the basic product level, it has met market expectations. However, data from the first phase showed insufficient self-transmission.

The development team adjusted the product strategy based on this.

So in the second stage, how to choose viral transmission?

The media selection at the level of viral communication should be: recommendation by opinion leaders - strengthening of content guidance - media account exposure to create popular concepts.

Around July 15th, we started the second round of communication guidance. Good-looking entertainment influencers + viral content.

Select 3 influencers with around 1 million followers and 300,000-1 million content views, and create viral short videos for dissemination. Content direction, showing how to play games and calling on fans to join in.

This time, with an exposure of about 1.2 million, the app ranked around 200th on the iOS rankings, and the user cost was reduced by half compared to the previous time.

Based on the influencer's suggestion to share and guide the fans to play games, this round of fans began to generate self-sharing fission because they saw their favorite influencers playing and sharing.

The second round of the product began to guide users to spread and share, improving the smoothness and feel of the product, and having greater advantages among similar products.

After being on the list this time, the product did not fall off the list, and it began to iterate steadily and continuously, showing positive growth.

The third step is to get on the list and create momentum.

After the second round of dissemination, Snake Battle began to enter the stage from slow dissemination to high-speed dissemination, and naturally the ranking of the list rose rapidly. At the same time, we began to enter the third round of dissemination.

The third wave selected nearly dozens of first-tier Internet celebrities, whose main audience is the post-90s generation in third- and fourth-tier cities, covering a population of about 30 million.

This time, Snake quickly opened his Moments status and was listed on the list simultaneously.

Yijian Media has helped products to be listed twice. Regarding lightweight entertainment tools and products, founder Bi Xiaoni believes that the market thinking is roughly as follows:

• The audience is clear and wide-ranging, and the product needs are clear. The product function requirements of Faceu and Snake Wars are very clear, including video cameras, stickers, and casual games.

• Easy to spread or easy to guide the spread. There are viral demands to speak of. From a rainbow falling out of your mouth when you open it to a perverted game where you grow up by eating the excrement and corpses of your own kind, both of these have strong points of entertainment, showing off and sharing. The former shares one's face and the latter shares the results of the game.

Faceu, which became a hit on WeChat Moments half a year ago, did not fade away quickly as those who watched the excitement at that time said. Instead, it has remained steadily in the top 100 of the overall list. This product quickly evolved from a viral sticker to the best video camera in China, and Snake Battle also has the best feel among similar games. In an era of capital winter and entrepreneurship downturn, there are still good products. Perhaps for today's entrepreneurs, it is more realistic to calm down and work hard to make good products from the perspective of user needs and market demands.

Just like I said half a year ago, many people think that a hit product is a kind of luck. In fact, you don’t understand that the luck you see is often a kind of ability. Whether it is a marketing team or a product team, a successful product requires a lot of accumulation. I hope that all those who are still struggling in this era can encourage each other.