Traditional promotion is gradually becoming ineffective. Are there any new promotion methods to replace it?

Recently, I read three books on marketing and promotion in one go. I feel that I have a new understanding of marketing and promotion. I will summarize and record it here.

My work experience over the years has always focused on online promotion and marketing, but the essence of promotion is actually the same, which is to establish valuable customer relationships. It’s just that different goals and scenarios lead to slightly different promotion methods.

Establishing a brand has always been a long process. If your company wants to grow bigger, stronger and last longer, then you have no choice but to spare no effort and continue to promote it step by step. Only then can you slowly accumulate users and finally evolve from quantitative change to qualitative change.

Of course, some people will say that many Internet companies have only been developed for one or two years, and now they are still very large in scale and have a good reputation. What I want to say here is that these Internet companies have stable sources of funds and are strong in strength, so they can carry out crazy publicity and promotion. The benefit of spending money like crazy is that the promotion cycle can be greatly shortened; but no matter how short the time is, it cannot be completed in an instant. Financing also has angel rounds, ABCD rounds, and finally listing.

If you want to create a sensation in the short term (3-6 months), you must adopt an activity approach; such as planning a sensational event, or hosting a national tour, etc. However, activities have great uncertainty and even randomness, and require a large amount of manpower and financial investment, so these Internet companies will eventually have to return to the normal promotion rhythm, supplemented by event promotion.

The failure of traditional promotion methods

One thing is certain, that is, the traditional promotion method that emphasizes traffic as king and is centered on products is gradually becoming ineffective, or the output of input is getting smaller and smaller, and the efficiency is getting lower and lower. Two years ago, the cost of acquiring a high-quality user was only a few dollars. What about now? There is no upper limit, ten yuan or fifty yuan is possible. The financing that was painstakingly raised will be squandered early. The key is that the effect of spending the money may not be very good, because various promotion media now will artificially create inflated traffic, and ordinary promotion managers cannot defend against it. This is particularly obvious online. What about offline activities ? The planning cycle is long, the financial and human investment is large, and the output cannot be accurately predicted. If you don't have absolute confidence and strong planning ability or strong strength, you'd better not bother. As for such low-level methods as scanning codes to get gifts and handing out flyers on the street, don't waste your time, as the effect is not great and the conversion rate is less than 1%.

Data or data

How is the project progressing at this stage? Do you want to promote revision and iteration? How popular is a certain functional module? How was the event? All kinds of things have to be supported by data, and often many companies are prone to making mistakes based on experience. For example, when in a meeting, for a certain function, they often say "I think this and that, I think it should be like this and that, and users should feel like this and that." This kind of argument that speaks for users is often the most likely to mislead decision-making. As a result, in the absence of real and effective data support, the product goes further and further in the wrong direction.

Is it difficult to collect data? In some cases, yes, and it can be extremely cumbersome, so we are lazy by nature and are happy to ignore it. This is fatal to the product and will make a company further away from its users.

Explore new promotion possibilities

On the premise of doing a good job of data collection, we can basically obtain the real needs of users in a relatively realistic manner, and then promote product changes to adapt to user needs. The next step is promotion. As mentioned earlier, traditional promotion methods, such as targeted media, online traffic promotion, etc., have gradually become ineffective. So is there a new and faster promotion possibility? After reading these three books in the past few days, I summarized and thought that of course there is, it is scene marketing and fan marketing.

Seeing this you might think, scene, fans? That's very simple. Just create a Weibo account and a WeChat group . Then send out a few red envelopes to encourage users to forward and share, and you'll achieve your goal, right? There is certainly nothing wrong with doing this, but it is only a very superficial fan marketing. It is not too difficult for ordinary companies to achieve this, but what is its effect? Do your Weibo posts have very little interaction? No one is interested in various groups and public accounts? So what went wrong?

Strengthen the scene and weaken the product

First of all, your promotion cannot be product-centric. For example, when promoting, you cannot say how good my product is, and how effective it will be after using it. Are you familiar with this information? If this kind of information appears in your circle of friends, will you block him immediately? Just like selling clothes, if you just pose for photos of your clothes and promote how good the quality is and how novel the styles are, people will find it boring. If you ask a beautiful model to wear the clothes and pose for photos, the effect will be immediately different. Furthermore, if the model walks on a beautiful beach or sits in a literary cafe to pose for photos, the effect will be different again, because at this time your product has been embedded in the real scene. It has emotion and tonality. Users can intuitively feel this tonality and resonate with it until they have a desire to buy.

Involve users

In order to understand user needs, user data is collected. This process can be carried out in various ways. In the past, it was often dominated by companies, and users passively provided data. This can certainly collect user needs but will lead to deviations, because users themselves sometimes don’t know what they want, so deviations will naturally occur.

But what if users are allowed to participate in the entire process of product improvement? Then this deviation will be greatly reduced, and some of these full-process participants will gradually become loyal users of the product, which we often call fans.

Fan economy is a very popular concept nowadays, how does it work specifically? I often hear colleagues discussing after dinner. Yesterday, a rich man was so crazy in the live broadcast room that he gave away many rockets (one rocket was 500 yuan). It was crazy! In fact, I often smile knowingly about this kind of situation, because I know that this is just the operation of a company behind the scenes. When they want to make a certain anchor famous, or want to create a certain event, this kind of situation will happen. This situation that seems to happen in an instant is actually the result of careful planning for a month or even several months, including the deployment of water armies, the creation of public opinion on major platforms, and hype on Weibo. These are all part of this event. They occur in different time periods and eventually slowly evolve into the desired goal. This also applies to Papi Jiang, who claimed to have raised 20 million yuan some time ago. In my opinion, 20 million yuan is just a transfer from the left hand to the right hand of the capitalists, but the effect it created is indeed huge.

However, these processes all have one thing in common, that is, the majority of ordinary fans are truly involved. They can interact with the anchor at close range and even make some requests. This is an unprecedented experience that makes fans willing to pay. Although most fans will not give N rockets, a little bit will add up to a lot. As long as the fan effect is established, the benefits will naturally be considerable.

If you are planning any event, please make sure to let as many users as possible participate, impress them, and make them rush to pay!

Sharing is the best way to spread

Now, if users are willing to promote your products and share them on their social circles, the effect will naturally be much better than pure traffic exposure. If you do the above two points, some users will naturally help you share your products. But this is not enough. You must also take some measures to encourage users to share your products and maximize the sharing effect. I will not go into details about the incentives here. It is nothing more than using some material or spiritual incentives to encourage users to share and forward.

At this point, a new promotion closed loop is formed by creating a scenario, inviting users to participate, and encouraging sharing and forwarding. Any current activities should operate around this closed loop. The effect it brings is much better than ordinary traffic promotion, and may even far exceed expectations.