You can advertise without money. These tricks can cut your marketing costs by half!

Is it possible to advertise without money?

Before answering, it is important to mention:

First: When you are thinking about this question, you may already be starting a company, or at least holding an important marketing position in a growing company. So your thinking should be: How to do marketing without money, rather than advertising. The former studies how to spend the budget and get greater returns in the short and long term; while the latter only studies how to spend the budget. Has certain limitations.

Second: He may not be completely without money, he must have at least 50,000 or 100,000 yuan. But this is enough. Its effect is similar to 500,000 or 1,000,000, which is just the cost of a small activity.

So the real thinking should be: how to achieve the greatest possible marketing effect with a very small marketing budget.

By the way, classic marketing strategies such as IMC/brand positioning/brand 360 are all based on high budgets. They all have strong brand appeals and require a lot of repetition to achieve brand strategies. The communication costs are extremely high, so many cases are difficult to imitate. Here is my answer to this question (please don’t criticize me if you don’t like it). It is divided into two levels: tactical and strategic. Let’s talk about the tactical level first:

First, put marketing first and proactively design a social scenario for the product

Due to the lack of budget, brands need to know how to leverage users and make the brand a part of users’ social behavior. So we need to take the initiative to design a social scenario for the product.

Most products are designed around usage scenarios, and people generally believe that if the product is well made, users will be willing to spread the word themselves.

But I think that good products will be used by people, but they may not be willing to spread the word, let alone post it on social media. These are two different things. Unless we give users a reason to share it.

In fact, we should proactively design social scenarios into our products, just like crosstalk performers design jokes into their lines. They will handle the jokes accurately and know which words, tones, and expressions will make the audience laugh. So Guo Degang also said that crosstalk is a skill.

The same is true when designing social scenarios for products. We need to study: which users are willing to share what about our products at what times and for what reasons. The most important thing here is that we need to be clear about the potential behavioral motivations of people when using social media.

Because everyone subconsciously manages their own impression when socializing. We want everyone to see what kind of impression they have and try to manage this impression through some external materials. Impression management is magnified many times in the virtual world of social media. For example: many people are willing to share some interesting things in WeChat Moments, and they may be subconsciously managing the impression that "I am a funny person"; many people will post in WeChat Moments to criticize some big directors for making bad movies, and they may be subconsciously managing the impression that "I have good taste in movies".

The social scenarios of products need to be designed around how to cater to consumers’ self-impression management, so we need to study the impression labels of target consumers and find scenario themes that manage these impression labels.

For example: Recently we were thinking about how to make an umbrella that is more suitable for young people born in the 1990s, and we thought of the most common self-impression label: interesting. We hope that consumers will take the initiative to hang our umbrellas out with themselves. Therefore, we painted the inner layer of the umbrella into various two-dimensional sunny scenes. If consumers take selfies on a rainy day, the inside of the umbrella becomes their background, and they will be in a two-dimensional sunny scene on a rainy day. In order to enhance the label of "interesting", we designed the umbrella handle into the shape of a well-behaved two-dimensional tropical fruit, and used warm and cool colors inside and outside the umbrella to enhance the drama. It's raining outside, but it's sunny inside. This dramatic design may increase the probability of the product being shared by consumers.

In social scenarios, consumers are the protagonists and products are supporting roles, and are often used to manage consumers’ self-impressions. Designing social scenarios around consumers’ self-images will greatly increase the probability of being shared by consumers. To put it in a popular way: Have you successfully helped consumers pretend to be X? X can be equal to: interesting, tasteful, rich, cultured, having a certain personality...

Summary: The first point of low-cost marketing at the tactical level is to put marketing in front and leverage the power of users. Only by designing marketing points into products can communication become a smooth process. Of course, many people say that under the current system, marketers cannot get involved in product development and design. I think this is just a matter of time. The result of highly institutionalized corporate management may be highly homogenized products. The first step in product innovation may be to allow cross-border talent. Guo Guangchang once taught a class at Lakeside University, in which he talked about the need to allow the existence of "grayness" between departments and employees. This is probably what Qi meant.

2. Improve the awareness of marketing costs in brand design and avoid the trap of high communication costs

Some brand names need to be read several times in TVCs before they can be remembered. Some brand symbols have standard colors that are so standard that they are difficult to distinguish. Some brand stories are like chewed gum, making it difficult for consumers to remember who is who. When we design a brand, the most important dimension is marketing cost. Different brand designs determine the level of promotion costs. So what are the brand elements with low marketing costs?

1. Dramatic brand story and niche brand personality

Dramatic brand story

Too many people claim to make an ultimate product, too many people talk about disruption, too many people say they want to make our world a better place, and too many people talk about craftsmanship.

The result of the proliferation of this kind of brand story is that when we tell the same story again, consumers no longer want to listen to it, which leads to a sharp increase in communication costs. We may need to shoot several films and find various media to tell this story, which is obviously not a low-cost approach. Which brand stories are easier for consumers to understand and remember? They should be new, interesting, uncommon, etc. It can be summed up in one word: drama. Without drama, it can hardly be a story. This should be easy to understand.

Here are two dramatic brand stories: 1. Male-centered tofu: Using a tough, straight male image to sell tofu, the Japanese masculinity combined with the soft and smooth tofu creates a distinct sense of drama in Japan, a country with a male-centered background. 2 Tattooed Arms Bodyguards Against Child Abuse Bikers Association: A group of fierce-looking men with tattooed arms, wearing leather jackets and driving Harley motorcycles set up the "Bikers Association Against Child Abuse" - BACA. Their outward "bad image" and the warm and positive energy of protecting children form a dramatic effect. Dramatic brand stories are more suitable for low-cost brand marketing .

Niche brand personality

In this era of scarce attention, we call a series of brand personalities such as life, love, change, dream, and persistence the main theme brand personality. They are more suitable for the brand personality strategy of market giants. In my opinion, these brand personalities are like chewed gum, which also has extremely high communication costs and is not a low-cost brand personality idea.

We might as well try some more distinctive personality strategies such as: "silly", "warm gay", "ugly and cute", "domineering president", "weird", etc. The popular "Kumamon" and "Egg Yolk-kun" in Japan are good chestnuts.

2. Low memory cost names, symbols, and standard colors

A good name that is easy to remember

There is a misunderstanding in naming, which is to make up words, especially names that are difficult to read, incomprehensible, and require explanation of their meaning. If a name still requires explanation of its meaning, it is not a good name. It may be a bit fancy, but the cost of remembering is very high, and it is not a low-cost approach. The correct way to name your product is to associate it with a word in the consumer’s mind. It can be a person's name, a thing's name, a book's title, a story character, an adjective... (Of course, you also need to study trademark law first)

Another criterion for a good name is scalability, which means it can be shaped into a higher-level brand in the future. Because one day your brand will need to be upgraded and face higher consumer demands. From this point of view: "Xiaomi" is not a good enough name. It is difficult to target middle-class consumption and is more like an online product.

Symbols, standard colors

The standard colors of many industry giants are: red, blue, yellow and black, orange, red and black, blue and white. If you don’t have a marketing budget, you need to avoid these standard colors as much as possible. In fact, using the better single or double color schemes in all visual communications will fall into the trap of high memory cost. So I suggest using three color combinations, which will result in good recognition and slightly lower memory cost.

3. Use advertising thinking to create news, and use news thinking to create advertising

Due to lack of marketing budget, we have to rely on the media. And what does the media need? News.

So we need to turn advertising into news. The latter is most importantly newsworthy.

What is news value that can be spread? Here is a brief summary based on relevant books on journalism: resonance and cognition. First, we need to make readers empathize and resonate with us; second, we need to meet their cognitive needs, such as curiosity and interest. Of course, there are many writing skills, such as: how to go deeper to increase the reader's sense of involvement; how to tell a story to guide the integration of ideas, etc. Since I am not a professional, I won’t say much.

So, how do we make an advertisement newsworthy? First, we need to see if everything related to our product can make readers feel empathy. Second, we need to see if everything related to our product can meet readers' cognitive needs.

For example, how to make the promotion of a cartoon become news? We can first talk about the living conditions of domestic animation practitioners.

Many people don’t know that the living conditions of animation practitioners are very poor, which to a certain extent will bring strong resonance to practitioners in other creative and cultural industries. There are tens of millions of people in China's creative cultural industry, and they are all the target readers of this news entry point. Of course, we can also have more in-depth techniques, such as writing in depth about a core creative character to make the news close-up; making the living environment look worse by elaborating on some facts, and contrasting it with the perfect animation product to create a strong sense of drama. Finally, we can further describe the animation’s subject matter, stills, and character creation process in the text to satisfy some people’s cognitive curiosity. Producing a piece of news like this is a win-win situation for both the media and the brand. It can achieve advertising effects and bring attention to the media. Most media welcome this kind of news because as far as the current media situation is concerned, although there is a lot of information, there are still only a few media outlets that can write news in great depth.

It is also worth mentioning here: 1. Different media face different audiences, so we should create different topics for them. 2 News is neither soft article nor event. Soft articles are a type of advertisement with very obvious traces. They are usually clickbait titles, and soft articles require payment. The cost of event marketing is higher than advertising, and the margin for error is low, so it is easy to spend money and get nothing done. So it is difficult to start both of these without a budget.

We have discussed the tactical level, which basically involves the three aspects mentioned above: product, brand, and advertising. Next is the strategic level. Strategic success can offset all tactical failures. Regarding strategic innovation, I only recommend that you study "Blue Ocean Strategy", especially about adding, subtracting, increasing and decreasing the product value chain. By changing the value chain, you can move away from tactical competition and initiate profitable growth.

From this point of view: I think many of the brands we are familiar with that have done very well in marketing are Three Squirrels and Xiaomi. In fact, their marketing is essentially very mediocre, and they all use the simplest routines. Any 4A company in the north can do the job. The reason these brands are successful is that they were the first to change the industry value chain: Xiaomi changed the value chain of mobile phone sales channels, Three Squirrels changed the value chain of dried fruit sales channels, and they were the first to establish a unified brand. Their strategic innovation absorbed their marketing mediocrity, so whatever name they chose, whatever advertisement they made, whatever story they told, they were all successful. This had nothing to do with the essence of marketing, and it would be difficult for other brands to achieve the same success by learning from them in marketing.

Innovation in the value chain belongs to business school courses, so I won’t go into details here. I just want everyone to understand that many successful brands are not worth studying in terms of marketing. If you can innovate strategically, you can absorb all the mediocrity and failures in marketing. Therefore, "advertising" and "marketing" are always dimensionality reduction terms. Those who do not consider the overall situation are not qualified to plan for a specific area. Marketers should have a higher-level thinking in order to go further.

The above is the answer to the question of how to advertise without money. You may have discovered that most of the key points need to be laid out before product design. The product has already been fully manufactured, and thinking about branding and marketing is already very passive. Of course, brands with marketing budgets of tens of millions don’t need to consider this. Because in this era of information explosion and commodity proliferation, products, brands and advertisements have gradually merged into one thing. Correspondingly, in the future we may no longer need a pure product designer, brand planner, and advertising creative person. Market changes force practitioners' skills and thinking to change accordingly.

If you want your APP to get more real users, please click on the link: Introduction to ASO Optimization Service

This article was written by @梅花网 and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article requires the consent of Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!