How to use social marketing to promote APP in the early stage of launch?

Faced with a fiercely competitive market, social marketing (WeChat, Weibo) is still a good choice in the early stages of an APP launch when there is not much funding and promotion costs are limited. Today, Chen Jin shared interesting topics and activity cases on Xiaodubi APP’s Weibo and WeChat, and told us how to screen out your precise users from a large number of users and quickly amplify your brand effect.

In the early days, there was no budget, so many CPs had a headache about how to do promotion.

Just like the question of "which came first, the chicken or the egg", the promotion of an APP and its activation downloads complement each other. After the product matures, promotion and activation will stimulate each other, bringing unexpected and wonderful effects to CPs. In the early stages of product development, especially when the barrier from 0 to 1 has not yet been crossed, how can CPs use the limited budget at hand to bring about the most effective downloads and establish a solid brand image?

Promotion does not necessarily require a large amount of money and advertising to achieve its goals. As new media, Weibo and WeChat will produce impressive promotion effects as long as they are operated properly. In the early stages, Xiaodupi planned two different routes for Weibo and WeChat, which are independent of each other but can influence each other.

The main features of Weibo are message transmission, some lightweight and easy-to-spread content and activities, and strong interactivity.

Therefore, every time the latest developments of Xiaodu products are released, they will be updated on Weibo so that users can know them first. In terms of content, Xiaodu created the #小肚皮瘦身减肥记# comic strip to enrich the content of Weibo, and continuously held activities to increase the activity of fans;

WeChat provides more in-depth content related to product positioning and is more specific.

Therefore, every time there is a new development on Xiaodupi products, it will be updated on Weibo so that users can be the first to know. In terms of content, Xiaodupi created the comic strip #小肚皮瘦身减肥记# to enrich the content of Weibo, and continuously held events to increase fan activity.

Product Positioning

The Xiaodubi APP is positioned as a lightweight exercise and weight loss APP with "health and happiness" as its main features. Most of its users are young girls born after 1995 in first-, second- and third-tier cities who want to lose weight easily and also love beauty. So we incorporated a lot of gaming elements into our products to make them lively and cute.

After clearly positioning the brand and user characteristics, Xiaodupi closely focused on user needs and launched a series of marketing and promotion methods that were quite different from its APP.

Weibo

Long before the product was launched, Xiaodupi launched the official Weibo account of "Xiaodupi APP" on Weibo and held a series of targeted marketing promotions.

The focus of Weibo operations is to maintain the users of the APP itself, and then influence their friends and potential users through word of mouth.

Based on the characteristics of Weibo, we use comics to shape the brand image to express the product, use Weibo topics to enhance and broaden the product brand definition, and combine APP functions to carry out activities to operate Weibo in three aspects.

1. Comics shape brand image

Since the establishment of Weibo, Xiaodupi has started a daily original comic series on Weibo called #小肚皮瘦身减肥记#. The themes of the comics mostly revolve around interesting things that happen in users' daily lives.

The vivid comics not only bring endless fun to users who are losing weight, but more importantly, they create a very three-dimensional image of "Little Dumb", a two-dimensional foodie who is funny, kind, cute, conceited, and occasionally sloppy. The average forwarding rate of each comic Weibo post is over 200, and the number of comments is over 70.

The topic #小肚瘦身减肥记# itself has already attracted over 3.26 million views, over 40,000 discussions and over 10,000 attentions.

With the emergence of comics, "Little Belly" is no longer just a flat two-dimensional body. It is truly integrated into the daily life of users and has become a good friend of users. In conjunction with the comic strip on Weibo, Xiaodupi also produced a lot of image peripherals, such as twelve zodiac notebooks, mobile phone cases, stickers, etc. as early prizes to be distributed to active users.

As a result, the cartoon image of "Little Belly" was successfully grafted into the overall brand image of the APP, which improved user stickiness and cultivated brand loyalty.

2. Weibo topic promotion broadens brand meaning

In order to broaden the brand meaning as a weight loss app, Xiaodupi has cooperated with many beauty and skin care products from an early stage, and elevated the brand's single purpose from "weight loss" to broader levels such as "becoming beautiful" and "life".

In addition to collaborating with various beauty brands offline, Xiaodupi also periodically conducts joint promotions with various brands online, holds Weibo topic events, and sends beauty gifts as rewards for users' active participation in Weibo activities.

User participation activities generally take the form of:

1. Retweet this Weibo and @ your friends;

2. Upload photos that meet the requirements.

The forms of brand cooperation are generally as follows:

1. Nine-grid display;

2. Brand forwarding. Both types of joint brands will make corresponding brand promotional graphics according to Xiaodupi’s event design template.

The activity topics are divided into the following festivals/hot topics and self-created topics:

1. Festivals/Hot Topics: #人圆月圆#/ #3.8女神节# (see illustration)

2. Create your own topic: #The only software away from being an internet celebrity# (see the example)

3. Combine app functions to conduct activities

The third highlight of Xiaodubi Weibo is that it often combines the APP’s own functions to carry out activities. Such activities not only boosted the popularity of Weibo, but also actively improved the user's activeness in using the APP, and further guided the user's use of the APP.

Users generally participate in activities by uploading screenshots of the APP. Most of the activities are also promoted in the form of topics.

Below are a few examples of Xiaodupi’s past Weibo activities. There are self-created topics, such as "You look good in anything when you're thin", and there are also topics combined with hot topics such as "Lu Han's birthday season", all of which attract user participation through a variety of interesting forms, rather than purely hard push.

1. Create your own topic: #Everything looks good when you are thin#

2. Combine hot topics with topics: #LuHanBirthdaySeason#｜#Everyone is a designer#

3. Upload a screenshot of the h5 game page during the specific activity time: Shake Up the Scholar Game | Bragging Game

WeChat

WeChat and Weibo operate similarly, but there are still many differences. Compared with Weibo, WeChat pays more attention to the definition of the brand's value proposition, allowing users to have a clearer positioning of WeChat public accounts. Therefore, all content on WeChat must revolve around its definition.

1. Determine your brand image

When Xiaodupi WeChat was first established, the high-quality content of Weibo was simultaneously transferred to WeChat, allowing the cute and funny image of Xiaodupi to be promoted on WeChat again. This not only deepened users' understanding of the brand's products, but also, because WeChat did not receive much attention when it was first established, Xiaodupi combined content with products to launch benefits, making users more willing to share, and inducing users to download the app through content.

2. WeChat menu featured content

The WeChat menu bar can intuitively display the entire product and WeChat content, allowing every paying user to further understand the entire company, generate interest, and directly download the product through WeChat.

The following are the settings of Xiaodupi WeChat menu bar:

1. Company and product details: Concentrate product download links, company details and main business cooperation information

2. Comic series: Comics are a very interesting part of Xiaodupi, and every user who follows it can find it directly.

3. Weibo Jump: Link Weibo and WeChat to each other, so that WeChat users can also browse Xiaodupi Weibo directly

4. H5 games increase entertainment: H5 can play a good role in promotion in the circle of friends. Xiaodupi directly displays the interesting H5 he made on WeChat

e) High-quality content aggregation: We will sort out the interesting and popular articles on WeChat to improve the user experience.

3. Hot spots/festivals, content combined promotion

In terms of content creation, Xiaodupi will combine hot news and festivals to launch special content, integrate products, and enhance publicity and promotion through welfare activities during festivals.

1. Hot events: Increase publicity through hot news and embed the characteristics of your own products into it

Because Xiaodu.com’s users tend to be female and are more interested in young and handsome celebrities, it pushed content on Lu Han’s birthday.

The content was combined to highlight the characteristics of the small belly, and on the same day, a special accessory - deer antlers - was launched to wish Lu Han a happy birthday, increasing user activity.

2. Festival activities: Through festivals, initiate welfare interactions, let users be happy to share, and have the opportunity to win prizes

WeChat and Weibo, the two major promotion channels, have become increasingly stable after more than a year of operation by Xiaodupi. The number of Weibo fans has reached 430,000+, with an average daily increase of 3,000+ fans. The number of readings of WeChat articles often exceeds 100,000+, and the cumulative number of followers is more than 1 million.

In the early days of its establishment, Xiaodupi cleverly used media promotion platforms such as Weibo and WeChat to achieve maximum marketing and promotion of its products with a limited budget, gathered a large number of users, and made the product achieve good results in the early stages, laying a good foundation for further development in the future. In fact, as long as we accurately identify our user groups and continuously send excellent content and activities to users in combination with products, we will get very good promotion results.