Mainstream promotion channels, the truth that startup companies must know!

The content shared some time ago was about how to do low-cost or even zero-investment promotion, including brand keyword optimization, knowledge search marketing , QQ group promotion and entrepreneurial media reporting.

Many friends who have read the article told me that although these methods seem to be zero-investment, the time invested in operations is not cheap in terms of labor costs. If you need to outsource the work, you still have to spend money to do it. As long as the returns per unit of input and output are reasonable, you should invest.

First of all, I strongly agree with the idea that if you can pay a professional to do it, you shouldn’t spend time doing it yourself. Frankly speaking, I would refuse to do knowledge search marketing again, but there are three truths that must be faced for startups:

First, many people joined startups before the product was launched, so we had to find something to enrich ourselves from the time we joined the company to the launch. At this time, doing knowledge search marketing, adding QQ groups, and doing SEO optimization of brand keywords became meaningful things to do, because they can help subsequent promotions achieve better results.

Second, even if the product is launched, most founders do not know how to measure the input and output of advertising before the service is commercialized. Moreover, promoting the product without ensuring the quality of service will only increase the harm to users.

Third, operating free promotion is a process of in-depth understanding of the product and the industry. At the same time, if you want to defeat the anti-advertising system of each platform, you have to learn how to polish the details of your work. If the free ones can be done, then the paid ones will be more likely to be done.

Let me reiterate that I strongly recommend that everyone use advertising to increase the volume of your product. After all, it is difficult for you to go from 0 to 1 through free means, let alone achieve profitability from 1 to N. Here I would like to recommend a channel that has helped a well-known cross-border shopping sharing community grow from 0 to 1 in 2013. As I said before, there are many people who understand this channel, but not many can really do it well. If you approach it with the mindset of sticking to knowledge search marketing and handle every detail well, the probability of you being able to master it will be much greater.

If your operations work involves product promotion, then in this process you will come into contact with many channels that are billed by CPT, CPA, CPS, CPC, CPM, and CPE. It is recommended that startups purchase pay-per-performance channels for promotion. First, the output of these channels is directly linked to target data. Second, these channels can adjust the settings of delivery conditions based on real-time promotion conditions.

Baidu bidding promotion, Tencent Guangdiantong , and Sina Weibo Fantong, which are well-known to everyone, are all pay-per-performance channels. According to their backend adjustment parameters, Sina Weibo Fantong has the highest accuracy, Tencent Guangdiantong is second, and Baidu bidding promotion ranks last (excluding DSP channels such as UFIDA)

(Channel comparison table)

I haven’t tried Tencent’s Guangdiantong, but according to internal rumors, the new version’s advertising conditions can be set precisely to the business district. Due to the limitations on word count and ad creativity, the mobile version of Baidu's bidding app was not very effective after trying it for a while. When we first came into contact with Weibo Fans Channel, we also tried to launch it with a disdainful attitude of "Weibo has low activity, who would use it?". As a result, the data proved that it is a channel that can efficiently bring high-quality users to the product. Here we mainly introduce the advertising style and delivery techniques of FansTong in detail, and attach a specific case study of the promotion of mobile Internet products in FansTong .

Weibo's "Fanstong" is a marketing product that uses Weibo's massive user base to deliver mobile Internet products to fans and fans of designated accounts. It delivers information accurately to target groups based on user attributes and social relationships. At the same time, the creative microblogs in the "Fanstong" advertising group also have all the functions of ordinary microblogs. Users can very naturally forward, comment, collect, follow, and click on them (these are all spontaneous operations of users, that is, the interaction between the advertising microblog and the user, interaction/ exposure = interaction rate)

1. Advertising style on the web page.

FansTong ads will be displayed in the target user's information flow in the form of normal Weibo, usually in the first or third position. As a straight man, I often see ads selling cosmetics. I feel helpless about their advertising capabilities.

(Fanstong advertising style on PC)

2. Advertising style on mobile devices.

The promotion of Fanstong on mobile terminals is divided into application promotion and Weibo promotion . Startup companies are recommended to use Weibo promotion for app promotion. After all, when the brand does not have an advantage, it still has to rely on high-quality content creativity to impress target users.

(Application promotion style on mobile terminal)

(Weibo promotion style on mobile devices)

3. Fans Pass Billing Method

There are two billing methods. CPM is charged according to the number of times the Weibo is exposed in the user's information flow; CPE is charged according to the effective interaction of the Weibo in the user's information flow (interaction includes: forwarding, clicking on links, following, collecting, and liking). On the second day of advertising, the Fanstong backend will automatically generate an advertising effectiveness report for you, where you can see your CPM or CPE cost from the previous day.

4. How to activate Fans Pass

Log in to your Weibo account via PC and activate Fan Pass in "Management Center- Marketing Promotion -Advertising Center". The qualification requirements for opening an account vary from industry to industry. What I know is that it is not easy for an Internet finance P2P startup to open one.

Finally, it’s time to give you some encouragement. I’d like to tell you about a promotion case called Beauty Artifact (an app that helps girls find plastic surgery hospitals). They have proved through their actions that Sina Weibo Fans Promotion can be the most cost-effective channel for Apps to acquire users. It only costs more than 1,000 yuan, the number of activations is around 2,000, and a single iOS activation costs a few cents.

The same platform, with different channel operation and management, will have different results. Just looking at the Fanstong channel, many friends who have used it said that the activation cost of a single product of theirs ranges from a few yuan to hundreds of yuan. Take a look at the background data of Meili Shenqi, the cost per interaction and the interaction rate. Those who have used Fanstong can compare their data with yours. Isn’t it scary? The trick lies in the detailed operation and continuous adjustment of materials! !

Those who work in channels should all know that the longer a product is promoted in a certain channel, the higher the marginal cost of acquiring users in that channel will be. This is good news for early product operations, because you are in the promotion stage and can acquire high-quality users from the Weibo channel at a low cost. I have had the honor of working with Sina Fans Promotion. Although it was not as awesome as the case shared above, I was able to achieve a single interaction cost of less than 1 yuan. Next, let’s talk about the advertising placement techniques of Fanstong, including some very detailed points to pay attention to.

1. Should I do Weibo promotion or app promotion?

Application promotion is simple to operate. You only need to submit the application link (app url) you want to promote, and Weibo's reviewers will review the product link you provided (mainly reviewing the product name and product description). Another drawback of app promotion is that there is little information displayed on the Weibo timeline. Only the first 7 characters of the product name are displayed, and the promotional copy can only contain 10 characters.

Weibo promotion is a form that startups can give priority to. It requires operators to create a creative Weibo to show to people who may be interested, and then fill in the advertising plan of the advertising group step by step. Each advertising group is composed of multiple Weibo creatives and advertising plans. At any time, there is only one top Weibo creative under an advertising group. This Weibo creative is shared by all plans under the group. The promotion schedule of Weibo creatives can be set according to different promotion needs.

Weibo strictly reviews advertisers' materials in accordance with the Advertising Law. When fans write product names and Weibo creatives, the word "most" and celebrity names should not appear to prevent the review from failing.

When promoting, learn to combine Weibo promotion with application promotion! On non-holidays, you can choose to promote mobile products on Weibo. As we all know, businesses will run promotional ads during holidays to drive up the CPM price of Weibo promotion. Startups can choose app promotion to make up for the weakness of blog promotion during holidays, because local businesses generally do not have mobile apps.

2. How to place accurate advertisements

1) Fan relationship settings

When setting up an advertising plan, you want to accurately display creative Weibo ads in the target user's information. As an operational promotion, do you already have the answers to the following 3 questions?

1) Do you know who the target audience of your product is? (Age, gender, city of concentration)

2) What are the target users interested in? (Education, animation, finance, automobiles ...)

3) Which Weibo accounts are they following? (That is, what kind of account fans can see the ads we place).

If you figure out your target users when doing knowledge search marketing and QQ group promotion in the early stages, you will probably be able to come up with the answer faster here. Taking Job Resume as an example, their target users are college students who have job-seeking needs, so they can specify Sina accounts of job-seeking service websites such as "Dajie.com" and "Emergency Graduates", as well as fans of corporate recruitment accounts such as "Baidu Campus Recruitment " and "360 Campus Recruitment" to see the advertisements.

(Specify the fan advertising settings of the account)

It is suggested that operators should take the establishment of fan relationships very seriously. It is the difficulty and the most important point of the Fantong launch plan, which directly affects the writing of subsequent promotional Weibo (I like to select people first and then write Weibo). Marketers can search for keywords that users may search for on Weibo search tools to see related users that appear, or they can conduct user surveys to understand the accounts that target users are keen to follow.

(Recommended related users based on keyword search on Weibo)

2) Crowd attribute settings

It is beneficial to set the crowd attributes in the delivery plan. The setting of interests and hobbies can further accurately deliver advertisements to target users based on their interests. For products with obvious user segmentation, delivery conditions can also be restricted in terms of mobile terminals, age, gender, and region.

3) Set up bidding

(Delivery bid settings)

If you are new to Fanstong products and have not found the delivery rhythm, it is recommended that you start with the CPM bidding method and adjust the bidding strategy from low to high, and optimize the price according to the delivery report in the second article until you find the balance between download volume and customer acquisition unit price.

In addition, it should be noted that the bid can only be modified once a day, the second modified price can only take effect in the early morning of the next day (the next day), and the actual cost of blog post exposure per thousand times is lower than the bid (Fanstong is a bidding model, and it is reasonable for startup companies to bid less than 10 yuan).

3. Carefully edit creative microblogs

The relationship between creative Weibo and delivery plan is one-to-many, that is, one creative Weibo advertisement can correspond to one delivery plan. However, in order to increase the forwarding rate of the promotion, startup companies try to choose a one-to-one relationship in the advertising group and write Weibo startup advertisements according to the specified delivery plan.

According to past experience, creative Weibo with interrogative and concrete content has the best conversion effect. For example, if Jobs chooses the official recruitment Weibo account of an Internet company, the fans can see the creative Weibo advertisement. Then, when writing a blog post, it can be like this:

"Want to know what kind of resumes Internet companies like to see? Want to know the key points of resumes for product operations positions? How to write a resume when applying for a product manager position but have no relevant experience? Let Job Resume tell you the answer, and Internet experts will personally guide your resume. Click **** to get the necessary tools for resumes."

Pictures can have a greater impact than text. If you want to achieve a high interaction rate, you must spend more time and effort on the production of accompanying pictures. Please try to choose screenshots within the product to increase the credibility of Weibo advertising.

It is recommended that marketing staff should frequently change promotional copywriting to use different user pain points to stimulate downloads from fans of the same designated account. Generally, the life cycle of a blog post is 1-2 days. When it is found that the effect is not good (low interaction rate), change it immediately and re-edit the creative Weibo.

Let me remind you again that every blog post needs to be reviewed by the editors of Sina Weibo Fans Channel. Do you know why the creative Weibo post about Steve Jobs’ resume cannot simply say “What kind of resumes do the human resources of Baidu, 360, and Tencent like to see”? Because writing about these famous companies will not pass the editorial review (even pictures cannot have copyright names, or celebrity portraits and names)!

Then, please remember to submit your modified ad group before 5 o'clock every day, because the review editor will go off work at 6 o'clock, otherwise the product will miss the great opportunity to increase its volume late.

4. Provide creative Weibo interaction guidance

Once the Weibo post passes the review, it can be put on the air. In order to increase the interaction rate and click-through rate of the product download link, the operator can first find employees within the company to make water army-style comments in the creative Weibo, including tagging some friends to guide netizens who actually see the ad to tag those people.

In addition, it is necessary to provide good guidance in the Apple App Store. Both the screenshots of the product and the comments below the product are very important. After all, there is still a conversion rate when clicking on the link to download (try to increase this conversion rate). Users who are still hesitating whether to download should see the user's "word of mouth".

It is recommended to do a good job in the interaction of creative Weibo. Generally speaking, good creative Weibo will cause netizens to ask questions and interact after the release of advertisements. Doing a good job of interaction can greatly increase the interaction rate and reduce the interaction cost and the cost per thousand exposures.

5. Choose the right time to launch

Under normal circumstances, there will be no restrictions on the delivery time of advertisements, but those who want to continuously optimize the interaction rate can choose a good delivery time according to the characteristics of the target users of the product. The click-to-activation conversion rate is different in different time periods. The most common time is 7-9 in the morning, when users are on the subway and using 2G/3G networks. They will hesitate to download after clicking, resulting in a low activation rate. It is different from 21:00 to 24:00 in the evening (7:00-12:00 is the peak download period). Most users use WIFI at home and will not consider traffic issues, so the conversion rate will be much higher.

In addition to choosing the daily advertising delivery time period, you also need to grasp the key delivery nodes. Here we take Job's Resume as an example. The period from October to the end of December every year is the peak period for campus recruitment and the key point when college students urgently need resumes. Job's Resume can choose this time to launch new products or to hit the charts. The effect of the launch will definitely be better than that from January to April (don't launch during statutory holidays because everyone goes out to play and who would bother to write a resume?). Therefore, in the final analysis, promotion personnel still need to fully understand the user characteristics of the product.

It is suggested that start-up companies can invest heavily during the Spring Festival. Generally, the new media promotion personnel of companies go home for the New Year. Before the New Year, we can prepare a few more investment plans and creative advertisements for the editor to review and approve. The conversion rate during the Spring Festival is high (people go to Weibo when they have nothing to do during the Spring Festival), and the interaction cost is also very low (we controlled the interaction cost within 0.5 during the Spring Festival, which is not worse than the beauty artifact)

If you want to improve your ranking on the list through Fans Pass, you have to combine it with the changing time period of Apple's list (usually delayed by two hours), and know when to vigorously promote Fans Pass to get on the list and bring in natural downloads (starting at 6 pm, you can raise the price and give it a big push, and then lower it after 12 pm. The hateful Fans Pass can only be adjusted once a day). At 8 o'clock, it will be in the top few places on the category list. With 200 downloads per hour, it is estimated that it will be able to reach the top 20 of the sub-list. The competition on different lists is different. Let yourself stay on the list for a longer time, with more exposure and activation. Mastering this rule can save a lot of costs.

The launch of Sina Weibo Fans Channel requires patience. In the early stages, you can spend a small amount of money to have a promotion specialist conduct tests to get a feel for it. It’s okay even if the cost of a single interaction is high. As long as you learn to make adjustments based on the data on interaction effects and download volume, it’s a good start. Who doesn’t go through the process of going from a novice to an expert?

Here we recommend the ultimate fan promotion killer trick! If you are a company that recognizes the Fans Channel, you can open several corporate Weibo accounts and simultaneously run Fans Channel advertising. For novices, they can quickly test reasonable prices, while experienced people can quickly test out promotion units with high cost-effectiveness in acquiring customers, and then put all the promotion budget for the day into this tested promotion unit to acquire more users with the same cost investment.

Finally, before the A round, you can find a full-time employee to manage the fan channel, including data management from delivery to clicks to download activation and retention. After all, channels that cost money need to be managed more carefully. It is not the case that you can just set up a delivery plan and wait for users to flock in. When you are still worried about the lack of fans for your product account, you should use Fanstong. It can bring a good effect in increasing fans, which can be regarded as another profit point.

Not everything written here is correct, welcome to add to it!