How did Keep use the "mine-laying plan" to cold start after accumulating 6 million users in 6 months?

Many products are in the early stages of promotion

They all want to use KOL resources.

But where do KOL resources come from?

Why not change your mindset?

How about turning your company’s employees into KOLs?

Many products rely too much on the power of channels in the early stages of promotion, but this will make you stare at the trends of various channels all day long, instead of adjusting the product direction by identifying natural growth trends and feedback.

The fitness tool Keep has accumulated 6 million users six months after its launch. How did they do it through content marketing and a systematic "mine-laying plan"? Let’s find out about it with my aunt today.

Seek official recommendations from Apple App Store

No one says that they will definitely be recommended by the Apple Store, but there are indeed some areas that you can work on, such as correct product classification (reading, newspapers, magazines, music, etc. with tool attributes) to be more likely to be recommended, and sufficient design sense to be more likely to get official recognition, such as highlighting the new features of the product.

During the product design stage of Keep, the founder of Keep sought advice from design experts and designed the product to be more youthful. For example, he abandoned the traditional color scheme and adopted a relatively noble and elegant purple, so that others would think that exercise is fashionable rather than traditional. At the same time, product designers collectively studied the "iOS 8 Interaction Guidelines" and tried to find the point that users like most.

The final product was officially recommended by Apple App Store two weeks after it was launched.

New media layout in advance, accumulating seed users

Keep was launched in February 2015, but its official WeChat account was established in October 2014. During this period, you can accumulate seed users for the product in advance and adjust the content design of Keep according to the situation.

From the operation of keep’s WeChat account, you can discover some early operation strategies.

In the first three months, the content of the WeChat account was mainly "Celebrity Fitness Stories", "General Fitness Tutorials" and "Life Hotspots". Therefore, in the WeChat account of this stage, in addition to being able to see "What APP do foreigners use to make appointments? 》《Everyone shoots the game and it’s dead, how can I find good subtitles? 》"This information will enhance your Interstellar viewing experience 100 times".

After a period of exploration and understanding of user feedback, Keep streamlined the content, clarified the three directions of the content, and enhanced the social attributes of the new media to cooperate with the cold start of the product -

1. More professional fitness tutorials;

2. Celebrity fitness stories;

3. User interactive Q&A.

Involve users in internal testing - Chief Tester's activities

At the beginning, Keep's product was very imperfect. At this time, it could leverage the power of the user side to allow users to participate in the iteration of the product. So Keep launched an activity called "Chief Tester", and found an internal testing team of about 4,000 people through Weibo, WeChat, and communities , allowing many people to download the internal testing version to experience it.

After using the product, users found it very good and spontaneously recommended it to more friends. The four to five thousand users accumulated during this internal test are very important for the launch, promotion and rapid explosion of the Keep product.

Mine-laying plan: content marketing, from finding KOL to becoming KOL

Many products want to leverage KOL resources in the early stages of promotion, but where do KOL resources come from?

Why not change your thinking and turn your company’s employees into KOLs?

In the early stage of keep's promotion, the operation team launched an action plan code-named "Mine-laying Plan". One month before the product was launched, five people were active in various QQ groups, WeChat groups , BBS, Tieba, and Douban groups. In these nearly 100 vertical communities and social groups, they trained regular readers by serializing high-quality fitness experience posts for a long time, and through long-term communication and exchanges with users, they became the users who spoke the most and were the most active, and eventually became opinion leaders. Even the founder himself often lurks in fitness-themed QQ groups.

First, and most directly, for tool products, KOLs can easily attract high attention from new users by publishing valuable and informative experience posts. More importantly, KOLs will guide users to shift their focus from content to products in the later stages.

When keep was officially launched, the operators detonated these posts at the same time. Almost overnight, they used the KOL voice they had accumulated to inform the readers that the previous high-quality fitness experience sharing content was maintained through a mobile tool called Keep.

At this time, the operation staff carefully releases the product download link, recommends everyone to try it, and converts users into APP users. It is said that "for a QQ group of 2,000 people, sending a link can bring more than 100 downloads on average."

The result of the concentrated explosion is that the entire fitness circle began to talk about Keep, and the daily downloads of Keep on the iOS channel reached more than 40,000.