This article is shared by Zhang Zihao, Operations Director of Matchbox, on SmallTalkCN: [Case Study] Topic Social Networking - Matchbox Our product is called Matchbox, which is an interest-based social network based on topics. The picture above is a pattern of our topics. You can see that many of the topics are actually very strange. I am also very worried that more than 10% of the users are born after 2000. They talk about what you think about when you poop and what kind of life experience Acup is. Of course, there are some more literary ones, telling a rainy day story in the style of Wong Kar-wai. It’s really tiring to speak in Wong Kar-wai’s style. This is roughly the situation. I hope everyone can download it if they are interested, or we can chat more about it if you have cooperation in Shanghai. Don’t recommend this too much, or you’ll be kicked out. Personalized weight loss plan - Lianlian This is something that a company I founded was working on, an app that provides personalized weight loss plans. The new version ranked first in its category within three days of its launch. Then it received the official recommendation on the homepage of the app store three times, or should be the fourth time, including the recommended app of the year, etc. I made this PPT yesterday, and someone called yesterday to say that you have been recommended again, but it is no longer us, and I am no longer there. But this is still a good experience and I can share it with you. Part 1: How did I get lucky? Let's get to the point, this is serious. How did we do it at the beginning? Maybe everyone is here for this thing, let me analyze it step by step for you. To be honest, as a college student, I had nothing at that time. What should I do? 1. Mobilize people around you to share The first thing that came to my mind was to mobilize everyone around me to share. At that time, a strict order was issued in the company that everyone had to find ten. These ten people must help us find nine, and these nine people must help us find eight. At that time, the company had a little over ten people, about thirteen or fourteen people. Through this method, we did gain our first batch of users. But to be honest, this group of users are not particularly pure and have no demand for our products. Some of them have eight-pack abs, so do they still need to use our products? However, it is a better way to mobilize people around you to do publicity. 2. "Undercover" QQ group, explosive promotion The second thing we did was to infiltrate a number of groups, including those for girls' beauty, body care, and casual chatting. We opened a lot of QQ numbers and joined every group. There was a limit on the number of groups we could join per day. We also hired interns to chat, and we had to get familiar with the group owners. Otherwise, if we were kicked out for posting advertisements, our efforts would be in vain. Why do this? We found that no matter what kind of operation or promotion activity we do, the budget is actually very limited. It is impossible to cover the entire marketing cost with your own money. More costs are spent between users, and they introduce it to others. So, although QQ has been around for many years, the form of QQ groups on the Internet is still maintained very well and they are very active. Especially for our main categories, weight loss and fitness, I find that every day quite a lot of people upload photos of their weight and take photos of their body shape today to see how it differs from thirty days ago. They encourage and communicate with each other every day. I think this is a very good opportunity. Then we also gained a considerable number of users through this event, our first batch of users. We planted nearly 200 groups in advance, and then when we thought about our product, after the first batch of users gave us feedback verifying that this version had no major problems, we started the second step and detonated the "bomb" in the group. We promoted it in those 200 groups, especially the groups that fit our category, to spread the news and recommend this app. 3. Some small tricks Then our third step is to use some small tricks, which may be an uncommon way of promotion. When we launched version 1.0, the product was so bad that I didn’t even want to show it to my dad, it was so bad. what to do? I wanted to take it off the shelves at that time, but then I thought it’s not possible. I had a long ideological struggle and decided that it’s not possible. After all, I have been doing it for so long, I can’t take it off the shelves. what to do? We changed to charging a fee. At that time, the download price was less than 1 yuan, so we set the price at 6 yuan, but no one downloaded it anyway. At this time, I thought about the issue of free apps, especially three, two, or even five or six years ago, when there were not so many apps downloaded or free apps, and many apps were paid. So iOS either required jailbreaking or sharing an account. At that time, the limited-time free traffic was quite large, and quite a lot of apps, accounts or websites would recommend limited-time free traffic. We are making a tool application, and the next version will definitely not be so ugly. So I will adjust it to a paid version and then make it free. Is it possible? It turned out to be successful. After I changed it to free, I gave it limited-time free access to all apps or websites that provided this service. I asked friends to recommend them, got to know their operators, and contacted them to ask them to find a way to promote our app because it took us a month to go from the previous version to the next one, which also complied with the limited-time version policy, even though no one would buy the original version. As a result, this thing was very successful, and helped us to obtain traffic from almost all limited-time free websites, etc., and in very good positions, including some big Weibo accounts, some of which now cost 10,000 or 20,000 to push one post, or about 10,000, and then it exploded all of a sudden. So after we changed our 1.1 version into a readable version, I did these three things at once. Of course, the preparation period was relatively long to accomplish such a thing. But this alone has not helped me reach a million users, because after all, losing weight, to be honest, is an anti-human thing. Many users may not really like this, and it is not in line with Chinese culture. Of course, this is something I only understood afterwards, and only after being scolded by many investors. What did we do later? The second step is to mix channels. Step 2: “Channel is king” Because first of all, I have something to say, which is how awesome my app is, and it has achieved this scale just a few days after it was launched. I looked for various channels, tried to find friends to promote it, sent emails, and tried every possible way. When I went to Beijing, I would definitely visit everyone I could and tell them how awesome my product was and whether they could promote it. We did find some people and received some support in terms of recommendations and traffic. Among them, I should thank 360. Although 360’s reputation is not very good now, I will not criticize it anymore. The Dandelion Award given to 360 has provided us with nearly one million worth of traffic support. We are very grateful for it. But I would also like to share a piece of experience with you here. When you communicate with them, you must understand what the channel operators value. Various channels are definitely not startups. Everyone is just an employee. It’s not just an employee. Everyone is trying to make a living. What are their KPIs? Distribution volume. They are responsible for the traffic when they push this thing up. I give you the best position on the homepage. The normal download volume is 100,000. If your app can only get 30,000 downloads, then the KPI they require will not be reached. How can you make him feel that this thing can give him a good effect and meet his KPI? This requires some small tricks such as packaging and PR of your products. This includes when everyone, especially new companies, write some initial emails, and how you can amplify even a small iteration of a feature. It's really important to feel like you've spent three months working on a huge new version. Of course, it’s not good to over-exaggerate, but I strongly recommend that you put more effort into this. The specific method of communicating with channels is very methodological. Of course, once you have a stable and long-term cooperation, and he feels that what you say is indeed true, your subsequent cooperation will be more pleasant. Step 3: APP Store official recommendation After receiving a lot of feedback on version 1.2 and the subsequent version 1.3, we are thinking about how to get more traffic? At that time, we had hundreds of thousands of activated users, and we were thinking about how to grow bigger? What should we do because there is a wolf behind us, a new fitness app has emerged, it has raised more money than us and has better products? At that time, we did something that required a lot of perseverance, which was to push the product back and do it again. At that time, we had only one goal and one belief, which was to get recommended on the official homepage of the Apple store. How to get it? I don’t know if anyone here has done special research on this issue? We did research on it at the time and spent more than a week or nearly two weeks investigating this matter. We spent a long time looking at all the apps that were recommended on the official homepage of the Apple store to see what they were like, including asking many industry experts. Later we came up with the following conclusions and would like to share them with you. 1. Correct classification First of all, if you want to be recommended by the Apple store, you must be in the correct category. If you are a social product, it will be very difficult to get on the platform, and the Apple store doesn’t like this. What will be favored by the Apple Store? Tools, reading, newspapers and magazines, music, etc. are things that have tool attributes and that people use. They need your software and may spend a lot of time using them every day. These categories are easily recommended. 2. Sufficient sense of design Another thing to note is the sense of design. According to the Apple store, the version that was recommended to us at the beginning still had many bugs, and even in our opinion there were many logical inconsistencies, but the final product still had some sense of design. If you look at the products currently promoted on the Apple Store, you will find that most of them attach great importance to design. One thing we did at that time was that our entire tone and color adopted the style of iOS8, which was iOS7 at the time. Even my product design style was similar to its design style. Then we used some things that no one else had used, such as 3D little people. Our original version of the action demonstration was a 2D flat fat man displayed over there, which had never been done before. They are all real people, handsome guys, muscular men or beautiful women with great figures. We went even deeper in the version that was recommended later. We did 3D modeling, rendering, and made 3D figures that looked outstanding, special, and had a sense of design. We really put a lot of thought into it. 3. Take advantage of new features The third point is to make use of new features, that is, if it has some new things, why are there some Apple Watches? Why are some big companies following up on these new features? They are also actively approaching the requirements of Apple Store to recommend them. That is, I will cooperate with you, and Dad will push it. That's all the meaning. So I suggest that I share with you some of my own experience. What are my thoughts? 1. The founding team should not always think about making big news The founding team should not always think about making big news. This is actually what I am saying to the boss. Don’t always think about making big news. If your product is not well made, you insist on relying on operational means to promote it. It’s not that there are no cases, but it is tiring and the efficiency will be low. There are indeed many apps. I have seen that they run a public account or some other method through operations and then direct traffic to it. But everyone should think about this calmly. Smart phones are now popular and even rotten. So many good apps have become rotten. When all good things have been used over and over again, the product is the most important thing if you can truly attract users to continue to produce for you and use your product. Similarly, I also advise many of my colleagues in operations not to limit themselves to the position of "I am an operations person, I am responsible for making the entire product usable by people", but they should spend more of their time, especially in the early stages, communicating with product colleagues and telling them how to do better. Because compared to them, operations colleagues are closer to users, and many times we need to make suggestions that they should be heard, and we should even participate in the product design process. This is the situation. 2. Really understand your product positioning, market and users I have talked about the last two points together. You need to really understand your product positioning, market and users. I will talk about this part in detail later. Including myself now. Another theory I am looking into is the market focus theory and leverage effect, and how to use these things to achieve better results. I would also like to talk about the second point. In fact, I found that many startup teams, including my friends, who started their own businesses, later asked me why their products could not be sold or why they did not do well. I said that when you were making this product, you didn’t think clearly about what you were going to do. You only found the direction afterwards. This is very important. But what is the value of our operations staff? Even if the product's positioning, market or users are unclear, is it possible for us to help it find that positioning under the current possible conditions, or repackage it into a positioning, instead of telling the product that we can't do it? That may be our value now. Market Focus Theory What is market focus theory? I can't recite it myself, but in the understanding of many people, it means that I should concentrate the heavy money or important resources or most of the help into a market with a large number of accurate users and all the good things, rather than dispersing them into many markets. It’s like why sales personnel start from one place, then move to the next city, and then the next city, instead of trying to conquer all places at the same time. This is the concept. I hope everyone will think about one thing, including thinking about their own products. What exactly is a real market? Are you working on a market with twenty people or a market with one person in twenty markets? Example: Let’s think about this example. I saw a case before, an O2O project, which was an O2O service that provided door-to-door service to help people repair computers, clean computers, etc. But when I heard about this thing, I felt it was unreliable. Why? It’s just that his promotion method is unreliable. He promotes the products door to door. Why? I found that he did not take one point into consideration when he was doing this market, that is, in this market you are doing, will users refer to each other's opinions before deciding to consume or adopt your product. Because when you go to repair a computer in some high-end communities, what would you actually do? You will check on the Internet, you will ask colleagues and friends who are familiar with this thing, but you will not knock on your neighbor’s door and ask how to repair the computer. No way? Definitely not. But when you are doing housework and an auntie comes to your house, you will ask. But if he wants to promote this case, I suggest that he focus on offices in the early stage. Similarly, in a vertical market like offices, who would you ask first if your computer breaks down? Ask the developers who write the code, or ask your product manager. I don’t know why product managers generally seem to be able to repair computers. This is a thought, that is, what you are actually doing is a decentralized market. You think it is very concentrated but it is actually a decentralized market, or you should be working on a very concentrated market. This theory is a marketing theory that is very suitable for traditional industries, but it is related to the Internet and app development in many aspects. Benefits of scenario-based positioning The second question is what are the benefits of scenario-based positioning. Just now I repeatedly emphasized the need to clearly understand your own positioning and identify your own market. What does that mean? I have made a lot of mistakes and thought a lot. Later I figured out one thing. In fact, when we package or position a product, we don’t divide it according to the population or category. I have seen quite a few products, including their BPs, which all say that our target group is women born after 1990 who have high-end consumption. I've heard this so many times. I wonder if any of you describe your users in this way. But that's okay, you are talking about users, and yes, this may be their standard behavior, their characteristics, which is not wrong, but it cannot represent the positioning of your product. The positioning of the product should take place in a scenario. For example, many products will talk about their functions and the needs they solve to kill users’ boring time. Even our matchbox once said so, so I am not afraid of making a fool of myself. There are so many ways to kill boring time. I can read newspapers, watch movies, chat on QQ, and do anything. So if I kill time and watch movies, am I your competitor iQiyi or Youku? He invests more in one day than I do in a year. How do I do it? Therefore, it is an extremely important topic to determine the specific scenarios in which your product will be used. I will give two more examples temporarily because I am afraid that you may not be thinking clearly enough. First example: For example, the same diamond, when sold as a diamond, is actually the same as a stone, but I believe that in the eyes of many female compatriots, they are different. In my eyes, they are the same and I cannot tell the difference. The same diamond may have the same origin and craftsmanship, but its marketing positioning can be completely different. What's the meaning? It is the ring you will use when proposing, and it is also a scene. I once saw a very good case where a female compatriot bought one for herself through her own efforts after getting married. This is another positioning. The same diamond can be marketed in two ways. The user groups they create, your entire packaging design, including your marketing methods, copywriting selection, etc., will be completely different. You can think about this case. Similarly, what’s the good thing about scenario-based marketing? If you can’t explain it clearly, and you can’t use scenario-based marketing to describe your product, maybe your entire company doesn’t know how to do it. Second example: For example, if you are selling simple meals, such as Chinese fast food, and you don’t have a good positioning, your chef may not know how to prepare these dishes. Even the research department doesn’t know which direction to go, and your operations colleagues don’t know how to make this thing better. So how do we get this done in a more detailed framework, and draw this scene in a scene. You may have three, four, or five scenarios. It’s all fine. However, it is extremely important to have a corresponding set of logic behind each scenario, rather than simply describing what kind of people your users are. Especially with Internet products nowadays, you can just focus on one scenario, but if you expand it, you can make the marketing positioning very clear. Market Focus on Three Elements Back to the market focusing on this thing, what is good about it, I summarized it myself: First, there must be users and this demand . Second, there is indeed such a scenario. One is the scenario and the other is the user. One has people and the other has needs. Third: When they consume and make decisions, they can influence each other. This is why when I was promoting Matchbox, I took the campus as the most core point and made sure to use ground-based marketing to influence them. Why? This is because the campus is a relatively closed environment, and what they use is easily influenced by others. When they are preparing to play something, there is a very high possibility that they will influence each other. And in line with the previous picture, when your market penetration rate reaches a critical point in a market, its natural growth is no longer entirely driven by you, but is promoted among users. This is an extremely important idea. I use it myself and I would like to share it with you. Leverage Effect Then the next part is the leverage effect, that is, the marketing cost mentioned just now is not completely equal to the marketing expenses of the marketing department. Let’s recall the previous picture. In a market of 100 people, when you break through 20 or 30 people, it is not equal to your full marketing expenses. Many times we are trying to achieve big results with small efforts. How can we achieve big results with small efforts? What we are doing is winning those twenty people over and letting them influence the rest on their own. Once I influence the most basic people in the market, this matter will automatically be magnified. Why I influence a key group, and the effect will be very good if they share it. Because they are larger communication nodes than ordinary people and can influence more people. The key is how to reach this point as soon as possible, rather than organizing a wave of activities and targeting Guangdiantong, and then only being able to influence a certain number of people. It is not like that. Then the responsibility of operations and marketing is more to inspire and mobilize users, and spread information to the most accurate and earliest seed users, or the target group of this marketing, or the small group of target users. Before the critical point, we are just spreading our information, and after the critical point, our users are helping us promote it. I think this is an extremely important idea for the Internet, and it is also one of the reasons why many Internet products can run so fast. 1. Opinion reference effect In addition, I think there are two effects that can be utilized. One is the opinion reference effect, which is easy to understand, that is, word of mouth. When you are going to carry out a marketing campaign, if you say something wrong, when a user is making a decision, he will listen to other people's opinions and he will search. This is how we can make good use of word-of-mouth communication. 2. Display Effect When you use a product, for example, I am playing a game, and the person next to me sees me and asks, what are you playing? This is another effect. If you grasp these two points, you can achieve twice the result with half the effort. FaceU is a very good example. One of the key points it grasps is that it makes itself very pure, just a fun entertainment software. I am not optimistic about its social attributes at all, but it does a very good job in the filter part. I have seen countless little girls taking selfies and then suddenly saying, "There's something very interesting recently, let's take a picture of it." I think it captures that. Online, people will post these pictures on Weibo and WeChat Moments, which also serves to showcase their reputation. How do we make good use of these two effects? I gave some examples. 1. Break expectations and provide novel experiences First you have to break expectations and provide a novel experience. From a traditional perspective, if your courier knocks on your door and he is just an ordinary middle-aged man, what are your expectations? What do you expect from couriers? Usually they are middle-aged people, but if a beautiful woman comes, it will be different. If a handsome guy with eight-pack abs comes, and he’s a foreigner, it’s different. Like when we were doing exercise before, all the people doing fitness were using muscles, muscles everywhere, and I almost dizzy looking at all that meat. I used a little fat man myself, an animated little fat man, you haven't seen it, it's very strange. It's strange that there are such products in the fitness category. In addition, there is Kaikou, which is a product I like very much. It is a product that allows everyone to debate and discuss a topic together, but what did everyone think of when they originally thought of this thing? It may be in a format similar to Tieba, but it is more displayed in a graphical form, or the decibel level is used to show your voice and how many people agree with your point of view. Using such intuitive things is different from the original expectation. 2. Create a knowledge gap The second is to create a knowledge gap. In fact, to put it bluntly, it is to give users a reason to show off their superiority. I know this thing, that’s awesome. If you don’t know it, haha, are you stupid? Like Xiaomi in the beginning, I think part of it was due to this. Of course, Xiaomi has too many methods. I attribute one point to this, that is, this group of Xiaomi enthusiasts went out and told people that this thing is cost-effective. Have you seen a domestic mobile phone like this? I can record this thing and make it as good as I can. Create a knowledge gap. I think the product "Zaixing" is very special. There will be a lot of people saying, "I made a date with a great girl and a great expert through this app today. He told me something very cool and I must try it." It means that your product is cool enough and it can drag users to a position, a commanding height, where they can radiate their influence to people around them, and their desire to share will be extremely strong. I guess there are quite a few people sharing this on WeChat Moments, right? 3. Use low-frequency topics to post high-frequency topics The third is to use low-frequency topics to post high-frequency topics, or use low-calorie topics to post high-calorie topics. What's the meaning? Here I would like to cite the example of a young boy selling powder, Zhang Tianyi. Zhang Tianyi is someone I admire very much. I think part of his success lies in the fact that opening a restaurant or running the catering industry is actually not much to talk about, but he posted about topics like college students' entrepreneurship. He posted about the topic of entrepreneurship. In fact, everyone who opens a restaurant is starting a business, right? They all start small businesses and start their own businesses. Everyone starts with small topics and then posts on big topics. 4. Blindly following and following the crowd The fourth is blind obedience. When you put together the previous points, you will find that everything is under your control. Let me give you two examples. One is that you are walking on the road and you see someone looking up. Will you look up? I think he has cervical spondylosis. But if there is a group of people lifting in front of you, you will definitely take a step back first and then look up. In fact, many Internet users today, including ourselves, are like this most of the time. When you see something being flooded in your circle of friends, you will think about it even if you don’t want to see it. Does something like AlphaGo really affect the lives of many people? No, but talking about this, talking about machine learning and deep algorithms, it’s so awesome, and when the whole screen is talking about this, you have to talk about it. So when I get back to my case specifically, what I did was like when I was working on a new wave of marketing plans, which will be posted next week. When I entered the campus, I not only did things like door-to-door and roadshows, but I also found a lot of classmates and shared the things they had seen, the very dirty things they had seen. Once his circle of friends is scanned like this, he has no choice but to come in. The value of communities and KOLs After talking about the previous things, let’s take this out. The value of community and KOL is how you can use the power of KOL to influence the people at the top. I strongly recommend that when you are preheating an early product, you must find ways to contact KOLs in your industry or those who can guide other people's consumption decisions, and find ways to get them to pay for it, or even invite them to use the product before it goes online. You must try every possible way to do this. And let me share this with everyone, don’t be afraid that he will ignore you. It’s normal if he ignores you. If he pays attention to you, you will gain something. How to find these people? Mobilize all the resources around you, everything you can think of. Because in today's society, the six degrees of connection may only be reduced to three degrees, so it's very easy. Don't care whether you can find him or whether you will fail. Don't care about these things. Nowadays, Internet entrepreneurship is no longer a purely intellectual-intensive industry. Sometimes it is a resource-intensive industry. You can control a lot of things in your hands, you have a great relationship with it, and it is exclusive on your platform. Your chances of success will be much greater than before. I firmly believe that people in the market can help each other. I have many big brothers who have guided me along the way, and I would consult them when I encounter many undecided issues. The fourth point I want to make is that when I don’t understand something or can’t find some people, I will post on WeChat Moments to find people who may be able to help me. Of course, if I can help him even if he doesn’t ask, I will help him. This is the most basic function of working in the workplace. Some Tips 1. Keep users and focus on retention Many of the things I just said are actually very much about attracting new customers, but in my opinion, defense is more important than offense. My own Lianlian product attracted a huge number of users at once, but to be honest, they all left in the end. In my opinion, for early products, the earliest, seed-level products, attracting new customers is more important than retaining them. But when it reaches the so-called angel level or is a little more mature, retention will be more important than attracting new users. How to make them use it more comfortably, use operational means to mobilize them to participate in activities, how to evaluate some key attributes or give them some benefits, add some new functions, and mobilize them may be far more important than attracting new users. And if we serve them well, they may become very important nodes for spreading the word. Although today we are talking about attracting new customers, I personally think that defense is more important than offense. 2. Team Management In addition, if you are a team head, or a company boss, or even I believe there may be a founder here, I think everyone should not focus all their attention on doing this thing, or think of a lot of new ideas every day, or anything like that. Instead, I suggest that no matter what, you should spend some time on expanding or updating your team. This does not mean that I must recruit people, but many times, it is important to share with everyone and organize everyone to participate in such activities. The organizer adds eggs, for example, it is very important to participate in such activities to improve everyone. This includes spending a lot of time on recruitment. A team head can completely avoid using HR resources, but instead build a stronger team through the power of colleagues or offline. Because I suffered a lot from this, I hired a few colleagues who had just graduated, and their personalities might not be suitable, but I was reluctant to fire them. In the end, I found that I was doing everything and I didn't have the time to take the company to a higher level. So this is also some advice for everyone. 3. Tool selection The third point is the choice of tools. I think that if you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. There are many tools now, including tools for operators. Everyone must be good at using them. For example, when monitoring apps, even if you don’t like to use them, you must develop a habit of using them as much as possible. I believe there are many other articles that will recommend some good collaboration tools, good management tools, or good operation tools, including tools such as Zhuge for new media operations. You must choose tools that are easy to use and suitable for you. This will really get you twice the result with half the effort. Otherwise, if you just use Excel or Word, your efficiency will be lower and it will be more difficult. 4. Sharing and communication The last point is that I would like to call on all my colleagues in operations to learn from each other, organize more activities, or share sessions, offline gatherings, and then utilize each other's strength, because now in Internet entrepreneurship, it is not a fight between one company at all. Everyone is pulling a group of people here and a group of people there to fight each other. It is all group fights. It is like this. So that’s about it, and I don’t know whether it’s long or short. The above are some of my own sharing and crosstalk. Thank you everyone, thank you. If you need ASO optimization service, please click this link: Introduction to ASO optimization service APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile APP promotion platform in China. Welcome to follow our official WeChat public account: appganhuo [Scan the top APP promotion WeChat QR code to get more dry goods and explosive materials] |
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