Zhihu brand promotion strategy!

Brand marketing on the Internet has always been about seizing core traffic channels.

During this period, many brand managers invited me to dinner and chat.

What to talk about? Talk about channels, traffic and marketing. After talking to them more, I found that everyone was starting to feel anxious.

When the sinking market becomes the last growth point for netizens, the Internet's traffic dividend gradually disappears. The widespread use of smartphones by young people in fourth- and fifth-tier cities also means finding incremental growth in the existing stock, which is about to become the norm for brand marketing.

In the past two years, Douyin and Xiaohongshu have become the focus of brand operations. Everyone hopes to get more off-site e-commerce traffic at a lower price. However, after the platform's traffic dividends were divided up, KOL price wars, failure to return ROI on investments, and limited market budgets have also become headaches for brands.

In fact, you can look at new traffic channels besides Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Zhihu, which has hundreds of millions of monthly active users, is still a virgin land that has not been developed on a large scale by brands.

Is Zhihu worth it for brands to market on? This is the main issue I discuss in this article.

Zhihu's user base and consumer base

Although Zhihu seems niche, it has a solid user base.

Zhihu's Q1 report for 2021 shows that Zhihu currently has 36 million daily active users and 85 million monthly active users. Compared with Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Toutiao, which have data volumes of hundreds of millions, Zhihu seems a bit niche.

But another data of Zhihu is that it is opened 6.2 times and used for 70 minutes a day, which is worthy of our reflection. After the Internet transitioned to the video era, there are only a handful of text platforms with such high stickiness.

Moreover, this data only refers to user data within the Zhihu site. Zhihu content pages that are indexed by Baidu and content pages that are shared for the second time on WeChat and Weibo are not included in the statistics. The frequency of Zhihu's content consumption, Zhihu's audience, and the stickiness of Zhihu users are much higher than we imagined. Today's Zhihu is not as niche as we imagined.

Let’s talk about another set of data. In the first quarter of 2021, Zhihu’s product recommendation and sales data reached 1.5 billion GMV, and the annual estimate is to reach 10 billion. This is only the second year of the launch of Zhihu’s Good Products project.

The left hand can help brand marketing in user minds and shape the brand image, and the right hand can use the in-site traffic to direct traffic to the brand store . The importance of the Zhihu platform to the brand seems to be obvious.

Of course, platforms with traffic cannot always successfully help brands monetize. Does Zhihu’s traffic have any added value to brands?

When I attended Zhihu’s 21st anniversary business conference some time ago, Zhihu’s VP Steven mentioned this set of data:

After 85% of the merchants started cooperating with Zhihu, their search volume increased significantly within 2 weeks;

There are 5 startup brands, 50% of their traffic comes from Zhihu, and they have made it into the top 10 in vertical categories by leveraging Zhihu;

There are 9 startup brands whose main business is on Zhihu, which have successfully obtained round A financing or above;

It can be seen that the operation of brands on Zhihu is a "both investment and production" situation. The platform is currently in a period of rapid growth. As long as your content is professional and interesting enough, Zhihu can completely become your off-site traffic pool.

The consumption scenarios of Zhihu community

From the past to the present, the two most common ways for brands to reach users are: one is people looking for products, and the other is products looking for people. The former is a search algorithm, a typical example is Baidu bidding, and the latter is a recommendation algorithm, a typical example is Xiaohongshu. Both have their own marketing links on Zhihu.

People looking for goods mode:

The daily search volume of Zhihu in Q4 of 2020 was 25.7 million times. Combined with Zhihu's daily active data, the frequency of search is close to one time a day. We all know that behind the search is user demand. Whoever can solve this demand can help the user bring it back to his home. The probability of consumers who go to Zhihu with questions being influenced in their shopping decisions is very high. Especially high-order products such as mobile phones, computers, home kitchen utensils, etc.

For example, today a Zhihu user wanted a Bluetooth headset, so he searched for keywords on Zhihu and found an excellent article about Bluetooth headsets. This article provides popular science on the working principle of the product, core purchasing data, brand, product special effects, etc., helping users to become familiar with the product from 0 to 1.

The process of browsing content is usually also the process for consumers to find answers. Rather than saying that Zhihu users come to find answers with questions, it is better to say that consumers come to find products with questions. Content is like a store. Whose products can be placed on the store counter depends on brand influence and product reputation on the one hand, and on the other hand, it depends on whether the brand is willing to work hard on Zhihu.

In the model of people looking for goods, Zhihu is an e-commerce platform that standardizes the platform's gameplay and rules, while the brand and product details pages are polished jointly by creators and brands.

Goods-to-people model:

Next, let's talk about the model of goods finding people. In the past, everyone always thought that Zhihu was the [male version] of Xiaohongshu, and only the technology and digital products that men liked could be promoted. In fact, the proportion of female users on Zhihu is not low at all. At the Zhihu 2021 Business Conference, the official data on the proportion of female users was 48%.

It is a well-known marketing common sense that women are the main force among consumers. On Zhihu, there is a typical question about skin care products: [What skin care products or cosmetics have you recommended throughout your life? 】, this question has been answered 1929 times and viewed 17 million times as of today, and this is just a drop in the ocean of questions on Zhihu.

Zhihu’s high-quality content is due to its recommendation algorithm. Zhihu's recommendation algorithm is simply a voting mechanism, where readers vote together to find the best answers to questions, and traffic is distributed based on user behavior feedback. The model of "goods finding people" was already a very typical Zhihu-style content before Zhihu was commercialized.

For example, what is it like to have all your household appliances be Xiaomi? 】, this question was raised in August 2019. As of today, the Q&A has been viewed 3.21 million times, which means that 3.21 million people have been implanted with and attracted by Xiaomi Home Furnishing scenarios.

The ability to jump to third-party links to good products on Zhihu and the implementation of the Zhi+ function, combined with the model of people looking for products and products looking for people on the site, allows Zhihu's brand strategy to formally form a closed loop, and also makes Zhihu's operations a magical weapon that integrates brand and effect.

Brand moat, Zhihu’s content accumulation

Zhihu’s long tail effect:

Zhihu can be said to be the platform with the strongest long-tail effect on the Internet. For platforms like TikTok and Toutiao, even if there is popular content, after 3-7 days of dissemination, the traffic will tend to stabilize, and there will be basically no traffic coming in afterwards, and the value of the content can be said to have been squeezed out. Zhihu is different. As long as the content quality is good enough, there will be a steady influx of traffic and the possibility of secondary dissemination. Even an old question that has been asked for two years may gain exposure to new traffic again because it is on the hot list.

This creates an excellent marketing firewall: as long as you continue to produce content on Zhihu, it will become increasingly difficult for your competitors to surpass you on Zhihu.

It’s a great feature to be able to transform a one-time transaction into a long-lasting user pool . There are not many platforms on the Internet that can ensure that marketing will lead to output, but Zhihu can. Although it cannot be said that all marketing outputs can meet expectations, at least 80% of brand investments will not be spent without making a single splash.

Zhihu Double-layer SEO:

Ever since Zhihu received financing from Baidu, Zhihu content has appeared on Baidu's homepage more and more frequently. Although Baidu's influence has declined in the mobile era, the Baidu platform still has a high daily active users and user usage frequency, and is still a key platform for companies to do word-of-mouth marketing. Zhihu's high inclusion and high ranking attributes give Zhihu content a double-layer SEO effect . The superposition of on-site and off-site search traffic can also allow brands to maximize their marketing content.

In a marketing era that requires finding incremental growth from existing stock, if you lay out an important track before others, rich profits and returns are foreseeable.

Zhihu is an open channel for brands to speak out. If your competitors have invested in Zhihu, don’t hesitate, just follow suit. After all, if you don’t, the right to interpret your product and brand will be in the hands of others.

If your competitors have not made any efforts on Zhihu, and the characteristics of Zhihu's audience happen to match your product, this may be a great opportunity for you to leave your competitors behind.

After a long period of observation and analysis, more and more brands have begun to establish their presence on Zhihu. Now is a good time to enter Zhihu, as its traffic and categories are growing wildly. If we don’t do it now, it is foreseeable that even if we invest heavily in the future, we may not be able to share in this traffic feast.

Author: Xinyu

Source: Xinyu