Why do you always fail in promotion?

After three months of closed development, the App was found to be difficult to promote . You have tried several approaches, all with poor results, and team morale is getting worse and worse. So you start changing your positioning and direction, and eventually everyone's enthusiasm is completely exhausted, and the App comes to an end.

Seeing how effective NetEase’s subway package was, you also applied for a large budget to package a subway station. Every copy was carefully designed and every picture was carefully polished, but in the end you found that it only brought a few hundred activations.

You have heard that many products were initially promoted by posting on forums, so you also registered a few small accounts to post on Tieba , Douban , and Zhihu. After a busy day, I woke up the next morning and found that all the posts on Tieba had been deleted, there were only two replies on Douban, one of which was an advertisement, and there were 0 likes on Zhihu.

We often make mistakes in operations , but we make more and more severe mistakes in promotion. Every failure may result in a waste of real money, missed market windows, and a decline in team morale.

The reasons for failure in promotion are often the following three:

1. Getting in too late
2. Choosing the wrong direction
3. Underestimating the difficulty

Below, we will analyze them one by one.

1. Starting too late

When will the promotion be done?

Most people’s answer is after the product is launched. After all, without a product, what is there to promote?

Let me give you an example from my own life because I have suffered a lot in this regard.

In 2015, my company was preparing to develop a treasure hunting product. Since there are already many treasure hunting products on the market, the demand has been fully verified, and the company has some promotional resources, everyone feels that it will not be a big problem to do it.

After the product was launched, we discovered that the CAC was far beyond our expectations, but the LTV was much lower than expected. It was like a bottomless pit. We were losing money no matter what we did, so we had to give up in the end.

So, when should we promote? Promotion should begin at the stage of product conception.

The purpose of promotion at this stage is verification . Verify product solutions, CAC, LTV, user retention rate and recommendation intention in the fastest way. The more dimensions of verification and the earlier the verification, the fewer detours you will take and the less resources you will waste.

For example, we could have applied for an identity as a promotion channel for other treasure-hunting products, used our own resources to direct some traffic, and estimated the levels of CAC and LTV.

Products that are painstakingly launched but fail as soon as they are launched often skip the verification stage. This is what is called starting too late.

2. Choosing the wrong direction

Promotion can be divided into three categories in general: channels , content, and invitations .

• Channel refers to obtaining exposure and new additions through purchasing traffic ;
• Content refers to the placement of soft articles on UGC platforms;
• Invitation refers to acquiring new users through sharing by old users.

Channel: Boss, let’s find the most effective channel for attracting new customers! 》 has been discussed thoroughly enough. Invitation has become a necessary function of every App, and there are also a lot of strategies for content promotion.

But the key is, which direction do you want to focus on?

To clarify this question, we must first think about another question: what changes have occurred in users from being completely unfamiliar to experiencing the product?

If you have ever tried to recommend a product to your friends, you will find that there are often only two reasons why they refuse: they don’t understand and they don’t dare to use it.

These two reasons actually correspond to two major thresholds, the cognitive threshold and the trust threshold .

From complete unfamiliarity to experiencing the product, users have crossed these two major thresholds.

Grouping the two thresholds according to the dimensional model, the products are divided into four categories. The promotion methods corresponding to these four types of products are completely different.

1. Low trust × high awareness = content promotion

Products such as Mobike and Duoduo have created new categories and are typical of those with low trust thresholds and high cognition thresholds.

For this type of product, content is the best way to acquire customers. Through content, clearly explain the product model, functions and vision.

As the first shared bicycle company in the industry, ordinary users often don’t know how to use Mobike . Therefore, Mobike carried out large-scale brand promotion, talking about products, value, and feelings. Let everyone understand the shared bicycle product.

Similar to Mobike, the Duode App pioneered the payment of knowledge . Despite having a huge base of Luoyou, Luo Zhenyu still repeatedly educates users' minds through videos, public speeches, industry summits, event marketing and other means.

2. High trust × low cognition = sharing and promotion

Financial products and paid products such as Jiedaibao , Meituan , and JD Finance have typical high trust thresholds and low cognition thresholds.

The best way to acquire customers for this type of product is to share it . A low cognitive threshold means a low sharing threshold, and users don’t have to explain what the product is about. Friends’ endorsement solves the problem of high trust threshold.

Jiedaibao realized early on that it would be difficult for users to trust a financial product through large-scale exposure. Therefore, it adopts a three-level distribution system to rapidly expand its scale by using users to attract users. In 2014, there were Jiedaibao promotion teams all over the country, offering free dolls, desk lamps, and even cash when registering and binding a card. In this way, Jiedaibao quickly completed the initial accumulation of user scale.

3. Low trust × low threshold = channel promotion

Tool products such as NetEase News , Toutiao , Moji Weather , and most free products have low trust thresholds and low cognition thresholds. This means that they only need to do a lot of exposure to gain users.

If you look closely, you’ll find that products that are frequently advertised in the subway usually fall into this category.

4. High trust × high cognition = exhibition promotion

If you find that your to C product is in this quadrant, it is probably too early and you are more likely to become a martyr .

This field is mostly composed of B2B products, which generally expand their user base through exhibitions, offline promotions, etc.

5. Product thresholds are variable

The quadrant in which a product is located is not static. With the changes in the external environment, the upgrade of operating methods, and the changes in product functions, the product's cognitive threshold and trust threshold are also constantly changing.

For example, JD Finance and Meituan in the original D area.

Financial products such as JD Finance have cleverly solved the trust issue in one way - by giving users trial money . Users do not have to invest their own money, they can intuitively feel the investment returns through the trial money, and the returns can be withdrawn. In this way, JD.com moved itself to the C quadrant and could carry out large-scale delivery through channels.

In the early days, after discovering that a large number of registered users had no purchasing behavior, Meituan also adopted the experience voucher strategy and launched activities such as eating a McDonald's Big Mac for 1 cent . Successfully migrated to the C quadrant.

Let me answer a question by the way: Why are personal WeChat public accounts becoming more and more valuable in the past two years?

Because among all channels, almost only personal WeChat public accounts can solve the problems of high cognitive thresholds and high trust thresholds.

3. Underestimating the Difficulty

The problem of underestimating the difficulty is particularly serious in the direction of content promotion. Many people think that if they just post something randomly, users will come in droves, but in the end they find that the effect is very poor.

This is because every community has its own explicit and implicit rules . Mastering these rules requires a lot of time and trial and error.

Here I will give an example of my own attempt to operate a Zhihu account.

This attempt took about 3 weeks and a total of about 10 hours.

When doing content promotion, the most important thing is to understand the rules of UGC products. I first studied Zhihu's distribution mechanism . Zhihu's information flow mainly includes three categories:

1. Focus on new answers to questions
2. Pay attention to the answers that users like and collect
3. Focus on new answers with the fastest increase in likes in the field

My core goal is to get precise exposure, the larger the better. The plan came naturally.

The abacus made a clacking sound.

I quickly chose a question: What is the difference between advanced operations and ordinary operations?

I call this the master problem. The main question has 25,000 followers and has a high Baidu search weight.

I posted my article and shared the answers with my fans and friends, getting likes from them one by one.

After that, I selected 8 questions in one go and posted them one by one in the articles of the official account. Links to other questions are placed below each answer.

I checked in the evening and found that the main question had 200 likes, while the other questions had 0 likes.

A week later, the main question slowly grew to 229 likes. The answers to other questions also received 10-50 likes.

The trend is consistent with judgment, but the growth rate is slower than expected.

So I turned to other possibilities. By introducing the dimensional model, I divided Zhihu copywriting into four categories based on the number of followers and relevance.

Category A has already been tried. Category C has no value, leaving only categories B and D.

At this time, many people will work on quadrant B. I will answer whatever question is popular, regardless of whether it is related to my field.

Remember the precise laws in the three laws of channels we mentioned in the previous article? The more precise the channels, the lower the CAC.

So don't do category B.

The reason is simple:

• I can’t even get high praise in operations, what are the chances of getting it in other fields?
• Even if I get it, if the fans I attract are not operators, how much value can they have to me?

It seems that I can only try Category D: potential issue, and timely occupation .

The logic is sound. Find a question with potential and take the lead when there is no professional answer. As the exposure of the question increases, people will see it and say, "Wow, what you said is relatively professional. Give it a thumbs up!"

So I found new operations-related questions, sorted them by time, and flipped through them page by page. It took about 5 hours and I answered 11 questions one after another.

After a week, the most likes among these questions were 14, and the rest basically had 0 or 1 like.

It takes a lot of time to find questions and edit answers.

In the end, I determined that the current method with the highest input-output ratio is to paste the new article into the high-voted answer .

This is the data as of today. Slower than expected, but still gaining momentum. Every time I just need to paste my articles into Zhihu.

Through this example, you should have discovered that the threshold for content promotion is actually very high.

If you really want to promote through content, you need at least 0.5-1 person, 2-3 weeks to familiarize yourself with the rules, and choose a UGC platform to delve into . And be prepared for a protracted war. Don't imagine that one piece of content will get hundreds or thousands of registrations. The possibility of this happening is only slightly greater than that of an H5 becoming a hit.

IV. Conclusion

There are three reasons for failure in promotion:

1. Getting in too late
2. Choosing the wrong direction
3. Underestimating the difficulty

There are three corresponding solutions:

1. Start promoting the product during the product planning period

You want to verify as many dimensions as possible through promotion. Since the product has not yet been produced at this stage, you can adopt a more flexible approach to solve the problem. You can promote competing products, make a simple demo, or manually support it through operations. The key is to be early, so that you can avoid detours.

2. Analyze product characteristics and choose promotion direction

You need to combine the characteristics of your own products, determine the cognitive threshold and trust threshold, and choose the most appropriate direction to invest.

• Channel promotion, fast growth, large and stable volume. Suitable for products with low trust threshold and low cognitive threshold
• Content promotion starts slowly but the volume is small and stable. Suitable for products with low trust threshold and high cognition threshold
• The scale of sharing is slow to grow and depends on the size of the household. Suitable for products with high trust threshold and low cognition threshold
• Through operational means and product upgrades, the product can lower a certain threshold and complete the migration of quadrants.

3. Pay full attention and provide sufficient resources

If you do content promotion, you must fully estimate the difficulty and prepare sufficient manpower, material resources and patience. Whether it is Weibo, WeChat public accounts, Zhihu, or Douban, the operation is difficult. It is recommended to focus on one platform rather than multiple platforms.