How to carry out operational promotion activities for the purpose of attracting new customers?

This article will share with you my thoughts on attracting new customers through activities in recent years, combining cases from three aspects: the form of activities to attract new customers, techniques for conducting activities, and things to pay attention to .

At the beginning of this article, it is necessary to first define what is activity-based new customer acquisition.

Activity-based new customer acquisition is a general term for the process of using activities as a means to attract new customers. Use different forms of activities to increase new user registrations, activation rates, and attention. Attracting new customers is the first step for all new products to enter the market and it is related to the success or failure of the product.

For those who are new to operations , they may encounter a confusion: what forms of activities are there to attract new customers? We are usually exposed to a lot of activities through social media or various advertisements, but not every activity is aimed at attracting new customers.

1. Forms of attracting new customers through activities

From the perspective of time, new customer acquisition activities can be divided into short-term topic marketing , event marketing , hot spot marketing , etc.; long-term ones include fee reductions for both parties when old customers bring in new customers, free/half-price products for the first use, gift packages for new customer registration, etc. What we can intuitively feel is that when each bank issues a credit card, it will directly give gifts to the cardholder. This is also an activity strategy to stimulate users to open accounts.

Due to the different durations, what are the respective characteristics of short-term marketing and regular marketing activities ?

1.1 Short-term marketing activities vs. long-term routine activities

In fact, short-term marketing activities for attracting new customers are similar to activities aimed at brand exposure, both of which have a 2-3 day communication cycle. However, marketing activities to attract new customers will focus on starting with the product's application functions , integrating the product's own "personality" into the gimmicks and selling points of the event promotion , and use this to design and promote the event.

Among these, the more famous cases include: the series of activities such as "pk Wu Meiniang", "My Elementary School ID Photo", "My Childhood Photos" organized by the Tiantian Ptu team taking advantage of hot topics, as well as the " Plato's Character Analysis Method " activity that was popular on WeChat Moments last year.

Plato's character analysis method

The Plato personality analysis method is a short-term marketing activity with high returns. The activity takes the generation of one's own personality map as its starting point, takes advantage of the voyeurism of the social circle of acquaintances , and has zero participation threshold based on curiosity, and quickly becomes popular in the circle of friends. Compared to everyone, the picture above was flooding their screens during those days.

In just 4 days, the Plato Character Analysis Method generated over 30,000 views, 20,000 people participated in generating cards, attracted over 4 million new fans for WeChat , and added over 200,000 new fans to the product . So much so that this game was quickly blocked by WeChat. Judging from the results, Plato's personality analysis method can be regarded as a successful activity.

When we review this event today, we will find the following rules: the voyeurism of the acquaintance circle, zero threshold to participate, and curiosity-driven thinking are the keys to the success of the event.

The biggest feature of the acquaintance circle is that the user's status is presented only after careful labeling . In simple terms, it means: I am willing to listen to the information of the people I care about, and I am willing to speak to the people I want to speak to. Because we are all acquaintances, we will unconsciously hide some information that we don’t want to reveal, and optimize or emphasize some information.

The personality words presented in Plato's personality analysis method are actually all positive , just like I praised myself, but it is a good idea to praise myself through the software or algorithm in my mind.

Based on the activity execution environment, new customer acquisition can be divided into online and offline.

1.2 Online activities vs offline activities

Online activities rely on and complete user registration, activation and other aspects online. From my experience, online new user acquisition activities are the main type of activities we usually come into contact with.

Offline activities are often just a supplement to online activities. The picture below is an app/public account promotion activity . This type of activity usually occupies important areas of traffic, using small prizes as inducement to attract users to download or register. The number of users will increase rapidly in the short term , but if you don’t strike while the iron is hot to stabilize these users, the number of unfollowers will also increase rapidly.

However, places with heavy traffic have always been places that businesses must compete for, and not every merchant has the opportunity to set up stalls and hold activities in places with heavy traffic. Small "wedding photography" and "jewelry customization" studios hidden in office buildings usually use the method of old employees bringing in new employees to attract new customers.

Because the store is small and there are few people, the merchant cherishes every customer who comes to the store and uses strategies such as emotional marketing and low-price competition. Encourage old users to bring new users.

Having said so much, you may be eager to try and start planning a new customer acquisition campaign. But don’t be too impatient. It’s not too late to take action before you read the precautions for attracting new customers through activities.

2. Things to note when attracting new members through activities

2.1 Identify new user groups and understand their psychological characteristics before planning activities

Since a new customer acquisition campaign is composed of user profiling , user characteristics and psychological analysis, event process planning and material preparation, event promotion and execution, and effect monitoring, each link is closely linked to the next. Once the user portrait deviates, the activity effect may be counterproductive and the result will be half the effort with twice the results.

During the new customer acquisition phase, it is recommended to focus on users who are highly compatible with the product . Don’t be greedy and try to set all age groups/regions as your new users. Both Mobike and ofo started in Beijing and Shanghai, and only when their products were operating well in these cities were they gradually expanded to other cities.

Secondly, understanding user psychology also determines the success or failure of an event . After determining the user group, please analyze the user's psychological characteristics, list several issues that users are most concerned about, and then make creative plans based on them . Finally, see if you can use hot spot marketing. Of course, hot spot marketing is already an advanced technique. If you can use it properly, it depends on the team's creativity and luck.

2.2 Understanding human nature is the highest realm of marketing

Understanding human nature is the highest level of marketing. The highest level of a perfect event is that it does not need prizes as bait, but can stimulate users to spread the word on their own . However, this activity is based on a deep insight into user psychology.

Similarly, taking the "Plato Personality Analysis Method" as an example, we observe each personality label ourselves, and each personality label is different, which meets the definition of "personality" of the current post-90s young people. Secondly, every personality trait on the personality label, even the shortcomings, are written as positive words. This satisfies the weakness of human nature, which is the desire to show off one's perfection. Let me ask you, who doesn’t want to share something that proves their own beauty on social platforms?

Based on this case, we can see that activities with high dissemination rates, such as “showing bills” on Alipay and “ancient costume time travel” on Meipai apps, are all activities that are designed based on human nature.

2.3 User experience is king

Generally speaking, users have not yet established brand awareness of new platforms and new products, so the presentation format and participation process of new user acquisition activities must be clear and simple . When presenting the activity, try to use intuitive forms such as pictures and videos, so that users can understand what the activity is and how to participate in it in about 2 seconds ; in the activity participation process, try to let users "click" as few times as possible, or even only operate once.

We all know that when users scroll through their Weibo and WeChat feeds , each piece of information will not be noticed for more than two seconds. If users still don’t know what you want to say after this time, you will be replaced by the next message. Therefore, when setting up activities, we must think from the perspective of user experience.

However, this does not mean that we do not set thresholds for all our activities, and we treat different activities differently.

During graduation season in July last year, our team organized a “Most Beautiful Alma Mater” selection activity, aiming to increase the number of app downloads. The activity is done using an h5 page, and users can vote without following it. However, after the voting is completed, the system will pop up a pop-up window prompting "Download the app to double your votes." We ended up getting more than double the downloads we expected. This is how we cleverly design activities in a way that does not disgust users but still achieves our goals.

Having said so much, everything needs to be implemented. Let’s summarize the next excellent planning skills for attracting new customers .

3. General techniques for attracting new customers through activities

3.1 Leverage hot spots to improve activity effectiveness

 In my opinion, hot spots can be divided into two aspects. On the one hand, there are fixed hot spots based on solar terms , such as New Year's Day, Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, graduation and other fixed days. When we plan annual events, we can sort out the fixed days throughout the year, select a few festivals that are most relevant to our products, and plan several large-scale events.

On the other hand, it is to take advantage of social hot spots . This kind of activity planning must be "fast, accurate and ruthless" and must take advantage of the sudden hot spot within two days of the outbreak of the hot spot. In this way, the brand can be spread with the help of the hot spot's dissemination cycle. This kind of leveraging requires high levels of creativity and adaptability from planners, and also tests a team's short-term planning creativity and execution capabilities.

3.2 Divert traffic from other channels , focusing on conquering core channels.

Generally speaking, users gather on multiple channels such as WeChat, Weibo, and vertical apps. If we have identified a core channel to attract new users, other channels can provide synchronous traffic diversion assistance. For example, if we decide to attract new users through the app, we can launch the same activity in all user channels of the new media matrix, but the requirements for participating in the activity will mention that "participation in the activity is only valid on the app." In this way, by utilizing the activity participation rules, users from other channels can be “directed” here.

At the beginning of last year, our app underwent a comprehensive revamp. At that time, in order to promote the app, we changed the form of participation in all online activities to "participation on the app is effective" within two months. In a short period of time, the number of app downloads increased dramatically. There is no dedicated promotion campaign set up for the app and there is no funding. Our APP download volume ranks second in Shaanxi media and information category.

3.3 Establish activity communities to increase user stickiness

Compared with old users, new users have lower user loyalty. Therefore, users attracted after an event are very likely to have a high user churn rate. In response to this situation, we need to increase new users' product familiarity and increase stickiness. The best way to increase user stickiness is through the community . Therefore, it is best for us to leave an official group number during the implementation of the activity. After new users join the group, customer service will answer their questions and resolve their doubts, increasing their favorability towards the product.