How to use content marketing to achieve 15 million APP exposures and 200,000 downloads in 1 day?

During the APP promotion process, marketers usually spend a lot of time and energy on building app stores, finding pre-installation channels, optimizing search engines, going to advertising platforms, and exchanging app traffic. These are very basic and meticulous tasks, and they require a lot of time and research to achieve perfection and the best results with the least amount of money.

This article shares another way - how to combine your own products and unique content to carry out content marketing through new media channels to drive brand communication and downloads of the APP.

The APP we promote, "He Du Shu", is an e-book city that brings together 400,000 genuine e-books. Combining the characteristics of the product and using the content provided by the product (that is, high-quality books) to drive the promotion of the APP is a more practical and efficient approach.

Take the content marketing "Three minutes to watch "The Journey of Flower"" planned by our team as an example. We used an interesting short video to summarize the plot of the book "The Journey of Flower" in three minutes, and prompted "read the original novel to 'and'". On June 24, the article was read 13.3 million times on Sina Weibo in one day, ranking third on Sina Weibo's hot topics of the day and appearing on the right side of the Weibo homepage; the article's WeChat text and picture messages were read over 2 million times. The total number of exposures exceeded 15 million, bringing in 200,000 APP downloads within two days, and ranked third on the Apple Store's hot search list.

The page was read 13.3 million times on Sina Weibo in one day, ranking third on Sina's hot topics that day:

The following six points are valuable summaries and insights from this content marketing process:

1. Content planning: follow hot topics and be innovative

It is best for marketing activities to keep up with current hot topics. This summer, the TV series "The Journey of Flower" was broadcast. The touching storyline and the leading actors' appearance and acting skills attracted a number of fans, making it a very good hot spot.

But event planning cannot just follow hot topics, otherwise it will be drowned in countless discussions related to hot topics and will not have any brand recognition. It is necessary to reprocess based on hot topics and refine your own selling points. Any communication channel needs to be based on high-quality content and be interesting and fun to attract the spread of netizens. Sentences like "The apprentice was killed by the master, then lived again, then was killed again, then lived again, and finally the two lived a happy life" in the short video caused netizens to compete to complain.

2. Communication channels: accumulate popularity and find big Vs

After posting the short video on the team's Sina Weibo account, an internal message was sent to the big account "Selected Cold Jokes" to introduce the video in the form of sharing. After the big account forwarded it, the number of reposts soon exceeded 20,000. At the same time, various friends and resources were mobilized to contact big accounts to forward the video. Many big accounts such as "I Can't Hold It Anymore", "Movie Factory", and "We Love to Tell Jokes" forwarded the video, which led to fans forwarding and sharing the video. Within five hours, the topic quickly climbed to the third place on the topic list and the topic column on the right side of the Weibo homepage, with more than 13 million views on the same day.

After WeChat public accounts such as "Cold Rabbit" and "Selected Cold Jokes" forwarded the picture and text messages, the number of readings of each picture and text message exceeded 100,000 in less than an hour, and the total number of readings reached more than 2 million within 2 days.

In this regard, it mainly depends on the accumulation of popularity in daily life. When you have nothing to do, contact the big account and ask if you can post some interesting content. In fact, big accounts also need interesting content. If the content is appropriate and not very marketing in nature, they are willing to help publish it. Make more friends in the same circle, and you can exchange resources with each other and help each other in areas where you have resources.

It ranked third on the Apple Store's hot search list that day:

3. Brand placement: strong placement and confidence

During the promotion of an app, marketing personnel are generally worried that brand implantation will make netizens feel that the marketing intention is too strong and affect dissemination, so they are hesitant or shy when implanting the brand. The team also had this concern when launching the marketing, but experience has shown that as long as valuable information and products are provided to users, users will not reject brand implantation. Users are not averse to advertisements; what they are averse to are advertisements that lack style and substance . The team’s initial idea was to “take you through watching “The Journey of Flower” in three minutes”, but in reality it only took two minutes to play the text and video. After discussion, the planning team simply put a message on the screen at the last minute: “It was finished in just two minutes! We decided to play music at will! While listening to the music: you can directly click the upper right corner to close it, or scan the QR code to download it.” This small detail also increased the number of downloads.

Many netizens left comments like “I actually finished listening to the whole music…” or @ their friends and left comments like “There’s an easter egg in the last minute.” As long as the content is good, netizens are still quite kind.

4. Hands-on execution: Ability to implement and confidence

It took the planning team only three days from coming up with the idea to completing the finished product. Without any foundation in art, they worked overtime to draw. They didn’t know how to make videos, so they learned it by following tutorials on the Internet. The copywriting was the marketing team’s strong point, so of course they wrote it themselves. As for the dubbing, each team member recorded the voices themselves one by one, and after taking turns recording in Wenzhou dialect, Hunan dialect, Sichuan dialect, and Henan dialect, they selected the final version.

There is a process from the idea to its final implementation. Although the effect may be better if it is handed over to professional artists and video producers, the time and effect will be compromised due to waiting for scheduling and understanding the intention, and the popularity may pass while you wait. During the implementation process, team members need to work together to turn ideas into finished products and have hands-on skills.

Before launching the product, we sought advice from a friend in a professional advertising company. Our friend was not optimistic about the “rustic” line drawings and felt that they would not be popular. He kindly suggested that we re-edit the TV drama clips to create content in the style of “Huai Xiu Bang” or “Gu A Mo”. The team adhered to the original style based on their strong confidence in their work, because this is what they imagined the work to be like when planning it. This is the so-called "original intention". In the process of sticking to your original intention, you need to have a little "blind" confidence in your work to a greater or lesser extent.

5. Fan Economy: Become a fan and interact

Every team member has a copy of the book "Sense of Participation: Xiaomi's Internal Manual on Word-of-Mouth Marketing". Everyone has read it at least three times. Each time they read it, they gain further insights and try to include interactions with fans in the practice of marketing activities. Therefore, the team’s QQ number was left in an inconspicuous place in the video. In just one day, more than 200 QQ numbers applied to be friends. Some fans even expressed their desire to join our non-staff planning team, hoping to plan interesting content together. This is the greatest recognition for the team and also helps accumulate loyal fans.

6. In-depth understanding: focus on products and strong connections

The last point is also very important. When doing marketing planning for app promotion, you must have a deep understanding of your products and features, and carefully analyze where your target users are. Marketing activities should be strongly related to your products. When discussing creative ideas, the team also designed offline cosplay activities and user self-propagation activities similar to the Ice Bucket Challenge, but ultimately felt that they were not relevant enough and it would be better to return to the essence of the product and directly introduce the contents of the book to drive users to use the APP.

Practice has also proved that this effect is better. In the process of driving products through content, it is also necessary to do a good job of segmenting users. When recommending products to white-collar workers and petty-bourgeois users, it is better to start with books such as "From 0 to 1" and Keigo Higashino's "Dream Flower"; when recommending products to young users and migrant workers, it is better to start with online literature such as "Perfect World" and "Douluo Dalu". It is difficult for a product to appeal to all users. For example, the promotion of "The Journey of Flower" this time mainly targets film and television drama fans. Continuously driving user growth through content is also the reason why "He Du Shu" rarely does brand advertising on TV and subways, but has 40 million monthly active users.

The contents of each APP are different, but in the final analysis, they are all closely related to people’s daily life of food, clothing, housing and transportation. Selecting the content recommendations that users need most and returning to the essence of the product may be the most important task besides finding traffic on the Internet.

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