Use PM’s mindset to do marketing, with an amazing conversion rate of 22.3%!

For a long time, marketing seems to be a taboo word in China. Marketing promotion is nothing more than exaggerating packaging, hyping up things, and selling feelings - many people think so, because there are indeed some people who are eager for quick success and instant benefits who do so. These people are missing out on a lot of fun. So I wanted to make things a little more fun by sharing a real-life example from my own work. If I take my own entrepreneurial project as an example, it will always be suspected of being self-promotion, so the case I want to talk about is a story of "internal entrepreneurship" in a large company.

In the first half of this year, I was still working at Dianping.com, responsible for its Marketing. From April to June, Dianping launched a brand promotion project to enter the third and fourth tier markets in China - internal product advertising, office LCD advertising, building frame advertising, bus waiting room advertising, cinema pre-film advertising, ground promotion, PC online promotion, mobile online promotion, social media marketing - spanning nine channels and covering more than 20 third and fourth tier cities across the country.

Due to the length of the article and the confidentiality agreements of large companies, what I will talk about today is just a small part of this huge project: ground promotion, commonly known as ground promotion. To be more precise, it is a smaller link in the small link of ground promotion - distributing flyers. As for handing out flyers, those who have done it know that the conversion rate is usually around 0.3% to 0.5%. That is to say, if you distribute 10,000 flyers with various discounted products printed on them, about 30-50 people will scan the QR code on them and download your APP client. If something like a "10-yuan coupon" is attached, the conversion rate will be higher, around 0.8%-1.0%.

And in this big project, what is the conversion rate of our flyers? 22.3%. We delivered a 22.3% conversion rate. That is 20-40 times the conversion rate of traditional flyers. So the question is – how did the Flyers do it?

1. Background

Goal: To get tens of thousands of users in third- and fourth-tier cities to use Dianping. Because users in third- and fourth-tier cities have almost no demand for the "review" function, the product that can enter these markets is group buying. The project goal then turned into acquiring new group buying users.

Strategy: A big promotion with the theme of group buying hot items for 5 yuan (it sounds boring, but that’s where the fun lies). Go on group buying and you can watch a movie for 5 yuan, or buy 20 yuan worth of bread and desserts for 5 yuan. Movie tickets and bread coupons are the best-selling products on group buying. The promotion will be carried out in conjunction with all online and offline products, free and paid channels, for a period of two months, covering 25 cities.

So if you do the math, it's not difficult to figure out that this is a promotion project with an investment of tens of millions. So the question is, when you know almost nothing about the new market, how do you plan to ensure that such a large amount of money is spent effectively?

2. Planning is the product

Many people think that promotion planning is a business plan that includes objectives, strategies, key challenges, etc. But I would like to use the rest of the article to make a point: a plan is a product. A product leader needs to connect with at least five people responsible for (1) user communication, (2) front-end development, (3) back-end development, (4) UI design, and (5) data analysis. It requires fully understanding and exploring user needs, and coordinating the interests among internal resources, leading them, and making good products.

As the leader of this case project, I need to connect with:

(1) Product: The product team needs to understand the promotional logic and integrate it with existing APP and PC products.
(2) Technology - Technology needs to arrange development time and discuss technical limitations with the project leader together with product;
(3) Sales: The regional group buying teams in 25 cities need to cooperate with this project and negotiate corresponding preferential group buying orders;
(4) Integrity - preventing cheating in large-scale promotions;
(5) Design - let the design team clarify all graphic design requirements involved in the entire campaign, and continuously review and iterate;
(6) BI - Let the data analysis team track the efficiency of different preferential products, different cities, and different media, and gain valuable practical experience from it;
(7) Public relations: pre-event and follow-up coverage by traditional news media;
(8) Social Media Marketing - Finalize the promotion plan on social media with the social media marketing team and integrate it with the company's own social media channels. The key is to coordinate the rhythm of each week during the two-month campaign;
(9) Ground promotion - design the most effective ground promotion method for the ground promotion team and ensure that it can be fully implemented when it reaches the 25 city regional teams;
(10) Online promotion: In conjunction with the promotion project, purchase online traffic from more than 10 channels on PC and APP, as well as related ROI (return on investment) analysis;
(11-14) Four traditional advertising media - office LCD, building frames, bus waiting halls, and pre-movie advertisements in movie theaters. Among the thousands of advertising spots in 25 cities, which spots should be placed in which cities, at which time, and with which content?

Compared with products, planning has a shorter development cycle, higher market uncertainty, and involves more links - but in fact, these are all problems that product thinking is good at solving. When you look at it from the perspective of "making a good product", you will realize that coordinating and managing these 14 links are only means (Means) to make a good product, not the ends (Ends). You must firmly grasp the line that has the greatest impact on the entire plan (product) amid the interference of these links.

This line is the core of product thinking - user scenarios.

3. Mining User Scenarios

A common problem among new product developers is that they like to pile cool features into their products. A common problem among many people doing marketing is that they like to pile up FABs (Marketing term: Features, Advantages, Benefits). For example, if you look at an e-commerce flyer with a conversion rate of 0.5%, you will usually find a bunch of discounts printed on it, such as: "20% off on refrigerators!" "50% off on movies!" "Only during the National Day Golden Week!" "Buy 100 and get 50 free!", and then there are a dozen discounted products printed on it.

Such designs are either creativity-driven or resource-driven. In other words, it starts from the "resources" that the designer has, adding whatever creativity there is and piling up whatever FAB there is. After it is launched on the market, the question is - why don't consumers buy it? If you ask a product manager to analyze this problem, the answer is very simple: because you are not starting from user needs. Someone argued that if I offer discounts, isn’t that targeting user needs?

no. Because user needs are different in different scenarios, his demand for a 20-yuan coupon when checking out at a supermarket is different from his demand for the same 20-yuan coupon when he sees your framed ad in the elevator. Therefore, everyone who makes products knows a term called "user scenario", which refers to the most common scenario in which users use the product. Only by focusing on this scenario can we create good and sticky products.

Now that you know that planning is product, let’s go back to the small step of “distributing flyers”. The question you need to think about is: “In what scenarios do users usually get my flyers?” Then you will find that the scenarios in which users get flyers need to be broken down into three sub-scenarios: (1) the scenario of choosing to accept the flyer (2) the scenario of reading the content on the flyer (3) the scenario of taking action based on the content on the flyer.

Among these three scenarios, optimizing the first scenario can increase the acceptance rate of flyers; optimizing the second and third scenarios can increase the conversion rate of flyers. Increasing the conversion rate by 3-5 times in each scenario can ultimately lead to a conversion rate difference of 20-40 times.

1. Segmentation scenario: choose to accept flyers

Many people think that the key to distributing flyers is only the content of the flyer itself. In fact, there are at least four important elements in this three-dimensional scene: flyers, people handing out flyers, the user’s mood, and the user’s environment. When users see sales personnel, they are often seen rushing in and out of shopping malls or CBD areas. He is busy, and he often has a certain resistance towards unfamiliar field sales staff. How does your “flyer product”—remember, not just the flyer itself, but the person handing it out and what he or she says—fit into this scenario?

Most O2O companies’ sales promotion personnel will try to add 15-30 seconds of sales pitch when handing out flyers, such as: “Hello, I’m from XXX. It only costs 5 RMB to download our APP to watch movies. You just need to scan this QR code, click to download, and then BLAHBLAHBLAH… that’s it. Remember to go back and download it!”

There are three problems with this: (1) It reduces the efficiency of field sales. (2) The longer the script, the more the script guidance is discounted in the process of being passed from headquarters to field sales staff, resulting in a heavy reliance on individual ability rather than overall strategy. (3) As a stranger to field sales, the words you say do not match or even conflict with the emotions of normal people walking on the streets of the business district (whether they are hurried or happy).

How can we take the first step in a simple, efficient, easy-to-teach, and emotionally resonant way? When you think about this scenario, the answer comes out: after saying it, hand over the flyer. Then move on to the next one. Users often accept something before they even think about it logically. (The fact is, most people decide to accept or reject a flyer in less than 0.3 seconds. There is no logical thinking involved; it is all driven by emotion.)

2. Segmentation scenario: reading leaflets

But "five bucks of happiness". . . ——What are you talking about? (Don’t forget that our core offer is a five-dollar movie group purchase voucher or something like that.) Don’t be impatient, just keep reading.

After receiving a flyer, users usually spend no more than 1 second reading the contents on it. If you think about it this way, you'll quickly understand that having 12 discounted products and three lines of discount information on it is useless. How do you design a “flyer product” that allows users to decide to act within 1 second? (Hint: There are definitely not 12 discount information listed above)

Many people who do marketing think that CTA (Marketing term: Call To Action) must be based on discounts. This is a very wrong mindset. Because preferential treatment is a logical concept, and humans are emotional animals - almost all human action decisions are driven by emotions (quoted from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's 1994 scientific work "Descartes' Error"). Therefore, your Call To Action should be based on an emotional appeal rather than a logical appeal. All offers should exist to promote an emotion.

Continue analyzing the scene. Users who receive flyers on the street can be divided into two categories. The first category is those who are in a happy state of shopping, and the second category is those who are in a tired state of running around, on their way to get off work, or just got off work. Under these two emotions, how can your "product" intervene in their field of vision to stimulate their actions (Call To Action) within 1 second? Here’s my answer (and it’s by no means necessarily the best): There aren’t seven or eight discounted products. No discounts available. There is no prompt to download the APP. Even the small words around it were added because the design team insisted that it would be too ugly without them. In fact, I think the effect may be better if it is not added.

Some people may ask, but you didn’t even explain the discount, so you didn’t achieve the purpose at all! It is sufficient for each step in the user path to convey only one message or one instruction. The worst thing to do is try to tell users five things in one step. This will make users wonder what to do. This flyer is just trying to convey a message that resonates with the user scenario in this 1 second: "Scan this QR code and you will get some happiness." (With some curiosity as a driving force)

3. Segment the scenario: take action

Now the user decides to act.

What is the scenario for most users at this time? They were walking on a street with no Wi-Fi and cell phone data was at a premium. Therefore, your "flyer product" must enable users to complete the entire operation easily, smoothly and simply under such extremely harsh climatic conditions. What would you do? The traditional O2O e-commerce practice is to let users scan the QR code and then go to the application market to download the APP. This is another approach that is full of parochialism ("I want you to download our app that is dozens of MB in size") and does not consider user scenarios. The end result is a very low conversion rate.

For this scenario, we made a simple and effective optimization: after the user scans the QR code, they will go directly to a local WeChat public account we established. In the introduction of this official account, we finally gave the FAB of "You can watch a movie for 5 yuan". After the user clicks to follow, the system’s first automatic reply is a link to download the APP.

In this way, if the user does not care about traffic or is in a WI-FI environment, he can download it on the spot; or, after he goes to the WIFI environment, he can still keep the download link. If the user forgets, we will push local life information that is valuable to the user to remind him to return to the download link until the final conversion is completed. In addition, as a local life service information provider, you have also established media channels in each local city, but that’s another story.

Most importantly, you’ve successfully gotten your users to take the first step. "Action" has an additive effect, which means that once you take the first simple action, you will be more likely to take the second, slightly more difficult action.

4. MVP planning and ABCDE testing

Of course, Marketing is not something that can be come up with on a whim. Now you have a product based on your analysis of user scenarios. But you can't roll it out to 25 cities yet. Your product design, graphic design, and copywriting are based on assumptions. Including my analysis above - if there is no positive support from the final data, it is wrong. I only believe in data.

People who make products will throw out a lot of cool terms at this time: Minimum Viable Product (MVP), AB testing (small-scale testing of different solutions), grayscale release (let some users use A, and other users start using B. If B is better, then gradually expand the scope and migrate all users to B).

This is not a particularly new concept. Only relatively few people use it in Marketing. Being able to strictly implement it to the end and do a good job of data tracking and analysis requires even higher execution capabilities from the Marketing team. We conducted a comparative test of five versions of this flyer design over three days, distributing 1,000 flyers for each version:

Version 1: The front of the flyer has a buy 50 get 50 free promotion message, and the QR code is the WeChat ID; the back has the traditional display of super discounted popular products.
Version 2: The front of the flyer has a buy 50 get 50 free promotion, and the QR code leads to the app store; the back has the traditional display of super discounted popular products.
Version 3: On the front of the flyer is the title "What is the happiness of five dollars?", and below is a display of super discounted popular products; on the back is the company logo and slogan.
Version 4: The front of the flyer only has the words “What is the happiness of five dollars?”; the back displays super discounted popular products.
Version 5: The front of the flyer only has "What is the happiness of five dollars?"; there is no back.

To test these five versions, because of the different contents and discount methods, the design team, marketing team, data analysis team, material team, and sales team (need to negotiate the corresponding hot-selling group orders) are required to work closely together within three days. The final test results showed that version five had the highest conversion rate: 1,000 flyers sent out attracted 223 followers, 25% of whom converted to downloads on the same day. The conversion rates of other versions are all in the single digits.

We tested version 5 in two cities and obtained data of around 22%. Finally, we settled on this plan, which is the “very simple” design you see above. It's not simple at all. After this "flyer product" was rolled out to 25 cities, it maintained a 20% conversion rate - a terrifying statistic that is hard to imagine for traditional flyer distributors. But through the sharing above, you can see how we made it a reality step by step. :)

5. Final Thoughts

Due to limited space, I can only share a very microscopic link (distributing flyers) of one of the 14 links (ground promotion). Now imagine that you need to control and coordinate all 14 links at both the macro and micro levels...

So I hope that through this limited space and this very microscopic story, you can see Marketing in my eyes - a job that combines the understanding of psychology and human nature, experience in product design, accumulation of entrepreneurial methodology, sensitivity to data analysis, and is full of creativity and fun. There is no conflict between making a good product and doing good marketing. The two make each other stronger. I would like to use this article to encourage many hard-working and talented marketers.

“Actually, you’re a product manager.”