Advertising your own products is the correct way to promote your products!

When it comes to promotion , most people think of advertising, which means spending money on advertising in newspapers, television, buildings, cinemas, outdoor areas, etc. Those who have "embraced Internet thinking" will probably think of relatively new methods such as SEM , video stickers, Weibo and WeChat soft articles, and Moments advertising .

With so many ways to spend money, the question of choice naturally arises.

So, in the past few years, many bosses have asked me:

"Which type of placement do you think is more cost-effective for my product?"

First of all, this issue cannot be generalized. Different products have their own positioning and target user groups. For example, compared with JD.com , the efficiency of Rolls-Royce’s advertising in the subway is extremely low. Therefore, different products need to be analyzed separately to find the most suitable media that can most efficiently reach the target audience for delivery.

Then, I would ask him a question in return:

“Do you ever advertise your own products?”

This question usually confuses the bosses - what does it mean to "advertise your own products"?

Okay, let’s talk about this issue today.

To advertise on your own products, to put it simply, is to treat your own product as a kind of media (referred to as product media) and display advertising information on it.

In other words, in addition to advertising on "narrow media" such as television, subways, and WeChat accounts, you can also advertise on your own product media. Product media can include any point that may come into contact with users, such as brand naming, outer packaging, vehicles, stores, and consumption receipts. It can also include non-physical items, such as official websites, apps, etc.

For example: for beverages, the bottle is the product media; for banks, the credit card receipt is the media. So, don’t waste this free promotional space, you can “advertise yourself” on it.

After looking at these two examples, you might say that there is nothing new about them.

Indeed, some products have been put into practice several years ago. But until today, most products still don’t have this awareness, resulting in products with daily impressions of over one million or tens of millions not using the media, but only knowing how to spend money to find advertising companies to place advertisements.

In addition, for those product media advertisements that are already in practice, like the two examples above, their advertisements are often too "hard" or "too much like advertisements." This will be instinctively ignored by everyone, not to mention inspiring self-propagation, which is a pity.

Next, let’s take a look at how to fully tap the media potential of your products, implant promotional information into your products, and stimulate self-propagation as much as possible to achieve the best results.

Specifically, when placing advertisements on your own product media, you can use three methods: "highlighting the brand, adding copywriting , and embedding Easter eggs."

1. Highlight your brand

The method of highlighting the brand is very straightforward, which is to make your own brand logo stand out in the product. This trick is most widely used in the luxury goods industry, whether it is an LV bag covered with logos or an Hermès belt with a huge "H" logo.

The same is true for Apple laptops. The glowing Apple logo on the lid of every Apple laptop is something that no one can ignore.

At the same time, not only should the logo be highlighted on the product, but please do not forget the packaging box, which is also part of the media. While most express delivery boxes are made of the same original kraft paper with a small logo printed on the tape or in the corners of the box, Xiaohongshu uses an eye-catching design that is all red and has a large logo, which attracts attention wherever the express delivery goes.

In addition to highlighting the brand logo visually, you can also make it more auditory. Soon after my child was born, I downloaded hundreds of children's songs on the Internet in order to give him some musical enlightenment. I found that some of the songs were very special. When they were played, the four words "Beva Children's Songs" and the name of the children's song would be read out at the beginning, and then the song would be officially played. It turns out that these songs belong to a children's song album called "Bewa Children's Songs", and Bewa Children's Songs is a product of Bewa.com.

Because children listen to these songs many times every day, the brand name "Beva Children's Songs" has been subtly implanted in the children's young hearts and is also deeply imprinted in the minds of other family members. Friends and relatives who come to visit the house are not immune either. They will also be "brainwashed" by Beva nursery rhymes because of passive listening to them many times.

In contrast, although other songs are very nice and I listen to them many times every day, I don’t know which brand they are from. It can be seen that Beva Children's Songs uses such a simple method to increase audio brand exposure, making full use of the invisible and intangible MP3 product media, thereby achieving product self-propagation.

2. Add copy

In life, we always overestimate the sincerity of love words. If you say to a girl, "I want to sleep with you," that's a "hooligan"; if you change the text to "I want to wake up with you," that's "Xu Zhimo" - however, the essence is the same.

In marketing , we definitely underestimate the magic of copywriting. Not only is copywriting ubiquitous, it’s also the simplest and easiest type of advertising to create.

So, let’s take a look at where we can embed copy:

• Receipts: Many businesses will print receipts for customers, so you can make good use of this medium. For example, Huang Taiji printed various famous quotes and aphorisms on each receipt, such as "Life is full of joys, sorrows, anger and happiness, just like pancakes, just spread them evenly" and "What happens right away is not important, what you do right away is more important." I have communicated with the bosses of China UnionPay and Meituan Takeout before. They receive tens of millions of receipts every day, but they are not fully utilized. They should learn from Huang Taiji in this regard.
• Packaging: Coca-Cola relied on printing interesting copy on the bottle, and successively launched "nickname bottles, lyrics bottles, and dialogue bottles", and achieved huge success without developing new products or upgrading formulas. Jiang Xiaobai and Weiquan Juice also followed suit, launching "Expression Bottles and Spelling Bottles" to carve out a niche in the red ocean of liquor and juice respectively.
• Body: On the road, you can often see small vans and trucks with the "58 Freight, Huolala" logo on them. This is to put advertisements on franchised vehicles to achieve the purpose of widespread publicity.
• Store sign: Under the sign of a beef hotpot restaurant, a line of large characters "Eat a cow that was still walking twelve hours ago" is prominently printed. This sentence not only inspires users to take photos and post them on WeChat Moments , but is also far more convincing and vivid than empty words such as "the ingredients are green and fresh".
• Product naming: Recently, a "negative energy" brand has become very popular. For example, Taiwan Yueye Milk Tea has launched four "negative cups", on the lids of which are printed words full of negative energy such as "Your weight will not decrease just by drinking one less drink", "Good things should be shared with good friends, ah, I forgot I have no friends" and so on. The " Sorrowful Tea " jointly produced by Ele.me and NetEase News is full of negative energy from the name of the milk tea. For example, there is the "You are not penniless, you are also sick oolong tea" priced at 18 yuan and the "Ex-boyfriend is living a better life than me" black tea priced at 20 yuan.

Of course, it is not only physical businesses and physical products that can use copywriting methods, but IT Internet products can also use them.

About twenty years ago, in order to promote its email service, Hotmail did not spend money on advertising. Instead, it added a small advertisement at the end of each email, telling you that you can apply for a powerful email account for free at hotmail.com. This is an example of making full use of its own product media.

The APP profile information in the app store is also an extended product media. Tuba Navigation once changed the boring style of the App Store introduction and wrote an unconventional and interesting introduction. The information that "the price of the new version of the navigation software is reduced to 6 yuan" has been turned into a real-life story of complaints from programmers . Such a novel approach and down-to-earth language attracted countless people to watch.

Today, the cloud computing market is highly competitive, and various brands do not forget to advertise their popular products. For example, Alibaba Cloud and NetEase Cloud Computing display "Alibaba Cloud/NetEase Cloud provides computing services" at the bottom of the opening pages of Taobao , NetEase Cloud Music , and NetEase News App respectively. Although the exposure is not so eye-catching, it is better than nothing. Think about the daily activities of these products, which are tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, so the exposure is also considerable.

3. Implanting Easter eggs

In addition to highlighting the brand and adding copy, you can also embed more participatory and "softer" advertisements into your own products. This is called "embedded Easter eggs."

We know that the core functionality of most products isn’t that exciting. Therefore, we can embed Easter egg functions into it to make the product interesting.

For example, Uber’s widely acclaimed “one-click call series” marketing, such as one-click calling of “helicopter, ice cream, pink health, mobile fitting room , hero car”, etc., are also easter eggs - allowing passengers to call vehicles with specific functions at a specific time and place. This means integrating special, implicit, self-propagating advertisements into one's own products, achieving very good marketing results.

The photo editing software Baidu Magic Photo and Tiantian Ptu have respectively introduced the easter eggs of "PK celebrity faces" and "Making elementary school student ID photos", which have greatly increased the fun of the products and stimulated self-propagation. Many people matched similar celebrities and made elementary school student ID photos, and then actively shared them.

Baidu Magic Photo even achieved amazing app activations of tens of millions in just a few days thanks to this Easter egg, which was truly amazing.

Sogou Voice Assistant launched such a humorous easter egg at the time to help people find toilets to solve urgent problems. If you say "I need to take a shit", the assistant will directly show you the nearby KFC stores. If you say "KFC is full", the assistant will immediately list the nearby McDonald's stores without saying a word.

Regarding this easter egg, Sogou's official account simply took a screenshot and posted a Weibo post, which received tens of thousands of reposts.

Conclusion

In this era of cross-border disruption, the boundaries between products and marketing are becoming increasingly blurred.

Product is marketing, product is media. We should always consider embedding marketing into products and make good use of the product itself as a free and powerful media to advertise ourselves.

There are several specific methods of placement, including "highlighting the brand, adding copywriting, and inserting Easter eggs":

Therefore, we need to exhaustively list the advertising positions of our product media, find one or more with larger display volumes, and then choose a suitable delivery method to embed promotional information.

Compared with traditional advertising methods, "advertising" in the product's own advertising space has many advantages:

• Save money and effort : It is obvious that advertising your own products costs very little.
• Long-lasting effect : When placing advertisements using traditional methods, there is definitely a time limit. Once the advertisement is removed, it is gone. However, when advertising is embedded in one's own products, the effect is long-lasting and can be seen for months or even years. Of course, it cannot remain unchanged, but must be innovated and iterated continuously.
• Merge two into one : products and marketing are integrated, products become more distinctive, and brand concepts are deeply rooted in people's hearts.
• Inspire virality : Products become eye-catching and interesting, which in turn inspires virality.

In short, before spending money on advertising, please make good use of your own advertising space first, and don’t beg for food with the golden bowl of your product!

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @朱百宁is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map