The secret of a hit product: creating influence

Creating product influence is not a one-day job. We need to look at the overall situation, start from the details, understand the basic characteristics of influence, recognize the huge role of the external communication environment, create influence from the source, and build a product that can truly be accepted by users.

Building influence

When making a product, many people spend a lot of effort and time on promotion and marketing , but the final results are far from satisfactory. What's worse, even though they have a very good product, they neglect the marketing and operation capabilities, and the product becomes mediocre and the public knows nothing about it.

This tragic situation is very common. Many of my friends have experienced it deeply. A sentence they often say is: Why is it so difficult to do a good promotion in this era?

Yes, the dissemination of information has never been as simple as we think. In this era, information that can influence others is absolutely worth its weight in gold. With influence, we can achieve deep interaction with users, and promotion and marketing will naturally come to fruition. The construction of influence comes from two aspects:

• You have to let others know your information
• You have to let others know the information and accept it

The above two points may seem unremarkable, but in the era of mobile Internet , the release of information has become extremely simple and the cost is extremely low. Anyone can release rich and colorful information in various forms through a mobile phone. But the difficulty lies in that after a lot of information is sent out, it falls into the sea. The person who posted the information has been busy for a long time, but in the end no one is interested. This situation is definitely not uncommon.

Nowadays, the publicity and promotion costs of a movie are astronomical figures. For some movies, the publicity and promotion costs have exceeded the shooting costs. Without such a large investment, the audience will not buy it at all and will not buy tickets to watch it in the theater. No matter how good the movie is, people will not know the truth until they have seen it. All the motivation for people to go to the theater comes from the publicity and promotion of the producers.

In the past few years, the cost of obtaining traffic was still very low, but in recent years, the cost of traffic has become outrageously high. Some Internet practitioners even directly judged that the first half of the mobile Internet has ended, and it is about to enter the second half with higher barriers and more brutal competition. The traffic dividend is a thing of the past and will never come back.

Good products still need to be continuously disseminated

In the past, I didn’t understand why a company with a long history and world-renowned reputation like Coca-Cola would spend so much money, invite so many celebrities, and advertise on so many platforms? Later I realized that spending money on advertising may not have much effect, but not spending money on promotion has serious consequences , even to the point that even the giants cannot afford it. Users are always the most picky. They are like goldfish and can only retain memory for about 7 seconds. Without continuous fresh stimulation, even the strongest brand will gradually decline.

Apple has long been famous. Its product quality, reputation, and design are the best in the world. But when you turn on the TV today, you can still often see iPhone advertisements. The reason is that only through repeated copywriting planning and advertising can Apple keep its products in the minds of users and prevent users from becoming unfamiliar or even forgetting them without realizing it.

For a good product, it is not enough to have intrinsic beauty. To have an impact, it must have the following three characteristics:

• Easy to spread
• Can spread spontaneously
• Can spread quickly between people

Some products are good, but they lack a clear value point that directly touches users, and it is very difficult to spread them. It is difficult for users to actively pay attention to a long list of parameters, and they are lost in the positioning that is not recognizable enough. In this case, it is basically a pipe dream to expect users to actively recommend the products to people around them.

The advertisement launched by Melatonin that year, "I won't accept any gifts this year, but if I do, accept Melatonin", had three influential characteristics. It quickly hit the target of giving gifts to elders during the holidays and provided a simple and easy solution to many people's pain points: buying this health product.

It is precisely because it accurately hits the pain points of the target group, the advertising information is simple, easy to understand, catchy and very easy to spread, that people are keen to recommend it to relatives and friends. Therefore, Nongfu Spring made Shi Yuzhu successful and allowed him to make a comeback.

Three basic characteristics: visual sense, participation, and concreteness

If you want to achieve the three inherent characteristics of influence, you must make the product information visual, participatory, and specific.

Picture

Everyone must be familiar with Fang Wenshan's lyrics. If you look closely at his lyrics, you will find that almost all of the language is very visual, for example:

• The blue and white patterns are outlined on the blank clay, with the brush strokes gradually changing from thick to thin. The peony painted on the bottle is just like your first makeup. The scent of sandalwood drifts through the window, and I understand what’s in your heart. The brush is halfway done on the rice paper. – Blue and White Porcelain
• It rained all night long and my love overflowed like the rain. The fallen leaves in the yard are a thick pile of my thoughts. A few words of gossip cannot cool my enthusiasm. You appear on every page of my poems. - "Seven Miles of Fragrance"
• The running script of Lanting calligraphy is as smooth as flowing clouds and running water. The door is pushed open under the moon, and my heart is as careful as your footsteps. - "Lanting Preface"

When I heard these lyrics, images immediately flashed in my mind. It can be said that it has a photographic memory and leaves a deep impression on people. The sense of picture and music coexist, and this is the source of competitiveness.

Sense of participation

When Xiaomi first launched its products, it attached great importance to user participation. Through the establishment and maintenance of the Mi Fan community , it allowed users to participate in the entire process from product design to software iteration and interface beautification. In the early days, Xiaomi already had an influence that many giants envied. Users helped to actively promote the product to their friends, thus completing marketing at a very low cost.

We often say that we should build good relationships with users. This relationship is actually a sense of participation. Let users become the owners of the product in a sense and form a sense of ownership. Only in this way can the influence of the product be quickly detonated.

Concrete

The so-called concretization means that the promotion and positioning of the product must be meaningful and to the point, so that users can gain the most intuitive understanding of the product in the shortest time.

The music players before iPod were comprehensive in functions and of good quality, but they could not make users remember the core value of this player. When promoting iPod, Steve Jobs used a magical slogan, "Put 1,000 songs in your pocket". With just a few words, without any boring propaganda about various audio parameters, memory size, and battery life, users were quickly aware of the characteristics of this new music player: large capacity, easy to carry, and light.

Communication environment

In order to achieve influence, in addition to having the three basic characteristics, we must also recognize the important role played by the communication environment , which includes the time point of communication, the conditions of communication, the location of communication, the people of communication, etc. These external environments are often ignored by us and turned a blind eye to by us as unimportant things, but in fact, these external factors play a very large role.

In order to respond to iPhone 7, Samsung hastily launched Note 7, which put it in a very unfavorable position in the communication environment at that time. All users' expectations were on the upcoming new generation of iPhone. Samsung tried its best but it was of no avail. On the contrary, due to the pursuit of mass production in a short time, the battery technology was immature, and a series of explosions occurred, which ultimately resulted in both loss of the wife and the army.

Umbrella companies hope that it would rain or be scorching hot every day; contraceptive pill companies hope that everyone can enjoy sex without barriers. The impact of the specific environment on the product can never be ignored, so the timing of communication and the starting conditions of communication are worthy of our energy and careful study.

The reason why community economy is so popular is that it is difficult to find products that meet everyone's needs. More products are personalized to meet the niche needs of a specific group. On this basis, they strive for excellence and continue to grow.

Facebook was originally designed to allow Harvard boys to easily view photos of girls. Momo was also originally designed to meet the needs of young people to hook up with the opposite sex nearby. Only by meeting the needs of specific groups in a specific period of time can there be an opportunity to accumulate enough energy for future growth.

Creating product influence is not a one-day job. We need to look at the overall situation, start from the details, understand the basic characteristics of influence, recognize the huge role of the external communication environment, create influence from the source, and build a product that can truly be accepted by users.

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

The author of this article @公子在野 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!