2 long product guide pictures completed in 3 days. Why are people so keen on guides?

I graduated from university with a major in e-commerce , and after graduation, with the idea of ​​putting my knowledge into practice, I joined an e-commerce company as a planner. It has been more than half a year now. Due to the special nature of my position in the company, I have done a lot of work during the big promotion. In the on-site activity projects, I have done page activities between brands and tracked product projects. However, most of these on-site gameplay and activity products will be accompanied by the planning and design of another material, which is the strategy.

Today I want to share my thoughts and experiences in the process of making the strategy.

First, I would like to raise three questions:

1. What makes a product strategy a good strategy?
2. What impact does a strategy have on the promotion and dissemination of a product?
3. How should a product strategy be designed and what should it express?

Only by tracing back to the source can we get a glimpse of the leopard

Only by knowing the fact can we know the reason behind it

In fact, whether we are making a strategy for a game product or for an overall promotional activity, the strategy itself is also a part of the product. The functional attributes it carries are to interpret and express the content and characteristics of the product . The goal is to promote the product to more users and enable users to clearly understand how to play the product. Essentially, the reason I think this way is to force myself to make this strategy with the mindset of making a product, understand my target users , and clarify the positioning of this strategy.

Why do we need a strategy?

In fact, the word "strategy" has its own understanding and definition in the user's subconscious mind , that is, the general solution and strategy for a certain thing or problem. To put it in a more concrete way, when we take the driving test, we will look for a driving test handbook; when we take the exam, we all like to ask the top students for their compiled review points; when we go out to travel, we always like to look for pictures like "One picture takes you around Nanjing" and save them in our mobile phones. All of the above are actually forms of strategy in different situations. From the perspective of human nature, people are lazy. The reason why we want to get various strategies is because the strategies themselves bring together the information we need. We can easily get the information we want through the strategies, which saves us the process of understanding, searching and summarizing. Naturally, we enjoy getting various strategies.

In essence, what we need is not the strategy itself, but the best solution to help us solve the problem.

So, which stage of the problem does the strategy provide the best solution to?

For example: when a user plays a game or experiences a product, he will encounter different types of problems as he develops from a novice player to an advanced player. A basic strategy provides users with basic understanding of the game or product in the early stages of the experience. So here I divide the strategies into deep strategies, medium strategies and shallow strategies according to the content involved and the depth of application level. Therefore, depending on our goals, the form and content of our strategy should be different. Back to our question: the strategy should actually provide the best solution for users at the stage where they want to gain a deeper understanding of the product.

How did I produce 2 guides in 3 days?

I once shared in detail about an AR game product that I led during the New Year Festival. This was because this AR game product required me to release two guides within three days for dissemination on and off the site. Actually, I refused at the beginning, because I already had too many things to do when I was following up on this project. But there was nothing I could do since I was the only one who was most familiar with this product, so I took it anyway.

Analysis and positioning

First, I analyzed the unique elements of this game: AR, catching, New Year Festival, red envelopes , etc. These elements are the planning and creative materials for our strategy. The positioning of our product itself is an AR game that issues coupons and attracts traffic during the New Year Festival. So the first few questions we should think about when making a strategy for this game are

1. Games are for the general public and are accessible to everyone, but AR technology is not something that everyone understands or recognizes. How to play AR requires us to describe it in a vivid way.
2. What other experiences can consumers get from this game besides playability? Is 888 yuan the maximum benefit? The joke about big lion brother and little lion sister teasing each other? The joy of receiving red envelopes during the Spring Festival, etc. If there is any, we should let users know through the guide
3. Should the basic operating process for consumers be presented? If so, will it lose the mystery of the game? Therefore, there is a balance between the content and depth of the strategy and the user's feelings about the game.

Competitive analysis

We referred to the strategies of several AR games and other games, and analyzed them from several aspects such as content and form. Discover strategies such as Ant Forest, Alipay AR Red Packet , etc. Both the content and form are very clear and simplified. In particular, the strategy for Alipay’s AR red envelopes was the same as what I was thinking at the time, which was to convey to users how to play AR in a certain way. So when I was thinking about the format and framework of my strategy, there were two principles I had to follow: a clear framework and a coherent whole.

Determine the style and form

There are many ways to display the guide, such as H5, posters, or videos. Considering the cycle and budget, we finally chose the poster format. Then our internal front-end colleagues cut the poster into pages and put them on the site, which can also form a jump.

In terms of style, we followed the atmosphere of the Chinese New Year and chose to present it in a festive and lively way.

Acceptance of demands

I chose to use two versions of long guide pictures to carry the content of our guide in the early stage and mid-stage of the event. In the early stage, users have no knowledge of this game, so we need to stimulate them with interest points to make them realize what they can do by playing this game. This will attract a large number of players to become the basic users of the game. Therefore, the first wave of guide posters plays the role of promoting the breaking news;

In the middle of the game, players attracted from the early stage are already deep players. At this time, in order to enable these people to pass on and share and continue to play, we need to use the data we collect to let these users know that there are so many people playing with them, and what small tricks we have to increase the probability of successful capture, etc.

So I designed two sets of posters with different content forms and styles in different time periods to carry the game product appeals at different stages during the game activities. the following:

Finally, I discussed the design of these two sets of posters with my design partner and put them here for everyone to see. I hope you can criticize and correct me.

Some thoughts

1. A strategy can help us quickly understand a game product, just like the table of contents of a book. After reading it, we can know the general content of the book, but at the same time, it may also make us gradually lose the mood for exploration and fail to experience the fun of exploration.

2. Each of us is essentially lazy. I believe that all kinds of "strategy businesses" on the market are based on this point.

3. People are keen on strategies because they are actually keen on a quick solution to the problem. Whoever can respond quickly and provide high-quality answers will have a place in the market.

4. Each of us should be able to get a lot of convenience from the guide, but this does not mean that we have experience. Just like you can't say you understand a movie just because you read a review without even watching it . There are some roads in this world that are more interesting to walk on without signposts. It’s not that I want you to get lost, but because the unknown is exciting enough.

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

This article was compiled and published by the author @十里桃花(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!