How to let content operations penetrate products and drive rapid product growth

"Content" in a broad sense includes music, film, television, radio, publishing and other aspects. For example, Chen Tong is responsible for content operations at Xiaomi, which is spoken in a broad sense.

"Content operation" in a narrow sense mainly appears in the Internet field. It is an operation method and also a division of labor. It is common in content-based or user-based products, such as Tieba, Weibo, Hupu, and Bilibili. It is less common in pure transaction or tool products, such as Tmall , Meitu XiuXiu , Weather, and Takeout.

This article mainly discusses content operations in a narrow sense.

The essence of content operation is to meet users' content consumption needs. Everything is centered on people. Where there is demand, there is supply. This is also the law of human society.

The PM’s job is to create the product, but it does not necessarily mean that there will be users using it. At this time, operations personnel are needed to promote the connection between products and users, and use channel promotion methods to let more users understand and use the products. This is to attract new users; use content, users, activities, etc. to give more reasons to use the products. This is activation and retention.

Therefore, the value of operation is to connect users and products, establish a bond between the two, allow users to understand and use products, and allow products to deliver value to users.

Content operation is one of the "links". Others include user operation , event operation and brand operation. This link is the value of content operation. Operations staff meet user needs and drive continued visits by launching high-quality content and planning graphic presentations.

Make up a story. You are planning to decorate your new house, so you come to visit me and learn from me. Before you come, plan to learn from my experience in placing bookshelves, workbenches, and beds in small spaces, including how to deal with windows in corners, because you will also encounter these problems. After coming, you were attracted by the light gray tones of my house, and even the floor lamp impressed you deeply. Before I even introduced it, you have already realized that I am pursuing a simple, practical, and fresh style.

When you leave, you will have a clear overall impression of the decoration style of my home. Not only through furniture placement and interior makeover, but also those lovely decorative items.

In this story, "you" are the user, "visiting and learning" is the demand, "my home" is the product, and "decoration" is the content.
Before coming to my house, you have a clear rational need to learn how to solve problems. After coming to my house, you will be deeply impressed by the color style and small decorations, which is an intuitive and emotional gain. After leaving my house, you not only learned how to decorate, but also had an overall understanding of the style positioning of my house.

To put it simply, by relying on content operation (decoration) of the product (my home), it not only satisfies the user's (you) rational content consumption needs (visiting and learning), but also allows the user to have an emotional understanding of the product's tone.

Content marketing has two functions:

1. Satisfy users’ content consumption needs (rational)

The most important role of content operation is, of course, to provide users with content they want to see. After further subdividing the content needs, they are divided into four types:

Get information, NetEase News, Toutiao

Kill time, embarrassing encyclopedia, Weibo

In-depth reading, Zhihu, Curiosity Daily

Consumption decisions, Xiaohongshu , What’s worth buying

Of course, there will be overlap in products that meet these four types of segmented needs. For example, Weibo can be used to kill time and obtain information.

2. Convey product tone

It means using content to make users have a certain perception of the product and form a specific impression. If you regard a product as a person, the product tone is equivalent to the person's personality.

For example. When a stranger approaches you, the first thing that catches your eye is his appearance, neat hairstyle, straight suit, and gold-rimmed glasses; secondly, you will feel his inner temperament through his appearance, his kind smile, elegant conversation, and strong aura.

Almost the moment you see him, you already have a certain impression of him, and the process of forming this impression does not require focused thinking, but is an intuitive subconscious reaction.
The intuitive feeling at this moment almost determines your impression of this stranger and will directly affect the subsequent communication between the two people. For example, "love at first sight" is one of these situations.

In short, you can form an intuitive impression of a person by feeling his inner temperament through his external dress and appearance. When applied to content operations, it means conveying the product tone to users through content, allowing users to form an intuitive impression of the product.

The user's intuitive impression of a product is not only determined by the UI, but also by the content, such as a title, a paragraph of copy , or a focal image.

1) Ideas

First, determine product positioning and target audience

Then, determine the content positioning based on the characteristics of the target population.

Finally, adjust and correct repeatedly in practice

Taking Station A and Station B as examples, they focus on the two-dimensional positioning, have very strong user population characteristics, and the content is closely centered around ACG culture, and the atmosphere of the entire product is very good. This is why their user loyalty is several orders of magnitude higher than that of major video sites.

From analyzing product positioning to determining content positioning or tone, due to limited space, I will not elaborate. Here we talk about the third link. In practice, repeated adjustments and corrections have two difficulties:

①Content standards are difficult to define

We hope to meet the needs of target users through content operations and attract more people. However, since the content has no particularly clear definition of type or attribute, it is difficult to grasp. Therefore, this "standard" needs to be repeatedly discussed, clarified and understood during the team execution process.

When encountering situations that are beyond the scope, we should bring them up for open discussion and reach consensus again. By repeating this process over and over again, a standard can be formed within the team. Of course, in this process, the person in charge is the helmsman, and basically the content standards are a reflection of his ideas.

②KPI orientation is prone to deviate from positioning

In the process of content operation, it is very likely that the following situation will occur: for content that meets the positioning, the user data is not high, but users like the content outside the positioning range very much. This is caused by many factors, such as the user source not matching the product positioning, or the user's high demand for entertainment content and low demand for in-depth content, etc.

At this time, if you simply follow the KPI without clearly analyzing the reasons behind it and cannot withstand the pressure, you will deviate from the originally designated content positioning, resulting in unclear product positioning, changing the product, or even killing it.

The correct approach is to understand the magnitude of user demand before execution and anticipate subsequent risks. When the data is lower than expected, we need to analyze the specific reasons. If it is within normal expectations, you must withstand the pressure and keep trying, and don't be tempted by the so-called beautiful scenery on the roadside. Even if the content direction is adjusted, it should be because of the proof of practical conclusions rather than blindly pursuing data.

2. Methods

From the perspective of content output sources, content operation methods can be divided into official output and user output.

①Official output

It refers to the website editor or content operation staff, who independently plan and produce the content, which is generally high-quality, in-depth or important content.

The advantage is that the timing and quality of content can be controlled to meet user needs and convey product tone; the disadvantage is that the labor cost is high and it is not suitable for mass production.

②User output

The content is planned, produced and produced by users, which is often referred to as UGC or PGC. However, most of the content displayed by Internet products at this stage has undergone secondary processing, so the user output mentioned here is actually UGC+secondary processing.

"Secondary processing" does not mean modifying user content, but optimizing the content presentation or priority order through product or operational means. The "secondary processing" method is mainly completed through product strategy, supplemented by operational manual intervention.

Let’s use three cases to illustrate:

Case 1, Zhihu

Zhihu is a UGC platform. The content selected and displayed in the timeline is based on product strategy, with no manual intervention from operators. Ensuring the cleanliness of tl is Zhihu's bottom line. Even if we haven't found a good way to make a profit, we will not interfere with the content display here.

Case 2: Maoyan Movie

Seven days after the release of the movie "The Mermaid", there were already 350,000 short reviews, but browsing users will definitely only read the top few, so it is very important to optimize the sorting of short reviews. It is definitely unrealistic to rely on manual sorting because the volume is large and the subjective factors are too strong. Therefore, we must rely on strategic sorting. The goal is to find high-quality and popular short reviews. I will not go into specific strategies.

Case 3: Toutiao

Toutiao is an algorithmic platform that uses strategies to display content that users may be interested in. This is the most typical case.

The content on the platform all belongs to other people, and Toutiao is only responsible for sorting for users, which is theoretically a good experience. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei said internally that he believes Weibo's competitor is Toutiao, and that one can feel the similarities between the two products.

There are also some small things that are actually very important, such as the layout of high-quality content and the pre-embedded replies to community topics. These are things that must be done in the content operation process and may even affect the final effect.

It is easy to imagine that if the layout of high-quality content is messy, without paragraphs, and the key points are not highlighted, this high-quality content will be considered "not high-quality" by users and is more likely to be closed immediately.

If the planned community topic does not have pre-built replies to the first few posts, and cannot guarantee that the first few replies will develop in the direction you want, it will affect the effectiveness of the topic. More seriously, if someone on the first three floors questions or insults, it could ruin the event.

Although these are small things, when they are shown to users, they are related to user experience and are also part of content operations.

The data that content operations need to pay attention to include the following three points:

1. Pay attention to data directly related to the content, such as UV/PV, click-through rate , number of interactions, number of forwardings, average number of pages visited per person, length of visit, etc. These are very basic data and require daily monitoring and concepts.

2. Pay attention to product data, such as DAU, retention, or UV and click-through rate of the entire column. Because content operations are meant to serve products, we need to use data to find out how content drives products.

3. Looking at the data over a longer period of time is the most critical. Normally, the impact of content operations on product data is a slow process. Because user awareness needs to be cultivated, it takes time for high-quality content to be discovered and spread.

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

The author of this article @熊猫大侠 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!