After two months in the job, I would like to share my new experience on product operation and promotion!

After joining the new company, I had the opportunity to enter a new project and participate in the promotion and publicity of the company's products. In more than two months from the operation of the main products to the promotion of the main products, I gained some understanding of 0-cost product promotion and publicity and paid product promotion and publicity, and I hope to share it with you.

1. Product promotion: SMO and SEM are the two main parts of promotion work.

1. SEM, search engine marketing

Everyone is familiar with SEO . SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a search engine optimization that improves the natural ranking of keywords on a website in search engines and gains exposure through optimization adjustments inside and outside the site. SEM (Search Engine Marking), search engine marketing, includes free SEO and paid PPC (Pay Per Click, Baidu bidding ranking ), etc.

For SEO, you need to understand the working principles of various search engines, such as how to crawl pages, how to index, and how to rank search results for a certain keyword, and then optimize the site through technical means and strengthen traffic exchange with external sites. SEO is an essential means in SEM. Through this free method, you can improve the site's performance across search engine platforms, increase the site's credibility, and make it easier to attract user clicks.

Pure SEO is effective, but it takes a long time to show results. It requires more effort in site optimization and must be adjusted in time as search engine algorithms change. Therefore, PPC has become an indispensable choice in product promotion. You can think of PPC as Baidu's paid ranking. By paying, the site's keyword ranking can be significantly improved in a short period of time. You can clearly track various data (ROI) and guide SEO keyword formulation. The disadvantages of PPC are obvious: user trust is low, the effect stops immediately once payment stops, and there are also some behaviors similar to "brushing orders" that make companies pay for it.

SEM includes SEO and PPC. Only by effectively combining these two methods and taking advantage of their strengths to overcome their weaknesses can we maximize the effectiveness of search engine marketing.

2. SMO, social media optimization

SMO (Social Medial Optimization) is a set of methods to achieve public communication through social media, online organizations and community websites. It is the latest form of online marketing.

The core of SMO is to enable people with common interests to communicate with each other. My understanding is to make full use of various social networking platforms, accurately deliver content on the Internet to target users, guide user participation through a series of means, and thus complete social media marketing.

When Pokémon entered China, we made an English vocabulary book for Pokémon, which included gameplay, strategies and other game- related content. We decided to promote this word book while the game is popular.

(1) Find a suitable promotion platform

Before promoting this dictionary, we need to find a suitable platform. I previously conducted a survey on users’ social media usage habits, which clearly showed the social media that users of each age group like, as well as what they like to do on this platform. We first determined the age, gender, and preferred social platforms of Pokemon game enthusiasts. At the same time, for the Pokémon in Pokemon, there may also be users who like the Pokémon cartoons and some of the main characters in the show, such as Pikachu, Xiaozhi, etc. We also need to find these platforms. We have identified the main promotion platforms: Baidu Tieba and some topic-related BBSs.

Next, we need to clarify the user habits of these platforms, such as what time there are more people, what style of content is more popular, and produce content based on the characteristics of specific social platforms.

(2) Aggregate all scattered content

In addition to the main promotion platforms: Baidu Tieba and topic-related BBS, we also have some of our own resources: Weibo, WeChat public accounts , communities, Zhihu and other platforms. If you want to launch a product at zero cost, you must first try various platforms on a large scale. You must adopt the mentality that if you don’t try, there will be no success, but if you do, there will be a possibility. Then you must use appropriate copywriting to promote and advertise on various platforms. But too much fragmentation is not a good thing. For example, when I play Clash Royale, I like to attack the opponent's two towers at the same time, but in the end I may not hit either one. Therefore, when we try it on a large scale, we need to try to establish relationships between different platforms. For example, we can do publicity and promotion on our own Weibo, and then do detailed promotion on other platforms. If users are interested, they will be directed to Weibo, and then users can choose to download, follow, and so on. Our staff can also communicate with users more freely.

(3) Guide users to assist in promotion

I promoted the Pokemon English vocabulary book in conjunction with the Rio Olympics on Baidu Tieba. For example, I posted a screenshot of a vocabulary book with Squirtle and called out to users in the Pokemon forum: Let's have a Pokemon Olympics, I'll release Squirtle, who dares to accept the challenge? There are more than 300 natural replies in 2 days. After the reply, I will follow up in a timely manner, "add fuel to the flames" when appropriate, guide users based on their psychology, and strive to achieve fission-like word-of-mouth communication.

2. Product operation and promotion are our core work.

When talking about the responsibilities of operations, we always say: attract new customers, promote activation, and retain customers. Whether it is attracting new users or promoting active use, operations staff will focus on business needs, including how many new users need to be attracted and how much activity needs to be achieved, but the retention rate indicator will never be left to operations staff. (I have always believed that retention is a user-centered job, which is mainly the responsibility of product managers . Of course, product and operation work complement each other and are indispensable.)

As for attracting new customers and promoting activation, I think these are two different tasks. If attracting new customers is placed in operations, it is called: channel operation. Outside of operations, it can be seen as what was mentioned above: product promotion.

As a product operation person, you can be called a "jack of all trades". Writing a copy, posting a message, organizing an event, chatting with users, and doing data analysis are all daily tasks of product operation, with promotion as the core.

When I do product promotion and publicity work, I mainly do it from the perspective of product operation. In the past, I would write an activity copy for the company’s internal club, hoping that existing users would participate and promote daily activity. When entering the external publicity stage, the form of event copywriting needs to be more open. Activities that were previously only available on a certain platform need to be extended to activities that can be participated in on multiple platforms. At the same time, since the user positioning of the community is very clear, the content produced for these users is also very precise. When it is expanded to the entire network platform, it is necessary to do refined processing of the content for different platforms and different users.

After working in external publicity for more than two months, I feel that there is a lot of overlapping work in product operation and product promotion. A qualified product operation can skillfully grasp one of the areas of content operation, active users, user operation , data operation, etc. in product operation. A good product operation can connect these tasks together with ease, and a successful product operation must be able to organically integrate product operation and product promotion work and formulate effective operation strategies.

3. Experience in product promotion

1. Expand external publicity channels

If you want to do a good job of operation and promotion at zero cost, you must use free resources effectively. After a period of exploration, you will gradually understand which platforms are effective promotion platforms for target products and can be used all the time; which platforms can be used when fixed themes are used and do not require special manpower maintenance in daily promotions; and which platforms have poor effects and can be abandoned. One day my eldest brother asked me: If the Ice Bucket Challenge started from our Weibo, would it have such a big impact? I think that good content and channels are indispensable.

2. Strive for cross-industry cooperation

As I said before, the main task of product operation is to promote activity. If we hold an event on our own WeChat official account to get users to download the App, the effect will not be very good because most of them are already users of our App. If we can find WeChat public accounts in the same industry and with the same target users to exchange resources, we may achieve good results. For example, we previously launched an activity of learning materials + welfare packages on a public account with the same target users, guiding users to follow our public account to obtain them, and the effect was very good. There are many forms of cross-industry cooperation, which can be traffic exchange for mutual promotion of articles, gift sponsorship to help the other party’s brand exposure, etc.

3. Learn to distinguish authenticity

The distribution of soft articles and press releases is essential for external publicity. For soft articles, we basically choose WeChat accounts with more than 100,000 headlines, and press releases mainly tend to come from Toutiao and NetEase News. (In the beginning, we launched our campaigns on many channels. Based on the content of our products, the two platforms with relatively good results were Toutiao and NetEase News.) If you become familiar with the editors of these websites, you can also package and send them to several channels. For example, you can spend 1,000 yuan to promote a piece of news on Toutiao, and then package it and send it to Sina, Sohu and other channels. However, we need to learn to distinguish the true from the false, especially for WeChat public accounts. When you spend thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan to publish a soft article, you need to judge whether the real data of this public account is so high. (The collective drop in the number of views of some major headlines that appeared a few days ago is a good warning.)

4. Create a good user portrait

If you know nothing about your target users and keep posting promotional posts on major platforms without any idea, you will be exhausted all day long but will not see any good results. Because the platform you find and the content you post are not what your target users need. As an operator, you need to analyze your users from both sensory and experiential perspectives. At the same time, you need to use data to characterize your users and clearly define your target user profile. (Age, gender, occupation, region, behavioral habits of using your product, etc.)

5. Follow up on user feedback

A word from the user can either lift you to the sky or bring you down. You need to understand the user's psychology, communicate with them in a friendly manner, resolve their emotions, solve their problems, and turn big things into small things and small things into nothing. If handled properly, a good feedback handling process will deepen the user's impression of the product and improve the user's favorability towards the product.