[Video] Xiaomi Senior Planning Director: How to come up with marketing ideas that have the potential to achieve great results with little effort?

The content of this article is selected from the Mantou Offline Marketing Practical Training Camp. The full text is more than 30,000 words, this article is about 2,000 words, and the recommended reading time is 5 minutes.

Xiaomi’s marketing is always amazing, and every press conference can create a screen-sweeping phenomenon in WeChat Moments and Weibo. Today, Mr. Yao Liang, senior planning director of Xiaomi and the driving force behind many Xiaomi new product launches, will talk to you about Xiaomi's phenomenal product, the marketing secrets of the Xiaomi router.

▲

Click on the video above to watch it directly

Being creative is the process of asking yourself questions and solving problems.

Many friends ask me: "We recently launched a new product. How should we market it and sell it?" Before formulating a marketing strategy, we must know that the starting point of creativity is actually to solve a problem. We have a product, and in the end we get a marketing and creative performance, and in between is a series of processes to solve the problem.

For example, the products I work on most often at Xiaomi are mobile phones and smart hardware. Smart hardware always has many new features and ways of playing, but what exactly are the problems we are solving? What can it do? What conveniences can it provide to users?

Mobile phones are very homogeneous and all of them look similar. What we need to solve in marketing is what they are not? How to create differentiation? Therefore, before doing marketing, what we need to face is not what method should be used to market a product, but what is the most urgent problem that needs to be solved before a product is launched on the market?

Marketing thinking path of Xiaomi router

Start with these 4 questions

What is the thinking path of problem-determined marketing? Once we have a product, there are many possibilities for marketing, but each approach has different effects and thinking paths for solving problems.

1. Routers are “black box” products, so how can they be different from others?

Xiaomi router appeared in 2013, and I asked myself a question at that time. A router is a “black box” product. How can we make it stand out from the crowd? The feel, craftsmanship, etc. that we talk about when we talk about computers and mobile phones are also present in routers, but no one knows the criteria for evaluating the quality of a router.

For routers, if all users understand this point, we will explain it very clearly. But it will be difficult if users don’t catch a cold. So we immediately did some internal popularization and explained what a router is. Maybe users don’t really want to know what this thing does, but we need to find a way to make users interested in it. So, we immediately made an initial version of the copy, for example, 3 times the speed, to allow some people's internet speed to be faster first, such as someone who appears cold on the outside but is fanatical on the inside, and so on.

2. To whom is this most effective?

After doing this, we started thinking about the next question, which is also an extension of the previous question. That is, when we talk about these things, to whom will it be more effective?

To put it another way, who cares particularly about routers, or who uses routers frequently? We thought that boys who learned computer technology at home would use it more, so we targeted this group of people for the first wave of users, namely geeks, enthusiasts and technology lovers.

3. What key information can touch the target users?

After solving the problem of who our product will be effective for, we raised another question: what is the key information of an enthusiast's router? In other words, which keywords and selling points can touch them?

Those geeks and enthusiasts can devote 1,000% of their energy for 0.1% of Internet speed, so we thought of the first key information: top configuration. This key information also includes dual-band AC and built-in hard drive.

So how do we explain the top configuration to audiophiles? Many enthusiasts want to show off their smart hardware in their circle of friends, so based on this phenomenon we found the second key information: new toys. How to present this new toy to users? We came up with a line of copywriting: Xiaomi Router is a new toy for enthusiasts.

What we care about most is the first picture of the product release, because it will determine the first impression of all users. On the first day of the product launch, Mr. Lei posted a Weibo with only one sentence: ping 20.13.11.20. This is an IP address, which is the most basic in the Internet world. We changed the release date into an IP address and said a sentence that Xiaomi's new toy will be released soon. At the same time, the accompanying picture shows only half of the router exposed. This is intentional. We want to see what answers users can guess if we don’t say what the new product is.

Some users said that this looks like a wine barrel, is it Xiaomi red wine? In the end, there were all kinds of guesses, and a bunch of pictures were photoshopped, including Xiaomi microphones, Xiaomi cosmetics, etc. That evening, the keyword “new toys” went viral on Weibo. At the time of the year, if you searched the keyword "new toys" on Google , you could still find the picture we released at that time. At that time, more than half a year had passed since our last product launch. It can be said that this marketing campaign achieved very good results and had a certain degree of sustainability.

When the final Xiaomi router was released, we still faced a problem. During the product launch process, the first batch of routers was very small, only about one thousand units. If this is the case, we might as well just ask enthusiasts to conduct the public beta test directly, so that they can participate in the improvement of the product.

So, we made a public beta website, but it was not very official. To put it at the top, there is nothing that cannot be played in the hands of enthusiasts, whether it is tinkering, disassembling, improving, combining or remaking. At the same time, in the popular questions below, some users asked whether the router is fast and how well it can penetrate walls? We did not answer this question directly, but said that if these two most basic things are not done well, we will not make a fool of ourselves.

Besides that, we also did a lot of fun stuff. When we started to plan the marketing of Xiaomi router with a relatively entertaining mindset, users also began to participate. The next day, a lot of very interesting things appeared on Weibo. Some users imitated the promotional copy of Xiaomi router and came up with several new products. For example, Xiaomi flashlight, a top-notch flashlight, is a new toy for hikers. Xiaomi desk lamp, top-notch desk lamp, new toys for top students, and more.

Because the number of Xiaomi routers participating in the public beta is very small, we made a very complex form to screen out real enthusiasts. Users need to fill in a lot of information to successfully register. In this process, we can foresee that many users may not want to test the router, but just want to join in the fun.

When we started planning the marketing for the Xiaomi router, we asked three questions. First, how to make a black box product unique? The answer we got was to deconstruct the information. Second, what kind of people would be interested? Is an audiophile. Third, how to display it? New toys.

If the questions asked at that time were not these questions. For example, how can an ordinary user understand 802.11ac? Obviously, this problem is not good. Even if it is solved, there will still be many users, including their own employees, who don’t understand it.

Before we market and promote our products, if we find the most critical issues, our creative path will gradually become clear.

4. How to create a sense of surprise?

Last question, what exactly is the surprise of a toy?

The happiest thing for enthusiasts when they get a toy is the unboxing process. Since the router is also a new toy, we can make the box very cool. We tried all kinds of boxes and finally found that wooden boxes are the most ceremonial and the coolest. The process of making wooden boxes is also very painful because they have to be made to be high-end. In the end, the cost of one box was more than 200 yuan.

We thought how to create surprises if we have a box? We disassembled all the components of the router and placed them in a box, allowing enthusiasts to assemble them themselves. At the same time, we also put a pair of anti-static gloves in the box to create a strong sense of ritual. It is not just as simple as installing them, but you have to really experience the process.

The number of places for the public beta test is very limited, only a few hundred, so how can we allow more users to experience the entire process of the router? If users unfortunately do not get the public beta qualification, they can come online and pretend to install it step by step.

A very interesting thing happened during this process. One reporter was lucky enough to get the qualification to test the Xiaomi router. He took it home and was about to install it when he received a phone call and was called away because he had an interview assignment. After returning home, he found that the router had been installed. It was his roommate who helped him assemble it. Because of this incident, the two of them ended up breaking up.

To do marketing, learn to ask questions first

And it is the key issue

Finally, let me summarize. I asked 4 questions when I was making the entire marketing planning plan for Xiaomi router.

1. A router is a “black box” product. How can you make it stand out from the crowd?

2. When doing marketing, who will be the most effective to talk to?

3. What is the key message for audiophiles?

4. What is the surprise of a toy?

These four questions still apply when we market other products. Right now

1. Find the selling point of the product or the difference between it and other products on the market

2. Identify the target users of your product

3. What are the characteristics of the target users? What keywords can trigger them?

4. Create unexpected surprises and a grand sense of ceremony.

Only when we find these four problems and use a series of means to solve them can we achieve effective conversion and sales of products and truly promote a new product to the public and the target user groups.