Why is brand advertising ineffective?

From selling goods to selling brands; from selling functionalities to selling brand premiums, there is never a shortcut like the Great Leap Forward.

Although the speed of Internet communication is accelerating, the process of human cognition has not evolved. We still have to go through the process of recognition, familiarity, and then liking. There is an element in between: time, and it is a constant cycle.

The essence of increasing sales is to continuously increase exposure within a constant period of time, constantly let consumers come into contact with your products, and continuously enhance their sense of familiarity.

Later, I met several gradually growing brand clients. They didn’t ask me to connect with live streaming resources right away. When I asked about the brand marketing path, it could be summarized in seven words: Weibo, Douyin, and Focus.

This is easy to understand. There are four channels for brand exposure. If there is exposure, there will be a premium. Otherwise, it will be a loss no matter how much sales are made.

Double micro: Weibo and WeChat. Cultivate fans on WeChat and gain followers on Weibo.

Shake: When Douyin shakes, the data goes out of control.

Weibo, WeChat and Douyin are often the basic skills for a company to develop from a small scale, so how do you play this "one segment"? Where does it fit into brand communication? What is its function? How to deliver? How to calculate the input-output ratio? This is a problem that many small and medium-sized brands have not yet figured out.

Today I will break down and talk about the experience I have summarized about "one-point crowd", and I hope that you can double the effect when doing brand communication.

01. Treasure Media for Precision Advertising

First of all, Focus Media can be said to be a treasure trove of media for precision advertising!

A Focus Media’s media environment is a very simple information channel. In the closed scene of the building elevator that you pass through every day, there is almost no other information to interfere, and people are easily attracted by advertisements.

If there is a girl next to you, you cannot stare at her. You can only watch the commercials to avoid embarrassment.

I think elevators are probably the only place where very few people would actively watch advertisements, so the Focus Elevator Media channel may seem simple but is actually very scary.

Unlike information flow ads, the quality of the content that is displayed up and down has a direct impact on the effectiveness of advertising.

For example, I just saw a joke, and then an advertisement came out saying “What to do if your child doesn’t want to eat”, and my good mood was immediately gone.

B Building advertisements are placed very precisely based on housing prices, surrounding industries, residents, and purchasing needs, such as school district housing, old residential areas, and industrial concentration areas.

This is even more accurate than Internet big data. When I lived in a new community, what was put on the market every day was either whole-house customization or furniture and showers, because the entire building was being renovated. The accuracy of this is unparalleled.

After Alibaba invested in Focus Media, it was able to use big data to understand what categories of products were most purchased in each community office building, and the consumption demand labels of the people in the building were also opened up.

Moreover, after you invest in Focus Media, the data on which people in the building have viewed it will be accurately fed back to your Tmall data bank, and you can follow up with investments on Taobao Mobile!

C Since Focus Building Advertising is a fixed high-frequency media, people see it when they go up and down the stairs in the morning and evening, and repeated exposure has a good effect.

When brands reach out to consumers repeatedly, they have more opportunities to establish more connections with them.

Moreover, the amount of information can be larger, many brand stories or product selling points can be clearer and more detailed, and the advertising content can have a stronger sense of series.

I once saw a brand’s entire product line being revealed one after another in an elevator, just like watching a TV series.

D As the largest brand media in China, Focus Media has entered almost every home of ordinary people.

Users have been watching these ads for many years. During work hours in office buildings, they see ads that encourage energization and motivation. When they take the elevator on their way home from get off work, they see ads that provide relaxation and warmth. They gradually get to know the brand and become interested in the product.

It can be said that Focus Media influences the lifestyles and consumption habits of nearly 300 to 400 million urban residents in China.

To sum up

The characteristics of focus media are: stable performance, strong certainty and precise target audience.

But there are also many tests for the brand. The Focus Media channel is not a stimulant or a hot girl, but it is the wife of the brand's success.

To grasp the power of segmented media, it is necessary to incorporate it into brand building and make continuous investments so as to enjoy the compound interest of time.

02. Five linkages that brands need to achieve

In this process, brands need to do these five linkages:

1. Positioning linkage, positioning must be clear

For example, Boss Direct Hire has one sentence: talk directly to the boss. This speaks out the thoughts of many job seekers, who always feel that their talents are being wasted by HR. It stands out from many similar recruitment websites.

Another example is Guazi used car, where there are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference. Buyers spend less money and sellers make more money, which speaks directly to people's hearts.

This clear and intuitive positioning was hung at the elevator entrance of the office building and repeated over and over again for two weeks until everyone remembered it. People who see it will tell others who need it, and word of mouth will spread like wildfire.

Positioning creativity is an old topic, but not many have done it well. Most brands still cannot summarize their advantages in one sentence, or you think you have made it clear, but consumers are left with question marks. I will talk about how to create good positioning ideas in another article.

2. Time linkage: it’s not that we won’t report, it’s just that the time has not come yet.

Products that can be produced today and sell out tomorrow only appeared in the last century. Nowadays, even epoch-making products like Tesla have to be nurtured for more than several years before they can become hits.

What you see is often hindsight. When you see others become Tmall's annual bestseller or earn over 1 billion yuan a year, it is easy to overlook how long they have been dormant behind the scenes and how many exposure lessons they have taken because it is not exciting enough. To pay attention to the success of a brand, we need to see what it has done during its growth period.

Feihe has such a good brand awareness that it invested in Focus Media for 8 months, covering hundreds of thousands of office buildings and communities across the country, before it reached a turning point and ushered in a big boom.

After achieving certain success in promoting its brand on the Internet, Yuanqi Forest ran offline advertisements through Focus Media for five consecutive months, firmly occupying the minds of more consumers and becoming the leader in the sugar-free soda water category.

This may be the most difficult part for all brands. Money is spent day by day, just like simmering beef brisket, but the familiarity, trust, and goodwill behind it are accumulating day by day, but there seems to be no big change in sales. Just like making friends, true feelings accumulate over time, and then there will be opportunities for long-term business.

3. Firepower linkage, take action when it is time to take action

In the past, there were winter promotions, summer promotions, and mid-year promotions. Now there are March 8, June 18, and Double 11. You must concentrate your efforts on each major time node. If you scatter your efforts too thinly, you will often get nothing.

In March, it’s the season for spring clothes. In May, 517 is the time for eating. In September, it’s time for school to start and education to start. There has to be a wave of brand promotion. And at the end of the year, you have to prepare a big gift box for returning home in glory.

For targeted advertising at this time, don’t do brand advertising . Either launch new products or have promotions. The advertising slogans should be full of driving words: Come and buy, place an order, and download quickly. What are you waiting for? Use passionate words all together!

4. Identify and collaborate, and continuously break through the circle

There is something called empathy bias in advertising theory, which is similar to the newspaper advertisements that year: the one millionth car owner was born, and 100,000 mothers trusted him. In other words, when you are doing well in the e-commerce circle, don’t forget to tell more people outside the circle.

The advertisements that Xiaoxiandun has placed on Focus Media show that it has been leading in sales for four consecutive years. For those who have bought it, they feel that they have made the right choice. For those who don’t know about it, they think: Wow, there is such a brand, it is endorsed by Zhang Ziyi, and it has been the number one in sales for four years, so I might as well try it.

Yuanqi Forest is not only about zero sugar, zero fat and zero calories, it is also the sales champion of beverages on Tmall. The reason is the same. With billions as the online foundation, if we want to attack the traditional channels worth tens of billions, we must first expose the real world outside of mobile phones to build social consensus.

So you will see recently that many internet celebrities are particularly keen on investing in targeted media, and the logic is that they want to break the circle and increase the volume.

When the Internet's investment-output ratio reached its peak, four-fifths of consumers still consumed offline. The breakthrough for this part is to break through from targeted advertising and become a public brand from an Internet celebrity brand.

5. Link the distribution and promotion of goods. Don’t just see them but not buy them.

Even if the targeted advertising is well placed, it is not acceptable if you cannot find it when you use your mobile phone to browse. It will not work if the products are not distributed in the surrounding areas. It will be even worse if the supporting services cannot keep up.

Feihe has a consumer education team of more than 3,000 people and approximately 90,000 shopping guides; Huaxizi has Li Jiaqi’s live streaming to harvest and create experiences for more people; Perfect Diary has Douyin + private domain. These are all combination punches.

After the brand advertisement is released, consumers will search online, and social media promotion must be coordinated. After that, it is necessary to convert traffic and transform the brand power into purchasing power as quickly as possible.

Summarize

There are so many things that can be written about "Yifenzhong". After all, when you know who are the people in this building, you can accompany them every day, and no one will snatch the microphone from you, you will really want to give it some thought.

In an era when Internet advertising is so noisy and inward-looking, the niche media environment ensures that advertising dissemination has certain results.

If you only want to sell goods and become obsessed with the quick conversions of live streaming, then it’s a one-time deal. There will be no loyalty, no repeat purchases, and you will only attract customers at low prices and then close the stall after the sales are over.

If you want to build a brand, don't act like you're trying to snatch money from other people's pockets. Consumers are not stupid and can see through it.

Understand them, solve their problems, and provide better choices so that they can gain practical value and psychological comfort.

Without brand promotion and content seeding, it is unrealistic to directly sell products.

Always remember the definition of a brand: a unique set of benefits, services, and reasons that a seller offers to buyers over the long term.

Author: Zhao Yuanyuan

Source: Zhao Yuanyuan