In-depth brand communication strategy—penetrate!

There are two things that left a deep impression on me. One was a project I personally worked on, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars in just one or two months. The original strategy was saturation delivery, giving people an overwhelming feeling, including large screens in the city, targeted advertising on buses and subways in the city center, and various places online.

A large budget was spent, but there was not much feedback from social media and no obvious changes in product data. Was the money wasted?

The second thing is that last year I went to a hot company for communication. They said they had a brand advertising budget of 1.5 billion. The CMO, who came from sales, counted on his fingers. CCTV, local satellite TV stations, Focus Media, Baima, iQiyi, Kuaishou, and Douyin... more than a dozen platforms. The budget had been divided up, and it was still not enough. I told him: If you haven’t signed the contract yet, you can wait.

Many people believe that as long as the budget is large enough, they can create a brand by spending money. This is very wrong.

When it comes to marketing nowadays, budget is very important, but a large budget cannot solve the problem. Including the brands I am familiar with with annual budgets in the billions, their marketing departments work 996 every day, their strategies and content are industry-leading, and they are still afraid that the public will think they are just rich. It is very difficult to spend a lot of money, and it is even more difficult to make the money work.

When faced with a large budget, you have two choices: to do more in-depth communication or to go for broader exposure coverage. These are two ways of thinking, but I tend to think that the depth of communication is more important than the breadth. Depth first, then breadth.

Today we will talk about how to influence and change consumers through deep penetration strategies rather than just letting them pass by.

Below, Enjoy:

Penetration dimensions: scenarios, crowds, and traffic pools

First of all, understand the logic of penetration. It is not about playing an advertisement repeatedly. That is a product of the previous era.

We divide penetration into three dimensions: penetrating a core scenario; penetrating a core group of people; penetrating a traffic pool.

There may be overlap in the specific implementation process, but for better understanding, we will talk about them one by one here. Even in actual implementation, there must be a key dimension.

For example, in a traffic pool and scene, there is no restriction on the crowd. For example, if you want to penetrate a group of people and a scene, there is no restriction on the media platform. It depends on the specific situation.

Scenario dimension: The strategy of some brands is scenario strategy, penetrating one scenario, then penetrating another, and achieving continuous growth of the brand through continuous scenario expansion.

For the young generation who are Internet natives, new scenes are constantly emerging in their new lifestyle. Some new consumer brands innovate products directly based on new scenarios. Similarly, mature products can also achieve new growth by establishing new scenarios.

Population dimension: We have seen in countless consumer insight PPTs that white-collar workers in first-tier cities, aged 25-35, with high education and high income, etc. It seems that all brands are targeting this group of people.

The population dimension we are talking about must be fixed to specific groups of people and clearly distinguished.

For example, I targeted the white-collar population in Beijing's five core business districts, about 3 million people; for example, I only targeted men's skin care and cosmetics products; for example, I only targeted pregnant women, and so on. Very specific people, not vague descriptions.

Traffic dimension: This is a dimension based on the Internet medium. In my opinion, all Internet communication campaigns must be based on core marketing purposes, select a major traffic pool, and then penetrate it.

Maybe you don’t have enough budget, so you can cooperate with an internet celebrity with high fan stickiness, such as Hua Xizi who has penetrated Li Jiaqi.

If the budget is large enough, you can cooperate strategically with social platforms to penetrate a platform in an all-round and three-dimensional manner in a short period of time. Such cooperation will have a greater impact.

Based on the brand's phased goals, we choose three dimensions: scene, crowd, and traffic pool. A main dimension is selected as the main battlefield, and in-depth communication is carried out in all directions and in three dimensions until this scene, crowd or traffic pool establishes a deep binding relationship with the brand.

Next, let’s talk about cases, interpret large-scale campaigns with billion-level budgets, and how to conduct in-depth communication.

Case: Wanglaoji penetrated Kuaishou

Recently, most marketing departments have been busy with the Spring Festival campaign, especially some large fast-moving consumer goods brands, which have come up with various tricks to gain a foothold during the Spring Festival.

Let’s talk about Wanglaoji’s Spring Festival campaign. Recently, Wanglaoji and Kuaishou held a joint press conference to announce their strategic cooperation during the Spring Festival.
The content of the picture cooperation is that during the Spring Festival, through online and offline linkage, Spring Festival customized products and multi-channel communication, the brand concept of "Drink Red Can Wanglaoji and Have an Auspicious Year" will be fully reached to Kuaishou users, from exposure to in-depth understanding of the brand connotation to post-link conversion, to achieve a topical and pioneering strategic cooperation.

To put it simply, it is Wanglaoji's Spring Festival marketing campaign. The marketing goal is to penetrate Wanglaoji's consumption scenarios during the Spring Festival by penetrating the Kuaishou traffic pool.

Choose the main battlefield

As a mass consumer product, Wanglaoji is already well-known nationwide in terms of its popularity, and it is difficult to increase its sales.

Repeated exposure is of little significance, and incremental information on the scene must be provided for in-depth propagation. Therefore, Wanglaoji’s choice to deeply penetrate the scene is the correct strategy.

The same goes for other fast-moving consumer goods brands. If they already have a very high degree of popularity, they should stop engaging in exposure-based communications.

Choose a major traffic pool and penetrate it. Why did Wanglaoji choose Kuaishou? There are many media that can be used for communication. Why did Wanglaoji form an alliance with Kuaishou? Let’s talk about the advantages of this alliance only from the perspective of marketing strategy.

First of all, Wanglaoji is a mass consumer product and can only choose mass communication without making any distinction in the population dimension. The traditional approach is to have content first and then look for media, but this makes it difficult to stand out during the Spring Festival when marketing is very crowded, and the media costs are extremely high.

The strategy this time is: first determine the traffic pool, and then customize the appropriate content. This logic will be used more and more in the future.

Then there is the value of Kuaishou. The conventional ones are of course the large number of users, high activity, strong stickiness, etc. In addition, compared with other popular platforms, Kuaishou’s commercialization is not yet saturated, and there are greater opportunities for it to stand out and penetrate.

Another very important point is that Kuaishou has a strong penetration capability in various regions, and its localized content has a higher reach rate. This will allow mass communication to break through the circle and not be limited to a single circle.

Focus on a single scene

The value of penetrating new scenarios is roughly equal to the value of developing new blockbuster products. The scene is very important and I won’t go into details here.

This time, Wanglaoji locked on Kuaishou's traffic pool and the single scene of the Spring Festival, which was more focused and more conducive to in-depth communication.

"Drink red can of Wanglaoji and have an auspicious new year." The iconic red can and the Chinese character "吉" (good luck) in Wanglaoji make this product more suitable for the Spring Festival scene. Wanglaoji’s scenario-based approach is not unfamiliar. The summer saying “If you’re afraid of getting a sore throat, drink Wanglaoji” has been deeply rooted in people’s hearts. Now the newly opened Spring Festival scene will become a new growth point for this national beverage.

Wanglaoji is a national beverage, and its marketing strategy only involves penetrating two scenarios, which is enough to shake up such a large scale.

Perhaps more scenarios will be developed based on young people’s new consumption habits. But now, Wanglaoji has first penetrated the New Year scene on Kuaishou and established a firm foothold.

Integrate into the content ecosystem

Finally, what does it mean to penetrate?

My standard is integration. Whether this brand is integrated into the traffic pool, whether it is integrated into the scene, and becomes a part of it.

Let’s take a look at what Wanglaoji is going to do on Kuaishou:

First, the first Laotie Co-creation Competition was held on Kuaishou, which lasted from January 15 to February 13 throughout the entire Spring Festival period. The Creative Challenge collaborates with gaming experts to drive the production of UGC through PGC, thus forming a strong bond between Spring Festival-related scenes and Wanglaoji. Make use of the vast number of Kuaishou creators to integrate Wanglaoji into the Spring Festival scene.

To put it simply, in the Kuaishou content ecosystem, Wanglaoji is responsible for the atmosphere of this year's Spring Festival.

The other things are: customizing the cans exclusively for Laotie; the live broadcast sales PK competition between top talents Sanda Ge and Erlu; and the subsequent long-tail communication by sponsoring the Wanglaoji small theater.

Finally, all content collaborations will be directed to Wanglaoji’s official Kuaishou account, where fans will be accumulated into the brand’s own and can be operated in the long term.

Of course, there is also the continuous exposure of regular advertising positions. Wanglaoji has fully integrated into the Kuaishou content ecosystem throughout the Spring Festival, giving Kuaishou users a stronger sense of brand experience.

Finally, when people buy New Year's goods in supermarkets and choose beverages, they will think of drinking Wanglaoji for an auspicious year. Choosing Wanglaoji as a drink for New Year's gatherings is a particularly successful scene marketing.

The above case has just begun to be implemented, and we will have to wait and see the results. But from a strategic perspective, I think it is worth learning from.

To sum up

Effective communication is when it can break through the public’s attention threshold.

Internet content that is full of generalities is already very saturated and flooded at the moment, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract users' attention.

Depth and breadth are two dimensions, and one dimension always dominates communication.

For certain special marketing purposes, such as when a popular product continues to be exposed and expanded rapidly, the breadth of dissemination is dominant. But more often than not, when we want to influence some people, create some new scenarios, or change some old consensus, deep communication is often more important.

For deep penetration communication strategies, I have summarized three dimensions: penetrating a scene; penetrating a group of people; penetrating a traffic pool.

There may be more dimensions, but the core logic is to drill deeper into a point. Communicate with users through a long verbal conversation rather than a quick question-and-answer interaction.

More specific information and deeper communication until marketing goals are achieved.

From the perspective of specific implementation, there is a dominant dimension, which may also overlap with other dimensions. For example, Wanglaoji takes the scene as the main focus and develops the scene role of New Year drinks. But if the communication platform only chooses to cooperate with Kuaishou, then the strategy becomes: penetrate the Spring Festival scenario on Kuaishou.

On one platform, penetrate a scenario and conduct in-depth communication.

Of course, not all brand campaigns have communication budgets worth billions. Millions or tens of millions are considered large projects, but the budget is not large. How to implement a penetration strategy?

Narrow the scope, more specific scenarios, smaller groups of people, and smaller traffic pool. First penetrate a small niche area, and then leverage it to leverage more popular peripheral communications.

For example, Hua Xizi strongly bound itself to Li Jiaqi from the beginning and penetrated Li Jiaqi's traffic pool to leverage greater communication power. The essence is to focus, first become a niche hotspot, and then spread outward.

Depending on the size of your budget, choose the area of ​​focus for your communication. Continuous communication over a long period of time and in multiple dimensions until it penetrates the entire network.

Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai