Tips for effective advertising!

During this period, advertisers did not increase prices or upload materials on a large scale. Why was there such a big difference in the sales results before and after the brand advertising? This is also related to the characteristics of Bytedance itself - requiring the advertisement itself to be more "content-based" and "immersive". Tik Tok is originally a content-oriented platform. When advertisers promote their brands here, the improvement in bidding conversion effects is visible, which is what we call brand-effect synergy!

Product-effect synergy is a marketing method that achieves high cost-effectiveness. Achieve new synergistic marketing effects by taking into account both the long-term brand impact and proactively guiding conversions.

Brand advertising under the Bytedance system can be divided into two categories:

① Strong advertising - opening screen/TopView: strong visual transmission, quickly establish brand impression, and improve users' awareness of the brand;

② Content marketing - influencer marketing: soft transmission, delivering brand information through a large amount of influencer PUGC + user UGC content output, shaping word of mouth, and more inclined to "experience".

Especially for the second type of content marketing, Douyin's content-oriented scenario is destined to bring better benefits to expert marketing.

So how does brand exposure work with bidding to produce the effect of 1+1>2?

As we all know, the effectiveness of brand advertising is difficult to quantify and evaluate, especially now that there are so many media platforms and users may be active on multiple media, platforms, and devices at the same time, making attribution very complicated. Therefore, Bytedance Marketing Science uses efficiency measurement methods to demonstrate the value of product-effect synergy. How does efficiency measurement work? Let us quote a metaphor from Kass Data:

“There was an apple orchard, and we divided it into two orchards of equal size, on the left and right.

The two orchards on the left and right enjoy the same sunshine and rain irrigation. In order to evaluate whether "fertilization" can increase the apple harvest, we chose not to apply fertilizer to the orchard on the left, and to fertilize the orchard on the right once a month.

When the harvest season comes, we compare the harvests of the two orchards. If the orchard on the left that does not apply fertilizer has a yield of 500 kg, while the orchard on the right that applies fertilizer has a yield of 800 kg, then we can determine:

The "incremental" benefit from fertilization is 300 kilograms. ”

Today we will analyze "brand-effect synergy" in detail. What exactly can it help us with as advertisers?

First of all, is this suitable for all advertisers? The marketing strategies of companies in different industries, sizes, and development stages are definitely different.

It is definitely not suitable for advertisers whose bidding advertising volume is not large. For example, if you invest 10,000 yuan a day and want to influence 100 people, then the bidding model can help you find this group of people very accurately, and there is no need for brand exposure to cooperate.

Therefore, the prerequisite for brand-effect synergy is that the delivery of bidding ads has reached a bottleneck. After running for a period of time, you can clearly feel that "I am in this circle" and cannot get out of it. The existing audience has been effectively reached. This is when the help of the brand is needed. On the one hand, the existing population should be penetrated to increase the consumer's GMV and premium; on the other hand, the brand should be helped to break the circle and radiate those users who were originally difficult to reach with bidding advertisements.

From the industry perspective, there are positive cases of brand-effect synergy in industries such as fast-moving consumer goods, games, real estate, home furnishings, automobiles, social networking, and finance. Therefore, we can think of it as a method of delivery that is applicable to multiple industries and generally effective.

1. Macro market and environmental changes:

As the Internet dividend gradually disappears and traffic growth slows down, everyone's demand for traffic is increasing. The most direct manifestation is that major giants have entered the market one after another, and eCPM has also been rising. All advertisers are pursuing the same goal - reducing costs and improving efficiency.

2. The existing delivery has reached a bottleneck, and the crowd needs to break through the circle. It is difficult to solve the problem of breaking the circle of people from the delivery end, because the targeted settings are there, and it is difficult to get out of the original audience even if you deliver it in general. At the same time, pure effect delivery is like a one-time vending machine - one click produces a bottle, without any long-term accumulation of transaction conversions.

Let’s take a look at some specific cases to see what problems brand-effect synergy can help me solve.

1. Expand user base

A game brand has been running bidding ads for a long time. One day, it launched a TopView first-swipe ad (opening screen + first information flow video) targeting male users. After the brand advertising was widely exposed, the number of key groups reached by bidding advertising increased significantly, with an increase rate of 94%-119%. Among them, the impact on core TA growth is more obvious.

What is most urgent for advertisers? Increment! Increment! Still an increase! Brand advertising can effectively increase the number of people and break the circle of competitive advertising, thus breaking the traffic ceiling. And the people we reach are also the circle we need. We divide the audience into the following eight categories according to the "Eight Major Group Systems":

It can be seen that before the bidding advertisement reaches the reach bottleneck (7 times), the superposition of brand effect brings a 120% conversion growth for the new white-collar population; when the bidding advertisement reaches the reach bottleneck (7 times), the superposition of brand effect is more effective for the conversion of the Genz population. It can accurately locate the crowd and break the circle.

2. Increased conversion rate

At the same frequency, the combined effect of brand + bidding is better than simple brand reach or simple effect reach, which helps to deeply convert the crowd. The following figure is a case study in the real estate industry:

Compared with reaching a single product or a single effect, the conversion rate of people reached by both product and effect increased by 287%!

3. Control conversion costs

The superposition of brand effect helps to control bidding conversion costs. The picture below shows that a certain game brand continuously launched bidding ads and concentratedly carried out three days of brand exposure at the end of the month, during which the number of people reached by the ads reached a peak. And the overall conversion cost was reduced by 22%.

Some people may ask: "Don't you also spend money on branding? How do you calculate this cost?"

First of all, when facing incremental breakthroughs, we must have a psychological expectation: we must pay a greater price than usual to reach this part of users. What role does brand-effect synergy play in this? For example:

For our original target users, our conversion cost may be 100 yuan. Without brand superposition, we may need to spend 200 yuan to expand new users. With the synergy of brand and effect, we may only need to spend 150 or even less to reach this part of users. This is the value of brand and effect synergy.

4. Promote commodity transactions

Brand effectiveness has both immediate value and long-term impact on product conversion. As mentioned before, without "quality", you will only get a one-time "effect".

Let’s take a specific case as an example: a food brand participated in the Douyin Super Brand Day event and used a product-effect combination strategy to attract customers to participate in the live broadcast event. In the conversion chain of exposure - entering the live broadcast room - entering the Douyin store, the superposition of product and effect brought the brand a 4.6% direct conversion increase and a 123% increased transaction efficiency.

Immediate Value:

GMV efficiency: Brand efficiency (123%) > Brand advertising (64%) > Bidding advertising (59%)

Long-term value:

The people exposed by the investment continued to buy in the following 30 days

GMV efficiency: Product efficiency (33.5%) > Bidding (8.8%) > Brand (6.3%)

It is important to note that within 30 days after exposure, there is still continued purchase growth, which is the long-term value.

Increasing volume, reducing costs, improving conversion rates, and increasing GMV are difficult problems that usually cannot be solved no matter how hard you rack your brains, but can be easily solved by changing your perspective.

As mentioned at the beginning, not all advertisers are suitable for this approach. So what kind of advertisers are suitable? For example, in the following scenario, you can try to create a second growth curve by using product efficiency.

• Business status: Industry penetration rate reaches a certain level, and growth encounters bottlenecks
• Strategic focus: ① Breaking the circle of growth. New products need to be introduced, or current products need to expand their audience

  ② Improved efficiency and profits. Want to improve new customer acquisition efficiency, deepen conversion behavior, increase repeat purchases, etc.

• Core indicators: new customer acquisition efficiency, repurchase rate, Arpu, ROI
• Suggested marketing mix: bidding + star map + brand – wide reach, large amount of seeding, expanded materials, main tone

2. Budget allocation strategy

Currently, the recommended product/effect ratio for mass consumer goods is 4:6, and the recommended ratio for industries with long decision-making chains such as cars, houses, and homes is 6:4 (with a higher brand advertising ratio). When focusing on long-term value, the proportion of brand advertising should be increased. The Shapley method can be used with slight adjustments for different marketing purposes.

• Short-term efficiency ROI as the goal: 25%: 75% ~ 45%: 55%
• Long-term ROI target: 40%: 60% ~ 75%: 25% (increase brand budget)
• Car, house, home and other industries with long decision-making links: 60%: 40% ~ 70%: 30% (increase brand ratio)
• When focusing more on GMV, effective advertising will be better, and when focusing on more user purchases, brand investment should be increased.

*Shapley is a method to measure marginal effects. It calculates the marginal effects of touch points to find the reasonable budget allocation point.

3. Frequency allocation strategy

Let’s take the gaming industry as an example.

① When the CVR of bidding advertising reaches the growth bottleneck, the conversion rate improvement brought by brand advertising is more obvious.

② The optimal product-effect-frequency combination with the conversion rate as the goal

MaxCVR (optimal frequency) = brand advertising S times + bidding advertising NS times

S≈the number of brand materials, and N is the frequency of bidding ads when the CVR growth bottleneck occurs.

4. Detailed suggestions on brand effect strategy

① From the perspective of contact point form, in the link of reach-click-conversion, the people reached by product promotion ads (TopView/influencer) perform better in each link; from the perspective of assist effect, TopView + influencer > influencer > TopView, which may be due to the stronger brand awareness caused by the higher frequency of reach of pre-placed product promotion ads. Moreover, the additive effect of IP on influencer effect is very obvious. Influencer marketing can cooperate more with big IPs. At the same frequency, the UV reach rate of multiple influencers separately is higher than that of a single influencer multiple times. It is recommended to select multiple influencers and focus on the superposition of different materials.

② The extension time of brand effect is 4-7 days (many advertisers adopt the method of launching one week and then another week to coordinate the effect of launch). You can launch the brand one to two days in advance.

③Brand material creativity: It should be differentiated from the bidding materials and promote the brand tone more, not just promotional material content. You can create some high-end materials with a prominent style, such as those with celebrity elements.

④ Crowd targeting: At present, it seems that brand and bidding targeting are consistent, and the overall effect is better.

The exploration of brand effectiveness is still ongoing. If one day, your account suddenly increases in volume without you doing anything, don’t be nervous, it might be your brand advertising that is helping you!