Spring Festival Marketing: Focus on Online, Breakthrough Offline

Despite the impact of the epidemic, the Spring Festival is still the best marketing opportunity for brands.

Recently, the CNY campaign has started in full swing, it’s full of New Year flavor, full of New Year atmosphere, and dazzling brands.

In an era of crowded marketing, it is too easy for advertisements to become homogenized and drowned out, resulting in ineffective marketing. It is important for brands to maintain independent thinking.

The core marketing value of the Spring Festival is the offline scene.

No matter how much publicity you do, how much content you create, or how much goods you sell, the most important thing is your brand's presence in people's offline social circles during those 7 days when the Spring Festival holiday comes.

Offline social interaction during the Spring Festival is a huge venue for information exchange.

During the Spring Festival, no matter how far you go, you have to go home. Even if the epidemic is serious, most people will still go home. In the offline scenes during the Spring Festival, the information exchange among your classmates and old friends, relatives and neighbors, these social relationships, is a true breaking of the circle.

You are in the Internet industry, and your classmate is in construction engineering; or you are a teacher, and your neighbor is an entrepreneur; you are in Beijing CBD, and your relatives are engaged in breeding by the sea.

Because of the Chinese New Year holiday, all kinds of strange and unusual social gatherings take place. Everyone exchanges information, including opportunities to make money, fun apps, and new brands.

There is huge room for growth here. Compared with breaking the circle online, visiting friends and gatherings during the Spring Festival are more efficient ways to break the circle of traffic.

Now that you understand and agree with this, let’s talk about how to implement it at the strategy and case level.

Below, enjoy:

1. Strategy: Focus on online and break through offline circles

Breaking the offline circle is the marketing goal, but marketing execution is still online.

During the period before the Spring Festival, do a good job of online marketing and communication to ensure that your brand can enter everyone’s social circle during the 7-day Spring Festival holiday and become one of the information exchanged.

How can online communication break through the offline circle?

Each brand faces different scenarios, including new brands, mature brands, consumer products, large appliances or technology products, and even Internet products. Each brand has a different role during the Spring Festival and uses different communication methods. We will talk about cases for reference later.

Let’s talk about general strategies: one is to focus on the crowd; two is to provide incremental information; three is to create scenarios.

This is essentially a word-of-mouth communication, word-of-mouth in offline scenarios, and private domain traffic for Spring Festival gatherings, which requires seed users first.

First, in terms of population, we should focus on core users first, and then consider covering potential new users.

For example, large fast-moving consumer goods brands tend to focus their communication resources on core old users, and organize promotions to encourage those who have already bought once to buy again. If it is an Internet product, there are many ways to give some benefits to users with high stickiness and please old users.

The second is to provide incremental information or products as topics of social conversation during the Spring Festival.

For example, Coca-Cola is a single product and its popularity is saturated. We won’t talk about how delicious Coke is during our New Year gatherings. There are many similar mature brands. So is it possible to make some special editions or customized versions for the Spring Festival, or have a hit in marketing content (this is more difficult)? You have to do something different to provide everyone with some brand topics to talk about.

The third is to find the right brand role in the Spring Festival scene.

Buy it as New Year's goods; bring it back as tools; use it as entertainment; become a topic of conversation at parties; or become a new year custom that iterates on old rituals, etc. Brands of different categories can always find a role in the Spring Festival scenes.

Simply put, we should carry out online communication with the mindset of breaking the offline circle.

For core users, provide incremental information and establish scenario roles. Next, let’s talk about the case.

2. New consumer brands, new products break the circle

In recent years, new consumer entrepreneurship has been the biggest trend, and new consumer brands have emerged in endlessly.

When we talked about new product marketing before, the data showed that Tmall launched more than 200 million new products in 2020, and a large proportion of these new products are new consumer brands.

The Spring Festival is an important opportunity for new consumer brands to break through and grow.

First, its popularity has not yet reached saturation, and there is still a lot of room for growth; second, it is new enough, and "new" itself is a topic of conversation; third, it can be established as a New Year's product and enter the Spring Festival social scene as a new year's product.

During this year's New Year's Goods Festival, Tmall Treasure New Brand IP accurately grasped the importance of the Spring Festival to new brands, and applied to open an exclusive track for new brands - New Year's Goods Treasure New Brand Special, seizing the opportunity of the Spring Festival to help new brands break the circle.

Use new brands to define new year products, interpret new customs and lead new consumption, and help new brands make their collective highlight debut in Spring Festival marketing . For the New Year Goods Festival, new brands bring new supplies, making the festival younger and sharper.

For new brands, they can take advantage of the New Year Goods Festival and enter the Spring Festival scene as new year goods to achieve greater growth. As for consumers, buy some new year goods.

This case uses the New Year Goods Festival as the outer packaging to promote a new brand, focuses on online strategy, and helps new brands break the circle in terms of purpose.

Next, let’s talk about the strategy from three aspects: focusing on new youth, launching new customs, and promoting new growth.

3. Focus on New Youth

As mentioned in the previous strategy, focus on core users. But this is not just one brand. When faced with a marketing IP that packages many brands, it still needs to focus to a certain extent.

The positioning here is "treasure new youth", mainly those born in the 1990s and 1995s, focusing on white-collar workers and students in first- and second-tier cities, young people who dare to try new things, are brave to explore, and are willing to share.

In terms of communication, the theme is "Treasure Youth, Relaxing New Year". These young people are basically the seed users of new consumer brands, and most of them are concentrated in the Internet and new media industries.

This group of people represents the latest trend in the Spring Festival social scene.

Therefore, as a new consumer brand, we try every means to sell goods during the Spring Festival. Only by selling the goods and having new year goods taken home can we break the circle in social gatherings.

4. Release New Year Customs

Content is the connection point, connecting the target population with the Spring Festival scenes.

This case uses two contents to connect the two: one is to create new customs, and the second is new scenes, so that the new brand can interpret the new customs.

First of all, there is a set of new customs posters, such as express delivery of New Year's goods, 5G-style New Year celebrations, cloud-based gatherings, intermittent filial piety, indulgent weight loss, etc. This content must enter public opinion and become a social topic.

After its release, it received spontaneous follow-up from over 450 media influencers including CCTV.com, became a hot topic on multiple platforms, and received over 1 billion readings. What these data can prove is that this new year custom has really entered the public opinion and is discussed by the public, rather than being a self-entertainment bought with money.

Then, the official Weibo account of the new Baozang brand released an MV, using the Bull Demon King as the creative symbol, and magically adapted and launched the Year of the Ox limited edition "Congratulations", bringing out the top ten New Year trends in 2021 and the relaxed attitude of Baozang youth towards the New Year, which received more than 20 million views.

This content integrates new youth, new customs and new brands into the Spring Festival scene.

For example, the Tineco smart food processor can easily prepare New Year's Eve dinner, making it possible to "do housework while lying down"; Brook building blocks can easily deal with naughty children's mischief, making it possible to "have a baby easily"; Jane Eyre yogurt can easily allow you to achieve "indulgent weight loss" and you won't gain weight during the Chinese New Year.

This MV focuses on showing how new brands can help young people celebrate the New Year with ease, create scene model rooms, and encourage young people to place orders for New Year goods.

5. Supporting New Growth

For the Spring Festival campaign of new consumer brands, we look at growth from two levels.

The first is the direct growth brought by New Year’s Goods Festival sales. All external social media communications will eventually flow back to the Tmall New Year Festival venue, prompting young people to place orders and take them home as New Year gifts.

The second is indirect growth, which is the implicit growth after breaking the offline circle. When these New Year goods flow with the flow of the crowd, enter the offline social circles of the Spring Festival, enter the festive scenes of the Spring Festival, and become the topic of conversation at gatherings, breaking the circle has already occurred.

Tmall is the largest gathering place for new brands. Last year, Jiang Fan said that he would help 1,000 new brands achieve sales of over 100 million yuan in the next three years. For new brands whose popularity has not yet reached saturation, if they want to maintain sustained growth, they must look at it from two angles: breaking through the crowd circle and expanding the scene.

This new brand’s New Year’s Goods Festival spreads new scenes online, defines New Year’s goods with new brands through the dissemination of New Year customs, and gives these brands new scenes and roles.

Should I continue buying traditional New Year goods, or buy some fresher new brands? For young people, this choice is not difficult to make.

Based on the new New Year’s goods scene, we will break into new offline crowds.

The core group is new economic industries such as the Internet or new media. During the Spring Festival, they recommend products to classmates and old friends in traditional industries and physical industries, bringing them new trends, and new brands begin to break the circle.

6. Summary

To sum up, let’s look at the problem from a different perspective in the marketing battlefield of the Spring Festival.

The Spring Festival is not an ordinary festival. Ordinary festival marketing only needs to integrate into the festive atmosphere, provide user benefits, and create some festive content, and the marketing can also pass.

But not during the Spring Festival. At least for now, the huge population movement and changes in social relations during the Spring Festival are both very astonishing.

People enter a non-daily social environment during the Spring Festival. Many relationships are only seen once a year, and in this state people begin to exchange a lot of information.

If the barriers in online circles become thicker and social cocoons become stronger, then the Spring Festival is the best time to break through social barriers.

Based on this, we divide the Spring Festival campaign into two phases:

The first is the early stage of marketing communication, which is the New Year’s Goods Festival starting from Laba Festival and lasts until the Spring Festival Gala on New Year’s Eve. This is a stage of continuous and intensive communication, and it is also during this stage that marketing can intervene.

The second is offline social interaction during the holidays, which is something that marketing cannot intervene in. However, this stage is an important moment for people from different circles, industries and cities to exchange information. It is a social interaction that truly has the value of breaking through circles.

The focus on communication is still in the first stage, but it should be done with the purpose of the second stage.

For example, during the New Year’s Goods Festival, usually things are sold out and the sales revenue can be calculated to show the effect. If you do it with the purpose of the second stage in mind and integrate the new brand into the new customs, what you sell will not only be new year goods, but also new trends.

During the information exchange during the Spring Festival, it was found that this automatic cooking pot, that mopping robot, or some healthy meal replacement were recommended to different circles, bringing about consumption growth after the Spring Festival.

Therefore, brands need to enter the Spring Festival scene, become a topic of social conversation, and be the object of recommendation.

Brands in different categories and at different stages have different methods and paths. The new consumer brands we use as examples are the products that are most likely to become topics of conversation and be recommended because their popularity is not yet saturated and their products are new enough.

At the same time, we need to remind ourselves of the misunderstanding that for big brands whose popularity is already very high, there is almost no value in exposure-oriented communication.

For other brands, here are three suggestions:

First, the communication is tilted towards core users, who are the ones who can spread word of mouth; second, it provides incremental information as social topics; third, it creates scene roles and makes scene model rooms.

Finally, the Spring Festival is a time for everyone to look outward.

Leave the cubicle and your comfortable social circle, find playmates and old friends from other industries, relatives and neighbors with different hobbies, talk to them, and discover a different world.

above.

Author: Yang Buhuai

Source: Yang Buhuai (ID: yangbuhuai01)