Nanny-level Zhihu marketing strategy!

Zhihu itself is very averse to others doing marketing on it, but it itself has the good characteristics of word-of-mouth marketing. The author of this article explains how to do marketing on the Zhihu platform from the following aspects, hoping it will be of some help to you.

Zhihu marketing is an issue that almost every brand, especially service-oriented brands with high customer unit prices, must pay attention to. Why? There are three reasons

First, the growth rate of Zhihu's DAU is terrifying, so there must be your users here;

Second, Zhihu has always been the Chinese community with the highest SEO index, and has always been ranked very high in Baidu. This means that once there are negative reviews on Zhihu, how to evaluate the negative reviews of a certain brand will particularly affect the user's decision-making experience;

Third, content is king on Zhihu. More than 80% of the hot posts come from ordinary users, not experts. You don’t have to pay for the high premiums of experts when doing Zhihu marketing.

So how can we do Zhihu marketing well?

I will break it down in five parts: traffic composition, algorithm, topic selection, content, and Zhi+ support.

1. Traffic composition

Zhihu's main traffic entrances are mainly concentrated in four sections

1. Search traffic

Girls use Xiaohongshu for search, while boys use Zhihu for search. Many male users use Zhihu as a search engine to search for various knowledge and questions. With the support of search engines, search traffic has become an important part of Zhihu.

Example: Search for "camera recommendation" on Baidu or Zhihu

Baidu Zone displays Zhihu Q&A content

Advantages of search traffic: accurate and long life cycle

Disadvantages of search traffic: weak explosiveness and easily affected by ranking fluctuations

Format: Q&A, articles, videos, etc.

2. Recommended traffic

Zhihu Recommendations is a column that is presented first on the Zhihu website and app. A large number of answers have become popular because of community recommendations.

Recommended traffic advantages: large volume

Disadvantages of recommended traffic: high requirements for content quality and data feedback

Format: Q&A, articles, videos, etc.

3. Hot list traffic

Zhihu Hot List is a ranking list for the most popular content on the entire site. It has a general list and sub-lists in various fields, which can attract the attention of users across the site in a short period of time.

Advantages of hot list traffic: large exposure

Disadvantages of hot list traffic: fierce competition, high requirements for topics, easy to be dragged down

Format: Q&A, articles, videos, etc.

4. Video traffic

Video is currently a form of Zhihu support. It can be accessed on the homepage and is also displayed in the recommendation column and hot list.

Advantages of video traffic: initial dividends

Disadvantages of video traffic: not accurate enough, relying on community support

Format: Video

5. Other traffic

In addition to the above traffic, Zhihu's attention column, ideas, circles, and live broadcasts still have some traffic, but generally there is no first-level entrance, so they are not the focus of marketing.

2. The Secret of the Algorithm

If you want to do a good job in Zhihu marketing, it is essential to understand Zhihu's algorithm

First of all, regarding search traffic, Zhihu’s search ranking is actually similar to that of search engines. Content needs to be included first before the search term ranking can be improved.

On the one hand, we need to consider the matching degree between the content and the search keywords. The higher the matching degree, the greater the probability of inclusion. On the other hand, high-quality accounts have higher weights and can obtain higher search rankings. Finally, the popularity of the content will also affect the search ranking. In short, the more popular the content, the higher the ranking.

Of course, the search also involves the ranking of answers under the question. Generally speaking, after the search term is included in the question, one of the highly praised answers under the question will be captured and displayed. In addition, because users usually refer to more than one answer, the answer that is naturally ranked first under the question will also have a greater chance of exposure.

Therefore, if you can achieve a very high ranking for the search term + question, then the traffic will naturally be better; if you cannot achieve both, then at least one of them should be in the front position.

The second is for recommended traffic. Recommended traffic is through Zhihu's recommendation algorithm, and then pushes content to users.

Generally speaking, the recommendation algorithm will first push the content to a small number of people, and then collect feedback data, such as reading completion rate, approval rate, interaction data, etc., to determine whether the content is worth continuing to recommend.

The third is the traffic on the hot list. The hot list is a collection of real-time popular content on Zhihu. Its dimensions are mainly calculated based on the 24-hour page views, interaction volume and field weight.

If you want your content to be on the hot list, you must have a large number of users in the field participate in the interaction within a short period of time. Once you have a good reputation, the popularity of the content will naturally increase.

Of course, for video content, its distribution mechanism is similar to recommendation, and there is a separate list to support it, which you can refer to.

The fourth is the comprehensive algorithm. Unlike Toutiao, Douyin and other platforms, Zhihu uses the Wilson algorithm, which determines the recommendation and ranking of content based on the Wilson formula based on the data of likes, dislikes, and collections of the content.

u represents the number of approvals for the content, v represents the number of disapprovals for the content, p represents the approval rate of the content = approvals/(approvals + disapprovals), and Z is a number related to the weight.

Although the algorithm formula is very complicated, you only need to remember the most important point: the approval rate is more important than the number of approvals, and the disapproval rate is more important than the approval rate.

Unlike other content platforms, in addition to liking and interacting, Zhihu users can also vote against content they disagree with, and the number of votes will affect the ranking of answers to a certain extent.

3. Topic selection and potential exploration

Before you get Zhihu traffic, tapping potential is an essential step

Under the premise that the content cost remains unchanged, the choice of different questions determines the number of times the content is displayed. The same content will have completely different effects when answered under two questions of different popularity.

After a long period of frontline practice, I have summarized the following three methods, which can help everyone discover potential problems to a certain extent.

1. Data-driven

Mainly data-oriented, the main data indicator is to look at the exposure (per unit time) of a question (or the growth rate of exposure)

The so-called exposure refers to how many users' recommendation pages this question will appear on. The reasons for appearing on the user recommendation page are nothing more than the following:

1) Hot topics that I’ve been following recently

2) The people I follow also follow this question

3) Someone I follow answered this question

4) Someone I follow liked the answer to this question

5) Others (such as inviting someone to answer the question, etc.)

The first four points, which are also the most mainstream ones, can all be calculated into a more specific number through the public information on Zhihu.

For example, let’s count the number of times “This appeared on my timeline because someone I follow followed this question.”

1. We click on the follower list to see everyone
2. We click on a person's name, such as mine, and then click on the list of people who follow me, and we can know how many people and which people's timelines will see this question because I followed/answered this question.
3. Repeat step 2 until we get a list of all the people who follow this question, remove the duplicate names, and the number of people we get is the upper limit of the exposure of "appearing in my timeline because the people I follow follow this question"

Why is there an upper limit? Because the people I follow may have performed multiple operations on this question, such as following, answering, liking, etc., these will be merged by Zhihu and appear on my recommendation page, rather than simply appearing again and again.

Similarly, we can also calculate the number of other exposures.

In addition to calculating the final exposure, we can also know the growth curve of these exposures (exposure/time curve) through the time when the answerer answered the question (this has public data) and the time when the followers paid attention to the question (this has no public data, but this rough data can be obtained by regularly grabbing the follower list). With these data, it is simple:

1) As long as this issue is widely exposed, it will definitely be seen by more people

2) As long as the exposure of this question increases rapidly, it will almost certainly become a hot question

Basically, the exposure is positively correlated with the number of followers of a question. As long as the number of followers of a question rises to a certain level in a short period of time, it can basically be considered that this question has potential. Of course, the accuracy of this prediction can be adjusted by adjusting the parameters of this magnitude. The stricter the magnitude, the more accurate the prediction.

2. Community Orientation

If you become a Zhihu answerer, the community will invite you to answer some related questions based on your expertise. These questions are all potential questions selected by Zhihu. You only need to choose some questions that are suitable for you to answer. These topics are mainly distributed in three entrances:

1) Recommended for you (https://www.zhihu.com/question/waiting)

The main recommendation factor is based on your areas of expertise, recommending potential questions in your areas of expertise

2) Popularity issue (https://www.zhihu.com/question/waiting?type=hot)

Mainly recommend some hot and popular issues at the moment, but they are usually not highly relevant and have timeliness, and the popularity disappears quickly.

3) Latest questions (https://www.zhihu.com/question/waiting?type=new)

It mainly recommends new questions in the field of expertise. It is the most accurate among the four major entrances, but most of the questions are still in the cold start stage. Whether they can have higher popularity needs further judgment.

3. Hot list orientation

It is known that hot list recommendations will bring a lot of exposure to questions. We use the hot list as a breakthrough point and crawl 50 questions on the hot list on a certain day of a certain month (the hot list here refers to the "hot list" label on the Zhihu homepage)

Indicators include question posting time, hot list inclusion time, number of answers, number of followers, and number of views

With a little arrangement, we can see the general situation of the hot list issues. There are two types of questions on the hot list: one is hot issues with high timeliness, and the other is classic issues that do not pursue timeliness:

1) Hot topics: 50%, generally hot topics released within 48 hours, similar to news;

2) Classic questions: 50%. Many old questions were raised several years ago, but because they are highly controversial, they appear on the hot list every once in a while.

Hot issues can be roughly divided into two categories: one is sudden hot issues, and the other is periodic hot issues.

Sudden hot spots, such as the recent death of Mr. Yuan and the Qinghai earthquake, are difficult to predict. If you want to make a layout, you can monitor the changes in the list through crawlers or collectors. If there is a question with a fast increase in popularity ranking, answer it immediately to seize the popularity.

Periodic hot spots, such as the recent League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational and spiritual involution, are predictable. For example, the schedule of the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational was known to everyone long before the start of the game, and some predictions about the results of the game could be made before the start of the game. For example, highly controversial topics like spiritual involution will attract attention for a long time. Every time a related hot topic appears, it will trigger new heat on this issue, which can also be planned in advance.

If you find it difficult to screen out periodic and highly controversial questions, you can judge by the growth rate of page views, because page views, answers and followers are almost completely proportional, and cannot be used as the main reference factor for whether or not to be on the hot list. Therefore, we will no longer focus on answers and followers, but only focus on one indicator - page views of the question. Here is a very important data. The median page view growth rate of questions on the hot list is 30,000/hour. Questions that exceed this value have a chance of being on the hot list.

If you don't know how to crawl, you can use some third-party collectors to capture data, such as Octopus Collector, Houyi Collector, etc. Most of the functions are free and can be used to assist in judgment.

4. Create high-quality content

As mentioned at the beginning, content is king on Zhihu, and content quality determines traffic. How to create high-quality content suitable for Zhihu is one of the things that brands must master.

First of all, Zhihu itself welcomes practical content. Compared with short content with few words, Zhihu also tilts more traffic to high-quality in-depth content.

Generally speaking, Zhihu content can be divided into the following types:

1. Story type

Typical questions:

How did you make the career change? Was it easy?

What interesting things have you encountered when visiting relatives and friends?

How are you doing three years after graduation?

Real experiences are more likely to impress others and thus receive high praise

The first type of story: You have to be someone that others envy

For example:

At the age of 30, he changed his career and his monthly salary doubled to become the operations director of a company;

Start by playing the victim (telling a few of your miserable experiences) + change your ways halfway (realize your own shortcomings) + start working hard (the beginning of transformation) + face many difficulties ahead (twists and turns in the plot) + finally reach the peak of life (climax) + spread your own life philosophy

The stories of the big guys all have something in common:

For example, Liu Qiangdong was admitted to Renmin University, but he had no tuition fees, and his fellow villagers contributed money to make up the tuition. In order to survive during college, he worked, started a business, and opened a restaurant. His employees stole his money. He started a computer business (selling CDs), but when SARS hit, he had to close the store. However, he unexpectedly sold a batch of goods online.

Thus, the road to counterattack began, and the initial prototype of JD.com appeared. It stepped on Li Guoqing, punched Ma Papa, married a beautiful and wealthy woman, and reached the peak of life.

Chu Cheng, Chu Shijian; Jack Ma - selling socks; Bill Gates, starting a business in a garage. These stories are widely known not only because they are celebrities, but also because of the rough experiences behind them.

People want to see a story with twists and turns, not a simple smooth story.

Of course, the story also needs to pay attention to the description of the writing style, and use more scene substitution techniques. If it is not used well, then use pictures instead.

For example, to describe a poor family, don't use:

My family is very poor, and we often have no food to eat. Sometimes when I see my neighbors eating meat, my mouth almost waters.

Instead, use: My family is very poor, how poor are we?

The most valuable thing in my house is a black and white TV that my relatives threw away. Every time I turn it on, I hear the sound first, and then it takes a while before I can barely see the picture on TV.

The house was a thatched house. Whenever it rained heavily, water would drip from the house uncontrollably, and the whole room seemed cold and damp...

The second type of story: Playing the victim to gain sympathy

For example, you can write about your miserable childhood experiences to gain sympathy from others. Of course, this approach is not suitable for brand placement, so it is omitted here.

The third type of story: evokes emotions of emotion, awe, anger…

Key points: Pay attention to the creation of the storyline - don't write a bland story

Create suspense - how do you start, what happens, and the reader wants to see your next move

There must be a climax at certain stages, rather than just a narrative plot, and the focus should be on the changes in the characters' emotions and thoughts.

2. Sharing

Zhihu personal IP creation, fan attraction, and traffic diversion tools, such as:

How do great people analyze problems?

What abilities are important but most people don't have?

How to maintain long-term, continuous and stable efforts?

How do college students learn self-discipline?

This kind of problem generally bothers many people, but only a few people know how to solve it, and there are even big differences between the solutions.

The easiest way to answer this type of question is:

Have sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge, and have rich practical experience in the things the answerer has experienced

If you want to quickly learn knowledge in a certain field, or even become an expert in this field, the best way is to teach and help others. In this process, you will force yourself to learn a lot of things, and systematically sort out the knowledge that you don’t understand enough, so that you can become more and more powerful.

How to produce high-quality content:

1) Be an integrator of excellent answers;

2) Learn it yourself first, then teach others (value transfer);

3) Discover the problem - research the problem - solve the problem (writing a paper), write the answer as if it were a paper;

4) Personal practice - transformation - sharing;

5) Use other people’s thinking to serve yourself;

Key elements:

1) Focus on the expression of opinions - A powerful and attractive opinion is the top priority for this type of article. (Core argument)

2) The logical structure of the article (if you don’t know anything, then just summarize the summary, which is also good)

3) The matching degree between the evidence and the thesis (the thesis and the evidence must complement each other)

3. Inventory-type answers

What are the truths that you only understood after entering society?

What free educational resources are available on the Internet?

What are some books that can help improve emotional intelligence, judgment, and conversation skills?

Answer the key points of the routine - the most

The most comprehensive, the strongest, the most complete, the most essential...

In short, you must let the readers feel that your answer is the best~~

For example, Yu Haohao’s answer has been on the hot list many times. What did he touch on?

The most attentive and the most refined, right?

How to show the most——

3,000 senior designers recommend this book, 100,000 people have saved this book, and 2 million people have saved this book on Weibo

A list of books selected by a professor at Tsinghua University, and a collection of websites collected over three years in 10 days

1) The data shows how popular the answer is, or how much effort you put into it

2) Use authority to serve yourself

Finally, here are some tips on writing:

1) Sentences should be short, paragraphs should be short, and a complete paragraph should not exceed 7 lines. (Improve reading fluency)

2) Try to use easy-to-understand language, and the language should be logical and coherent. (First order, last order)

3) Try to build scenarios as much as possible instead of rigidly describing them

5. Knowledge + Assistance

Zhi+ is Zhihu's official content acceleration tool

After large-scale content delivery, there will definitely be answers with eye-catching data performance. Such high-quality materials must not be wasted. They can be used to accelerate exposure and improve conversion with the help of commercial traffic.

Of course, if there are no answers with good data performance, don’t use commercial traffic to increase exposure. Commercial traffic is a tool that adds icing on the cake. It will only have good results when applied to content with good data performance.

Through Zhi+, we can set up content promotion orders and promotion budgets in the background. After passing the community commercialization review, the content will be directly recommended to the "Homepage Recommendation Column" of Zhihu without any advertisements or promotion logos. The content is native and user-friendly.

At the same time, the interaction data obtained through Zhi+ promotion can also be fed back into the natural recommendation of content, helping the content to gain more exposure.

After opening a Notification+ account, we can configure the conversion plug-in in the background, and then embed the plug-in into the content, which can realize various forms of jumps such as mini-programs, web pages, product purchases, adding WeChat, etc., directly realize traceable conversions and effectively monitor ROI

At present, Zhi+ orders are all charged by clicks, and city targeting can be performed. Compared with some other acceleration tools, data analysis is more controllable. The overall situation of the content can be easily calculated through the number of clicks, click costs, plug-in clicks, conversions, etc., so as to make timely adjustments and optimizations to the content.

Compared with other platforms’ information flow tools, Zhihu’s Zhi+ has several core advantages:

1. With convertible plug-in

As we all know, Zhihu’s control over external links is relatively strict. If you want to promote products, you can only do so through product recommendation cards and Zhi+. Otherwise, you will have to face the high risk of violating regulations.

Therefore, in comparison, although Zhi+ is a paid product, it supports conversion plug-ins and landing pages in various forms such as WeChat and websites. For many products, the conversion path has been realized and shortened.

2. No advertising logo, and paid promotion traffic can be fed back to natural traffic

Different from information flow ads, although the content promoted by Zhi+ is less targeted (currently only city-targeted), the content promoted is the original answers or articles in the community, without any advertising logo, so users have a stronger sense of trust.

Secondly, according to the cost per click, the cost of a content click of +0.25-1 is not very cheap, but the natural traffic feedback brought by payment can accelerate the circulation of content, and the promotion cost of high-quality content can be reduced exponentially.

According to my own practice, the comprehensive cost per click can even be reduced to a few cents, which is still very cost-effective. After all, according to the AARRR formula, the cost of purchasing front-end traffic will eventually be directly fed back to the final conversion cost.

After our long-term investment, we can roughly summarize the input and output:

For a collection of multi-category products, the ROI can be over 1:3;

For single products, it is more suitable to launch products with medium to high prices, and the ROI can reach more than 1:2;

For attracting followers on WeChat, the overall cost can be controlled to a small single digit per follower;

For low-priced, non-essential products, Zhi+’s direct ROI may not be high (after all, the click cost is there), but the content sedimentation traffic and brand promotion traffic it brings can bring more secondary conversions.

PS: All of the above are based on content with good natural data performance.

Author: Zhao Zichen Vic

Source: Zhao Zichen Vic