The essence of marketing promotion is to acquire customers

Whether it is old marketing or new marketing , the essence of marketing is to acquire customers.

Of course, old marketing does not talk about the concept of customer acquisition, but the actual actions taken are customer acquisition actions; the rise of e-commerce has changed the logic of traditional marketing, returned to the essence of marketing, and turned customer acquisition into the core element of marketing.

The shift from old marketing to new marketing is due to changes in the environment, mainly the online real-time connection environment built by the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, which has changed the disconnected environment of traditional marketing and created new and more efficient means for acquiring customers.

1. Traditional Marketing

Due to environmental constraints, traditional marketing is a relatively inefficient means of acquiring customers.

Traditional marketing mainly relies on two means to acquire customers:

The first is brand building, that is, influencing target users through brands.

Traditionally, the main means of building a brand is advertising, which relies mainly on spending money. However, since there is no more effective way to link users, acquiring users through brand building has become a very inefficient way of acquiring customers from today's perspective.

Traditional marketing focuses on user awareness of a brand. In fact, most brands rely on high-density advertising to build up user awareness. Many brands have not formed a core brand connotation and it is difficult to form strong user awareness. The so-called strong awareness mainly depends on the results obtained by spending money.

The second is channels: mainly relying on various terminal retail channels.

You need to enter various retail stores to acquire users; in fact, entering various stores does not essentially mean acquiring your own users, but borrowing the users of the retail stores; this user system is not yours, but the user system of the terminal retail stores.

So deep distribution came into being - the essential purpose of deep distribution is to acquire customers; but now it seems that deep distribution is a very inefficient and high-cost way of acquiring customers - because it relies on a blind typing mode to achieve the customer acquisition goal.

So there is an entry fee, which was invented by foreign-funded retail; because retail itself has users, brands need to pay "tolls" if they want to enter other people's territory and borrow other people's users.

So after entering the store, you have to do a lot of sales promotion activities in front of the shelves, including hiring a lot of shopping guides, the purpose is also to attract customers.

Traditional marketing mainly relies on these two methods to acquire users and achieve sales targets.

However, the problems with this customer acquisition method are very prominent - mainly low efficiency and high cost.

More importantly, in the traditional environment, users acquired in this way are very easy to lose, and it is difficult to achieve a good retention effect; at the same time, the way traditional customer acquisition methods promote user conversion is relatively simple.

Of course, talking about these issues does not mean criticizing them, because all marketing models are based on a specific historical context and specific technical conditions.

Of course, at present, although the environment has undergone new changes, these measures are still useful.

However, compared with the new means and new models brought about by the new environment, its efficiency has lagged far behind; relying on such customer acquisition methods can no longer adapt to the current new environment.

2. New Marketing

New marketing mainly talks about marketing in a link environment - that is, a new set of customer acquisition methods that need to be formed by using the link environment built with the help of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, to achieve online links, especially the user links.

New marketing brings not only changes to the means of the old marketing model, but more importantly, changes to the model.

The marketing model of the old marketing is: product-brand-channel; first have the product, then build the brand, and then build the channel.

The marketing model of new marketing has changed to: user-product-transaction-brand.

The old marketing was centered around operating commodities, while the new marketing has become centered around operating users—this is an essential change between the old and new marketing.

This also returns to the essence of marketing: users create value, not products.

Therefore, the new marketing brought about by the new environment is a disruptive change to traditional marketing, which is from product marketing as the main body to user marketing as the main body.

Of course, new marketing is not a complete negation of traditional marketing, but it is to build a new and more efficient marketing model with the help of new means, that is, a new marketing model with user marketing as the main body.

Although there is new marketing, old marketing can also exist; the main difference between the two is their efficiency.

At present, it is observed that many industry professionals and many companies are using traditional marketing thinking to transform into new marketing, so the transformation is full of contradictions.

Some people doubt whether it is necessary to link users and manage users? Some people even think that my product system is relatively single. Do I need to establish a system to manage users?

Therefore, when talking about the core of the new marketing transformation, we must first sort out the basic logic of the new marketing. The new marketing is to establish a new marketing system with user management as the main body. The core subject of the new marketing operation has changed. It is no longer the product, but people and users.

Therefore, we need to rebuild a new marketing system around this new core entity.

To transform into new marketing, you must first establish a system to connect with and manage users; to transform into new marketing, if your product structure and category attributes are not suitable for the needs of transformation, then you will need to make new adjustments for the new marketing.

If your product structure does not meet the requirements for operating user value, you need to adjust the new product structure, similar to the Xiaomi ecological chain model; if your product category attributes are too low frequency, you need to make corresponding adjustments to your product category attributes.

Of course, these patterns are just references, not fixed patterns. The most important thing is that your value chain can support the needs of your business users.

New marketing regards customer acquisition as the core and starting point of marketing, and other elements such as products, transactions, and brands become the means for companies to manage users.

The marketing goal of new marketing is to maximize user value. It is no longer about maximizing product value; the focus of new marketing research is on super users, not super products.

What the new marketing aims to achieve is the essential question of marketing: how many valuable users are there and how high the user value is.

The starting point of new marketing is customer acquisition. It makes customer acquisition the core task of marketing. It is no longer the traditional 4Ps of product, price, channel and promotion.

New marketing is to establish a new system for managing users; the goal is to maximize user value, and the main thread is core tasks such as customer acquisition - conversion - repeat purchase - user value.

The change in customer acquisition through new marketing compared to traditional old marketing is that it uses links to build its own user system.

There are two core points here: one is the link, and the other is belonging to yourself.

This is the private domain traffic that industry insiders have talked about a lot in recent years. The essence of private domain traffic is to establish user links and build your own private domain traffic pool.

The value that private domain traffic brings to enterprises is enormous. From having no users and no traffic and relying on other people's traffic and user systems to building their own private domain traffic pool, the significance of marketing is definitely huge.

Is it necessary to build private domain traffic and establish user links? Businesses can no longer wait and see! ! ! Must do! Need to do it quickly!

At present, some companies have carried out active and fruitful explorations in this regard and achieved good results.

What companies must think about is: If you don’t establish a user operation system in the future and don’t have a private traffic pool to support your marketing, it will be very dangerous.

The marketing value brought by establishing a private traffic pool is enormous, and it can play an important role in many aspects. I believe that greater value will be created in the future.

At present, there are many ways to acquire customers to support enterprises’ transformation in the new marketing environment, and the technical support is becoming more mature.

It mainly includes technical means, content means, social means, third-party means, etc.; enterprises should make good use of these means to establish a matrix system for customer acquisition.

Author: Bao Yuezhong

Source: Bao Yuezhong