How to conduct a marketing campaign that can be implemented?

Today I will share two issues that I have gradually understood during the process of building the brand from 0 to 1:

1. Why must brand marketers embrace e-commerce?
2. How to create a digital campaign that can be implemented and bring actual conversions?

01 Why brand marketers must embrace e-commerce

Let me first talk about the conclusion, why brand marketers must embrace e-commerce:

1) Determined by the number of platform users

E-commerce has become an important sales channel for all 2C brands, and the e-commerce platform (Tmall and Taobao) is already a large-scale content platform with more than 700 million active users per month. Where users gather is where marketing efforts are made, which is the same as marketing on Weibo, official accounts, and Xiaohongshu.

2) The premise of integrating product, effect and sales

The integration of brand and effect is the focus of all marketers. In my experience, if all promotions can get through the e-commerce link, the integration of brand and effect can be achieved.

If we look at a closed sales loop inside and outside the site, we can see that the communication plans made by most advertising companies are to divert traffic from outside the site and focus on "product". However, if we want to achieve the final "effectiveness" and "sales", marketers must complete the last mile of communication, understand the traffic logic of e-commerce, and ensure that all digital campaign activities are finally implemented on e-commerce.

3) E-commerce is the test site for MKT activities

Brand strategy, content creativity, communication topics, exposure, and the final effect can be seen in e-commerce data. If you know how to look at the backend of Business Advisor, you will understand.

02 How to create a digital campaign that can be implemented and bring actual conversions

OK, let’s talk about why it is difficult for many people (especially advertisers) to implement their marketing plans?

First, let’s look at the two thinking models that most people who do digital marketing use:

(Figure 1)

(Figure 2)

Most advertisers will basically follow the workflow in Figure 1 before starting a campaign, and the underlying logic will follow Figure 2 when writing a marketing plan.

Anyone who has worked in MKT is familiar with the AISAS model. Almost all the marketing plans made by the third party that I have seen are designed with the communication path based on this model: there must be preheating to create topics in the early stage, detonating topics in the middle stage, and secondary communication in the late stage. Each link is closely linked and the logic is perfectly self-consistent.

But anyone with a little traffic thinking and common sense will understand that every time a user takes an extra step, retention and conversion will be discounted; a longer purchase path will definitely affect the final conversion. At a time when mobile payment is so convenient, most purchasing behaviors will basically not go through the entire communication path.

Party B is good at starting from big ideas, conducting content creation, creating topics and exposing brand products; but what Party A wants more is that after users see the advertisement on their mobile phones, they can immediately click to enter the e-commerce platform to collect, add to cart and place an order.

At this time, when making similar plans, we should break away from content thinking and use AIPL consumer thinking to promote.
Let’s first popularize the brand crowd asset quantitative operation model AIPL proposed by Alibaba:

• Aware: includes the number of consumers who have been exposed to information about a brand or product through any channel within the Alibaba ecosystem.
• Interest: includes the number of consumers who have expressed interest in a brand or product, such as those who have searched for the brand, interacted with Taobao headlines, or received a trial package, etc.
• Purchase: includes all consumers who purchased brand products minus the number of loyal consumers
• Loyalty: includes the number of consumers who have made positive comments about the product or have repurchased it.

The current marketing trend has shifted from traffic operation thinking to user operation, which means that differentiating consumer groups and understanding consumer needs have become the core foundation for achieving a closed sales loop.

This is a simplified version of the on-site and off-site traffic path map. When making a promotion plan, how can we use this map to create a campaign that combines brand and effect?

Grasp two points:

1) Understand the integrated traffic link logic inside and outside the site

E-commerce operations place emphasis on data and results orientation, requiring that all traffic can be tracked and monitored, and that all traffic must ultimately achieve a certain result (this result is not necessarily the final sale, but rather a certain link in the sales path).

Therefore, you must know how the traffic from off-site promotion enters the site and how it affects the behavior of different consumers on the site. For example, do you want consumers to directly click on an ad to go to Taobao to place an order after seeing it on Weibo, or open Taobao to search for the product name? These two different behaviors will have different impacts on the store traffic and weight within the site.

As you can see from the picture, the traffic generated by off-site promotion can influence the brand awareness population (Awareness), brand interest population (Interest), and brand purchasing population (Purchase).

According to real data from many brands, compared with the conversion rate from cognition A to purchase P, the conversion rate from interest I to purchase P is often several times or even hundreds of times that of the former.

Judging from the data, the efficiency of a brand acquiring 60 A-group members is the same as that of acquiring 1 I-group member. Therefore, the new customers that brands need to attract are those who can cultivate high-potential consumers and turn them into interested customers, rather than just reaching more people with advertising (this is why a lot of advertising costs are wasted, and many reasons are that the target audience of the activities is not accurate enough).

Therefore, before you carry out a promotional activity, if you know clearly which type of people you should target, how to coordinate with the traffic strategy within the site, and develop targeted channels and content strategies, the plan you come up with will be more executable.

Therefore, the key issue is to understand the main affected population before promotion.

2) Learn to use data banks to analyze: the current problem of brands’ “AIPL” population

By directly using the Business Advisor Data Bank and referring to the traffic links and purchasing behavior data of past activities of the same magnitude, we can analyze the problems existing in the four categories of "AIPL" people.

For example, if there are too few people with brand awareness (Awareness), you can use hard advertising and influencer recommendations on the site, while also using external online precision exposure to attract new customers. If there are too few people with brand interest (Interest) and brand purchasing (Purchase), it means the conversion rate is too low, then you need to analyze several major factors that affect conversion, such as buyer shows, user reviews, and product promotions, to see if they can be improved, for example, whether this group of people can be activated through discount promotions, product cross-sales, celebrity endorsements, etc.

Therefore, before promotion, when you know through analysis that there are problems with the "AIPL" group, you can formulate more targeted product, media and content strategies to achieve precise attack and harvesting of the group.