For many people, they may dream of becoming rich overnight, such as suddenly having 10 million, and then realizing their various dreams and making up for the long-term regrets in their hearts. How wonderful it would be...

Wait, I don’t think I’m an emotional blogger! Let’s talk about marketing .

The topic is: If I have a budget of 10 million, how should I spend it?

I know that when many company bosses, marketing managers, or department leaders receive a budget of tens of millions, they don't feel relaxed and may even be a little panicked.

Because this may be their marketing budget for the year, how to spend the money well and effectively is still a big challenge, especially now that brand budgets are generally declining and people want to spend two dollars for one dollar, this problem should still be a pain point for many people.

When it comes to the question of how to spend a marketing budget well, we cannot discuss it too specifically on a certain brand, otherwise it will become a special consulting project.

We still need to discuss this issue from a methodological perspective.

The underlying logic of this perspective is:

Different ways of spending money actually reflect different marketing strategies.

As for marketing strategy, it is a question that can be solved from the perspective of methodology.

Therefore, this article hopes to explore the different uses of marketing budgets from the perspective of several different types of brand marketing strategies that are currently mainstream in the market.

Everyone can choose the appropriate way to spend money based on the attributes of their brand and business goals.

Marketing strategy 1: Advertising awareness

As the name suggests, the goal is to quickly create brand awareness through advertising.

For example, the following well-known "brainwashing" cases all belong to the marketing strategy of "advertising cognitive school".

Of course, the "advertising cognition" school's approach is not all brainwashing advertising. There are also many "syllogism-style" advertisements represented by Procter & Gamble and Unilever in the early days:

Oops~ encountered XX problem; don’t panic, use this; XX brand XX product RTB information. Many brands are still using this advertising format.

But in short, the marketing strategy of the "advertising awareness" school can be summarized into a basic formula, which is:

“Simple and memorable advertising film + intensive media placement”

And the "intensive media placement", such as CCTV, large screens in elevators across the country, major APP screens, etc., is the core.

Therefore, don’t think that you can “brainwash” consumers simply by shooting an advertisement that looks “brainwashing”.

Without sufficient media resources to support it, everything is nonsense.

If you choose this approach, you must be prepared to have a budget of 10 million, with 9 million being spent on purchasing media. Moreover, in today's noisy communication environment, 9 million is unlikely to make much of a splash.

This approach has indeed quickly made a number of brands famous in the past 10-20 years, and has also made us remember many slogans that we can still remember today, such as: Hengyuanxiang’s “Sheep, sheep, sheep…”, Melatonin’s “I will not accept any gifts this Chinese New Year, and if I do, I will accept Melatonin”, Fuyangjie’s “Wash for a healthier life”, Haodi’s “Haodi is really good, and everyone’s well is the real good”, Heilan Home’s “Men’s wardrobe”, and so on.

Back then, most audiences received information through centralized media such as CCTV and local satellite TV stations, so as long as the brand invested enough money and had many channels, it was basically enough.

But now not only has the media environment changed, the fragmented "decentralized" touch points are no longer the "obedient" group of people they used to be.

“You can reach me and bombard me with information, but I may not believe what you say”, this is probably the mentality of today’s young audiences towards advertising.

I think the core supporting the "advertising cognitive school" approach is Trout's positioning theory. To put it simply, it is to occupy the mental memory of the consumer audience to generate brand awareness.

I think this theory is biased at present, and there is another very important reason: one of the main points of positioning theory is that cognition is more important than facts.

This may be applicable in the field of light consumption decision-making. Because people may not spend too much time to "falsify" the advertisement. For example, Wanglaoji promotes its product “not causing heat in the body”, but no consumer will question or attack this point. This is largely because of its low price. As to whether it really has this function, everyone will just laugh it off and will not take it seriously.

However, in areas where consumer decisions are important, such as the automobile and home appliance industries, perception is greater than fact and is a lie that can be easily exposed. Because now consumers get information not only from brand advertisements, but also from various word-of-mouth testimonials and popular science from professional experts.

To summarize, there are three suitable conditions for the "advertising awareness" marketing approach:

1. The media budget is at least tens of millions;
2. Brands in the field of light consumption decision-making;
3. The information in the advertisement is simple and easy to remember;

Marketing strategy 2: Marketing campaign

It is what we usually call spending money on campaigns.

Compared with the "advertising awareness" school, which mainly uses one-way brand advertising as its main marketing strategy, the "marketing campaign" school focuses more on conveying brand-related information to the target audience through multi-dimensional and multi-touchpoint content.

For example, it may integrate various forms of marketing communication methods such as offline events, social communication, online interaction, public relations communication, and e-commerce implementation.

In their annual marketing plans, many brands concentrate their budgets on a few major marketing campaigns. They don’t spend their pocket money like children, buying this today, that tomorrow, and then buying something else the day after tomorrow if they see another child having one.

The advantage of this is that the content will not be too scattered and can communicate the core message that the brand wants to convey in a more comprehensive manner.

But it is not easy to carry out a successful marketing campaign.

First of all, it is a great test of marketing communication strategies and creativity.

Strategy determines whether this marketing campaign can achieve the brand's business goals. I have seen too many cases where even the direction was wrong.

Creativity determines the effectiveness of information dissemination in this campaign. Good ideas require much less media budget. But in this industry, there are so many different brand marketing campaigns launched every day, and I wonder if even 1% of them can be called creative.

The second difficulty in launching a “marketing campaign” lies in whether the brand can integrate the resources of different internal departments.

Especially now that everything is about "product and effect synergy", it is rare for a consumer brand's marketing department to carry out a wave of pure brand activities alone, and it is also rare for an e-commerce department to carry out a wave of pure promotional activities alone.

For brands that have various horizontal and vertical departments intertwined internally, resource integration is even more difficult.

Marketing strategy 3: Growth hacking

If the previous "advertising awareness" and "marketing campaign" factions are more based on the communication level and are relatively floating.

The "growth hacker" school that I will talk about next is relatively simple and closer to the growth of various marketing dimensions. It is more like marketing through refined user operations.

For example, the private community that many brands are currently developing belongs to the “growth hacker” marketing strategy.

The operation of community private domain can be generally divided into three parts:

1. Where do people come from?

2. How to operate and maintain people when they come;

3. How to monetize them

Before that, you need to first determine the orientation of your community. Is it welfare-oriented? Or knowledge-oriented? Or what?

Different community positioning orientations have different operating logics in the above three parts.

Of course, there can be communities with different orientations coexisting

Next, consider the above three parts one by one:

1. Where do humans come from? There are two main directions to attract people: one is to attract people through media touchpoints, which can be done by first trying all the brand’s own media touchpoints (online and offline) and paid media touchpoints (hard advertising, campaigns, etc.); the second direction is to rely on “old members bringing in new members”, and the brand can provide benefits to new and old members respectively, which can achieve a fission effect.

2. How to operate and maintain them when people arrive? The first and most important thing is to tag the crowd and understand the origins and interests of different community members. This also corresponds to the different community orientations mentioned earlier. Different members can form different communities. Secondly, after adding them to the group, how to maintain the activity of the community through content, what is the monthly and daily content direction planning, and how to use incentives to encourage community members to speak actively. In addition to groups, personal WeChat Moments is also a very important content operation and maintenance platform. What should be posted in Moments and how many posts should be posted every day?

3. How to monetize them? First, determine the monetization channel, is it a mini program, or is it personal WeChat business transfer purchase? The second is to understand the link position of each community member and push precise conversion information to people on different links to increase their conversion rate. Secondly, you can consider the fission mechanism, such as inviting people to join a group and bargaining. More advanced ones will also consider whether to connect all channels of membership. Community members can establish a membership points system here to maintain their continued activity.

I think that a very important point of the “growth hacker” approach is to empower users with refined operations based on data. For most brands in the stock market without much bonus, this is a very important direction for future refined marketing.

Marketing strategy 4: Product innovation

Behind the “product innovation” approach is the rise of the grass-planting economy.

Its logic is to first promote a product and then quickly build awareness for the entire brand. This is exactly the opposite of the logic of the traditional marketing model. Traditionally, we build the brand first and then promote the product. With the rise of the younger generation of consumers, the "grass planting" consumption chain will become more and more mainstream.

Data from Xiaohongshu shows that in the past year, Xiaohongshu users have posted more than 1.8 million notes related to domestic products on the platform, a year-on-year increase of 110%, and have received a total of 300 million shares and discussions from more than 42 million people, driving the gradual popularity of new domestic brands including Perfect Diary, Santonban, Xiaoxiandun, Guyu, Zhong Xuegao, Maia Active, etc.

When we look at why these brands can benefit from the "grass-planting economy", the reason is without exception: product innovation.

These emerging brands are able to innovate products quickly, and the solid foundation behind this is China’s current strong production and supply chain. We know that in the past, big brands needed to plan new products at least a year in advance, but a lot of changes will happen in that year.

However, today's fast and efficient production and supply chains have greatly shortened this time. It only takes a few months from product planning to the actual launch of new products. We can quickly seize opportunities in change, quickly release insights into young people, and maintain close contact with consumers and this era.

The trillion-level market of "grass-planting economy" has just exploded. If brands want to maintain growth in the second half of the Internet, they need to pay more attention to product innovation through front-end consumer trend insights and back-end supply-side optimization in marketing.

Author: JS Planner

Source: Planner2333