4 traffic depressions for user growth in 2021!

As the title suggests, let me give the conclusion first:

1. Use live broadcast to harvest content + delivery
2. Paid content promotion with customer acquisition as the core
3. Multi-platform enterprise account integrated marketing
4. Hot product logic

This article mainly talks about why I think these are the hot spots, the core gameplay logic that I have seen and practiced so far, and the more obvious pitfalls to avoid.

I. Background

There is no long-term need to pay attention to traffic, just do both. Grasp the paid one and the free one. On the one hand, we turn normal products into products, and on the other hand, we use the dividends to innovate. To achieve good results, 50% is the trend, 30% is the fit between the product/company genes, and 20% is personal skills.

So, it’s not shameful to chase the trend, and being able to catch the trend is also a recognition.

Looking back over the years, we find that many companies can do well by only providing paid or free services. Among the people I have met and talked to, there are three who have annual revenue of over 100 million just by providing free services. I have seen two people who only do paid services and have a monthly turnover of tens of millions. Although these may not be impressive in the eyes of the big guys, you have to admit that this is something most people cannot achieve, and it is very impressive.

There is only one reason why you only need to offer either paid or free services in the past to qualify: the platform traffic dividend brought by the demographic dividend, and the traffic is increasing.

In order to facilitate the understanding of the gameplay later, we need to lay a foundation first: the demographic dividend does not directly bring traffic dividends, because you cannot reach these people directly. The platform is like an excavator, which uses the characteristics of the platform to dig out the corresponding users and then monetize these users through advertising.

So strictly speaking, it is the demographic dividend that creates the platform dividend, and the platform dividend creates the paid traffic dividend.

Whether it is paid traffic or free traffic, it is all obtained from platform-based Internet products. Among them, paid promotion has the lowest traffic cost and the highest quality in the early stage of platform commercialization.

In the past, top platforms such as Baidu, Douyin, Toutiao, WeChat, and Guangdiantong were born one after another, as well as mid-level platforms such as Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Bilibili. Moreover, these platforms have grown and commercialized one after another, so from the perspective of the entire traffic pattern, there are not many stagnation periods, but the traffic trend flows among various platforms.

The commercialization of a new platform will definitely ease the pressure of paid traffic, even if the tone of this platform has nothing to do with your product. In the short term, the cost of market placement is limited. Some players will move to new platforms that are more suitable for their own style, and the pressure on traffic players on the old platforms will be reduced.

However, as of now, these existing platforms have been commercialized for some time and there is no longer any profit. And it is obvious to the naked eye that there will not be another platform-type product in the short term, so paid promotion has begun to roll out. Free traffic also began to be restricted as the platform matured.

Let me emphasize again that free traffic and paid traffic seem to have the same trend, both following the platform. But the underlying logic is different. Free traffic follows the platform rules, and the bonus is because the platform is not mature enough and will turn a blind eye to some loopholes.

The quality and competitiveness of paid traffic depends on the degree of commercialization of the platform.

So there are three stages of traffic depression.

• In the first stage, large platforms will benefit from the development of population growth;
• The second stage is the dividends that small platforms tap into from the population stock;
• The third stage is the new model on the old platform .

This year marks the beginning of the third phase. If you look closely, this stage is actually a period of differentiation and integration. The differentiation is that as each platform matures, the ecosystem becomes gradually closed, and it is difficult to direct traffic from multiple platforms to one platform for centralized monetization as in the past.

Yes, I am talking about WeChat. The best way to play in the future will definitely be to directly complete the monetization loop within each ecosystem, at least user activation.

What is integrated is the gameplay of each platform. Of course, each platform has its own tone and characteristics. But in the general direction, the marketing models of many platforms will gradually converge. The reason is that in a certain technical background and platform development period, a certain platform carrier form has the best commercialization path. At the same time, they all began to close their ecosystems, so convergence was inevitable.

After a lot of nonsense, let’s start talking about the third stage of traffic dividend: new model on the old platform. The following descriptions are all from the perspective of owning one's own products, and monetization through pure content advertising is not included.

2. Use live streaming to harvest content + delivery

It is a foregone conclusion that live streaming is a hot topic, there is nothing much to say. But we have to clarify the positioning of live streaming. For content providers, live streaming is a traffic model, but for product providers, it is a conversion model. Since it is a conversion model, it is definitely impossible to expect it to attract traffic. Only content and activities can attract traffic.

So let’s first think about the source of live broadcast traffic. Now there are two common ones:

1. Get more official free traffic distribution through platform rules. For example, increase the frequency and duration of live broadcasts.
2. Cold start through private domain.

But in reality, you’ll find that neither is a highly leveraged thing. The first one is more content-oriented and is physical work, so just push yourself to death. And it is inconsistent with the purpose of conversion. The second is the monetization of existing stocks, without any fresh capital.

So is it possible to zoom in? Private domain is not considered, it is too slow. From the perspective of leverage, what we need to consider is how to leverage more monetizable public domain traffic and improve the efficiency of public domain traffic utilization.

First of all, we must make it clear that except for e-commerce which has multiple SKUs, most of the products have single SKUs. Therefore, we definitely hope that users are there at the beginning of the live broadcast. If they join in the middle, there will definitely be connection problems. Users won’t know what you are talking about and won’t be able to complete the conversion.

Therefore, we need to focus on the reservation function of the platform.

Nowadays, live broadcasts on various platforms usually have a reservation function. You can make an appointment for a certain time, and the official will help you remind you when the time comes. Push, subscription notifications, SMS, etc.

So, first of all, we can plug the appointment button into regular content, such as videos on Video Account, notes on Xiaohongshu, etc.

Theoretically, as long as you produce enough content, you will be able to book enough users before your live broadcast, and then the official will help you give strong reminders and explode it all at once.

So the question is, how to produce enough content? Multi-platform distribution + single content splitting.

Conventional content is distributed on multiple platforms, including Tik Tok, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Video Account, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, etc. In theory, you can distribute one content work on more than 6 mainstream platforms, with a 6x leverage.

Good content can be further promoted through platforms such as dou+ and French fries to continue to amplify it and consume more officially distributed traffic (the essence of promoting content logic is to consume more officially distributed traffic, rather than the little traffic purchased).

Here’s a tip: for your real-life content, high-quality original content, you can have multiple editors edit it. For example, when recording a 20-minute video, you can make 20 clips by splicing other materials and mix them into 20 videos. Each clip has its own creative style and will not be repeated. The official cannot detect it, and then it is distributed in an account matrix. 20x leverage. A total of 120 times.

There are many people doing this now. For example, I have seen people doing the second category and fortune-telling. Of course, the one that everyone knows best is Fan Deng.

Through the above methods, we can obtain the first wave of public domain pre-booked live broadcast users from the platform in a "free" manner, and then pay for additional promotion before and during the live broadcast to get the second wave of public domain users. The whole process is a purposeful multi-platform simultaneous live broadcast with a leverage hundreds of times higher than that of regular live broadcast.

Live streaming is a type of operation, and the most important thing is the sense of rhythm. In addition to this concentrated blasting model, it is also necessary to do regular live broadcasts to increase the weight and take advantage of official traffic. And most importantly, what to play. This is different for every company, so I won’t go into details here.

3. Paid content promotion with customer acquisition as the core

When users are over-marketed to, they will tend to prefer soft content. In the past, the commercialization focus of major platforms was advertising, but since last year they have basically shifted to polishing components that can achieve an ecological closed loop.

So we can understand that in the past, the form of advertising that users were exposed to was mainly hard advertising, but in the future it will turn to soft advertising.

Now is the time for marketing dividends. If you don’t understand, go check out Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Douyin and Bilibili.

Let’s first make it clear that high-quality content can directly attract traffic and even be monetized, and the monetization efficiency is extremely high.

But one of the pain points in the past was that the content could only be seen by a small number of people and might be mistakenly killed by algorithms, and the controllability and leverage were too weak. The second pain point is that many platforms do not have any way to monetize and can only accept advertising or traffic.

Now that both pain points have been solved, why don’t you play in the ecosystem?

Doujia, Zhi+, and French Fries are currently the three better traffic hubs. All three platforms have grass-planting attributes, and there are official diversion components for promotion, which can leverage a large amount of public domain traffic and solve the problem that the content can only reach a small number of people.

Anyone who has done public account advertising knows that hard advertising is more effective than soft advertising. But among the above-mentioned promotion methods, soft advertising is actually more effective than hard advertising, and it’s even better not to use soft advertising, just pure promotion.

Purebred grass can be converted into cash! Purebred grass can be converted into cash! Purebred grass can be converted into cash! Important things should be said three times. Here you can refer to the logic of Xiaohongshu’s amateur advertising and then Taobao’s monetization. And a long time ago, there was a case of using websites to rank in Baidu and then attract traffic.

The pitfall here is that the right to pay used to be in the hands of the market, and the market prefers hard advertising, which is the most embarrassing part. It can be clearly stated that hard advertising and promotion will definitely not be effective. If you feel that your content is weak, cannot be promoted, or has extremely low monetization efficiency, don’t doubt it, it’s because the content is too bad . You neither attract users to buy it, nor arouse their interest in buying it.

Among all the platforms, Doujia is generally recognized as the most difficult to play. This is related to ByteDance’s gene of selling traffic and the rules change too quickly. But Zhihu and Xiaohongshu are slow enough that they are worth a try.

Let me emphasize again that the difficulty does not lie in payment, but in producing good content. Whether something can be done or not does not depend on the investment, but on the content.

4. Multi-platform enterprise account integrated marketing

Since the year before last, various platforms caught in the competition for existing market share have begun to layout their own business closed loops and crack down on traffic diversion. So my point is: everyone should play in various ecological closed loops in the future, and don’t divert traffic everywhere, as the risk of attrition rate is high. However, activated users can be centrally managed through certain means.

It is true that WeChat is a private domain that is reused, and it is also the most popular one. But in the past, other platforms lacked in monetization. Now that this has been made up, it is worth giving the closed-loop gameplay a try.

The ones I am currently optimistic about include: Baidu Enterprise Account, Xiaohongshu Enterprise Account, Douyin Enterprise Account, Kuaishou Enterprise Account, and Zhihu Enterprise Account. Each platform has different ways of playing, but the core logic follows the platform.

To sum up, there are three steps: use the platform's marketing components, produce content that the platform likes, and participate in the platform's activities.

For example, Xiaohongshu provides a lottery component. Once a month, you must follow + like to participate in the draw. If you choose the right products, a product costing a few hundred yuan can at least increase your followers by a few thousand, and if it goes viral, it can increase your followers by tens of thousands. An enterprise can register 3 corporate accounts. It goes without saying how expensive Xiaohongshu fans are, right? It is still good to attract tens of thousands of fans stably in a month, and in the process, you can continue to amplify it through content plug-in sampling activities. Users will not unfollow easily, so this is an official fission tool.

There are not many companies playing this game now. If there are too many, the users will become numb and the quality of fans attracted will also deteriorate. It’s better to generate traffic first when it’s easy to do so, and consider monetization later. At present, Xiaohongshu platform is a good choice to repeatedly wash users through live broadcast + content and product plug-ins.

The method of mass production of content has been mentioned above. Of course, those who are capable are advised to update original works daily or three times a day (from the perspective of an enterprise, the current algorithm must be based on quantity over quality. Don’t think about producing explosive products every day. Unless you are an MCN or a content company).

This combination is: stable content output + official event components + multi-account distribution and leverage + official monetization/traffic diversion component harvesting.

One point to emphasize here is that if you have your own products and are not a pure content company, you should not pay too much attention to increasing your followers. If the official gives you activities, you just participate in them; if the official gives you tools, you use them; the rest is just to produce content normally.

Your goal is conversion/traffic. It doesn’t matter whether the content is popular or not. It’s all free. You make money as long as you attract users. Stick to playing by the platform’s rules, and everything else will follow naturally.

5. Hot-selling product logic

The most important thing in operations is a sense of rhythm. Those who have read my past articles know that I have always advocated the productization of operations. Because automation saves manpower, is easier to leverage, and can ensure a stable rhythm.

But my current view is that productization must be done, but that is the bottom line, you can’t expect it to be outstanding. Something that costs almost nothing, that's extra profit earned.

For current operations, what really matters is explosive products.

When it comes to blockbuster products, the simplest way is to release them in waves. You must master this trick. It is not just a script model, but you need to do more research. Last year, I organized a competition event. With a simple 4-day and 4 WeChat Moments post, the fission index was 30% higher than that without preheating. But now many people hold activities without warming up, and there is nothing much to say. Stubborn.

The general formula is: private domain reservation/deposit reservation + KOL/KOC/channel leverage + scripted concentrated sales + great value gifts + steps/limits (real limits) . With this combination, there is no activity that will not be a hit if it is executed well.

There is not much to say about hot-selling products. It depends on your own situation, but two points must be met: making concessions and leveraging the situation. Give concessions to channels and leverage their momentum, give concessions to users and leverage their momentum.

You have to give first before you can get. Only if you dare to gamble, you will win. But this is more of a test of control. Many people dare not make concessions, and many companies dare not let operators engage in activities that appear to lose money. Everyone is good at math and only takes action after they are sure they will not lose money. But the result is a prisoner's dilemma, where users are paralyzed and no one can pry them apart.

At this time, you should do something conscientiously, control the dissemination nodes and closing methods, and what seems to be within expectations and exceeds expectations is actually a very natural thing.

Author: Ye Yasheng

Source: Ye Yayoi