The underlying logic of 2022 marketing hits

Is screen swiping the only purpose of marketing?

You are welcome to leave your comments in the comment section about the screen-sweeping content that impressed you.

1. Is screen swiping the screen the only purpose of marketing?

Whether it is the marketing department or the content production department, of course we hope that as many people as possible will see the content we have worked so hard to create, and it would be best if it could go viral. However, is screen swiping the screen the only purpose of marketing?

While this is often what I ask of my team, it is definitely not the only thing. We know that the emergence of a hit product is extremely accidental. And it must be matched with large traffic and large resource investments. Frankly speaking, I don’t recommend small companies or marketing departments with an annual budget of less than 20 million yuan to pursue blockbuster marketing.

Because marketing is always a content + channel job, we should first lay a good foundation for marketing, return to the essence of marketing, and deliver content that interests the target audience through appropriate channels to achieve customer acquisition or sales goals.

A properly functioning marketing department, a healthy-minded CMO and CEO, please start by respecting the basic logic of the business. Don't think that you can change the situation with little cost or even no cost by hiring one or two people.

The logic of hot products that I am talking about is based on such a fundamental. The creation of a hit product is a natural result of a sound foundation, wide dissemination, and some good luck.

I communicated with the person behind the scenes of "Houlang" at Bilibili, and he said very soberly that we were just doing very routine things, just like other communication projects, normal dissemination and normal delivery. Of course, the dosage was increased in addition to the communication fees, which was twice the production cost of this commercial. It just became popular. He said this is the power of good content. But you said that even without our promotion, it wouldn’t work. Without so many people seeing it, no one would spread it or discuss it.

I asked further, are you the ones who manipulate the debates among the different opinions among the KOLs on the Internet? He said calmly, no. (Surprised or unexpected?) Of course we only ask people to make positive comments, haha.

I think the above conversation can explain a lot of truth about hot products. It is better than ten thousand theories. The most important thing is honesty. (Stand up and applaud here)

To answer this question, I would like to take you through a review of the macro-level changes in our time.

• First, from the strong mass media, through the Internet portals, social media, mobile Internet apps, the media has been completely fragmented.
• The audience has also changed from the general public to the niche audience, and then has become completely "tribalized" due to labels such as identity, class, interest, and topic.
• The relationship between media and audience has changed from one-way output to interactive participation
• The economic form has shifted from a commodity economy to an experience economy, pursuing the experience value created by enterprises. In many fields, it has evolved from an added value to a rigid demand.

These trends are changing the way everyone obtains information and interacts with businesses.

The change from content marketing 1.0 to 2.0 is caused by a huge change in the form of content distribution.

In the content 1.0 era, it was editorial recommendations, and branded content was displayed to users by placing it in specific locations (advertising slots or advertising time slots) on the content page;

The era of Content 2.0 is algorithm recommendation. Brand content is accurately recommended to specific users through algorithms based on user behavior and portraits, achieving precise reach, thereby allowing "brand and effect integration" to occur to a greater extent. This is why the ROI of ads placed on TikTok is high.

The above change not only improves the efficiency of information distribution, but also brings about subversive changes in the relationship between information and people, and the relationship between information and the crowd.

It is also easier for us to come up with some views like:

High-quality content itself has channel attributes. With its large-scale circulation, it forms a strong channel with high exposure and high conversion.

Readers are screening content, and content is also selecting its audience. Audience groups formed by browsing and watching different content form "blogs" that may have no intention or understanding of each other. The application of algorithms has led to different content interaction platforms for different people, and information cocoons have been created by algorithm recommendations.

The marketing content push is accurate, but it is more difficult to build more consensus.

Whether a piece of content can arouse consensus and resonate among the public is the logic behind whether it can become a hit.

So here comes the question

Content marketing is certainly a marketing method, and it can also be a secondary department under the marketing department structure. As the media environment becomes social media-centric, content marketing has become more and more popular.

However, what is more important is that content serves as the underlying layer supporting the entire marketing system. In a broader sense, content marketing exists as a basic marketing thinking.

Here are some examples:

Good advertising is becoming more and more

Please take a closer look at the following sentence:

Second example

When positioning the product, we approached it from the perspective of social content, so we came up with the product definition of "Ex-Boyfriend Mask"

The third example

In recent years, some companies have begun to use personalized content to resolve crises when dealing with public relations crises. They no longer use the traditional three methods of appeasement, investigation and apology, but use video content with a little two-dimensional content to resolve crises and social embarrassment in a flexible way.

Fourth example

In the media delivery environment, the concept of native advertising has emerged, which allows advertising content to be well "disguised" as media content, thereby achieving a "soft landing" of hard advertising.

2. How to understand content marketing thinking?

Key points: The ability to attract specific audiences and gain their active attention.

By doing content marketing well, what are we doing for consumers?

It is the role of translator + tour guide.

Can we translate information with a certain threshold or boring product introductions into vivid and easy-to-understand content?

Through the clever use of content, we can guide customers like a tour guide to the direction we want them to experience and feel.

For example, what comes to your mind when you see this picture?

Yes, "The Shawshank Redemption", which has been ranked first on Douban for many years.

Looking at Shawshank's comfortable expression, what did he do?

He gained the trust of the warden and had the opportunity to go to the studio, where he played an opera.

When the inmates who were taking a walk or working in the square heard this music that they had never heard in prison before, they stopped what they were doing and looked up at the loudspeaker.

What is Shawshank doing?

He used the auditory language of opera to translate what freedom means to his fellow inmates who had long been institutionalized in a prison environment that was in stark contrast to theirs.

3. What is content power? What does content power include?

• Storytelling – The essence of content marketing is storytelling;
• Connectivity – Creating connections is the core of content marketing;
• Spreadability – Bringing dissemination is the purpose of content marketing;
• Popularity - Creating popularity is an effect that content marketing can trigger;
• Growth power – is the result of high-quality content marketing;
• What drives the improvement of content power is content marketing thinking.

This Nike advertisement during the epidemic used a large number of UGC images. These images were all from our daily life in home isolation during the epidemic. Some people are still insisting on the spirit of exercise in this state of home isolation, which is very consistent with the slogan "Nothing can stop us", and it is also very easy to create a consensus among the public and resonate with everyone.

The case of Volvo, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes that year, is still fresh in people's memory. The core memory point is the "splits" of the Hollywood action star.

Can we create participation nodes open to users?

The case on the left is that during the epidemic, IKEA launched this album with a black and white cover on its official website. What is it for? Because children particularly like coloring, and they are actually very bored during the isolation period, so he provides parents with such convenience. You can print out this booklet and let the children color at home. He even made a small maze on the last page for children to find the way to IKEA.

In this way, the brand manual is made into a content form that allows users to participate in interaction.

The one on the right is a campaign done by Dyson during the epidemic, which is also very interesting. As a representative of consumer technology companies, Dyson has a lot of physicists, chemists and engineers in their company. They collected ideas from scientists internally - 56 small physics and chemistry experiments that can be completed with children at home, designed as challenge cards, which parents can print out. In the process of taking children to play these small experiments while staying at home, they also deepen their favorability and recognition of the Dyson brand.

(IV) How to plan hot-selling products to enhance the power of content?

Let me break it down briefly. Behind the popular content, we can put a prism here to refract the three primary colors. The success is all related to these three elements, namely - the right time, the right place and the right people. Although it is old-fashioned, this is the most basic logic of marketing.

• Time - the time I choose for marketing, what is the time node;
• Location - In what scenario and on what platform do I choose to communicate with my users?
• Renhe - seed users, find my advocates and word-of-mouth people to spread my marketing content.

Then, using the three-element method of hot-selling planning, let’s review the Alipay Koi incident.

The time it chooses? National Day is the Golden Week, right? We know that the National Day Golden Week is the time when the most Chinese people travel abroad. Before the National Day Golden Week, Alipay teamed up with hundreds of overseas merchants to offer a bunch of discounts. Among all the users who forwarded the message, one lucky fish was drawn, allowing him to enjoy all the conveniences when traveling abroad.

What are the geographical advantages it chose? The platform he chose was Weibo, the public opinion platform that is most suitable for fermenting topics and is also Alibaba's home turf;

It has elements of people and things. First of all, its core group is the fans of Alipay. Then the advocates are the blue Vs of all the brands who participated in this promotion, as well as the koc who watch the fun and those who want to get lucky and forward the message to new fans.

Can we design our marketing events in the same way as we do with Internet products, so that they can be replicated on a large scale and retain users?

We should first have our own fuel, and at the same time we can have some accelerant to detonate it.

• Productization - creating a mechanism and user experience.
• Novelty - Can I create a sense of novelty that no one has ever seen before, which will attract people's desire to explore?
• Sense of scale – creates a sense of wonder.
• Platformization - designing the links for user retention and sedimentation.

Helps combustion. We all know that in today's fragmented media environment, if a brand wants to launch a marketing campaign that makes a splash, it really needs to have a certain level of strength. If not, can we take advantage of the momentum?

• With the help of hot spots/nodes - we can use some hot spots or nodes. People naturally pay attention to hot spots and nodes.
• Strong cross-border brands - bring the potential for communication.

Let me take the case of one hundred million one-click calls made by Uber during my time at Ping An as an example. Let me break down the logic behind our thinking at that time.

My marketing strategy is to pursue the productization of our marketing events. Not only do I want to make it a one-time marketing event, I even want to turn it into a marketing event brand to accumulate our own brand's potential.

As a not very well-known third-party payment platform, we want to find the most popular brands to cross-border with.

What is our fuel?

• Productized mechanism and function - we have launched a large amount of trial money, and lucky users can receive 100 million yuan of trial money through the event.
• The second part is the novelty. The creative point of the armored car is that it is a carrier that has both the attributes of a transportation platform and financial attributes.
• Sense of scale. What are you doing on a money truck? I will give you 100 million yuan in experience money in the car and put it into your user account. All the profits generated in a day will belong to you.
• Platformization. We work with the buzz brand Uber to guide more download users.
• The fueling part was to take advantage of the hot spots and potential of the brand cross-border cooperation. This was the first time that a financial product cooperated with Uber to create a temporary hot spot and topic.

Author: Dong Qiao Xi Kan

Source: Dong Qiao Xi Kan