Performance marketing is too difficult

Not wasting a single cent of advertising budget is the ideal of marketing practitioners, but it is difficult to achieve. Fortunately, we can minimize waste.

This "Goldbach's Conjecture" in the advertising and marketing world was proposed by John Wanamaker, the father of department stores. The "Goldbach Conjecture" proposed in 1742 has not been solved to this day. The "Goldbach Conjecture" in the advertising and marketing industry has also remained unsolved for a hundred years.

The rise of Internet marketing once made people think that the "Goldbach Conjecture" had been solved: Internet technology allows every online advertisement to be effectively tracked, thereby achieving quantitative evaluation of its effects. However, the market is always more complicated than people expect. The authenticity of the data, the effectiveness of the creativity, and the complexity of the conversion make online advertising difficult to track.

01. New challenges in performance marketing

Performance marketing is much harder than we expected. Judging from the evolution trend of marketing and technology, advertising and marketing activities have taken effectiveness as the ultimate goal, striving to directly hit the bull's eye of the effect. This requires the integrated support of accurate data, ROI models, refined operations and performance tools. However, if we break it down, we will find that each one is difficult.

1. The difficulty lies in the data.

Data is the basis for insights into users, needs, and scenarios, and is the cornerstone of performance advertising. However, there are two major problems: 1. Different platforms have different data, leading to the problem of "blind men touching an elephant"; 2. Data authenticity may be inaccurate, dirty, or outdated. Doing performance marketing based on problem data will only go in the opposite direction. How to simplify data and separate the true from the false?

2. The difficulty lies in improving ROI.

An expert in making hit online products once told me that the biggest pitfall they have ever encountered is ROI. The composition of R (RETURN) and I (INVESTMENT) of performance marketing is far more complex than imagined. R includes multiple values ​​such as direct and indirect, immediate and long-term, brand/traffic/user, market/public relations, brand/effect, etc. I includes traffic, content, human efficiency (market, public relations, operation), time window, etc. Traditional ROI calculation models will either cause brands to underestimate the value of some of their investments or result in a lot of waste. Focusing on ROI will only blind you to the forest for the trees.

3. The difficulty lies in refined operations.

QuestMobile data shows that the number of mobile Internet users decreased by 2 million in Q2 2019, and the average daily usage time of Chinese mobile Internet users increased by 6% in June. The only way out in the era of inventory is to work hard and intensively, but this is very difficult. Content creation, material assembly, KOL promotion, expert organization, KOC reputation, fan participation, traffic purchase, and cross-platform conversion, there are plenty of opportunities for waste in each link.

4. The difficulty lies in the application of effect tools.

Today's marketing techniques, models and concepts are vastly different from those of ten years ago. Creative advertising production is no longer dominated by designers, but is co-created by advertisers, optimizers, KOLs, short video experts, MCNs and designers; advertising materials include new media such as voice, H5, interactive games, live broadcasts, flash sales, offline entities, etc.; the creative process is no longer project-based, but a standardized process based on automated tools. However, there has not been much change in the tool support for marketing practitioners, and tools suitable for performance marketing are scarce, resulting in half the result with twice the effort.

Everyone realizes that mobile Internet performance marketing is expected to become the correct answer to the "Goldbach Conjecture" in the advertising and marketing industry, and clearly knows the four key elements for aiming at the center of the performance. However, each point is too difficult.

02. How to carry out marketing with visible results?

All business in China is worth redoing, including marketing. In 2019, as advertisers’ budgets are tightening, performance marketing will become the mainstream choice more quickly. It’s time to rethink performance marketing.

As a new benchmark in performance marketing, ByteDance launched the marketing service brand Massive Engine at the beginning of this year. On September 17, the 2019 Bytedance EVOLVE Conference was successfully held, full of useful information. I have distilled some key points, which may be inspiring to marketers.

Massive Engine brings together the traffic of ByteDance's 1.5 billion global MAUs and the social traffic of the Pangolin platform with 700 million DAUs. The massive real data behind the traffic is opened up together with computing power through "platform deep conversion + joint advertiser modeling". Advertisers can combine their own data to gain a more realistic insight into users, allowing data to drive every link of the upstream and downstream of marketing and reduce traffic and labor costs.

One very inspiring point is that ByteDance has come up with a brand-new ROI model. Instead of focusing on traditional ROI, it has launched a large-scale growth model of "growth = ROI x scale = (revenue/cost) x volume" to adapt to the complex input and output structure in the fragmented era and help brands form a new growth cycle.

In response to the problem of traffic depletion, ByteDance has focused on "open source" and conducted traffic mining. It launched a commercial content intelligent transaction and management platform - Star Map, which classifies and fine-tunes the operations of 176 industry influencers based on 112 content tags, and combines data to help brands find the KOLs that best match the target audience. Based on components such as information flow, DOU+, and shopping carts, it realizes traffic mining between influencers and fans.

PROYA has tasted the sweetness of huge volume, and its approach is worth discussing. PROYA first took out different single products or sets and selected low-cost KOCs to test out the most popular products. After six months of small-scale, small-investment, and multi-group testing, it found that the bubble mask was the most popular. It then made a large-scale investment in top influencers to amplify the word-of-mouth effect, and asked its own celebrity spokesperson Luo Yunxi to personally shoot the video. It also used bidding ads with an average daily budget of one million to improve content distribution efficiency, quickly harvest, and integrate product and effect. Throughout the process, PROYA made good use of the basic components provided by Bytedance, such as information flow, DOU+, shopping cart, as well as functions such as product showcases, encouragement to post orders, and good product lists for the e-commerce industry.

PROYA’s showcase can be replicated. The integration of "content + advertising" in product and effect adopts a combination of "long-tail KOC + head KOL + celebrity spokesperson" at different stages. A six-month long cycle of planting grass + selecting products accumulates energy, and finally a large-budget bombing with a daily granularity is used to detonate.

As long as the strategy, combination and rhythm make good use of the capabilities of Massive Engine, refined performance marketing can be achieved. Different industries have different characteristics, but the concept of performance marketing is consistent . For example, in the game industry, in line with the game life cycle, a fairy-tale RPG mobile game reduced the payment cost by 37%, increased the number of paying users by 52%, and effectively increased the next-day retention rate by 23% through the launch, growth, maturity and decline stages of the game through the launch of a deep conversion product combination. Bytedance has launched a number of customized solutions for industries such as e-commerce, games, online services, and automobiles, such as the first information flow performance marketing product for the automotive industry, Effectiveness.

Bytedance launched the "Byted Creativity" App, which reconstructs the trends of people, goods and objects in the new creative marketing era, uses creative data to drive the three major links of creative inspiration, creative production, and creative delivery, and provides marketers with interpretive methodology, automated collaboration of creative multiple roles, and creative materials and other dimensions of support; Bytedance also launched a one-stop video advertising production service platform - the Jihe platform, which makes the production of video creative advertising personalized, automated and digitized, and all of these will enter the marketer's toolbox.

To this day, the "Goldbach Conjecture" in the advertising and marketing industry remains unsolved. Not wasting a single cent of advertising budget is the ideal of marketing practitioners, but it is difficult to achieve. Fortunately, we can minimize waste , and we are getting closer and closer to the correct answer to the "Goldbach Conjecture".

Author: Luo Chao Channel

Source: Luo Chao Channel