Marketing promotion: innovative ways to achieve big marketing with a small budget!

Can’t you do marketing without money? By mastering these 12 words: strong value, strong content, strong relationships, and short paths, you can achieve big marketing with a small budget.

“ The essence of marketing is to let people who don’t know your brand know your brand, let people who know your brand like your brand, let people who like your brand buy your products, let people who buy your products buy them frequently and recommend them to others to buy… ”

At a large annual marketing summit, many marketing elites from Fortune 500 companies shared their marketing cases and proposed novel marketing ideas.

During the question-and-answer session, a young entrepreneur asked this question: "As a small company, we only have 10,000 yuan in marketing expenses each year. How can we use this 10,000 yuan to do good marketing?"

These elites are adept at marketing with large amounts of money, but feel a little embarrassed when it comes to marketing with small amounts of money.

Can’t you do marketing without money? By mastering these 12 words: strong value, strong content, strong relationships, and short paths, you can achieve big marketing with a small budget.

Make a good product with strong value

The essence of marketing is to let people who don’t know your brand know your brand, let people who know your brand like your brand, let people who like your brand buy your products, let people who buy your products buy them frequently, and also recommend others to buy them...

How to achieve big marketing with a small budget in the Internet era? The starting point is: to make a good product with strong value .

Make the product closer to user needs, better satisfy user experience, and even reach the "extreme" state. This is the foundation of marketing, the fundamental to achieving "light marketing", and the key to preventing waste or ineffective marketing investment .

To do this, try asking yourself a few questions:

• What value does my product provide to users?
• Does the value provided by the product meet the needs of users?
• Is this need being undermet or overmet?
• What room for improvement is there in response to user needs?
• ······

The strong value of a product lies in combining scenario analysis to find the key factors that make the product "really work" for users.

A scene we are all particularly familiar with: the "coin wishing well" while traveling. You can make a wish by throwing a one-dollar coin into the fish's mouth.

Analyzing this scenario, the key factors of "product" are: games, small amounts and wishes.

But with such a simple scenario, Yibao Charity designed a charity game that quickly captured the hearts of users, making the Yibao Charity Circle quickly grow into one of the three major charity circles on the Internet.

By carefully analyzing the key factors that make a product "really work" for users, we can grasp the source of market demand, form core competitiveness in market competition, and create a unique market within a certain range, and ultimately enjoy rich profits.

Create business stories that touch your heart

For small and medium-sized enterprises, without large capital investments, the simplest and most economical marketing method is to output highly infectious marketing content to attract attention, stimulate discussion and sharing, and improve the efficiency of communication with users .

Small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the generosity and confidence to spend lavishly like the CCTV advertising bid winners, so they can only choose low-cost online marketing methods.

In addition to low cost, network marketing has two major advantages:

• One is that the impact is wide and basically unrestricted. Whether the content disseminated can have a wide-ranging impact no longer depends solely on a small number of elite media editors, but on hundreds of millions of mobile Internet users.
• Another is low customer cost . Traditional marketing is about you going to find customers, while light marketing is about letting customers come to you. These are two completely different types of marketing. Customers come to you and they may even pay you.
• Telling a good story and creating good content are the best marketing weapons . A good story can mobilize people's inner emotions and directly reach the user's subconscious mind.

An example:

• "Why did Van Gogh commit suicide?" The story describes that Van Gogh's works could not be sold, and he eventually chose to commit suicide.
• The end of the story leads to the conclusion that if Van Gogh had Alipay, it would be possible to predict his possibility of becoming a "rich man" in 10 years based on his financial situation and interpersonal relationships, and he could obtain a survival fund to wait until the day he became famous. In this way, Van Gogh would not have committed suicide.
• This story mobilized the enthusiasm of netizens to participate very well, especially the final reversal, which highlighted the new loan function of Alipay and left a very deep impression on people.

To tell a good story, we must discover the content that can touch people's hearts as the main body .

Here is one approach: the SCQA structure (next week there will be an article analyzing this model in more detail)

• S stands for situation, which is introduced by familiar situations and facts.
• C stands for complication, which refers to the direct conflict between the actual situation and our requirements;
• Q stands for question. What should we do when faced with conflict?
• A is for answer. What is our solution?

Take the story of Vincent van Gogh:

• S: The story of Van Gogh's suicide (which we are familiar with);
• C: Why did Van Gogh commit suicide?
• Q: Is there any way to stop him from committing suicide?
• A: Alipay loan function.

By creating business stories that reach consumers' hearts, low-cost marketing can be achieved through "fragmentation" on the Internet .

Turn weak ties into strong ties

First, let’s distinguish between strong and weak ties:

• Strong relationships are those that are very close to us, such as parents, children, spouses, etc.
• Weak ties are relationships that are somewhat related to us, but not that close, such as old colleagues whom we haven’t seen for many years, or distant relatives with whom we haven’t had any contact for many years.

But in reality, the person who recommends you a job, a house, or delicious food is often a not-so-close colleague or a distant friend.

Why is this happening? In fact, the reason is very simple. Strong relationships are too close to us. They usually have the same resources as we have, and we also have the same resources as they do. There is a lack of complementarity between them.

If the interpersonal circle is regarded as composed of a series of strong relationship circles, then weak relationships are the bridges connecting the strong relationship countries, allowing the information and resources of different strong relationship circles to complement each other .

Before WeChat, phone numbers were only used when the other party was needed. Usually they were just kept there for backup, and there was a lack of dynamic understanding between each other. With WeChat, you can see each other’s latest updates in the Moments, and even chat and exchange ideas at any time to increase the topic. WeChat has thus become a converter between weak relationships and strong relationships.

Marketing must constantly seek effective paths to transform weak relationships into strong ones. Here is a role path method:

• That is, list all the "roles" related to the business;
• Then find an effective path from weak ties to strong ties among them.

Everyone has fans, more or less. One of the key factors for WeChat’s success is to activate the weak relationships of the past and transform them into positive strong relationships. Through the role path method, we can find the effective path from weak relationships to strong relationships, and pull the peripheral members or free elements of the company's interpersonal relationship circle to the core area of ​​the relationship as much as possible, thereby achieving light marketing.

Maximize the shortest path

The shorter the path, the less waste there is and the greater the value. The short path not only shortens the distance between users and enterprises, but also improves operational efficiency and reduces marketing costs.

Therefore, implementing short paths is a key step in light marketing.

There are two paths in the marketing field:

• One is the operation path: for example, if you want to buy a piece of clothing online, we must first open the homepage of the e-commerce website, then find the clothing category, then find the subcategory of "Men's and Women's Clothing", then enter the price range, and then look for the clothes you like in the results.
• The other is a management path: open the homepage of the e-commerce website, directly enter "men's clothing" or "women's clothing" in the search engine, and then select from the search results.

I believe most people will choose the management path because it is simple, convenient and short.

Let’s take a look at the example of an Internet restaurant, which proposed a solution to flatten the management process through the Internet:

• All links can directly face customers;
• Whether the dish is salty or bland, or whether it is delicious, can all be communicated directly to the chef via WeChat;
• Not only do chefs know about consumer satisfaction, but head chefs and restaurant managers also know this clearly;
• Improve cooking skills through rapid iteration through “effective consumer feedback”;
• It even solved the problem of chef performance appraisal.

This restaurant uses the Internet to shorten the long-chain service process of the traditional catering industry and transform it into a customer-centric "short-path" management model. Two months after the improvements, the restaurant was profitable just by serving lunch, with a daily turnover rate of 15 times.

This is a typical big picture thinking , that is, having a "God's perspective", overlooking the entire operation process and management process, and finding the shortest path between the departure point and the destination.

The shorter the path, the stronger the operability, the better the user experience, and the higher the efficiency of business operations. To achieve the short path, you can use big picture thinking to quickly find the shortest distance between users and businesses and shorten this distance as much as possible, thereby achieving light marketing .

Summarize

1. To strengthen value, we must carefully analyze the factors that "really work" for users and produce products that can meet user needs to the greatest extent, thereby forming core competitiveness in the market competition.
2. Strong content, through highly infectious content and stories, stimulates people's discussion and sharing, thereby effectively improving the efficiency of communication with users and achieving the goal of zero-cost marketing.
3. Strengthen relationships, increase interactions, and convert more users from weak relationships to strong relationships. The role path method can be used to find an effective path from weak relationships to strong relationships, and to pull peripheral members or free elements in the corporate interpersonal relationship circle into the core area of ​​the relationship as much as possible to give full play to their effectiveness.
4. Short path, the shorter the path, the stronger the value. Because the shorter the path, the stronger the operability, the better the user experience, and the higher the efficiency of business operations. In practice, big picture thinking can be used to quickly find the shortest distance between users and businesses and minimize this distance.

Author: Eight Moon Melon

Source: August News