The 2020 Guide to Bargaining for Marketing Ads

There is a famous saying in the marketing world: I know that half of the advertising dollars are wasted, but the problem is I don't know which half. So what can we do to avoid marketing behaviors that result in more losses than profits? Maybe we need to learn to bargain and squeeze out the profit from the wasted half.

There is a popular saying in China's business and investment circles: "Our model has a lot of room for imagination."

This sentence is so magical, just like an ancient proverb, often only the first half of it is circulated in the world, and the second half is deliberately hidden. (PS: Anyone who knows “When one is well fed and warm, one thinks of lust”, what about the second half of the sentence? The answer is: “When one is hungry and cold, one thinks of stealing”.)

The imaginative second half of the model is “currently there is very little room for profit.”

My income is meager or even loss-making now, will I be able to make money smoothly in the future?

Of course it’s not that simple!

A friend who has been an entrepreneur for many years told me that it was only after 10 years in business that he discovered that the money saved from advertising fees was almost equal to his total income. The real turnaround from loss to profit began from the moment the net profit of the product exceeded the advertising cost.

However, it is extremely ironic that beneath all the fantastic business models, the unavoidable fact is that more than 80% of Chinese companies lose money on advertising .

Why is this the case? Wanamaker said:

Ultimately, there are only two modes of entrepreneurship: "intention" and "business".

The so-called "familiarity" is a relationship economy, which relies on a limited source of downstream customers to maintain a balance between income and expenditure through high profits and high customer unit prices; while "business" is to obtain profits on a large scale by constantly acquiring new customers.

In China, there are many people who are proficient in "business" but are novices when it comes to "business".

This is why many billionaires with vast resources and a thriving business in traditional industries easily fail once they turn to the Internet business battlefield.

For those who are familiar with the rules of the advertising game, any business can be done easily when every marketing investment can be recovered steadily.

Hell on one side and heaven on the other!

If advertising fails, there is no recovery; if advertising succeeds, it will have a positive impact.

As someone who came from Baidu, I can say responsibly that most of the advertising methods we are familiar with (including but not limited to search ads, information flow ads, MCN, patch ads, self-media implants, street ads, and live broadcasts by internet celebrities) have a terrible low input-output ratio. They are either too expensive to afford, or too cheap to convert!

If you invest according to the typical model, you will almost certainly lose money!

Unless you know how to bargain and squeeze out profits from the wasted half of the advertising budget. (Of course, it is possible that your financial sponsor will support you to burn money or that you will inherit hundreds of millions of yuan in assets after your business fails.)

How to cut it?

First Cut Multi-Act Drama Strategy

Bargaining range: Four stars

Difficulty: Four stars

Don’t ever think that bargaining means buyers confronting merchants head-on. “We won’t invest unless the platform lowers the price.” If you do this, it would be too simple. After all, large platforms don’t need a customer like you.

The bargaining we are talking about here is certainly not simply playing around with the price, but rather making strategic adjustments to gain the same profit at a lower cost.

Obviously, it is impossible to achieve this by simply looking for channels, comparing prices horizontally, and mechanically placing orders, which is the routine operation of most companies and marketing personnel.

People blindly place ads based on the assumption in their minds: "Anyone who sees the ad at that time has the opportunity to become the target user." This assumption limits them to only one way of placing ads:

However, advertising is like a movie. Not everyone who sees the trailer will buy a ticket to the theater. Therefore, the one-act play-style advertising is doomed to a tragic outcome. A large amount of the budget is spent on passers-by A, B, and C who will never care about you. It is unjust that the advertising is not losing money .

What should I do?

We all know that many people who open restaurants will definitely look for some diners to keep the place entertained when they first open, and it would be best if the restaurant is full. For this purpose, some bosses even pay for it.

This is because they know that the participation value contributed by diners and the impact on other onlookers far exceeds the dining fees, and it is essentially an advertising behavior.

This type of operation actually applies the principle of multi-screen presentation: the advertising display itself and the previous wave of participants work together to influence the next stage of the group, thereby achieving a layered involvement effect.

Suppose you are in the financial industry and your target market is Beijing. If your previous expectation was to book as many billboards in Beijing as possible and target advertising space in the Beijing area as much as possible.

Now, using the multi-act play approach, you only need a billboard or a display opportunity, and then distribute the display space and the participants' packages to the corresponding channels, which is enough to make your input-output ratio at least several times higher.

In order to play with multi-screen delivery, the prerequisite is to think clearly about where the first screen will be displayed and in what form.

Just like Li Ziqi found popular foreign social media platforms such as YouTube and INS, or like Lao Gan Ma first found American supermarket shelves and Amazon, and then ended up in American prisons, or like Warrior shoes found European fashion gurus, who paired them in various international occasions and set off a trend.

They all use atypical scenes as the first act of the advertisement, then drive a wave of people to participate (companies usually do not make a profit from this wave of people), and then put the participation behavior on social media in a point-to-surface manner. If it can successfully go viral, other media will often follow suit.

Once you have mastered the essence of multi-screen marketing, you can significantly lower the average customer acquisition cost when you do promotion.

The second cut: old space new scene strategy

Bargaining range: Four stars

Difficulty: Samsung

Many companies have made a mistake before they start marketing, which will make most of their marketing investment go to waste.

The mistake is: they always pay too much attention to the "Life Cycle of Product" but tend to ignore the "Life Cycle of User".

What is the difference between the two and what impact will each have on the company? First, the product life cycle:

When making a product, you must pay attention to the entire process from birth to death, but if you focus too much and use it as the basis for your marketing layout, it would be terrible!

Your product is to be sold to users, but only looking at the product cycle means that you cannot predict user behavior at all. You cannot answer why they buy and why they don’t buy, and you have no idea where to start to change it. Isn’t it terrifying?

The lack of answers often leads to confusing advertising content:

From a consumer's perspective, you must be disgusted by this kind of advertisement: "I just want to buy a few batteries. What the hell is an energy ring? What is a KK battery? What does 6.6 times mean?"

Obviously, users live in their own space, but not in the company's marketing or product department, let alone your R&D personnel. The company's known information is unknown to users, but this fact is often ignored.

In return, their ads will be ignored by users, forcing companies to invest more money.

So be sure to switch to the "user life cycle" perspective:

In the user space, they are initially unaware of the product, but after encountering it by chance, some users may become interested;

To understand more, you may compare other products horizontally, or weigh your own conflicting emotions, such as whether you should be more self-disciplined or more indulgent, more self-centered or more altruistic.

Afterwards, they may make a decision to buy or give up the product based on the marketing of the people and environment around them. If the product gives them a superior experience, they may share it with others.

By clearly understanding the user’s life cycle, we can understand their subconscious and conscious decision-making basis at each step, and then match user needs in new marketing scenarios to improve the effectiveness of advertising.

In the last century, De Beers, the originator of diamond marketing, tied diamond rings to love scenes. After more than a decade of success, it encountered a bottleneck - the purchase rate in its stores once dropped to 1/40.

In order to ease performance pressure, De Beers' market researchers tried to find the cause.

They found that many virtuous women, when they learned that their fiancés were about to propose, would stop their husbands from spending a lot of money on expensive gifts, and some men would listen to the advice of their fiancées and give up on buying diamond rings.

As a result, De Beers quickly adjusted its advertising strategy: "The proposal must be surprising enough, and the purchase must be made secretly to make her feel happy." De Beers created new behaviors in the existing user space , thus breaking the deadlock. This is a conclusion that companies trapped in the product life cycle cannot come to no matter how hard they try.

Exerting influence on the decision-making stage of the user life cycle is particularly applicable to many industries, especially retail, finance, education, real estate, and automobile industries.

When consumers are hesitant, they often refer to the opinions of people around them. However, the opinions of friends and relatives are not based on professional considerations. Instead, they are based on personal one-sided experience or hearsay, and most of them will make direct users give up purchasing.

If the company does not try to reverse the situation and create new behavioral scenarios at this time, all that awaits them is to watch these customers fly away and waste the costs invested in them.

The third strategy is to first channel and then product

Bargaining range: Five stars

Difficulty: Samsung

Let me ask you a question: Do you think chewing gum, facial tissues, condoms, e-cigarettes, and power banks are good product categories?

Don’t jump to conclusions, think about where we usually see these products?

That’s right, next to the supermarket checkout counter!

What's special about the cash register?

There's nothing special about it, but it means that they have the opportunity to access the highest quality traffic entrances.

When we go shopping in a supermarket, we may not pass by all the shelves, but we will definitely pass by the checkout counter. The probability that you browse the products here is higher than other products, and this slight channel advantage will be infinitely magnified.

So you will find that although the first few categories of products are inconspicuous small items, there are brands with annual revenues of over 10 billion in each category.

Whether a product is good or not is not only determined by its performance, but more importantly, whether it has the possibility of seamless connection with the channel and whether it can occupy high-priority traffic entrances.

This principle applies not only offline, but also in Internet business.

For instant messaging (QQ, WeChat), search engines, e-commerce, browsers, and video sites, people usually create shortcuts on their computers or mobile phone desktops to become the beneficiaries of first-level traffic, and the developers behind them naturally become giant companies.

On the contrary, no matter how well your product is promoted and how much convenience and value it can bring to users, if you don’t observe and think from the perspective of the channel, it is nothing but the entrepreneur’s self-satisfaction.

At this time, no matter how hard you try to find channels and place advertisements, it may be going against the trend. It is expensive, boring, and will also consume your entrepreneurial passion.

Therefore, before developing a product, it is important to consider channel needs and then go back to design and improve the product. This is the right thing to do.

The fourth multi-act drama strategy

Bargaining range: 2 stars

Difficulty: Samsung

There is a story circulating in American business history:

In 1885, in order to relieve the post-war pain and morphine addiction of the military community, veteran Pemberton invented a black drink and put it on the market in pharmacies in Atlanta. He sold 400 bottles and the total sales in one year was only US$20.

So he sold the formula to Asa G Candler, who was later known as the father of Coca-Cola.

In the process of marketing Coke, Asa realized that if it was only positioned as a "medicinal drink", the audience would be very narrow. So he began to try to promote the "popular refreshing drink" (PS: early OTC).

Later, when the US government implemented Prohibition, Coca-Cola became popular across the United States as a substitute for alcohol.

This story tells us that many times, when you imagine a user group for your product and target it at them, you will soon find that the results are not ideal, which may be due to your one-sided judgment of the market.

Even if you imagine that your product can bring unprecedented value to users, a narrow audience will often limit the promotion of the product, preventing the value of the product from being fully reflected.

Beyond this field of vision, extended functions of the product are developed, welcoming a larger audience and a more potential market, and the company is expected to break away from the competition in the existing market.

As this audience group grows or begins to migrate on a large scale with the development of the times, companies will have the opportunity to usher in blue ocean growth.

For example, many people thought that the early users of QQ would be PC users, but it turned out that people who used pagers were a larger potential customer base, so QQ's positioning changed to: "Internet pager."

For example, Mayinglong Musk Hemorrhoid Ointment was originally used to treat the lower body, but was discovered by a group of beauty-loving women that its ingredients can remove dark circles and also have miraculous effects on the upper body. As the news spread, buyers for the purpose of removing dark circles accounted for 30% of the total users. Later, Mayinglong actually developed an eye cream specifically for this purpose. (Another similar example is "Qichacha")

By tapping into new demands and creating the long tail, companies can then make investments to reap the long-tail dividend and gain doubled conversion opportunities.

The Fifth Knife Product Media Strategy

Price cut: Samsung

Difficulty of operation: Five stars

In this era, almost all companies and even individual entrepreneurs know the power of the media. Everyone has a blueprint in their minds, and with the help of the media, the product will be widely spread, and becoming a unicorn is just around the corner.

As a result, setting up new media departments, launching Weibo, WeChat and Douyin, and buying press releases from large platforms have become routine operations in the entire business community.

However, the current situation is that most companies spend money like crazy, but only get pitiful data and user volume, which also includes first-level connections such as within the company, investors, and media business. There is no secondary dissemination and it is even more difficult to have conversion.

Why?

The reason is that the purpose of enterprises using the media is not clear.

If you ask a few people in charge why they do this, they will ponder thoughtfully and then answer:

• “Because my peers are all doing it!”
• "Because it's a bonus period now!"
• “Because we saw someone do it very successfully!”
• "Because if we don't do it, others will think we are low!"

If we simply imitate a result without understanding the premise on which it is based, the result will often be contrary to our expectations.

Just like when Xiaomi successfully implemented hunger marketing, even if it just opened an online store to sell cakes, it would have limited-time and limited-quantity sales.

However, they do not analyze the premise of Xiaomi's hunger marketing at all - research has found that when a product lacks substitutes, hunger marketing can increase user preference; but if there are a large number of substitutes, it will instead cause user disgust.

Therefore, if you want to use the media perfectly, you must first understand what constitutes a media, and then measure the content you present.

It must have at least three properties:

1. News value
2. Scenario consensus
3. Sensory Habitat

1) News value

Which of the following information attracts you most?

Remember, users will never care about themselves as much as you do, and if the content you provide cannot compete with other information they see, they have no reason to give up other things and pay attention to you.

The human brain is like a filter. It processes the information transmitted to it at any time and anywhere, blocking some of the information while retaining other parts.

What can be preserved are often those with news value, such as:

• Related to users——【Emotional】《Young people dragged down by fake intimate relationships》
• Characteristic of the times——【Just released】"Exposure of average income of live broadcast industry"
• Creating a sense of contrast——[Abnormal] "Luxury car was broken into late at night, but nothing was stolen"
• Exclusive: [Exclusive] "Laoganma Conquers American Prisons"

Therefore, if a company wants to bind the media, it must first give it news attributes.

2) Scenario Consensus

Our world is built up by scenes, each of which carries more or less potential functional requirements and forms a certain range of social consensus.

When consensus is reached, we can predict each other's behavior and purpose without explaining it to each other.

For example, if the opposite sex invites you to watch a movie for no reason, you can guess with your butt that he/she is interested in you. This is because before entering this scene, both parties have reached a consensus - only lovers will make an appointment to go to the cinema.

Similarly, as users, there is a consensus between us and the media scene: the browsing process is to find information that we care about and don’t know, and the mission of the media is to provide such information.

As a media, you should find ways to build consensus with users in certain scenarios based on the scenarios in which they think of you.

Suppose your company is in the education industry, when parents realize that their children need to improve their grades? Do you want to cultivate your child's interests other than exams? Or do you want a promotion and salary increase but lack professional skills? Still want to cram before the study abroad exam?

Then, design a consensus path so that when users encounter a certain situation, they will remember to look for you instead of others, and then distribute media and advertisements, which will save a lot of resource investment.

3) Sensory Habitat

When we conduct user analysis, we often use a method called "deep dive" to find hidden, yet instinctive reactions that best correspond to consumers' personal experiences in a multifaceted and multi-faceted way.

Harvard Business School conducted a deep dive experiment:

The testers placed two drinks with exactly the same ingredients but different packaging colors (sea blue vs. flame color) in the service area of ​​the cinema to observe the audience's purchasing tendencies.

The results showed that most viewers who watched horror films and disaster films would buy beverages in sea blue packaging, while most viewers who watched emotional films and inspirational films would buy flame-colored beverages.

This result shows that

After watching horror or disaster movies, people will feel restless and anxious and need to calm down. The sea blue can bring a cool and comfortable feeling, which can help them return to emotional stability.

Audiences who have watched romantic or inspirational films are either full of emotions or full of passion. They feel it is great to continue this state, so they will choose the Flaming Mountain beverage that represents passion.

In daily life, people have a lot of unsatisfied or unexpressed emotions. This feeling is like being suddenly in a desolate wilderness and urgently needing to find a place to place it. Commodities usually provide the function of a psychological habitat.

At this time, the product itself is the media. As a merchant, you cannot waste any inch of the product's space, otherwise it is equivalent to giving up an opportunity to send a habitable signal to users.

Of course, many domestic products have already taken this step:

• For example, the snack brand Three Squirrels: white-collar workers want to eat more varieties of snacks, but they don’t have time to choose carefully. The brand sends a signal through IP symbols and large packaging that occupies the visual field: eat whatever you want like a squirrel, and you can vent your dissatisfaction here.
• For another example, young people want to be different, but they are easily trapped in negative emotions in the process of pursuing self-esteem. So, my friend Yu Hai encouraged them to "swallow all negative energy". He unified the abstract creed into an image - the devil cat, and empowered various categories of products with this image:

In addition to physical brands, many Internet products, including Tmall, NetEase Kaola, Tubatu... are also making similar attempts.

summary

Product is media, media is product

More and more products will be operated like media, and more and more media elements will be integrated into product marketing.

Sixth knife extreme environment testing strategy

Bargaining range: Four stars

Difficulty: Four stars

Everyone has three states: the real state, the ideal state and the lost state, and usually these three states overlap.

But people often ignore the positive aspects of reality and feel lost:

We all know "Three Days to See" written by Helen Keller, and have seen how beautiful the world is as described by the blind. However, vision is something we healthy people have naturally and is often overlooked.

Accordingly, people ignore negative things in order to blur the current situation and put themselves in an ideal state.

For example, even if all relatives can see that a man is unreliable, the girl will still marry him without hesitation, and selectively ignore those risky details (borrowing money from the girl when they are not familiar with each other).

Life is different for everyone and everyone has their own joys and sorrows, but if you selectively ignore important details when running a business and doing marketing, you are walking on a precarious tightrope.

Therefore, we must first make the assumption that the results may not be ideal, remove the unrepeatable or accidental factors in the experience, and then fill in the missing parts, so that we can finally approach a relatively ideal result.

1. Assume no one is paying attention to you

When making products, we often hear or actively collect some feedback, including positive and negative reviews.

At this time, we need to distinguish clearly which reviewers are internal staff, which are old acquaintances, and which have potential interests with us. Will they give you positive comments out of personal consideration or because they love you?

If there is, we should rationally erase it from our subjective impression.

The same is true when doing marketing. First assume that no one will pay attention to you, and then exclude those who are already familiar with you.

Until the company's true influence and trust among unfamiliar groups is tested, after all, large-scale revenue comes from strangers.

2. Assume that other products are better than yours

What would you do if your industry suddenly had a large influx of competitors?

Maybe the competitive pressure is not that great now, but let’s make an assumption: “If you are your own competitor and want to beat yourself, what would you do?”

Wouldn’t thinking like this instantly generate countless valuable methods to improve your products and marketing strategies?

If you think this is true, you might want to do some small-scale tests before marketing:

3. Assume you’re going out of business tomorrow

If your company were to die tomorrow, what would be the possible reasons?

Supply chain collapse? Capital chain broken? Poor product performance? Or is it because of poor marketing? What would you do when this situation really happens?

When you think in this way, do you feel that you are beginning to have solutions to many aspects that you had not thought of before?

A strange phenomenon is that no matter what social class people are in, they are always afraid of the word "death", even if it is just an assumption and tacitly understood.

In fact, making assumptions is not terrible. What is terrible is people’s fear of the truth. Making assumptions often can help us open our minds and increase the possibility and quality of “life”.

Just like when close lovers discuss what would happen if they break up, they will not really break up just because they talk about it, but will try to avoid hidden dangers early. On the contrary, those lovers who never dare to mention it, by the time they realize it, the conflict is so deep that there is no turning back.

4. Summary

Instinctively, we are often accustomed to thinking positively and taking the ideal state as the starting point for formulating strategies, which directly leads to one-sided conclusions and a cowardly approach to action.

As a marketer, you should always stand on both sides at the same time, pursuing the ultimate ideal while always guarding against extreme bad situations, avoiding marketing losses caused by short-term and limited decisions.

The Seventh Knife’s Multi-Act Drama Strategy

Bargaining range: Five stars

Difficulty of operation: Five stars

As a product developer, we know that without marketing, various innovative products will be difficult for users to accept and change their lives; but most users have an aversion to marketing.

(Experience how you feel when you see this ad on your Moments)

Therefore, good marketing is one that makes people unaware that it is marketing, but rather it sincerely helps users realize their wishes and quietly makes them accept it .

(Liu Wen ViVo advertisement: Appearing as a user)

This is very much like a stage performance. If an outsider praises an actor for his good acting skills, it is often not because he has really integrated into the role, but may just be showing off his skills.

It is impossible to show the acting skills in a perfect performance, but rather it is a comprehensive performance that will only make the audience feel that the character is the actor himself. (Recommend Fan Wei's Golden Horse Award-winning film "The Problem That Was Not a Problem")

Most industries are subject to the "professional curse":

Once we have mastered some "skills", we feel that we are professional enough and become obsessed with the pursuit of skills. We mistakenly believe that knowledge and skills are equivalent to ability , and that fundamentals and technical aspects can determine everything, which ultimately leads to a situation where too much is as bad as too little.

Advanced abilities come from the experience of life, and are gained by injecting true feelings into actions. Learn the skills and then forget them, impress users with sincerity, and melt the world with warmth.

As Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poem:

One day, you no longer look for love, but just love; you no longer pursue success, but just do it, and everything will really begin!

Author: Ibsen

Source: Ibsen (ID: ibsen2020)