4 marketing strategies for creating hot products!

A hot-selling product means extremely high popularity, a huge number of users, considerable product revenue and other favorable factors. Therefore, creating a hot-selling product is always the dream of business owners, products, operations, and marketing . So how do we achieve this goal? The author will share with you 4 major marketing strategies.

In March, enterprises across the country are resuming work in an orderly manner, and all walks of life have been affected to varying degrees by the epidemic.

How to make good products, improve performance and make up for losses has become the core issue for all business owners, product, operation and marketing darlings. At this time, making, producing, and marketing a hit product may be the magic weapon that turns the situation around.

Mr. Kaohsiung Yong, who has more than 20 years of experience as a product manager across the Internet and traditional industries, shared with everyone in detail the entire process and key points of making hot products in his new book "I Make Hot Products in Xiaomi". Today, the editor shares the “hot product marketing” part with readers, hoping that everyone can make and produce a hot product.

So, let’s get started!

Key points:

1. The core of hot product marketing is conversion. Marketing that is not aimed at conversion is a waste of money.
2. The core of product marketing is to re-match products with users, that is, to redefine products based on user logic.
3. The way to increase the activation rate is to let users experience the "explosion point" faster. The earlier the explosion point occurs, the faster the conversion!
4. For every 5% increase in user retention rate, corporate profits can increase by 25% to 95%. Retaining users is an important means for companies to make profits.

No matter how good a product is, it will not work without marketing in this era. Objectively speaking, marketing is also a kind of ability, and it is a very important ability. On the premise that the product is powerful enough, marketing is the catalyst for the explosion of hot products, which can make the hot products explode in a short period of time.

The customer is king! The core of hot product marketing is users

The explosive product marketing we are going to discuss today needs to be user-centric. Redefine your product based on the user group and use the methods that users are accustomed to to generate traffic and conversions.

The traditional model where channels are king has been gradually fading. The recent rise of various C to C (manufacturer direct sales) and C to M models has shown that whoever owns the users and is closer to the users has greater opportunities.

How to retain users and avoid wasting money? Four strategies for hot-selling products

Hot product marketing is more based on product level marketing . This type of marketing is more based on product conversion, and only marketing that sells products is truly valuable marketing. We often say: Any marketing that is not aimed at conversion is a waste of money.

Since the purpose of marketing is to sell products, we will adopt the logic of e-commerce to see what kind of marketing methods we need at different stages. The formula for e-commerce is:

E-commerce = traffic × conversion rate × average order value × repurchase rate

We will develop our marketing strategy for explosive products from these four aspects.

Strategy 1: Acquire customers! Get customers! Do whatever it takes to absorb traffic

Traffic marketing, to put it simply, is about acquiring users, which we call customer acquisition. Here I will explain how to gain traffic based on the logic of explosive products. Let’s look at how to do traffic marketing from three dimensions.

1. Product Marketing: Find the “Explosion Point” That Excites Users

Products are the source and the foundation of all marketing. Regarding product marketing, we should re-match products with users and find the "explosive point" of the product. The most attractive aspect of your product to users is the core competitiveness of your product. As long as you dig out this explosive point, your product will have soul.

Let’s take a look at a classic case of finding a hotspot from the user’s perspective. In 2018, the phrase “Guazi used car direct sales network, no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference” became popular in major media. Why is this slogan so popular?

A simple reason is that they found the user explosion point - "no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference". Users have always hated middlemen. Guazi.com seized this opportunity and launched its direct sales service to the market. Users were of course guided to Guazi.com.

In fact, let’s think about it carefully: Isn’t Guazi Second-hand Car also a middleman? However, this no longer matters to users, as they believe that Guazi.com is more honest.

Advertisement of Guazi used car direct sales website

Once a product has a hot spot, it can easily impress users and detonate the market. On the contrary, some products themselves have no problems, but if they are targeted at the wrong target audience, it is easy for them to be misunderstood as having problems with the product.

2. Design a catchy slogan: simple, bold, and effective

In today's era of information explosion, whoever can grab the user's attention within 8 seconds and quickly establish the user's awareness of the product will have the opportunity to win the market.

Today's advertising slogans are more about six words: simple, rough and effective. The core of advertising slogans is to convey information, and this information should be directly imprinted in the user's mind like a stamp.

There are two techniques for this type of advertising slogan: grasp the product features to match the user's concerns and directly complete cognitive implantation; find the precise user group and directly and accurately position the product and the group.

3. Social marketing: word of mouth is the most important! Understand the platform user attributes and push products with unique features

Social marketing, also known as socialized marketing, is simply marketing based on social relationships. With the rapid development of mobile Internet, there are already 3 billion Internet users in the world, of which social media users are expected to reach 2.5 billion.

Social media has several distinct characteristics: more accurate target groups, higher conversion rates, and lower marketing costs.

In the Internet age, when consumers purchase products, it is not only the end of a transaction, but also the beginning of another transaction and the beginning of word-of-mouth communication. It is this word-of-mouth cycle that has brought about great changes in social marketing today. Dentsu of Japan summarizes the entire consumer behavior into the AISAS model .

This model is a complete model of online consumer behavior. For enterprises, we need to set up corresponding marketing strategies in every link of the AISAS model to establish a complete cycle of social marketing.

Specifically, today's social media is very rich. WeChat, Weibo, Toutiao, Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, Tieba, as well as live streaming and many vertical websites are actually social marketing platforms.

Different platforms have different attributes, and we need to choose different platforms based on different products and different marketing goals each time. If you want to make a cosmetic and hope to compete with major brands in terms of ingredients or technological content, then Xiaohongshu and Beauty Legend are more suitable for you. And if you want to sell products through influencers, Douyin may be the best choice for you.

4. Content and IP marketing: Live streaming by influencers is on the rise, and scenario-based and drama-based marketing is the trend

Today, various live broadcasts by internet celebrities and TikTok screen-sweeping are rapidly rising, and major celebrities are also following suit and switching to major live broadcast platforms. For a time, online influencers promoting products became a hot topic. The reason behind these internet celebrities promoting products is actually the rise of content marketing.

In 2018, the number of top internet celebrities with more than 1 million fans increased by 23%, and the number of internet celebrities with more than 100,000 fans increased by 51%. The total number of internet celebrities has exceeded one million. The huge number of internet celebrities and fans has created a new economic form. The live broadcast market alone reached 45.3 billion yuan in 2017, and it is expected that the market size will reach 112 billion yuan by 2020. This will be a huge market.

In the internet celebrity economy, content marketing has a high degree of “star-chasing characteristics” , and internet celebrities who broadcast live do not need to tweet loudly to promote the products they want to sell. They show scene-based effects. For example, lipstick on the lips, accessories on the hands, and cosmetics used in the dressing room can all become hot commodities. The same styles as those of celebrities and internet celebrities are all the rage on the Internet.

Celebrity Wang Yibo endorses Amul milk

Although Internet celebrity products are very popular, we should not deify them. First of all, we must make our products unique. Internet celebrity products have several characteristics: eye-catching appearance, high recognition, novel functions, and in line with the personality of young people.

Among internet celebrity products, scenario-based and drama-based marketing are particularly popular among users. Many internet celebrities will link their products with daily life, such as travel, food, etc. Directly implanting products into life situations allows users to unknowingly like these products, thereby stimulating consumption. The effect is often much better than the original word-of-mouth promotion.

In addition to online influencers promoting products, IP (intellectual property) is still a major source of traffic. Especially the Marvel and Disney series, which are deeply rooted in people's hearts, have been increasingly combined with various products and achieved very good results.

In this regard, the former time-honored brand Wufangzhai has done a very good job. The Disney series of rice dumplings and Marvel series of rice dumplings it launched are deeply loved by children. These two types of rice dumplings have naturally become popular products in the rice dumpling world.

Wufangzhai Marvel Series Zongzi

In addition to this IP implantation , another marketing method is cross-border cooperation.

In this regard, the collaboration between Rio Cocktail and Liushen is a classic. During a Tmall national trend campaign, Rio launched a floral water-flavored cocktail, which aroused the curiosity of many young people: What would it taste like if a cocktail was put in a floral water bottle?

As a result, Tmall sold 17,000 bottles of this cocktail in one minute, which was a huge hit.

Strategy 2: Increase activation rate (let users experience the “explosion point” faster)

After we attract users, we need to activate them, that is, let them purchase or use our products. Generally, we call the proportion of users who purchase or use our products to the total users the conversion rate. Conversion is a very important part of the entire user transaction process. E-commerce companies often mention conversion rates. Good e-commerce companies can achieve 5%, while poor e-commerce companies can only achieve a few thousandths. Without conversion, no matter how much traffic you have, it is meaningless.

So how can we improve conversion rates? One of the most effective ways is to let users quickly experience the "hot spot". Once users experience the "hot spot", it will be easy for them to place an order and complete the conversion.

In addition to allowing users to experience the hot spots faster, we also need to determine the activation path and establish a funnel report. In other words, we need to monitor the data of the entire process of user activation to see at which stage more users are lost.

From the perspective of the App, registration is generally the link with the most user loss. Lowering the user registration threshold and increasing registration incentives are the most important means to improve the activation rate.

Below is an App activation funnel model: From the graph, it is very obvious that registration is the link with the most user loss.

Strategy 3: Double attack of word of mouth + viral marketing to improve retention rate (awaken and retain users)

How important is user retention?

A survey report shows that for every 5% increase in user retention rate, profits can increase by 25%-95%. Simply put, a large part of a company's profits comes from old users.

Word of mouth marketing and viral marketing need to be used together. We often find that many old users like our products and they also like to recommend our products to others. However, this enthusiasm will only last for a while. So, how to continue this popularity? The simplest way is viral marketing.

The process of viral marketing is actually quite simple. It is to constantly create surprises and give users extra stimulation, so that both seed users and fissioned users have a sense of participation and gain something at the same time. A simple fission process is shown in the figure below:

In this process, two things are very important:

1. The fission copy should be interesting, and the "benefits" of fission should be clearly stated. Only when there are benefits will users be willing to participate;
2. After the task is completed, the prize link will be issued. This prize will be given not only to the seed user, but also to the fissioned user. In this way, it is easy to form a fission open loop, and other users can continue fission.

In addition to viral fission, another way to retain users is to continue to provide users with products or services that satisfy them.

Strategy 4: Repeat purchase, make users loyal to the brand and buy again and again (enhance brand influence + increase repeat purchase rate)

Repeat purchase refers to a user purchasing a product or a product of the same brand again after purchasing the product. Repurchase rate is a very important indicator that reflects the user's loyalty to a brand.

Users are not obliged to be loyal to a brand. Only by providing better services and greater brand influence will users make repeat purchases.

Another way to increase repurchase rate is to continuously enhance the brand’s influence. In addition to the practicality of the product, users buy products because they identify with the brand . An important indicator of consumption upgrading is brand awareness. Many people choose the brand first and then the product when buying things.

Therefore, how to strengthen product brand becomes more important. Strengthening a brand does not necessarily mean advertising. The best way to strengthen a brand is to constantly promote your product. With the rise of new media, let your product appear in places where users gather to increase your presence. In addition, encouraging users to post more orders, share on WeChat Moments, and leave more user reviews are also good ways to enhance the brand.

Author: Kaohsiung Yong

Source: Kaohsiung Yong