How to promote online a product with almost zero repurchase rate?

I believe that many people have deeply felt the difficulty of "growth" in the past two years. It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new customers and retain existing customers. How can we find new ways to play and new growth channels?

The author of this article takes the wedding photography industry as an example to analyze the promotion channels and gameplay. This is a product with almost zero repurchase, and it has "innate" difficulty in achieving growth. It can bring new thinking to partners who are doing online growth, and can also provide online promotion ideas for traditional industries. I hope this can bring you some inspiration, Enjoy~

It’s the end of the year again, and I noticed that there were overwhelming travel photography advertisements in the elevator. Travel photography is widely used in wedding photography. In the past five years, in response to domestic consumers’ demands for consumption upgrades and personalization, traditional wedding photography has been combined with travel weddings.

1 Industry Overview

At present, online customer acquisition has become the main way of acquiring customers in the entire industry, and online customer acquisition mainly includes free channels and paid channels.

Among them, the free channels are mainly on self-media platforms and short video platforms. Merchants attract customers' attention and learn more information by publishing pictures, texts and short video content; paid channels mainly include search ads: such as SEO ads of search engines such as Baidu, Sogou, and 360.

Information flow advertising: such as Toutiao’s information flow advertising, Tencent News’ information flow advertising, Xiaohongshu’s grass-roots notes, and advertising placements by expert accounts.

Third-party platforms: including entering e-commerce platforms and opening flagship stores; local life service platforms: Meituan Dianping; entering wedding apps, such as opening a store on the largest wedding app Wedding.com; and some third-party app patch ads, such as in the vertical community Mayu.

WeChat ecological advertising: including Moments advertising and public account advertising, which is also a commonly used advertising method for many businesses.

At the same time, the wedding photography industry has characteristics different from other industries:

1) The customer decision cycle is long. The period from intention to payment can be as long as half a year to a year;

2) The average customer price is very high. According to public data, the industry average customer price was 5,000 in 2018;

3) The service cycle is relatively long. From placing an order to shooting, customers usually need to agree on a schedule at least one month in advance. During this period, communication and coordination are required to shoot all the details.

4) There is almost no repeat purchase and the customer decision-making cost is relatively high.

Due to the characteristics of the industry, online customer acquisition has formed a basic logic:

According to the customer purchase life cycle, online advertising is not intended to stimulate immediate conversions, but must first obtain leads (customer phone calls or WeChat), then be followed up and maintained by professional sales, and finally guide potential customers into the store. Obtaining the customer’s phone number or WeChat account has become the primary goal of measuring advertising effectiveness.

Therefore, we can see that the marketing landing pages of online advertising are almost all form-style landing pages, which guide and require customers to fill in their mobile phone numbers and names to obtain quotes or receive limited-time discounts at the same time.

On the conversion side, the entire industry has almost formed a set of standardized industry conversion methods and paths:

Friends who pay attention to the brand through content will search for the brand or directly follow the official account. If they follow the official account, the automatic reply of the official account after following is almost always to guide them to provide a phone number, and then the customer service staff will connect to ask about the customer's needs and concerns, and then guide them again to "add personal WeChat to facilitate sending quotes and photos":

The author selected three companies, namely, Mrs. Golden, a traditional brand, Platinum Travel Photography, a cutting-edge travel photography brand, and Crystal Vision Wedding Photography, a local company. It can be seen that the logic and gameplay of the automatic replies after following the three companies are almost the same, with no significant differences.

2. Online free channels to acquire customers

1. Toutiao and TikTok

Below we have selected five leading players in the industry and analyzed them through data:

The above table counts the number of fans of the five leading players in the industry on Toutiao and Douyin. It can be seen that the five companies attach great importance to the operation of Douyin accounts. Among them, the headlines of three companies are in a state of suspension, and the number of fans is also very low.

Among the Douyin accounts, Platinum Travel Photography has 436,000 followers, making it the account with the most followers among brand wedding photography. At the same time, the content is relatively good, and the content mainly consists of on-site shooting footage of real client cases. Compared with other accounts, the content with finished client photos and edited "blockbusters" makes people more down-to-earth; at the same time, the content presentation has a stronger sense of brand.

It is worth mentioning that some mid-level brands have also done well with the help of Douyin. For example, this brand focused on wedding photography has four matrix accounts. Each account has some different positioning. The total number of fans exceeds 3.3 million, and there are live broadcasts every night.

2. Public Account

The above table summarizes the operation status of 5 public accounts. The table only counts the brand’s largest official accounts. Almost every brand has multiple matrix official accounts.

It can be seen that in terms of the total number of fans, South Korea's Yijiang has an estimated 330,000 fans, and Platinum Travel Photography has 230,000 fans, ranking first and second. But in terms of opening rate and headline reading, the opening rate of Korean Artisan's headlines is around 6.3%, while the opening rate of Platinum Travel Photography's content is very high, reaching 35%. However, in the long run, the average reading volume of the headlines in September was only 15,000.

From the content point of view, the content released by many brands is similar. They will all use the exquisite customer photos shot that month as the material, and mostly reflect the brand tone. Relatively speaking, the content of Platinum Travel Photography is richer. In addition to the brand-specific customer photos, almost every release contains nearly 5 pieces of content, and also includes some life topics and some issues that customers care about.

We know that although self-media can gain exposure and attention for free, the core of self-media is to test the company's content output capabilities, and content creation is a process that requires long-term accumulation, so we need to persist and measure long-term effects.

What is certain is that it is very difficult for small regional brand merchants to maintain content on multiple channels. Small regional brand merchants usually focus on a certain platform, mostly based on official accounts, and some also rely on short video platforms with large traffic such as Douyin. The number of fans is also good and the attention is relatively high, but at the same time it also faces regional issues, and many businesses are unable to provide cross-regional services.

3. Sina Weibo

The above table summarizes the basic information of 5 brands’ accounts on Weibo. It can be seen that all major brands and many regional brands have continuously updated content on Weibo. It can also be seen that big brands usually operate multiple accounts, and the accounts are usually divided by region. However, judging from the level of activity and fan interaction, both big brands and regional brands are not ideal, with relatively little interaction.

3 Overview of online advertising

1. Search ads

Here we take Baidu SEO advertising as a research case to illustrate.

When we search for wedding photography keywords on Baidu PC, we can see related advertisements, which are mainly of three types.

① The first type is an advertisement such as the Korean Artisan, where you can get the price list by prompting to enter your phone number without clicking on the page;

② The second type is ads such as Platinum Travel Photography, which require customers to click to enter and then be guided by preferential information to stimulate customers to submit a phone call to obtain a quote;

③The third type is that after clicking into the landing page, there is no obvious guidance for obtaining customer phone numbers, and online consultation is the main method.

Because it is impossible to obtain specific advertising data, it is impossible to know which one is more effective, but from the logic of traffic exposure and conversion, the first one will have less loss without clicking to enter the page, and in principle the conversion will be better.

The ads displayed on mobile searches are similar, but because of the way Baidu displays ads on mobile devices, there are no ads like the Korean Artisan ads on PC that allow users to enter a phone number to get a price list without having to click on them.

The above table shows Baidu's main core keywords for the wedding photography industry and the related traffic. For big brands, they can advertise in a wider area. Moreover, you can bid a higher price and get more exposure, and the effect will be better due to the brand effect. For regional brands, they will generally only target areas where they can provide services, and the traffic they can obtain will be very small. They usually use precise keywords as the traffic entry point.

2. Information flow advertising

Through research and analysis, we can see that almost all major brands have placed advertisements on Toutiao.

Based on the powerful data tags of Toutiao's Bytedance Engine, brands can place advertisements based on different dimensions such as potential customers' interests, in-depth behavioral data, reading preferences, video preferences, geographic locations, etc.

Usually when placing advertisements, it is necessary to design the advertising materials based on the different needs and preferences of users. Use multiple materials and multiple plans to conduct data testing, find the material copy and plan with the best data, and then launch them in large quantities.

3. Xiaohongshu recommendation

According to public data, the number of Xiaohongshu users reached 300 million in July 2019. According to Qiangua data, the number of monthly active users of Xiaohongshu reached 100 million in September 2020, and their ages were mainly concentrated between 18 and 34 years old. The majority of the respondents are women, accounting for 88.37% and men for 11.61%. More than 56% of users come from the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and 70% of users are born after 1990. From the user portrait of the platform, it can be seen that they are very consistent with the target customers with strong demands in the wedding photography industry.

By analyzing the search results of keywords on Xiaohongshu, we can see that the search popularity of wedding photography is still very high. To facilitate comparison, we can also see that the search popularity of the keyword "fragrance" in beauty is 157,900, which is similar to the search popularity of wedding photos.

There are more than 1.03 million notes related to wedding photography on Xiaohongshu, and 1,438 accounts related to wedding photography. As a content-seeking community, many users will search for relevant experience sharing on Xiaohongshu before making decisions or purchasing products and services. Similarly, for newlyweds who want to take wedding photos, there are also many users searching for related content on Xiaohongshu.

So we can see that for large brands, they all operate corresponding brand accounts on Xiaohongshu. The basic situation of the accounts is shown in the following table:

By analyzing the accounts in the wedding photography industry, we can see that the brand with the largest number of fans is not the well-known brands we mentioned above, but rather the Beijing brand Rose Constellation, which currently has stores in Beijing and Shenzhen.

Although the popularity is very high, the problem we mentioned above with regional brands still exists: it is impossible to provide services across regions. So you can see under the brand's popular notes that many users ask whether there are stores in various parts of the country where they can go, but the brand is unable to provide services.

The content of each account is similar, and only the number of video notes of Platinum Travel Photography is greater than the text and picture notes. In addition, there are many reviews, guides, and money-saving content written by amateurs who cooperate with brands.

Among these brand accounts, except for the Mrs. Jin brand, the other brands almost only operate one official account on Xiaohongshu’s product platform. The Jin Madam brand has multiple matrix accounts on the Xiaohongshu platform, most of which are regional. It can be seen that Jin Madam’s strategy is to acquire users based on regional boundaries and then provide precise services.

In addition, there are also brands that place advertisements on Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu’s advertisements will appear in the recommendations on the discovery page and the information flow on the search page; by clicking on the advertisement, you will also jump to the landing page to collect customer phone numbers.

Similarly, for regional brands, Xiaohongshu is still a good choice, with low cost and a more precise target audience. In terms of content format, you can choose a matrix approach of corporate brand accounts + amateur sharing. Corporate brand accounts can focus on guest posts and behind-the-scenes videos, while amateur sharing can focus on experience sharing.

4. Third-party platforms

1) Opening a store on an e-commerce platform

Through analysis, we found that brands currently mainly open stores on two platforms, Tmall and JD.com. We will use the Tmall platform for analysis and explanation. Through searching, we found that there are 2,046 wedding photography-related stores on Tmall, and 46,860 wedding photography-related stores on Taobao as a whole.

We crawled the top 10 products in terms of sales volume under the keyword "wedding photography" on Taobao, and the following table lists the detailed data:

It can be seen that among the top 10 products, there are 6 brand flagship stores, and the best one is Platinum Travel Photography, which has the longest Tmall store opening time, 9 years old.

We can find that big brands and some mid-tier brands serving multiple regions have opened flagship stores on Tmall. Similarly, for brands that can provide services in multiple regions or even nationwide, they can acquire more users on Taobao.

Of course, the data we get from third-party platforms shows that there are also demanding customers in the region. Therefore, for regional brands, opening a store on Taobao and using data analysis to specifically acquire potential customers in the region is also a feasible method. Of course, this puts higher operational requirements on brand owners.

2) Wedding APP settled in

For the wedding photography industry, users of wedding apps can be said to be the most accurate customers, and among wedding apps, Wedding.com is the platform with the largest number of users.

According to public information, as of January 2020, the number of registered users on the Wedding.com platform has exceeded 70 million, with more than 200,000 brands and merchants, covering more than 400 cities and regions across the country.

Compared with other platforms, Wedding.com may be more suitable for regional brands. When users log in for the first time, the APP will automatically locate the current city and display the service providers in the current city; for regional brands, the customers will be more accurate.

5. WeChat Ecosystem Advertising

In the WeChat ecosystem, advertising can be placed on official accounts, Moments, and mini-programs through the Guangdiantong platform. However, for the wedding photography industry, Moments advertising is still the main form of advertising. Compared with official accounts and mini-program advertising, Moments advertising has better click-through and conversion effects, and it is easier to acquire accurate customers based on geographic location.

Moments advertising is also a very common form of advertising in the wedding photography industry. Well-known large brands and regional brands are all placing Moments advertising. This is also because Moments advertising is within the WeChat ecosystem, which can better acquire customers, guide them to private domains, and cultivate customers until they are converted. Currently, there are two main forms of Moments advertising:

1) Guided by collecting customer information by filling out forms

This type of delivery has a very clear conversion goal and obtains customer information. It is also the industry-wide mining method we analyzed in the previous article. The marketing landing page is the main method to obtain customer information.

2) Focus on following the official account

The logic of this type of delivery becomes: click on the ad > follow the official account > reply to the official account to guide the customer to submit the phone number/customer service guidance > follow up by phone/add WeChat. Compared with the method of directly obtaining customer information through forms, guiding customers to follow the official account through behavioral calls will put less psychological pressure on customers and may result in higher conversion rates. Then, we can continue to reach customers through the content of the public account in the future, and attract them to take the next step of consultation.

Usually, this type of delivery has higher requirements for the content of the public account. When customers follow the public account, there will be an automatic reply guide, and customers can check the historical message content of the public account by themselves. If the content is not good or even not updated, it will directly lead to customer loss. Similarly, after customers follow a public account, if there is no good content in the later stage, it is likely that they will not be reached and will become silent customers.

4 Problems faced by regional brands in online customer acquisition

Judging from the future growth of the macro wedding market, it can be seen that the growth space of the entire market is very limited, so existing competition will inevitably become the norm in market competition. For regional brands, it is impossible to provide services across regions. At the same time, due to limited resources, it is impossible to acquire new customers through more channels. After communicating with many industry practitioners, from my analysis, regional brands face the following problems:

1. Lack of online system play

We know that the wedding photography industry is an industry where users think rationally and make decisions over a long period of time. Customers have a purchasing life cycle. At each stage of the life cycle, we need to know how to connect with customers and what operational means we need to use to stimulate customers to take action and complete the next step until the conversion is completed.

At the same time, it is necessary to clearly understand the brand’s own advantages, concentrate resources, and measure the channels and methods through which the brand can acquire new customers, as well as how to design the entire operational process of conversion after acquiring new customers. Wedding photography is an industry with strong private domain operations and is very suitable for private domain system strategies.

2. Online advertising costs are high

For online advertising, usually high click-through rates and high conversion rates are required to lower the overall cost of acquiring a single customer, or the early indicator consulting cost. The click-through rate and conversion rate of advertising materials are mainly based on the brand’s understanding of the advertising placement in that channel and the underlying understanding of advertising marketing. Due to the lack of professional knowledge, we are at a disadvantage in understanding customer needs, copywriting and material selection.

At the same time, there are many channels for online advertising. Brand owners face the problem of how to make reasonable choices and which channels to spend their marketing budget on. Otherwise, they will become anxious and try all kinds of methods, resulting in excessively high marketing costs for the company.

3. Lack of good content output

For regional brands that lack marketing budgets, the creation and output of good content will become a lever for brands to acquire customers. From the author's analysis of multiple platforms, the content released by brands lacks interactivity, feels a bit condescending, and is not easy to trigger dissemination and discussion, and also lacks a call to action.

4. Low customer conversion efficiency

Earlier we talked about the problem of long decision-making cycles in the industry. According to the normal conversion path, we need to gain the trust of customers at every stage of the customer purchase cycle so that we can win when the customer makes the final decision. For regional brands, almost all of them have managed to attract customers to their personal WeChat accounts, but they are relatively lacking in the ability to conduct refined operations for customers. At the same time, how to strike a cost balance between acquiring new customers and settling customers in the private domain is a problem that brands need to solve.

Author: Tian Dengchao

Source: Tian Dengchao