Soft article placement, using 600 yuan to achieve 20,000 yuan of effect

Soft article placement refers to the process of publishing the company's own soft articles through major websites to gain exposure, increase brand awareness and endorsement. Soft article placement is part of product promotion and exists to assist effective advertising.

The process by which soft articles work is roughly like this: when a user sees an advertisement through performance advertising, when deciding whether to choose this company, he will use search engines to find information about the company in order to judge the company's strength and credibility. At this time, the soft articles released in advance will be presented to the users, telling them that it is a good idea to choose us, thus facilitating the transaction. This is the value of soft article placement.

The placement of soft articles is a need for every company. When I was doing mobile game operations, APP operations and traditional business operations and promotions, the company had placed soft articles. The effects of the placement vary from person to person.

The reason for writing this article is that I chatted with an operations friend some time ago. He works for a startup company and has limited funds. In order to increase the company's visibility, he set aside a considerable budget of nearly 10,000 yuan, wrote a soft article and placed it in several major media outlets. In the end, he couldn't even find it on Baidu and felt that he had suffered a great loss.

We cannot do anything to add insult to injury. We did not ridicule them, but just said a few words of comfort and said it was normal that it was not included in the news. But I know in my heart that if I put out an ad, I can get the effect they want with just 200 yuan, and the results will be very good. How do I do it specifically? Here I will take a previous soft copy placement as an example and give you a detailed explanation.

Media Trading Platform

At that time, we launched a voting campaign. In order to show the company's status, we decided to invest in some media to endorse the campaign. Because it was the first time to do a voting activity, in case the number of participants was too small, it would not be cost-effective if a lot of investment was made. With a testing mentality, we decided to control the budget for soft article delivery within 1,000 yuan, and actually spent 600 yuan.

After the event went online, I asked several users who participated in the event indirectly, and the responses I got were basically: The scale of your event is quite large, it must have cost a lot of money! I smiled but said nothing. If my colleagues did it, it would probably cost at least 20,000 yuan to achieve the same effect.

So how did you achieve the effect of 20,000 yuan with an investment of 600 yuan? First of all, we need to know that there is such a thing as a media trading platform, where we can screen out media with the highest cost-effectiveness. As shown below.

You can filter media by industry, price, and city. The voting campaign I was conducting at the time announced that the media reporting on it included 15 media outlets including People's Daily Online, China.com, Tencent News, Sohu.com, Phoenix.com, and MBA China.

Doing promotion is like doing art. Art comes from life, but is higher than life. News reporting has the same idea. It is based on facts and slightly beautifies them, but not exaggerated too much. We don’t do anything to deceive people.

Publish secondary and tertiary pages

If the 15 media outlets mentioned above were to look for official editors and put their content on their homepage, the price would definitely not be low. But the budget is limited, what to do? You can put it on the second-level or third-level pages, and the price can be as low as a few dozen yuan.

The five major portals are the media I prefer. They have strong brand endorsement and the price of publishing articles in different columns can differ by more than 10 times. Because no matter which page it is, it belongs to Sina.com, so you should understand why the final placement price of the 15 well-known media I selected was only 600 yuan. Just find the cheaper one among them.

For example, the Tencent website below. No one would have thought that you could publish a soft article on Tencent website for only 30 yuan.

You can't look down on others just because the price is low. The supporting media in my voting campaign, Tencent, was brought by this 30 yuan. It is based on facts and not exaggerated.

Prioritize high inclusion rate

The purpose of selecting low-priced media is to give an explanation to users and to save advertising budget. Is it enough to just select the lowest-priced media? No, when we publish soft articles, we need both the appearance and the substance (inclusion).

Because event promotion is only temporary, we hope that our voice can still be heard on the Internet after the event. Therefore, when choosing media, low price is one aspect and inclusion rate is another.

Except for a few media outlets selected to make up the numbers, the remaining two-thirds of the media outlets will choose those with a coverage rate of 100%. What does this mean? This means that after the article is published, it will be 100% likely to be found on Baidu, which is actually the core indicator of daily soft article delivery.

As shown in the picture above, on Tencent.com, the prices of the three columns are 80 yuan, 96 yuan, and 104 yuan respectively, and the highest inclusion rates are 75%, 100%, and 25%. Do you understand after reading this? When the prices are similar, give priority to the one with a higher inclusion rate.

Therefore, the media in the middle is more ideal. If the soft article cannot be included, what is the point of publishing the soft article?

When I post soft articles on a daily basis, I always choose the option below, which includes the news source, meaning that I will definitely be able to find it in Baidu News. Everyone should be able to understand the meaning of "package", which is the kind that will refund if invalid. As long as there is still life, we will definitely find a way to include it for you.

With 600 yuan, 3 to 4 media outlets were selected on the media trading platform to make up the number, and about 10 outlets were included. This ensured both the endorsement of major media and the inclusion effect of the event.

If you search the keywords of our event on Baidu now, you will find four news items on the homepage. This is brand endorsement, and it is also a way to truly achieve great things with little money. It is well worth the 600 yuan.

Pay attention to Baidu's inclusion

After selecting the media, contact customer service to help produce the manuscript. I also encountered some pitfalls when choosing media platforms. One is that the price of the same media varies between platforms, and the other is that the degree of cooperation is not necessarily positive. In the past, some media would take several days to publish manuscripts after they were submitted, and the hot topics had already passed. Just like the current internet celebrity quotation platforms, the quality is uneven and it is easy to fall into traps when you make your first investment.

During the delivery process, you should pay attention to Baidu's inclusion status in real time . My 15 media outlets submitted their release requests on Friday morning, and by the afternoon, Baidu searched for the event keywords and found results. It has to be said that choosing the right media can really achieve twice the result with half the effort.

In addition, don't underestimate some unknown media. When I place news on a daily basis, I like to place ads for around 50 yuan, with a 100% coverage rate. These are media with average popularity, so it's a great deal.

A few hundred yuan of advertising budget can be used to advertise on a dozen media. Although Baidu's inclusion rate is 100%, there is no pattern in which media to display. At this time, the more media placements there are, the more information there will be on Baidu's homepage, just like a concentrated fire tactic. Ordinary users only need to see that there is brand exposure and will not pay too much attention to which media published it.

Combined with self-media release

In addition to paid placement, soft-text placement can also be combined with self-media release , a two-pronged approach that makes it difficult to distinguish true from false. Self-media is a free news publishing platform. When combined with paid media, whether it is small news with a small budget or major event news with a budget of thousands or tens of thousands, the online exposure is ideal when released together. You should know that there are no less than ten self-media platforms, and the minimum investment for a paid media is ten. If you publish a soft article on more than twenty media, it would be strange if Baidu cannot find it!

Finally, just like performance advertising, soft-text placement requires skills and constant trial and error and learning. If you are a novice, it is normal to waste part of the advertising budget. When I did soft-text placement for the first time, I spent 4,000 yuan on two portal websites, and the result was hard to describe. But now I am already a veteran. After all, I have gained experience by investing more. If I want to improve my advertising level, there is no shortcut. There is only one way: invest more!

Author: Tiger

Source: Tiger Talk Operations