Why can't your marketing drive user growth?

Starting from the analysis of the entire marketing chain, the author explains the three elements of marketing and how to optimize and apply them in actual operations to achieve user growth .

As a user growth practitioner, do you often encounter the following problems:

• There are over 100,000 WeChat articles, but the number of orders has not increased;
• The UV of activities on the APP is very high, but the conversion rate is very low;
• After running tens of millions of ads, claiming to reach tens of millions of people and gaining hundreds of millions of impressions, the business data has not changed much;
• …

Why is our marketing ineffective? Why is our communication effect very good but cannot drive user and business growth?

The reason why our marketing is ineffective is mainly affected by three factors.

To understand why we cannot drive growth, let’s look at how the entire marketing chain affects user behavior.

Marketing creativity drives growth chain

From the above picture, we can see that information (activities, videos, posters, H5 and other creative ideas) reaches users through different media, thereby influencing users and triggering them to download, use, purchase products and other behaviors.

Therefore, the marketing effect is actually the result of the comprehensive behavior of information, media, and products (landing pages). The reason why our marketing results are not good and cannot drive growth is because one or more parties have not done well.

Below I will analyze these three aspects one by one to see how to improve our marketing effectiveness.

Three elements of creativity-driven growth

1. Message: What you say is more important than how you say it

No matter what kind of marketing behavior, an advertisement, a WeChat article, a poster, a video, an offline event... they are actually conveying information to our target users.

The transmission of information includes two aspects:

1. What to say: that is, what kind of information do we convey to users? For example, price discounts, product features, life propositions, technological advantages, etc.
2. How to say it: that is, what form of expression to use to convey our information. For example, the one-shot of our TVC, the dynamic visual presentation of posters, the narrative structure of WeChat articles, etc., these are all forms of information expression.

We tend to pay more attention to the form of expression of creative information, but what is most easily overlooked is the correctness of the information conveyed by the creativity itself; that is, we pay attention to how to say it, but ignore what to say?

The most important thing about “deciding what to say” is to consider the “position” of the brand in the user’s mind.

"Position" refers to the user's impression of the product, which mainly includes familiarity and liking. The different “positions” will result in different messages that the creativity needs to convey to users. The “position” determines what we want to say to users.

Based on the target users’ familiarity and liking for the product, we use a four-quadrant analysis to analyze the brand’s position in the user’s mind.

Four-quadrant analysis of user "position"

Quadrant 1: High familiarity and high liking

In the first quadrant, target users are highly familiar with and like the product.

Information delivery strategy: Continue to maintain high visibility and reputation, and provide users with differentiated value propositions.

To drive growth while maintaining a high level of visibility and reputation, it is also necessary to deliver differentiated value to users from competing products. For example, through new images, functions, technologies, services, and interest points, we can continuously stimulate users, improve product retention and monetization, and continue to expand market share.

For example, products such as Taobao and Tmall have good user awareness and reputation. At this time, if the message you convey to users is "Go to Taobao for online shopping", it is actually worthless; no matter how good the idea is or how much exposure it gets, it will have no effect on business growth. Because everyone knows that Taobao is an e-commerce platform, this is not a problem or pain point for users.

Quadrant II: Low familiarity, high liking

The product has a very good reputation among users who have used it and users love it very much, but the product's popularity is relatively low and many users do not know about our product.

In this case, either the field we are in is a new market and the target users are not familiar with the industry and field and are still in the cultivation stage; or we are a late entrant and many target users do not know us.

Messaging strategy: Increase visibility and awareness.

The most important thing at this stage is to increase the popularity and recognition of the product and brand, let everyone know about our products, and use creativity to tell target users who we are and what problems and pain points we can solve for them. This is the fastest and most effective way to drive user growth.

For example, Shunfeng Express, as an instant logistics brand, provides a very good user experience for people who are in a hurry to deliver things. However, in the entire logistics industry, compared with logistics brands such as SF Express, Shunfeng Express has lower popularity and recognition.

Therefore, Shunfeng invited Jay Chou to be its spokesperson, and the main message it conveyed was "one-to-one express delivery", which was an information delivery strategy based on the "position" of the brand. The purpose is to establish the user mindset that "urgent delivery" = "flash delivery" through creative information, so that when users are in a hurry to deliver something, they will think of flash delivery first, thereby driving user growth.

Quadrant 3: Low familiarity, low liking

The target users have a low level of liking for the product, which means that the product has a poor reputation. However, the good thing is that the brand itself is not well-known.

Information delivery strategy: Discover the reasons for low likeability and propose solutions to it.

The first thing to solve is not the problem of popularity, but to find out the reasons why users don’t like it and make improvements to fill the gap in user impression.

If we do not consider the current "position" of the brand and carry out large-scale communication and promotion before the impression gap is filled, the more we expand the communication, the more detrimental it will be to the growth of users and business.

Quadrant 4: High familiarity, low liking

Such brands and products often have high visibility and market share, but for various reasons their reputation and credibility are poor.

Information delivery strategy: Reverse the negative image and reshape a good image.

Because these brands have high user awareness, once their reputation is damaged, it will take a long time to rebuild their image.

The most important thing is to find where the problem lies. For example, Tencent in its early days was criticized for plagiarism; Momo was once called a tool for hooking up; and Didi Chuxing was affected by its own individual safety behaviors.

These will affect user growth, especially when other strong competitors appear in the market and do well in terms of product experience, etc., users are likely to migrate, resulting in large-scale loss and transfer of users.

Therefore, it is necessary to make improvements to the problems, convey them to users, and slowly regain users' reputation and attention.

2. Media: Focus on penetrating circles

After we figure out what message we want to convey to the audience, the next step is to use what media and channels to convey our message to users.

1. Media from centralization to decentralization in the mobile Internet era

First, let’s take a look at what changes have taken place in media in the era of mobile Internet?

In the era of mass media, media are centralized and power-dominated, that is, the issuance and dissemination of information are mainly concentrated on a few centralized platforms, such as CCTV, satellite TV and some newspapers and magazines.

A brand does not need to pay special attention to who our target users are. We can influence almost most of our target users by simply conducting marketing and disseminating information on these platforms.

In the era of mass media, information is centralized and radiated

In the era of mobile Internet, the channels and carriers for information transmission are becoming more and more numerous and dispersed. The transmission of information has changed from centralized to decentralized, from a top-down hierarchical relationship to a peer-to-peer network model.

In the era of mobile Internet, in addition to traditional channels such as newspapers and television stations, a website, an APP, a public account, or even a person may become a channel for the dissemination of information. For example, major app stores, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Baidu, Weibo, WeChat, Toutiao, Douban, Cai Xukun, Papi Jiang, Rebecca, etc.

In the era of mobile Internet, information flows in a decentralized network mode

2. It becomes difficult to reach users and traffic conversion efficiency is low

The result of decentralization is that it is difficult for us to reach our target users through a few media and channels. Users become difficult to reach and traffic conversion effects become low.

For example, there is a newly developed snack product that is targeted at young white-collar workers. In the era of mass media, these target users are basically covered through media such as CCTV or Hunan Satellite TV, plus some newspaper and magazine media, because users have few other choices besides these media forms.

But now, these target users are scattered across various channels. They watch less TV and read newspapers, and use Douyin, Weibo, Youku, Toutiao, WeChat, NetEase Cloud Music, Keep, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Momo, etc. more. They may follow Cai Xukun, Li Xian, Xiao Zhan, or they may like Jay Chou. There are thousands of such fragmented media nodes. It is difficult for us to cover all our users by covering a few channels.

With so many media nodes, even if we spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, we may not be able to cover and influence all of our target users. For example, during Taobao’s Double 11, in order to cover more target users, in addition to Alibaba’s own product traffic, it also spent an extra 10 to 200 million yuan to cover more media, and this can only cover some of the target users. Except for companies at the level of BAT, many other companies simply cannot afford this kind of lavish spending.

3. Find the right users - saturation attack - penetrate the circle

What should most companies do if they don’t have sufficient budget? How to reach users and improve traffic conversion effects.

This requires us to focus on the target user circle, specifically to achieve three points: identify the user - saturation attack - penetrate the circle

Break through the circle path

1) Find the right users: less is more, shift from pursuing coverage and exposure to focusing on coverage overlap rate

When choosing media, we often pay attention to the number of people covered and ignore the coverage overlap rate. The difference between the two is that the number of people covered is more concerned with the number of people affected by the media and the exposure, which is a kind of scatter-net user reach; while the coverage overlap rate is more concerned with the degree of overlap between the media and our target population, which is a user reach that pays more attention to effect and precision.

We can think about whether we often make the following mistakes when choosing media: when Papi Jiang became popular, we all rushed to cooperate with her, and we chose whoever was popular and had the most fans on WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin. The final result may be "critical but not commercially successful". On the surface, it covers more people and gains greater exposure, with good communication data such as comments and playbacks; but it has no impact on business growth, because many of the users reached are not our target users.

For example, if our target users are people working in Internet companies, we choose media accounts of joke tellers such as "Benboerba and Baboerben" and "Memories Special Little Vest", but the effect may be far less than "Xi'erqi Life Guide" and "Internet Things" which have fewer fans. Because "Xi'erqi Life Guide" and "Internet Matters" have a higher coverage overlap with our target population.

We can do a simple calculation. Suppose media A covers 1,000 people, but the actual target population is only 100 people, which means that the other 900 people have become invalid people. Although media B only covers 500 people, its target audience is 300 people. Of course, the final conversion effect will be better than that of media A.

In the era of mobile Internet, traffic has changed from mass to circle-based. If we only use the channel coverage methods of the mass media era, it will be difficult to influence our target audience, which will result in a huge waste of resources and costs.

Therefore, we need to choose circle media that has a high overlap rate with our users. No matter how creative and interesting our advertisements and messages are, if they are not seen by the right people, such information is wasted and has no value.

2) Saturation attack: The 7-times rule, creating an effective display effect through repetition

By selecting media and super nodes with a higher overlap rate, only user reach is achieved.

In this era of information explosion and fragmentation, everyone is faced with overwhelming advertising information every day. Even if the information reaches the target users through the media, it is very easy to be ignored and forgotten by the audience.

Advertising expert Alvin Akenbaum once proposed a concept called "effective display", that is, if the display of information is lower than a certain value, it will be difficult to establish a solid connection with the audience, which will result in ineffective information transmission.

This display value is called threshold in marketing, which means critical value. In order for information to be effectively transmitted, a certain number of times is required.

If the information does not reach this threshold, no matter how creative and interesting the information we convey is, it will be difficult to arouse the user's purchasing (download, use, etc.) behavior.

Different marketing ideas and different products have different thresholds. It is generally believed that the number 7 times is a reasonable number. This is the "7 times rule" of limited display.

The essence of the "Rule of 7" is to combat user forgetfulness through repetition, strengthen user cognition, increase trust and goodwill, bring stimulation and conditioned reflex, and thus increase conversion.

Specifically, there are two main ways to implement the "Rule of 7" through repetition.

1. Repetition of content: In specific creative works, the purpose of deepening the user's impression can be achieved by repeating the concepts that need to be conveyed. However, it is important to be careful not to repeat the content in a simple and crude way just to deepen the user's impression, which may cause user disgust. The principle of repetition of information and concepts in creativity is to be non-offensive, natural, and to influence users silently.
2. Media repetition: Media repetition does not mean long-term and multiple placements in the same media form, but creating a sense of repetition through a combination of different media; that is, information and concepts reach our target circle of users through different media. This requires us to find different circle nodes to influence users

Let’s take the example of promoting a new pair of running shoes:

Online method:

• Tools: such as Yuedongquan, Gudong, and Nike+;
• Event information: marathon registration, China Marathon Platform, Beijing Marathon and other public accounts and websites;
• Running knowledge: For example, you can access some accounts and platforms such as Ai Ranshen, Hupu Running, and Cool Running Guide, which provide running theory knowledge, skills, and running information.

Offline, we can reach them through media nodes such as gyms and sports parks.

Through these users’ media touchpoints, a sense of repetition effect is created.

However, it should be noted that it is not necessary to display the same creative form in all media, as long as a concept and information are conveyed. For example, taking running shoes as an example, if the main message conveyed is "shock-absorbing effect", the ways we can create a sense of repetition may include WeChat articles, offline hard advertising, viral videos, etc.

3) Penetrating circles: Finding super media nodes in the circle

These media nodes have different influences on the flow and transmission of information.

For example, WeChat, a platform with over 1 billion users, affects a completely different group of people than an app with only a few million users. As public accounts on the WeChat platform, every big V is a central node, but their influence in different circles is also different.

We call the media nodes in the information flow chain that have a strong influence in the circle super nodes.

In the era of decentralized mobile Internet, if you want to detonate a circle, the most important thing is to find the "super nodes" in the circle's information flow relationship chain, and use these super nodes to influence more people.

Media Models in the Mass Media Era and Mobile Internet Era

So how do you find the super nodes in the circle? What conditions do these super nodes need to meet?

• The super node itself is a center with strong influence among circle users. It can influence many other nodes in the circle and is followed and trusted by the nodes in the circle.
• Among the nodes influenced by the super node, the more centralized nodes there are, the greater the influence of this super node will be.

For example: If A is a super node, it can affect B, C, D, E... and many other fulcrums; among them, B and C are centralized nodes that can affect many other nodes. The more centralized nodes like B and C there are, the greater the influence of super node A will be.

Simply put, a super node is a node that can influence more nodes, and the affected nodes have a longer flow length.

Super Node

In addition to launching a saturation attack on the target circle, the most important thing is to find such a super node in the circle. For example, the reason why Xin Shixiang’s “Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” campaign exploded in the circle, in addition to the event itself, the most important thing is that Xin Shixiang’s official account is a super node with a fan circle of more than 2 million.

The public account "Mr. Zhang Says" that published the article "In Beijing, 20 million people are pretending to live" is a super node, and the first release account of the article "People in Xi'erqi with a monthly income of 50,000 teach you how to live like you earn 5,000 a month" "Xi'erqi Life Guide" is also a super node.

They all have tens or even millions of fans. If these articles were only posted to an ordinary node rather than a super node account when they first started to spread, it would be difficult to detonate the circle.

BMW MINI once used super nodes to promote its new products and achieved very good results. MINI released the "MINI YOURS Caribbean Blue Limited Edition" through the super node and the fashionable self-media account "Rebecca's Fantasy World". Within 4 minutes, all 100 MINIs priced at 285,000 were sold out; and after 50 minutes, all orders were paid, creating nearly 30 million in sales.

3. Three Principles of High-Conversion Landing Pages

There is also a situation where, even if the creative message is correct and the media selection is accurate, the user growth effect may not be good. The main reasons are either that our products do not address user pain points and needs, resulting in a poor product experience; or that there is a problem with the landing page of our activity, which affects the conversion effect.

Let’s focus on landing pages.

The landing page is the carrier page of creativity, and plays the role of receiving and converting traffic. The quality of the landing page directly determines the conversion of users brought by creativity and media channels, thereby affecting the final user growth.

Landing page is a broad concept. Any page that is accessed through creative guidance is a landing page. A landing page can be a website, APP, activity page,

What kind of landing page is a good landing page? What kind of landing page can improve conversion rate and promote user growth?

A high-conversion landing page should have three elements: content, expression, and experience.

Three elements of landing page

1. Content power: Content is the fundamental factor that affects user growth on landing pages;
2. Expressiveness: mainly stimulates user conversion through layout and visuals;
3. Experience: refers to the fact that the landing page should be both usable and easy to use in terms of user experience.

Below we will analyze how to create a landing page with user growth potential from these three aspects.

1. The content power of the landing page: Content is the fundamental factor in creative conversion

For a landing page to have a good conversion rate, the first thing is the content of the landing page itself, which is mainly reflected in several aspects.

1) Principle of consistent commitment

The most important thing for a landing page is to adhere to the principle of commitment consistency. The so-called commitment consistency means that there should be a strong correlation between the content conveyed by the advertising creativity and the content presented on the landing page.

The reason why users click on our advertising creativity and enter the landing page, or see our creativity and enter the landing page, means that the information conveyed by our creativity makes users want to download, use, buy, etc. If the landing page does not consistently connect, users are likely to leave.

2) Unity of focus and richness

A good landing page should also highlight the key points and provide clear information.

We often see some landing pages that have creative content to convey to users, but in order to show more content to users, in addition to the creative content, many other additional contents are added.

After the target users enter the landing page, they find that the information is complicated. The key information conveyed by the creative content may be placed in a relatively deep position or is difficult to find, so the target users' bounce rate will be very high.

There are generally two ways to solve this problem:

1. A landing page only delivers one content and message, so that the content conveyed by the landing page and the creative is completely consistent. This is more suitable for some single products, for example, I only buy one kind of cosmetics, one pair of shoes, a car, etc.
2. For some platform-based products, such as Ele.me, Taobao, and JD.com, the creativity of these products is sometimes to convey the information of the entire event. When entering the landing page, it will include many categories, promotional information, gameplay, etc. This requires that the content of our landing page should highlight the key points that the entire activity creativity wants to convey, and at the same time classify other content, such as by category, by hot sales, by scene, etc. The purpose is to allow users to better find the content and information they want, and truly achieve the unity of focus and richness.

3) Let users feel the value first, then they will take action

Creative content only guides users to the landing page. In order to improve the conversion rate, the landing page also needs to reflect the value we want to bring to the target users so that users will generate growth behavior.

For some products with low decision-making costs, such as free tools, fast-moving consumer goods, etc., which are easier to demonstrate their value, it is relatively easy to get users to take purchasing actions.

For products with high decision-making costs, such as cars and education, it is difficult to get users to place orders immediately. The most important thing for the landing page is to let users feel the value first. For example, free pilot courses in the education industry can eliminate target users' concerns about payment through good courses and good teachers' explanations. For example, in the case of automobile products, it is difficult for users to place an order just by watching a video on the landing page and reading some graphic descriptions. This requires collecting user information and guiding users to offline test drives through the introduction of functions such as the content of the landing page.

4) Secondary stimulation gives users an experience beyond their expectations

The fact that users can enter the landing page through the transfer shows that our previous creative ideas have stimulated users. If the landing page at this time not only fits the user's previous imagination, but also provides secondary stimulation, the conversion effect will be significantly improved, which means giving the user an experience that exceeds expectations.

Just like falling in love, if you are attracted by a girl's appearance and want to contact her, the girl's appearance is a stimulation. If you meet this girl through a date and find that she is not only good-looking but also has a lot of inner qualities, this is secondary stimulation.

The incentives here can be price discounts, authoritative endorsements, herd mentality, etc. The purpose is to dispel users' purchasing concerns.

Trolley case landing page

For example, the landing page of Xiaomi suitcases on JD.com, in addition to its good-looking design and low price, is also endorsed by a list of "Top 10 most beautiful and practical suitcases". Because other good brands of suitcases are also selected, the credibility of the endorsement is further increased.

This actually provides users with a secondary stimulus besides price, thereby increasing the probability of users purchasing.

2. The expressiveness of the landing page: inspiring user conversion through layout and visuals

Even if the content of a landing page is well-made, if its expressiveness is poor, it will affect user conversion. The expressiveness here mainly refers to the visual expressiveness of the landing page.

1) Design a clear layout to guide users to find what they want

Users are impatient, and chaotic landing pages will distract users and affect their search for information. Therefore, the design can help users make choices through visual classification, grouping, highlighting, weakening, color, etc., allowing users to quickly find what they want.

2) Visual appeal stimulates user growth behavior

In addition to clearly conveying core information to users, if the image design can bring sales power and appeal, it will effectively improve the conversion rate of the landing page.

3. Landing page experience: The landing page should be both usable and easy to use

In addition to good content and good visual expression, the landing page also needs to have a good user interaction experience. It mainly includes two aspects: "usability" and "ease of use", such as page loading speed, jump, smooth operation, and what you see is what you get.

summary

Finally, let’s summarize the main content of this article.

This article mainly analyzes the main reasons why our marketing ideas are ineffective and cannot drive user growth.

We analyzed the links from which marketing influences user growth, namely: information – medium – landing page.

1. Information

What you say is more important than how you say it, but we often focus on how to say it and ignore what to say? The most important thing in saying something is to know the "position" of the brand and product in the minds of users. Different positions determine different things to say.

2. Medium

After knowing what to say, the next step is to use what media channels to convey the information to users.

In the era of mobile Internet, if you want the media to have a higher conversion rate, you must focus on penetrating the circle. Specifically, you need to do three steps: find the right users - saturation attack - penetrate the circle.

• Find the right users: less is more, shift from pursuing coverage and exposure to focusing on coverage overlap rate;
• Saturation attack: The 7-times rule creates an effective display effect through repetition;
• Penetrate the circle: find the super media node of the circle.

3. Landing Page

A high-conversion landing page should have three elements: content, expression, and experience.

1. Content power: Content is the fundamental factor that affects user growth on landing pages;
2. Expressiveness: mainly stimulates user conversion through layout and visuals;
3. Experience: refers to the fact that the landing page should be both usable and easy to use in terms of user experience.

Note: The above content is compiled from the author’s book “User Growth Methodology”.

Author: Huang Yongpeng

Source: Huang Yongpeng