The two essences of marketing promotion: content and channels!

I have been engaged in marketing promotion for so many years. Every year, my understanding of product promotion becomes deeper than the previous year. I also feel that marketing promotion is essentially a very simple thing. It is in line with the saying: The way of the Tao is simple, but knowing is easy and doing is difficult. The more difficult things are to do, the simpler they are, and the simpler things are, the harder they are to do. As for marketing promotion, my current understanding is that it is enough to do the following two things well: content and channels .

Before writing this article, I searched online about the essence of marketing promotion, and immediately saw: 4P, 4R, 4C, 4I and positioning theory. Each theory is summarized after years of testing in the battlefield. Seeing this, I can't help but admire the modern people's ability to create words. Why does a simple thing have to be made so complicated? When I was doing community operations a few days ago, I heard this statement, and I roughly understood why marketing promotions have to be packaged so complicatedly.

It all comes down to money. In the process of user monetization, there is a way to confuse users. When users are confused, it is easiest to close a deal. The transaction scenarios of quick recruitment companies and offline large classes are the perfect interpretation of the above routine. Then the purpose of the high-sounding packaging of marketing promotion theories is naturally to cheat the sponsors’ money. If you don’t even have the ability to fool the sponsors, how can you teach the sponsors to fool users?

I have worked in many companies and witnessed them grow or decline. I know that it is impossible for a company to grow healthily by relying solely on marketing, products, or services. A healthy growing company is the result of the normal operation of a system composed of multiple departments. It cannot be achieved by a certain department, such as the marketing and promotion department, doing a good job. Those marketing and promotion companies that do "nail soup" can only do things like "blaming others for their own success". Alas.

Let's put it this way, even if we know 4P, 4R, 4C, 4I, and positioning theories by heart, when facing users, as long as we throw out the 4P theory, users will be foolish enough to buy it. Do you think it's possible? Isn't it too magical realism? Come on, let's sing together: Medicine, medicine, medicine, check, noisy, a set of 4P positioning, users are paying for it and shouting.

I have never seen anyone who can recite marketing theories fluently and sell products well. On the contrary, there are many marketing and promotion experts in life who have never talked about any theories, but the copywriting they write and the activities they organize are very effective.

Next, I will use some down-to-earth methods to explain to you the two essences of marketing promotion: content and channels .

content

Common forms of content are text, pictures, videos, and audio . Marketing promotion is actually about creating content that can attract users and delivering it to appropriate channels . The closed loop of marketing promotion is completed. Does it sound simple? Yes, promotion is actually that simple.

But it is not easy to create content that touches people's hearts. There are 360 ​​professions in life, and there are hundreds of millions of product types on Alibaba. Even if they are the same type of products, the content produced will be different if they face different user groups. Take milk as an example. The user groups of milk include children, students, adults, and the elderly, and different users have different needs. Children focus on healthy growth, students focus on brain benefits, adults focus on convenience, and the elderly focus on digestion. The content has different focuses for different users.

To break it down further, milk for the elderly is divided into three grades: high, medium and low. The high-end ones emphasize the quality of the milk, the mid-range ones emphasize the cost-effectiveness, and the low-end ones are perfect. Just offer a buy-one-get-one-free promotion, which is much more effective than those useless ones. Because our marketing promotion has only one purpose: to sell goods. If the vague copywriting cannot bring goods as well as “Mom, I want to eat roasted yam”, then what is the point of writing high-sounding copywriting? I heard that you can win a prize, but let me ask you, can the trophy be used as salary?

Short videos are very popular for selling products now. After watching a 15-second video, users will place an order to buy the product, which really tests the content production ability. A few days ago, I saw a screen recording video with three pictures, which sold millions of goods. Recently, I finally understood why the effect was so good. First of all, the product has a wide audience and is an acne-removing product. The second and third photos are clean amateur selfies. Perhaps the author did not realize at the time that it was the third photo that would impress users.

There is one key point when creating content: it is better to talk about the future than the present. What does it mean? Continuing with the example of milk, we can say that our milk is produced at 42 degrees north latitude, a world-recognized high-quality dairy area, and that the cows grew up listening to Beethoven's music, etc. We say these things to instill in consumers the idea that our products are of great quality.

This is about the present, let’s see how it talks about the future.

Our milk can help you sleep better at night. Drinking a glass every day will help you have fewer wrinkles than your peers because the milk contains a lot of milk, which can whiten and hydrate your skin. Drink our milk for a year and you will stay one year younger. We are just asking you if you want to drink it. (The above are all fictitious, please do not take them seriously). What I want to express is that you should talk about what benefits the product can bring to users. Don’t talk at length about the benefits of the product itself. Users don’t care about this. Users only care about themselves.

The short video above sold millions of products. In fact, the third photo hints to users that using this to remove acne can achieve the same effect as the third photo in the future. It is very interesting that Chinese culture is profound and full of innuendos. Some things do not need to be said and users will naturally understand them. This gives content creation unlimited space for imagination. Creating content is like creating art. It is the result of talent plus subsequent training. It seems that everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well.

channel

The channel is a pit. The difficulty in our marketing promotion lies in creating good content and delivering it to the right channels. Both are indispensable. Just like two gears, no matter how perfect each one is, if they don't fit together, the result will still be a big goose egg.

How big is the channel pit? I think everyone still remembers the story of a liar who cheated another liar that happened a while ago. If such a shrewd scammer was deceived, you can see how cunning the channels are.

It’s still the same problem. There are many types of products, and different types require different copywriting content. Similarly, different types are suitable for different channels.

Taking milk and hot pot restaurants as an example, the promotional content is all text and pictures. Assuming that they are all put on the Xiaohongshu channel, then the next link of traffic diversion will begin to diverge. Milk can be bought online or in supermarkets, and traffic can be directed to online shopping malls to facilitate orders, but Xiaohongshu cannot be linked to Taobao stores. Either you open a store on Xiaohongshu yourself, or type the product name and let users search for it themselves.

For physical stores, the most important thing for promotion is to leave the store name and address. I have seen many account owners who spontaneously recommend stores. They post pictures without leaving the address, and other people ask in the comments: Where is this store? What's the name of this shop? Isn’t it smart to meet a savvy promotion expert like me who will leave the name of the store I promote under other people’s tweets?

Xiaohongshu is just one of thousands of channels, and different channels correspond to different users. The popular channels such as Douyin and Kuaishou that we are familiar with are used by everyone, and the effect will become weaker and weaker. On the contrary, the vertical maternal and child, social, and sharing apps, although not large in scale, have incredibly high conversion rates and are relatively low in price. Spending 500,000 yuan to invest in a big Douyin influencer will not be as effective as spending 50,000 yuan to invest in 100 small KOCs in vertical channels. Why do people still prefer the first option even though they know the second option is better? It saves trouble! If the boss sees this, he will probably feel like a thousand arrows piercing his heart.

at last

If you want to master content and channels, it is definitely not something you can learn overnight. It takes time and effort to develop a sense of the Internet and understand the temperament of the channels. I have been doing promotion for five or six years, but I feel that I have not yet figured out the real tricks of marketing promotion. Those who have no practical experience at all, just come up and do a few tricks and ask you to pay money, there is no more appropriate adjective than the word "scam".

Author: Tiger

Source: Tiger Talk Operations