How to use soft articles to create word-of-mouth marketing?

Word-of-mouth marketing is a widely used promotion method for enterprises. By laying a solid foundation for products and services, and then actively promoting friendly interaction and communication with customers, the advantages of products and services and the characteristics of the brand can be fully disseminated, further expanding the brand's visibility and improving its reputation.

When we entered the Internet era, word-of-mouth marketing was initially more common on highly interactive online platforms such as forums, blogs, and BBS, and was often combined with event marketing, among which soft articles were also one of the more common forms. Later, with the rapid rise of question-and-answer and review content platforms such as Zhihu, Douban, and Baidu Knows, soft articles also had the opportunity to intervene in word-of-mouth marketing in a relatively more independent and advantageous manner. Therefore, at present, soft articles must be well combined with word-of-mouth marketing. Special attention should be paid to this type of interactive question-and-answer platform.

Generally speaking, word-of-mouth promotion on text-based online platforms is mainly carried out by asking and answering questions related to the industry, brand, product, market demand, etc., promoting the company's business information in the process of asking and answering, and at the same time establishing the brand image. The biggest advantage of word-of-mouth marketing through publishing soft articles on online question-and-answer platforms is that it can accurately promote to the target group at a lower cost and higher efficiency, because this platform has a very effective recommendation algorithm, relatively obvious circle divisions and communication, which makes it more target-oriented. On the other hand, the affiliation between the platform and the search engine enables soft articles to obtain high search rankings and weights with the help of keywords and SEO methods.

In general, using soft articles to create word-of-mouth marketing and question-and-answer platforms is one of the most efficient ways of online promotion. Companies also need to grasp every angle of platform selection, use, and release.

The first is the use of common word-of-mouth platforms.

Currently, the more commonly used question-and-answer platforms include Baidu Knows, Tianya Q&A, Sohu Q&A, Zhihu, etc. To use these platforms, you need to register an account, and some even require multiple accounts, such as Baidu Knows; after having an account, the brand needs to understand the platform's layout regulations, push mechanism, interactive form, background management, platform style, etc.; then raise questions related to the industry, enterprise, products, etc., or answer such questions and publish soft articles.

In addition to questions and answers, there are corresponding platforms for soft articles such as evaluations, such as the comment sections and seller shows of e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Dangdang, as well as more professional review websites targeting a certain field such as Douban and Dianping.com. In addition, on vertical content platforms such as Xiaohongshu, you can often see soft evaluation articles such as product reviews and grass-planting. On these websites and platforms, the content of the reviews covers a wide range. Questions and answers can be designed for a specific product, and reviews can be used to shape the product's word-of-mouth content.

The second step is to choose the appropriate platform based on the field, needs and characteristics.

When choosing a platform, you can either choose a few that are at the top of your own industry, or you can choose popular platforms with wide use and many users. "Casting a wide net" can increase exposure and communication efficiency. Another way is to choose targeted platforms based on the industry and target population, because there are many vertical and professional platforms, and many platforms have different user characteristics. For example, Xiaohongshu focuses on topics such as beauty, dressing, entertainment, and daily life, and is a platform mainly for female users, while Zhihu covers a very wide range of content, and its users are mainly young people with a higher level of education.

The third is the issue of registered account publishing.

The registration process for each platform is similar, so there is no need to say more about this. However, it should be noted that if a company prefers to use content itself as part of its product service, it needs to establish its reputation, professionalism or authority through content articles. It can directly name its company brand or product, such as Ding Xiang Doctor, which is very active on Zhihu and Weibo. In many cases, in order to pursue authenticity and reduce the sense of advertising and marketing, it is not appropriate to directly use the brand or product name. Using a more casual online name will be more convenient for operation.

The next step is to post questions. This step includes two key points: keyword setting and question setting.

When setting keywords, you should choose appropriate long-tail keywords to ask questions. For example, if you need to promote notebook products, then the keywords should not only include notebooks, but also more specific descriptions such as business notebooks, gaming notebooks, ultra-thin notebooks, 13-inch notebooks, etc. In this way, by screening different long-tail words among the keywords, you can subdivide them into a vertical field and accurately connect with people who have this demand and interest, so as to carry out more effective word-of-mouth publicity.

When setting a question, you must first carefully design and raise a question. This question should meet the needs and interests of the target group, as well as their search and reading habits. It should also be closely integrated with the theme you want to promote and be able to blend naturally with the promotional information. The content of the question also needs to be as true and credible as possible, and it is best to hope to obtain shared content to arouse more interaction. The question can be related to life and hot topics, and have strong practicality or universality. It is not only true but also attracts the attention of users with the same needs. Asking a good question can increase exposure and reduce the chance of being deleted. As the questions become more in-depth, further questions can be added and supplemented to continuously improve authenticity and credibility.

Finally, the design answer.

It is best not to use the same IP address for asking questions and answering them, as this will easily be discovered and reduce the authenticity, which is why people criticize it as a "small account", "marketing account" or "shill". For this, the operation team can use IP online proxy to improve the levels of different accounts, and answer questions when the account level is higher, which can avoid this problem. In addition, the answering cycle needs to be designed in a certain way. You cannot just ask questions and then answer and adopt the answers immediately. You can ask questions on the first day, answer them on the second day, and adopt questions or conduct other interactions on the third day.

But it should be noted that an account should not always ask the same or similar questions. Similarly, do not use the same account to frequently answer similar questions. Also, try not to include links in your answers. Instead, link to website pages related to the question.

In addition, after answering questions and publishing content on the platform, you should also monitor the questions in a timely manner, including other questions and answers, evaluations and interactions of the answers, etc., summarize the answers that are beneficial to marketing, and organize operations staff to post these answers to the top of the posts so that more people can see them.

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Source: PR Home