Understanding "promotion" and "marketing"

When you need to produce a feasible promotion plan for an unfamiliar promotion channel, such as WeChat Moments, in a short period of time, do you know what to do?

When it comes to promotion channels , some companies, especially large ones, will set up special marketing or distribution departments to be solely responsible for this part of the work. In this case, you may not need to complete the production of a promotion plan. However, as an operator with 1-4 years of experience, in order to get rid of the short board effect, develop horizontally better or even become a management level, you need to break out of the limitations of job content and have some knowledge of promotion and marketing .

As the beginning of the promotional marketing content, let us take a little time to understand what the so-called promotional marketing is.

The essence of promotional marketing

The essence of promotional marketing is actually to find our users from external channels, and then through intermediaries, such as landing pages or certain paragraphs of copy, eventually convert these users to our products or services and become our users. This is the overall logic.

In fact, in promotion and marketing, there are two core things we need to focus on. The first thing is to obtain traffic , which is a very important thing especially in the logic of the Internet; then the second thing is to convert traffic . We must first get the traffic, and these traffic are willing to pay attention to us. Then we have a page to receive the traffic, or some other service, and finally complete a conversion.

When it comes to acquiring traffic, the methods can be divided into two types: free acquisition and paid acquisition . Paid acquisition is relatively easy to understand. It means spending money on advertising. There are many types of advertising. Obtaining traffic for free includes but is not limited to posting a soft article somewhere, or hyping up an event on a forum, etc. These are all ways to obtain traffic for free.

As for conversion traffic, the final core outlet mainly depends on two things. The first is the number of users. The increase in users leads to the conversion of users into our registered users or downloading users. The second is more direct, especially for e-commerce products or stores. The direct guide must focus on the increase in sales.

Therefore, in the overall promotion and marketing process, we tend to pay close attention to two data.

Data oriented towards the number of users is called conversion rate . What does conversion rate mean? It can be understood as the total traffic we bring from the channel. For example, there are 1w UVs, and 500 of them are finally converted into our registered users. From 1w to 500, the conversion rate is 5%. The conversion rate means the efficiency of the promotion.

When we are sales-oriented, we will also look at a data, which is ROI . What is ROI? It is actually the abbreviation of three English words, called Return On Investment , which actually means return on investment.

For example, we opened a store on Taobao, and put a product on the store. Then we invested 1,000 yuan in advertising to promote this product. After the promotion, our sales volume was 2,000 yuan. In this case, the overall ROI is 1,000:2,000, which is a ROI of 1:2. We will also try our best to maximize the ROI in promotion and marketing. In this way, if we continue to invest money in a channel, we will be able to make more money. This is the fundamental logic of promotion and marketing.

Conceptual explanation of the three elements of promotion and marketing

After everyone has established a preliminary understanding of promotion and marketing, let’s look at another thing, which is the three elements of promotion and marketing.

The three elements include users, channels, and scenarios. Basically, when doing promotion and marketing work, we must clearly define these three things.

List the three elements of promotion and marketing

For example, some users of an online education institution are college students in their third and fourth years who want to enter the Internet industry. These users typically frequent channels such as Zhihu and campus BBS. We have basically defined these two channels where they will frequent.

The third element is the scenario. What scenarios related to our products do they appear in? For example, when you are browsing Zhihu, this is a scene. Similarly, he may have already made it clear that he wants to be a product manager or an operations manager, but he doesn’t know what operations are or how to do them. It’s just that later on, he’s not browsing Zhihu, but searching. This is another scenario.

Or maybe he is actually looking for something else related, for example, he is looking for the possible employment trend of college students this year. This is also a scenario. This includes whether he is looking for some learning materials out of the desire to improve himself, or he is about to find a job and the pressure of finding a job is particularly high. Based on these two situations, the scenes that appear on this channel are also different.

Why should we consider the scene? This is because the conversion motivations given to users must be different in different scenarios. In other words, the logic we use to persuade and influence others should be different. For example, if a college student is wandering around, and you want to make him interested in your product manager or product operation courses, you need to tell him stories and constantly arouse his curiosity to convert him and make him interested in your products or services.

But on the contrary, if he has made it clear that he wants to work in operations at BAT, but cannot get in, and does not have any practical experience, what should he do? There is already such a clear question here, so all you have to do is answer his question.

You can tell him that from being a college student with no experience to becoming an operations staff of BAT, what abilities or experiences are needed in the process, what you do not have and how to make up for it, and how this course can help you. Explaining this to him clearly is actually enough to convert him, so you will find that the conversion logic is different.

Therefore, when we carry out any promotion and marketing work, we must think clearly about these three elements. With these three elements, we can design conversion motivations for users based on these three elements, and finally convert users to products or services. These are the three basic elements when carrying out promotion and marketing work.

Basic working ideas of promotion and marketing

To expand on this, the basic work ideas of promotion and marketing can actually be divided into five steps:

The first step is to clearly define the users, then the potential marketing entry points, and our promotion methods to find out the potential channels.

The second step is that we need to evaluate the channel and familiarize ourselves with the channel's rules and promotion logic. For example, if we want to promote on Zhihu, we need to be familiar with Zhihu's promotion rules and logic. For example, does Zhihu support paid promotion? What is the presentation format of paid promotion information? If it does not support paid promotion and can only be done for free, then how can free content get the maximum display and exposure on the Zhihu site? We need to think about these things.

The third step is to build specific conversion scenarios. For example, how can an inexperienced college student enter Tencent to work as a qualified product operator? Assuming this is the case, this problem is actually a specific scenario. To build this scenario, you need to consider clearly what kind of demands and motivations the user has in such a specific scenario, what information we should provide to him to meet such needs, and how to organize this information to ultimately achieve a good conversion. This is called building a conversion scenario in a more professional way. In fact, it is to think clearly about the logic of persuading and influencing users in a specific scenario.

The fourth step is to implement the scheduling of materials. Materials may include pictures, short videos, copywriting, etc. These are the most common materials. This includes doing a promotion on a certain channel, what is the schedule like, and whether this schedule requires an appointment with others. For example, if I buy the forwarding resources of a WeChat public account, then we need to confirm the schedule, when to give the materials to others, etc.

The fifth step is data monitoring and optimization. A good promotion result can often be achieved after repeated optimization and polishing.

Problems that newcomers often encounter when they first come into contact with promotion and marketing

Everyone should have a relatively intuitive understanding of the basic tools, ideas and logic of promotional marketing. So, suppose I am a newcomer and I already know these logics. Now I want to start promoting a product. What kind of problems will I often encounter?

There are probably several common core issues:

1. Can’t find a suitable promotion channel

2. There are many channels to choose from, but I don’t know how to choose and judge

3. The payment channel has been specified, but the channel promotion rules are not familiar to the user and the user looks confused.

4. The promotion effect is not good, but I don’t know why and how to optimize it

5. Develop a promotion plan independently without any ideas

The above five problems are some of the problems that newcomers often encounter when carrying out promotion and marketing work. So in the following content, I will help you solve these problems one by one.

Author: Xu Xiongxiong

Source: Xu Xiongxiong