Is Douyin promotion definitely suitable for your product?

As one of the most popular short video platforms, many businesses are eyeing its traffic and want to promote their products on Douyin .

However, not all products are suitable for promotion in this way. The author of this article will analyze this issue from seven aspects, hoping it will be helpful to you.

1. Background

Background: A while ago, a friend who was engaged in the business of electric car charging stations talked to me and said he wanted to promote it on TikTok. Although it was just a casual remark, he may not really want to promote it on Douyin.

But I think that since Tik Tok is so popular now, is it suitable for a small company like his to promote its products?

Product background: This product mainly provides charging point services for electric car owners in Wangjing District, Beijing. It has been online for one year and has about 20,000 customers.

This article is written in this context.

The following ideas are written based on the 5w2h thinking method, which is also the most basic thinking method for product managers and the most useful thinking method.

2. Why do you need to attract new customers? Do you really need to attract new customers?

When faced with this question, many people will say, yes. The current environment is actually like this. How to attract new users for a product is a difficult problem for every initial product (except BAT).

But for our own products, do we really need to attract new customers?

2.1 The market share of the product determines whether to attract new customers

The first thing to consider is the coverage of your product in the entire user group. If the coverage in a certain area or user group is low or incomplete, especially when the user share is low compared to competing products, you need to conduct activities to attract new users.

For example, in first- and second-tier regions, Ele.me’s product users account for 47.4% of the total user base, which is close to half of the entire user base. This product must continue to attract new users.

Let’s go back to the products mentioned in the article as an example.

First of all, the number of customers for his product is around 20,000, and according to a survey, there are 200,000 electric car users in Beijing. Through simple calculations, we can roughly conclude that there are about 20,000 electric car users in Chaoyang District, and his products are only sold in Wangjing area, but there are 20,000 users. It can be seen that his products basically cover all electric car owners in the entire Wangjing area. Then in Wangjing District, there is no need to attract new users, because the users attracted are not the local user group, and there is no way to provide continuous services to the attracted user group.

If we want to keep attracting new customers, what should we do? This question leads to the next small question, which is the preparation work before attracting new customers.

2.2 Preparation before attracting new customers

If the user share of our product does not meet our expectations, we need to attract new users.

But before that, we need to identify the differences, advantages and disadvantages between our products and those of our competitors. We must narrow the gap with competitors as much as possible and maintain the advantages of our products. This is to avoid attracting new users and causing low retention rate due to product reasons.

For example, Mobike and ofo are familiar to everyone. Mobike has been acquired by Meituan. Although it has actually become history, it has won the war between OMG and YUM. There are many articles on the Internet explaining why ofo failed. Here I will use a simple user experience to illustrate the big picture.

Think back to the process when we want to use a shared bike. Mobike: Take out your phone, scan the code, kick up your kickstand, and ride away. ofo: take out your phone, scan the code, enter your password, click to confirm, kick the footrest, and ride away. From the simple code scan above, we can easily see that ofo’s operation has an additional step of bending down to enter the password (and 4 times!) and clicking to confirm before you can ride away. Relatively speaking, Mobike undoubtedly offers a better experience during this process, not to mention other issues such as the damage rate of the yellow bikes.

To sum up, when we are preparing to attract new customers, we must make our products good and excellent. At least the basic process must be better than that of competing products.

3. How to attract new customers

The ways to attract new customers include third-party traffic introduction, platform customer acquisition, user fission, and advertising.

Among them, the best short-term effects are third-party traffic import and advertising, and what needs to be done in the long term is the product’s own user fission.

In this article we are only talking about advertising and traffic generation, so we are only studying advertising and traffic generation.

4. How to attract traffic and promote on the delivery platform

This article takes the product launch on the Internet platform as an example. Traditional paper media, television, advertising space, etc. are not within the scope of this article.

4.1 Deep understanding of your own products

We say: Only by knowing yourself and your enemy can you fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat. Before launching, you must first have a deep understanding of your product. Including product types, product profit models, product user portraits, etc., I believe every product manager can understand these contents. Here, the most important thing is that we should pay attention to the user portrait of our product. Why we do this will be discussed below.

User profile of this product: Electric car users in Wangjing and Chaoyang areas.

4.2 In-depth understanding of the delivery platform

Here we only need to focus on the user portrait of the delivery platform. There are many analytical articles on Baidu about Douyin’s user portrait.

Tik Tok’s user base covers those born in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and its users’ interests range from music, dance, daily necessities, fulfillment, creativity, cars, etc.

It can be said that it is indeed possible to promote on Douyin, because Douyin can achieve precise promotion based on location, age group, and interests.

4.3 Why not do Tik Tok promotion

We mentioned Douyin’s precise promotion above, but is it suitable for our product?

Let’s first look at our user group, a very small user group: electric car owners. It is almost impossible for us to accurately capture this group on Douyin. We can only obtain car owners, prospective car owners, and car enthusiasts whose current location is in Chaoyang area. However, Douyin is unable to capture the important portrait of electric car owners that our product needs.

Whether it is brand promotion or early-stage traffic generation, a lot of advertising will inevitably be wasted because it is impossible to obtain accurate users. This is not very desirable for a company.

5. Choose the right product for your product

So what kind of promotion platform is suitable for our products?

Based on our product user portrait, electric car owners + location. We can think of navigation software.

First of all, navigation software is based on user habits, and it is easy to filter out users who frequently use car navigation as car owners.

Secondly, based on whether the user has navigated to a gas station (the number of users who have not navigated to a gas station is small and can be ignored), we filter out whether they are electric car owners.

In this way, we can basically accurately find the user group for our promotion.

6. New Customer Attraction Plan

This is just a simple introduction, and a final solution will be given after more detailed analysis and research.

6.1 Advertising

Based on the above analysis, we can place splash screen ads on navigation software such as Baidu and Amap, and offer certain coupon rewards.

6.2 Navigation and Traffic

When users search for charging stations near charging stations, we can run search ads.

Of course, we need to analyze how far the user is from our charging station before promoting. If it is too far, users may not come. If it is too close, we are already in the first position and there is no need to do it. Of course, the premise is that the search ads of the navigation software can be accurate to this extent.

7. Evaluation of new customer acquisition plans

The above is the process of attracting new users. After attracting new users, you need to judge the number of new users, next-day retention, weekly retention, and monthly retention.

8. Final Thoughts

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you haven't broken it down to a simple level.

As a product, the most important ability is to solve problems, and the key to solving problems is the ability to understand them.

Author: Sunny Day

Source: Sunny Day