How to market effectively in the second half of 2019?

Entering 2019, marketing seems to be facing its biggest crisis in recent years. For brands, insufficient economic momentum has led to a decline in expected revenue and a significant reduction in marketing budgets. For media and agents, the reduction in brand marketing budgets has directly affected their own income. In short, both Party A and Party B are having a harder and harder time.

CTR data shows that China's overall advertising market declined by 11.2% in the first quarter of 2019, with traditional media declining even more severely, with a year-on-year drop of 16.2%. Specifically, except for elevator and cinema media, which achieved a slight year-on-year increase, other media placements all declined. Even Internet advertising, which represents the future trend of advertising placement, declined by 5.6%. This is really not a cause for celebration.

The updates of one of my friend on WeChat Moments may be quite representative. He works for an automotive vertical media. His work platform is media, serving the automotive industry. In Q1 2019, he ranked in the bottom two in the industry in terms of profit growth rate.

Marketers today are becoming more and more anxious. Fragmentation is becoming more and more serious. Platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili have quickly occupied the center position. Traditional advertising and even Weibo and WeChat have been hit hard, and marketers are becoming more and more at a loss. At the same time , various new concepts and new ways of playing such as growth hacking, social fission, private domain traffic, Vlog, etc. are emerging in an endless stream. If you are not careful, you may be left behind by your peers.

2019 is already halfway through. Faced with this marketing environment, how should we respond in the second half of the year? The following are marketing methods that I believe will remain effective in the future.

1. Carpet bombing of the entire scene

Today, there is no longer a monopoly media like CCTV before 19:00 that can make a brand popular overnight. The biggest problem facing communication is the fragmentation of media and information.

The fundamental reason why brands succeed by advertising on CCTV is that they attract the attention of the largest group of people at a fixed time, thereby quickly gaining popularity. In the fragmented era, it is impossible to rely on a monopolistic media (and there is no such media) to gather the attention of a large group of people, so brands need to use a combination of numerous media to achieve a similar effect as CCTV.

Imagine that a person wakes up in the morning and checks his Moments and sees an advertisement for Brand A. He then sees an advertisement for Brand A in the elevator again while taking the elevator. He also hears an advertisement for Brand A on the radio while driving to work. He sees an advertisement for Brand A on the subway while taking the subway. He sees an advertisement for Brand A in the news feed while checking the news… until he is exposed to Brand A’s advertisements many times throughout the day. This would achieve a goal similar to that of CCTV advertisements. Such advertisements cover all scenarios of users, and users will definitely be covered multiple times in these scenarios. It's like an indiscriminate carpet bombing. No matter which hole you hide in, you will be bombed someday.

However, a brand’s budget cannot be large enough to cover all media indiscriminately. At this time, it is necessary to target target users and make relatively precise delivery, trying to achieve accurate coverage in the target users’ scenario routes. Nowadays, most users' attention is on their mobile phones. Fragmentation makes the media more dispersed, but the good thing is that big data can be accurately delivered based on target users. For a single user, big data accurate delivery only needs to form coverage relative to him. This brings us to the second type of marketing.

2. Algorithm-based precision marketing

If full-scenario carpet bombing is fighting violence with violence, then algorithmic recommendations are catering to the needs of the target. As I said in "How to Implement Marketing Integration - The Essential Path for Marketers' Transformation", with the geometric growth of algorithms and big data accuracy, the communication industry has undoubtedly ushered in a new transformation. In the future, everyone will no longer receive the same information, products, and advertisements. Instead, they will receive thousands of customized information, products, and advertisements based on their income, interests, etc. There are two examples that exemplify this change.

In the election race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Facebook demonstrated the concept of playing to the preferences of the people. In the Facebook news feed, most people who support Hillary Clinton received information that she was in the upper hand and continued to lead, and received no news about Trump at all. When the election results were announced and Trump won, those who supported Hillary were still kept in the dark. They are trapped in their own information cocoons and are fed precise information.

In the film Brexit: The Unfair Battle, Dominic Cummings, the chief campaigner for Brexit, also adopted this strategy. In terms of advertising strategy for Brexit, Kaminsky did not, as in traditional elections, make large purchases of traditional media whose marketing effects are difficult to measure. Instead, he sought out a big data mining company, Aggregate Think Tank. The company could run a series of matching ads based on users' behavior on social networks, primarily Facebook, and gradually guide them to become staunch Brexit supporters.

3. Integration of communication, sales and service

In an era without the Internet, advertising exposure and conversion effects could not be tracked directly. Therefore, the saying "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half" is widely circulated and deeply rooted in people's hearts.

One of the hot words this year is “bringing goods” , and this word is increasingly used to describe celebrities who used to be the main stars of brand advertisements. This represents a trend where marketing is increasingly directly linked to sales conversions.

In this environment, compared with pure advertising, those marketing forms with visible results will have more advantages . Taobao advertising + Taobao stores, Moments advertising + official account system, Douyin + small stores and other marketing platforms with full-link conversion paths will gradually occupy a dominant position.

Taobao Second Floor is such a case. It originated from the Taobao platform and can monitor the entire link path and effects. It can be continuously optimized to achieve efficient conversion. At the same time, Taobao store customer service can directly serve customers and realize the integration of marketing, sales, and services.

4. Lean Startup - Growth Hacking

Lean entrepreneurship is a hot topic that has emerged in recent years. Its core is to establish a relatively scientific system for entrepreneurs to guide entrepreneurship, make entrepreneurship traceable, and minimize entrepreneurial risks. Its core thinking is the minimum viable product (MVP), feedback, and iteration.

On this basis, Sean Ellis proposed the concept of growth hacker, the core of which is to use products, data, technology, marketing and other means to promote the growth of products or sales in a relatively scientific and visibly manner. Social fission can be regarded as a tactic of growth hacker. In recent years, this trick has been fully utilized by Internet companies. Its core is to be profit-driven and use users' social relationships to achieve product dissemination and sales promotion.

The Lean Startup-Growth Hacker System focuses on the growth issues of the enterprise, which is different from the previous method of investing heavily to gain brand exposure and gradually gaining sales. This system achieves visible growth in corporate business through a relatively scientific growth approach. For Internet companies, the way to achieve enterprise and business growth through lean entrepreneurship and hacker growth system is much more scientific, predictable and efficient than extensive advertising and marketing systems . This is also the reason why traditional marketers are most anxious.

5. IP creation

In today's rapidly changing marketing methods, what remains stable? It is still excellent content. Marketing will never suffer losses if it returns to branding and content creation, which are skills that will never go out of style. Even Yang Fei, the CMO of Luckin Coffee, who is the most advocate of social fission, believes that the most stable traffic pool is still the brand.

For enterprises, in today's world where celebrity personalities are unstable, creating a successful IP is more valuable than celebrity endorsements. The Haier Brothers, who are already in their 20s, still contribute huge value to the Haier brand today.

Disney can be said to be the company that is best at creating IP. In 2013, "Frozen" alone earned $1.27 billion at the box office, more than 7 million DVDs, more than 2 million soundtracks, as well as the top 10 game rankings and countless dolls priced from tens to hundreds of dollars. Driven by "Frozen", Disney's profits increased by more than 20% year-on-year for three consecutive fiscal quarters after Thanksgiving in 2013.

Creating IP is not an easy task, but it is indeed an asset that can bring long-term value to the brand.

The above are the marketing methods that I think will be more effective in the next period of time. This article can also be read in conjunction with my previous article "How to achieve marketing integration - the essential path for marketers to transform."

2019 is already halfway through, and we feel like the marketing industry has changed more in the past six months than in the past few years. I asked my friends in the same industry: The marketing industry is becoming more and more anxious in 2019, and marketers are also becoming more and more anxious. Why? He said: The industry is shrinking and talent is being diverted, and 2020 will be even worse. Judging from the trend of marketing, this is likely to come true. Only by being well prepared can we meet the challenge.

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Author: Xunkong

Source: Xunkong Revelation