In this article, we will talk about the basic ideas of making materials, and talk about some simple, basic but important parts.

Contents of this article:

1. How can optimizers develop the ability to judge and control materials?

2. Material measurement formula: from many to one, then from one to many

3. How to explore the creative blue ocean and learn from other industries to broaden your thinking

How can optimizers develop the ability to judge and control materials?

The model of the company I work for is: optimizers will participate in the materials and are mainly responsible for proposing directions.

The optimizer will not directly tell the material team "I have a certain product, and ask you to provide me with a certain amount of material this week". Instead, he will tell the material team "what kind of material do I want, and what the general direction is". Sometimes he will also find references for the material team, so the optimizer will be more involved.

How can the optimizer come up with a direction? Where does the direction come from?

It is mainly divided into three parts.

The first part is to understand the product and analyze its selling points;

The second part comes from material communication . Avoid the points that must not be passed by advertisers and media reviewers, and don’t do it;

The third part comes from the data . Once a piece of material comes out, no one knows what the effect will be. You have made a judgment after looking at it, and I have made a judgment as well, but our judgments may not be accurate. So what is accurate? The data is accurate. Therefore, data feedback is very important in the process of making materials. We must constantly modify the direction of the materials based on data feedback.

Next, we will talk about the key points of each operation in detail. If you can achieve these points, you will be at least an above-average optimizer in terms of materials.

1. Understand the product

How do you know?

The method is very simple in theory. Those who sell goods need to take a look at the goods first, those who promote apps need to download the apps, search for relevant articles on the Internet, and it would be best if they can talk to users to see what they think.

None of them are difficult, the difficult part is to do it in a proper way. My personal observation is that some third-party optimizers, because they have to make many products on a daily basis, may not even experience the products themselves, and they just think about the general benefits of the products and start investing.

But it is indeed necessary to do so, which is the basis for promoting a product.

If you don’t go through these steps, your creative ideas will largely be copied from others, but if you follow these steps and think about them yourself, you may think of some material points that are overlooked by everyone and get the first wave of volume.

Is it important to understand other people’s ideas?

Of course it is important. This can reduce the testing costs in the initial stage of launch. You can directly know what kind of materials can run now and make similar ones. But this is not a long-term solution. Thinking of materials by yourself is a basic ability of an optimizer.

2. Communication materials

This is also a simple thing but always easy to make mistakes. Sometimes advertisers will have clear requirements on the materials: certain words cannot appear, for example, the social industry often has such requirements. At this time, if you use banned words again and again in your materials, advertisers will think that this agency is unprofessional and not serious. These things should indeed be avoided within the agency.

How to avoid it?

A simple way is to print out what the advertiser has explicitly requested and stick it on the wall. Then take a look at it every time you make material. This will reduce the probability of errors.

Media review is also a hurdle in the advertising process.

It is very troublesome to modify the material if it fails the review. Although the media sometimes approves a material and sometimes rejects it, which gives optimizers unlimited room for imagination, there are still some things that are very sad. Let's just forget about them and save ourselves the trouble.

How can you know what the audit requirements are?

The media will have relevant documents in the learning center, so just read them often.

Whether it meets the audit requirements needs to be filtered by the optimizer first. Only when the material is reviewed and there is no problem can it be put on the market without any problems.

3. Analyze the data

Whatever the data says is good, then it is good; whatever the data says is bad, then it is bad.

Through data feedback, we can make more similar ones with good materials and less with bad ones. This is the significance of analyzing data. Let the data tell us what users like and what works well, rather than our own judgment.

Speaking of my own judgment, there is another point I want to emphasize: once something passes through a person's hands, that person will definitely have some control over the matter. The optimizer is the last link in the chain before the materials are delivered to the account, and he or she must have his or her own judgment on the materials. This is normal. But please note that people are subjective and everyone's judgment is limited. Don't pass up those materials that you completely despise. You should also give them a try. Maybe they can work.

For example, when this material was first made, I really didn’t think much of it. I thought it was just a piece of paper, what could it do? But after it was projected, the effect was very good. I was very surprised. Why was my judgment wrong? So I quickly adjusted my "algorithm" and figured out why it was good - you see, the actor's expressiveness is quite good and very cute; the point of salary increase is also more attractive; this form of holding paper may be more popular among users (this material is relatively old, from 2018, and this form of holding paper was really popular for a while, and it was used a lot in both content and advertising. Now you can occasionally see this kind of material).

If I didn’t use this material at that time, I would have lost an opportunity to sell a lot of volume. This was the most popular material when I was working for this client. Every data feedback of the material is a learning opportunity for the optimizer to adjust his or her perception of the material. The more you practice, the more accurate your judgment will become.

In addition to these three basic modules, are there any other ways to improve the optimizer's sense of materials?

Yes, it’s also a stupid way: watch a lot of movies.

If you want to make good materials, you must first know what good materials look like, right?

Even when you don't understand information flow at all, you still have to know the style of the information flow material first, right? Therefore, reading a lot of materials is a basic skill for an optimizer. When new people come to our team, we ask them to watch 100 sets of materials a day. They don’t have to worry about anything in the first three days, just watch them. By using this method of flooding the website with materials, optimizers can have an idea of ​​the information flow materials in the short term, so that the materials produced in the future will not be too amateurish.

Where can I watch that material?

One is a material monitoring website like App Growing, which has a large amount of material; the media will also provide some materials for everyone to see. Toutiao has an App called Huge Creative, and other media also have such sections.

There are also advertisements that we usually see on our mobile phones. Users generally don’t want to see ads, but we as advertisers are quite happy to see ads because we want to see what materials others are investing in.

A typical application is: when you are making a new product, you don’t know what to invest in, and you can look at it here to get a sense of the current investment direction.

For example, I have never invested in Xianyu, and I had no idea what to invest in at the beginning. After I searched here and looked at the materials that appeared, I had a general idea. For example, there are very cheap things like 1 cent or 1 dollar, so cheap is a point; and the photos of refrigerators, air conditioners, and televisions are obviously not taken by professionals, but just look like ordinary users took them casually and put them up for sale on Xianyu, which makes them look more real and like they are getting a bargain. So "real and second-hand" is also a point. This way you can roughly know what to invest in.

Of course, the limitation of such a platform is that "it is difficult to know whether it is a good material or a bad material. There is no way to do this because we cannot directly see the cost and consumption of the material, so the judgment of the effect is not accurate. So we mainly use it to broaden our thinking and find the general direction of delivery. We cannot assume that all the materials on it are good materials.

I would also like to emphasize that when reading materials, it is best to analyze and organize them, so that your thinking will be deeper. Even if you just post it on your circle of friends or discuss it with someone, it will deepen your impression.

As media becomes more and more intelligent, the ability to perceive and judge materials should be the core quality of an optimizer. I have also met some very excellent optimizers, and many of the scripts for running large-volume materials are written by themselves. Isn’t it amazing!

You may think that script writing is a highly professional thing and you cannot write it yourself, but do you remember what we said is the main role of the optimizer in material production? Propose the direction, right? So you can write a simple script, don't pay attention to the format, just write the general content.

This does not mean that the scripts written by the material team are bad. It is because you are making the product yourself and are closest to the data. These data will prompt us to think about the product and the material, and thus cultivate a sense of the material - "which direction may be able to run", and writing the script yourself can express this feeling most completely.

I think this ability to perceive materials is the most valuable aspect of an optimizer.

It’s not that difficult. If you haven’t written one before, give it a try! (I like to write, I am not good at it, but I have not given up struggling)

The formula for measuring materials: from many to one, and then from one to many

In the first part, we mainly talked about how optimizers can improve their ability to judge materials.

For a material, direction should be the most important.

So how do we measure the direction of the material?

I have summed up a formula, which is " from many to one, and then from one to many ". I have been talking about this mantra for many years and now I want to share it with you.

What does “from many to one” mean?

When you receive a new product, you should try to find as many material directions as possible, list all the material directions you can think of, and then make at least one or two materials in each direction to see which direction of the material performs best. This is "from many to one", from many directions to one direction.

So what does “from one to many” mean?

After we test out a hit material, what we want most is to test out more high-volume materials. At this time, splitting the elements of this popular material, keeping some elements unchanged and deforming other elements is the best way to continuously generate high-volume materials. This is “from one to many”, from one popular material to making multiple materials.

This is a bit abstract, so let’s take a look at an example of a novel product. Follow the mnemonic "from many to one, and then from one to many" to simulate the process of material testing (this case is based on my assumptions after reading a lot of materials and combining them with my experience in making novel products. The materials are not made by me)

First of all, you need to think more about the direction of the material.

First write four keywords, namely "massive, novels, free, and read".

"Massive" is an attraction, meaning there are a lot of novels, and there will be something you want to read;

"Novels" themselves have some appeal to users. Reading novels and playing online games are quite interesting.

“Free” is definitely a point. No matter whether this thing is useful or not, it’s free and everyone is happy about it.

The last point is “look”. How to express "seeing" will also have some differences in the form of material expression. Only the content of the novel can appear, or people can appear. People can appear by just sliding a finger, or they can appear as real people, so it can also be a variable of the material.

When making materials, these points will be combined, and the resulting style will be roughly like this.

The first one indicates that there are many novels, the second one uses a cartoon dialogue to indicate that the novel content is interesting; the third one is real-life material made like a movie; the fourth one is also a cartoon dialogue, but made into a video; the fifth one is prominently free.

After testing so many directions, I found that one material was running. This is it.

I was really shocked when I saw this material. It turned out that such a material could be so popular. The picture was not moved at all. It was just a picture with a song!

Later I thought that this copy was very well written, so I searched it online and found that it was a promotional copy for a novel written by the original author. It was very attractive, with a bit of determination and hinting that the male protagonist will regret it and that there will be more plots later. The song is also good, an ancient love song, and the artistic conception matches the copy well. The picture is also very beautiful, also in ancient style.

Whatever the reason, the material came out. “From many to one” has been achieved. What to do next?

Now that you have a running volume material, the next step is to "go from one to many", focus on measuring this type, split its elements, and then control the variables, allowing some elements to move and others not to move. The main elements can be considered as "copywriting, songs, background pictures, and video presentation". See how they transform.

Change the song and background picture first. This is a new material.

How else can it change? Of course you can continue to change songs, there are many songs to change...

You can also use a different video format, such as the one below. This form of expression was beyond my expectations, and it became quite large. I think if it were me, I probably wouldn't be able to think of it.

Let’s look at another case.

This is a material I invested in early on. It is a little girl with a headgear on her, and three expressions: "unhappy, thinking, and happy." I didn’t have particularly high expectations at the beginning, so I invested normally, and unexpectedly found that the results were very good.

After it became popular, I told the designer, "This material is really effective, please make a few more similar ones," and he made it like this for me.

I changed the headgear, then the model, then the expression, and produced a few more sets of materials, and they all managed to get some volume.

This type of material was later used in many loan products. This is the original design that I worked on, haha.

"From many to one, and then from one to many" is a very useful formula I have summed up in the direction of measuring materials. I hope everyone can remember it.

In addition, there is one more point I would like to mention: after you have tested a popular material, it is recommended that you try it on various platforms.

Some people say that a high-volume material may work on one platform but may not work on other platforms. For example, something that works on Douyin may not work on Kuaishou. However, if it can work on one platform, it means it still has its merits, so it is worth trying on other media platforms. I have seen a lot of high-volume materials that are popular on all platforms.

How to explore the creative blue ocean and learn from other industries to expand ideas

In the advertising creative industry, many things are new combinations of old elements, so it is very important to learn from other people's experience. When it comes to "reference", people generally focus on materials from the same industry, which is of course fine; but there is also a blue ocean: materials from other industries.

There will definitely be people who think that he is in a different industry from mine, so why should I learn from him?

Just now I saw a friend asked, "Can the experiences you mentioned be used in e-commerce?" This is universal. Cultivating a sense of material and "from many to one, and then from one to many" are the basic ideas for information flow, which are applicable to all industries and platforms.

Let’s talk specifically about how to learn from others.

First of all, a material can be divided into two parts: content and form.

The content is to introduce the product and promote what it sells.

Form can be roughly summarized as something other than content. For example, the examples mentioned above: a girl holding paper, a girl wearing a headgear with words written on the side, and the novel material with a still picture and music playing, are all forms of expression of the material.

It is difficult to learn from the content. A person selling melons cannot be said to be selling peaches, but a lot can be done in terms of form. Let me share how I find material ideas from materials in other industries.

First of all, let’s take a look at the materials for this second category of e-commerce.

When I saw this material for the first time, I was shocked. I didn’t expect that the information flow could be so deeply integrated into life. This is footage shot directly at a rural market, and the tone of voice is “My uncle (second tone)…”, it’s very, very real. We really can’t capture this kind of energy in the office.

So what can we learn from this?

If you are doing e-commerce, you can of course take fruits, knife sharpeners, clothes, etc. to the market to sell and also make videos;

So what can we learn from other industries, such as social networking?

When doing social networking, it is very important to choose models and shooting scenes. Generally, the shooting is done in places close to the company, such as offices, cafes, and parks. There are also rural scenes, but most of them are self-monologue types, and the style is more literary;

This video inspired me to shoot some more life scenes. Instead of always shooting a person who can’t carry things anymore and wants to find a partner, or mops the floor at home and then says she wants to find a partner, I can also shoot scenes like her chatting with neighbors, cooking at home, and working in the fields. This will be more immersive.

Let’s look at another case.

This is free material for expressing novels, which combines people and mobile phone screens together. Those that I have seen seem very common, while those that I have not seen seem quite fresh. I have an observation that is not very accurate (my ability is limited, I just see it on a daily basis, and I haven't looked at the overall industry data): the time when this method of synthesizing people into mobile phone screens was widely used in different industries is different.

In the 17 years of the gaming industry, we can see such materials, using green screen to shoot people, and then cut out and synthesize them into the game screen, which creates a fresh feeling of real people and game screens colliding together;

Later, this form became really popular in the loan industry. I saw more than 5 accounts of different products that exploded because of this kind of material. There was an account that used to spend a few thousand a day, but used this material to spend 500,000 a day. This was around the end of 2018.

Similar to this one, the main content of the video is "a little man jumps on the screen, telling you the original account balance, the balance after swiping your hand, and then saying come to a certain place to borrow money."

Have you seen it?

The novel industry received huge investments in 2019, and this format also became popular in the industry.

What about other industries?

Is it used a lot in your industry? If not, see if you can use it. Maybe it will become popular.

4. Summary

To sum up, today I talked about three parts. The first part is that as media becomes more and more intelligent, there may be no difference between a novice and a mature optimizer in the background settings, both of which are targeted.

What makes the difference is the material. So I think the optimizer’s ability in materials will become more and more important as time goes by.

In terms of improving material capabilities, we first encourage optimizers to participate in material production, at least to provide direction. Of course, the direction cannot be proposed randomly. The basic skills such as analyzing products, understanding audit rules, and analyzing data must be mastered. You must also read a lot of films, immerse yourself in the materials, and improve your perception of the materials.

The second part is that when measuring the direction of the material, you can follow a formula, called "from many to one, and then from one to many", which can prevent you from being blind when measuring the material. Although it is not so logical in actual work - even if the direction of the material is correct and most of the produced materials are not in high quantity, in the end it is likely that no direction will be given up and they will be done one by one. But if you list all the material directions, and then make similar ones based on the running volume materials, you will understand better what you are measuring when making the materials, instead of thinking that you are a machine that follows the plan.

The third part is to use several examples to let everyone feel that materials from other industries can also provide us with ideas. Things that are overused in other industries may be rarely used in your industry, and you can get the first wave of volume. I work as a third-party developer and have come into contact with many industries. I often apply the experiences of various industries universally, but I find that many optimizers do not do so, especially those on the first party, so I want to talk about this specifically.

The above is the experience sharing of this time.

Author: Aunt Ning

Source: Sanlitun Information Flow (sanlitunxinxiliu)