Brand Marketing: How to create advertisements that users like?

Many students who have just joined our company, after several internal training sessions, feel that being an optimizer is a mechanical and repetitive job: to put it bluntly, it means constantly making plans and then waiting for one of them to come out. Over time, what some comments say will become "just doing it to get by".

Furthermore, since there are no professional courses for the profession of advertising optimizer in universities, there are almost no strict evaluation standards for interviews and employment. With the continuous development of Internet advertising, the demand for optimizer positions is increasing, which has led to a low threshold for entry into the industry; this has also led to the "influx of optimizers of varying quality" as mentioned in the comments.

Speaking from my own experience, I took too many detours and experienced too much confusion in the early stages of my career. In the first two years after I joined the company, no one could systematically tell me what advertising was and how to do it well . Most of the knowledge I was taught consisted of scattered dots. Most of the time I could only rely on myself to try and make mistakes and then constantly summarize. It took me quite a long time to slowly understand some of the feelings and methods of advertising. During that time, as a newcomer, I tried my best but I did not have the necessary thinking, methods and experience. Every time I see my poor account performance, I feel like I’d rather die than live. I still feel scared when I think about it now…

Push away the clouds to see the sun, wait for the clouds to clear and the moon to appear. Although that period was painful, I still gritted my teeth and persevered. The launch feels more like driving a car in the winter; it starts slowly, but once it gets going, it becomes much smoother. In the past 22 months, I have gradually grown from a "newbie" to the person in charge of the company's App business line. Now I can independently coordinate and plan advertising budgets of billions of yuan.

Mencius said: If you are poor, you should take care of yourself; if you are rich, you should help the world. Until now, I still feel that I have only been an advertising optimizer for a few years, and I don’t have outstanding skills or a sophisticated mentality. However, I am still willing to share with you the pitfalls I have gone through and some thoughts on "advertising placement", because I think that compared with producing more practical information such as "placement strategies" and "optimization techniques", it is more important to let everyone have a correct understanding of the placement industry; and let the students who are doing placement have a clear understanding of themselves, otherwise they will fall into a state of confusion, not knowing what else they can do every day besides completing trivial affairs, what they can learn in the process of placement, and whether this profession is worth sticking to...

Back to the present, everyone should be able to feel that people’s attitude towards "Internet advertising" or "Internet advertising practitioners" is not friendly. Even among people in the industry, their understanding of the job of "delivery" is biased and one-sided. For example, many people think that "advertising" and "channel promotion" are equivalent, that is, spending money; "advertising" and "sales" are not essentially different, they both attract users and guide them to monetize...

So, I would like to ask everyone who is in the advertising industry, what exactly is advertising?

In order to better explain this problem, I roughly divided the development trend of Internet advertising in China into three eras. Let us explore the living conditions of advertisers in each era.

Phase 1: 1997-2015: Traffic is king

Internet advertising in China started in 1997 and grew rapidly in the following decade. In 2007, the market size reached 10 billion; in 2009, the investment scale reached 20 billion; in 2013, the investment scale exceeded 100 billion; and by 2015, although the growth rate had slowed down, the market size had reached 200 billion.

The continuous rise of traffic owners has awakened the advertising awareness of major advertisers. Internet advertising was a blue ocean. The advertising campaign in that era was simple and crude. As long as you were willing to spend money, you could see a linear increase in data. "Putting in" is completely equivalent to "promotion"; as long as you spend money, you can see the effect. Occupying the channel means occupying the users. Who would care about the optimization after the advertisement goes online?

Many people probably started to think that launch was a low-level job at that time, because it was not like a product manager who needed to master various methodologies or use various tools to make prototypes, nor was it like R&D where they could achieve requirements through mysterious codes.

The second stage: 2016-2018, the era of content being king

In my opinion, 2016 was an important turning point for online advertising in China. That year, China's online advertising saw relatively large changes in its segmented sectors. Search advertising, which had always been in the leading position, saw a significant decline in market share due to policy restrictions caused by serious negative events (those who are interested can search "Baidu" themselves). At the same time, users' attention began to shift from PC to mobile, which provided huge development space for mobile advertising.

As the competition for traffic becomes increasingly fierce and the growth rate of user volume slows down, advertisers' goal has begun to adjust to "finding incremental users from existing users." After returning to their senses, advertisers no longer blindly spend money to acquire users, but focus more on how to improve advertising effectiveness, such as how to create high-quality advertising materials, how to formulate delivery strategies, how to accurately target and increase user conversions...

At the same time, the delivery has also begun to undergo qualitative changes. The accumulation of big data combined with user tags, LBS targeting and other functions have been introduced one after another, which seems to indicate that the delivery is becoming less ordinary and simple.

Since that era, advertising can no longer be simply defined as promotion. The diversity of media traffic, users’ strict requirements on advertising quality, and the imperfect advertising backend have brought many challenges to publishers.

The simple act of placing an advertisement has also started to have more of an “optimization” flavor…

The third stage: 2018-present: the era of operation is king

In 2016, major traffic providers began to launch the OCPC advertising function, which was revolutionary for the advertising industry. A few years have passed, and it has successfully completed the transformation from "unique" to "popular". At the same time, with the continuous development of Internet advertising technology, higher requirements are placed on the quality and standards of practitioners, so systematic training courses, books, and articles have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.

The investment industry has begun to gain depth, and the profession of optimizer has also begun to become professional...

In my opinion, “delivery” is no longer enough to define what we do; because we are not only placing and optimizing advertisements, but also involved in media, competitor and user research, advertising material production, product performance optimization, and user experience optimization. Investment has become a profession that requires both systematization and process. For example, the following picture shows the work links that I, as an optimizer, will participate in during actual delivery (not too many):

Taking the above picture as an example, the optimization of a certain performance or iteration of a function within the product should be initiated by product students; design students should be responsible for the production of advertising materials; and increasing user activity and stickiness should also be the work of students responsible for content or user operations. However, the reality is: as a small investment, we have begun to infiltrate these many links in a "silent" way.

So, should we also have a new definition of ourselves?

So is “traffic operation” more in line with our current job positioning?

A long time ago, I read Huang Youcan's book "The Light of Operations". There is a passage in it that I think is the best description of the position of operations: "The word 'operator' can carry a lot of things, but when it comes to details, it is extremely trivial. My biggest advice to operations practitioners is: to understand operations from a macro perspective, and at the same time to do operations well with a micro and practical mindset ."

Here comes the second question: How can we achieve good delivery?

Let me say in advance that you may feel empty when reading the following content, but I am really sincere.

Mr. Guo Degang once commented on the crosstalk industry in this way, and I think it is equally appropriate when applied to investment; he said: " The requirements for the crosstalk industry are very low, and anyone can do it; but the real threshold is actually at the top of the mountain. Some people have been in it for seven or eight years and are reluctant to leave, but it is difficult to continue climbing the mountain ."

Therefore, advertising is a job that is easy to get started but difficult to master. In other words, if you want to do a good job in advertising, in addition to hard work, you really need to have talent .

To sum up, if you want to do a good job of advertising, you need the following things (again, not too little):

●Mindset

Do your best and leave the rest to Fate : Once, I saw a colleague in the company bowing his hands to the computer. So I asked him the reason, and he replied, "I want to create a new account today, and I just set up the plan. Bye." Actually, I can really understand that no one has figured out all the mysteries of quality until now. Even brand new advertising accounts will have differences in quality. What we can do is to complete 100% of the things we can control, and not force the things we cannot control.

The goal is purely unprofitable : the goal setting in the Internet industry is highly oriented and KPI-oriented, and our revenue performance is also linked to KPIs. In this situation, it is easy for us to form the mentality of "work as much as you are paid for". I cannot say that this idea is wrong, but at least I think it is not very positive. Take myself as an example. Every time I get my KPI, I will put the performance bonus aside and try to complete it to the best of my ability. In the past two years, although I worked very hard, my KPI completion rate was actually not very high. Even so, my salary increased significantly. (Let me emphasize that I didn’t get a salary increase by changing jobs)

●Awareness:

Awareness of trade-offs : The delivery work is "numerous" and "complicated", especially for client-side optimizers. In addition to the heavy optimization work and high-pressure KPI targets, they are also responsible for recharging, payment, accounting, and various pre- and post-delivery data analysis and delivery reporting. At this time, the awareness of trade-offs becomes extremely important. This "trade-off" is not about choosing "to do or not to do" but to arrange work in order of priority. It doesn't matter whether you use the four-quadrant method or OKR.

Comparative awareness : There are thousands of optimization methods, and the most efficient one can always be implemented first. To give a simple example, how many ways are there to amplify advertising consumption? Increase the number of accounts, increase the number of advertising creatives, increase bids, change the delivery method (such as changing CPC to CPM), change the feedback method (activation-submission), etc. So which one is the fastest to take effect and which one has the least risk? You have to make a choice based on the actual situation.

●Ability:

Thinking ability-data analysis ability : Thinking ability is the basis of data analysis. A large advertising account should have at least hundreds of advertising plans. Although there is the "80/20 rule", it is not easy to manage it well, not to mention that no optimizer can be responsible for only one account. When doing advertising, you should always accumulate data through optimization, and also optimize based on the data.

●Methods:

Process-based : There is a core difference between an ordinary optimizer and an excellent optimizer: an excellent optimizer will process the delivery in the early stage of preparation, and then formulate clear and complete optimization methods based on each link in the process, and can even allocate his energy according to the importance of each link. However, more ordinary optimizers may take it one step at a time.

MVP first : MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the most simplified viable product. To put it simply, for example, the OCPC you previously launched used callback activation as an optimization indicator, but now you can use the number of callback paying users as an indicator. Will you overturn the existing plan and conduct a large budget test? The essential purpose of MVP is to " try and error at the lowest cost ". Perhaps this concept is more applicable to the product side, but we can also learn from it during the launch.

Finally, let’s talk about “luck” and “talent”, two factors that basically cannot be controlled by humans.

Luck : No matter how experienced an optimizer is, he cannot guarantee that all accounts can be made bigger, just as no matter how good a doctor is, he cannot completely avoid accidents during surgery and postoperative complications. There are too many factors that affect the delivery, in addition to the optimizer's own quality; company budget allocation, account quality, media traffic division, competition from competing products, and even malicious clicks from users can affect the advertising effect. So any "good" account has an element of luck.

Talent : In addition to being oriented towards various data indicators, the delivery must be more user-oriented. We are actually a bridge between products and users, and delivery is just one form of connection. What we need to do is to tell a good story (advertising creativity) and pave a smooth road (delivery method) so that users can voluntarily and happily enter this environment (product) and become unable to extricate themselves (user retention). How well and attractively this story can be told depends more on the optimizer's "talent".