Marketing promotion: The end of the era of mass screen swiping!

The content that used to attract a lot of attention in previous years is no longer effective nowadays. Comedy makers have run out of ideas, users are becoming aesthetically fatigued, various marketing tactics have failed, and old tactics have become obsolete. Marketers can't help but sigh: it's really hard to "cheat" traffic anymore.

Compared with the "exciting 2018", everyone's circle of friends this year is much more boring. The first half of 2018 was the peak period of marketing screen swiping. There were not only DIY H5s such as customized family portraits and customized workstations, but also knowledge-based paid distribution fission promotions such as NetEase Xijing Class and New World Reading Club, as well as test H5s such as "My User Manual"... However, in the first half of this year, our circle of friends was unusually silent, and 2019 ushered in an overall silence in the marketing industry.

The disappearing routine

Behind "Fire Extinguishing 2019" is the failure of various marketing tactics. The content that could cause the public to swipe their screens in previous years is no longer surprising to today's users. It has become extremely difficult to reach the threshold of WeChat's screen swiping limit. However, many marketers eventually discovered that sending red envelopes to KOL groups and asking for reposts to curry favors is the “essence of circle of friends marketing.”

1. H5 no longer refreshes the screen

Compared with the booming promotion of H5 in previous years, H5 no longer dominated the screen in 2019. Even NetEase, the master of H5 blockbuster production, has failed to make a splash with its recently launched new H5.

For H5 producers represented by NetEase, multiple screen-sweeping and homogeneous styles make users lose their sense of freshness. In addition, the dissemination of H5 mostly relies on "induced sharing". Under the circumstances of severe crackdown and flow control of WeChat, it is equivalent to cutting off the way for H5 to swipe screens.

Generally speaking, H5 can be divided into four categories: page turning, viewing, testing, and games.

"PPT-style" page-turning H5s have long lost their marketing and communication functions and exist only as display and operation tools; viewing H5s mainly rely on content scripts or visual interactions. The former tests novelty and creativity, while the latter tests financial investment. It is already very difficult to surprise users; although testing H5s hit the weaknesses of human nature, there has been no major breakthrough in the techniques and routines in the past few years, and users who have been "over-educated" are gradually losing interest; on the one hand, game H5s use small games represented by lotteries, roulette wheels, and treasure chests as daily user operation tools; on the other hand, heavy games such as escape rooms and exploration have too high investment costs and risks.

All in all, H5 has lost its popularity in 2019, and we may never see H5 flooding the WeChat Moments again.

Two Sessions H5

1. Comic strip aesthetic fatigue

The graphic and text format of comic strips is very consistent with the reading habits of public account users. For this reason, there will be screen-sweeping cases every once in a while.

It goes without saying that there were early Weibo-style joke comic strips. A few years ago, the one-shot long picture of Pechoin from the "Local Climate Survey Team" exploded on social networks. Last year's "Kuang Fuyao" comic was well-liked by the public. There are also well-known accounts of well-known institutions such as the "GQ Lab".

Image source: GQ Lab

But nowadays, it is not difficult to find in our circle of friends that comic strip-style content has become increasingly difficult to spread beyond the circle, and most of them are limited to vertical interest areas, and it is no longer possible to achieve the previous grand occasion of being forwarded and liked by the whole nation.

In terms of immersion, comic strips are still heavy reading content. After reading a high-quality comic strip, one may turn the screen more than ten times at least, and dozens of times at most. The total reading time is usually more than ten minutes. This obviously requires a higher reading threshold and free time to support it. In this environment where users are baptized by 15-second short videos, I am afraid that only core fans have such patience.

In addition, the creators of comic strips usually have obvious personal styles, which is both an advantage for the creators, but also limits the mass breakthrough of the creators' works. We often find that the style and content of comic strips created by the same creator are similar, so it is not surprising that users are aesthetically fatigued by comic strips.

1. The joke teller has run out of ideas

Funny jokes are the content section with the largest traffic on the Internet. Riding on the popularity of Weibo, Tooth Fairy Advertising, Lou's Culture, and Gushan Culture have become the three major joke teller groups. In the early days, the joke teller marketing accounts were mainly based on content reposted from the Internet, and only later did they gradually begin to flood the screen with original content. Among them, the Genius Red Panda is a typical representative of joke tellers.

In the WeChat ecosystem, there is no shortage of joke-type content that floods the screen. Funny ending twists, brain-opening jokes, and conversational pictures and texts were once popular in the circle of friends in the past few years, but today they rarely flood the screen. If you pay attention to various joke-type public accounts for a long time, you will find that the quality of most original content has plummeted.

Image source: NIKE×GQ Lab

Nowadays, UGC is very popular. It is not difficult to find that most joke accounts have become information aggregators, and the original content is often a new spin on old jokes. The real fun for netizens lies in the comment sections of major communities, such as Weibo public accounts, Douyin and Kuaishou, and even NetEase Cloud Music. Personalized joke tellers have run out of ideas, and what is being competed on is more about the speed of industrial integration. Screen-sweeping content no longer exists.

1. Video dissemination is not suitable for local conditions

Although WeChat hopes to overlay various multimedia forms such as video and audio on top of pictures and texts, as I mentioned in my previous article, the design concept of WeChat public accounts comes from the subscription center of email. Overall, it still has the reading habits of a picture and text magazine, and is not suitable for dissemination in the form of video, audio, etc.

As for video content, WeChat Moments has had the function of sharing short videos for a long time, but it has never made much progress. Even with the newly launched personal video updates, although an update icon has been added to the chat avatar, it has still not really cultivated user habits. As for audio, how many songs shared by friends in Moments have you listened to in their entirety? The audio in Moments is about emotions, taste and identification, not the listening experience.

Picture source from the Internet

In public account text and picture messages, videos and audio can only be used as a means of assisting reading. Even if a graphic or text contains video or audio content, it is often necessary to attach text and picture content. Even a "One Post" that focuses on high-quality videos now has text and picture descriptions. Even many video and audio bloggers have gradually transformed into graphic and text content bloggers in the WeChat content environment.

In general, the WeChat environment is not suitable for the dissemination of video and audio. Think about it, how long has it been since you saw the works of Yitiao, Papi Jiang or other video influencers in your circle of friends? Weibo, Tik Tok, Kuaishou, and Bilibili may be more suitable for multimedia dissemination.

1. Fission distribution is immune

With high traffic costs, social sharing becomes the best solution to obtain cheap traffic, and fission propagation comes into being. Since last year's high-frequency screen-sweeping of "NetEase Xijing Class", "Sanlianting Weekly" and "New World Reading Club", users' Moments have been flooded too many times with this type of knowledge payment distribution fission posters.

Picture source from the Internet

The popularity of distribution fission is always accompanied by a lot of controversy in the industry. Many people believe that it takes advantage of the evil of human nature to flood the screen and pollute the circle of friends. There has also been controversy that sharing fission is a kind of knowledge pyramid scheme. However, the knowledge-based paid products that have promoted distribution fission also have many natural pain points, among which the most criticized ones are the emphasis on marketing rather than content, the uneven quality of content, and the selling of anxiety and chicken soup.

The means of fission distribution have actually existed in offline promotions for a long time, but its popularity in online Moments is largely a special phenomenon at a special time. With WeChat's cleanup of the Moments environment and users' "awakeness" to paying for knowledge, it is almost impossible for the fission distribution method to replicate the influence of NetEase Xijing Class today.

Nowadays, distribution fission and forwarding fission have become the basic means for every operator, and are widely used in daily activity operations and user operations. However, the effect is not as good as before. Many users have long been disgusted with fission propagation, believing that the method is too low.

6. The mini-game ended without success

Mini games were the excitement of WeChat last year, and many dead groups were revived because of the sharing of popular mini games. During the wild growth period of mini-games/mini-programs, in addition to the official "Jump Jump", there were also popular games such as "Brain King", "The Strongest Bounce", "Pirates Are Coming", and "Guess the Idiom".

Picture source from the Internet

In addition to the magical gameplay, the most important thing that makes a mini-game a hit is the sharing resurrection mechanism. However, due to the pollution of the group chat environment, WeChat restricted the sharing of the resurrection gameplay, and the mini-game seemed to have been unable to recover. There was no longer the craze of "The Strongest Bounce" that swept the screen.

For companies, mini games are usually used as a means to attract new customers. Users can usually follow the official account or customer service WeChat account through customer service messages or QR codes. Even during the Alipay subsidy period, there was an alternative monetization method of automatically copying the Taobao password when opening the mini-game.

But nowadays, mini-games are no longer remembered by the public, and there is still a long way to go to build an ecosystem for mini-games. From a marketing perspective, the promotion methods of mini-games seem to be in vain.

The ideal and reality of traffic

The old routines are outdated, and the new routines have not been reborn. Today's marketers' anxiety lies in the anxiety about traffic. The culprit is an ironclad fact: the cost of traffic is high.

1. Traffic is not good.

It has been 7 years since the public account was launched. Even without the "information flow" revision, it is an indisputable fact that the overall reading of the public account has declined. Many people have noticed that some public accounts that used to easily have over 100,000 readers now have an average readership of only 20,000 to 30,000, even though the content has not declined significantly. From the perspective of reading numbers, traffic is no longer easy to “cheat”.

Picture source from the Internet

Under the impact of new content consumption represented by short videos, picture and text reading on public accounts and Moments has been downgraded from a "must-read item" to an "optional item." From the user's perspective, the voices of escaping from the circle of friends and the official accounts are gradually being heard again; from the industry's perspective, "The world has suffered from WeChat for a long time" has become a public opinion banner for many social entrepreneurs.

Traffic is constantly dispersing like a trickle, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Short videos, vlogs, vertical communities, online variety shows, big dramas...all kinds of content forms and platforms are competing for user attention. The era of marketing with one trick is over.

1. Traffic conversion is poor

What is being talked about here is not the conversion of goods brought by e-commerce, but the conversion of content attention and fan accumulation. A few years ago, an article with over 100,000 views could increase the number of followers of a public account by tens of thousands overnight and bring in long-term long-tail traffic. However, according to feedback from many public account operators, even an article with over 100,000 views may only bring in a few thousand new followers. The era when a popular article could make a public account popular is over.

The reality behind this is that when people browse articles on public accounts, they are more of a bystander and are more interested in joining in the fun, without emphasizing their own participation. Just like in a square, users will turn around and leave after watching the excitement of juggling, and will not continue to pay attention to the subsequent actions of the jugglers.

In addition, today everyone follows a lot of accounts and installs a lot of apps, which invisibly increases the user's attention cost. Information overload makes everyone extremely tired, and it becomes more difficult to attract new users' attention.

1. Traffic share is low

Everyone’s WeChat friend list is getting longer and longer, carrying more and more social relationships, which leads users to become more cautious when sharing content. In other words, users have become more silent and less willing to share.

WeChat groups, three-day visibility of Moments, WeChat account switching...all these functional optimizations are designed to give users more private space and reduce their social pressure.

On the other hand, the "Like" button of public account pictures and texts has changed to "Good looking"/"Reading" and can be displayed in the information list of "Look at it". WeChat's original intention should be to promote the social distribution of high-quality content, but this invisibly requires users to personally endorse high-quality content, further reducing the willingness of ordinary users to share and hindering the flow of content in the WeChat ecosystem.

The communicator's self-salvation

The process of routine failure is also a process of removing the dross and retaining the essence, sifting out the outdated shells and leaving the enduring essence.

In an environment of desensitization of mass new media, there are still some public accounts and content operators that have emerged against the trend. The most typical example is the sudden emergence of deep accounts represented by "Shou Lou Chu" and "Meng De Hao" last year, as well as the rapid rise of various vertical interest and subculture accounts. It seems that there are ways to maintain attention and readership.

1. Hotspot Healing Reading Volume

Today, when reading volume is generally declining, hot content is still the only way to attract users' attention and is also the conventional pacemaker to save new media reading.

However, to follow hot topics, one must either be fast enough, have a new angle, or have enough information. Otherwise, simply integrating past information will not be able to provide unique value to users.

Of course, not all hot topics are suitable for brands to pursue. In a regulatory environment where content risks are increasing dramatically, the tragedies of Ergeng Canteen and Mimi Meng are also worthy of operators’ vigilance.

1. Deeply capture the user's heart

The importance of in-depth content is becoming more prominent. Generally speaking, the higher the information density in an article or video, the more likely it is to be recognized and shared by users. Among the articles that are flooding the screens of the public, long articles of more than 10,000 words are becoming more and more common.

Compared with shallow content, deep content can break through the circle of dissemination in one fell swoop and quickly push information to a larger audience. However, the disadvantage is that deep content takes longer to produce and is very challenging for the creator's personal ability. How to achieve a balance between quality and quantity will be a difficult problem for operators.

1. Practical skills create a sense of value

Every new media needs to think about what value it can bring to its target users. Regardless of the form, substantive content is the safest and most reliable approach.

Picture source from the Internet

It is not just the WeChat content ecosystem. It can also be found in short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou that skill-based, knowledge-based, and science-based accounts are often more able to retain fans. For example, accounts such as "Dingxiang Doctor" and "Paperclip" have very high fan stickiness, while entertainment-oriented accounts are often only short-lived.

1. Personalization sticks to users

Personalization, IPization, and internet celebrityization will bring longer-tail traffic to new media. Distinctive personality can make users more emotionally invested, which not only enhances fan stickiness, but also effectively drives sales for e-commerce.

The listing of internet celebrity MCN company Ruhan Holdings in the United States marks the arrival of the internet celebrity era. Zhang Dayi, an internet celebrity under Ruhan, is known as the "king of sales" in the industry. On Singles' Day 2018, she generated sales of over 100 million yuan in just 28 minutes.

Although brand personalization and IPization can enable brands to break through in social communication, forming an IP is still a relatively long process, and not all brands have the patience to make the investment.

Picture source from the Internet

1. Build private domain traffic

"Public domain traffic" and "private domain traffic" are popular terms in recent times. Simply put, the so-called public domain traffic refers to platform-distributed and centralized traffic. Traffic must be purchased every time content is promoted, such as on public platforms such as Weibo and Toutiao. Private domain traffic refers to decentralized traffic that brands can control themselves. Brands can reuse traffic in promotion without having to purchase it every time, such as official accounts, personal WeChat accounts, WeChat communities, etc.

Against the backdrop of rising traffic costs, brands can take the initiative in communication by building private traffic pools. For this reason, community operations and personal circle of friends operations become more important, which may also become a life-saving straw for brands to spread in a fragmented environment.

Conclusion

2019, when all routines failed, is a big test for marketers. The end of the screen-sweeping era will test the brand’s basic skills in refined marketing and refined operations. It's more like a cooling off than a wintering.

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)