Grass-growing marketing: grass-growing, advertising and bringing goods

“On Valentine’s Day, a high-end, thoughtful and inexpensive gift. “

"I recently bought 10 great things for less than $100."

"Winter turtlenecks, these two are enough."

"Oily skin? This facial cleanser is worth it."

We have actually seen such methods of recommending products a long time ago, but today, this method of recommendation is called "planting grass".

Planting grass is one of the most popular marketing methods on the Internet in recent years. The essence of the emergence of planting grass marketing is, firstly, the explosion of content on content platforms, and secondly, the growing demand of brands for content marketing . Under this circumstance, this marketing method has seen a blowout.

Whether it is Weibo, Douyin or Xiaohongshu, they have produced and spawned a large amount of content about products, and are favored because they attract users with content, naturally triggering and promoting users to make purchases.

The characteristics of grass-roots marketing are that it is fast, lightweight, low-budget, and has measurable effects. This marketing method can basically be applied regardless of the size of the brand or what stage it is in.

Grass-planting marketing is essentially a kind of content marketing. Grass-planting without content is soulless, so it is a marketing method that is more inclined towards brand exposure rather than sales conversion. However, because in the current Internet environment, the links of grass-roots marketing can be better monitored and measured, many brands doing grass-roots marketing will pay more attention to its conversion.

Generally speaking, grass-roots marketing has both brand exposure and sales conversion, but the former is greater than the latter.

As mentioned above, grass planting is a way of recommending products by combining content. As a marketing method, this method is sometimes free of charge, but most of the time it does require fees. The grass planting method that does not require fees can be called natural grass planting, and the grass planting method that requires fees is called paid grass planting.

01 Natural planting = word-of-mouth marketing

When it comes to natural promotion, we have to mention an older marketing method - word-of-mouth marketing. The so-called word-of-mouth marketing means that consumers take the initiative to recommend products to their relatives and friends. This marketing method is spontaneous among consumers and does not involve marketing costs.

Nielsen's 2015 Global Advertising Trust Survey shows that 83% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family, which is a typical example of word-of-mouth marketing.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a natural way of promoting products. The reason why this marketing method has gained great trust from consumers is that when consumers recommend products, they are proactive, objective, genuine, and not profit-driven.

When there was no Internet, good products could promote word-of-mouth among consumers, thus creating brand influence and good reputation. In the Internet age, at the beginning, consumers recommended products on the Internet in a natural way. That was a relatively pure Internet era. When bloggers in related fields recommended certain products, it was because they actually used them and truly thought the products were good.

For example, in the blog era, knowledge-based bloggers will recommend book lists at the end of the year. These books are the ones they have read and think are worth reading. This is a typical natural way of recommending books. This kind of promotional method is often mixed with some soft advertising cooperation from publishing houses today.

The necessary condition for natural grass planting is that the products sold by the brand must be good products. They are either inexpensive and of good quality, or they are great value for money. Products that cannot achieve this cannot achieve natural grass planting.

Natural promotion can bring exposure to the brand. Once a product is naturally promoted to other people by more and more consumers, its brand effect will show a trend of fission, and of course it can also bring huge sales conversions.

If movies are viewed as a commodity, then they are a typical example of natural promotion. Even in the pre-Internet era, a good movie would be passed on from one person to ten people, and from ten to a hundred people, thus creating high box office sales. For example, in 1982, "Shaolin Temple" starring Jet Li, with a ticket price of 1 cent per ticket, achieved a box office record of 160 million yuan.

For a brand, the most essential effect pursued in marketing is natural promotion. As the saying goes, good wine needs no bush. This is the reason.

02 Paid promotion = advertising marketing

Natural grass-growing is often hard to come by, so the most commonly used grass-growing marketing method used by brands today is paid grass-growing (if there is no special emphasis, grass-growing in the following text refers to paid grass-growing). Since it is all paid marketing, this marketing method must have a certain connection with traditional advertising marketing.

Advertising marketing usually involves paying the media to promote your products. It is actually a way to use the media to tell consumers how good your products are.

One type of advertising marketing is to pay celebrities to be spokespersons and then advertise. This method is actually similar to paid promotion. Relatively speaking, this type of advertising does not involve the advertiser saying good things about themselves, but rather asking celebrities to testify. For example, Jolin Tsai would say (roughly), "My hair is smooth because I use Rejoice every day," and Guo Donglin would say, "Tide laundry detergent makes clothes cleaner."

The most typical case is the Bawang anti-hair loss product endorsed by Jackie Chan. What makes this endorsement different from most celebrity endorsements is that Jackie Chan directly talked about his mental journey in taking the advertisement, and said that he really used it and that the effect was good, and he still uses it every day.

The essence of paid grass-roots marketing is no different from advertising marketing, except that brands give the money that was previously given to media and celebrities to platforms (which put grass-roots content into information streams), KOLs or KOCs.

The essence of media and platforms is no different in marketing. The logic behind brands giving money to celebrities and KOLs for marketing is the same. Both are about using the other party's influence to achieve exposure and testify for themselves, thereby ultimately promoting sales.

Although the essence of seeding and advertising is the same, there are still differences between the two in terms of the cost of placement, the conversion time of content to sales, and the marketing approach.

From the perspective of advertising costs, advertising requires a large investment in the short term to quickly influence the minds of consumers, while the cost of planting grass is relatively controllable. It can be invested on a large scale, or it can be done by first piloting and then expanding the investment.

In terms of conversion time, the conversion time from advertising exposure to sales is generally long, and it may be as long as several days or even months. The fastest conversion rate for planting grass may be measured in points, and the longest will generally not exceed a few days.

From the perspective of strategy, advertising and celebrity endorsement marketing is a top-down strategy that uses large-scale advertising bombardment to quickly make a large number of consumers aware of the brand. Grass-seeking marketing is a bottom-up approach that usually penetrates a small group of people first, then continues to spread among the target group, and then gradually achieves a great influence.

The former is more like a tactic of first occupying the central cities and then expanding power downward, while the latter is more like a tactic of surrounding the cities from the countryside. There is no absolute superiority or inferiority between the two tactics. Instead, it depends on which tactic suits the brand at which stage.

Because paid content recommendation has the word "paid" in it, its content lacks authority and objectivity. Today, there is a large amount of paid content recommendation on major content platforms, so much so that a large number of users cannot distinguish whether it is real content or advertisements.

If a product is good enough and can be promoted naturally, then it basically does not require paid promotion. However, in today's fiercely competitive market, "even good wine needs no bush", and if you do not engage in paid promotion, then what may await you is a long wait with little prospect of the future.

For most start-ups or small and medium-sized brands, they do not have a large budget for advertising. On the premise of excellent products, if they can influence a group of people through paid promotion, and then guide these people to form long-term natural promotion, this is nothing less than a reliable social network marketing method.

A group of new consumer brands such as Perfect Diary and Zhong Xue Gao have completed the cold start of brand sales with the help of such marketing methods.

03 Advertising, seeding and product promotion

So what is the relationship between advertising, product recommendation and product promotion?

First, let’s talk about advertising and selling products. The first step for a brand is to let as many people as possible know about it, and then let these people consume it. Therefore, there is no doubt that the first goal of advertising has always been exposure rather than sales, but this does not mean that the advertisement cannot bring sales. On the contrary, good products + good advertising can often achieve large-scale sales.

For example, during its peak period, advertisements before the news on CCTV1 were scrambled for by a large number of brands, because advertisements during this prime time period could achieve the greatest exposure across the country and at the same time promote a significant increase in brand sales. Advertisements during this time period have created success for brands such as Kongfuyanjiu, Qinchi, BBK, and Wahaha.

Celebrity endorsement advertisements can also achieve this effect. Wahaha endorsed by Leehom Wang, Tide endorsed by Guo Donglin, and Yolemei endorsed by Jay Chou all promote products and help brands achieve exposure and sales conversion.

In a word, the goal of advertising is exposure, but good advertising can definitely bring sales.

Let’s talk about promoting products and bringing in goods. Today, we are talking about selling products, which usually includes two ways. One is content-based selling, which is achieved by KOLs creating content on Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin platforms and attaching sales links. The other is live streaming selling, which is mainly achieved by influencers selling products through live streaming on Douyin e-commerce, Kuaishou e-commerce, and Taobao.

Content-driven sales is to promote products through content planting. Its goals are the same as those of advertising, which are exposure and sales. However, as mentioned above, the conversion time of content-driven sales is much faster than that of advertising.

As for live streaming sales, most of the mid-level anchors’ live streaming sales sales do not have the nature of forming brand influence, their goal is to sell goods.

The situation of top anchors is slightly different. Their live streaming sales have huge traffic and have formed the mindset of selling good products in the minds of a large number of consumers. Therefore, they have the nature of both planting grass and selling goods, such as Li Jiaqi, Luo Yonghao, etc. Luo Yonghao once promoted Great Wall Motors through live streaming, but in fact, this live streaming gained more brand exposure than sales, because there were only 10 half-price cars in the live streaming room, which could not bring in a large number of sales. Instead, this live streaming allowed Great Wall Motors' brand to achieve greater exposure, which was actually an advertisement.

This is also the reason why many brands are willing to let top anchors promote their products even if they do not make money.

Therefore, the core goal of grass-planting is exposure, and the incidental goal is to bring goods. The live broadcasts of top anchors have the nature of both grass-planting and bringing goods. Simply put, the top influencers’ bringing goods = grass-planting + bringing goods, while the live broadcasts of mid-level anchors are mainly for bringing goods.

04 The essence of marketing remains unchanged: paid promotion + natural promotion = advertising + word of mouth

Grass-roots marketing is the focus of brands today, but in essence it still does not deviate from the basic model of advertising marketing.

The advertising marketing model is to use advertising to expose the product based on its excellence, so that more people can know about the product. After the initial consumers purchase and use it, they will recommend it to others, thus forming word-of-mouth communication.

The model of planting grass is also based on the excellence of the product. It is exposed by KOLs to influence a certain number of people, and then these people influence other people, ultimately forming word-of-mouth communication.

So, in the final analysis, the best marketing model for a brand is to use excellent products + paid marketing (advertising) to trigger natural marketing and create a ripple effect.

If the ideal state of marketing is summarized in one word, it is word-of-mouth marketing.

Author: Xunkong

Source public account: Xunkong’s Marketing Revelation (ID: xunkong2005)