Marketing promotion: Why is product promotion ineffective?

When users are faced with product marketing that is like an "emergency", they will go from confusion at the beginning to forgetfulness, and then from forgetfulness to passivity. Each step in between requires accurate and reasonable guidance from marketers to achieve the best results.

Every day on my way to the company, I have to pass through an underground tunnel. There are often two aunties distributing thick stacks of flyers below. They will stand in the middle of the aisle, and one stream of people will be split into two and continue to move forward.

The auntie is very proactive. She always hands you flyers so that they can almost fit into your hands. Her movements are extremely efficient and I am overwhelmed. After careful observation, it was found that the effect was extremely small.

This is a very common thing, and people rarely accept these flyers. Even if I accept them, it doesn't mean that I have any interest in the things on the flyers.

Why? Because we are all doing something else: rushing.

As consumers and users, we all have our own things to do every day, although some people have more and some have less, but we have never planned or reserved some time to receive advertisements.

As merchants, each time a product is launched and put online, they must reserve a portion of the product's marketing schedule and promotion time. This is something that actually needs to be written into their roadmap and implemented.

Then there is a problem. The merchant must do this thing, but from the consumer's perspective, it has never been expired. Every marketing and promotion is basically like an "emergency".

Many times, if the promotion and marketing effect is done well, it is like "the company announced two days of paid holiday tomorrow and the day after tomorrow", but if it is not done well, it is like "you booked concert tickets but were suddenly notified to work overtime on the weekend."

These plans that seem to be implemented only by luck actually have traces to follow. If you understand the psychological changes of users in the entire early marketing chain, perhaps your marketing plan can be more focused and no longer waste users' time.

Next, I will share how I would deal with these problems by analyzing the expected psychological changes of these users:

Experience the user's "dark moment"

I believe everyone has had this feeling: for a period of time, you feel that you understand users very well, but after a period of time, you feel that you don’t understand users at all. After another period of time or after experiencing certain projects, you feel that you understand users very well again.

We often say that before making a product, we must understand the users and have empathy, but in fact, not everyone has empathy, just like not everyone has perseverance.

There are all kinds of strange reasons for this difference. People's behaviors are often influenced by the environment in which they grow up. It is really difficult to reverse it in a short period of time. As the saying goes, it is difficult to change one's nature.

But without the blessing of strong empathy, we can understand the logic behind the phenomenon, then transfer the situation happening to ourselves and feel it ourselves.

At this point you may be able to understand the user’s “dark moment”.

As mentioned above, merchants plan to implement something and bring it to market, but users never give merchants this "opportunity", which creates a perception bias.

The user is just doing his own thing, or even researching something very attentively, but in the process, he inadvertently receives an unfamiliar message. From the audience's perspective, this is confusing, and the more sudden it is, the more confusing it is.

And this is often the first time a product and user establish a connection. This relationship is like the first day you go to work and meet all your new colleagues: hazy and easily forgettable.

Forgetting is the key word here. Think back to your first three days at work. You could hardly remember the names of all your colleagues. The human brain will selectively remember some high-priority content, and those that can be remembered or not will naturally not be remembered.

What’s more, there are some product marketing activities that I had no schedule for and were suddenly inserted into the schedule?

The user is confused, you need to face his problem

No matter which industry, no matter what product we promote, we can call such things "emergencies". When facing emergencies, the first thing we need to solve is the problem of user confusion.

But in my own experience, most of the users' confusion will be presented in the following two questions:

1. What do you do?
2. How does this work for me?

Yes, the questions are very direct and utilitarian, but both are indispensable. Most people spend their time on beautiful typesetting, introduction of company strength and other irrelevant content instead of directly answering these two questions of users.

Imagine the scene: users are shouting these two questions angrily, while you are giving a crazy roadshow to justify yourself. It is actually very ridiculous.

Let’s go back to the example of handing out flyers. Regardless of the content on the flyers, the high resistance rate of flyers is inevitable no matter where they are. Is it because the merchants did not make these two issues clear?

Perhaps the user knows the answers to these two questions in advance.

Let’s look back. When distributing flyers, the aunties basically didn’t speak. If they shouted, it was only for the purpose of attracting users’ attention.

But the reason behind such a high resistance rate actually reflects that: users know what you do, which is to distribute flyers, but flyers give people the impression of cheap discounts and waste paper, which are of no use to me.

In the user's mind, the user has already sentenced you for this behavior, and the user can solve these two problems by himself. In addition, you have not tried to defend yourself, so everything is happening normally.

Since users dislike flyers and believe that they are invalid items, the first step for us to carry out effective promotion is to make users feel that this is not a flyer.

Yes, try hard to break away from this image, break away from the appearance, break away from the form, and let users forget about flyers before they come into contact with product promotion.

Then what to send?

Just send whatever is suitable for the marketing scenario, just like some brokerage firms have been promoting offline recently, offering one share of Tencent stock directly to the account you are about to open for opening a Hong Kong stock account.

Then in reality, they will simply print the promotional leaflet to look like a stock and hand it to you. For users who have investment intentions and financial management needs, this may be the most thoughtful gift.

To resolve user confusion, you still need to answer the two questions above, but you need to make sure that these two questions are what users want to know and have not already left a mark of dissatisfaction in their minds.

Users are forgetful, you need to enter their time plan

After users establish the first relationship with your product, they are forgetful, so that after coming into contact with the product in the morning, they will have forgotten what you do by noon.

I don’t know if you have noticed that you rarely think that the friends you often come into contact with are not good-looking, even though in reality, they are really not good-looking.

After all, most people’s looks in society are below average, and beautiful people have always been scarce.

From a psychological point of view, people will gradually become familiar with things that appear repeatedly. The familiar feeling can make people feel good about this thing or even this person, thus offsetting other negative feelings.

In other words, repetition can help users become familiar with a product, and they will develop an attachment to it over time.

In the previous step, you have solved the problem of user confusion. Here, you need to use the time schedule of repeated users to make sure that your product will be part of their daily plan.

Just like every Sunday night at 22:00, which is the time point that "Jacob" keeps repeating, we agree to review an underlying issue at this time point every week and interpret rare information.

As for why I chose this time point, I have also introduced it in the article "Jacob tries to answer your three questions in 2018".

Users are passive and need you to advocate what they should do

In my work, I find that there is often a kind of demand that is always missed, but its importance is not low. In addition to its importance, it has another characteristic that makes people always put it aside, that is: "not urgent".

The priorities of many important but non-urgent things are often squeezed out by important and urgent things, or unimportant and urgent things. This not only often occurs at work, but is also reflected vividly in life.

For example: reading, thinking, fitness, physical examinations, and spending time with family. Although everyone recognizes the benefits of doing these things, not many people can actually put them into action and stick to them.

Most of their time is occupied by busy work and endless appointments. Only when it is late at night and they are thinking about life, they suddenly remember that it is time for them to do this or that.

Laziness is human nature, and people are used to living within plans. After all, this way of life has the highest certainty and the strongest sense of happiness. Therefore, when arrangements that have never appeared before suddenly appear, people will become very passive and even at a loss as to what to do.

Since we have gone through so much trouble to break the user's confusion and overcome their forgetfulness, at this time, we need to tell the user: Next, you do this, believe me, I have done this before, so I have experience!

Just like the fitness app Keep, it conveys the idea that "self-discipline gives me freedom". When you want to stick to fitness, it will first do a simple physical examination for you, and then recommend suitable fitness courses for you, including what to exercise every day and how long to exercise each time.

At this point, for users, as long as you have a desire to exercise, all that remains is your persistence. I have prepared everything else for you. Just do as I say and you won't go wrong.

Summarize

From the user's perspective, facing product marketing "emergencies" at every moment, almost everyone has to go through these three steps, from confusion to forgetfulness, from forgetfulness to passivity, and each step requires accurate and reasonable guidance.

These reasonable guidances are usually completed by several departments, so it is easy to cause deformation of actions and derailment of guidance. This is why some small products focusing on vertical markets are more likely to detonate the market. After all, a small ship is easier to turn around, and the continuity of steps is relatively compact.

Only when these links are done well will your great "product ideas" have a chance to be felt by users.

Source: Jacoblab (ID: jacoblab)