Weibo Marketing: “Social × Consumption” scenarios are connected and popular cases emerge frequently!

In the past year, Weibo marketing has seen the evolution of methodology, further enrichment of commercial solutions, and frequent hot-selling cases, opening up the entire chain of social × consumption, marketing-communication-conversion. Thanks to Weibo's commercial ecology, social media attributes and unique context, different brands have formed an effective system for producing popular products on Weibo.

As young people become the main consumer force in the digital economy era, gaining the attention of young users has become the key to breaking through in brand marketing. The celebrity resources and fan culture contained in Weibo make it a major platform for young people to communicate and interact. Behind every interactive behavior of Weibo users there is potential commercial value to be tapped.

Looking back at 2018, whether it was the village’s hope Yang Chaoyue, Alipay Koi, or IG’s awesomeness and other popular screen-sweeping events, they all demonstrated Weibo’s powerful ability to aggregate hot spots. Therefore, reaching young consumers through Weibo is increasingly becoming a broad consensus among brands.

In the past year, Weibo has been making continuous marketing moves, holding the Weibo Influencer Marketing Summit to share new trends in Weibo marketing; establishing a Social Marketing Research Institute to empower partners' social marketing, and continuously outputting Weibo marketing ideas, providing full support for brand marketing activities.

At the same time, many marketing cases have achieved great success, winning nearly 120 awards including the Golden Mouse Award, Golden Wu Award, and Golden Investment Award, and its marketing strength has been unanimously recognized by the industry.

Evolution of methodology: Core strategy of enterprise marketing, Social First

In the era of digital consumption, social platforms such as Weibo have become important channels connecting brands and consumers. Brands pay more attention to two-way communication with young consumers through Weibo, accurately matching users' niche and personalized needs. Many brands, including jewelry brand Platinum and car brand Smart, have launched fan-customized models to embrace young consumers.

The relationship between consumers and brands has changed, and the way brands market has also changed accordingly. Through marketing practices on the Weibo platform, brands use new forms of social media to explore new corporate marketing strategies. This strategy fermented, took shape, and was implemented on Weibo, and relied on Weibo's social potential to convert users' multi-level forwarding and interactions into product sales and brand awareness.

As a witness and carrier of brand marketing strategies, this year, Weibo proposed the "Social First" marketing concept on the winning strategy for brand marketing in the social era at many well-known industry events such as the Golden Investment Awards, Harvard Business Review Open Class, and Weibo Influencer Marketing Summit, redefining the brand marketing communication method and providing a new reference for the strategic management upgrade of enterprises.

Specifically:

1. From the decision funnel to marketing perpetual motion

Traditional marketing is a typical funnel model and funnel logic. Companies are more concerned about the conversion of traffic: how much exposure there is in front of consumers; how often the exposure is; how to reach them continuously and effectively; and how to stimulate consumers' interest and generate a desire to buy.

But today, as the relationship between consumers and brands changes, a marketing perpetual motion machine model that activates the channel between the two has emerged. Through the interaction between brands and users, from the seven steps of cognition, consideration, evaluation, purchase, enjoyment, recommendation, and bond, the marketing perpetual motion machine model achieves deep user participation, activates relationship channels, and helps brands build a double closed loop from traffic cycle to loyalty cycle, efficiently activating old users while acquiring new users.

2. Use corporate social business cards to connect with fans

In recent years, more and more brands have chosen to embrace social media platforms such as Weibo to build exclusive fan assets through deep exposure and traffic conversion. Many corporate managers have opened Weibo accounts, established deep connections with brand fans through Weibo, and used the concept of Social First to operate their corporate social business cards.

These entrepreneurs are also well-known to post-90s consumers. They enrich the brand image and further narrow the distance between the brand and young consumers.

3. Light up the digital pathway between consumers and brands

On Weibo, users do not just receive brand marketing information in a one-way manner, but instead become participants in the marketing process. Interactions such as forwarding and commenting simplify the threshold for users to participate in brand marketing, deepen user engagement, and create an immersive sense of participation.

As an open communication platform that is media-based, socialized, and integrated, Weibo connects brands and consumers through content, provides brand owners with a marketing environment based on deep user participation, and lights up the digital channel between consumers and brand owners. Weibo's content ecosystem, built with 28,000 entertainment stars, 60 vertical interest areas, 2,700 partner organizations, and 500+ partner IP programs, enriches and diversifies brand marketing methods and increases users' enthusiasm for participating in marketing.

There is no doubt that in the era of Industry 4.0 where consumption is constantly upgrading, the digital economy is booming. Faced with increasingly diversified and personalized consumer demands, it is inevitable for companies to transform themselves into "Social First".

U Micro Plan: A comprehensive solution for social networking and consumption

The introduction of the “Social First” marketing concept has redefined brand marketing in the digital age. While gradually improving its business ecosystem, Weibo has also teamed up with industry giants to further enrich its marketing solutions and continue to explore marketing value for brands.

In 2018, Weibo and Alibaba joined hands to achieve a comprehensive connection at the data level. Starting from the three stages of marketing strategy, marketing communication, and communication sedimentation, they provided brands with a social x e-commerce full-domain marketing solution - the "U-Wei Plan", creating a marketing closed loop of "Weibo planting grass, e-commerce pulling grass".

1. Solve the customer's global marketing problem

The "U Micro Plan" combines the advantages of the Weibo and Alibaba platforms to provide customers with online omni-channel marketing solutions. By connecting the data and crowd strategies between the Weibo and Alibaba platforms, we can integrate Weibo’s social front-link performance and Alibaba’s e-commerce back-link performance.

In the marketing strategy stage, we connect social attributes and consumption attributes, restore the user portrait in 360°, and accurately identify the target audience.

In the marketing communication stage, with interest and attention as the core, we enrich the social exposure scenarios, trigger users' interactive behaviors such as forwarding, commenting, following, and liking, occupy the users' minds, and expand the brand voice. During the communication and sedimentation stage, the social data generated during the communication process will be returned to Alibaba's global marketing data bank, and brand fans will be deposited on the brand's official WeChat account to be converted into brand-exclusive data assets, and finally sales conversion will be achieved within the Taobao system.

2. Help brands build a global marketing ecosystem

The "U Micro Plan" can realize the full-link data operation of brand marketing, further verify the marketing value of Weibo social media, and help brands build a full-domain marketing ecosystem.

• First of all, Weibo’s media value makes it a platform for celebrities, internet celebrities, brands, etc. to speak out. Weibo's rich social media styles and diversified content help brands achieve strong coverage of social scenarios, effectively increasing consumer interest and brand awareness;
• The second is the social value of Weibo , which provides an interactive platform for brands and users. Through interaction, both parties can develop emotional connections, and users can become brand fans, thus increasing their loyalty to the brand.
• Finally, there is the data value of Weibo . Based on 360-degree brand value insights at multiple levels throughout the entire chain, it provides insights into the market's response to products, audiences, spokespersons, and influence methods, and provides comprehensive and scientific decision-making support for corporate marketing strategies.

As of now, the "U Micro Plan" has completed cooperation with more than 140 brands, and its customers are distributed in various industries such as beauty, mobile phones/3C, clothing, food, mother and baby, electrical appliances, personal care and household cleaning, etc., which has basically covered all categories of e-commerce.

During the Double 11 period, the gxg.kids brand used the "U Micro Plan" to reach out to people who prefer children's clothing on Tmall and KOL fans on Weibo at the same time, and placed advertisements on Weibo targeting the target groups, bringing in more than 100,000 Tmall interactive users during the Double 11 period and fully enhancing the target users' consumption interest in the brand.

It can be seen that since the proposal of the "U Micro Plan", a new marketing ecology composed of platforms, brands, agents, media, third-party monitoring, etc. has been formed, helping brands to achieve one-stop marketing from multiple aspects and angles.

Hot-selling cases frequently appear: Dyson is popular, Koi is popular on the screen

In the past year, guided by the "Social First" marketing concept and Weibo's comprehensive commercial services, many screen-sweeping marketing cases have emerged, the most representative of which are Dyson and Alipay Koi.

1. Dyson is a representative of Weibo’s marketing strategy “U Micro Plan”

As one of the first pilot brands of the "U Micro Plan", Dyson successfully used the "U Micro Plan" to make its new smart sweeping robot a hit by adopting a two-step strategy of identifying target users and reaching out to customers through information and converting them into sales.

First, target users were identified: Weibo selected fans of Dyson spokesperson Wu Zun and overseas shoppers, while Alibaba looked for Dyson brand consumers, home furnishing consumers, and 3C digital consumers. After the two sides had complementary data, information flow advertising was placed on Weibo targeting the target groups to expand awareness of the new product.

Furthermore, information reach promotes sales conversion: @Dyson Daisen reposted Wu Zun’s home love video released by @美好家园杂志. With the help of Weibo information flow advertising, brand information appeared on the target user’s Weibo homepage, achieving precise reach. Subsequently, a large number of users interacted with the brand in real time. Ultimately, the video was played 7.797 million times, and 153,000 users went to Tmall to buy Dyson products or ask related purchasing questions after being inspired by the video on Weibo.

The success of Dyson's new product marketing has verified the professionalism and scientific nature of the "U Micro Plan" and highlighted the unique advantages of "planting grass on Weibo and pulling grass on Tmall" in brand marketing.

2. The fermentation of “Koi” is the release of the potential of Weibo social media platform

During the National Day, @Alipay chose to cooperate with Weibo to create the "Looking for Chinese Koi" event. Through Weibo's natural traffic pool attributes and powerful platform aggregation capabilities, the event successfully achieved social fission. The number of readings of a single blog post exceeded 200 million, and the total number of interactions exceeded 4.2 million. Within 24 hours, the blog post forwarding level reached 39 levels, accumulating immeasurable social assets for @Alipay.

In the Weibo business ecosystem, many brands tend to interact with users by forwarding and holding lucky draws to establish an emotional connection between the two parties. A few years ago, @Haier joined hands with various businesses to launch a retweet and lucky draw campaign, which made it famous overnight and has since established itself at the top of Weibo marketing. Today's Alipay #中国金鲤# is obviously an upgraded version of this gameplay and a typical example of social marketing.

The word "koi" originated and fermented on Weibo, then spread to the entire Internet and became a topic of conversation among netizens in various social scenarios. Therefore, in the context of Weibo, Koi already has huge potential energy. Compared with most previous corporate brand communication actions, the ultimate secret of marketing this time has undergone a qualitative change: from things to people; from prizes to a sense of luck.

A summary

In the past year, Weibo marketing has seen the evolution of methodology, further enrichment of commercial solutions, and frequent hot-selling cases, opening up the entire chain of social × consumption, marketing-communication-conversion. Thanks to Weibo's commercial ecology, social media attributes and unique context, different brands have formed an effective system for producing popular products on Weibo.

At present, the entire marketing environment is undergoing earth-shaking changes. For brands, choosing to communicate directly with fans, accumulating fan assets, and using Weibo to complete the brand's "Social First" transformation is the only way to avoid being left behind by the times.

Source: Wu Duidui (esnql520)