Product promotion: 4 ways to attract seed users

The author of this article will introduce some strategies and methods that are often used when attracting seed users .

It’s a relatively new product and I don’t think there will be any users coming. How should I deal with this situation?

The first step is to understand who your target users are? Many students have not thought clearly about who they really want to attract and who they are. Where is it? So I listed three questions, and I hope that before you actually do user operations work, you will consider these three questions and how to answer them.

• The first question is, who are they?
• The second question is, who has influence over these people?
• The third question is, where are these influential people?

The first question: Who are they? This means that you should first think about who your target users are? First consider what kind of product your product is? For example, if I am making beauty products, and I go to recommend my products to some men or even people playing basketball in the stadium in an attempt to attract some users, the possibility of them responding to me will not be very high. The second thing to think about is who is the influential person for my product’s target users, a beauty expert or an athlete? After considering these two points, you need to think clearly about where these influential people are.

After thinking about the questions about users, there is another more advanced question, which is what type of product am I operating? According to a broader classification concept, Internet products are divided into five major categories, and the products currently operating on the Internet are basically within these circles.

1. User community. The community is the most in need of operation because from a product perspective, there is not much difference. There may be some emphasis on the functional level, but overall it is a platform that attracts specific users to produce content.
2. E-commerce community. Why do we need to break it down? Because the product goals of user community products are different, this is also reflected in the different monetization methods of these two products. The user community first gathers people together and then considers how to monetize these people. The ultimate goal of all content generated by the e-commerce community itself is to stimulate user consumption, so I separate these two.
3. Tool products. Users of this type of product may not have a strong need to log in. I know that the purpose of users coming to me is to use the product, but after using it, I don’t know where they will land or why they will gather. This is a very typical tool product.
4. O2O products , the popularity of this type of products has gradually declined in the past two years, but it still has a large scale.
5. Financial management was particularly hot when P2P emerged last year and the year before last. This product has certain special user attributes.

Before attracting users, think about which type they belong to in the products you operate? This can help you narrow the scope and find your users more effectively.

After considering the above two issues, we should really start thinking about ways to attract seed users. Next, I will introduce some strategies and methods that are often used to attract seed users.

I abstract this method into four major methods:

1. Channel acquisition and screening;
2. Invitation mechanism;
3. Platform activities;
4. Offline point-to-point.

1. Channel operation is the first step, and the product must be launched first

When it comes to channels, everyone thinks that channel operation and user operation are completely different things and there is no necessary connection between them. Many operations colleagues believe that when a product is launched, the first thing you think of is to launch the product. Whether it is an APP, Xiaokaxiu, or even a public account, the first thing to do is to launch the product through channels first. Only when users come in do you start to consider user operations.

In fact, many companies are very small, so some operations people will take on channel work after the product is launched, and then do operations after users gather. But in fact, when you choose a channel, you should pay more attention after submitting your materials. The channel itself will have its own channel activities. If you want to select your own seed users, you must make good use of these channels.

For example, Xiaomi market has an outing season in April, or "618" is coming in June and there is an e-commerce consumption season. Have you submitted your products to the event to get a chance? Because during this period, the users who download are already users interested in e-commerce consumption. The conversion rate of these users is definitely much higher than the conversion rate of your general submission of installation package downloads.

In fact, this is the same as the pre-installation of mobile phone apps. In the past, the pre-installation price was based on the number of installations and the amount of money per user. However, the current pre-installation is also different from before. Now many manufacturers will have relatively in-depth cooperation. If your product has its own unique value, you can discuss deeper cooperation with these mobile phone manufacturers. For example, if I make a beauty camera product, can I directly implant my product into the original camera of a mobile phone and share users with the manufacturer? These are all worth paying attention to.

After the channel operation submits the product, the product enters the cold start stage. This stage is the time to accumulate the original batch of seed users. How to discover? After the product is cold-started, have you noticed the path these channel users take after entering the product? The above picture shows the basic path for a user to enter a product for the first time. This path can help us determine whether he will become a seed user. User path: entering the product through recommendation/download, most users may consume the content on the recommendation page, some users just glance at it and leave, while some users may leave the current page and enter the second page for a second consumption and may jump multiple times until they decide there is no more content of interest and leave the product.

By observing the user path, we can screen a group of users. Generally speaking, you need to observe whether there are any differences in the length of time a user stays in your product. If so, you need to single out the top users who are very willing to consume your product, make a second recommendation to them, and bring them back a second time, so as to slowly convert these users into your seed users. This starts with channels, and I hope everyone can think more deeply about it in daily operations.

From the perspective of channels, you can probably accumulate seed users initially by participating in application market activities that suit you and observing user paths. Of course, there are still many details involved. Let me first introduce to you the method of thinking. The specific practical operations require you to learn from others and be flexible.

2. Bring more benefits to both the sharer and the sharee through invitation 

Next, let’s talk about the more commonly used invitation mechanism. This section gives several examples of different types of products to help you understand the differences.

First, let’s take the user community as an example: Do you still remember this page?

Although the user activity of Kaixin.com is not as active as it was in its heyday, it was indeed very popular at one time. One of the reasons why it spread so quickly in the beginning was due to its invitation mechanism. Because the core of SNS is still a community. It establishes relationships between people through its products through invitation, which is the core of the user community. The main feature of this type of invitation is to attract users through content and social relationships. The first batch of users were actually its own employees. Because when SNS was emerging, everyone believed in the six degrees theory, which said that there was only a distance of six people between each other. Therefore, it uses this theory to spread the product's extended relationships, using social games such as stealing vegetables and grabbing parking spaces to stimulate everyone to invite interactions. These are all means, and its purpose is to quickly establish connections with users through these methods.

It is also an invitation mechanism. Let’s see how products with tool attributes will do it. Take Dropbox as an example. If you invite your friends to use Dropbox, you will get more space. Through invitations, more product features can be brought to sharers and sharees. This is the driving force for users of tool-type products to share.

One of the characteristics of invitations for financial management is that they attract customers by offering profit rebates. This is also because the operators of such products clearly realize that when users use financial management products, the core purpose is to get more money, which is their driving force. Therefore, in financial products, the invitation mechanism is used to the extreme. It will even be divided into more levels, dividing the invitations into: how many people you invite, how many accumulated people, and how many points I will return to you, in this way stimulating you to share with more friends. And when it comes to actually sharing, the friends you share with won’t have too much burden. He thinks that if I share it with you, both of us will benefit, so the invitation method is very frequently used in financial products.

Its method is that the initial seed users basically start from friends' recommendations. The conversion rate of this method must be relatively high. Various tools and financial products like to publish their own reward invitations through various platforms.

When everyone is using this method, it depends on the stability of the product and whether you can afford the money. If you want to do it, you should think about how to measure the input-output ratio, how much income you get based on how much input you put in.

3. Platform activities: low cost and accurate positioning

Some products are actually a community or a forum in themselves. Some products may have their own accounts on other platforms and maintain users on other platforms. According to the attributes of your own products, you can publish your own platform activities on many platforms with many user categories to collect original seed users. After collecting user information in this way, it is necessary to follow up in a timely manner and establish subsequent communication channels with users.

I saw a fitness software on Weibo before. It is a typical large-platform activity that acquires seed users. His platform activity is to post a message on Weibo to call on fitness experts to run a certain number of kilometers together, or to achieve certain fitness goals together. In fact, in terms of volume, its posts were not forwarded very much, only about 200 times, and there were probably about 100 to 200 users who responded. However, because the user group targeted in the activity was relatively precise, the quality of these users was relatively high, and most of these people were also absorbed by the operation as seed users. When doing an activity, you must first think about it carefully. What is the purpose of my activity? What kind of users should be attracted? These users are not what I want. This software is very smart. When it first started the activity, it recruited people who love sports. Everyone who answered below could be privately messaged by the operator to become a seed user.

4. Peer-to-peer seeding is most suitable for the O2O industry

Example: Didi Taxi. I worked on innovative O2O products for a while before. At that time, I did some research and asked my friends at Didi how they accumulated these users in the beginning?

He said, we should first go deep into the industry and understand where the target user group (B-side drivers) is? Then we went to places like the South Station to install mobile phones for the drivers one by one. After installing the system on their phones, the drivers tried it out with some doubts, and then the employees started pretending to be users hailing a taxi to create a scenario in which the drivers would receive an order. Drivers gradually heard the sound and began to realize that this thing could really receive orders. The company began to spread the word internally, and Didi became popular among drivers and attracted a large number of B-end users.

Point-to-point pulling is actually a very primitive operation with little technical content. But you have to think about what kind of product you want? What kind of users are seed users who can attract more target users? For example, it is very costly to attract a big V, but how many users can this big V's influence bring you? For example, iQiyi brought in Gao Xiaosong at the time, and later brought in Ma Dong. The cost of bringing these two people in was very high, but they brought in a lot of attention. According to this method, you should first think clearly about your product types and user types and classify them well, and do not blindly pursue a single user volume.

Author: Wang Xuefei

Source: Wang Xuefei