To find out the hot marketing trends in the second half of 2018, just look at these 7 cases!

Yesterday’s “official announcement” and today’s Double Ninth Festival, everyone has been busy following the hot topics these past two days. Q4 is an important battlefield for brands and companies to sprint to the year-end peak season. With the clustering of hot festivals at the end of the year, it is a good time for brands to concentrate their efforts. How to seize the peak consumption season at the end of the year and launch a successful marketing campaign?

Let’s first take stock of the important festivals that we need to deal with. Basically, they can be divided into two categories: traditional festivals and modern festivals. There are still three traditional festivals this year: Frost Descent, Beginning of Winter, Light Snow, Heavy Snow , and Winter Solstice; there are five major modern festivals: Halloween , Double 11, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas . There are a total of nine festival hotspots, big and small, that are worthy of brands' attention. How can we utilize so many hot spots and carry out marketing well?

Traditional festivals: Chinese style

With the popularity of social media , traditional festivals including the 24 solar terms have become important marketing nodes that brands cannot ignore. Of course, hot posters are a must for brand marketing . During traditional festivals, a hot Chinese-style poster with thoughtful copywriting and full of sincerity will surely impress your consumers.

Pechoin ’s dynamic poster for the beginning of winter has its own charm.

The dynamic poster released by Wuliangye during the light snow season is also in a beautiful Chinese style, with eye-catching copywriting, placing the product perfectly in the light snow scene, which is very appropriate.

Modern festivals: let’s have fun

Compared with these traditional festivals, modern festivals at the end of the year play a more important role in brand marketing campaigns.

Halloween

Halloween is a festival from the West. The custom of dressing up as a ghost makes the festive atmosphere of Halloween particularly relaxed and happy. Consumers may not take Halloween seriously, but dressing up as a ghost on Halloween is itself very interesting, full of topics, and has high public participation, making it a good opportunity for brands to play with social marketing.

McDonald's made a big splash in social marketing last Halloween.

Taking advantage of the Halloween hype, McDonald's released a number of new products, and a set of "Halloween Headlines" themed posters were released on Weibo. The funny and interesting pictures were full of suspense and created a very Halloween atmosphere. At the same time, the "One-Sentence Ghost Story Contest" was launched on Weibo, with cash coupons as rewards to guide fans to participate in the interaction. This can be said to be a very successful case of interaction between the brand and fans.

▌Double Eleven

The carnival of e-commerce is the biggest festival of the year. Discussions about Double Eleven are very lively not only on e-commerce platforms but also on social platforms. Various topics related to shopping, such as planting grass and pulling grass, are widely discussed on social platforms. E-commerce brands, big and small, are concentrating all their efforts on the Double Eleven "battle".

Aokang’s “11.11 Real Discounts” performance art last year was quite interesting. A "fracture group" appeared in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Wuhan, performing "11.11 Real Discounts" performance art at city landmarks, subways, orthopedic hospitals and other places, attracting onlookers from passers-by.

Events such as OKAN executives leading employees to collectively "break bones", couriers breaking bones while delivering packages, and netizens making fun of Tmall were exposed, and major Weibo accounts reposted the messages, and the events continued to spread.

As of noon on November 1, the Weibo topic #11.11真打折扣# had been read over 95 million times and was reported by multiple media outlets . Traffic flowed explosively to OKAN’s Tmall flagship store.

This year’s Double Eleven, e-commerce friends may wish to try this kind of event marketing , cooperate with Weibo topics, KOL dissemination, etc., to directly drive traffic to the store.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is the best time to give back to users. Simple and direct Thanksgiving activities are a good choice for brands, especially e-commerce brands.

Last year's Thanksgiving Day, Gome gave fans a simple and straightforward thanksgiving return by offering in-app purchase discounts.

Black Friday

Shopping festivals from abroad are also a marketing battlefield that e-commerce brands must compete for.

During last year’s Black Friday, Yangmatou teamed up with Weibo to make a big splash in social marketing, opening up a new way of playing e-commerce and social networking.

The combination of numerous resources such as the discovery page banner, massive KOL collaboration, hot searches, etc., are closely linked together, bringing Yangmatou multiple explosive effects in terms of users, sales, and voice. E-commerce brands can refer to Yangmatou and make full use of Weibo’s marketing power in social e-commerce to open up new prospects for the brand.

▌Christmas Eve & Christmas Day

Christmas is a somewhat romantic holiday. When Christmas is approaching, it would be more pleasing to create some romantic or warm theme activities.

Starbucks , which knows how to play, launched the "Christmas Story Cup" last Christmas, which has become a hot topic. The large amount of blank space on the cup leaves a lot of creative space for consumers, guiding fans to create " UGC ". Users who created beautiful cups spontaneously spread the message on the social networking site Instagram, and it quickly became a hot topic. Online topics are generated on social platforms, attracting more users to consume offline and participate in creation, and the online and offline linkage completes the marketing closed loop. You can refer to this idea and use the communication power of social media such as Weibo and WeChat to carry out some interesting topic marketing .

There are less than 80 days left in 2018, and it is the final critical moment of Q4. I hope that the above tactics can help everyone to complete the Q4 tasks!

Source: 91Get