How to make a good holiday marketing picture?

For holiday marketing pictures, it means: find the points of convergence between the festival and the product, and provide points for conveying emotions to users.

Double Eleven is here again. As someone in the "circle", my mobile phone screen has already been dominated by "discounts, offers and promotions" from various brands and platforms. Of course, behind this is the operation of a complete marketing system, from the entire strategic level to the final performance level.

Perhaps many operators still feel a headache when they recall the time they spent preparing for pre-holiday events and planning marketing plans.

Fortunately, I tried a wave of marketing map planning work before the Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, Double Ninth Festival and Double Eleven. I was inspired to talk about and record some of my thoughts:

1. What is festival marketing?

The so-called "marketing" has a "popular version" definition: find ways to create excitement. When there is excitement, users are attracted and there will be traffic available for conversion .

As for "festivals", from ancient times to the present, anything that can be called a "festival" is a spiritual and cultural product that is jointly formed and recognized by the entire society and belongs to the entire collective.

Therefore, there are two key words for holiday marketing, one is "collective" and the other is "spirit". The spirit here can be simply and popularly perceived as "emotion".

So during these special days, no matter what specific expectations we have, deep down we are all seeking some way to gain a sense of participation as a member of the collective, to achieve some kind of emotional perception or release.

I think this is an emotion buried in everyone's heart. If not properly released during the holiday season, it is often accompanied by depression and a sense of loss. In other words, it is a feeling of frustration after falling behind in the group. In order to avoid this frustration as much as possible, we will be more proactive and willing to participate in various activities to celebrate the festival.

For example, if we don’t get to eat rice dumplings during the Dragon Boat Festival , but see big rice dumplings shared by friends on WeChat Moments , we will more or less feel lost. I believe that the reason for the loss is not as simple as not eating delicious rice dumplings, because everyone has eaten rice dumplings. The difference is that if you didn’t eat rice dumplings during the Dragon Boat Festival, you “fell behind”, lacked a sense of collective participation, and missed the emotional perception of this festival.

Therefore, every festival is a national-level large-scale atmosphere-creating machine. Many people have a deep need to participate, perceive and vent their emotions. Therefore, marketing activities at this time can often achieve twice the result with half the effort. To give another example, it’s like Double Eleven, which is another wave of collective participation, momentum and demand, as well as the perception of consumer sentiment. If you don’t buy, you won’t even have the chance to vent your anger and say “I’ll cut my hands off if I buy again.”

2. Why do we need to do festival marketing?

Here, regarding marketing methods and approaches, leaving aside all the high-sounding concepts, many operators ultimately return to this idea: efforts to gain the favor of users. Only when it is liked by users can there be word of mouth, dissemination and conversion.

However, we are living in the Internet age, and the background of this era places more demands on holiday marketing. Traditionally, perhaps we just need to decorate the shopping malls with lights and shout loudly, and in the strong festive atmosphere, we may be attracted to the merchants. The Internet age has brought about a series of changes in time and space. We can compare the same product in different stores on one screen within one minute. These variables make holiday marketing complicated, but also very exciting, and it has become a stage for everyone to perform.

We need to note that the Internet, especially the mobile Internet , has several major characteristics of users:

First, when users turn on their phones, they enter their own world and can select information based on their own feelings.

We often see that many holiday marketing images are actually background images with a few dry holiday greetings and a LOGO. This kind of marketing may actually be more of a "can't do without" perspective. When seeing other companies have various marketing images, they feel that they cannot fall behind and must participate.

But in fact, such participation does not take into account the user's sense of participation. Here we go back to the two key words mentioned earlier. The establishment of user empathy is critical, because in fact, we all know how many people will stay on such a "can't-live-without" picture, and how many will be converted as a result.

Second, users can refuse to receive your information without you noticing.

After we create a holiday marketing picture, we may be in control of the initiative until it is released, but once it is released, we suddenly fall into a passive situation.

We need to have a good understanding of the user's viewing experience and communication effect, but in fact, to achieve this, we still need to spend a lot of effort. However, without actively establishing a monitoring mechanism for user retention and conversion data, it will be difficult for us to make substantial progress and achieve real marketing results.

Third, every user is connected to each other, and everyone is a node of communication.

At this level, more focus is placed on identifying the target users . We need to define the user portrait, the user's experience path of our marketing methods, and the user's usage scenarios. In addition, we must also realize that marketing products are fast-selling products that are fleeting and rarely used a second time.

Therefore, the key to the problem may not be to establish a relationship between us and the target users, but to think about the relationship between users and how to achieve communication between users, which is the key to marketing success.

3. How to make a good holiday marketing picture?

There are many points to consider, and you need to have a very creative imagination. However, you only have so much time to plan and think. Perhaps there is a feasible methodology that can help us quickly achieve our goals. Here I will talk about some methodological issues.

We can go back to the matter of artistic creation and painting creation. We find that the presentation of many pictures is based on the establishment of elements, the construction of the framework, and the final rendering of the whole. This process is particularly reflected in sketching. In addition, for holiday marketing, the two key words mentioned above, "collective" and "emotion", can be described as: finding the fit between the festival and the product, and giving users a point of emotional communication.

Based on the above two points, we can summarize the specific methods, namely the establishment of elements and the way to connect festivals with products.

In terms of establishing elements, it is not difficult to think of a logic similar to "cooking". Imagine that to make a delicious dish, you should think about the taste itself and then deduce the way to make it, or you should directly list the possible materials and then think about the possibility of combination. Which way is simpler and faster?

It’s like if we want to complete a Mid-Autumn Festival marketing picture, we can first conduct a festival background research and list a series of nouns related to all festivals, as well as a series of nouns related to the product, such as the moon, moon cakes, Chang'e, etc. We can quickly anticipate the basic elements that will appear in the picture. After completing this step, the basic materials are prepared.

The next step is to think about how to combine festivals with products. Let’s look at these two examples:

We can see that Sogou Input Method , when it comes to the combination of festivals and products, focuses more on the functionality of the product, that is, the product's functions can meet certain demands of users in festival scenarios, and ultimately bring users' ideas to the characteristics of the product. As for M&G , we may not be able to intuitively perceive its "function", and we may not even know what M&G does (but we actually all know this brand). However, we can intuitively get the emotional expression of the festival from the picture - that is, the reunion mood of Mid-Autumn Festival, and guess the connection between the product and festival behind it.

These are the two ways of combination that I have thought of. The first one, I call functional connection; the second one, I understand as value connection, which is the connection between the festive mood, or the concepts and values ​​represented by the festival and the concepts and values ​​of products and brands. The point of combination is the touch point, which directly faces the questioning of two key words and is the soul of the marketing map.

IV. Conclusion

Of course, the beauty of marketing maps lies in their innovation, and innovation represents uncertainty. This kind of uncertainty produced by methodology is largely intended to solve a certain problem rather than for "poetry and distant places." This may be a bug in the methodology itself, but having a method is always better than going around in circles like a headless fly.

The above are some of my own thoughts. Today is Double Eleven, and we can see many marketing activities again. What kind of imaginative marketing pictures will there be among them? Let’s look forward to it.

Source: Xiao Yanbo