NetEase's marketing hot-selling methodology, here are 3 points to think about

A hit product is something that can only be achieved by chance. This may be true for most companies, but NetEase is an exception.

Companies in Hangzhou seem to have a keen sense of brand marketing , such as Alibaba and NetEase. Whether it is NetEase Cloud Music’s subway music reviews, NetEase’s carefully selected hotels, or the personality test in “Identity V” , they have all been “explosive” in the circle of friends to varying degrees.

It is worth noting that these popular products come from the continuous output of different business lines within NetEase Group. Behind this phenomenon of mass-produced hits, there must be rules at the mechanism and methodological levels that can be explored. A high-quality brand promotion campaign may not necessarily guarantee market performance, but viewing brand marketing as optional will almost certainly ensure that the brand will be short-lived and unsustainable.

Last week, NetEase Media made a new structural adjustment and established a cultural and creative division, which is responsible for tasks including the creation of high-quality courses in NetEase Open Courses. In addition, this new department will also undertake some tasks to continue creating "explosive products" for NetEase Media. The Boiling Point Studio under it will be responsible for the creation of self-media matrices including Caozhi and Dada, which can influence up to 4 million to 5 million fans.

Whether it is Caozhi or Dada, the purpose is to establish communication channels with young people and create a better brand impression for NetEase.

A recent success story of NetEase Dada team is an h5 titled "She died after struggling for 48 hours and no one knew about it". You may have seen this title in your circle of friends. In fact, this is an h5 advocating social attention to animal protection, which eventually received more than 20 million visits.

The development of NetEase DaDa has been quite dramatic. In its early days, it was a content platform for NetEase to communicate with young people and had its own App. Subsequently, the content platform stopped updating and the App was removed from the shelves . Dada deviated from its established course and re-established its reputation by producing h5.

5 million visits is a hard indicator for evaluating whether h5 is a hit.

Compared with most h5 production teams, NetEase DaDa has a good efficiency in producing hit products and can produce at least three hit products every year.

1. Why h5

Wen Chutao knows the development history of NetEase's marketing system like the back of his hand. He is the operations director of the newly established cultural and creative business unit and controls the development direction of NetEase's Dada team.

When asked why NetEase became a factory for manufacturing marketing blockbusters, Wen Chutao quickly answered - " NetEase's own mechanism ." He believes that NetEase is fully aware of the importance of brand marketing and is willing to make arrangements for it.

Among the many marketing contents, h5 is currently the form that is easier to produce popular products, so NetEase also has many h5 production teams - in addition to NetEase Dada, it also includes the newly established M2 studio within NetEase Cloud Music. NetEase Entertainment also has its own h5 production team. In addition, the design center also has h5 designers and technical developers to provide support.

The NetEase DaDa team will also separate from Boiling Point Studios at the end of this year to form a separate studio.

The emphasis on the h5 format stems from the confidence in this marketing medium. In fact, the large-scale development of h5 has only been four or five years since 2014, and the driving force behind it comes from the circle of friends.

The context of Moments determines that it is only friendly to graphic and text content. It is difficult for pure video content to find a way to achieve fission propagation through Moments. In this context, the advantages of h5 are revealed. It can carry various contents including pictures, texts, and videos, and makes multi-form interactions possible.

After seeing the space and possibility for brand communication, take immediate action. This is what Wen Chutao calls the "mechanism." Wen Chutao believes that from the perspective of h5, in addition to general expressions, the "mechanism" is also composed of more detailed methodologies. Although these techniques cannot establish an inevitable causal relationship with the production of hit products, they can greatly increase the probability of successful brand marketing.

2. Hot-selling Methodology

Let’s review the evolution of h5 over the past five years: At the beginning of 2014, h5 was more of a PPT page-turning application. Although it was not novel in terms of form, it brought a lot of impact to people at that time. Subsequently, with the popularity of h5s such as "Surround the Nervous Cat", "Wu Yifan is about to join the army?!", and " Travel through the Forbidden City to See You " which let ancient emperors sing rap, take selfies and post on WeChat Moments, this "spectacle" presented through technology has become the mainstream method for h5 to attract attention.

The novelty brought by strong stimulation is fleeting, and content return became the theme of marketing communication from 2017 to 2018. For example, the post “This post is intentionally left blank” published in March 2017 allowed young people to find emotional resonance in life, and the final sentence “ Tomb-Sweeping Day should not be your festival” made people forward it out of grief.

In Wen Chutao's opinion, the dissemination of news clients and WeChat ecosystem is fundamentally different. The former focuses on clicks, while the latter focuses on sharing . Besides, every h5 starts from scratch. Having a good title does not guarantee the number of readers. The quality of the content is the key. This has become the reason why h5 marketing returns to the essence of content after the technical flow.

"The starting point is important. If the point is wrong, there will be problems no matter how well you do." Wen Chutao believes that the role of planning in the entire h5 production process may be much more important than most people realize. The reason why NetEase’s entire brand communication system often produces hits is largely related to the “planning center system”.

In the NetEase Dada team, planners have the highest say, while designers and front-end developers tend to be more executive. Planners have the final say in almost all production links, which makes the quality of planning determine the output efficiency of the work. Planners need to be sensitive to surrounding social issues and have relatively accurate intuition.

The video produced by Dada team titled “This is the childhood that adults dare not open” achieved good results, with over 1.5 million visits within 3 hours. The reason for stimulating forwarding is people's nostalgia. In this h5, cartoon characters such as "Slam Dunk", "Sailor Moon" and " Doraemon " are strung together. The sense of the times behind these images has become a trigger for people's emotions. On the surface, people are sharing anime images, but in fact they are sharing their own youth.

"The most important point is that h5 is best produced in-house. It is difficult to guarantee the output quality of h5 by outsourcing the team," Wen Chutao specifically mentioned. In a rapidly changing communications environment, an internal team that can ensure response at all times is obviously more agile.

3. What kind of h5 makes people want to share?

Wen Chutao believes that as long as sufficient motivation and benefits are provided, the sharing and dissemination of h5 will be a natural outcome. As for what kind of motivation and benefits will trigger users to share, it covers four levels :

(1) Common company interests: People tend to spread content produced by their own company, but it is easy to be niche;

(2) Group interests: content related to the group’s concerns, such as Party B often sharing content that criticizes Party A;

(3) Interest motivation: triggering people’s interest in certain things. Common test h5s take advantage of people’s curiosity;

(4) Emotions and resonance: It makes people feel emotional, and driven by emotions, people are more likely to share.

Specifically, some content provides users with natural motivation and benefits for sharing.

For example, the "Children's Gallery" h5 launched by Tencent Charity combines charity elements with autistic children. The care for vulnerable groups makes the sharing of h5 a natural result; "Late at night, a male colleague asked me if I slept..." released by NetEase Youdao successfully triggered people's curiosity, and ultimately combined with interesting content to create sufficient reasons for users to share. In fact, this "curiosity-oriented title + interesting content" has become one of the fixed formulas for producing hits.

After working in operations for many years, Wen Chutao has accumulated a lot of experience. For example, h5s related to nostalgia factors and animal protection themes are more likely to be shared. In addition, content that can effectively arouse people's excitement, anger, happiness and other emotions will also bring a stronger possibility of sharing.

Although there are also doubting voices that believe h5 is facing some bottlenecks and doubts, and some comments even bluntly state that h5 has become popular, NetEase obviously believes that there is still a lot of room for development in h5.

Each form of marketing has its own characteristics and rules. One of the conditions for producing a hit is to adapt to the communication environment . "For example, in the communication environment of WeChat h5, the role of recommended positions and KOLs is smaller than imagined. This is a track that truly tests content."

Source: 36kr