How to get users to voluntarily forward and recommend your products?

To promote more effective sales conversion of products, it is necessary to promote the sharing and forwarding of product information among acquaintances.

If your product is a C-end product, then you will definitely find that among all the conversion channels for user purchases, recommendations from friends and family must account for the highest proportion and are the most important. Users are more likely to trust a product recommended by a friend than a product advertisement they see on TV, even if the latter may be an unknown brand .

In the past, friend recommendations were spread through word of mouth among neighbors, but the difficulty for brands is that it is difficult for brands to get involved in this marketing model of recommendations from friends and relatives. However, the rise of mobile Internet has made information sharing among friends faster and more monitorable. The forwarding of brand information allows brands to intervene in the recommendation of friends and relatives, which has been the most important conversion channel since ancient times.

Therefore, the logic is that in order to promote more effective product sales conversion, it is necessary to promote the sharing and forwarding of product information among acquaintances. Then, brands can start from the following two aspects:

1. Create brand content and forward materials to users

Sometimes users do not think that forwarding brand information will affect their personal image in their circle of friends , but that the brand does not provide enough content for users to forward. Users are very lazy and will not rack their brains to take photos, edit pictures and come up with forwarding messages just to forward your brand information. They would rather you just give them ready-made copy and pictures so they can just copy them mindlessly.

In other words, it’s not that users are unwilling to forward and share, but that you have not provided the corresponding materials. You ask users to use their brainpower to spontaneously help you spread the word, and the starting product must be amazing, otherwise it will be very difficult.

So, what brands need to do is to focus on content creation so that users can more easily forward and share brand information. You can start from the following two aspects:

1. Diversified content to meet different forwarding needs

Generally speaking, brand content is divided into two types. One is sales information, such as coupons, promotions and other information, which can bring direct conversions to products; the other is brand information, such as sentimental and emotional propositions, which can bring long-term premium to the brand.

Users have two different sharing channels on WeChat . The first is sharing among acquaintances, which is mostly based on people with strong social relationship chains, such as family , girlfriends, dormitory groups, friends, etc. The second is sharing and forwarding in the circle of friends, which can be seen more as information release by self-media , information sharing based on weak social relationship chains, and one-way release of life status. The same is true for platforms such as Weibo and Douyin .

Then, when creating brand content, you can create different content for different channels shared by users:

1) Share with down-to-earth friends

When sharing with friends in a strong relationship chain, more down-to-earth content is needed. Because in this strong relationship chain, both parties are very familiar with each other and can remove the disguise of their personalities and directly communicate and share, so it is more necessary to be straightforward and get to the point as soon as possible.

So in this scenario, brands can create more entertaining and "magical" content as well as promotional content.

People tend to care about their image in the public eye, so even if they see interesting content, they will be more concerned about the damage to their own image if the content is too popular. Even if you have the urge to forward discount information when you see it, you will worry about whether sharing it on your circle of friends will lower the quality of your own personality. Therefore, joke content and promotional sharing are more likely to be forwarded among friends and acquaintances.

2) Share in high-end friend circle

Unlike sharing and forwarding in strong relationship chains, people in weak relationship chains care more about shaping their own personality image. Whether in WeChat Moments , or self-media channels such as Weibo and Douyin, we rarely see the forwarding of discount information, but more of beautiful photos and high-end lifestyles. It is not that they will not forward discount information and jokes, but the channels let them make content choices.

But precisely because self-media channels such as WeChat Moments have a wider personal coverage, brands also need to make corresponding plans for the forwarded content in WeChat Moments. From high-quality promotional videos to daily check-in signatures like golden sentences, or beautiful copywriting and posters, they can all make users want to forward them to their friends circle in order to maintain their personal image in the circle of friends.

The other type is interesting but not vulgar content, which is also easy to be forwarded in the circle of friends, such as pictures and texts created with comics, interesting videos on Tik Tok, etc. Being not vulgar is the basic requirement, while being interesting is about building brand affinity and creating points of content, giving users a clear point for forwarding and sharing.

2. Content templates allow users to produce materials on their own

In addition to the original content produced by brands, content generated spontaneously by users is of great significance to brands. It enables brands to increase their exposure exponentially with little investment, but many brands want to allow users to generate content, and there are not many successful cases.

1) Content modularization

If you want users to generate content, on the one hand, the brand’s communication content needs to be modular and simple enough. We can all see that the secondary creation of the "Friendship Boat" comic has swept the entire Internet. In addition to external reasons such as social emotions, the core reason is that the comic is very easy to replicate on a large scale. It only needs to add two sentences to become a new content.

Modular content greatly reduces the learning cost for users. Because the threshold for creation is lowered, users are interested in trying. Users are naturally motivated to forward their own creations, and in the process of forwarding, your brand exposure is increased.

2) Professional content guidance

Every communication case will face the problem of initial delivery. Compared with content production, in order to guide users to spontaneously produce content, brands need to prepare a large amount of professional content production, that is, to drive UGC through PGC .

The content produced professionally by the brand can have a demonstration effect on users. When your initial users reach a certain level or the content produced by the brand reaches a certain amount, it will easily trigger users to follow suit and create content.

In addition, the content professionally produced by brands will be of higher quality and have greater dissemination value than the content produced by most users.

2. Products exceed expectations and create a pleasant experience

The product itself will be the strongest motivation for users to forward it. If your product is good enough, users will spontaneously share and forward it. In the final analysis, users buy your products or services. The quality of the product essentially determines whether the user's needs are met. Giving users a surprise can exceed their expectations. In fact, it is similar to the mentality of "picking up a bargain". They spend a certain cost but get products that exceed their plans. This will make users spontaneously share with their friends.

In fact, it is not new that products exceed expectations, but there are also a few points that are easy to overlook:

1. 100 points is the passing score

In today's era of product oversupply, users have a large number of products to choose from in every field. A product scoring 100 points is merely a passing score and there is nothing worth sharing or forwarding. The 100 points mentioned here means that the product can perform its functions well. For example, if you sell laundry, washing clothes very clean is not something worth users forwarding. The quality of the product function itself is no longer the driving force for forwarding. Achieving the desired effect is only the starting line for a good product.

In order to get users to spontaneously share product information, the experience must be more than 100 points. For example, your laundry detergent can clean faster than other brands. Other brands may take 40 minutes to clean, but yours only takes 20 minutes to achieve the same effect. This is a product that exceeds expectations.

This involves the issue of setting an anchor point, that is, what is a 100-point product? This explanation often comes from the brand's external publicity. The product efficacy that the brand guarantees to consumers is 100 points for your product, and achieving what you guarantee is merely passing. Taking the laundry detergent example above as an example, if your promotional materials state that it can be washed clean in 20 minutes, then users will use 20 minutes as an anchor point when using the product and will not generate new expectations beyond that.

Therefore, brands may need to make good use of "reserved items" as saying "one more thing" may not necessarily become the real "one more thing". Surprises that are not highlighted in external publicity may become a point of sharing for product word-of-mouth communication

2. Exceeding expectations in terms of experience, not functionality

When it comes to exceeding expectations, it is more about the expectations of the product experience rather than the product functions. In fact, users buy your product to solve their specific needs. Users will not get more benefits because your product has more functions. Sometimes, too many superpositions of product functions will make users more confused and stressed when using the product. This is the meaning of "less is more".

Stacking product functions will reduce the product experience. The user may just want to cure the flu, but you insist on giving him a full physical examination, which will increase the burden on the user.

Exceeding expectations means exceeding expectations in product experience. From logistics speed to customer service attitude to product packaging, every aspect of the user experience can exceed expectations. But many of the results that exceeded expectations are the result of large amounts of fixed capital investment and process optimization, and are not as simple as they seem.

3. Cost-effectiveness is not everything

In the era of consumption upgrading, users are not as sensitive to cost-effectiveness as before, but of course it is still a key factor. Generally speaking, a price reduction can lower users’ expectations for a product, making it easier to achieve an experience that exceeds their expectations. But at the same time, price reduction will also make users skeptical about the product, and the influence of this psychological factor may very likely lead to an illusion of product experience.

MINISO once said that it is always questioned why its prices are so cheap and whether its product quality is not up to standard. The same situation has been proven by many psychological experiments and practical cases. For example, if a pound of Chilean imported cherries costs 60 yuan, you may think it is good value for money. If the price drops to 40 yuan, users may start complaining about quality issues, such as not being sweet enough or easy to rot. In fact, there may not be any obvious difference in product quality.

To sum up, by building diversified content, meeting users' recommendation and forwarding needs through various channels, and achieving spontaneous recommendations from users through exceeding expectations of product experience, your products and brands will be able to gain more exposure in the current communication environment.

Source: Spread Gymnastics (ID:chuanboticao)