NetEase’s marketing methodology for screen-sweeping!

To swipe the screen once may be luck, but to swiping the screen multiple times must be the result of methodology. What kind of methodology has NetEase grasped to continuously create hit products and flood the circle of friends of white-collar workers?

On the evening of September 11, another H5 from NetEase Dada team went viral on WeChat Moments. The animal protection charity H5, titled "She died after struggling for 48 hours, and no one knew", used an anthropomorphic approach to make more young people feel the importance of animal protection, and sparked discussions and sharing among countless users. In the end, due to too many users sharing, the post reached the daily sharing threshold of about 1 million times in the Moments of Friends (data from the Almighty Uncle) in just 3 hours and became visible only to oneself, which shows NetEase's ability to create hits.

To swipe the screen once may be luck, but to swiping the screen multiple times must be the result of methodology. Currently, whether the screen swiping exceeds the WeChat sharing threshold has become one of the core indicators to measure whether marketing is successful or not. What kind of methodology has NetEase grasped to continuously create hit products and flood the circle of friends of white-collar workers?

1. Insight into human nature and the underlying design that satisfies the seven deadly sins of human nature

All addictive products are essentially designed to satisfy human nature. The same goes for sharing on WeChat Moments. Only by satisfying users’ human nature can users become unable to stop and thus trigger word-of-mouth communication. The core manifestation of this is screen-sweeping on social media such as Weibo and WeChat. NetEase’s continuous H5 screen-sweeping deeply meets user needs among the seven deadly sins of human nature.

The seven deadly sins come from Catholic doctrine and refer to human sins such as gluttony, lust, greed, anger, laziness, envy and arrogance. Therefore, Internet products are constantly in line with human nature, maximizing profits by constantly strengthening and satisfying users' "human needs".

We can see that Luk Kin Coffee, which took advantage of "greed", used free gifts to become the representative of the new middle-class coffee, Ctrip, which took advantage of "lust", used the seven young and handsome boys of Lehua Entertainment for marketing, and Wang Sicong, who took advantage of "anger", criticized internet celebrities for causing miscarriages in pregnant women, which became a hot topic. We can see that Ele.me and Mobike, which took advantage of "laziness", captured hundreds of millions of users.

The marketing of NetEase M2 and DaDa team is more based on the human nature of users' arrogance. People have a natural desire to be valued and paid attention to, which is also expressed by Kevin Tsai:

"Humans are more interested in themselves than you can imagine, and if humans haven't shown that much interest in themselves in the past, it's because the tools weren't good enough to let you show how interested you are in yourself."

The circle of friends is the core platform for satisfying people's desire for self-expression. Especially when the circle of friends becomes a place for acquaintances, friends and work partners, performing a "better self" has become a subconscious or conscious action for many users. They "shape" a better self through selfies, food, learning sharing, and photos with celebrities.

As the famous American sociologist Goffman wrote in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

"As performers, members of society are eager to create an acceptable image in front of the audience, so everyone tries his best to perform on the stage of social life. In interpersonal interaction, his interest is always to control the behavior of others, especially to control their reactions to him."

Regarding the sin of arrogance in the circle of friends, the author has also expressed it in the previous article "You are acting, you are "trapped", and you are in a "fake" circle of friends". NetEase's marketing cleverly took advantage of the sin of "arrogance":

1. This H5 is related to animal protection and is an expression of personal animal protection philosophy;
2. The H5 theme is about the protection of wild animals, which makes it easier to shape the image of a person's concern for animal protection;
3. The H5 reflects NetEase's consistent high standards with its anthropomorphic creativity, and is more likely to shape the image of a person's forward-looking understanding of new things.

Regardless of the psychological factor, it is essentially showing a better self to friends in the circle of friends, and this is the fundamental reason that attracted more than 1 million users to forward and share within 3 hours.

Many of NetEase’s H5 marketing efforts have achieved the effect of sweeping the screen with the help of “arrogance”. For example, the Jungian psychology and AI face-scanning playlists launched by the M2 team of NetEase Cloud Music have both achieved the effect of sweeping the screen with the help of “arrogance”.

In addition to arrogance, gluttony, lust, greed, anger, laziness and jealousy can all be well implanted into marketing products, thereby achieving the effect of swiping the screen.

For example: Ctrip used lust to "cooperate" with "Produce 101" mentor Wang Yibo, which boosted its popularity; in 2016, Pepsi used "anger" to collaborate with Liu Xiao Ling Tong for the Year of the Monkey marketing, which earned it a wave of word-of-mouth and also helped Liu Xiao Ling Tong appear on CCTV; Roseonly took advantage of the mutual "jealousy" and desire for happiness between couples to capture a large number of young girls. The most successful marketing method that utilizes human nature is "strike the rich and divide the land", which will not be discussed here.

2. Design and technical expression of activity creativity

The daily active users of WeChat have exceeded 1 billion. In a sense, WeChat has become the most important word-of-mouth marketing platform. Occupying the circle of friends is the key to measuring the success of a marketing campaign. Precisely because the circle of friends has become almost the only battlefield for word-of-mouth, numerous brands have flocked in and raised the user threshold, just like people who have taken the little blue pill for a long time. If they stop taking it, it is difficult to have an experience that exceeds their expectations.

Zhou Hongyi has an intuitive explanation for exceeding expectations:

"If you are given a bottle of mineral water today and Moutai is added to it, it will exceed your expectations. This is called experience."

Exceeding expectations is the fundamental reason why H5 marketing activities go viral. Only when the marketing activities exceed users' expectations in some aspect can they create a viral effect. Just like the Second Law of Saint Seiya, the same content will be invalid the second time.

The H5 marketing of "She died after struggling for 48 hours" innovatively brings users into the doomsday crisis scene from a first-person perspective, while highlighting the plot with visual scrolling animation and black and white tones, making the fire special effects, blood-red special effects, and sound and picture effects more impactful, forming a strong visual contrast.

The main types of H5 that can be spread now are as follows:

(1) Brand-new technical expression

H5 uses completely different technical methods or overall forms of expression than before, for example: the black-and-white comic form of "She Died After Struggling for 48 Hours"; for example: the previous marketing that simulated WeChat group chats; for example: Sogou Input Method 's first-person perspective of "Don't Send Me Long Voice Messages on WeChat Anymore"; for example: Jay Chou's customized video for the sixth anniversary of LOL + interactive creative combination of "Jay Chou's Mind Reading"; for example: Pechoin 's one-shot magical advertisement.

(2) Deeply understand and utilize human nature

All marketing that can promote user sharing is a deep exploration and utilization of human nature. For example, various test questions are the most important models; for example, NetEase’s "Jungian Psychology" test; for example, NetEase Cloud Music’s "Hi! Click to generate your instruction manual" test; for example: Zhihu "You in a Parallel World" marketing.

(3) Provoking and creating conflicts and venting

Marketing is essentially user insight . Only touching insights can trigger touching communications. Creating and intensifying conflicts is essentially an essential weapon to trigger screen swiping. For example: There used to be a "Mi ( Mimeng ) content" in the circle of friends to identify friends, and every article by Mi Meng would always trigger positive and negative discussions; for example: Xin Shixiang 's " Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou " and "Book Throwing Operation" are the epitome of creating conflicts and triggering users to vent.

"She died after struggling for 48 hours and no one knew" is essentially buried with the fierce conflict of whether protecting wild animals and being eaten by humans are equal, and whether forwarding is helpful in protecting animals.

(4) Cross-border expression of creativity

Another manifestation of exceeding expectations is breaking down and reorganizing familiar things to form completely new elements. For example: Douyin 's "The First Cultural Relics Drama Conference" combines cultural relics and Douyin to form a unique style.

(5) Emotional resonance and identification

One of the reasons why zodiac signs are so popular is that they give users enough sense of involvement and emotional resonance. Nike’s “just do it” attitude, China Merchants Bank’s “Tomato and Scrambled Eggs”, and Tencent’s 99 Charity Children’s Gallery are all typical cases.

Of course, there are also negative screen-sweeping patterns, such as: the pattern of refreshing the lower limit of user perception; for example: Juewei Duck Neck puts an advertisement with strong sexual connotations on the homepage of its Taobao store; for example: Uniqlo ’s Sanlitun incident.

3. NetEase’s precise cold start population

The solidification of circles is the biggest problem facing marketing. The Internet has created a social cocoon for everyone, and the solidification of browsing habits and crowds has further strengthened the information cocoon. Therefore, information distribution platforms such as Toutiao have even put forward the slogan "What you care about is the headline."

There are two core challenges that circle solidification poses to marketing:

1. Marketing only ferments within a certain circle and cannot have an impact outside the circle;
2. The interests of different circles vary greatly, and it is difficult for marketing to influence all circles.

There is only one core method for advertising sponsors such as Taobao and JD to break through their circles during Double 11 and 618 , and that is full-media marketing bombardment. From TV to the Internet, from online to offline, we ensure that any channel can reach users, ultimately forming an impact on all circles of users. But not every brand has the ability to invest such huge amounts of money. If you want to spread across circles, you may be able to learn from NetEase’s approach.

(1) Accurate and efficient cold start of the crowd

The first step to create a nationwide screen-sweeping effect is to break the circle. The first step to breaking the circle is to penetrate the circle, create an instant intensive screen-sweeping effect, and ultimately attract the blind pursuit of general users in the circle.

NetEase's cold start-up is very mature. NetEase's core users are white-collar users with a unique literary style. The platforms for H5 cold start are the two core platforms of NetEase News and NetEase Cloud Music. Therefore, NetEase's marketing in the circle has always had an extremely accurate cold start method. The natural love of sharing and commenting by NetEase users makes it easier for H5 marketing to reach a wider circle through sharing.

Accurate cold start of the crowd can ensure that a screen-sweeping effect is formed within the circle in a short period of time, forming a short-term screen-sweeping effect within the circle.

(2) Use marketing PR to spread the circle

The first thing we need to dispel is that apart from Taobao and JD’s high-cost advertising coverage across the entire network, no other marketing can break the circle and form omni-channel marketing. Once marketing has gained a certain degree of popularity and influence within a circle, the spread of the circle becomes inevitable.

Only by spreading the marketing momentum within the circle can it be possible to achieve a wider range of dissemination. At this time, the factors that dominate the old circle have greatly reduced their influence in the inner circle, and it is impossible to achieve the effect of dominating the new circle. Therefore, marketing PR plays the role of breaking the circle.

The role of marketing PR is to package and elevate marketing, creating the illusion that everyone is swiping the screen (yes, it is an illusion), and arousing understanding and even discussion among the marketing industry and a larger circle of users, forming a real national hot topic. In fact, for marketing, it is not necessary to truly achieve universal marketing. As long as the marketing industry media and mainstream discourse users are guided, the illusion of universal screen swiping will be formed within the industry.

NetEase is a brand with its own style. The consistently high standards of the Dada team and the M2 team have formed a group of followers. In marketing, NetEase, as a media rather than a brand, is extremely subtle in its exposure of the brand, forming a marketing model that does marketing but does not over-emphasize the brand. Therefore, NetEase's marketing is more likely to be reported by self-media , resulting in reports that go viral among the public.

NetEase’s marketing continues to dominate the WeChat Moments and is widely sought after by marketing media and self-media . However, behind all these hot products is the methodology of dominating the WeChat Moments. Through insights into human nature, it forms circle dominating activities and uses tap water marketing to create the illusion of nationwide dominating activities. This is NetEase’s replicable methodology.

Source: Rare