3 strategies for native advertising!

Only by using fewer "tricks" can you truly win the favor of users. In fact, the most effective advertising strategies are often the simplest. This article details native strategies to help you engage users effectively.

Today's operational strategies are becoming more and more complex. In order to gain user clicks and make users willing to download and activate the APP, "routine" copywriting is rampant on advertising platforms, and a variety of activity methods make users feel like they are walking in a maze.

After being "cheated", users will see through the merchants' "tricks" and develop negative emotions towards such products. In fact, the most effective advertising strategies are often the simplest.

Through user insights, we can target precise users and attract them with the most authentic rewards and the most effective advertising copy. I call this strategy the native strategy.

The native strategy includes three aspects: native user insights, native reward strategy and native advertising copy.

1. User Insights

Marketing guru Jack Trout proposed the positioning theory in the early 1970s. The positioning theory has a description about user insight: the effort you put into the minds of future potential customers is to position your product in the minds of your future potential customers.

In the first few years of my career in marketing, Jack Trout's classic marketing book "Positioning" accompanied me through countless anxious nights. Whether it is advertising marketing or user operation, accurate insights into users are very important, especially when looking for new users.

Don't always think that everyone in the market is your user. When attracting new users, you need to conduct in-depth research on existing stock users. Based on the common characteristics of the user group, you can draw a user portrait and then locate the people you need to find.

When doing user insights, think about the following three questions:

1. What are the characteristics of the users on your platform?
2. Where are the potential users with similar characteristics?
3. Where do your lost users go?

By gaining customer insights from existing users, you need to have a deep understanding of your users in terms of user information, behavior, characteristics, social identity, etc., and form a user portrait for your product. Only when the user portrait is clear can it guide you to discover potential customers.

Taking the user insights when online ride-hailing drivers are launching new advertisements as an example, with multiple rounds of subsidies from platforms such as Didi, Shenzhou, Cao Cao, and Meituan, the number of registered online ride-hailing drivers has already reached a very large number, and the penetration rate among car owners is very high.

The high penetration rate of this group of car owners means that it is no longer possible to achieve a large-scale increase in the number of new drivers across the country.

However, there is still a serious problem: from the perspective of the supply and demand balance between drivers and passengers, the capacity of online ride-hailing platforms has been under long-term pressure, and the number of orders received by drivers in many cities cannot keep up with the travel needs of passengers.

Therefore, online ride-hailing platforms cannot relax for a moment in placing advertisements to attract new drivers, and Didi, a super platform, is no exception.

Car owners with mature driving skills and a desire to earn extra money have been bombarded with advertisements from online ride-hailing drivers in recent years. They have found that the effects of conventional advertising are very limited, and the cost of advertising is rising. Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack on advertising platforms, it is better to focus on user insights.

With the support of BI, I conducted a systematic analysis of the existing driver information on the platform and found several important value points: drivers' social identity, place of origin, mobile phone type, special identity tags and other information. One interesting thing is that nearly 12% of the drivers are retired military personnel. These user identity-related information provide a very solid data basis for me to target potential customer groups.

Only by doing enough work on user insights can we locate accurate users when attracting new users, such as label screening when placing advertisements, scene selection when promoting products on the ground, and cooperation platform selection when engaging in business cooperation.

We need to lock in precise channels, occupy the minds of users with native reward strategies, and not miss any opportunity to contact target users.

2. Down-to-earth native reward strategy

Since 2017, the lower-tier markets have been particularly hot, and some more down-to-earth reward strategies have become more effective. When I was visiting a friend in Shaanxi, one of my friends shared a case of “3 eggs = 1 APP download”, which was a very down-to-earth strategy for attracting new customers.

He made a local information APP, and when doing local marketing to acquire customers, he adopted the "eggs for users" strategy. This APP is similar in nature to the products of Tencent Daqin.com, but its target users are more down-to-earth, mainly those in third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas.

When doing ground promotion in county-level towns, the operation staff adopted a strategy of giving away three eggs for every download and activation of the APP. The effect was surprisingly good, and within a few months, they attracted 100,000 new users through this strategy. At the price of 1 yuan per egg, they purchased eggs in bulk as reward materials, which made the cost even lower. A rough estimate of the cost of a single new user reward was less than 3 yuan, which is far lower than the reward cost of many APP ground promotions.

I call this new customer acquisition reward strategy that is customized based on user tone and promotion channels the channel-native strategy.

Reward strategies like this are also very common online. WeChat Reading uses the same strategy to attract new users. New users who download the WeChat Reading APP can get a 20-day free unlimited reading card. For a user who has the urge to read, they can start reading the books they want after downloading the APP. This experience is wonderful, and the funnel conversion data at the registration activation-active user level will not be bad.

Based on the cost of attracting new users, the monthly fee for a member user is 19 yuan, and the cost of a 20-day free reading card is about 12 yuan (19 yuan*20/30). Assuming the same new user acquisition cost is used, but the reward strategy is changed, for example, new users are rewarded with a 19-15 yuan discount coupon for a month, and users can only read unlimited content after paying 4 yuan. This payment threshold will keep most new users out, and the conversion effect will be greatly reduced.

This reward strategy postpones the payment action.

Combining the product features: reading is addictive, just like watching TV series. If after 20 days, you are enjoying a book and your unlimited reading card expires, in order to continue reading, a considerable proportion of users will consider paying and become paying users.

Based on insights into the target users’ needs, physical rewards are used as a means to attract new users. This approach can bring users a much better sense of value than strategies such as downloading to receive cash or receiving coupons for purchases over a certain amount.

3. Speak human language and refuse to use routine advertising copy

Statistics from Nielsen on digital advertising in China show that a person sees as many as 1,500 ads a day, and the average viewing time for each ad is 1.7 seconds.

Good advertising copy should seize these 1.7 seconds to arouse the user's interest and make them click. Especially with the rise of information flow advertising, the concept of native advertising has become increasingly popular.

For operational work, operators have a lot of copywriting to write, including advertising copywriting, banner copywriting, event landing page copywriting, event rules copywriting, etc.

The simplest advertising copy is often the most touching. Today’s mobile phone advertising copy has basically returned to the original copy, such as OPPO’s mobile phone slogan “Charge for five minutes, talk for two hours” and Xiaomi’s mobile phone slogan “Take more beautiful photos of people”. It meets two basic characteristics of excellent copywriting: the product’s selling points are clear and easy for users to understand and remember.

Trick 1: Whitewash or exaggerate product selling points

Among the "routine" copywriting, real estate advertising is probably the most sophisticated.

Many real estate advertisements like to use exaggeration to embellish the selling points of a house. Although such vague descriptions can make the house appear "high-end", in reality, home buyers cannot see any valuable information from such copywriting. The same old exaggerated copywriting will cause the audience to become aesthetically fatigued and find it difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood. For example, the following text:

The advertising slogan for real estate projects far away from the city center: Poetic living, return to nature. If you want to see further, you must climb to a higher level.

Slogan for real estate near the airport: International taste, in line with the world

Trick 2: Red tape, too many selling points

Whether it is spending money on external advertising or working hard to schedule internal banner resources, it is hard-won for the operation of the business line. Many people want to increase the value of this advertising space, so they put a long paragraph of copy on a small advertising image.

Given that users browse ads for 1.7 seconds, content with more than 20 words usually cannot be read. Even if your product has many advantages, you still have to make trade-offs. Each product can only have one USP, which stands for "Unique Selling Proposition". Another benefit of UPS is that it can repeatedly deepen the user's image memory of the product.

Trick 3: Frequent use of Internet vocabulary

Especially in long advertising articles such as WeChat tweets, many content operators will use popular Internet terms and various dynamic emoticons extensively in order to make their articles "fashionable".

A copy with too much internet slang will be difficult for users to read, and it will also distract from the main content.

Internet vocabulary can be used, especially among young people, but it should be avoided that it is used too frequently.

There are many more misunderstandings in copywriting than just these three. In order to improve your "sense of language", it is recommended that you browse Meihua.com, AdChina.com, and Marketing Department.com frequently, where there are many excellent advertising cases to learn from.

4. How to write native advertising copy

A large number of operators are not "liberal arts students", and it is also a common phenomenon that operators have poor literary skills. In fact, writing copy is not difficult, and this ability can be quickly cultivated in a short period of time. I have summarized several effective methods for writing native advertising copy for your reference.

1. Disassemble the product selling points

For product selling points, we need to use the exhaustive method. We can call on the team to brainstorm together, and then find product and marketing colleagues to do selling point rating together to form a core selling point and multiple secondary selling points. For example, the core selling point of Xiaomi mobile phone is photography. In addition, there are secondary selling points such as high cost performance, full screen, high performance, and lightness.

2. Semantic extension

After getting the selling points, we usually use straightforward descriptions of product features, or even some parameters and professional terms, which are not emotional enough.

Semantic extension is the marketing language transformation of selling points. It usually starts from the user's perspective, combines user scenarios, and changes into descriptive words or phrases. For example, OPPO mobile phone describes its fast charging speed as “charge for five minutes, talk for two hours”, and Vipshop describes its genuine products at low prices as “all are good brands, and there are 70% off every day”.

3. Form a copywriting vocabulary

For a product, a commonly used copywriting vocabulary should be formed. This vocabulary should include product selling points, selling point extension words, user demand points, brand slogans, related hot topics, etc.

With the copywriting vocabulary, when writing any form of advertising copy, we only need to reorganize the copywriting vocabulary to build the basic framework of the copywriting, which can greatly improve the output efficiency of the copywriting.

4. A/B testing of ad copy

Sometimes it is difficult to conclude whether a copy is good or bad based on subjective feelings. We can compare the effects of copywriting through A/B testing, which is the most scientific way.

When placing an advertisement, the copywriting accounts for half of the effectiveness of the advertisement. Therefore, when formulating an advertising plan, it is necessary to conduct comparative tests on different advertising copy. Especially when placing information flow ads, the creative test should be divided into two parts: pictures and copy. A good idea can get higher exposure and clicks, while those that perform poorly are generally not displayed.

Author: Yiwen

Source: Rushiyiwen