What kind of new users is Zhihu targeting with its World Cup “brainwashing advertisement”?

During the World Cup , the brainwashing commercials promoting the question-and-answer website Zhihu left an indelible mark on the minds of the audience waiting for the kick-off. So what kind of new users is Zhihu’s World Cup “brainwashing advertisement” targeting?

During the 2018 World Cup in Russia , this brainwashing commercial featuring actor Liu Haoran to promote the question-and-answer website Zhihu left an indelible mark on the minds of the audience waiting for the kick-off.

BOSS Direct, Pinduoduo, Mafengwo , Youxin Used Cars ... More than ten years ago, this kind of brainwashing advertising that constantly repeated core concepts was only used by a few brands such as "Naobaijin" and "Hengyuanxiang", but now it is flourishing in the golden time.

What makes some veteran Zhihu users "sigh with regret" is that the originally well-known Zhihu has also embarked on this rather "people-friendly" publicity route.

What they are more accustomed to is the grand style of Zhihu's first brand advertisement "Discover a Bigger World" released a few months ago. The film used a lot of special effects to string together 31 Zhihu questions. It had extremely rich imagination, a broad span of time and space, and a "high-end" style was clearly revealed.

Now, however, audiences feel that Liu Haoran’s lines resemble those from a 2012 Baidu commercial (“I know you don’t know that I don’t know…”) or the commercial in which Yang Mi endorses Liuliupei (“Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”).

So, it’s not that Zhihu can’t make good advertisements. Just a few months ago, it made a long-lasting confession of love to its old users, but suddenly it made a gorgeous turn and showed its "earthy" style. What is it trying to do?

1. Is there anyone who doesn’t know Zhihu now?

It goes without saying that advertising is necessary to attract new people. But the advertising strategy you choose depends on what kind of new people you are facing and what kind of new people you want to attract.

“Go to Zhihu to ask questions, get answers, read Zhihu, search Zhihu, and browse Zhihu…” At the end of the ad, Liu Haoran said with certainty, “If you have any questions, go to Zhihu.”

Obviously, this Zhihu advertisement is aimed at people who don’t know that the Zhihu website exists .

However, most readers may wonder after reading this: Is there anyone who doesn’t know Zhihu now?

The author concluded in the article "Defining "New Knowledge Youth" and Calibrating the Course of Zhihu":

"In 2017, Zhihu had more than 100 million users, more than 30 million daily active users, an average daily visit time of one hour per person, 18 billion monthly page views, 21 million questions, and 82 million answers."

This is certainly a pretty impressive statistic. But even so, Zhihu is still far from being known to everyone. Just as some of Zhihu’s old users may not know about products such as Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao “outside the Fifth Ring Road”, many people other than them do not have a clear concept of what Zhihu is and what it can do.

However, these users who do not know what Zhihu is may have obtained the answers they wanted from Zhihu without their knowledge .

The author once wrote:

"Zhihu has become one of the largest Chinese knowledge sharing platforms, while the presence of the former dominant player Baidu Knows has become increasingly weak."

Now, you can try to enter a question in the Baidu search box. On some search results pages, the links to Zhihu answers are already ranked comparable to those of Baidu's internal products such as Zhidao and Baike , and even more positions have been occupied by Zhihu links.

Although Baidu's voice assistant product DuerOS still gives priority to Baidu's internal links as the default answer source, some of the answers it automatically selects may not be as relevant to the questions as Zhihu, and sometimes even affect the user experience .

Since many people were already using Zhihu when they didn’t even know what it was, it’s time to transform Zhihu’s existing answer resources and friendly search engine rankings into actual recognition and influence.

The author once wrote "Zhihu, with 30 million daily active users, still cannot do without search engines", revealing that the current scale of loyal users is far from expectations, and more activity may consist of one-time "use it and go" traffic such as search and forwarding.

Zhihu needs an opportunity to convert this first impression into user registration, retention , client downloads and product purchases. Compared with continuing to focus on SEO , allowing users to directly gain awareness of the Zhihu brand in their minds is a more fundamental means of acquiring customers.

Cognition is the most important weapon to seize netizens’ free time. Now, Zhihu has leapt into a new stage of expanding its influence and allowing more netizens to form fixed cognition.

2. What can you give and what do you want?

After generating new cognition and acquiring new users, what can Zhihu provide to new users and what does it want to get from them?

With the launch of the "New Knowledge Youth" slogan by Yan Club and the upgrading of the knowledge market to "Zhihu University", the knowledge products and services provided by Zhihu are becoming increasingly complete. They can provide appropriate resources and help to users from different circles on the site, which is enough to meet the needs of the new generation of Chinese netizens with strong thirst for knowledge for interesting and diverse content.

As mentioned earlier, for newcomers, the rich question-and-answer resources on Zhihu can be used not only for "searching when needed" but also for "taking a look when free" (these two sentences are Baidu's advertising slogans and are purely coincidental), and the overall quality is better than that of information distribution products such as Toutiao , which is enough to keep them busy for a while.

Correspondingly, creators at the "top of the pyramid " of Zhihu and the "backbone" of old users can get better satisfaction from the upgraded "Zhihu University".

For the small number of creators who continuously and stably output content, Zhihu provides stronger operational support . Based on questions in the corresponding fields within the community, the system communicates with the speakers in advance and polishes the content. For users who are willing to pay for knowledge , the upgraded key courses will be equipped with course managers. The lecturers will communicate with students in a timely manner, leave questions for reflection, and even correct homework , so that the courses purchased by users will no longer gather dust.

Obviously, Zhihu University's upgrade compared to previous knowledge-based paid products is intended to address the drawbacks of such products that are unable to quantify their evaluation effects and cost-effectiveness. In the same period, similar products such as Dedao and Zaixingyidian also faced the problem of shrinking opening rate and repurchase rate after consumers purchased the products, which seriously affected the platform revenue.

However, new speakers and new courses have been upgraded and can overcome human weaknesses to a certain extent and ensure the quality of teaching. So what should we do with the existing courses that have been accumulated?

The important thing is that the original courses are not completely useless. After all, there are still quite a lot of people who will be attending a lecture for the first time in their lives, or even learning about some new concepts for the first time through such courses, opening the door to a new world.

Zhihu’s “brainwashing advertising” this time is probably aimed at finding this group of people, allowing more new users who have never been exposed to the product to benefit, extending the life cycle of the content product , and further leveraging the inclusive role of the content product .

3. New users are good users

The identity of artist Liu Haoran in shooting the advertisement for Zhihu this time is very clear, he is the image spokesperson appointed by Zhihu. However, more than a year ago, another artist had an earlier encounter with Zhihu. He was Zhang Yi, who received the work badge of "Zhihu Employee No. 000" .

However, perhaps due to his tight schedule, Zhang Yi only answered 26 questions and wrote 6 articles in more than a year, which is not considered very productive. Most of the time he quietly browses Zhihu and attended a Live event 8 days ago.

After Zhang Yi, other celebrities such as Lang Lang and Ao Changzhang have also joined Zhihu to answer questions. In fact, the same is true for some celebrities such as Kai-Fu Lee and Lei Jun who were invited by Zhihu in the early days of closed registration. They may not necessarily speak how they do, but their previous answers remain on Zhihu as a piece of history and become a useful resource for newcomers. "The peach and plum trees are silent, yet people come to them of their own accord."

Zhihu does not regard these celebrities who have registered accounts as spokespersons, nor will it pay them to promote its products . Instead, it simply allows their presence to further consolidate Zhihu's position as a "serious question-and-answer community."

Starting with Liu Haoran, Zhihu has adopted a new method of utilizing stars and celebrities - a purer endorsement relationship, with less emotional ties , which is also a method of utilization we are familiar with.

Liu Haoran registered an account 18 days ago, answered a question in one sentence, followed a question, and then entertainment news like "Liu Haoran sincerely asked on Zhihu 'How to fix singing out of tune' and netizens burst into laughter: his desire for knowledge is off the charts' came out.

For some old users, this is very confusing. But this is enough for Zhihu now.

The user group that can be attracted by the advertisements endorsed by Liu Haoran will certainly bring a completely different experience to Zhihu compared to the users that employee Zhang Yi targets, but these new users are the good users that Zhihu wants to capture now.

The first role of new users will be to increase their activity by "brushing Zhihu" , and the next step will be to access Zhihu's existing paid knowledge resources .

At the end of October 2017, the data from Zhihu Bookstore, which was launched one year ago, showed that:

The e-book download volume of Zhihu has exceeded 50 million copies, the cumulative number of bookstore users has exceeded 5 million, there are more than 3,000 authors, and the total income of authors has exceeded 6 million yuan.

At the same time, the iconic knowledge-based paid product Zhihu Live entered a new life cycle. Zhihu launched products such as VIP membership and monthly packages for unlimited Live listening to reactivate the sales of Live products.

It is conceivable that some classic Live, private lessons, and e-book products may have been familiar to old users, but may be the first time for newcomers to encounter them. For Zhihu, the marginal cost of providing these resources to new users is 0.

It is also worth mentioning that these new users may not be good at content output, but at critical moments, many of them can become the protagonists of "answering questions personally", enriching Zhihu's regular content reserves from multiple angles .

At the end of May this year, when the cockpit windshield of Sichuan Airlines flight 3U8633 broke and the flight made an emergency landing in Chengdu , a passenger on board was interviewed by CCTV and other media while wearing a headrest. He later answered related questions on Zhihu, providing readers with more details, and posted a selfie of himself in the car on his way to his destination after arriving in Lhasa.

Zhihu is working hard to invite more and more new users like this to use their own perspectives and personal experiences to provide the most convincing answer sample for various "how to evaluate" questions. To this end, Zhihu has launched the "Personal Answer" function . If it is verified that the answer is from the person involved in the incident, a "Personal Answer" mark will be added to the answer.

At the same time, new users also include scientific researchers and other industry insiders who work hard in their professional fields but have little contact with the Internet .

Among the annual honorary members selected by Zhihu’s Salt Club in 2018, the author found quite a few who are newcomers who have only become active in the last one or two years.

Auto expert @一个kebab first answered questions in early 2016, doctor of medicine @胡远东 in December 2016, economics expert @Manolo in January 2017, fitness coach @然然 in May 2017, and psychology master @小红拖器 in June 2017 ...

Therefore, the newcomers that Zhihu wants to attract must represent the various components of Chinese netizens more broadly than the original more homogeneous user group, so that they can not only get what they need, but also contribute to the further diversification of Zhihu's content.

Finally, it should be said that how to ensure the influx of new users while not disappointing old users is a historical problem .

In 2013, the author mentioned this contradiction between new and old users in an article titled "Zhihu: Serving "Elite Users"" in which he first observed the adjustment of Zhihu's operating policies. At that time, Zhihu's high-quality content was heavily dependent on a small number of core users, so the target audience of its product design and operations were actually these core authors rather than readers.

The author further believes that:

"In the future, Zhihu may become a ' self-media cluster' for these core users."

Fortunately, such a situation did not happen today. Zhihu's vigorously developed algorithm-driven operating mechanism allows reasonable differentiation between different users , making it easier to push content in a targeted manner and provide "one thousand faces for one thousand people".

For those who really want to break out of their information cocoon and listen to different opinions, Zhihu also allows them to "discover a bigger world" through updated search functions and hot topics .

In the future, as users with different growth backgrounds, different knowledge structures, and polar opposite personalities gather together, how to solve the problem of their peaceful coexistence will become a major challenge for Zhihu's operations. It can be said that as long as this problem is solved and a steady stream of new users are exposed to Zhihu's existing excellent content resources , Zhihu will have a sustainable and promising development prospect.

If the circle "outside the fifth ring" is the sea of ​​stars that Zhihu will face in the future, then the territory waiting for it to explore is far larger than we have previously observed and imagined.

The author of this article is @Hangtongshe. It is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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