How to plan a successful vulnerability marketing event?

Loophole marketing , as the name suggests, is a marketing strategy that packages a company's promotional activities as loopholes in products or rules to make users mistakenly believe that they have got a small bargain and participate in the experience or even make a purchase. This strategy makes full use of the public's love of small bargains and curiosity to achieve the purpose of attracting traffic . Next, I will conduct an in-depth analysis from three perspectives to give everyone a more comprehensive understanding of vulnerability marketing.

1 What are some classic cases of vulnerability marketing?

When studying a specific marketing method, the most intuitive way to present it is through cases. Through cases, you can quickly understand and apply it to actual operations. Here, I will provide you with several classic cases.

Gong Wenxiang sells books: I don’t have time to receive red envelopes sent via WeChat

The first example just happened. I saw a status from the well-known micro-business self-media person Mr. Gong Wenxiang in the circle of friends . Mr. Gong recently published a new micro-business book and is promoting it. Then he posted in the circle of friends, "I'm so busy that I don't even have time to collect money. I don't have time to open most of the red envelopes to collect money." This is a typical loophole marketing, making people think that even if they send red envelopes, they don't have time to receive them, and they can get the new book for free, stimulating everyone to take advantage of this loophole to get the wool. In order to verify, the gentleman really sent a small red envelope to Mr. Gong, and as expected, the master accepted it. Overall it was a bit embarrassing, but we have to admire the master's marketing skills. There are reasons for his success, so please stop scolding him.

Gambling website fabricates story to expose platform loopholes to make huge profits

The second example also happened recently. There are many articles with titles like "A college student who was guaranteed admission to graduate school was sentenced for using professional knowledge to crack the lottery ticket" on NetEase, Baijiahao , and Toutiao . The content of the article is roughly about Zhang, a student from a well-known university, who was suspected of using mathematical knowledge to crack the lottery ticket to make an illegal profit of 3.8 million yuan. As the amount involved is extremely huge, the relevant law enforcement agencies have formally filed a lawsuit with the court. If convicted, Zhang may face a prison sentence of less than three years and confiscation of huge amounts of illegal proceeds. The article will specifically state that a certain formula was used to increase the hit rate of gambling, and then expose the link to the gambling website by posting screenshots of the chat.

It has been confirmed that these articles are soft advertisements placed by gambling websites. They use stories to tell people that by exploiting loopholes through certain formulas, the hit rate on their platform can be increased to obtain huge profits. This loophole marketing is very clever, and I believe the effect of attracting traffic will not be bad, because these articles have extremely high exposure on major platforms. There are more than 30,000 user replies on the NetEase platform alone. There must be users who think they are very smart and go to this platform to try to get the benefits, but they didn't expect to be tricked. Loophole marketing is really everywhere.

You may think that the above two examples are not very presentable and cannot be directly applied. Next, I will give you some examples of vulnerability marketing by well-known companies.

KFC app has a bug, you can get a half-price coupon on your birthday

On August 30, 2017, KFC's official app was revealed to have a major bug. By changing the account birthday to 20160828, one could receive a half-price coupon for a six-person family bucket within five minutes.

Once such a bug that benefits the people is discovered, it will naturally spread from one person to ten, and from ten to a hundred. Many users will rush to download the app after learning of this opportunity to make a profit. It managed to push such a food app into the top 50 of the rankings . In fact, platforms like KFC often do various similar half-price activities, but they are far less effective than this one that makes users feel that they are very smart and have made a profit. You must know that in the second half of 2017, users' willingness to download apps was actually very low. If you use the distribution channel to download and register, the cost is very high.

Baidu Cloud Payment has a bug, and you can buy millions of membership services for 0.1 yuan

On the evening of June 21, 2013, a piece of news about a major bug in Baidu Cloud’s payment system went viral on Weibo, major forums, and news websites. The prices of all products on Baidu Cloud “became” 1/1000 of their original prices. It only cost 0.1 yuan to purchase a membership service that originally cost nearly 100 yuan, and 0.5 cents to expand to a 100GB package. For a time, most netizens, regardless of whether they had a Baidu Cloud account or not, and regardless of whether they used Baidu Cloud in their daily lives, rushed to purchase the packages.

In the end, this bug was fixed by the official in a very low-key manner. However, after studying the relevant posts on the Internet, I found that these posts that reveal information and promise to get free stuff are highly suspected of being soft advertising, because at the end they even praised Baidu Cloud as the largest and most popular personal cloud storage service provider in China. This is not in line with the mainstream values ​​of Chinese netizens. In addition, Baidu, which has always prided itself on its technology, is unlikely to make such a low-level error. It is even more puzzling that it takes dozens of hours to fix it. Basically, all of the blame is placed on a carefully planned vulnerability marketing campaign. Sure enough, a few days later on June 26, Baidu announced that the number of Baidu Cloud users exceeded 70 million and was growing at a rate of 200,000 per day.

Mr. found a picture on the Internet that lists some vulnerability marketing incidents. You can also refer to it.

2 How to design a successful vulnerability marketing campaign

Through the above series of vulnerability marketing cases , I believe everyone already knows the power of vulnerability marketing, but how to plan a successful vulnerability marketing event?

1) Determine your budget

In essence, loophole marketing is actually an extreme form of promotion. Normal promotion is to directly and positively inform users of such promotions, while loophole marketing is a viral marketing method that pretends to be discovered by users and then spreads itself. For companies, promotion is active marketing, while loophole marketing is passive marketing. From the official level of the company, it seems that there is no need to do anything at the beginning of marketing, and it is enough to wait for users to spread it spontaneously. Of course, it is inevitable to act as a user to do promotion in secret.

The first step of vulnerability marketing is to determine the budget. This budget consists of two parts. One is the promotion fee for basic activation at the time of early launch, and the other is the project budget for gifts to users. This budget may not be the actual money spent, but the equivalent service of the product itself. Anyway, it is set based on its own product attributes and corporate strength. Generally speaking, the budgets of these two parts are opposite. The more the early promotion budget is, the less the project budget can be used to give gifts to users.

Everyone must pay attention here that the project budget used to give gifts to users must not be arbitrary. The budget must be compressed into the ultimate attraction rather than a dishonest trick. For example, if you use 20% off coupons, 20 yuan vouchers or something like that to give gifts to users, it would be insincere and unattractive, and such an activity is doomed to fail.

This budget is the turning point of this activity. When the number of users who take advantage of the program reaches a certain number and the expenses incurred reach the budget range, it is necessary to immediately fix the loophole or close the entrance to the loophole to stop the loss in time. The amount of the budget determines how many users who can take advantage of the program can be brought in.

2) Design bait and loopholes

Designing vulnerabilities that are attractive and bring value to the company is the key to the success of vulnerability marketing. Whether exploiting a bug in the program or a bug in the rules, on the one hand, it is necessary to stimulate the user's feeling that there is a bargain to be gained, and on the other hand, the reward for the loophole must reach the psychological expected value of bothering users to participate.

The patterns of program vulnerabilities are relatively simple. You can refer to the vulnerabilities of Baidu Cloud, KFC, and Mobike . Almost always, there is a problem when making a payment, or some settings can trigger a platform promotion. For this type of vulnerability, you should pay attention to the time node and finally seal the hole within ten hours after the media report . Generally, the vulnerability is exposed at night and a repair statement is issued the next morning. If it is delayed for too long, it will leave the public with the impression of poor technology.

The design of loopholes must revolve around the company's marketing goals and bring practical value to the company. For example, if the company's goal of vulnerability marketing is to attract new users to register, then when designing the loophole, old users must be left out and the loophole must only be effective for new users.

3) Design communication rhythm

One very important point is that fixing the vulnerability is a turning point. From the perspective of maximizing benefits, our ideal situation is that users before the vulnerability is fixed have strong social communication capabilities and can spread this information after receiving benefits through the vulnerability, thereby attracting more users to participate through recommendations; users after the vulnerability is fixed have weak social communication capabilities, and after discovering that the vulnerability has been fixed, try not to spread the news that the vulnerability has been fixed, so as not to let too many people know that the vulnerability has been fixed and continue to participate.

The truly valuable users of vulnerability marketing are actually those who did not catch up with the vulnerability bonus but participated in the registration conversion . How to attract more such people to participate is the highlight of vulnerability marketing design optimization.

The communication rhythm of vulnerability marketing is actually quite smooth. It basically includes three stages: basic activation, vulnerability fixing, and public relations response. By optimizing based on the above principles, you can create a good communication plan.

The first is basic activation. In addition to daily deployment of water army, industry big account deployment, and buying hot searches on various online forums, BBS , and Weibo, special attention should be paid to selecting some personal KOLs who love to share and have great influence. They may not have public accounts or Weibo, but they have a certain degree of communication power in the circle of friends. Covering some of these people and allowing them to profit through loopholes can have a positive effect on the early basic detonation. At the same time, the intensity must be controlled, and all operations should be carried out by simulating the behavior of real users, without revealing too many signs of hype.

In order to achieve the budget determined in advance, it is necessary to fix the loopholes in a timely manner to avoid further economic losses. For an attractive vulnerability marketing, the time from basic activation to vulnerability repair is actually very short. Whether the vulnerability information can be successfully fermented on social media before the vulnerability is repaired is the key to the success or failure of vulnerability marketing. When fixing vulnerabilities, you must be low-key and leave no traces while users are participating in the experience, so as to buy more time to attract more users who want to take advantage of the vulnerabilities.

The timing of official response is very important. Generally, a response is made when the loopholes of the platform exposed by mainstream media have been patched. As long as it does not affect the company's reputation, it is better to respond later rather than earlier, so as to attract more users who are not aware of the situation to participate in the event. And the official response should be as low-key as possible, and do not take the opportunity to promote other activities. Just give a brief explanation.

Vulnerability marketing must grasp the rhythm of communication. A week after Xunlei completed the vulnerability marketing on Baidu Cloud, it also carried out a similar vulnerability marketing. For one cent, one could get a Xunlei member's platinum annual card worth 180 yuan, which caused netizens to rush to buy it. A total of more than 5,000 Xunlei member platinum annual cards were snapped up for 1 cent. This matter was not done very well, both in terms of public opinion and actual user participation. The reason for this is that, apart from the poor timing (if you learn from Baidu, you also have to pay attention to time), the promotion rhythm was very bad. Most of the 5,000 1-cent bait platinum cards were discovered and snatched away by existing members, and the official quickly refuted the rumor, leaving no time for the influx of wool users. It is inevitable that the effect was not good.

3. Vulnerability marketing should be done with a good sense of scale and frequency

It is a good medicine, but also a poison.

At this point, I believe that many friends also want to try loophole marketing in conjunction with their own brands . Loophole marketing is more suitable for growing brands and products that have a certain degree of popularity, but the user base is not large. Through a wave of loophole marketing operations, the popularity can be increased and a number of registered users can be attracted at the same time.

However, you must be careful to strike a good balance during the operation. The word "vulnerability" itself is associated with negativity, and it is very important to handle the public opinion generated by the vulnerability. Generally speaking, the choice of vulnerability should not affect the company's mainstream business image. Imagine that a platform that focuses on security is revealed to have a vulnerability. Isn't the negative cost a bit too high?

For enterprises, they should pay attention to controlling the frequency of vulnerability marketing. If a vulnerability appears every now and then, it will be seen through by users, which is not a good thing for the enterprise itself, because after all, vulnerability marketing will be regarded as a deception by some users.

So which companies are not suitable for vulnerability marketing?

First, it is not suitable for large-scale enterprises, as the disadvantages of vulnerability marketing far outweigh the benefits. The reason is that, firstly, the stability of large platforms is very important. If a loophole occurs, it will cause the public to doubt the company's internal management and technology, and affect the company's reputation. Secondly, large platforms have many users. If old users can also participate in the loophole, it will cause great economic losses. If old users cannot participate in the loophole, it will lead to injustice. In any case, it will be a lose-lose situation. For example, a few years ago, the price of goods on Taobao dropped to 1 yuan, which brought considerable negative impact to Taobao.

Second, it is not suitable for companies that put security first. The reputation impact caused by vulnerability marketing may cause immeasurable losses. For example, the cryptocurrency exchanges mentioned at the beginning are not suitable for any connection with vulnerability marketing.

Third, companies that are too small are not suitable either. Because they are too small, they lack visibility, and it is not easy to attract users to participate in vulnerability marketing, so it is conceivable that the effect will not be very good.

Summary

Vulnerability marketing is a double-edged sword, a good medicine but also a poison. We have seen many successful cases of vulnerability marketing, which can quickly bring user traffic to enterprises at low cost. However, the prerequisite is to grasp the scale and control the frequency, and to show enough sincerity to attract users and guide the rhythm of communication. Only in this way can the power of vulnerability marketing be fully utilized and bring considerable users and benefits to the enterprise.

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

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games