Three ways to be smart in marketing: playing with patterns, leveraging trends and creating hot spots

This is an era of information explosion, an era where whoever can "light up" users' eyes will be awesome.

Generally speaking, everyone believes that good marketing is about investing a small amount of resources, achieving great results with little effort, and attracting a large number of high-quality audiences. This is also what marketers call "cleverness". Marketers often rely on cases created through cleverness to show off the brilliance of their careers.

Let's talk about this marketing trick today:

Level 1 Skill: Play Mode

Second level skill: borrow the trend

Level 3 Skill: Creating Hotspots

1. Play Mode

A good way of playing that makes consumers addicted can often achieve twice the result with half the effort.

1. Check-in

Many apps now have a punch-in function. This kind of punch-in is different from the traditional "sign-in" and is paid! It is an act of paying money to buy out one's own promise. If you do this, you will get your money back, or even make a profit. This kind of gameplay takes advantage of the gap between people’s ideals and reality. Participants always idealistically think that they are very hardworking, but the platform always bets on some kind of contingency that makes it impossible for users to persist.

The more people participate, the greater the chance of failure to complete the task, and the higher the accumulated prize money will be. It is the same as sports lottery, once you buy, the prize money will be deposited into the prize pool. The only difference is that in lottery you can only wait for the prize to be drawn, but here users can participate in addition to paying money. They will feel that this is not a gamble but a positive incentive that can be achieved through hard work.

Eg1: 36kr morning reading check-in

Eg2: Oulu - Listen to the target time every day

Eg3: keep21 days development plan advanced version

2. Fission

It is said that someone has even published a book specifically about this model, called " Traffic Pool" (refer to "Traffic Pool" by Yang Fei, published by CITIC Press). It says that marketing will be integrated with technology, and the mainstream approach is for the technology department to develop a fission program, either by sending red envelopes or adding benefits, to maximize the motivation for self-propagation and cause viral marketing to spread.

Eg1: Ele.me’s fission red envelope

Eg2: Pinduoduo - Share with 1 friend and get 1 yuan each

(Pinduoduo’s gameplay is always changing, but the general marketing spirit is this fission sharing model)

3. Group buying

If three people join in a group purchase, the product will be discounted at half price. A product that originally costs 10 yuan will only cost 5 yuan if you invite three friends to buy it.

Eg1: Get - Mini Program Spelling Book

Eg2: Pinduoduo-Initiate a group order

(Sorry for giving the example of Pinduoduo again. As a veteran group-buying powerhouse, the rise of Pinduoduo seems to be the ultimate endorsement of this model.)

Summary: The marketing tactics of the above model need to be realized with the help of online APP development. Technical development has a certain degree of difficulty and requires the coordination of multiple resources to be realized.

• Professional requirements ★★★
• Integration capability ★★★★★
• Financial investment

2. Borrow the trend

Marketing that doesn’t take advantage of the situation is not smart marketing.

If you don’t use hot spots, trends, or topics to attract traffic when doing marketing, your peers will say you have no standards, no brains, and no creativity in the contemporary business environment. So let’s take a look at some tricks to use trends:

1. IP empowerment

When a product has few users and traffic is relatively thin, the best way is to cling to others. The sudden emergence of social hot spots not only drives the news media, but also the inclination of various social resources.

At this time, all product packaging and communication content are all All in and become part of the traffic, which is IP empowerment and traffic diversion.

Eg1: Peppa Pig

Remember Peppa Pig? Somehow people in society have connected her to Peppa Pig. She was very popular for a month some time ago, and brought about a group of micro-businesses printing T-shirts, Taobao stickers and tattoos, third-rate communication equipment manufacturers, and unscrupulous cotton figurine workshops. This is a typical case of using IP for production and resale.

Eg2: Durex advertisement

Every time Durex comes up with creative images, it takes advantage of real-time hot topics and adds sexually suggestive copywriting to create a lot of secondary dissemination that is talked about a lot.

2. Internet celebrities /stars promote products

When you are in society, who doesn’t have a few friends? Internet celebrities are the best friends of companies and the biggest source of traffic. They have gotten rid of rigid product preaching and tapped into the psychological needs of users from the added value levels of appearance, entertainment, interest, etc. The most commendable thing is that purchasing behavior motivated by this kind of motivation rarely has after-sales problems!

Eg1: JD.com

A bigger example is last year’s 618 event, when JD.com invited various celebrities to do live broadcasts . The same items sold by XX celebrity became the best expression of the herd mentality, and JD.com made a fortune from this.

Eg2: Internet celebrity

Going a little smaller, such as finding an internet celebrity with more than 100,000 fans, posting an article on Weibo or doing some product placement on Douyin has become the preferred marketing method for many small and medium-sized enterprises or startups .

(The picture and text are unrelated. You can’t afford the traffic of this internet celebrity)

3. Mascot

Yes, you read it right, it is a mascot, and the mascot is the trend. Look at the various animals in the Alibaba system, they are simply leading the new retail trend. Look at the various retail companies that are following up, dogs, gorillas, whales, koalas... A beautiful animal will naturally have no distance with consumers. To put it more deeply - children like it! Kids love it! Kids love it! Isn’t capturing the hearts of children the same as capturing the heart of a family?

Eg1: Golden Baby

I remember that the mascot of Gymboree was a puppet clown like Pinocchio, who would come out at 11:30 every morning to dance and give out gifts to the children. I once asked several parents who were attending early childhood education classes there, and their answer was: the children had a lot of fun there, so they signed up.

Eg2: Hema

Hema Fresh’s pet hippopotamus interacts with children during theme events in the store every weekend and holiday, giving out gifts and asking for photos. From the photos posted in the WeChat group , you can tell that the children are really happy.

Summary: Whether it is borrowing "people" or "things", it is relying on some consumption trends hidden in the minds of consumers. This marketing model can be very good at attracting traffic from scratch. It requires you to have an open mind to pay attention to public opinion every day and a slightly larger financial investment.

• Professional requirements ★★★★
• Integration capability ★★★
• Financial investment ★★★★

3. Create hot spots

Marketing and public relations are inseparable. If the purpose of marketing is to expand, then the purpose of public relations is to add color and flavor.

1. The big guys call

Ever since investment became the primary productive force for exploring the future, the bigwigs in the venture capital circle have become the news hotspots pursued by major information platforms. As a marketer, it is often not enough to only know some marketing methods facing consumers. You must find strong product endorsements. One of the sources of these endorsements is the words of bigwigs.

Once these big-name public figures have non-commercial theoretical outputs and have great social influence, it becomes invaluable when they come back to promote their own brands . The so-called dimensionality reduction attack will catch you off guard! This is a sales method that cannot be simply summarized by the word "brainwashing".

Eg1: Lei Jun often posts on Weibo to endorse Xiaomi

Eg2: Luo Yonghao has long insisted on personally holding press conferences for Hammer phones

Eg3: Luo Zhenyu recommends you a paid product in 60 seconds every day.

2. The media helps you tell your story

Often senior managers always say to the event department: "Don't do events just for the sake of doing events." In fact, few people know what the next sentence of this sentence is. Some say: do events to promote sales, some say: do events to attract new people. These statements are all correct, but they seem to be missing something. In my opinion, the ultimate goal of PR activities is to make products sell better and more valuable.

The channel to enhance value is media coverage. The amount of media coverage, commentary, and self-generated news points about your story is the ultimate KPI for evaluating an event. Therefore, a good event must have media outlets specifically helping you tell your story.

If the content of your event summarizes a new level of scrutiny of the industry when it is disseminated, people in the industry will cite your case to elevate it, just like everyone is accustomed to citing Jack Ma 's "new retail" to refer to consumer behaviors that they don't understand. Even if your marketing is imperfect and you don’t have many customers now, you must believe that public opinion will push you and resources will come to you, and it will be difficult for you to do poorly!

Eg: Tencent Cultural and Creative Ecosystem Conference

(One of the important reasons why I give this example is that Tencent Games , which is very profitable, has been widely criticized by public opinion. The Entertainment Conference is an important node for reconstructing Tencent's entertainment logic and telling good stories to the public. If the stories are told well, it will greatly enhance Tencent's social value)

Summary: Using big Vs to reduce dimensions and using the media to increase dimensions are the correct ways to create hot spots. The clever power to create hot topics requires superb operation skills and public relations capabilities. If used improperly, it will backfire and may trigger a war of words and negative reports. Inexperienced marketers should use it with caution.

• Professional requirements ★★★★★
• Integration capability ★★★
• Financial investment

IV. Review and Outlook

Perhaps there are many ways that are not covered in the article, but no matter what, marketing methods are rapidly iterating with the rapid development of business. The summary of known marketing methodologies will immediately become outdated, and the use of shortcuts in brand marketing activities is often touted and overestimated.

So is there any method that is truly timeless? Of course there is, please stay tuned for the next article: The “clumsiness” of marketing activities.

The author of this article @A Marketing Man Facing a Midlife Crisis was 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