Reflections on the rise of new network marketing channels and how to correctly choose network marketing channels

Some time ago, I met something in enterprise network marketing, which was very interesting. I was busy before and didn't have time to write.

Here's the thing: one of the clients is engaged in wedding photography. The wedding photography industry can be said to have been publicized on the Internet for a long time. Since the era of search engines, I have done SEO and SEM promotion on search engines such as Baidu, and searched for keywords related to wedding photography. There will be a large number of wedding photography agencies that have done Baidu bidding ranking and natural search optimization. When Weibo was hot, wedding photography companies began to use Fan Tong, Weibo activities and Weibo topics to get traffic on Weibo. When WeChat friends circle advertisements become popular, wedding photography advertisements will also be seen (related to corporate crowd positioning and user behavior). These are relatively mature promotion models. When I contacted this customer, my strategy was to use news, forums and other relatively high-quality channels to conduct a PC-side search engine, and to gain interested consumers by combining the company's own official website SEO and the dominant position of key keywords in the search engine. On the mobile side, the company will set up its own brand promotion positions on Weibo and WeChat, attract fans through fan activities, events and content operations, establish brand influence, and finally facilitate the transaction. In the process of implementation, the effect is good. After all, these channels are familiar, which is not the point to be said or described in detail. Later, in the communication with customers, customers fed back a competitor's channel, and the exposure, transformation, input and output all reached an amazing level, which made me more convinced of my previous thinking and decided to write it out.

As we all know, new/brand-new/novel things have amazing appeal to consumers. Even if the word is added to the copy, the product will exude charming charm, such as new packaging/new formula/new upgrade, which will arouse consumers' curiosity.

Of course, what is more attractive is the changes brought about by new technologies, such as the PC era and the mobile Internet era brought about by technological changes. The whole marketing environment has undergone earth-shaking changes with the upgrading of technology, and now online marketing and precision marketing are based on this. However, this technological change may only happen once every few decades. I think what enterprises and marketers should pay most attention to is actually new channels.

Many people may have heard this sentence: You missed Taobao 10 six years ago, Weibo eight years ago, and the official WeChat account five years ago. Do you want to think about XXX again now? This actually refers to the huge traffic dividend of the new channel, which is unexpected for enterprises and marketers with huge exposure and transformation. In the previous article, the feedback from customers and me was this new channel: Tik Tok, or a short video platform represented by Tik Tok. According to customer feedback and our later tests, Tik Tok, at least for the wedding photography industry, has a very matching channel attribute (I will analyze it in detail below). At present, we can already see a lot of publicity information of wedding photography enterprises on Tik Tok (which also shows that this channel is very effective for this industry at present), and most of the ways are to open Tik Tok accounts, star publicity and official advertisements in Tik Tok. Let me talk about the logic of my choice of marketing channels, and combine my own experience to talk about what products are suitable for marketing in Tik Tok and how to do marketing in Tik Tok.

In a short period of one year, Tik Tok has become a phenomenal product, and all new phenomenal products on the Internet represent new marketing channels. The new marketing channels involve less advertisements, and the user participation of products is higher. In order to expand its influence, the platform has relatively loose control over product placement, so it hides a huge traffic dividend. However, why can some industries flourish in Tik Tok, while others are lifeless and will not even appear in Tik Tok?

In marketing, every industry will have the most suitable channel, even every enterprise and every product will have the most suitable channel. Similarly, a channel is often particularly effective in promoting certain industries or certain categories. Vertical channels are naturally aimed at vertical industries, such as baby trees and new oxygen. Even all-inclusive platforms such as Tmall, JD.COM and WeChat have advantages in targeting specific industries or categories, such as digital home appliances in JD.COM, branded clothing of Tmall, knowledge and content information of official WeChat account, etc. For start-ups or new products, the most important work in the early stage of marketing is to find the most suitable communication channel for their own enterprises. So how to choose channels, I will generally consider from the following aspects:

Generally speaking, channels have their own unique attributes, even though some channels exist specifically for publicity, such as our common outdoor billboards with LBS attributes; Building elevator advertisements and closing narrow spaces; Original information flow advertisement, making people have an immersive reading experience; No matter what kind of channel, there will always be a fundamental channel attribute. These attributes are the first thing we should consider when choosing channels. Take Tik Tok as an example. The first is the short video information flow platform, which constantly brushes interesting video information to attract users. Then its two most important channel attributes are: first, video presentation, which has stronger visual impact than words, pictures and graphics; If it is just a video display, then outdoor video and building video advertisements are all like this. Another important channel attribute different from Tik Tok is that users are immersed or actively ask for advertisements. The location of outdoor or building is known to consumers psychologically, and it is an advertising space, so most people choose to ignore it or even deliberately avoid it, while Tik Tok is the advertising information inserted when users take the initiative to ask for it (sometimes even very interesting and targeted advertising information), so they can brush one interesting video after another and enjoy the pleasure. The sense of accomplishment and memory that immersion brings to users is the second attribute of Tik Tok.

Then, from the channel attributes, it is not difficult to find out what kind of industry or product is suitable for this channel: firstly, the communication should have video effects, which can be shocking, fun and interesting; secondly, the video can be integrated into the video tonality of the platform, such as the industries that have started advertising on the platform at present: wedding photography (which pursues large-scale visual effects, and love is an emotional bond that human beings can attract * * *), and mobile games (mobile games) are shocking. Compared with video, graphic display is simply weak), travel (I just wanted to watch pictures before, but now I want to watch videos), and home improvement (the home improvement industry invested a lot of money in the 3D experience room of mobile phones before, asking customers to watch it, and now I can rest). According to the channel attributes, film announcements (especially action or visual blockbusters, suspense, etc. ) It should also spread well in Tik Tok; Cars have spent a lot of effort on video promos, but they are rarely seen in Tik Tok at present.

Without users, there is no channel. Users are the foundation of channels. No fool will invest money on an unknown billboard. Every channel, like the products of enterprises, has its own user base, the most important of which is the core users. If you want to promote a certain channel and understand the attributes of the channel, the most important thing is to understand the core user groups of the channel, which is related to whether the brand can be accepted when it reaches these users and how to express it.

Let's take Tik Tok as an example. Tik Tok belongs to the short video industry. Let's first look at the user data of the short video industry. Ai Media Consulting data shows that the scale of mobile short video users is expanding rapidly, and it is expected to reach 353 million in 20 18. According to Analysys data, among users of short video integrated platform, women account for 6 1.6%, much higher than male users, accounting for 38.4%. Users are generally younger, and 70% of users are under 35 years old. In terms of geographical distribution, users are widely distributed, and the proportion of users in super-first-tier cities is the lowest. Several key points can be extracted from the above: younger age, high proportion of female users, wide geographical area and large population base.

Then look at Tik Tok. Vibrato short video is a social software for young people in first-and second-tier cities in China, which is hatched in today's headlines. More than 85% of users are under the age of 24, and there are more female users with relatively high academic qualifications, and they are concentrated in first-and second-tier cities, with narrow coverage and relatively small market scope. Users are in the high-speed growth period, and their usage habits are unstable. Several key points can also be extracted from the above: young people, highly educated, first-and second-tier cities, and many female users.

Of course, in actual combat, we need to find more data to support it. Judging from the data we have compiled from the internet at present, we can make a simple sketch for Tik Tok's user group: white-collar workers living in big cities, mainly women, brush funny videos after meals or before going to bed to pass the time, and share them with friends when they meet interesting ones.

From the above analysis of core users, it may be explained that there are not many reasons why the automobile industry appears in Tik Tok: first, men pay more attention to the automobile industry, while women pay less attention; Secondly, the age group is young and the consumption power is temporarily insufficient. Of course, brand communication sometimes integrates multiple future dimensions, not necessarily because of insufficient consumption power. For the wedding photography industry, the user groups are very matched: wedding photography is generally women as decision makers, pursuing beautiful visual feelings, being in the period of love and marriage, having certain quality requirements and spending power in first-and second-tier cities, as well as home, tourism and other industries. It can be seen that the core users have a high degree of matching.

The worse the reputation of a product, the fewer users. With the emergence of substitutes, the product will gradually die out. Channels are slightly different from products in this respect. Many channels, such as psoriasis advertisements, are quite viable even if their word-of-mouth is a bit poor. Many times, it is because they are profitable. On the one hand, the most important thing is actually the impact on human cognition. Exposure is sometimes greater than reputation. As long as a product gets enough exposure, people will remember that people will consider it when choosing. This is also the main reason why some enterprises or celebrities will use some controversial scandals or even scandals to increase their exposure (some ingenious marketing cases can be found online here, but the risks are higher).

For enterprises, especially those who want to establish brand influence, the user perception of channels is very important, which can be seen from the brand advertising channels of luxury goods. For most enterprises, users' perception of channels only needs to be divided into positive, non-perceived and negative, which is relatively easy to distinguish, such as CCTV, which is positive and has brand endorsement; Rural wall-painting advertisements are unconscious and grounded, and users who generally brush walls are also grounded; Leaflets, no perception, creative leaflets will improve positive perception and so on.

In addition to this perception, a few channels will have tonal perception, such as Tik Tok. Because positioning is a short video of musical creativity, it will give people a young and trendy tonality. At this time, brand selection for publicity, if it has too much to do with brand tonality, will be very abrupt. For example, it will be very touching to promote health care products for the elderly on Tik Tok, and then some old experts will stand up and say.

I have written about product marketing and marketing productization before (everyone is a product manager link: /marketing/960039.html), saying that products can be marketed by themselves, but more often, corporate propaganda must be attached to channels. Through the above channel attributes, channel core user group and channel user perception, we have preliminarily finalized this channel. Generally speaking, what we said before is just to choose the right channel and plan to put the advertisement step by step, but there is still a long way to go to do this advertisement well. It is only the first step to do a good job of communication and choose the right channel.

To do marketing, we must first make it clear that in the modern era of material surplus, products can't be popular without going out of the door, and they can only be promoted through communication. In fact, communication relies most on two forces, one is the channel and the other is the user. Only by leveraging the power of channels to incite users to spread can we achieve the best communication effect and establish brand effect.

In order to give full play to the power of channels, what we need to do is to choose the best channel-product combination, and the most important thing is to choose the right channel-product combination point. This topic is very vague, so let's take the exchange of Tik Tok as an example (for discussion only).

I once saw the advertisement of Youxian Daily on Tik Tok (I prefer Youxian Daily and bought their members). Here is one of the screenshots.

Look at the copy: colleagues buy here every day (taking advantage of people's herd mentality, which is also a higher degree of trust among colleagues and acquaintances), and the whole audience buys 59 MINUS 30 (preferential information, price privacy will be very attractive no matter where it is placed, and there is no need to wait until when it is new), which can be said to be 1 hour (logistics guarantee, eliminating users' worries). The video repeatedly emphasizes cost performance and quality. But I don't know what I am thinking. Is it because I am approachable that I use ordinary people to play it? But this is Tik Tok, and its algorithm is that the strong are stronger. More and more users will see interesting and wonderful videos, so they will see either beautiful women, cute pets or beautiful scenery that they can't usually see. Every day, when several excellent advertisements come out, I feel that I can't stand it at all and stand out from the crowd. I force myself to watch them in the professional habit of marketers.

I think this is the channel-product fit point is not found right. If this information is put in the information flow of life news, I feel fine, but in the platform tonality like Tik Tok, is it better to change the protagonist or the script?

Through the power of channels, advertisers can be reached to the maximum extent. In the next step, we will use the power of users to complete the multiple amplification of communication, which is very common in Internet communication. The forwarding and sharing of users is an important part of many marketing activities. Our design and copywriting will also add many incentives to stimulate sharing or forwarding in the whole advertising design process, such as forwarding offers, plot turning points, helping users to show themselves, helping others, feeling and so on. There are many discussions on the internet, so I don't want to repeat them. I emphasize that when choosing a channel, we must study the communication chain that users use to share, whether there is a ready-made sharing path in the channel, and whether this path is simple and natural for users to use. For example, if you advertise in traditional newspapers or magazines, when you reach users, the communication chain may end, and few people will share the advertisements they saw in registration or magazines. In some internet advertising channels, such as search engine advertising, DSP and so on. We can see that advertisements are complete in Tik Tok's channel-product communication chain, and users can share advertisements like other interesting videos, which of course puts higher demands on advertisements themselves, so we can maximize communication with users. There are also many examples. Many H5 screens we see can be screened, largely because WeChat provides a complete communication chain of channels and products.

At the end of this article, it is too long to read, and the version is summarized in two sentences:

1, focusing on new online marketing channels, a new product often means a traffic bonus;

2. How do enterprises choose the most suitable channel? From the aspects of channel attributes, channel core user groups, channel user perception, channel-product convergence point, channel-product communication chain, etc.

A word of advice:

The great difference between online marketing and traditional marketing lies in more marketing data (display, click, transformation, jump, etc. ) can be fed back, which gives us the possibility of continuous testing and continuous optimization, so we must constantly monitor these marketing data in order to communicate better.