How to do good word-of-mouth marketing?

Even very popular online dramas will encounter these four marketing problems

In the past two years, there have been many very popular dramas, such as "Langxie Bang", And "Ode to Joy." The popularity of these dramas is inseparable from two factors, one is the marketing momentum, and the other is the viral spread on social media.

For example, when "Flower Thousand Bones" was particularly popular, it would basically hit the Weibo topic list once a week, then brew it on social media, and then feed back its ratings, so every issue of it Programs will go directly to social media to guide users to discuss topics.

However, in the promotion of online dramas, we also found that different dramas will encounter different problems.

First, the popularity of the entire show’s creators, including the director and actors. Because if the main creative team is very famous, the marketing pressure will be reduced.

Second, it is the promotion cost. This will directly affect the effectiveness of marketing and the people it reaches.

Third, is the appeal of the IP of the script itself. Games like "Tomb Raiders" have relatively strong IP. Its marketing is also easier, because the IP has a higher degree of attention and it is easier to generate an increase in topics.

The last thing is the subject matter. If the subject matter is innovative, it will be easy to do. There have been a lot of dramas about time travel and palace battles, and there have been a lot of them in the past two years, such as "Jingxin" and "The Legend of Zhen Huan". These are all very well done. . Therefore, it is really difficult to surpass previous results.

Companies that use word-of-mouth marketing have done these four things well

It is imperative for companies to do a good job in word-of-mouth marketing. Whether it is a movie, TV series, or other brand, there are 4 steps that are very critical.

First, we must have good insights and consumer insights. Explore your target audience and find their pain points.

Second, choose the appropriate social platform. This requires a layout based on our insights into consumers.

Third, for brands, we need to sort out our own resources, both internal and external resources, and then build a word-of-mouth marketing system.

Fourth, we need to use different strategies, methods and mechanisms to motivate these groups and help us spread word of mouth. How to make good insights?

1. Conduct consumer insights before marketing activities

Let’s talk about insights first. Consumer insights are a very important step before every marketing campaign. We have to make a lot of preparations. For example, we have to read the original work and read the comments on social media. The conclusions drawn in this way will be more objective, macroscopic and representative.

2. Find the user's G-point and determine the propagation point

Where is the user's G-point, so that we can determine which our propagation points are. Not all works adapted from popular IPs can sell very well, because if we cannot firmly grasp the psychology of young audiences, even if you have a good hand, you may be dealt a bad hand.

So find what our brand wants to say, including what our people want to hear and what our potential customers want to hear.

Before each promotion, our partners will use data tools to conduct analysis. After analysis, we found that there may be some features in these dramas that are very distinctive, or that the audience is very interested in. For example, points like fresh meat, palace fights, and costumes and props are all boring points. When these points are put on social media, they will trigger a lot of discussion and spread.

At the same time, we need to do some in-depth research on the audience for watching the show. We found that the audience in the 80s and 90s were born. It can be seen from the age group that the main target group is mainly students. It can be seen that the post-90s generation is still a very core group of people.

Nowadays, the consumer population is changing very fast. In the past, consumer research was conducted every five years, but now it may be done every two to three years, or even shorter. Because only in this way can we maintain sensitivity to consumers and ensure the vitality of the enterprise.

In the survey, we found that those born in the 60s and 90s pay more attention to entertainment topics. In the world of the post-90s generation, entertainment is what they consider truly serious. They don’t have to read books every day, but they must watch entertainment. Therefore, videos occupy a lot of leisure time of the entire post-90s generation. Including online dramas, self-made content by netizens, and live broadcasts by anchors, they follow up on such real-time hot spots very quickly. And at this time, they will make a lot of complaints.

So, this is what is particularly interesting about these groups of people. Especially after we spread the web series, we found that they really have very strong communication capabilities. They can give themselves to Amway first, and then give Amway to the friends around them. Therefore, the post-90s generation is very capable of word-of-mouth communication. If today's marketers don't understand the world of young people, any marketing techniques you use may be ineffective.

In the process of marketing, we need to analyze which points around which netizens are more likely to participate? Before companies do marketing and communication, they need to sort out these characteristics and combine them with users. What are the points that users may be more interested in? Favorite one? We need to find it out.

Take "Ode to Joy" as an example. This drama is watched by young people, so when doing marketing, you must consider the preferences and characteristics of this group of people.

Of course, if we want to encircle everyone, it will definitely not work. I have seen such a passage before, and it makes perfect sense. The more people you target, the smaller the market you actually occupy. Sometimes the narrower and clearer the positioning and the clearer the target group, the broader the group of people you may end up with. At that time, when we were doing marketing and communication for online dramas, we found that we were targeting the post-90s generation, but in the end we brought in the post-00s generation, the post-80s generation, and even some of the post-70s generation.

Before, we did the following things when marketing Chucheng.

In 2013, we helped him do some data analysis. We found all the users who mentioned Chu Cheng on social networks and Weibo and did an in-depth analysis. We found that these people have three common characteristics. First, they all like to eat fruits; second, they all pursue organic and healthy food and a high quality of life; third, they are Influenced by Chu Shijian’s inspirational story.

So our subsequent communication strategies all focus on these groups of people and what they may be interested in. For example, our copywriting can be divided into these types. The first one is to say that Chucheng products are safe and delicious, and the second one is to say that Chucheng products are related to users' high-quality life and what are its characteristics. The third one tells the inspirational story of Chu Shijian to influence these people.

Choose a suitable social platform for communication

After gaining insights, we need to choose a suitable social platform. In view of the habits of the post-90s generation, we need to make layouts on many different platforms. Generally speaking, if we do word-of-mouth marketing for online dramas, on what platforms will we do it?

1. How do online dramas achieve screen-level word-of-mouth marketing?

If companies are doing marketing now, Weibo and WeChat basically need to be deployed. The daily active users of these two social software are over 100 million, WeChat has more than 600 million users, and Weibo has more than 200 million users.

(1) Weibo

Topics are one of the greatest values ??of Weibo. Nowadays, almost all self-media companies check Weibo’s popular list in front of their computers every day. If you look at Weibo to see which topics are popular, he will write corresponding articles to take advantage of the trend and spread the word. Other platforms will be slower than Weibo hotspots. Therefore, the topic value of Weibo is very great. If the company can put its own topic on the list, the value will be even greater.

Let’s talk about KQL. There are many big and very influential people on Weibo and WeChat. Our company needs to find KOLs who are consistent with our own tone and consistent with our potential customers, and let them help us spread the word.

Basically all dramas will have posters. Like "The Return of the Great Sage" was particularly popular before, a very important reason is that its posters are very attractive.

It sparked a lot of discussion and virality.

(2) WeChat

In the process of spreading some dramas, we will see a lot of self-media, and many users will generate a lot of related content, such as digging into some of the stories behind online dramas Unknown inside stories, etc. These UGC contents will drive the spread of the entire drama and increase its influence.

(3) Live broadcast

Live broadcast is now a hot topic, and doing it well will also produce very good results. There are many live broadcast platforms, such as Douyu, Bilibili, etc. Recently, when we were disseminating online dramas, we found that a large number of people would come to watch during the live broadcast, and these users would become an important force in our dissemination on Weibo and WeChat.

(4) Other social platforms

Bilibili is now a platform where the post-90s generation gathers. We can also put some content in Bilibili. When this content becomes popular, it will also Inspire users to generate more good UGC content. There is also Zhihu. The typical mode of Zhihu is question and answer. Therefore, we can make some answers and post them. If this answer is very logical, it will also generate a lot of likes. Zhihu is a place where young intellectuals gather. If there is a popular online drama recently and a question and answer post related to it is published on Zhihu, it will also be widely reposted on other platforms.

2. Management of the core fan base

We have also done a very important thing, which is the management of the core fan base.

They will also generate a lot of discussions in the group. In this process, as long as we provide a little guidance, they will tell us what the next communication point should be. This comes from the real voice of users, not what our company predicts or slaps on the forehead. Sometimes we feel that our fans are more creative than us.

How to manage the core fan base? It needs a carrier. This time we used QQ instead of WeChat. Why use QQ instead of WeChat? Because we found that more netizens born in the 1990s prefer QQ to WeChat. For them, WeChat may be more suitable for the workplace. Therefore, when companies choose a platform, they must consider the user population more. If you are born in the 1990s, we think QQ is still a very good carrier.

In the above picture, I briefly analyzed some advantages and disadvantages of QQ groups and WeChat groups. To sum up, QQ groups have more people and are easier to form centers. If we were doing community operations around those born in the 1990s, this platform might be able to better highlight the tone and theme of the brand. Build a word-of-mouth marketing system

The third very important thing is to build a word-of-mouth marketing system. There are two very important points here, one is the company's word-of-mouth marketing model, and the other is the word-of-mouth marketing driving model.

Now that we are doing word-of-mouth marketing, we need to build a model based on the user's social influence, including his close relationship with the brand.

(1) Company employees and channels

Who is closest to the brand? They are the company’s employees and channels. He is the one who knows the company’s products best and understands the best, and he is also the group of people who can most easily provide consumers with clear benefits. The value of these people is often ignored by companies. ?

(2) Loyal users and community members

One level up, there are loyal users of the enterprise, including community members, which are relatively close to the enterprise. There are many product-based communities now. When they make products, they may first build a group and add some seed users. The number of these seed users is not particularly large, 1,000 or hundreds or 1,000. Then they will continue to interact with these people to improve the product. They have an emotional connection with the company. This relationship is very close, and it is easier to help the company spread word-of-mouth marketing.

(3) Opinion leaders/KOL

The group further up are opinion leaders, which is what we call KOL. Nowadays, Internet celebrities are very popular and popular, but many companies don’t like Internet celebrities because they sell all kinds of products and have little consistency in values ??with the company.

So where do the opinion leaders we talk about come from? It comes from your employees, from your channels, and from your loyal users and community members.

(4) Potential consumers

In the word-of-mouth marketing model, we find that companies that generally do well tend to focus on the top of an iceberg, which is the potential consumer. At the consumer level. For example, Xiaomi is a company that does very good word-of-mouth marketing. Lei Jun often says outside that Xiaomi’s fans are everything to Xiaomi. The reason why Xiaomi is very good at word-of-mouth marketing is because its word-of-mouth marketing system is built from the bottom up. That is, starting from the employee channel, to mid-level users, and then to opinion leaders.

If a company wants to do good word-of-mouth marketing and only does the top level, then your cost must be the highest. Because let’s think about it, which one is higher, the cost value brought to you by 1,000 of your loyal users and 1,000 employees, or 100,000 fans? It may be that it is easier for you to communicate with your 1,000 loyal users and get them to spread word of mouth than to influence 100,000 potential consumers. How to stimulate word of mouth?

When word-of-mouth marketing is driven, we find that creating content is very difficult. Especially for a company like Durex, if it wants to maintain its leadership in creativity, its team size, including investment costs, will be very high. Therefore, no marketing planning master can guarantee that every content he creates will trigger a large amount of communication.

On the basis that companies say they should try their best to make their own content better, how can they try their best to promote dissemination? There is something ignored by many companies, which is the incentive mechanism. Because of the incentive mechanism, different groups of people can spread more actively, and this spread will be more sustainable.

Do a good job in social marketing

Creativity and technology are equally important

One-on-one communication with users and advertising are both data-driven. Content is very luxurious and difficult to promise. Incentive mechanisms have been ignored by most companies, and data and technical capabilities are even more important today when social dividends have disappeared.

I remember what Steve Jobs once said, saying that we are now at the crossroads of technology and humanities. In fact, for corporate marketing, for every marketing person in the company, and every CMO, we We are at a crossroads between creativity and technology. Creativity is important, and technical layout is equally important.

For example, everyone has been talking about the concept of big data for several years, but which companies have actually used it? What companies can do well? There are very few.

Most of the successful marketing cases we have done have used data and technology analysis. These technologies can help me know which users are our target users and which users are willing to help us spread and share. of.