Although there are many social media in China, from popular “WeChat weibo douyin” to vertical platforms such as douban, xiaohongshu and zhihu, different media play different marketing roles.Socialized marketing is like a flood of monsters, making traditional marketers and brands unprepared.Brand marketing from the CCTV, published widely, T brand, to create a topic, do blast, web celebrity and other ways of transformation is just a few years.

The topic of fragmentation of communication and media dusting has been discussed too much in the industry. If brand owners want to achieve “circle breaking” of marketing, social communication is the first or even the only choice.However, for most enterprises, social communication is a mystery. In reality, there are a lot of brands that spend a lot of money on social marketing but have no return, and there are also some brands that thrive in social media with very low cost.

Is hot style replicable?Why are you always bad at social marketing?Are there any effective social marketing strategies?China digital marketing hopes this article can give you some help.

In the early years of 2011-2013, Microblog, as an emerging medium, enabled brand owners to communicate directly with users. During this period, the basic marketing strategies of brands were established character setting and interactive.Big brands are the first to have the smell of social marketing. For example, brands owned by P&G and MINI China will design personification roles for official weibo accounts to interact and communicate with users.Common content management techniques in this period were to do daily topic management, then implant brand information, and do user interaction such as “night chat”.

From 2014 to 2016, users have already experienced aesthetic fatigue in daily interactions and desensitized to online marketing routines.Brand owners begin to devote more and more energy to hot marketing and creative marketing, and promote brands by participating in discussions on hot topics, making posters and executing specific campaigns.

By 2017-2018, the daily operation method of morning and evening greetings has begun to fail substantially. Meanwhile, the concept of “planting grass” has emerged, and online marketing is paying more and more attention to transformation and sales.So the lucrative marketing of sweepstakes, such as alipay’s koi campaign, has been revived in a more powerful way.

From the client side, you can see that the user’s attention is constantly being divided.When they first went on weibo around 2011, users were surprised by everything.But by 2018, the information overload was overwhelming users with marketing campaigns.However, the positioning of weibo platform itself has also changed. In the early days, weibo was mainly focused on social issues, and most of the people who voiced their opinions were opinion leaders. However, nowadays, weibo has been transformed into an interactive platform focusing on entertainment, and most of the people who voiced their opinions were entertainment stars and fans.

Different marketing roles of different platforms

In addition to weibo, the importance of other platforms for brand promotion is self-evident. Different platforms have different attributes and rules, leading to different methods and purposes of brand marketing. Here is a brief list of the differences in marketing roles of the other three major platforms.

For example, users’ content preferences: WeChat is deep and long content, warm-hearted, sharp comments;Douyin is new peculiar and creative content.Little red book is a kind of grass, evaluation of the kind of content.WeChat, refresh, hot style is very hard.China digital marketing suggests deep value output and deep interaction with users.Douyin currently has a chance to get out, but it’s getting harder.China digital marketing suggests to explore new and strange ways of products and release users’ creativity.Little red book is currently unable to achieve hot style, but long tail product flow is high.China digital marketing suggests building product reputation and transforming products.

Why is it difficult for traditional marketers to do social marketing?

There may be obvious differences in thinking between traditional marketers and those who pay attention to social communication.

1. Treat KOL — Hard -Sell advertisement or co-creation

The emergence of KOL is a unique phenomenon in the era of social marketing. In the network communication structure of the Internet, KOL becomes a transit node of information and plays an important role in brand communication.

However, traditional marketing people tend to regard KOL as the online hard and wide resource position, while ignoring the creativity of KOL itself. Obvious examples are that many big brands will provide unified language information for kols to schedule and push.This is wasteful.

A more reasonable approach is that the brand side can try to create advertising content together with KOL, and make different promotion adaptation to different KOL user groups and content styles.Only in this way can it be big and small.After all, KOL knows what her fans love best.No KOL has ever become hot style because of the hard and wide language provided by party a. No matter how much hard-sell and wide verbal trick you send, you cannot get viral self-transmission.

2. Treat channels — high coverage or explosive power

Similarly, the practice of traditional marketers may be used to increasing the coverage of channels, and they are used to buying all the available head resources in the process of promotion.This is the newspaper radio and other media monopoly period of marketing ideas.And it’s not cheap.This has deviated from the small and broad nature of social marketing.

For social marketers, in addition to the usual head KOL, you can also choose the “explosion” KOL carefully.The number of fans of this kind of KOL may not be high and it is in the waist area, but the content is very real, the user stickiness is very high, and the creativity is very good. If this kind of KOL is launched, the probability of hot style can also be greatly improved.In fact, most of these kols need to be screened manually, and there are probably no more than 100 that meet the KOL standard.

3. Treat content — egoism or altruism

The early domestic marketing was a seller’s market, and the publicity content was often based on the brand’s own perspective to sell products to users.Now the brand is relatively surplus, the seller’s market has turned into the buyer’s market, users have more options.If the same brand perspective content is still used for promotion, it will only be abandoned by users.

Social marketing needs a user’s perspective in content communication. The brand should consider whether the advertising content and operation content are useful to users, and then superimpose commercial information on the basis of being useful to users. Otherwise, no matter how large the exposure is, users cannot really forward and collect it.What is useful?Having the chance to win a prize is useful.See your own love beans is useful.It is also helpful to have a positive mood after reading it.

4. Treat costs — financial or human resources

The promotion effect in the traditional marketing is good or bad, greatly depends on the resources to buy and spread, so well-known brands are the most aggressive advertising brand, it is precisely because of this, the early “king” has very important significance to the brand.”National brands” must be rich brands.

However, in today’s social marketing environment, high-quality resources are more hidden, and the resources bought by budget alone may not be high-quality or even have a lot of water.Real quality resources need to rely on the marketing team’s own energy to obtain and to comprehensive judgment the sensitivity of the social topic and study.For example,the head account in each big organization publication is not necessarily the best release channel.

What is social marketing thinking?

Generally speaking, social marketing thinking has three aspects: respect users, satisfy users and become users.

Today’s Internet users are no less sensitive to social marketing than any marketer. To respect users means not to treat them like fools. They may see more than you.You also don’t think of users as traffic. Social marketing with pure traffic thinking is not going to work.

To meet the needs of users, there is no need to say more. On the one hand, the brand needs to find out the needs of users, so as to avoid the phenomenon of apples and oranges.On the other hand, it needs some creativity to meet users’ needs in an appropriate way.

Become a user, may be a lot of brand side and marketing people’s short board.Marketers and brands need to experience products and other users’ emotions just like ordinary users, so as to know where the most impressive points are.These points whether social marketing or traditional marketing are the same.

Four effective social marketing strategies

1. Interest stimulation

Incentives such as sweepstakes work all the time, but with a little innovation over time.For example, last year’s refresh alipay koi activity, in fact, is to use the blue V brand linkage and comments on the floor of the way to do microblogging lottery.

2. Real-time hot spots

The hot topic is the own traffic.In the past, many small brands become “web celebrity brand” by grabbing hot spots.The bonus of hot spots is always there, nothing more than Angle, depth and speed.At present, the effect of hot posters is not obvious for new brands, and it is very difficult for new brands to break the circle through hot posters, but it is actually some effective exposure techniques to seize the comment space of hot weibo or related hot comments with smart copywriters.

3. Quality content

Users’ desensitization to marketing techniques means that social marketing will return to content. Creating content that is truly beneficial to users can always bring good quality traffic, and content has a long tail effect, which may be the most beneficial to brands in the long run.Whether it is evaluation, user experience, UGC sorting, teaching of professional knowledge, or even entertainment content.Quality content needs to start from the “user perspective” and be real and useful to users, rather than pr content made from a “brand perspective”.

4. Visual stimulation

Another way is to attract users through visual, interactive and other methods. Some brands can obtain considerable sound volume by relying on posters or TVC for marketing, but this mainly tests the design ability, as well as the grasp and innovation of The Times’ aesthetics and users’ aesthetics

Five tips for social marketing

Although social marketing can bring great volume and attention, it is still only a part of integrated marketing. Social marketing must be promoted within the framework of integrated marketing to make sense, otherwise it is not important at all.Here are five social marketing tips:

1. Heavy input of marketing personnel

Social marketing requires a marketer to be sensitive to socially-related topics, and this sensitivity is built on a lot of time and energy spent studying them.Good social marketers can quickly determine what topics are likely to catch fire, what forms will impress users, and what state of KOL will generate refresh power.Social marketing can be small and broad, and it is by virtue of the keen marketing personnel that there are also a lot of artificial skills in operation techniques to leverage the discussion of user topics.

2. Integrated marketing thinking

Social marketing is a part of integrated marketing, and integrated marketing is like regimental warfare.Different marketing techniques and different marketing actions have a light weight on the overall goal.It’s just that social marketing is the army with the bazooka, and all the attention is on it, but not infantry, logistics, military doctors, etc.Brands that require hot style alone often fail to understand the purpose of doing hot style and treat hot style independently, which is caused by the lack of an integrated marketing thinking.

3. Product strength is the foundation

No amount of marketing can make a product useless.”Go princess go” is popular not because the cast is poor, but because the quality and opportunity of the show itself is good.Social marketing is just about making it known in a way that suits it.In fact, since then, there have been a lot of network drama imitate it hit “poor, toxic, dirty” point, but did not get what big response.

4.Good ideas are hard to reuse

Good ideas are disposable. They are not fresh after one use. We need to find the next good idea.However, the good news is that the creative methodology can be applied iteratively, and we can always find new creative points, and once again get the opportunity to spread it in a small and broad way.

5.Trust is everything

In order for social marketing to work well, mutual trust is very important.Brand side and agents have enough trust, agents will have enough freedom to carry out creative practice;Brand side and agent have enough trust to KOL, KOL can create a real suitable for their users of the promotion content, trust is such a link, finally achieve a hot style.Behind each of our successful cases, there is strong support and trust from the brand side, otherwise any plan may be reduced to mediocrity, so the brand side and the agent, in fact, is a win-win relationship of mutual achievement.