Breaking out of the Red Ocean | Good content drives new brand growth

This article uses ten sentences and ten case studies to solve the problem of how brands can achieve new growth through content-driven development. The author draws a strong conclusion from an objective perspective and official data that only by improving the awareness of content strategy and improving the ability to implement content can we achieve brand effectiveness and super growth. It is recommended for novice operators to learn together.

The fact is that there is no blue ocean market anymore. How can brands stand out in the red ocean? Content is the key factor. Ten sentences and ten cases explain the underlying logic of good content driving new brand growth.

1. Good content enriches brand image

The image in the minds of consumers should not be just a few words, but a picture , and the content will give the picture its own style .

Good content will impress consumers with the brand, and then naturally grow a corresponding brand label in the minds of consumers. The secret of lululemon's content dissemination is its " Brand Ambassador Program ", which covers everyone from famous athletes to local celebrities such as yogis and personal trainers. Lululemon provides ambassadors with free products, exposure and popularity, and initially builds these KOLs' loyalty to the brand.

KOLs spontaneously publish "lululemon" related content on their own channels and fan circles. In such a close connection, the influence of both parties is constantly broadened and transformed, forming a win-win virtuous cycle . "lululemon" attaches great importance to the creation of brand image , and will ensure that the values ​​of the selected KOLs are consistent with the brand, creating a unified image in different cities and cultures, and depicting a very consistent ideal life state for consumers.

2. Good content elevates brand

Neuromarketing scientist Martin Lindstrom used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record brain activity in people, and found that consumers’ brain activity when exposed to powerful brand images was similar to that when they were exposed to religious imagery.

This seems to indicate that a strong brand is to consumers what a religion is to its believers . Therefore, brands need to shape consumers’ beliefs , and both good products and good content are essential. Good content is spread by believers like the Bible, constantly raising the brand’s status and height in the minds of consumers.

For example, Apple’s classic advertisements “ Macintosh 1984 ” released in 1984 and “ Think Different” released in 1997 shaped and emphasized the “freedom” and “innovation” in the Apple brand spirit, which later became the two cornerstones of the Apple brand story.

Apple's annual product launch conferences, developer conferences, etc. The vague new product leaks before the annual launch conferences, the invitation letters sent out a few days before the launch conferences, and reports on the developer conferences are all different types of brand content, making the Apple brand a high degree of faith in the minds of its consumers.

3. Good content saves brand budget

The logic of content dissemination in the Internet era is fundamentally different from that in the past. There used to be an economic phenomenon called the " water cooler effect ". Economic masters believe that once a major TV program or major event occupies the water cooler time (the time when everyone gathers in the tea room to chat) the next day, it means that it has occupied the public's attention, occupied advertisers, and occupied the commanding heights of economic effects.

This reflects a kind of human nature defined by sociology : although there are differences between people, as social animals, people all care about what is happening around them . However, in the past five years, the rise of social software such as WeChat has brought subtle changes to the dissemination of content .

In decentralized media, in theory, everyone only sees the content they care about. In daily use, everyone constantly removes content that is irrelevant to them and adds content that they like.

From a psychological point of view, this is correct. As animals with complex emotions, all human behaviors follow only two principles: first, obtain as many details of information as possible ; second, try to interpret the information obtained in the way that is most comfortable for one's own cognition.

This leads to the decentralization of the media, which is actually contradictory in sociology and psychology . Therefore, we often see some obvious centralization phenomena in decentralized media, such as the frequent appearance of some nationwide events and articles in the circle of friends. At the same time, the popularity of WeChat has not made Weibo, which has a strong media attribute, disappear. So how is this contradiction resolved?

In fact, in an era of media decentralization, people still have a social need to find the center of public opinion . This has given rise to a new identity, which can be called active communication nodes , that is, opinion leaders ( KOL ). Therefore, brands now need to spend a lot of budget on active communication nodes in the network information structure - KOL, to cover more people through KOL.

At this time, the value of good content is obvious, because good content has a very strong self-propagation attribute, provided that it meets the needs of KOLs, expresses certain views on their behalf, drives fans' emotions , and even brings them extra income . This can greatly save the brand communication budget . The "Hongxing Erke" incident that swept the entire Internet is the best example.

4. Good content expands the user pool

Brand is a consumer-centric concept. Without consumers, there is no brand. The so-called brand equity is the consumer's knowledge about the brand. It is the psychological fact created for consumers by all marketing activities or contents related to the brand. This definition shows that brand equity has four characteristics.

First, brand equity is intangible.

Secondly, brand equity is centered around the brand name.

Again, brand assets influence consumer behavior , including purchasing behavior and responses to marketing activities.

Finally, brand equity is attached to the consumer, not to the product.

Therefore, the biggest asset of a brand is actually its consumer assets . The growth of consumer assets is centered on the consumer life cycle, increasing the penetration rate of segmented populations and the growth of ARPU value. Good content is to help brands expand the consumer pool and increase the penetration rate of segmented populations.

Crowds drive business growth, and content drives crowd growth.

This is the strategy that "Novan" has been practicing all along. For a long time, the chocolate market has been monopolized by foreign brands. Dove, which ranks first, has 80% of its volume in offline channels. As a domestic brand, Novan can only rely on online channels if it wants to break through and grow. Therefore, the brand regards Douyin as the main battlefield for growth, and invested 70% of its brand budget in Douyin last year.

"Chinese-style" products, sufficient budget and efficient budget use have directly cultivated a huge pool of A3 interest groups for "Novan". The number of interested people in the brand reached 124 million at its peak last year. It can be said that one out of every eight Douyin users is an interested person of "Novan".

Through efficient content promotion and full-area conversion, "Novan" successfully won the first place in annual sales in the online chocolate market during the peak sales season in December last year, and achieved the first place in omni-channel sales of domestic chocolate throughout the year.

5. Good content deepens user interaction

White-label products use low prices to reach consumers in a one-way manner , while brands use content to interact deeply with consumers. Products priced at 9.9 yuan are indeed enough to make users place orders on impulse, but this may only be limited to impulse, and consumers may not even stay for an extra second.

Here I would like to talk about the "Return Plan" of "Santonban". The Return Plan is a long-term plan of "Santonban" to recycle empty coffee shells . It is carried out twice a year. Users can make an appointment through the exclusive mini-program and go to the return points set up in various cities on the designated open days to exchange empty shells for themed supplies. The recycled empty shells will also be reused to make life-related products.

In the past six seasons of the return plan, there were a total of 330 return points. In 16 days, the brand received 125,653 returnees and 13,671,400 empty coffee cans they sent. At the same time, 578,521 items were delivered to the returnees and 1,896 volunteers were taken care of on-site. The return point is a warm and friendly connection point. This is just one of the brand contents that "Santonban" can be called amazing. Who doesn't love it?

6. Good content increases user stickiness

For brands, attracting new customers is certainly important, but retaining consumers and getting them to buy repeatedly is even more important. The repurchase rate can well reflect the brand's consumer stickiness. On the basis of finding good products, good content is the key to increasing brand and user stickiness.

The main theme of the "Babycare" short video content is maternal and infant parenting knowledge , including lazy complementary food, picture book reading, parent-child games, easy parenting and other fixed columns. In addition to the regular live broadcast of bringing goods, Babycare also holds a special live broadcast every week, inviting professional parenting experts, nutritionists, etc. to share parenting experiences and methods with mothers.

The person in charge of operations of the "Babycare" video account introduced: "As a brand, we hope to help the mother and baby group, rather than simply gaining traffic through personalities and stories. We look at content and users with a long-term perspective , and hope that users will recognize the brand through content , so that the brand will have more opportunities to display and recommend more products to users in the future." Good content has become a powerful medium for "Babycare" to win new users and connect with old users.

7. Good content catalyzes new product introduction

In a purchase decision , most of the user's efforts are spent on choosing from the available alternative brands . We call the set of alternative brands known to the user the demand awakening set , and the set of alternative brands that the user will actually consider the final consideration set (because for reasons such as price, negative experience, etc., the user will not seriously consider all the brands in the awakening set ).

The main purpose of content seeding is to build consumption scenarios , implant new products, and then add brands to the user's demand awakening set . The real impact of content seeding on consumers is to link products with the self-value that consumers expect to achieve , creating a positive psychological experience for them. Over time, consumers will transfer the positive emotions obtained from these experiences to the seeded products , which is manifested in behavior as paying for the products (pull out the grass), and emotionally as the realization of self-value (the experience brought by pull out the grass).

"Yuanjiusuo" is a dark horse brand of functional food and beverage that is well aware of this . It was founded in May 2021 and focuses on developing soft drink products with high consumer awareness and guaranteed functional ingredients based on various sub-health issues. On December 14, 2021, the first product focusing on eye protection function, blueberry anthocyanin juice, was officially launched on Tmall and other platforms.

By quickly bringing new products to the market through content seeding and strengthening mental seeding words through scenarios , the search index on e-commerce platforms has maintained a steady and stable growth, and the brand has also entered the list of top 15 emerging beverage brands in China in 2022.

8. Good content accelerates the distribution of hot products

In the era of content e-commerce , every time a brand has an influencer producing content in a live broadcast room or through short videos, consumers have an additional window to understand the brand. This is of great help in cultivating user minds for the product and is a good channel for distributing popular products and promoting the brand .

At the same time, thanks to the early content preparation, the brand has accumulated quite accurate and abundant crowd portraits when it starts its own store broadcast, which also lays the foundation for the effectiveness and efficiency of paid traffic.

From June 2021, when it was discovered that mid-level influencers could bring sales growth, to January 2022, in just half a year, the monthly sales of "Ding Ding Lazy Food" sauerkraut fish on Douyin reached 50 million, of which 70-80% of the contribution came from the distribution of influencer content.

Compared with directly launching live broadcasts, Dingding Lazy Food prefers to use short videos to attract traffic to live broadcasts and filter out people who have no willingness to consume. In order to produce high-quality video materials, the content team of Dingding Lazy Food has now reached 50 people, and content capabilities have become a basic threshold when selecting partners.

9. Good content drives natural traffic

High-quality pictures, texts and short videos will definitely stimulate consumers to take further actions . For example, it only takes one step to like and collect , followed by forwarding and commenting . But for a product recommendation content, the most important consumer action is actually search , which means that she really wants to learn more or place an order directly.

Therefore, " search after viewing " is a very critical indicator to measure the value of seeding content. It can also further track the subsequent add-to-cart , collection and purchase data of this group of search users. The most important thing is that the traffic brought by search behavior is accurate and free natural traffic .

As a new beauty brand, "Funny Elves Fangli" has added short video content that is interesting , interactive , and timely in terms of content scenarios, and has deployed a large number of mid-level influencers to increase product search terms.

During the search operation process, Fangli found that the operation and maintenance of "search after viewing" can help users who have already been attracted by the product but have not made an immediate decision to buy it to speed up their decision-making cycle . Through the blue words, users can jump directly to the live broadcast room or other short videos to be attracted to the product again, thereby increasing users' favorability towards the brand and products and promoting conversion.

From April to August last year, Fangli achieved a nearly 400% increase in search GMV, and in July, the transaction volume in the shelf scene exceeded 10 million.

10. Good content reduces investment and production costs

Content is the crowd , because the material is targeted, birds of a feather flock together. The type of content determines what kind of people are willing to watch it , so optimizing content materials is roughly equivalent to optimizing the delivery effect.

From the user's perspective, when a user sees an ad video, it is an opportunity for the brand to display its content on Qianchuan. There are multiple ad creatives competing for this opportunity, but only one ad creative is successfully displayed to the user.

What determines whose advertising creativity can be displayed is the push logic behind Qianchuan, one of the most important of which is the eCPM value evaluation, eCPM value = bid (Pbid) * estimated click-through rate (eCTR) * estimated conversion rate (eCVR) * 1000.

From a brand perspective, eCPM is the estimated cost per thousand impressions . The higher the eCPM, the more competitive the ad is, and the lower the cost of getting the same amount of traffic. The click-through rate is a direct test of the quality of the content and determines the life and death of the entire delivery plan. Good content has a high 3s completion rate and a high click-through rate.

During the 818 event last year, Li Ning used rich video materials to reserve users with relevant interests . It combined vertical videos of product display and scenario-based Amway with highlight materials in the live broadcast room, and creatively edited diversified video content to attract a large number of interested users to enter the live broadcast room and convert them into new fans. The number of fans increased by 23.25% compared with the previous cycle through the explosive video. The main pink sweater was used on the 818 day to conduct a single product video to attract traffic, and the online viewing rate increased by 466% , and the advertising transaction GMV increased by 4.63% with less consumption .

Only by improving the awareness of content strategy and improving the ability to implement content can we achieve "product effectiveness and super growth."

Author: Brand Old White

Official account: BrandLaoBai (ID: BrandLaoBai)