The Breakthrough Effect of Black Myth: Wukong: The To B Journey Behind Top Marketing

As a recent popular game, Black Myth: Wukong has not only attracted widespread attention inside and outside the gaming circle, but has also successfully broken through the circle and driven the development of a series of related industries. From the hot sales of co-branded coffee to the fluctuations in the capital market, this game has demonstrated its strong marketing capabilities and brand influence. This article will explore the marketing strategies behind Black Myth: Wukong and the implications of these strategies for To B marketing.

Speaking of the recent hot topics, "Black Myth: Wukong" must be the well-deserved Top 1. I believe that everyone's circle of friends has seen this "monkey", oh no, it's the Monkey King!

After four years of development, Black Myth: Wukong, which carried the expectations of countless players, was finally officially launched on August 20, completely igniting people's enthusiasm. Its popularity soared from domestic to foreign countries, and set off a Journey to the West fever.

I believe everyone has experienced this craze. Regardless of whether you are a game enthusiast or not, you will mention "Black Myth" when chatting.

Even my mother would ask: Son, have you played the new Goku?

According to public data, Black Myth: Wukong has topped Steam's global sales charts for eleven consecutive weeks since its pre-sale in June this year, with sales on all platforms exceeding 1.5 billion yuan. Even CCTV and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have endorsed it.

At the same time, the co-branded coffee with Luckin Coffee was sold out instantly after it went online, and Luckin Coffee’s CGO even lamented that male purchasing power subverted cognition.

In addition, the game's extremely high popularity has also spread to the capital market, with many concept stocks such as CITIC Publishing, Huayi Brothers, Zhejiang Publishing Group, and Zhishang Technology experiencing a surge in their daily limit prices.

In just a few days, the popularity of "Black Myth: Wukong" has continued to rise.

Of course, the quality of a product is always the cornerstone of marketing success. However, after four years of development, even the best products still need certain marketing and operation methods. Because the popularity of a product cannot be accidental, it must be the product of marketing strategy.

With excellent product quality, outstanding core gameplay, and appropriate marketing strategies, "Black Myth: Wukong" eventually triggered a network-wide traffic carnival.

1. Three stages of black myth marketing

In summary, Black Myth: Wukong has gone through three stages in marketing:

1. The various pre-release promotions for the game, starting with a promotional video on Bilibili four years ago, whetted the appetite of its core user base.
2. Starting from the day before the release, "Wukong" has teamed up with many well-known brands such as Luckin Coffee, Didi, Lenovo, etc. to set off a joint wave, allowing people who have never played the game to quickly learn about the game, and using the influence of various brands to make the game even more popular;
3. After the game was released, it brought high-quality gaming experience to the majority of players through its in-depth game content and achieved high-intensity self-propagation around the world.

1. Find the right channels to meet the expectations of core users

First, clarify the product positioning and target user groups.

Just like this time, the production team positioned Black Myth: Wukong as the first domestic 3A game from the beginning of the project. The core user group of its target is also very direct, that is, the small proportion of console and stand-alone players in China. And this type of users is relatively concentrated on Station B, so Game Science chose to release the promotional video of Black Myth: Wukong on Station B at that time, and it became a hit in one fell swoop. It really hit the pain point of this group of players that "there are no domestic 3A games, and China can only make mobile games", and also laid the foundation for the phenomenal spread of Black Myth: Wukong in the later period.

(The video released by Black Myth Wukong on Station B has a maximum number of views approaching 60 million)

2. "Wukong" set off a joint branding trend, gradually breaking through the user circle and "entering the homes of ordinary people"

Nowadays, everyone is "divided" into circles by various hobbies and media, and everyone lives in their own circle.

Judging from the data alone, the gaming community is huge, however, stand-alone console games only account for a very small part of the gaming community. Most people's knowledge of games only stays on mobile games and computer games, and they have no idea about 3A games on consoles.

However, this time, "Black Myth: Wukong" successfully broke the circle through multi-dimensional brand collaboration, from coffee to shared bicycles, laptops, peripherals, and even Hanyi fonts, and achieved the penetration of product popularity from core game players to more marginal game users and even non-game users.

The extensive collaboration of Black Myth has brought us some inspiration, that is, in the marketing communication design, product marketing should not only target users who directly pay for the product at one time, but also consider the characteristics of the product and go one step further above the core users. How to use the brand influence at a broader level to bring more new users or even paying users to the own brand? The key is to design an effective and sustainable process mechanism for users to influence users.

3. Focus on polishing products and improving the brand's self-propagation ability

As a game regarded by domestic players as "the first college student in the village", the public's concern, care and curiosity towards "Black Myth: Wukong" were concentratedly expressed the moment the game was released.

Whether they are game enthusiasts or casual fans, they are willing to pay for a glimpse of it. Pre-orders, waiting to see it online, and posting pictures on WeChat Moments, every action is a support for this "monkey".

It is also because of this group of hardcore game users who took the initiative to launch a large amount of content and share on WeChat Moments, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu that the early popularity of "Black Myth: Wukong" was achieved, and after the release, all anchors and platforms "crowded" to broadcast the popularity of Tianmingren.

It was also because they spontaneously produced a massive amount of content on platforms such as WeChat Moments, Bilibili, Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu that more and more people who had not paid attention to it began to learn about "Black Myth: Wukong", instantly achieving an upgrade from a hot spot in a small circle to a large circle.

So, how do you measure the success of a marketing event?

When a company launches its product and starts marketing, it can not only accurately reach and serve the core target users, but also enable users to empathize with its own products, allowing these users to spontaneously enter the company's marketing process, and then achieve viral dissemination across the entire network. This is already a very successful marketing event.

"Black Myth: Wukong" undoubtedly takes this to the extreme.

In C-end marketing, we often see many seemingly sudden and accidental phenomenal hot events, but in fact there are clearly rhythmic marketing strategies and processes behind them; and how can B-end enterprises with relatively complex business models and product attributes combine their own environment to effectively improve marketing ROI?

2. When C-end products become popular one after another, what should B-end marketers do?

1. Fully understand the business

There is a saying that goes, there is no such thing as overtaking on a curve, a good start is more important than anything else.

We ToB marketers should first clarify our products and users, and fully understand the company's marketing needs at different stages. Admittedly, improving brand voice and acquiring customers must be the top priority in B2B marketing work. However, if you want to effectively achieve brand and customer acquisition goals, fully understanding corporate strategy and product business is the key prerequisite.

However, as the company's growth begins to slow down and the user pool becomes increasingly saturated, we should consider transitioning from extensive operations to acquire customers, toward more refined operations for existing customers.

2. As marketing becomes more difficult, low-cost growth and customer acquisition are key

With the rapid growth of the domestic B2B environment, customer awareness has increased, and the market has become increasingly saturated, making it more difficult for ToB companies to acquire customers. At the same time, due to the general environment's requirements for companies to "reduce costs and increase efficiency" in operations, companies have more precise requirements for market conversion data than in the past.

Therefore, a low-cost, high-precision, and high-ROI marketing strategy is the key to a company's long-term survival.

Whether marketers can flexibly apply ABM strategies to accurately reach target customers in a market environment with limited budgets is the key to whether they can lead the team to break through.

In the ABM marketing process, what we want is not more leads, but to expand the number of lists of a single enterprise and the activity of each contact, which is a very critical feature of ABM.

By formulating corresponding personalized marketing strategies for different customers among existing users, and through a series of learning and exchange activities such as high-end closed-door meetings and visits to enterprises, we can reach the core management level of customers.

In addition, ABM can strengthen collaboration with the sales team. By relying on monthly customer data, we can analyze customer behavior in multiple scenarios and new contacts, determine whether there will be changes in sales customer coverage and leads, and then assist sales actions to improve the overall collaborative efficiency of marketing and sales.

But simply serving existing users well is far from enough. The company still needs to expand, and the user pool needs to have new users flowing in continuously.

Therefore, the company needs a flexible and robust marketing system to ensure the company's lower limit in the process of innovation and maximize the conversion ROI on this basis.

3. Establish a process-based marketing system MTL

The infrastructure of an enterprise is its organizational capability and organizational system. The establishment of the MTL process can ensure the lower limit of an enterprise.

The MTL (Market to Lead) marketing system means that when we promote marketing strategies, we must always put customers at the center of the market strategy, emphasizing the construction of targeted full-process marketing plans based on the customer's psychological purchasing cycle.

Marketers need to say goodbye to the past “talking to themselves” marketing approach and delve into the customer’s perspective to explore their needs and pain points.

Secondly, we must actively coordinate internally within the company to establish a comprehensive integrated marketing and operation system of brand-strategy-R&D-sales-customers. While ensuring the effective implementation of marketing activities, we must be able to input effective demands and insights into the production and research team, ensure high-quality delivery of products and services, and thus achieve the overall business goals.

At the same time, marketers need to further integrate MTL process thinking throughout the entire marketing activities and build a process system from point to surface.

Concerns include: whether the marketing department has clearly established lead operation rules, whether the leads collected by the marketing department are efficiently and timely transferred to the sales side, whether the marketing department has established an effective evaluation system for its own ROI assessment, and other multi-dimensional process specifications.

3. Establish a sustainable enterprise survival system

The hot spots are one-off and unsustainable, and the heat will fade away over time. Due to the different audiences, it is difficult for ToB marketing to create a phenomenal hot event like "Black Myth: Wukong". Therefore, it is crucial to grasp the marketing logic and system that suits your own company.

In the current environment, we don't necessarily have to make a big noise. We can further explore sales opportunities in the existing user pool, take small steps to try to expand external channels, connect every link between marketing and customers, and gradually form a sustainable marketing closed-loop system. This is the long-term strategy for enterprises to survive and promote development.

As Feng Ji, founder of Game Science, mentioned, completion is more important than perfection. Whether it is B-end or C-end, whether it is marketing or games, I wish you and I can become the destined people on the journey of learning scriptures.