How to advertise at zero cost

In this article, the author selected the well-known brand Lululemon as a case to explain to you how to obtain traffic sources at low cost. Read this article and learn together!

If there is a proper strategy, a lot of advertising is free, such as Steve Jobs and Jack Ma in the past and Elon Musk, Li Shufu and Lei Jun in the recent past.

Their remarks often spark discussions throughout the industry, and their advertising is highly effective at almost no cost.

We have said too much about Jobs and Musk. This time we will choose a sports brand. You will definitely find a lot of ways to advertise for free here.

01 Brand ambassadors are a free source of traffic

Brand ambassadors are different from influencers and sports stars in that they are opinion leaders within the community.

Lululemon has about 1,500 store ambassadors, most of whom are sports experts or yoga studio founders within a few kilometers of the store. Their consumption choices have a direct influence and word-of-mouth effect on potential customers in the area.

Lululemon pays very little to its brand ambassadors. Unlike brand spokespersons who receive endorsement fees of millions or tens of millions, brand ambassadors receive trials of lululemon's new products and yoga photos taken by professional photographers. These photos will be placed on lululemon's website and store windows.

Luxury trench coat brand Burberry is also good at this. The brand hired photographers to take street photos in bustling cities around the world to discover customers wearing Burberry.

Brands will put these photos on their official websites, social media and store windows. On the one hand, this is almost free brand endorsement, but more importantly, it allows potential customers to see that ordinary people can also dress like celebrities.

After taking the first step by acquiring traffic at a low cost, lululemon continued to upgrade the quality of its spokespersons, first signing nine top yoga masters, and then signing 35 sports stars as spokespersons.

When we were consulting for a local tea brand, we suggested that they sign a contract with a local entrepreneur or artist as their spokesperson. Since the brand was originally only sold locally, it would be more appropriate to use a local brand master.

Brand ambassadors are not created naturally, lululemon has specially set up the position of "educator". They are well aware of lululemon's brand values ​​and know who is suitable to be a brand ambassador.

Educators look for store ambassadors based on their personal connections and social networks, and confirm cooperation after 6 months to 1 year of investigation. Each city has its own unique temperament, and educators determine who is suitable to be a brand spokesperson based on local characteristics and brand positioning.

02 Stores are the most direct source of traffic

Lululemon's stores are all located in busy shopping districts. The intention is obvious: if you are a top brand, you will naturally choose the best location. This is the perception of potential customers. First-tier brands cannot open stores in vegetable markets.

It is said that many brands in Beijing Sanlitun, Shanghai Nanjing Road, and Chengdu Taikoo Li are not making money or even losing money, but they still want to stay in these places because top business districts have potential energy, and potential customers believe that brands in top business districts are good.

If the business district is well-established, the store can bully customers. If the brand is well-established, the customers can bully the store. Brands like Haidilao, Starbucks, KFC, and Louis Vuitton can enjoy rent discounts or even free rent in many business districts.

If a business district does well, it can bring traffic to the brand, so there is a reason to raise the rent or even eat up the brand's reasonable profit. This is why the store bullies the customers. If a brand does well, it can bring traffic to the business district, so there is a reason to lower the rent or even give it away for free. This is why the customers bully the store.

To make a store a source of traffic, in addition to choosing a location, you also need to have a unique design for the store's windows and doorheads, and have advanced concepts for color and visuals. A good location only determines the traffic entrance, and a good design can determine how much conversion rate the traffic has.

Lululemon's unique design doesn't stop there. She turned the store into a yoga practice site. The bottom of the hangers in the Lululemon store have pulleys. In the morning and evening, they push the hangers aside and leave the middle space for customers to practice.

Coupled with the unique store design (potential customers can see yoga practice activities in the store through the window), the store has become a showcase for yoga practice. The store staff will actively invite potential customers to participate in yoga practice, even if they do not buy lululemon products. After establishing a sense of familiarity, the transaction will naturally be realized.

When we were consulting for a children's model training school, we suggested that they design their children's clothing store as a model practice place. The reason is the same as lululemon, allowing potential customers to see their children wearing the clothes in the store can smoothly close the deal.

The domestic toy brand Brook also took a similar action. When Lego withdrew from the Toys R Us channel, Brook promptly replaced Lego. Because Toys R Us is a high-end toy channel, it has a great effect on improving Brook's brand image.

Bosideng is also like this, investing a lot of money in store upgrades, because channels are advertising spaces and the embodiment of brand potential.

03 Yoga Party

If the yoga practice in the store is expanded to the outdoors and the number of people increases to hundreds or thousands, it becomes a yoga party.

Lululemon is very good at and values ​​its outdoor yoga activities. All potential customers who love yoga and sports can participate, not limited to lululemon's own customers.

Lululemon combines group yoga with the city's creative markets and music parties, becoming a part of the city's culture. We know that a brand must have its own values, and the highest pursuit of a brand is to become a representative of people's values.

Nike strives to represent our values ​​of breaking through limits and pursuing dreams, Apple represents rebellious spirit and minimalism, and Nongfu Spring is also working hard to create its own brand style of productism and craftsmanship.

The values ​​​​that lululemon promotes are consistent with the spirit of yoga. She now wants to equate herself with yoga, and the next step should be to create a brand style that is optimistic, healthy, and self-disciplined.

An outdoor event with nearly a thousand people, combined with corresponding online promotion, is of great significance to brand building and customer creation. Yes, don’t let the activities within the circle just stay within the circle, but promote the offline activities online.

04 Yoga teaching

The value of yoga teaching is similar to that of store masters. Both use a method that potential customers can accept to enter their cognition.

After all, not everyone has the time and financial resources to take professional yoga classes. There are many yoga classes on the market but they are not professional and systematic enough.

The yoga classes produced by lululemon just meet this demand. Potential customers can build brand awareness while learning yoga.

The yoga teaching videos shot by lululemon on Youku in the United States are of high quality enough to be considered as paid products. The brand hired professional yoga coaches and video production companies to output the industry's top yoga teaching courses, which are still free. This has a huge effect on building potential customers' goodwill towards lululemon.

Of course, the teaching video also features lululemon’s store ambassadors and brand spokespersons. This is a very natural and clever interaction.

Lululemon will also sign contracts with some waist-boosting influencers to shoot yoga practice videos, guiding more users to follow suit and upload their own practice videos.

Nike is also good at this, often inviting its sports stars to shoot some basketball teaching videos, which are viewed by countless users just by uploading them to social media.

05 Rehan Community

Rehan Community is the gathering place for lululemon’s private domain traffic.

Private domain traffic refers to traffic that brands can use for free at any time. Public domain traffic refers to traffic that exists on applications such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, etc. These traffics are huge and the purchase cost is also extremely high.

WeChat, Weibo and other applications are like shopping districts such as Beijing Sanlitun and Chengdu Taikoo Li. With huge traffic, they can arbitrarily slaughter brands without traffic. So for brands, the reasonable way is to build their own private domain traffic.

In the general sense, we think that the way to gather private domain traffic is the brand's own subscription account, Toutiao account, Douyin account, etc. But lululemon has gone a step further. You can find nearby stores and yoga activities on the Rehan Community and arrange to sign up for them yourself.

Keep also has a small program that can simply record the user's exercise data.

In terms of the use of private domain traffic, we believe that the most professional brand at present is Perfect Diary. Perfect Diary has accumulated all the traffic obtained from Tmall, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, stores, and WeChat, and has achieved the activation and fission of private domain traffic in a reasonable and effective way.

In the Rehan community, you can also see lululemon store ambassadors and user photos. These 7 ways to get free traffic are also coordinated.

06 Customers are also opinion leaders

After the education brand Xueersi entered a new city, the first thing it did was not to open branches on a large scale, but to find outstanding students in the area and focus on training them, so as to create a word-of-mouth effect for the brand.

After all, it is much easier to train a student with a score of 90 to 95 than to train a student with a score of 60 to 80. The emergence of excellent students will bring a good dissemination effect to Xueersi, and those students who are not so good will not doubt the level of Xueersi even if the training effect is not good.

The same is true for lululemon's strategy. The brand is positioned as high-end yoga pants, and its current target audience is unmarried and childless super girls aged 25-35: they have high incomes, live in independent apartments, love sports, pursue quality of life, and are willing to pay for high-quality products.

The founder of lululemon once made a mistake, saying that women with poor figures were not suitable for lululemon, and was therefore accused by the media of discriminating against women.

In fact, this shows lululemon's brand strategy: focus on high-potential people who will drive other people's consumption choices. When a super girl with a toned body and obvious curves walks by wearing tight yoga pants and showing her curvy figure, she is the brand spokesperson of lululemon.

After a brand becomes successful, of course most people like it and it also loves to promote universal values. However, when a brand first becomes successful, it emerges from a niche group of people and marginal areas, and the values ​​it upholds are also a bit rebellious. Only in this way can it win the recognition of that niche group of people.

07 The shop assistant is also a super girl

If the customer is a super girl, then the clerk should also be a super girl.

Only in this way can a seamless link be formed between customers and store clerks, and store clerks, educators, store ambassadors, and potential customers can become a community.

This also means higher labor costs than other companies. If you think you can train ordinary store clerks to become super girls, it is actually very difficult and even means higher investment.

Lululemon paid a higher price to hire super girls as store clerks because they can truly embody the brand's philosophy and temperament. For potential customers, the intuitive perception of the brand is not only the product itself but also the quality of the store clerks. Only when the store clerks truly love sports, love yoga, and have an optimistic attitude, can lululemon create such a brand feeling.

Super girl-level customers and shop assistants are the origin group in the positioning theory. If you grasp the core customers in the crowd, others will be attracted.

For a consulting brand, publications and short videos are equivalent to lululemon’s yoga teaching videos, training courses and summit speeches are equivalent to her yoga parties, recommenders of publications are equivalent to her brand ambassadors, well-known entrepreneurs in training courses are equivalent to her super customers, and WeChat communication groups and student company visits are her hot sweat community.

This is true for any industry. You need to have uniqueness and professionalism, as well as media channels to spread your uniqueness, and gather some expert customers who recognize you. We call it: correct positioning, origin channel, origin crowd, drainage products, core products and credentials, etc.

In summary:

The above 7 ways to advertise without spending money actually require financial investment. Although they are not advertisements in themselves, they have advertising value.

When these parts are added together, they create a strong brand effect, saving the brand more advertising costs and even store rent.

Of course, these effective tactics alone are not enough. We still need to emphasize the need for clear brand positioning and product innovation so that these promotional methods can form a synergistic force.

Author: Zhang Zhiyu

WeChat public account: Zhang Zhiyu (ID: zhiyu2307)