Some thoughts for June 2023!

This article shares the author's insights on marketing, content, platform and business management through 9 pieces of thinking. If you are also concerned about the hot spots and trends in these fields, this thinking is worth reading.

A minute of thinking is worth an hour of nagging.

When humans think, God laughs. In order to make God laugh more, I have always set a small goal for myself: think and record .

Every month, at the end of the month or the beginning of the next month, I will organize some of my thoughts for that month into a written form and continue to share it with everyone in 2023.

No matter what, I will keep thinking and recording for a long time. As long as I am not too busy, I will continue to share it every month. You Raise Me Up!

01

The most important thing in writing product copy is never the logic of the copy, but a deep understanding of the product. This is not a question of ability, but a question of attitude.

Okay, is this just nonsense?

Yes! But how many copywriters can do this? Either they don’t know the product at all and just look for the copywriter of the competitor; or they read a few pages of brief introduction of the product; or they extract a few selling points from the manuscript of the product department and that’s it…

It's actually very simple. If someone asks you whether your product is good or not, and what makes you say it is good, you should be able to immediately call up countless pieces of information in your mind.

What’s interesting is that now if you ask many copywriters whether your product is good or not, their answer will be: rubbish.

02

After social media became popular, I often heard people say that marketing nowadays is diffusion-based and the funnel-based marketing is outdated. Especially after the rise of interest-based e-commerce, more and more people mentioned see-and-buy, real-time marketing, and any link may directly convert.

Diffusion marketing is good, and real-time planting and mowing are also true, but to say that the funnel marketing model is outdated is pure bullshit.

No matter what kind of marketing you use, it has layers of conversions and marketing touchpoints, and touchpoints have funnel models. How to catch people's eyes, how to attract people, how to make people interested, how to make people trust, how to promote more conversions, there are many things to do in each of these points. The funnel model can help us do touchpoint marketing better and conduct marketing operations more refinedly, and it will never be outdated.

For example, many businesses nowadays treat traffic investment as a joke. They don’t sort out the conversion path, don’t optimize the CTR of each touch point, and just spend money and look at the ROI. Is this what marketing in the new era pursues? It’s a one-size-fits-all approach without thinking.

03

I think that in the past two years, we can talk about reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and stop talking about the integration of brand and effect. No matter how beautiful that thing sounds, but how difficult it is to do, it is basically a false proposition. It is more like a beautiful imagination of people hoping to withstand the cold winter when the market environment is sluggish. If everything can be integrated, would this concept be popular only now? It would have become a classic marketing model long ago. Moreover, why must brand and effect be integrated? In different scenarios, facing different groups of people, and using different strategies, the brand should be a brand and the effect should be an effect.

What we need to think about is not how to force them into one, but how to maximize their synergy and interaction.

04

Many brands should stop trying to be creative and use some so-called creative methods on the Internet. There is really no need for this. Creativity is just the icing on the cake. It cultivates external strength rather than internal strength.

For some big brands, their internal strength is already very strong, and there are many ways to steadily increase sales. They can play with creativity from time to time, whether it is to increase brand vitality, to get closer to young people, to help launch new products, or to create brand premiums... All of these are fine, and they don't require immediate results.

As for the vast majority of small businesses, don’t always think about becoming famous overnight through creativity. Instead, focus on improving your internal strength. If you haven’t even solved the problems in business operations and the marketing system, it’s too late to dream of some unrealistic creativity.

There are also some large traditional enterprises that really don’t need to rely on the Internet and creativity. We are doing traditional offline business and the target audience is relatively narrow, so there is no need to play this game. The core is our own business system, marketing system, product system, upstream and downstream relationships, resources, etc. If we have to spend money and effort to come up with some embarrassing and self-indulgent creativity, it will be conspicuous.

05

Logically speaking, advertising companies and marketing consulting companies should be the easiest to set up because they know how to advertise and do marketing, right?

But this is not the case. Advertising companies and marketing consulting companies are not easy to run. The projects are too dependent on human experience, difficult to replicate in batches, and the stability and timeliness are worrying. You rarely see advertising companies advertising themselves. Why? They are obviously in the advertising business!

There are many reasons, the most fundamental of which is lack of confidence.

Whether it is advertising or marketing, they are all about empowering products, services and brands, so don't put the cart before the horse.

When you expect advertising agencies to make a few advertisements to save you from danger, you might as well think about whether they can make a few advertisements to save themselves.

06

In my reflections last month, I mentioned that Xiaohongshu has taken a further step in standardizing commercial seeding notes, dividing commercial traffic and natural traffic, and suppressing businesses that take advantage of the situation to grab commercial traffic. As commercial traffic is increasingly segmented, I feel that the effect of pure amateurs spreading traffic is also gradually weakening, and it is difficult to enter the commercial traffic pool. At most, it can only play the role of search positioning.

Furthermore, to say something offensive, now when a third party comes to you and asks you to scale up your sales, the influencers they usually find are mostly fake accounts. The data on the volumes are all made to look very good and will never be too low, but as for the real effect, there is almost no such thing.

07

If you ask me what kind of content is easy to attract traffic on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, my answer should be emotional and sentimental content.

But if you ask me what kind of content the platform likes, I think it should be a combination of emotional and practical content. It has both emotional appeal to people and is easy to explode; it also has practical value to people and is easy to retain.

Such content is undoubtedly good, what the platform needs, and even the future direction. People will get tired of always acting silly and cute, and there is not much content value.

So working back to the content itself, I think it should be emotionally stimulating when it is needed, such as in the title, cover, visuals, expression, viewpoints, emotions, etc., to attract people; and it should be substantial when it is needed, with reasons, evidence, analysis, solutions, knowledge points, and suggestions.

08

Xiaohongshu live e-commerce is also very different from Douyin live e-commerce. First of all, Xiaohongshu is more like an "encyclopedia of life". If I have a problem, I come here to seek a solution.

Therefore, the live broadcast rooms that are popular on Xiaohongshu all target specific problems in life, provide thoughtful solutions, and at the same time convey to you some delicate lifestyles and values.

Douyin's live broadcast room is different. In my opinion, the core is the word "price". They have already assumed that these products are what you need, and you just need to quickly pass them on one by one. Of course, the premise is that the price is low. As long as the price is low enough, the brand is under pressure, and the acting in the live broadcast room is good enough, there will be a lot of people squatting.

09

Finally, always remind yourself of three questions: " What do I have, what do I want, and what do I give up ."

This is true for me personally.

The same is true for businesses.

When you are confused, when you are anxious, when you don’t know where to go, really ask yourself.

Best wishes.

Author: Mumu Old Thief

Source: WeChat public account: Mumu Laozei (ID: mumuseo)