Say no to rebranding technology — ways to improve marketing effectiveness (Part 2)

The article raises the question of "How to reuse and improve efficiency in an innovative environment?" and introduces methods to improve the efficiency of marketing activities. The author grasps "activity reuse" to improve business speed and marketing efficiency, and finally practices it, constantly trying to understand the operating rules of this field and try to find the "optimization space" of this industry. Interested students are welcome to read on.

1. Production efficiency – grasping the essence of “activity reuse”

To improve efficiency, we need to save workload, and reuse is the most effective means of saving, followed by optimization of key steps.

Activity requirements are not convergent, but we can break down activities. Activities can be broken down into various gameplays, gameplays can be broken down into multiple behaviors, and behaviors can be broken down into step-by-step functional points.

In the process of disassembly, we will gradually find that these things are becoming more and more similar. With continuous disassembly, they are becoming more and more convergent, and finally they return to the 01 operation.

How to improve efficiency through reuse in an innovative environment?

1. Reuse opportunities & granularity

Generally speaking, there is a negative correlation between the opportunity for reuse and the granularity. The larger the granularity, the smaller the opportunity for reuse, and the smaller the granularity, the greater the opportunity for reuse.

Take an activity as an example. From large particles to small particles, it can be roughly divided into activities, gameplay, stateful functions, stateless functions, and library functions.

It is almost impossible to reuse an activity directly without any changes. At least it has to be re-skinned. The opportunities for gameplay reuse are obviously much greater. For example, the reuse of raffles, tasks, sign-ins, etc. The opportunities for reuse of stateful functions that make up the gameplay are even greater, such as opportunities, token accounts, inventory, counting, etc. Then there are stateless functions, and finally they are disassembled into library functions. All programming behaviors occur on top of them, which are almost completely reused.

2. Reuse opportunities, granularity, and cost savings

The larger the granularity, the more cost savings, but the smaller the reuse opportunities. The smaller the granularity, the smaller the cost savings, but the greater the reuse opportunities. In practice, there is an optimal point for the efficiency improvement brought by cost savings alone, which is often the stateful function and gameplay. So the granularity of our reuse is basically based on this.

3. Reuse opportunities & granularity & cost savings & innovation limitations

After measuring the cost savings, we cannot just follow this and should also consider the impact of the entire reuse solution on innovation. The smaller the granularity, the smaller the restrictions on innovation, so we should try to focus on the optimal reuse granularity and move towards a smaller granularity.

In practice, there are basically no restrictions on the granularity once it reaches stateful functions, so the optimal reuse granularity is often this.

4. Reuse enables innovation

For marketing activities, concentrated brainstorming before the event does not solve the problem. It requires a large amount of daily idea accumulation and small-step trial and error.

Reuse is not the enemy of innovation. A large number of splicing combinations means that a demo can be built at a very low cost. It is easier to produce a demo directly by randomly splicing a large number of ideas than to think of ideas dryly. Most people don’t have so many effective flashes of inspiration.

5. Use combination punches

I have been talking about the importance of innovation. What we need to do is to improve the efficiency of innovation. However, it is almost impossible to have a completely innovative gameplay for an event. Even a completely new gameplay is not so user-friendly. Usually, an innovative gameplay is combined with several familiar gameplays. Only in this way can the event be both unfamiliar and familiar, and the user experience is the best. This is basically the practice in the industry.

At the same time, the sedimentation of inherent gameplay is equally important, which requires our system to work in several directions, including rapid gameplay reuse, rapid gameplay transformation, and rapid innovative gameplay construction.

2. Business Speed ​​– Marketing Funnel

There is a huge funnel for user participation in activities. There is conversion at every step, and there is loss at every step.

1. Marketing funnel optimization

There is a classic "marketing funnel" in the marketing world. We can roughly divide the life cycle of user participation into: "awareness stage", "consideration stage", "conversion stage" and "retention stage", and the marketing activities are responsible for allowing users to sink in each stage to reduce loss. This model is very classic. Regardless of the business form, if you want to attract new and retain users, almost all of your users will go through these stages.

Awareness Stage

Users see a brand and come into contact with a platform. These potential users have no idea that they may become users or make purchases. What we need to do is to attract users to learn more.

At this time, it is important to attract and make users further interested. Some high-quality content is the key. The core is to make users feel emotions, such as fun, anxiety, vanity, and identity. Emotions, whether good or bad, are extremely valuable. Even if it is negative anxiety, there are not a few people in the market who start by selling anxiety.

This requires that our activities have the ability to generate emotions in users. Videos, animations, and even scripts are all good choices. At this time, it is not appropriate to reveal some gameplay information (such as making money by attracting new users), as this will scare users away.

It should be noted that the emotional value that each user wants to obtain or prefers is different. In the pre-stage, we need to know what to let the user see. In the Internet age, this is not a difficult task. Although the user is relatively new and is cold here, it is not the case on the Internet. Even if it is brand new, there is a common emotional basis, which is very simple.

Consideration Stage

When users pass the awareness stage and enter the consideration stage, they are considered your users to a certain extent, but there is a great risk of loss, and they will try to explore your products.

At this stage, we need some content marketing or interactive activity guidance for novices to reduce the difficulty of user exploration. The difficulty and confidence of accepting text introduction, video introduction and explanation by big V are constantly decreasing.

Therefore, our system needs to provide the output capability of this part of the activities, preferably with the best guiding activities for each scenario, and this part of the content should require long-term data polishing. This part of the activities should not look like an activity, but more like a marketing capability that penetrates into the product.

Conversion Stage

After consideration, the user has basically decided to become your customer, but whether to place an order or continue using your product is a question.

It's time to give users a push. If it is an e-commerce or local life scenario, new user discounts and purchase rebates are good choices, and it would be even better if they are packaged as limited-time discounts.

Retention stage

To make users become your long-term customers, I personally think that the core of this part is product value. Marketing does not have much substantial help, but we can use some marketing methods to assist retention. For example, after placing an order, you can issue an exclusive long-term incentive, receive red envelopes every day, and stimulate new retention stickiness.

2. Self-funnel solution

The previous part talked about how to use activities to market products. It looks at marketing activities from the product perspective. However, if you want to do these activities well, it is not enough to just know what activities are needed in each link. We need to know the funnel of the activity itself, even if your activity is just a picture or an H5 static page.

We need to know every time a user stops, swipes, or clicks after entering an activity, whether it is because the incentive is not enough or the gameplay is too difficult.

About Attribution

Most of the attribution for products is to see how many conversions are made in each link, through what channels, and to infer the reasons. More attention is paid to expanding the advantages. It is a positive analysis process to attribute the users to where they come from.

But for marketing activities, we should pay more attention to "churn attribution", why users leave, and we need to establish an analysis system for churn.

And establish a comparison mechanism between activities. It is not enough to compare strategies within an activity. Try comparing strategies between activities. Many times, it is because you start in the wrong direction.

Funnel Optimization

After establishing attribution, we can start to optimize the activity, focusing on: overall link optimization, step-by-step conversion optimization, and incentive optimization.

It should be noted that our product processes are usually coherent, but the marketing activity participation process is often fragmented and scattered in various links of the product. We need to connect the activities together and view them as a whole to avoid each link operating independently, which will result in each link being a local optimal solution or the links affecting each other.

3. Business Speed ​​– Capital Efficiency

In addition to investing in traffic funnel optimization, the remaining more important part of our activities is the issue of capital efficiency. How can we make the funds play their role more efficiently?

1. Equity Design

Activity budgets usually appear in the form of various benefits, and then the benefits are delivered by the gameplay, and the benefits are written off in the product process. To optimize capital efficiency, the most important thing is to optimize the benefits. From the user seeing the incentive, to the user trying to claim it, to the actual write-off, we might as well define this as: the life cycle of the benefit.

Life cycle analysis: Expression forms: red envelopes, cashback, instant discount coupons, discount coupons, tokens, etc. Rights collection: task threshold issuance, free collection, game acquisition, etc. Rights cancellation: usage restrictions, ease of use

The design of rights and interests is relatively difficult and requires a lot of adjustment testing and user acceptance analysis. Each claim and redemption can basically bring new customers or retention through gameplay. There are several influencing factors in the entire design process. Let's try to analyze them:

For the form of expression, the main considerations are the user fatigue level and the value penetration. For the collection of rights, the main considerations are the collection threshold and the difficulty of the threshold. The difficulty here is mainly the difficulty of gameplay operation, user social pressure, and user operation cost. For the redemption of rights, the main considerations are ease of use and redemption restrictions.

2. Optimize capital efficiency

• To optimize capital efficiency, there are mainly several means:
• Effective distribution;
• Differentiate value;
• Pay attention to psychological leverage; here we will see how to use a 300,000 yuan budget to achieve a 1 million yuan effect.

Efficient flow of funds

We regard the rights and interests that actually enter the hands of users as effective rights and interests, and the rights and interests that are actually written off (with business benefits & without business benefits) as real costs. To optimize, we must first make the rights and interests as effective as possible, and then ensure the write-off of business rights and interests and less write-off of cost rights and interests.

Avoid capital occupation: The effect of investing in equity like a large number of investors is actually not good, and it will also cause a large amount of budget to be used in the wrong place, and a large amount of budget will be locked in advance during the event. Even if you want to use equity to recall users, it is also a tempting way to distribute it at the time of entry, and invest equity to users who are really interested.

Reduce idle capital: Especially for large-scale events, the validity period of the rights is also relatively important. It does not necessarily have to be valid during the event period. Limiting the time and adding an expiration mechanism can improve the efficiency of fund use. Generally speaking, users will use it immediately and touch it again within 3 days. If the user does not write off, then this right will probably be idle. If there is an expired budget recovery, the number of rights issued for the entire event can be at least twice the total budget.

Reduce expenditure: At the exit of funds, add restrictions for incentives without business contribution, such as withdrawal upon maturity and withdrawal upon reaching the limit, which can reduce the withdrawal amount by half. However, it is necessary to balance the user experience and adjust the entrance appropriately. For example, if the amount is more than 5 yuan, the withdrawal can be made after 10 days.

Capital value & equity value are not equal

Spend money wisely. Users are not all the same. Use a pricing strategy that increases benefits as much as possible and reduces benefits of constant value. Pay attention to what users want. For some users, you cannot attract them even if you give them 50 yuan, as the cost of attracting new users is completely beyond your budget. For some users, 50 cents is enough.

Distinguishing between value and performance

Even if they are of equal value, as mentioned earlier, different forms will have different effects. Some users pay attention to physical objects, some users pay attention to cash, and some users have purchasing needs. Don't let your lottery be just a probability model.

The value distribution of rights and interests needs to be distributed according to the target population. A unified 50-cent cash red envelope will not solve the problem. Before the activity is launched, the number of rights and interests of each value should have a proportion.

These strategies should be able to be adjusted in real time during the entire activity. It is best to use user data to feed back the rules and complete the cold start of the pricing rules at the beginning of the activity.

Focus on sensitivity

We need to know the users' sensitive points, such as physical object sensitivity, value sensitivity, cash sensitivity, etc. These sensitive points can be measured through the users' browsing, clicking, and participation records in the activities. After obtaining these data, we can adjust the value and form to use 20% of the experimental traffic to leverage the remaining 80% of the traffic and increase the utilization rate of the activity traffic at the same time.

Psychological leverage

In addition to incentives, we should pay more attention to the emotional value of users and what this benefit will bring to them. If it is just small favors, it is far from enough. Who wants to draw a bunch of special product discount coupons worth 50 cents?

We need to pay attention to the emotional value of users (desire to share, sense of identity, sense of participation, curiosity). For example, if you want to organize an event for a big V or a celebrity, you can have an event poster with the user's name printed on it and a poster with user participation certification. The top several posters will receive different rights and interests, and 100 concert tickets will be distributed among the general crowd, and 5 people will be eligible to join the live broadcast.

For example, challenge games are mainly about sharing and reminiscing, so use this part of the mind to organize the activity.

4. Specific implementation practices

Next, let's look at specific practices. To improve the efficiency of activities, both production efficiency and business conversion efficiency are indispensable. Only by doing these two things well can the activities really run fast. Here we still look at specific practices from the two aspects of improving production efficiency and enabling activity effects.

1. Productivity Practice

As for improving production efficiency, the implementation of the overall system is actually not complicated. Here is a brief description of the specific design and implementation ideas.

The first step is to do the most basic reuse construction, split the activities into various dimensions, obtain the "parts library" of activities, gameplay, functional functions, etc., and standardize and summarize the split parts.

The second step is to build an active production factory for the precipitated parts library:

1. Establish template capabilities for activities and provide rapid replication capabilities;
2. For gameplay, establish instantiation capabilities based on metadata, and select interfaces to implement specific representations;
3. Provide the ability to quickly assemble functions in series, and use low-code and other means to ensure efficiency;

The third step is to prepare for the activity template + familiar gameplay + innovative gameplay, including the activity's functional process, incentive strategy, activity guarantee, effect analysis, and data feedback capabilities. Thus, a brand new activity is produced.

2. System empowerment for business efficiency

In simple terms, marketing activities can be summarized as motivating users under certain rules and conditions, thereby forming conversions and ultimately making profits. To increase the speed of business, the first thing to do is to make the rules more flexible and make the formulation of rules more intelligent.

Overall link interaction

First of all, we need an observable activity so that every behavior of the user in the activity is observable. For each activity we need a large amount of data support. Observational data is the most basic. After obtaining the observational data, we need to break down these data into indicators according to the entire life cycle. Both vertical and horizontal indicators are required.

Based on these result data, the rule adjustment results are disclosed by relying on manual experience or algorithms. According to the disclosed results, the rule results are made effective through the rapid content adjustment mechanism and rapid pricing adjustment mechanism under AB.

The above are related to details, and there must be more adjustment processes between gameplays. Switching gameplay and switching associations are both necessary.

The effectiveness of the entire adjustment is very critical, and the cycle of an activity is not very long. Therefore, it is necessary to "build the ability to feed back the effects between activities in space" and "build the ability to feed back the effects within the activity in time". It is very important to shorten the data collection and calculation capabilities.

Event Preview

To run a successful event, we should know 70% of the specific effect before the event goes online. We should use the accumulated traffic data and experience as much as possible to calculate and rehearse the event. How will the data of an event perform, where users may be lost, where they may be converted, and at which step should we strengthen incentives and attraction? This is not only to manage expectations, but also for the design selection of the event and the initial value of the event parameters.

Going a step further, by inputting a budget and a set of goals, we can basically produce a campaign, and at this point we only need to focus on innovation, freeing people’s energy to do more creative work.

5. Ask yourself a few questions

Do we really need so many activities? Do marketing activities really need to be so refined and self-serving? What do we need to bring to users? Marketing activities are very important for the growth and retention of a product, but how many activities are needed to cover the overall business goals? The actual impacts of activities are often mutually exclusive, but all activities should be coordinated and consistent. How should we determine the overall marketing campaign strategy?

6. Final Thoughts

I have been doing marketing activities for almost 5 years, so I would like to talk about some of the things I think are important in the field of activities. Activities are very interesting, and doing activities is often more interesting than participating in them. It is very similar to writing a book. I feel that I am communicating with users through activities, or competing with users in wits and courage. From users, to R&D, to products, and then to operations, I have also been exposed to many business forms. I have been trying to understand the operating rules of this field and try to find the "optimization space" of this industry. And recently, I feel that the activities on the market are beginning to make users more and more tired. I personally feel that this industry may need to be innovated again. What will the future look like? In short, let's try to make a breakthrough next~

Author: Zou Zhiquan