Obtain accurate clues to help increase user growth - the significance of content to user growth (Part 1)

Good content can drive the growth of a brand's business and can even become one of the most important driving forces for brand development. So why do many companies spend a lot of money on content, but their growth is hindered? The author of the following article shares with you from two dimensions. Let's take a look.

1. Introduction

Some time ago, we conducted training on "Product Thinking Empowering Product Operations" for Haier Company.

During the Q&A session, one of the content operations staff said that the main problem now is that the leads attracted through content are not accurate. After organizing an event, most of the users attracted are those who want to take advantage of the situation.

They are also producing short videos and live broadcasts, but the content production work is outsourced to suppliers. The content itself does not fit well with the leads.

In addition, simply organizing an event and allowing users to obtain benefits without any threshold in the event design can also cause inaccurate leads.

It reminds me of when I was working at Autohome, we also often did user activities, and the operations staff focused on how to make the activity costs lower and the quality of leads higher.

After listening to the problems they encountered, I realized that this case is by no means an isolated one. Good content can drive the growth of a brand’s business and can even become one of the most important driving forces for brand development.

So why do many companies spend a lot of money on content creation, but their growth is hindered? I would like to share with you from the following two dimensions.

1. Users: The user group is not accurate

Because there is no accurate content clue, the entire operation is hindered.

First of all, we need to consider three questions: Who is our content for? Have we thoroughly understood the actual needs of this group of people? Does our product really bring tangible benefits to this group of people?

The reason why clues cannot be obtained well is essentially that the separation between the brand's target users and the brand is relatively serious, and a lot of energy is placed on the preferences of the general population.

For example, our target users are mainly white-collar workers in first-tier cities, but when we output content, we do not focus on the pain points of white-collar workers in first-tier cities, so the conversion of the content is definitely not accurate.

2. Advertising: Advertising has low return on investment

There is a very heartbreaking saying in the advertising industry: I know that half of my advertising budget is useless, but I don’t know which half.

At the current stage of brand development, the functional attributes of advertising companies have become more concrete, especially for the domestic market. Many advertising companies are simply responsible for a certain point in the client market, such as the script shooting of Douyin, the shooting of corporate promotional videos, and the content production of public accounts and video accounts. In this case, a specific problem faced is the production of content by the service company, and whether the content is produced based on the agreed tone of a brand.

If it is popular today, we will shoot this content. If it is very popular tomorrow, we will think about live streaming to sell goods. Services without strategic thinking are dangerous. After all, not everyone can afford the immediate benefits compared to delayed satisfaction. When the content and the brand's cultural tone are inconsistent, even the best creativity may lose its meaning, and even the content will be separated from the crowd, operation and sales. A good third-party service company must serve the strategic development of the brand.

2. The significance of content to growth

1. What is content

Content marketing has become a hot word in the entire brand market, and many people even believe that the era of content marketing has arrived. But what is real content?

The essence of content is culture, the foundation is users, the core is value promotion, and the purpose is to achieve marketing that maximizes benefits.

All digital media are fundamentally just tools for content promotion. The content of a brand must be based on the humanistic temperament presented by the brand's cultural connotation - personality, language style, character, clothing (packaging), you can refer to Huaxizi's Chinese style and Muji's sexual indifference, and the humanistic temperament presented by the brand must attract a group of people with highly similar user portraits.

This group of people is your precise target group, and the core of content production is to continuously provide this group of people with different forms of content that are high-value, strong experience, and deep belonging, so as to build trust between the brand and users, enhance stickiness, and achieve continuous purchases from users.

In short, content is the bridge between brands and users. Good content needs to broaden the bridge surface while deepening the overall thickness of the bridge.

2. What is the underlying logic between content and brand?

The connection point between content and brand is "product". No matter what form of content is on what platform, the ultimate goal is to achieve the goal of product sales. The product is the key to completing the final experience with the user. Therefore, no matter what the circumstances, the quality of the product must be the foundation of brand development and an untouchable bottom line.

(1) User thinking

The cultural connotation of a brand rarely changes throughout its entire development cycle, and may even always empower the vertical depth of the same core. The purpose of doing this is to gain more trust from the target users. In order to live up to this trust, the content needs to go deeper from the user's dimension.

The content needs to establish a tacit understanding with the user that "it's you at first glance", speak for the user from the user's standpoint, and actively provide the user with both a sensory spiritual experience and a tangible product experience. The user will naturally "expose" his or her true self to you.

(2) Product thinking

A high degree of spiritual fit may not necessarily solve users' actual problems. Product thinking is to improve the product's ability to solve user problems internally, and to provide users with more dimensions of added value externally. We should strive for excellence in every aspect of product research, product development, product launch, and product operation, and then ultimately achieve "mutual selection" between products and users through content linkage of the entire operational ecosystem, thereby driving data growth.

(3) Value thinking

Don’t trust the “loyalty” of users. Especially in this consumer age with so many choices, providing users with valuable content is something that needs to be done continuously. In other words, every piece of content must be valuable to users, and the value of the content must be more diverse.

It should be noted that every user is at risk of leaving and the cost is very low, so while delivering value, you also need to be prepared to cultivate new users and grow with them.

3. Significance of content

(1) Marketing power of brand growth

Content is the key to brand growth. Whether it is the current emphasis on scene nutrition or live streaming, including product photography in the mall and detail page introductions, content marketing is everywhere.

For content that is truly marketing-powerful, you can refer to the rhetoric of "Oriental Selection". At this stage, its understanding and application of content can be regarded as a dimensionality reduction attack in the industry. Similarly, the emergence of Oriental Selection has also opened the door to the dimensionality upgrade of content marketing.

What is worth our consideration is that the content and the user reach are actually quite broad. It may be just a simple copy or a poster with a very strong sense, so this also requires strict control of the content during the operation process.

(2) Accumulation of Precision Users

Good content will definitely attract a lot of fans, especially the more consistent the content tone, the higher the accuracy of the users will be, which is also very important for the development of the brand. Where do users come from? This is a question that any project needs to consider, how to use the "right" content to find the "right" people; now everyone generally recognizes that the cost of acquiring customers is getting higher and higher, but from the conclusion itself, the low-cost customer acquisition path may not necessarily find the "right" people quickly and effectively.

(3) Mutual “trust” between brands and users

What is the mutual "trust" between brands and users? If we transfer this relationship to the relationship between stars and fans, such as "Andy Lau and his fans" and "Jay Chou and JM", this relationship must be tempered by the world and accumulated over time. For brands, good content is the key to promote and maintain this relationship, even if it is the handling of an emergency public relations event. Users are becoming the most valuable wealth in this changing consumer era.

(4) Ultimate goal: increase sales

The ultimate goal of content is to increase sales. If the content layout is not for the purpose of increasing sales, it must be a huge waste of manpower, material resources and financial resources. The ultimate goal refers to the result of user behavior, so in terms of content presentation, it is best not to let users see at a glance the purpose of your selling. Here you can refer to Durex’s previous marketing content, which has a style of surrounding a point and attacking the reinforcement, that is, the relationship between content and users is a kind of implicit cultivation, which makes your content and users "fall in love".

3. Misconceptions about content generation

1. The strategy is in the enterprise, and the execution is in the third party, which is prone to deviations

The current advertising industry has reached a rather awkward situation, that is, it is gradually becoming the execution end of the Party A company. From the perspective of the Party A, if the third-party company is not a top domestic 4A company, the content production and release should not be placed in an ideal state, especially when the company completes the internal strategy formulation and wants the third-party company to complete the execution. Even if the strategy is communicated accurately, it will still be deviated when it is executed by the third party, even if it is a service company with service as its core competitiveness.

Remember, don't entrust the production of your brand's content to a third-party service company unless you have a professional internal team specifically responsible for connecting with it and let the third party provide creative empowerment.

2. Good ideas ≠ good content. The foundation of content is products, but more importantly, culture.

Due to the rise and popularity of short videos, the public has formed a psychological illusion that "knowledge can be learned and used immediately after watching it". From the perspective of commercial behavior, this illusion means that good ideas = good content. This view is extremely undesirable.

For good content, creative presentation is only one dimension. Truly good content needs to be remembered by users, and they should be willing to actively share it to help you spread it.

This requires us to start from the expected user behavior and work backwards to figure out how we need to make the content better. The most intuitive needs of users are often only two: what problem does this product really solve for me, and what cultural values ​​it conveys are what I like.

3. Content that attracts users ≠ the right content

From the perspective of operational logic, attracting users is only one part of the process; content also needs to be a closed loop.

Because our goal is to retain users and co-build content with them, and attracting users is only the first step in the entire closed loop. Users will not "give" themselves to you at this stage.

And there is another point that needs attention: whether the users attracted by your content are the precise users that the brand wants.

Author: Sister Persimmon Talks About Products

Source: WeChat public account "Sister Persimmon Talks about Products (ID: diandihuijin)"