The author | Gu Twenty
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What should brand marketing do in 2022? Obviously, this is a question that has no standard answer and is difficult to give specific practical guidance. However, despite this, judging trends, guiding the future, and improving the success rate are still the common rules for the future of all industries.
The basis for judging trends is to look back at the past and understand the environment.
Looking back at marketing phenomena in the past year, industry changes such as the cooling of new consumption and the reduction of brand delivery. From a macro level, the closed loop of "delivery growth" that was soaring in the past tends to be flattened today, the brand miracle of traditional barbaric growth is becoming less and less, the marginal effect brought by the brand marketing budget is reduced, and growth anxiety has become the marketing problem of every brand.
If there is trouble, there will be an attempt at a solution. Observe the marketing changes in the past year, such as the brand data bank in The Alibaba domain, the brand social assets emphasized by Weibo, and the commercial middle office system "brand bank" released by Station B.
At the micro level, the keywords "assets" and "bank" have become the marketing consensus widely discussed by major platforms in the past year. The premise of guiding the future is to find consensus.
As an outpost of marketing consensus, Weibo, a social media platform that took the lead in proposing and defining the consensus of brand social assets in 2021, recently released the top ten annual marketing cases in 2021. Review the case, every marketer can also see the brand marketing vane in 2022.
First of all, as one of the largest Chinese content community platforms, Weibo's annual cases cover a variety of brand types such as game products, sneakers and clothing, mobile phone digital, fashion and beauty, food and beverage, and automobiles. Almost every brand can find its own marketing soil on Weibo.
Secondly, from the perspective of effect, in the case, the brands have achieved the improvement of brand voice and the promotion of product sales, and achieved the marketing effect of product synergy. In addition to the effect, the most critical review for marketers is often the strategy.
Finally, from a strategic point of view, compared with the traditional marketing method that relies solely on brand exposure or performance advertising. The selected brands have a more scientific and long-term marketing growth strategy in terms of delivery targets, influence paths, and communication cycles, which provides a more practical brand marketing vertical and horizontal technique for brands to achieve circle-breaking growth and grass planting target penetration optimization.
01 The butterfly effect of brand communication
As an indispensable carrier in social marketing, Weibo has been providing brands with a social field soil for diffusion and word-of-mouth.
With the help of this characteristic, the ripple-like communication of brand marketing topics in multiple circles is realized, and the butterfly effect of brand communication is finally formed, which is the commonality of horizontal multi-circle layer communication in the top ten marketing cases of Weibo in the year to achieve the growth of brand voice.
Taking the OPPO brand as an example, as a domestic brand evergreen enterprise, in the domestic mobile phone market that tends to compete in the Red Sea, it often faces a very large pressure of homogenization competition, so it is not enough to rely only on accurate crowd exposure. Therefore, through social marketing, it is a great possibility to make the new machine out of the circle.
As a new product of Find X3, a product line that has been released for ten years since the release of the first generation of Find products, whether it can find marketing keywords that are highly susceptible to fans across generations has become the brand key to whether OPPO Find X3 can span ten years and continue high-end product positioning.
The new products continue the product style of the Past Find series, focusing on the product concept of high-end image flagships, while the difference is that the marketing keywords of OPPO and Jiang Wen are - color aesthetics. This keyword that is detached from pure technology comes from the brand "connection flashpoint" found by Weibo Social Insights, rather than simply speculation.
OPPO cooperated with Weibo to extract relevant hot spots such as "Jiang Wen's works, personality, impressions", and excavated the common interest tags of interested users, and finally determined "color aesthetics" and "images" as the connection points between Jiang Wen and Find X3.
With this connection point as the center, in the three stages before, during and after the press conference, three major Weibo topics were launched according to the rhythm of #Jiang Wen's ideal type#, #Jin Chen under Jiang Wen's filter,# and #Jiang Shuying under Jiang Wen's filter, covering professional images, celebrity entertainment and other circles, driving the interaction of digital technology, fashion images, star entertainment and other circles.
At the same time, the marketing insight with color as the keyword will also be "activated" on Weibo about the precipitation content of Jiang Wen's works, awakening fans' feelings about color. Along with the user's discussion of the line terrier created by fermentation, the find X3 brand positioning and the social currency between the user, and the trend will detonate the new Find X3 products from the digital circle layer, stimulating the tap water spread of more circles.
With the product characteristics of the small incision of "color", according to the community atmosphere, topic creativity, and user interaction, the multi-attribute communication of the product from point to surface is realized, and the national discussion of stars under the Find X3 lens of the image of niche professionalism to the aesthetics of mass entertainment is realized.
Finally, on Weibo, the high-end products formed around OPPO continued to accumulate, and the voice of each user discussion was like an invisible wing forming a public opinion shock, which also made the brand leave a huge amount of social assets on Weibo, becoming a natural soil for the brand to continue to grow.
The essence of the butterfly effect of brand communication is that the brand uses accurate insight to crack the homogenization of marketing, shape differentiated high-end products, and achieve emotional resonance between brands and users.
For example, with emotional resonance and accurate insight into marketing nodes, Terunsu "Better 2021" brand marketing has been launched successively, locking in the trilogy of "Better Childhood, Better Youth, and Better Gifts" on Children's Day, Youth Day, and Teachers' Day, realizing multi-circle layer, multi-generational long-term communication, and completing the multi-circle user influence of high-end product concepts.
During Children's Day, Terunsu released the brand movie "Better Childhood", which combined with popular writers, emotions, mothers and babies, fashion and other circles, and nearly a thousand Weibo celebrities released their movie-watching feelings on Weibo, staged childhood memories and killed, and triggered user emotional resonance.
In the end, the #Better Childhood topic was read more than 1.6 billion times and the video played more than 19 million times. The entire brand big movie series of "Better 2021" has reached 4.5 billion + readings on Weibo-related topics, the number of micro-movies in the series has exceeded 65 million, and the better 2021 brand concept of Terunsu has achieved great dissemination.
It can be seen that the same emotional resonance occurs every day on Weibo, and the same strategic consensus also occurs in the communication of brand marketing every day.
What resonates is emotion, what is consensus is the trend, and what resonates is communication. If you want to really impress users on Weibo, sincere emotions, sensitive topics and content that conforms to the trend of consumption change are essential, only in this way can we drive the relationship chain between brands and users and form a butterfly effect of the brand.
02 Grass marketing is increasing step by step
For brands, horizontal cross-circle communication expands brand voice. Vertically, the penetration ability of circle planting grass is also one of the characteristics of brand marketing.
Taking Tmall's star short video business innovation project #Bursting Good Life# created on Weibo as an example, we can see the importance behind the brand's in-depth grass marketing at the moment when grass content is flooded.
According to the case, we can see that in a deep brand planting marketing, there are generally two dimensions: one is the immersive penetration of the content creative dimension, and the other is the step-by-step penetration of the grass planting population.
Tmall launched a layout around the #Explosive Good Life#, and together with cecilia Cheung and five other core stars released a series of grass planting videos, and the stars incarnated as the role positioning of the Tmall Double 11 Explosive Intelligence Officer and released the celebrity life report. Through the grounded form of planting grass, the grass content is built into a short variety show of celebrity life creativity, which raises the enthusiasm of planting grass that pays attention to effectiveness and gathers brands.
At this time, the Weibo of the vast majority of celebrities was stationed as a well-deserved "online entertainment position". In the eyes of enterprises, it is the best choice for brand content to penetrate from celebrities to the public.
On the one hand, in addition to linking many celebrities to participate in the topic, sharing the good things of life in various forms such as short videos and pictures to form an atmosphere of Weibo stars planting grass.
On the other hand, Tmall and Weibo widely cover vertical bloggers in various fields, based on the list of explosive models to carry out different dimensions of grass evaluation, covering the number of each blogger and the desire to share UGC content fan user groups.
It constitutes a point-to-face celebrity/KOL content dissemination matrix, and finally realizes the increasing planting of celebrity red bloggers and fan passers-by, forms a grass planting atmosphere of all-round three-dimensional penetration, and releases the grass potential energy that comes with Weibo.
In addition to planting grass for short videos of variety shows, with the help of the content production capacity of celebrities to entertainment, the pan-content production capacity from opinion leaders to ordinary netizens can make the product characteristics form a precise planting and penetration of professional content.
03 Synergy of products and efficacy under open soils
As the forefront of brand marketing, a brand on Weibo can achieve both short-term sales boost and long-term accumulation of brand equity, which realizes brand marketing that takes into account both short-term and long-term, and some people call it product-effect synergy.
Unlike the product-effect integration that brand marketing often emphasizes, it usually refers to the idealization of brand marketing, which is almost difficult to achieve.
Product-effect synergy refers to the fact that a marketing does not pursue the double maximization of brand communication and effect conversion at the same time, but in different stages and different scenarios, it is focused and targeted to achieve stage goals, and finally achieve short-term and long-term marketing synergy to maximize the overall comprehensive effect.
Whether it is the butterfly effect of spreading and expanding the voice of the brand and accumulating the sound of the brand's social assets, or the vertical penetration of the accumulation of the brand's repurchase rate by digging deep into the brand's ability to plant grass. It can be found that the advantages of methodology are not enough to become the long-term advantage of brands, because the method itself is constantly iterating. The advantages of the traffic dividend are also not sustainable enough, as any new traffic depressions will be rapidly overdrawn.
When the methodology and new traffic dividends recede, it is the key for brands to see future marketing trends.
Reviewing the annual top ten cases of Weibo, it can be found that based on the open and emotional brand PGC guidance, stimulating the atmosphere of the whole people to participate in UGC is an important environment for the Weibo content ecology, which also determines that Weibo is often the basic soil for brands to deepen the emotional relationship with users, as a connector between brand marketing concepts and user relationships, rather than a controller directly involved.
As Ge Jingdong, senior vice president of Weibo marketing, once mentioned: The hidden business power of Weibo lies in the fact that it can become the "eyes" of the brand, to gain insight into the market, perceive consumers, and then work with the brand to provide social new marketing solutions around the "brand popularity, sense of belonging and trust".
On Weibo, it is unrealistic to want to gain brand popularity, belonging and trust through an endorsement. However, the social data that is constantly precipitated through continuous insight into consumer interests, continuous communication with users, feedback and iteration is the direction that can help enterprises judge the next strategy of the brand.
This is also today, there may no longer be a fixed brand strategy, but the brand that is constantly close to the user and close to the consumer has become a must, which is also one of the reasons why the brand social equity and brand bank replace traffic and explosive models as the vane of brand marketing. The former is a reproducible, iterative, and evolvable brand growth soil, while the latter is only the exposure brought by a brand launch.