With the widespread of various social media turning into commercial marketing battlefield, new brands seem to follow a simple but effective pattern of growing up into influential ones.
The pattern to be:
Pattern 1 Large quantity of bloggers to lay the foundation on Soical Media-Red ,
Pattern 2 Post 1000+ Q&A on Zhihu ,
Pattern 3 Power of live-streaming from KOLs on TIKTOK .....
Then you have a new brand!
Even though this supposes to be a joke, KOCs do play a vital role in introducing a new brand into the market. When we browse Red, Tiktok and Zhihu like an average person with a smart phone in China, seeing a new brand introduced by many bloggers and talents many times, leaving us the impression that this brand has been very popular recently.
It is undeniable that social ‘grass planting’ can affect users' minds. Otherwise, how can so many brands break through on major social platforms and spend so much money and energy to find talent to launch?
New brands can put the RED "widespread first, and then accurately", and use the cheap and large quantity of plain bloggers to lay the volume. And then gradually use the primary RED KOCs with high content verticality to plant grass in the middle waist and head.
However, with the adjustment of the rules of the RED, there are more restrictions on advertising in disguise as original notes.
Therefore, the brand with a relatively large amount of investment [more than 100 articles per month] still needs to have about 10% of the total number of commercial report notes per month, and it should continue to have them, otherwise the probability of being restricted or even "blacklisted" by the platform is very high.
The next step is about Zhihu, a Q&A platform of which most users answering the questions are well-educated and rational users of the internet and social media. 2000 Q&As about one new brand is enough to gain attention,
Zhihu, as an independent online Q&A community, although unlike Baidu Q&A, which has a strong backing of Baidu, is very popular with enterprises in the direction of network word-of-mouth construction and brand in-depth communication.
Zhihu has three main values for the brand:
First of all, Zhihu has continuous long tail effect, unlimited editing function and dual SEO effect. The difference between Zhihu and live video is that Zhihu has a continuous long tail effect. The live broadcast is real-time, and users are not accustomed to search. The life of short videos and short pictures and texts is over after a few days.
Secondly, Zhihu can edit unlimited times. Its editable function and long tail effect can be combined to produce good results, but this is also just ignored by many brands.
Finally, Zhihu's dual SEO effect. Baidu has invested in Zhihu. Its content has a high search weight on Baidu. Through SEO keywords, Zhihu and the brand can have a good effect.
As for top KOLs, their influence and sales capability are obviously good for brand reputation, as normally top KOLs only represent or sell top market players’ products on their shows. Even thought the top KOLs had been finned for tax issues and some other reasons, it is undeniable the power of live-streaming show and the influence of the personal touch of the hosts.
Normally, when a brand decided to work with top streamers to make a sale during their live-streaming shows it has to be prepared to loss money to gain attention. The normal fees including spot fee to secure a few minutes of the show time to introduce the brand, products and the sales package deal. Usually the streamers with higher amount of fans and sales record require the brand to offer the best deal when compare to other retail channels. Therefore, the most important question for the brand is how much it can afford to loss and how much disappointment they can handle with their other distributors, which can be very tricky.
In the end, the most important question is how. WKI will discuss in detail in the following blogs.
