At the moment when the track is saturated and the competition is highly homogenized, the pursuit of traffic is just the starting point! Involution has become a cyclical problem that threatens brand growth.
Whether it is the era of SEO information flow of Baidu search, the social media of Weibo and Xiaohongshu, and the leap to the short video outlet, the battle for the Z generation after the rise of station B, all the live broadcasts bring goods. in Attack... The outlet keeps on, the struggle keeps on, and the inward turns keep on rolling in. After shuffling the cards again and again, there is nothing but exhausted anxiety.
In the era of stock, the competition in the Red Sea has opened, the popular track is close to saturation, the cost of customer acquisition is getting higher and higher, the competition pressure is increasing, and the Matthew effect is becoming more and more significant. How to break this helplessness in the second half of Internet marketing? How can brands get rid of involution anxiety?
1. Traffic ≠ growth, the essence of pursuing transformation
First, let's re-understand the meaning of brand involution. In a broad sense, insubstantial consumption, low-level self-repetition, and alienation caused by excessive competition can all be called "involution".
The key to the definition of involution itself is "inward evolution", which is refinement and low-level complexity. Therefore, in terms of brands, involution is the meaningless internal friction caused by the loss of strategy and tactics in the fierce competition.
The most obvious involution behavior is the overwhelming marketing activities in the stock game, which is essentially a kind of traffic anxiety. For example, the online education industry that used to burn more money, whether it is TV advertising, information flow advertising, elevator media, outdoor media, online comprehensive title... As far as the eye can see, it is bombed.
After the market has been cultivated, the cost of acquiring customers has been rising: according to the statistics of Mustarddui, the top 10 online education companies invested less than 5 billion yuan in marketing in the summer of 2019, and it will be as high as 10 billion yuan in the summer of 2020. The cost of acquiring customers has risen from less than 2,000 yuan per person in 2019 to more than 3,000 yuan per person in 2020.
Obviously, under the involution, the higher the marketing cost of brand investment, the more serious the diseconomies of scale.
You must know that traffic ≠ growth. Under the competition of exposure that you are catching up with, the results obtained are not necessarily completely positive. Once the environmental threshold is exceeded, it is very likely to have a backlash effect. Online education, as a social public tool, has been overturned frequently due to its extreme penetration of marketing and publicity, and finally fell silent under the attack of "strong supervision".
Obviously, the desire for increment cannot be based on sacrificing quality and breaking away from the original intention. The impact of telemarketing list such involution is painful. Acquiring customers through word-of-mouth and recommendation is a better solution to quickly attract new customers.
Cold thinking, a must-have idea is: while grabbing the bonus window, you must accumulate value. When marketing is out of control due to involution, the brand image will naturally collapse. The volume of sound is not the only measure of brand power. It should be turned to the precipitation of brand value, and the traffic anxiety caused by it will be easily resolved.
On the other hand, it should be understood that under the trend of Internet-based marketing, brand competition is no longer a zero-sum game.
The blind pursuit of traffic does not bring direct growth, and incremental growth has become a consensus for brands to reverse involution. Put aside the fierce battle of traffic in the stock era, and let go of the prejudice against competitors, brands should more directly pursue the transformation of making the cake bigger, and pursue a win-win ecosystem.
For example, abandoning the awareness of inward competition, this year's Tmall 618 created a reverse CP of "competing CPs shouting in the air", achieving a win-win traffic feast. "618 Gathering Cost-effective Gathering Day", three squirrels & Baicaowei, Lux & Dove, Boss & Fang Tai, Budweiser & Corona, Menglong & Lovely, it is rare to see the joy of 10 brands in five categories and nibbling CP in the same frame screen.