Under normal circumstances, when a company is just starting out, the first task of entrepreneurs is to promote the brand. Getting more people to pay attention to the company and their own brand is the primary goal of this period. However, compared with companies that have stabilized, start-up companies are not sufficient in terms of basic resources such as capital, manpower, and customer sources, and they are also very prone to the crisis of insufficient stamina during the promotion process. However, if you don’t promote it, you are waiting for death. If you don’t want your early efforts to be in vain, you must learn to resist pressure. If you want to quickly promote your brand, we have many things to consider.
Brainstorming
1. The purpose of brand promotion
Brand promotion includes far more than just the brand name and logo, and requires entrepreneurs to have strategic thinking and precise brand positioning. Successful brand promotion must have an accurate positioning. Positioning is the core factor of marketing and even sales. If managed properly, it can become a "compass" that guides customer preferences and builds a stable and strong relationship between the brand and the customer.
The main target of brand promotion is users, and the substantive purpose is to fundamentally influence users’ consumption behavior and transform users’ consumption habits from purposeless to exclusive. Brand promotion takes target customers as the core and requires us to create a brand strategy with insight. This insight is the observation of the consumption needs of target users.
Through observation, it is not difficult to find that users are easily inspired by content that is close to people's hearts, emotional commitment and attractive brand features. The current consumption concept is a combination of rationality and sensibility. Not only did they pursue quality, they also began to pay attention to service and sentiment, and the proportion of price dropped a lot.
Business owners
2. Opinions on various driven bosses
(1) Technology-driven:
This kind of entrepreneurship The boss of a company is the most common in the current wave of entrepreneurship. For technology-oriented companies, the founder may be a good CTO, but it is easy to ignore the brand building aspect. The most basic task of brand building is to find the values ????of the company and products. Many company names and slogans in the early stages of startups are thought of on the forehead. As the company develops and grows, the business direction and products will continue to be adjusted. According to the words of the technology-driven boss: Only by constantly running at the forefront can we occupy the market. As a result, only various system frameworks and JS codes were occupied.
(2) Marketing-driven bosses
Those who are marketing-driven bosses will have few contacts in the entire entrepreneurial process who are down-to-earth in starting a business. What is meant here is down-to-earth It refers to using one's own products to impress customers in a down-to-earth manner, while in their minds they will always only think about using hot-button events, CP, IP, etc. to promote products overnight, but they don't pay much attention to brand building and Product polishing. In jargon, it means: Entrepreneurs always think about opportunism, but marketing-driven needs good user experience and good products to support!
(3) Market-driven
This type The bosses are also kind of weird, most of them are from sales background. My own sales quality and ability are very strong. Maybe starting a company now is based on my own business ability. When my business ability reaches its peak, I can no longer satisfy my inner pursuit of business projects, so I registered my own company. After starting business, this type of boss has accumulated many customer resources. It is no problem to make profits in the short term, but I have never been optimistic about making the company bigger and stronger. Because after you get in touch with more founders of this type, you will find that their company may not even have an official website or any brand information, and they may earn thousands of dollars just from a concept.
Finally, it is assessed that market-driven startups are suitable for business! Perhaps, this is too arbitrary. Comments are welcome!
3. How to do brand promotion without money and resources
After traveling all over the country to communicate and see startup companies, in summary, there are basically no bad products (except for business) that can muster up the courage to start a business in this Internet era. So, whether you are an IDEA or are currently working on The positioning of the polished product has already been planned before starting a business. To put it bluntly: my product is online, what kind of people do I want to make money, and what kind of data do I want to collect? This is in the product architecture. It was already imprinted when ! Then. As for how to make money? How to collect data on the target group? Brand promotion is indispensable.
Here, I think it is quite important to say a few more words. In the early years when I was operating in an Internet company, I was always very passive and the result was that the company promoted whatever it wanted. That is, you will spend a lot of time and money to "squeeze out" some similar and similar products in order to highlight the exposure point of your own product. Therefore, I would like to remind some students who are new to starting a business to keep the following points in mind.
(1) From the name of the registered company to the layout of brand promotion
When naming the registered company, do not think about auspiciousness, auspiciousness, prosperous business, or hot words to register. On the one hand, it is industrial and commercial. It will not be a waste of time to verify the name. Another is that even if you name it: xxx Leading Co., Ltd., in the end you will not be able to become a leading company. Therefore, the name of the registered company must be based on brand and product-driven positioning. , the advantages of this: one is that after the product and brand are formed, you can rely on the trademark!
Then, you need to pay a lot of attention to the derivation. Before naming, you can check the name (brand) on Baidu The proportion of name) in search engines, generally speaking in SEO terms: does this word have a lot of coverage, whether there are similar companies on the first 3 pages, if so, it is recommended that you rename it because it will be helpful for future brand building. It’s a little difficult, but on the contrary, I didn’t register decisively!
(2) Marketing methods
A brief introduction is as follows:
Online promotion
SEMSEO: Search engine promotion is mainly to divert traffic to your products from major search engines. The purpose of optimization is to divert as much traffic as possible and to divert more accurate and high-quality traffic. (Comment: Why do entrepreneurial companies still spend money on SEM even if they have no money? Many bosses may think it is too expensive when they mention SEM. The minimum account opening is: 6,000 yuan. In fact, if you can spend money to sell the product in the early stage and If there is a ROI return ratio, you can invest with confidence. On the other hand, SEM is very helpful for the natural ranking of the newly built company's official website. This point is combined with SEO knowledge. The best thing about SEO is to achieve natural ranking through manual intervention. Ranking, I won’t go into details here. However, it is not easy to recruit a capable SEO/SEM employee)
EDM: There are several forms and functions of direct mailing, exchange of information and resources. , research on customer needs, renewal and service expiration reminders, humanistic care (holidays, service outage reminders), event notifications (promotions, year-end customer thanks), etc.
PR: The role of public relations is mainly to expand the brand’s visibility and influence. The work involved may include: Cooperation: media cooperation and docking, content cooperation, daily maintenance, accepting manuscript requests/reviewing articles, participation Activities/awards; (Comment: PR is of little use in the Internet industry for start-up companies, and there is not enough money to recruit a PR!)
Copywriting: In addition to having their own Write company news and product features, focusing on disseminating them to the outside world;
Community promotion: Based on its own industry, content output as the core, targeted groups are formed to form communities, and within the communities Carry out event organization, such as online live broadcast sharing or communication, hold online live broadcast events regularly, and produce high-quality content.
(Comment: WeChat social groups and QQ groups are currently the most effective free methods of attracting traffic. WeChat groups are born on 1-22-4-4 and 8... Maximize the quantity and quality of WeChat groups. As for how to distribute materials and when the traffic flow is good, I won’t go into details one by one. WeChat groups are generally better organized at night. Promoting traffic to QQ groups should be the earliest promotion method. Thousands of QQ groups flash at the same time, and countless Red dots are inexhaustible resources. In summary, only by maximizing the community, strong execution is the key)
We-media channels: including WeChat official accounts, Toutiao accounts, Baijia accounts, NetEase accounts, etc., regularly produce content. When using self-media channels, you can produce high-quality content without using the product name as the self-media name. Embedding soft advertising is very effective (Comment: Do self-media for SEO, such as your The brand name is Home accounts have a great impact on SEO rankings and others are basically not included)
Trollies: Promote on relevant industry forums, and the number of paid trolls will be larger, but considering the current sensitivity of the forum to advertising, It is recommended that you produce high-quality content yourself and pay appropriately!
Online trolls
Offline promotion
Event promotion and hosting: hosting events with products as the core, Invite the media and relevant company personnel to participate, such as product first anniversary activities or product investment activities, and conduct a corresponding integrated marketing campaign for the event.
Participation: Participate in industry-related conferences, enter the industry circle through participation, establish media relations, and obtain potential customers.
Note: Organize and screen exhibition forms and quotations for industry conferences As well as determining the details, preparing for the exhibition and participating in the exhibition, collecting customer information, sorting and distributing it
Channel cooperation: Products can be cooperated with corresponding channel dealers in various places. Channel dealers often have customers for other types of products. When its customers have corresponding needs, they can make priority recommendations; this also solves the problem of products that cannot be promoted due to geographical limitations.
Introduction from a friend: Entrepreneurial products often have a long trial period. Directly inviting customers to conduct free trials or recommend products can also have better results and is also conducive to product selection in other companies. Win.
The above are promotion methods. The subject owner can choose or focus according to his own needs. These are also some commonly used methods. So, it seems to deviate from today’s theme. How to do brand promotion for free?
When I was working in an Internet company a few years ago, I defined it this way: new business A company needs money but no one, and it needs people but no one. So, do you want to stop starting a business? That’s definitely not the case. So, I told my old employer this: No matter how awesome your product is, no one will know about it. It’s also a waste if no one finds it. I suggest you find a home in a search engine. So, it’s just Baidu with a relatively large share. How to do it?
(1) SEO natural ranking
How to do it? The meaning of this is to let Baidu search for your brand name: xxx, and your official website can be found on the Baidu homepage. Then the products formed by the "extremely powerful" IDEA displayed on the official website will have the opportunity to be exposed. This is also Many startups don’t pay attention to it.
Some startups don’t even have an official website, which is weird! Then, other SEO related external links, internal links, and mate tags: title, keywords, and description are to show the soul of an official website. As for how to operate it, That’s it. After all, this is an industry type of work. After all, SEO people will scold me!
(2) Soft article promotion
For free soft article promotion, it is recommended to do Tieba, Many people on Douban, webmaster forums, local forums, Tianya Forum, etc. think these things are outdated long ago. However, after you do it, you will smile happily when Baidu includes and releases the snapshots to occupy the first 3 pages. After all, it is free. !
The other way is to use very little money to obtain large-scale exposure: this requires a certain fee to produce commercial soft articles. As long as you have channels, you can basically publish more than 80 soft articles with 3,000 yuan. After the soft article is exposed, other small sites will reprint and spread it. The money spent is worth it! If you need to post soft articles, you can also publish them on Qidi Cloud Media (www.qidiwang.com). Looking at it now, the effect is still good, and the price is low, and there are more resources in the market!
Soft article release
(3) Free news information,
Based on free reports on my products, the following new product reporting channels are collected:
36氪(NEXT), IT Orange (Today cheers for the new products around us), i Dark Horse, Sprout, Lieyun.com, Chuangye.com (demo8 is currently closed and renamed the first page), tech2ipo Chuangzhen, Huxiu.com, TMTpost Media (WoMake Community), DoNews, Chopping Network, Geek Park, Pingwest Pinwan, New Products, Mindestore (Love Style), Sutu.com, Whip Niu Shi, Kutui.com, Baidu Baijia, Lei Feng.com Ifanr (Guangzhou), Lieyun.com, Tencent Venture, Sina Venture
There are also various free self-media: Lu Songsong’s blog, NetEase subscription account, uc big fish account, Toutiao, Yidian News, Beijing time account, Wukong Finance self-media, Dongfang Toutiao, Sohu public platform, Yixin public platform, WeChat public platform, etc.
Finally, don’t forget to use the above free channels. The fastest publicity and promotion for a company is that a startup company has a successful There are hundreds of WeChat groups and QQ groups. The content produced by the above channels still needs to be combined with social marketing and spread more widely!
In fact, in summary, free brand promotion is not at all Difficult, what is difficult is execution and planning. However, only by using movement to control stillness and combining movement with stillness can the company's brand be better promoted. Not to mention letting everyone know, at least people in related industries will know your brand! No money, work hard to polish your products, simulate and improve process services, and there will always be a "good" day!