Can Marketing Really Achieve More with Less?

Some things are unsettling to think about: the apps we commonly use are nearly a decade old, and no new widely adopted apps have emerged. What does this mean? The internet has seen no new traffic for a long time, with everyone competing for existing users. The result is that big brands dominate everything, while small brands struggle to survive. Why? As platform tools become simpler and traffic stability increases, the work of optimizing for weight and guessing algorithms has become increasingly difficult. A friend in e-commerce in Hangzhou, smoking a cigarette, asked me why Douyin has no traffic anymore. A friend in Shanghai, sipping tea, said: "Teacher Zhao, pay more attention to Focus Media; we've been investing recently, and the results are decent." A businessman's "decent" is basically an understated boast. What does this mean? Didn't we all shift online because offline traffic was too expensive? Are we going back now? Is this the logic of marketing repetition? Wang Xing, president of Kantar Research, believes the core of current marketing is "Double Micro, One Douyin, One Focus Media." Integrated marketing investment should build both brand power and promotional power; two forces can create miracles. The market shows two completely different brand trends: one is shifting from offline to online, paying tribute to the internet, holding onto core offline media like Focus Media, and doing WeChat and Douyin online. The other is shifting from online to offline, as the internet becomes saturated and customer acquisition costs rise; moving offline, they encounter Focus Media, and it seems offline traffic has potential! But in reality, the world progresses in waves and spirals, not suddenly online or offline. For example, marketing improvement is a combined effect of brand power stacking and promotional channel expansion. The essence of doing more with less is skilled operation, avoiding wasted money, and not taking detours. Next, I'll use Focus Media as an example to explain the logic of offline digital advertising, since there's not much else to invest in offline now—only Focus Media. I hope after reading this, you can use Focus Media as skillfully as you use direct traffic and Douyin+.

-01- Does Marketing Cost-Effectiveness Exist? Marketing cost-effectiveness used to be called "big creativity on a small budget," now it's called ROI. The underlying logic is taking shortcuts. Of course, there are high-frequency cases of small investments yielding big returns. Otherwise, how could there be viral videos, 100k+ WeChat articles, and hit products? Those who understand don't say it; those who don't get anxious. Some say hits are random, but from the print era to the CCTV-dominated TV era to the Douyin era and the Focus Media era, every era has had overnight success brands and astonishing best-selling products. Decades have passed, and if hits haven't randomly landed on you, it doesn't mean they don't exist. Some think cost-effectiveness is a false proposition, like arguing the best employee should get the lowest salary—that's sophistry. In marketing, cost-effectiveness is Occam's razor applied to subtraction. For example, clear differentiated selling points: Genki Forest focused on Focus Media to explode with 0 calories, 0 fat, 0 sugar, promoting a sparkling water that tastes good without gaining weight, jumping from 200 million to over 2 billion in sales in one year. For example, brainwashing creative performance: Milkground, with a catchy tune at Focus Media elevator entrances, went from 100 million in 2018 to 800 million in 2019 and 2 billion in 2020. For example, category creator: Xiaoxian Dun, precisely positioned as freshly stewed bird's nest, insisting on same-day stewing and cold-chain delivery with a 15-day shelf life. Starting from Xiaohongshu seeding to 200 million annual revenue, then using international star Zhang Ziyi as spokesperson and Focus Media to break out, reaching 2 billion in annual revenue within two years. So when you invest, you must firmly believe: ROI can indeed be continuously improved, but the methods to improve ROI may not only lie in the "investment" itself.

-02- Media Is Not Divided into Online and Offline, Only by Traffic Volume Investment is only about accuracy. When traffic is sufficient, it's a blue ocean, like watering with a tap on full blast; force can create miracles. But when competitors increase and user attention is fragmented, traffic becomes insufficient, leading to precision targeting, "recommended for you," and interest-based e-commerce. The era of extensive advertising is long gone; now it's cross-screen linkage and online-offline integration. Focus Media runs a catchy ad, then data flows back to Tmall's data bank, and then direct traffic ads retarget users who saw the Focus Media ad, often increasing conversion rates by 30% to 60%. So allocating 20%-30% of traffic budget to Focus Media not only breaks brand boundaries to attract new customers, but also enhances brand awareness and recognition, which can improve the conversion rate of online performance ads, and can also be exchanged for traffic on Tmall. Mathematically, even without qualitative change, there will be quantitative improvement. For example, Ulike laser hair removal device, often seen on Focus Media recently, achieved 150 million during last year's March 8th promotion, and this year, with Focus Media breaking boundaries, sold over 300 million on Tmall alone, and gained great fame, transforming from an internet-famous brand to a widely recognized public brand.

-03- Three Things to Do for High Marketing Output **Improve marketing cognition: understand the overall marketing and local operations, be able to do it yourself, and teach others. For example, if you invest in Focus Media, you must know the three elements: A. Choose the right timing For example: Vatti range hoods became famous during the French World Cup with its "refund marketing" campaign. Although there was a small glitch in the redemption process, the betting-style creative itself was brilliant. Coinciding with everyone's attention on the World Cup, how did these non-sponsor brands ride the wave? They rode it with height, performance, and new ideas. Vatti + Focus Media taught brand veterans a lesson. Timing (World Cup) + Scenario (elevator in buildings) + Great creativity (refund if champion) was clearly a month-long marketing campaign, but it became a classic case of small investment yielding big returns. B. Focus on cities Event-driven effects may be uncertain, but there are many cases of low-budget Focus Media investments with certainty. For example, Chengdu's internet-famous restaurant Kaojiang, whose ads focus solely on Chengdu, constantly reminds people on Focus Media screens when they go downstairs to eat: "In Chengdu, if you don't eat hotpot, eat Kaojiang." It's incredibly popular. Another example is Laoxiangji, endorsed by Xiaoyueyue, which expands to Nanjing and runs elevator ads in Nanjing, then moves to Beijing and penetrates ads within three kilometers of new stores. The top online brand IBABY constant-temperature sleeping bags is even more typical: with limited budget, they don't spread thin but adopt a focused strategy, concentrating on a few cities, and indeed achieved the "number one" pace, jumping from 30 million a year to 150 million in one quarter. C. Choose the right scenario Scenario triggering creates a scenario imagination for users, bringing strong immersion. Its core is to trigger and awaken the psychological needs of consumers in specific scenarios, prompting purchase impulses. For example, Safeguard is a brand with stable sales. To increase growth, during flu season, Safeguard's elevator ads on Focus Media remind you that the buttons you just pressed have many bacteria, so wash your hands with Safeguard before eating upstairs. Another example: Juewei Duck Neck's elevator ads in office buildings ask, "What's the point of working overtime without Juewei Duck Neck?" Ele.me's Focus Media screens roll out ads for big-name takeout like Xibei: "The bitterness of overtime must be compensated with a big meal!" Florasis constantly changes scenario themes on Focus Media screens: for Valentine's Day, they propose "Send Florasis instead of flowers." For 520, they launch the "Concentric Lock" lipstick, encouraging boys to give it to girls as a confession: "Lock love for life, unite as one!" Using Focus Media ads well is about creating scenarios and inducing potential needs; good scenario ad content actively creates purchase impulses. What does this mean? Significant cost reduction and proactive business growth.

-04- From Digital Traffic Buying to Digital Focus Media Benefits of Full Digitalization It's often said that half of advertising spend is wasted, which essentially means data is not transparent, feedback is not timely, and by the time you react, the money is gone. But after years of development, especially after Alibaba's 15 billion yuan investment in Focus Media, online and offline data have been fully connected, achieving full-domain marketing digitalization. The benefits are obvious: when offline media like Focus Media becomes digital, data becomes more visualized, quantifiable, and optimizable. Digital Focus Media can be summarized as "opening the six meridians" with Alibaba's help: Alibaba Cloud empowers real-time content distribution and updates, precise distribution based on property data and Alibaba data, you can select communities around terminal outlets based on business district location data, match different grades of products to different buildings based on property prices, and judge community purchase interest by category based on Alibaba shopping data, thus selecting communities with high potential customer concentration. For example, Feihe milk powder can choose communities around maternal and child chain stores for precise placement, or choose high-end properties above X million yuan for Feihe organic milk powder, or select communities with high purchase probability for maternal and child products for precise placement. At the same time, data on who saw each Focus Media brand exposure flows back to the brand's data bank, allowing quantitative evaluation of effects. How many people were exposed, how many converted to interested people, and when brand assets accumulate to a certain level, Tmall retargets the exposed and interested groups to complete the sales loop. Through data integration between Focus Media and Tmall, the barrier between brand and performance is broken, shortening the cycle from "brand" to "performance."

Summary Marketing itself requires continuous cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In this process, digitalization helps turn occasional "hits" into marketing inevitability. Increased inevitability means a higher "hit rate," which is the continuous optimization of ROI. Marketing has no YYDS (eternal god), but there must be methodology. Don't believe in metaphysics; trust mathematics. The better you use Focus Media, the better you understand the public.

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