Click 'Read Original' for details. My name is Xiao Yi. I joined P&G as an intern in 2011 and was instilled with the most traditional and standardized FMCG logic for four or five years. In 2016, I went to Afu and discovered that I am a barbarian who loves wild growth. Fortunately, after three years of struggle at Afu, the genes of standardization and wildness began to reconcile. I managed offline distributors for P&G, handled JD.com when serving OLAY, led Tmall's Double 11 at Afu, and over four years touched KA sales and operations across almost all online and offline beauty channels. I developed 106 new products, all IP cross-border marketing products. Among these 106 products, one was the second best-selling color cosmetic on Tmall Double 11 in 2017, second only to MAC. Some products are still being cleared. I've seen the life and death of 106 products and stepped on many pitfalls. In marketing, I've mixed proposals, initiated and united 9 P&G brands to propose to JD.com, achieving JD's largest integrated marketing campaign almost at the level of Super Brand Day. In the last six months, I've been focusing on KOL marketing and information flow advertising. First Function: Transformation of Traffic Acquisition Capability First, the ability to acquire traffic; without this, don't do consumer goods. Second, the ability to combine and communicate product prototypes; I focus on this. Next, the Era Change of Traffic: Traffic Acquisition 1.0 — Build an encirclement around the target audience's life circle, reaching the same person 6 times, and they will definitely be converted; this requires extreme wealth. For this, media colleagues need to build an encirclement around the target audience's life circle, and expensive single content (big stars, big films, big ideas) came into being. Traffic Acquisition 2.0 — Joint business plans, resource exchange, need for viral and proposal event marketing, brand marketing. Both 2C and 2B capabilities are indispensable. This requires project managers + client managers + planning managers. Traffic Acquisition 3.0 — Direct performance marketing is achievable and very efficient; at this time, the boundaries between client, agency, and advertising company capabilities are increasingly blurred, and everyone is exploring. These three traffic acquisition capabilities are not outdated or superior; they target different markets and audiences, and at different times, the efficiency of traffic acquisition varies. How to Grow from 0 to 1 in Seeding? 1. Need a Pioneer Force: Set up an innovative marketing department with only four or five people, invested 1.8 million ourselves, and it all collapsed; finally, through top KOL distribution cooperation, we paid for our team's learning. Until January 2019, we saw the first positive feedback; only when positive feedback comes do you know the previous efforts were useless. That video had 9.35 million views, 330,000 people opened Taobao to search for 'jojoba oil' (phonetic), with a 4% conversion rate, extremely healthy. I realized that when content marketing finds the site calm and ineffective, it will never be effective; if it works, it's Douyin one second and Taobao the next, there's no other criterion. 2. Scale After Positive Feedback: Expand the team, scale up investment, until June, with 400 million views on Douyin. I think these 400 million users are high-quality, high-potential users. Two top hits and three mid-level products, with many interested people from outside the site flooding into Tmall, triggering Tmall's crowd tagging and search logic, doubling the store's daily sales and traffic. We are already SKA-level clients on Tmall, with two to three times growth afterward. That's the process we went through. 3. Share the Pitfalls We Stepped On: (1) No advertising or marketing company can find the most reliable KOL, and no perfect content operator can create a hit; giving up illusions brings you closer to success. Reasons: a. Media and clients are on the same level; KOLs popular on Douyin and Xiaohongshu don't overlap much with those on WeChat and Weibo, and Douyin and Xiaohongshu haven't been popular for long, so everyone is a novice. b. Advertising companies don't bear ROI; besides us struggling to sell goods, who bears ROI? For new things, only clients have the motivation to explore, so once you understand this, you accept it and pull it down yourself. I think we made the right decision in October 2018. (2) Business leaders must win first: When you can't get positive feedback yourself, you can't lead the team to positive feedback. Here's what I did: a. I found MCNs myself; Weibo's official account listed 100 MCNs. I identified 42 with text logos, searched each of the 42 MCNs' names on Baidu, and built relationships with them. b. I selected accounts myself; for good accounts, I first compared data on multiple data sites, observed the account for a week, read comments, guessed the MCN's strategy for the account, and checked if they bought water army. An hour later, a batch of water army might come. Three days later, if the video is bad, they delete it. If you delete videos three times in a week, I roughly know it's fake. These detailed methods now fill more than three pages. c. I wrote scripts myself; the scripts MCN gave me were incomprehensible, and I couldn't imagine their quality. So I thought of a trick: I filmed myself, acted as a KOL, and performed according to their script. I watched every frame, every second, and judged if it was useful. That's how I polished it bit by bit, with deliberate practice and small improvements. When you demand extremely high standards of yourself and accumulate a lot of first-hand detailed experience, qualitative change will come. That's the first step. (3) After a victory, build a team: Having fought, you clearly know who you need to fight with and continue fighting. Deeply study the business; I watched every video myself, and when WeChat rang, I wanted to vomit. You must fight with the team to form a unified context and understanding, and then you can enter methodology and accumulation. (4) Team methodology accumulation: Individual ability rises to team ability; the standard is that newcomers can achieve 60 points upon arrival and won't make the most basic and stupid mistakes. The team's small genius individual abilities are refined into team capabilities. Core and senior members can do more expansive things, the team starts to lead teams, and once a positive cycle is established, the real barrier is built. The Traffic Market I See First, passive recommendation media: The baton of traffic is the platform, not paying for follower count, betting on the ability to produce viral content. These are Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Bilibili. In this context, you need these capabilities: 1. Establish your own value evaluation system: When investing, the question of whether to find big, medium, or small KOLs is wrong. You still use follower count to establish your KOL evaluation mechanism; pricing by follower count is the pricing of the traffic and media side. Look at the pricing of big, medium, and small KOLs and various types of ads on Kuaishou, and you'll find the difference in price per ad per follower is only a few cents. 2. Whoever can create a hit is listened to: Fans like content, but to leverage public domain traffic, you need more universal appeal to go viral. It's not about listening to us or the director, but who can combine product pain points, selling points, and visual language. 3. Sellers don't go viral, and viral doesn't sell: This is a natural conflict; 10 million views * 10,000 copies is 1% conversion, which is equivalent to 1 million views * 0.1% conversion. Which one do you do? Do you know the difference and methodology? In our view, we can do both and have done both. If you can't, you're just talking nonsense. 4. The speed of training a bidder is proportional to the speed of reaction: Information flow CPM is getting more expensive. On the first day, you don't know the results, but you need to react. So train bidders to react on the first day when results are unknown. The frequency and requirements of this act-react-react-react cycle determine how quickly a bidder is developed. As traffic gets more expensive, their optimization ability strengthens, and there will always be a balance. Seeding is still passive recommendation; traffic gets more expensive, aesthetics get higher, making viral videos gets harder, and the entire content team must upgrade. There are more solutions than problems. The second type is follower-first, including private domain traffic, which is WeChat and temporarily Kuaishou. Those who don't do traffic owners will suffer. Second Function: Transformation of Product Prototype Combination and Communication Capability As traffic changes, product R&D organization shifts from linear to aggregated. Previously, development took three, six, or nine months to create annual hits, which were then communicated to consumers through layers of media, with feedback taking a month. If it was really bad, it wasn't a waste of money but time. The brand and product development team would need another ten months to guess again. Now traffic is fragmented, and the aggregated crowd profiles of each traffic source are more precise and closer. Traffic, content, and product ends must develop products together. Finally, what remains after the traffic dividend passes? 1. Traffic dividends should build the brand: While there is traffic, quickly build the brand; it can help you build barriers and safely wait for the next dividend period. 2. The team can be retained: Excellent media, content, planning, and product talents are scarce. Talents who have fought together and built understanding and trust through time and money are even more precious. Source: Qunxiang Club (ID: Qunxiangle)