---
title: "How to Fight Marketing Battles in the Post-Traffic Era?"
description: "This article is authorized. In 2017, at the annual meeting of Logic Thinking, Luo Zhenyu solemnly announced the end of the traffic era. Indeed, we can all feel that the online traffic dividend is almost exhausted, and many major platform owners, such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com, have begun to turn to offline, opening up a new battlefield for traffic competition - new retail. Customer acquisition costs are getting higher and higher, and conversion is becoming more and more difficult, which is a common perception. So, Luo Zhenyu said \"the traffic era is over\", but I think it is not an end, but a new beginning..."
author: "粉丝工场创始人丁丁"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-10-22"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-to-fight-marketing-battles-in-the-post-traffic-era-b097f257/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-to-fight-marketing-battles-in-the-post-traffic-era-b097f257.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8kPsPF6TKr8n4t8Wo9fhhQ"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E5%90%8E%E6%B5%81%E9%87%8F%E6%97%B6%E4%BB%A3%E7%9A%84%E8%90%A5%E9%94%80%E6%88%98-%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E6%89%93-b097f257.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-to-fight-marketing-battles-in-the-post-traffic-era-b097f257/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# How to Fight Marketing Battles in the Post-Traffic Era?

> This article is authorized. In 2017, at the annual meeting of Logic Thinking, Luo Zhenyu solemnly announced the end of the traffic era. Indeed, we can all feel that the online traffic dividend is almost exhausted, and many major platform owners, such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com, have begun to turn to offline, opening up a new battlefield for traffic competition - new retail. Customer acquisition costs are getting higher and higher, and conversion is becoming more and more difficult, which is a common perception. So, Luo Zhenyu said "the traffic era is over", but I think it is not an end, but a new beginning...

This article is authorized.
In 2017, at the annual meeting of Logic Thinking, Luo Zhenyu solemnly announced one thing - the end of the traffic era!
Indeed, we can all feel that the online traffic dividend is almost exhausted, and many major platform owners, such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com, have begun to turn to offline, opening up another new battlefield for traffic competition - new retail.
Customer acquisition costs are getting higher and higher, and conversion is becoming more and more difficult, which is a common perception. So, Luo Zhenyu said "the traffic era is over", but I think it is not an end, but a new beginning, and the competition is more intense, so I prefer to use another concept - **the post-traffic era.**
01
**In the post-traffic era, corporate marketing is becoming more and more difficult**
In the field of business operations, there is a good saying: growth can cover up all contradictions. It means that as long as the company's performance is growing every year, operational problems, management problems, organizational structure problems, development strategy problems, employee problems, corporate culture problems, etc. are all not problems, because growth can continuously bring new profits and continuously broaden the boundaries of the cake. As long as everyone makes money and the cake is enough to share, contradictions will not intensify.
But once growth stops, all problems will be exposed. The post-traffic era is exactly at such a stage: growth has stopped, the traffic dividend has been exhausted, and the cake suddenly becomes insufficient to share, so problems arise, mainly in the following aspects in marketing:
**1. Marketing costs have greatly increased.** This is determined by customer acquisition costs. Some people have counted that in the past, the cost of acquiring a new user was only a few cents, but now it has risen to hundreds or even thousands of yuan.
**2. Conversion effects are getting worse and worse.** The original conversion effect was good because a large number of new users kept coming in. The typical characteristic of this part of users is that they are willing to try new things, so it is very easy to attract new users. For example, in the first few years of WeChat official accounts, it was very easy to attract fans because there were no more choices. Now the number of fans and opening rates of most official accounts are declining, because the transition from new users to old users makes fans' decisions more and more rational.
**3. The communication environment is getting worse and worse.** There are too many channels, and consumers' attention is extremely diluted. There are too many monks and too little porridge. According to statistics, as of December 2017, China's Internet population reached 772 million, and the number of mobile Internet users reached 753 million. It can be said that popularization has basically been completed, and traffic is fixed, but new media platforms are increasing year by year. In these years, media platforms such as Himalaya, Douyin, Kuaishou, Xigua Video, Huoshan Video, and Micro Video have emerged... all competing for existing traffic.
The increase in communication platforms actually increases the difficulty of marketing, because the public's attention is dispersed. As Zhang Ruimin said: In the past, enterprises shot at fixed targets, but now they shoot at moving targets, even flying saucers! Originally, you knew where the audience was, knew which TV station to cooperate with, and could even hand all this directly to a third-party PR advertising company, but now it doesn't work.
02
**In the post-traffic era, how to do marketing?**
Luo Zhenyu said that we should transition from traffic thinking to super user thinking. That is to say, in the past, we focused on attracting new users, but now we should focus on retention. In the past, free marketing and subsidy wars were prevalent, but now we should pay more attention to the exploration of the lifetime value of super users. This coincides with the fan thinking we advocate.
In addition, I think we should do these three things well in specific tactics:
**Make the brand more prominent**
Brand marketing ultimately competes for public awareness, which is what the traditional positioning theory calls seizing mind resources. Whoever's brand occupies a unique and important position in the customer's mind will win.
**In the mobile Internet era, an important way to seize customer mind is "IP-ization", that is, brand personification, making the brand more vivid, specific, and lively.**
In the era of oversupply, product function has become the basic need of the brand, while emotion has become a strong need. That is to say, the perceived differentiation of the brand is mainly reflected in the spiritual value level such as tone, emotion, and culture. Although the way of finding brand positioning through category segmentation (mainly focusing on product function) is still effective, brand IP-ization is unstoppable.
There are two main ways of brand IP-ization:
**One is to create original IP by yourself.** For example, Jiangxiaobai and Three Squirrels realize IP-ization by contentizing the brand itself; Xiaomi, Gree, and Chu Orange IP-ize the founder or business owner; Uni-President Xiaoming Tongxue IP-izes the product.
**△ Jiangxiaobai**
△ Chu Orange
△ Xiaoming Tongxue
**The second is IP licensing, mainly by purchasing original IP copyrights to reshape the brand image and build brand momentum.** For example, the recently popular music marketing, Zhongjing Mushroom Sauce purchased the copyright of the song "The Little Girl Picking Mushrooms", the financial product Huanbei obtained the music copyright of "Long Live the Idol" made popular by TFboys, and "I Miss You" in Pinduoduo's advertisement, and Shenzhou Special Car's adaptation of "Throw the Handkerchief" and so on.
Of course, the most direct licensing method is to invite IP to endorse the brand, such as ofo's custom car with Minions, and Haojiayi's cooperation with Peppa Pig.
△ ofo Minions custom car
**Make content more attractive**
In the marketing environment of information overload, in order to attract public attention, in addition to making your brand prominent, more toned, and more likable, another important measure is to make the communication content more attractive and explosive.
An effective way to increase the attractiveness and explosiveness of content is to create topics and mobilize public emotions. For example, the Alipay Koi fish propagation that swept the Internet a few days ago made good use of these two points. In the previous article, we discussed it specifically, so I won't go into it here.
△ Alipay Koi fish
Refined content operation can improve communication efficiency and continuously enhance users' favorability. Therefore, in the post-traffic era, any company that wants to do marketing well must establish its own content team, so that it can be more calm in the face of changes in the marketing environment.
**Cross-border traffic diversion, harvesting platform traffic dividends**
Although the dividend period of the entire online traffic has passed, the birth of new platforms can trigger traffic migration, and the migration process will also generate traffic dividends. For example, from blog to Weibo to WeChat to short video, each user migration is an excellent opportunity to harvest traffic. Brands should be good at seizing opportunities, doing a good job of positioning and cross-border traffic diversion.
**The battle for traffic is the eternal theme of business warfare, but don't fight for traffic for the sake of traffic. Instead, see the essence of the battle for traffic. What is fought for is traffic, but also trust.**
This article is reprinted from Deep Fan Marketing (ID: sdfenxiao) (Author Ding Ding: Founder of Fanctory Fan Workshop, creator of the Deep Fan Marketing theory system.) Please indicate the source for reprinting.
-END-


---

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671