Respiratory Rule for Content 1.0 Ver Telling you How to Do a Successful Social Ad (1)

1. In the current social age, brainstorming in a room doesn’t seem to work

In the past, business owners usually had to pay ads according to the broadcasting time and the ad size; therefore, the creative space was quite limited and the ad was all about the product itself except for the interesting introduction. We can say that most of the creative ideas were inspired by real life, which can barely meet the ad demand.

Sometimes we find that, tattoo is quite popular recently then all the copy writings involve this topic; people like to associate art with Tibet, then we see typical Tibet scenery show in the ads; creative director seems to prefer family story after he has had a baby.

Now, creative brainstorming may work for hard-sell ads but won’t do for social ads, because the essence of social ads is to promote the product in a softer and friendly way. The best way would be to engage the audience with the story, letting them forget they are actually watching an ad. The promotional ad can be organized in this way: 3 minutes to draw the audience’s attention, 2 minutes for creating an atmosphere and finally 3 seconds for the promotion message. Only in this way, consumers may continue to watch the ad until the end.

It’s really a big challenge for creative ads, which means that  an easy slogan created by advertisers in a short 3 days won’t be fit for the latest trend. Your creative ability should be remarkable to beat the competitors in the market.  

2. Social ads feature a large amount and are unrepeatable.

The most difficult thing for social advertisers is to create various and unrepeatable ads, just like news broadcasting on TV. The old ways to use the same TVC for 3 months or even 1-2 years won’t apply to today’s ad market. For example, you have finished 10 posts on Microblog, 5 posts on Wechat, 7 pics, 6 GIFs and 3 short videos, but one night passes and a new day comes, again you need to come up with something new.

For inspirations and good ideas, so many editors choose to go through countless website pages, learn foreign languages and download APPs, but still they feel powerless when creating content.

3. The Respiratory Rule for Content

From my experience of creating thousands of posts on Microblog and Wechat, I have summarized a Respiratory Rule for Content to help you organize and compile materials, so as to ultimately output some appealing content.

4. What to breathe in

To build a brand, the following points need to be taken into account:

(1)Know the key words related to your brand. For instance, if I want to promote H&M, I need to know the essential vocabulary related to the name of clothes, the textiles, including specific sales terminology as well.

(2)Category key words. If we consider H&M, for example, it is pivotal that you are familiar with specific fashion key words. Moreover, you should know the new trends related to that industry.

(3)Fans key words. If you have invited some celebrities to be your representatives, you can search for relevant content about the representative. For example, if your brand signs with the EXO singer group, then at least you should know about “Xiaomangnei”, “Langzai” and “Gaohu”.

(4)Highlights on APP. Different apps have their own highlights. Uber has discount coupons; Taobao has New Year Market； Headlines Today is reporting Baidu Event; Meipai is opposing sled dogs. These together constitute a series of hot topics that may draw the attention of different TAs.

(5)Similarly, travel businesses all keep an eye on Ctrip’s latest news and offers; cosmetics businesses are busy with merging; Bilibili Website is still overwhelmed by The Romance of Three Kingdoms. It is necessary to distinguish different kinds of TAs and learn about what they are really interested in. Otherwise, it will be embarrassing if you suddenly join a Harry Potter Community and say “Release yourself and have some fun” when the group is actually sad for the death of the Professor.

(6)Knowledge of specific fields. You need to have common sense for some common fields. For example, if you are in a coffee related industry, at least you should know the 4 major origins of coffee beans and cappuccino shouldn’t be a new word for you.

5. How to organize what you have breathed in.

Human’s brain will forget 30% of the messages it intakes each day and it will be up to 70% as days pass. Most people cannot clearly remember what has happened in one specific summer vacation in the childhood, and it’s the same for the content we collect and store in our brains. Brains won’t help you to automatically classify all the content you take in, so you have to do it by listing and organizing it by yourself.

In this way, every time you need a particular material, you can easily pick it out from the list. For example, you can list all the hot topics based on their social influence, so that when you do a yearly summary, it’s easy to find the right massage among the records, such as popular buzz that goes viral on Wechat, hot news on Microblog or big events of a specific community.