Every marketing channel sucks right now 现在的每一个营销渠道都很糟糕

Yes, I'm about to roast every tactic you're betting on
是的,我准备把你押注的每一项策略都吐槽一遍

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These days I’m spending a lot of my time with very early stage startups (yes, as part of the program at a16z to invest up to $1M into each, called a16z speedrun) and as part of this, I spend a lot of time talking about launch and marketing strategy for new products.
最近我把大量时间花在与极早期初创公司打交道上(没错,这是 a16z 名为“a16z speedrun”计划的一部分,该计划会为每家公司投资高达 100 万美元),因此,我经常与他们讨论新产品的发布和营销策略。

The options for marketing are pretty grim right now. Here are my complaints:
目前的营销选择相当严峻。以下是我的槽点:

• SEO: Takes too long, you’re competing against listicles (and Reddit threads), Google might screw you over at any moment, maybe AI one boxing will kill your traffic next year anyway :(
  SEO:耗时太长,你得和各种“推荐清单”(以及 Reddit 帖子)竞争,谷歌随时可能坑你一把,而且明年 AI 的“一框式搜索”可能直接让你的流量归零 :(
• Influencer marketing: Get a big spike of traffic but none of it converts, the spike goes away after a few days, big creators are too expensive and a slew of small creators need to be cobbled together, lots of babysitting :(
  网红营销:能带来巨大的流量峰值但转化率极低,流量几天后就消失了,大博主太贵,而找一堆小博主又得费力拼凑,还需要大量的跟进和维护 :(
• PR/comms: Doesn’t actually generate signups, doesn’t scale and not repeatable, expensive retainers for PR experts to grab coffee with journalists, your competitors will get the same article next month, and press is as likely to attack you as to cover you :(
  公关/传播:实际上无法带来注册量,无法规模化且不可重复,支付昂贵的顾问费只是为了让公关专家去和记者喝咖啡,你的竞争对手下个月就能拿到同样的报道,而且媒体攻击你的可能性和报道你的可能性一样大 :(
• Email marketing: hope you like spam folders, building a good list takes forever, open rate rates are <30% and CTRs are <5% so hope you weren’t expecting a lot of clicks
  邮件营销:希望你喜欢垃圾邮件箱,建立一个优质名单需要耗费大量时间,开信率低于 30% 且点击率低于 5%,所以别指望能有多少点击量
• Viral loops: doh you need an actually great product, all the contacts spamming techniques no longer work (neither email nor SMS!), your UX will be ruined by aggressive popups and onboarding schemes, and it’s nearly impossible to get viral factor >1
  病毒式循环:哎呀,你需要一个真正伟大的产品,所有的通讯录骚扰技术都失效了(无论是邮件还是短信!),你的用户体验会被激进的弹窗和引导方案毁掉,而且病毒系数几乎不可能大于 1
• Ads: way too expensive, always getting more expensive, your competitors will just copy your copy, lots of fake/low-conversion clicks, your investors hate it, and it’ll kill you if you don’t have a strong business model already
  广告:太贵了,而且越来越贵,你的竞争对手会直接抄袭你的文案,存在大量虚假或低转化的点击,你的投资者讨厌它,而且如果你还没有强大的商业模式,它会拖垮你
• Referral/affiliate/etc: be ready for a crazy amount of fraud, it’s just as expensive as paid marketing (though people fool themselves into thinking it’s not paid), and surprisingly most people don’t care and will get fatigued quickly! :(
  推荐/联盟营销等:要做好应对海量欺诈的准备,它的成本与付费营销一样高昂(尽管人们常自欺欺人地认为这不是付费推广),而且令人惊讶的是,大多数人对此并不感冒,很快就会产生审美疲劳!:(
• Big launch on social: it can only happen once, you’ll have to spam all your friends to share and over time they might come to resent you, the algo is always working against you, and it only lasts for a few hours :(
  社交媒体大动作发布:这种机会只有一次,你不得不骚扰所有朋友请求转发,久而久之他们可能会心生怨恨,而且平台算法总是在针对你,热度只能维持几个小时 :(

I could keep going... but you get the picture!
我还可以继续列举下去......但你已经明白我的意思了!

Unfortunately this is the state of growth marketing. A lot of channels are not working, or are slow, expensive, or one-time only. This is the natural end state for things, and maybe we’re in a bit of a lull due to the technology super cycle as we’re 15+ years into the mobile wave, we’ve had various kinds of paid ads for 20+ years, and so on. All of these aforementioned marketing channels are now fully mature.
不幸的是,这就是增长营销的现状。许多渠道要么失效,要么变得缓慢、昂贵,或者只能产生一次性效果。这是事物发展的必然终局,或许我们正处于技术超级周期的低谷期——毕竟移动浪潮已持续了 15 年以上,各类付费广告也已存在了 20 多年,诸如此类。上述所有营销渠道目前都已进入完全成熟期。

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, Redux
“糟糕点击率法则”的回归
This is the logical ecosystem-wide conclusion for the concept I wrote about many years back, The Law of Shitty Clickthoughs which inspired by the efficient market hypothesis. It said the following:
这是对我多年前提出的“糟糕点击率法则”(The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs)这一概念在整个生态系统层面的逻辑总结,该法则受到了有效市场假说的启发。其核心观点如下:

Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.
随着时间的推移,所有的营销策略最终都会导致糟糕的点击率。

I encourage you to read the full essay if you haven’t, but the tldr; is that when marketing channels work, everyone jumps in on them, and they start to decay like crazy.
如果你还没读过全文,我建议你读一下,但其核心观点是:当某个营销渠道奏效时,所有人都会蜂拥而至,随后该渠道就会开始疯狂衰减。

Why do they decay? Because customers stop responding over time — they start ignoring things as the novelty wears off. The ROI also goes down, as all the intermediaries that charge you for access to their audiences jack up prices. The super slick self-serve, automated auction model for paid marketing offers many pros and cons, first that it lets you aggregate much larger audiences with simple tools, but by making it easier, of course you end up with a ton of competition that then drives up CAC. In other words, as a marketing channel scales and ages over time — and yes, we’ve had SEO as a concept for 25+ years now — consumer engagement goes down, costs go up, competition goes up, ROI drops like crazy.
为什么会衰减?因为随着新鲜感消失,消费者的反应会逐渐冷淡——他们开始视而不见。同时,随着那些向你收取受众访问费用的中间商不断抬高价格,投资回报率(ROI)也会下降。付费营销中那种极其丝滑的自助式、自动化竞价模型既有优点也有缺点:优点是它让你能通过简单的工具聚合庞大的受众;但正因为它降低了门槛,你最终会面临海量的竞争,进而推高获客成本(CAC)。换句话说,随着营销渠道的规模扩大和时间推移——没错,SEO 作为一个概念已经存在 25 年多了——消费者参与度会下降,成本会上升,竞争会加剧,ROI 则会疯狂暴跌。

Big channels versus Little channels
大渠道 vs 小渠道
All the aforementioned marketing channels are what I describe as “Big Channels.” They have scale, can be moved using $ (or labor, which costs $). And if you’re a big successful company, you might be fine because you have a (hopefully) strong brand, you get a bunch of organic traffic from word of mouth, you (hopefully) have a successful product that can cross-sell into new products, etc. You can have badly performing Big Channels because it’s all blended into a longer LTV recovery period, more organic, and all the other advantages that successful companies have.
上述所有营销渠道都是我所描述的“大渠道”。它们具有规模效应,可以通过资金(或需要资金的人力)来推动。如果你是一家成功的大公司,你可能觉得没问题,因为你拥有(希望是)强大的品牌,能获得大量口碑带来的自然流量,并且拥有(希望是)成功的产品可以交叉销售新产品等等。你可以容忍表现不佳的大渠道,因为这些成本都被融合进了更长的 LTV(生命周期价值)回收期、更多的自然流量以及成功公司所拥有的其他优势中。

But let’s talk startups, who have none of these positive dynamics? I want to lay out a few thoughts:
但让我们谈谈初创公司,它们并不具备上述任何积极因素。我想提出几点想法:

• Don’t focus on Big Channels, focus on Little Channels. first, you should just know that all the aforementioned big, mature channels will suck for you. These channels have mostly all been bid up by bigger companies, and they are mostly stale to consumers, and you don’t have the same LTV and financial strength as an established product. Instead, a new startup has to be asymmetrical — what you can do that they can’t? The natural solution points towards Little Channels, which are all the smaller marketing strategies that are tried in the early days and abandoned over time.
  不要关注“大渠道”,要关注“小渠道”。首先,你必须明白,所有前述的大型成熟渠道对你来说都很糟糕。这些渠道大多已被大公司抬高了竞价,且对消费者而言已显陈旧,而你又不具备成熟产品那样的终身价值(LTV)和财务实力。相反,初创公司必须采取非对称策略——你能做哪些他们做不到的事?自然的解决方案指向了“小渠道”,即那些在早期尝试、随时间推移往往会被放弃的所有小型营销策略。
• Don’t worry about scaling. Let’s say you have a new product with only 100 active users. If your marketing campaign gets you +500 actives, you’re ecstatic. Gain a few hundred users inside an established company, and you should clean up your resume. Thus, little channels can work: Running mini events with cool speakers, organizing a Facebook group, going after a single college/company/town, emailing your ex-colleagues/friends to try a new thing — these can all help in the early days. You won’t have the competition, the response rates will be higher since you’re doing it all by hand, and you can always scale over time by moving onto the next channel.
  不要担心规模化。假设你有一个只有 100 个活跃用户的新产品。如果你的营销活动为你带来了 500 个活跃用户,你会欣喜若狂。但在一家成熟的公司里只增加几百个用户,你可能就得准备找下家了。因此,小渠道是行之有效的:举办有酷炫嘉宾参加的小型活动、组织 Facebook 群组、攻克单一的大学/公司/城镇、给前同事或朋友发邮件邀请他们尝试新事物——这些在早期都大有裨益。你不会面临竞争,由于是纯手工操作,响应率会更高,而且你以后总能通过转向下一个渠道来实现规模化。
• Novelty is in your favor. There are only so many ways to sell a big established product to customers. The “wow” moments have all been used, the value prop is already understood. The response rate on marketing declines as a result. But if you’re a new, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed product on the market, and you have a “wow” product that presents well in a hype video, then you can get a nice big spike when you launch. And maybe even a few more smaller ones over time.
  新颖性是你的优势。向客户推销一个大型成熟产品的方法只有那么多。那些“惊艳”时刻早已用尽,价值主张也已被大众熟知。结果就是,营销的响应率不断下降。但如果你是一个初出茅庐、充满活力的新产品,并且拥有一个在宣传视频中表现出色的“惊艳”产品,那么你在发布时就能获得一个巨大的增长峰值。随着时间的推移,或许还能再获得几次较小的增长。
• One-time is fine, repeatability is what you do later. A lot of marketing tactics that work in the early days only work once — like a social media launch — but that’s OK. If you can prove that a few unscalable tactics work, and it helps you gain momentum via funding/hiring/otherwise, then over time you’ll have more time to try additional strategies.
  一次性成功也没关系,可重复性是以后才考虑的事。许多在早期奏效的营销策略往往只能用一次——比如社交媒体上的发布活动——但这没关系。如果你能证明几种不可扩展的策略是有效的,并且它们能通过融资、招聘或其他方式帮你获得势头,那么随着时间的推移,你将有更多精力去尝试额外的策略。
• Your product is brand new, so your marketing can be brand new as well. When you build a new product, it’s always smart to take advantage of the new tech wave, so that you can create something different than what’s existed before. You want to be building a mobile app in 2010, not a website, and you want to be building in AI now. But in the same way, you can use these new technologies on the marketing side too. What does AI allow you to do in marketing that previously couldn’t happen? Whether it’s rapidly creating personalized creative, or generating concepts faster, or creating an interactive bot — what can you do different than no one is doing, using the new tech?
  你的产品是全新的,所以你的营销也可以是全新的。当你打造一款新产品时,利用新技术浪潮总是明智之举,这样你就能创造出与以往不同的东西。在 2010 年,你应该开发移动应用而不是网站;而现在,你应该在 AI 领域深耕。同样地,你也可以在营销端利用这些新技术。AI 在营销中实现了哪些以前无法做到的事情?无论是快速生成个性化创意、更迅速地构思概念,还是创建交互式机器人——利用新技术,你能做哪些别人还没在做的差异化尝试?
• Take risks with your brand. You can attract people with your brand by being polarizing. Say “this product is not for you, it’s for these other cooler people.” Or hit competitors directly in the face, in your marketing. Be aggressive. These are things that long-term employees of the world’s trustworthy brands can’t do, because they are being protective, and managing the downside. You need to do everything you can to stand out, because being ignored is the worst outcome for any marketing tactic.
  在品牌建设上敢于冒险。你可以通过极具极化色彩的品牌形象来吸引受众。大方地说:“这个产品不适合你,它是为那些更酷的人准备的。”或者在营销中直接正面硬刚竞争对手。保持侵略性。这些是那些世界级信誉品牌的长期员工不敢做的事,因为他们处在防守位,在管理负面风险。你需要竭尽所能脱颖而出,因为对于任何营销策略来说,被忽视才是最糟糕的结果。

The point is — yes, today’s marketing channels sucks, but that has everything to do with the level of competition and the rate of customer fatigue. So go innovate! Try reaching people in new ways, say novel things to people they haven’t yet heard, and if you have to trade off anything, just trade off scalability. (You can deal with that later once your product is successful even at a small scale)
核心观点是——没错,现在的营销渠道确实很糟糕,但这完全是因为竞争程度和客户审美疲劳的速度。所以,去创新吧!尝试用新的方式触达人群,对他们说一些从未听过的新鲜事,如果必须做出取舍,那就牺牲可扩展性。(一旦你的产品即使在小规模下也能获得成功,你以后再去处理规模化的问题也不迟)

Product is (unfortunately) King
产品(不幸地)才是王道
So I have bad news: Your product actually has to be very good. I wish I lived in a world where you could have amazing marketing and growth strategies, have a shitty product, and you would win. Then marketers would run tech, and they do not. It’s the people visionaries that create the products that run tech, and that’s a good thing!
所以我要告诉大家一个坏消息:你的产品实际上必须非常出色。我倒希望我们生活在一个只要拥有惊人的营销和增长策略,哪怕产品烂透了也能获胜的世界。那样的话,营销人员就能主宰科技界了,但事实并非如此。是那些创造出产品的远见卓识者在主宰科技界,而这是一件好事!

The reason is that even if you do a ton of work to acquire a bunch of users, it won’t matter if they leak out of the DAU number. I’ve come to think of great marketing strategy as a multiplier effect on your inherent product quality. If you have a great product, you will multiply that into greatness. If you have a shitty product, you will multiply that into... well, you get it.
原因在于,即使你付出了巨大努力获取了大量用户,如果他们从日活(DAU)数据中流失,那也无济于事。我逐渐认为,出色的营销策略是对产品固有质量的一种乘数效应。如果你有一个伟大的产品,你会将其乘倍放大为伟大。如果你有一个烂产品,你会将其乘倍放大为......好吧,你懂的。

I think we’re seeing this in the AI wave at the moment. You have great, highly novel products and when one startup makes a hype video, it just goes viral. They don’t know anything about funnels, A/B testing, CAC, etc. The product is just killer, and the output is highly marketable, and as a result social media really works well for them.
我认为我们目前在 AI 浪潮中就看到了这一点。你拥有非常出色、极具新意的朋友,当一家初创公司制作一段宣传视频时,它就会迅速走红。他们对漏斗模型、A/B 测试、获客成本(CAC)等一无所知。产品本身就是杀手级的,产出内容极具市场吸引力,结果社交媒体对他们来说效果极佳。

A year from now, I think the novelty value will have faded a bit — we aren’t as impressed by the output of image generation models compared to when they first came out. If the novelty fades, as I predict, then in a few years we’ll need to really figure out how to market these products. (Sorry AI researchers, you’re going to have to learn marketing and sales!)
一年后,我认为这种新鲜感会逐渐消退——与刚问世时相比,我们现在对图像生成模型输出结果的惊艳程度已经有所下降。如果正如我所预料的那样,新鲜感不再,那么几年后我们就必须真正研究如何营销这些产品。(抱歉了,AI 研究员们,你们也得开始学习营销和销售了!)

Every marketing channel sucks, but it’s going to be OK
每个营销渠道都很糟糕,但没关系
This essay was not meant to be depressing, but rather to just call out the idea what we can all see — that most of the channels we work with are decades old, that the performance is teetering on an edge. Just as products are innovating by adopting new tech — AI, XR, web3, and so on — we in the marketing field need to innovate as well, by asking ourselves, where can I do something new with XYZ new tech?
这篇文章并非为了传递负面情绪,而是为了指出一个显而易见的事实——我们使用的大多数渠道都有数十年的历史,其表现已处于崩溃边缘。正如产品正通过采用 AI、XR、web3 等新技术进行创新一样,我们营销领域也需要创新,问问自己:我能利用这些新技术在哪些地方做出突破?

And it’s very clear that we should not copy incumbent products. They have too many features — try something smaller and more targeted. But the same is true in marketing. Don’t copy the established products and try to execute in Big Channels — instead, think asymmetrically. What can you do that they can’t, and going with small channels is always a great place to start.
显而易见,我们不应该模仿现有的成熟产品。它们的功能太多了——你应该尝试更小、更具针对性的切入点。营销也是如此。不要照搬成熟产品的做法去挤“大渠道”,而要进行非对称思考。去做那些他们做不到的事,而从“小渠道”入手永远是一个极佳的起点。

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