New 4C framework Methodology in digital marketing social media marketing and content marketing context community Content connection in china

1. I
Content context community connection New 4C’rules in digital marketing
and digital communication:
In the face of such a fragmented, multi-screen era, the methodology of
marketing has also changed. From Jerry McCarthy's 4P theory, that is, product,
price, place, and promotion, to Robert Lauterbur's 4C theory, that is, consumer,
cost, convenience, and communication, none can satisfy the marketing
methodology system in the new environment.
For this reason, combining years of practical experience and thinking, a new
4C methodology model for digital age marketing has been proposed to help
companies cope better.
The so-called new 4C rule is that companies can, in the appropriate context,
target specific communities with compelling content, and spread and propagate
quickly through connections between people, ultimately achieving effective
business communication and value.
The thinking path under the appropriate context is about understanding the
scenarios in which consumer demand will be more concentrated, and what

2. emotional and physical state of the group is more conducive to marketing. Simple
consumer concentration is not enough; what's more important is that bulk
consumer demand can be concentrated in a short period of time. Such a scenario
is a good opportunity for you to make a move.
Human communities in cyberspace, and effective marketing communication
methods, will lean towards community-based strategies, and efforts will be made
around potential communities. Your target should be the customers of the
upstream and downstream industry chains of corporate products, find out their
"habitat" in cyberspace, and rank them according to user numbers, activity, and
other parameters. The tribal lands of these communities are where companies
should work and battle.
Of course, you need to not only understand where the community is but also
attempt to build your own community and private domain to grasp your
customers. For example, the yoga clothing brand Lululemon blew up the market
by winning in the construction and maintenance of the community.
Marketing and sales in the digital age are finally converging, although there
are still some differences in functions and application scenarios. But what they
have in common is conveying information, influencing the target customer's
mindset and purchasing decisions, and ultimately obtaining brand recognition or

3. orders.
ve streaming brings goods, the digitization of sales pitches (content);
ihu;
From now on, you don't have to distinguish between new media marketing,
traditional sales, on-the-ground promotions, etc. You need to think about their
differences in the way they convey information, but they are all about conveying
business information.
The differences in information transmission mainly revolve around three
aspects:
1. Cost
2. Efficiency
3. Customer experience
Under the same timeframe and budget, what are the cost and efficiency of
information transmission? For example, offline cosmetic sales and shopping

4. guides can convey product information to 32 customers a day, while in a live
broadcast room, you might be able to convey product information to 10 million
potential customers in the same amount of time. The difference in sales
performance is obvious.
Every company must be a content company. As marketing enters the era of
narrow audiences, methods that influence all groups have become outdated.
What we need is precise communication that minimally disturbs irrelevant groups.
For specific groups, an effective approach is to follow the network structure of
communities (like a fishing net) to achieve rapid dissemination and
communication for effective commercial results. To achieve this, you need to
consider the structure of the community, its characteristics, the dynamics of node
dissemination, the effect of individual communication, and more. Only by building
an effective connection mechanism can you reap valuable returns.
Scenes allow marketing information to penetrate people's minds more
effectively. A scene is a background as well as an opportunity. The key
components of a scene are time, place, need, and emotion. The linear
differentiation and continuity of a scene are focused on the time dimension. The
location is the spatial dimension of the scene, which includes physical space,
virtual space, etc. The need is the commercial key code hidden in the scene;
without the need, there is no marketing value. The emotional point is
indispensable, having a significant impact on marketing effectiveness and
conversion rate.

5. The ultimate scene experience is to provide the right information and services
to the right people when they have needs or desires. To be precise, marketing
must penetrate the target customer's community.
We are moving from the era of mass communication to the era of
communities, and these two eras have distinct differences in philosophy and
behavior. For instance, we used to focus on broadcasting information, but now we
turn our attention to relationship building and dialogue. Many companies have
sold a large number of products and have a large customer base but have not
established effective communities. Even if they have customer data, it's often just
a simple purchase information record, without corresponding customer
consumption psychology, consumption behavior analysis, or support for
marketing strategies. This is like a person begging with a golden bowl. Therefore,
it is necessary for companies to rethink their community strategies strategically.
Content is the essence of all marketing communication. The core logic of self-
media business is content-user-business. Through content, you attract users, then
cultivate these vertical users into communities or platforms, and then sell to
companies that want to establish relationships with users. Take live-streamed sales
as an example: if you want to become a popular influencer, the only way is to
output content, attract fans through content, and then conduct live-streamed
sales (convey content) for the fan group.
The most important step for a company's future marketing is: how to
"translate" its own business goals (acquiring customers, brand awareness,

6. activating old customers) into readable and communicable content. What I mean
by "translation" is actually rewriting according to your goals, achieving business
aspirations through content. It's a difficult task to "translate" daily operational
aspirations into content that customers love to see and listen to without
forgetting commercial value.
Content marketing mainly considers how to better use existing Internet tools
to promote and sell products. The Internet provides companies and brands with
tools to showcase their expertise and thoughts, reducing friction and asymmetry
of information with customers. If I had to describe the effect of content marketing
in one sentence, it would be "moistening things silently like the night wind".
Content marketing mainly delivers information to consumers from the
perspectives of sharing,
collaboration, and providing answers to customers, whereas traditional
marketing often disrupts the user's thoughts, perspectives, and hearing to
forcefully convey product information. The core of businesses producing content
is to transform browsers into buyers, and then turn these buyers into returning
customers, or even fervent followers and advocates. By transmitting content and
information over the internet, businesses deepen their relationship with
customers. By continuously creating content that consumers pay attention to,
businesses inspire consumers to interact with them, ultimately achieving
commercial value.

7. The new 4C rule focuses on precision marketing, which promotes economic
communication and less disturbance. It considers how to make information
explode among target customer groups. The connections between people in the
4Cs bear the responsibility of content coverage and communication efficiency. By
mastering the connections of the community network, you can allow information
to "penetrate" into target customers, reaching the core, thereby reducing
ineffective broadcasts that disturb the public.
As proposed in the "Small World" theory by Duncan Watts and Steven
Strogatz, the core finding is that a group of closely connected individuals on a
social network form a relatively independent small world circle, good for
communication. Information can flow from one small circle to another along
multiple paths, and the spread of information within a specific group of people
has micro-orientation and diffusivity.
The theory of weak ties proposed by sociologist Mark Granovetter can also be
applied in connection marketing. His finding was that the social relationships most
closely associated with a person's work and career are not "strong ties," but "weak
ties." Although "weak ties" are not as sturdy as "strong ties," they possess
extremely fast, potentially low-cost, and high-efficiency communication
capabilities.

8. In "The Connected," Nicholas Christakis also put forward his views on strong
and weak connections, arguing that strong connections trigger behavior, while
weak connections transmit information. Weak ties often act as bridges between
different groups. Through weak ties, different circles can be connected. The
characteristic manifestation of the connection is that information can quickly
penetrate into the community built by strong connections through the weak
connections of these circles.
This book explores how, under the appropriate context (context), you can
target your community (community), create engaging content (content), and
initiate rapid fission and connections between people (connection) to achieve
explosive community effects.
The new 4C rule innovatively interprets the methodology of marketing
communication under the new environment. The new 4C rule forms its own
unique logical consistency and possesses a vibrant vitality.
Although the new 4C rule differs significantly from previous theories, I want to
say that the essence of marketing has not changed. There are many intersections
in the knowledge category. The content in the new 4C rule is a new interpretation
of copywriting in classic advertising, and the specific community is a new
interpretation of the audience concept, and the connection of social networks

9. plays the role of a communication medium. However, for the first time, the scene
has been elevated to an equal height.
The new 4C rule of digital marketing, birthed in China, was proposed by
digital marketing expert Tang Xingtong in 2009. Mr. Tang believes: "Platforms
such as Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and the Metaverse are akin
to the various weapons in a business's marketing arsenal – the knife, the
sword, the spear, the gun, the halberd, the mace, the crossbow. Learning to
operate these tools is quite simple. However, if you truly wish to excel, you
need to possess inner strength and secret techniques.
The new 4C rule strives to be the universal methodology that transcends
these new media platforms. In other words, the new 4C rule can help you more
effectively leverage platforms such as Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok,
etc., to achieve your business goals.
Tang Xingtong
Digital Transformation Consultant, New Media Marketing Expert, Best-selling
author of 'Igniting the Community', guest speaker at the Wharton School, judge
for the American Marketing Association Effie Awards.
He serves as a professor for the Alibaba Business School's overseas courses

10. and as a marketing innovation instructor for the Microsoft Accelerator. He also
holds positions at multiple business schools, including Tsinghua University, Peking
University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Sun Yat-sen
University. He has taught digitalization and new media marketing to over 300,000
corporate managers. He has been invited to Japan and Singapore multiple times
to teach marketing strategies to entrepreneurs. He has also provided consulting or
training to CEIBS, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Tsinghua University,
Peking University, Alibaba, Mercedes-Benz, Midea, Sany Heavy Industry、Mindray
Medical and others.