With the increasing application of generative artificial intelligence in work, study, entertainment and other scenes, in 2024, AI tools also showed a blowout state. Technology giants, unicorn rookies, and AI startups compete in the same field. While competing for products, the huge increase in scale has also washed out a new track in the marketing industry-AI tool marketing. Yu Shijun, general manager of 360 commercialization industry, pointed out that "with the arrival of the application period of AI tool industry, the AI tool industry officially entered the brand occupation period".
At this stage, how AI tools can achieve brand destruction through global marketing, and how to take root in "scenes" to create a benign and sustainable growth closed loop has become a problem that "AI brand" needs to explore and solve together with the marketing platform. On December 5, Yu Shijun, general manager of 360 commercialization industry, was invited to attend.2024 Jianshi Annual Private Forum -AI Sub-forum, bringing the theme sharing of "Brand Out of Circle and Global Growth: Marketing Breakthrough of AI Tools".

The following are dry goods.
From "Cognition" to "Use"
AI tool brand occupancy period is coming in an all-round way.
The popularity of AI today is largely due to the improvement of closeness with users.
In the exploration period, AI technology focuses more on computing power, algorithms, models and data. For users, it stays at the conceptual level and is cognitive but difficult to feel; Entering the development period, the generative AI tool arouses users’ interest, and people begin to accept, learn and use it, and tap the value it can bring to themselves; With the continuous subdivision of AI tool capabilities, users’ usage habits have been further developed, and AI has become an essential tool for users in their work, study and life, and its compactness has been improved again.

Accordingly, the style of play at the marketing level has also changed. At the beginning, the mobile information flow accounted for a large proportion, which played a key role in the formation of AI cognition for users of the whole network. However, at that time, the investment in cognitive education was the main one, and there was no brand awareness, so the cost performance was low.
During the development period, AI tools heavily overweight the mobile content platform, taking "planting grass" as the main means to enhance users’ interest and quickly innovate. In fact, it was the investment of AI tools at this stage that triggered a huge discussion. The extreme desire for user growth triggered a large-scale investment campaign of domestic AI, which triggered a surge in customer acquisition costs. In the short term, the product usage data and brand exposure results are gratifying, but is it still effective in terms of user retention and paid conversion?
The answer is also obvious,For the AI tool industry, the mobile terminal with the peak traffic dividend is not a "strategic highland" if it wants to continuously gain user growth. When the user enters the "use stage" from the "cognitive stage", the AI tool enters the brand occupation period, and the user’s core use scenario is where the value is.
The use of scene alignment and conversion links is short.
The PC side has become a rich mine of AI tool marketing value.
The value of PC is back in the spotlight today, largely due to the explosion of AI big model, which makes traffic gather again on the PC side.
First of all, as an information deep processing terminal, PC has becomeHigh user enthusiasm and high value incrementThe best adaptation scenario for type application. AI tools take the lead in "productivity" scenarios such as work efficiency and content creation, and are highly adapted to PC-side scenes such as work and study, so that traffic can be reunited on PC-side and become a "user portal" in the AI ? ? era. With the further development of AI tools, the vertical field that meets the deeper needs of C-end users will also become the next main battlefield of AI applications, and PC will also create greater value at this stage with its ability to handle complex tasks and multi-task collaboration.

In addition, compared with "planting grass" marketing, the PC side is fromSearch to useThe link is also simpler and more efficient. At present, under the condition that the usage habits and preferences of AI tools are not fixed, users still actively search for their own AI tool products on the PC side at high frequency, which has huge marketing growth space.
In fact, domestic head AI manufacturers also have a clear awareness of this. According to 360 data, in Q3, the domestic AI tool products were put on the PC side, which increased by 417% year-on-year. Among them, PC search accounted for as high as 85%. In 2024, H2 was higher than H1, and the average daily consumption of AI industry increased by 159%.
In addition, the gathering of high-value people in the workplace on the PC side not only has a high demand for AI tools, high frequency and depth of use, but also has a higher willingness and ability to pay for AI tools with the goal of improving work efficiency, and the deep transformation indicators such as customer acquisition, retention and payment for AI tools will play a key role.
As the first media of PC, 360 gathers hundreds of millions of mainstream users in the whole network, and the PC side has a monthly life of 530 million, ranking in the forefront of the industry. For more than ten years, we have been deeply cultivating the PC side and built a perfect PC marketing ecology to take into account the user experience and intelligent marketing of commercial realization, and help all walks of life to reduce costs and increase efficiency. In the face of the new topic of AI tool marketing, 360 Smart Business responded quickly, took root in the scene, and took the lead in laying out the whole link of AI tool marketing to create a closed loop of industry marketing.
Let the value benchmark the brand and integrate the demand into the scene.
360 "plus BUFF" for AI tool marketing
Users are more professional and smart, and the cost of application replacement is high-AI tools have entered the third stage of marketing, and "how to make users use and get used to innovative applications" has become the core problem to be solved in marketing. The value index created by innovative applications for C-end users is related to its value increment and replacement cost compared with traditional applications. The higher the value increment and the lower the replacement cost, the greater the probability of being used by users.
In fact, the terminal is not the decisive factor in whether the AI tool is selected. On the mobile side, the lightweight AI tool suitable for entertainment scenes still has its display space. In the productivity scene and vertical field, the current situation that domestic AI tool manufacturers are neck and neck has not been broken, but in the PC scene, AI tool marketing can be truly realized.Search on demand, download and install, and use directly.The application replacement cost is lower, which has become an important prerequisite for the marketing of AI tools on the PC side.
Therefore, 360 Smart Business believes that the marketing of AI tools on the PC side is not simply "selling" products, but should be passed.Implanting AI products in the user’s necessary scene path reduces the replacement cost of applications and improves the marketing conversion efficiency of AI tools.
For example, when users search for the function word "PPT", their real intention may be to make, edit and beautify PPT. By identifying and matching users’ real intention needs, 360 Smart Business will give priority to PPT generation AI tools-based on their search behavior, providing them with better work efficiency choices. Implanting AI tool products in such a suitable scene is equivalent to "adding BUFF" to the user’s search behavior, so that the user’s needs can be met more than expected, and at the same time, AI tools can reach the target users more accurately and achieve efficient conversion.
Based on the in-depth insight into industry marketing, 360 Smart Commerce integrates all-platform marketing resources, and after many rounds and multiple vertical categories of marketing, it precipitates the AI tool marketing methodology-native scene BUFF zero sense Marketing (hereinafter referred to as "BUFF Marketing").
The word BUFF is well known as "effect gain" in game scenes. BUFF marketing proposed by 360 Smart Business can be understood as:
B(Brand Insight) brand diagnosis:Firstly, the brand marketing competitiveness is quantified from the dimensions of market environment, brand performance, competitive brands and market segment demand, and the product marketing direction is anchored with the key words of "digging, grabbing, breaking out and expanding" in combination with the different marketing life cycles of products, such as "cognition, growth, maturity and iteration".
For example, the mature AI tool brand takes "sudden" as the marketing direction, and the marketing focus is to "break through" the growth bottleneck and unlock the new amount with the help of multi-creative forms, gameplay and operation empowerment.

U(User-Locked) user lock: With the product matrix covering PC, mobile and IOT, 360 products realize the full scene wisdom for users. Daily average of tens of billions of user requests, build a large database covering the whole marketing link. It can help AI tools to dig deep into user needs and accurately target the target population.
F(Funnel Optimization) funnel optimizationProducts are only the results of users’ search, and upgrading and improving efficiency to meet users’ search needs is the "BUFF" for marketing. Based on the request of hundreds of millions of users, 360 Smart Business accurately matches the multi-platform resources with the real intention needs of users, and makes real-time adjustment of the launching strategy, integration of superior product resources, optimization of search keywords and creativity in different levels for PC task scenarios, vertical office scenarios and accurate efficiency improvement scenarios. Strive to implant AI tools in the only path and original scene where users use AI tools, and reach potential people, intentional people and core people step by step. From the shallow to the deep, through the implantation of the original scene of "zero sense", the cost of application replacement is reduced, the initiative of users’ subjective choice is stimulated, the marketing effect is gradually improved, and the marketing transformation is promoted.

F(Feedback Loop) feedback rewind: Check the key indicators such as brand exposure, market penetration, keyword coverage, brand attention and user growth, and optimize the marketing strategy for the AI tool brand in a customized and targeted manner to further improve the conversion efficiency and stimulate marketing growth.
Based on brand diagnosis, user lock-in, funnel optimization and feedback resumption, "BUFF Marketing" builds a PC marketing closed loop in the third stage of AI tool marketing, and creates a sustainable growth model for the new marketing track.
Taking a language AI tool as an example, the brand diagnosis shows that the brand has completed the grass planting stage and entered the user competition period. On the delivery side, CPC was mainly used in the initial stage to test the delivery level and transformation effect; Enter the effect optimization period, increase the quick delivery mode, and evaluate the docking ability and risk of oCPX; In the incremental period, the docking of oCPX is completed, and the delivery effect is further guaranteed, and the steady increment is realized by continuously combining CPC and fast delivery mode. Parallel realization of funnel optimization by multiple delivery methods ——360 Smart Commerce helps the brand to achieve rapid start-up and achieve re-launch assessment indicators. During the delivery period, the customer acquisition cost of the product is stable and far lower than that of the mobile terminal at the same time.
Through the brand diagnosis of a network disk-like AI tool, it is found that users still need a large number of files to be efficiently retrieved and processed in the network disk, and the AI search, AI assistant and other functions of the tool can just meet the full-link processing needs of users for retrieval, creation, editing, storage and sharing. 360 Smart Business targets high-potential people such as smart office and efficient office, as well as target people such as brand people and competing products, helping to accurately harvest traffic. On the delivery side, brand advertisements are searched to enhance brand exposure, and at the same time, vertical functional words such as writing, resume and PPT are covered to reach more potential target groups. Based on 360 search and 360 software housekeeper and other super-large user portals, 360 Smart Business optimized the client download link for the brand, effectively improving the user’s stickiness, continuously and stably obtaining customers, and gradually increasing the scale of launch.
"History will not repeat, but it will rhyme", Yu Shijun pointed out that every technological revolution will bring new opportunities. The outbreak of AI big model technology has once again stimulated the ecological vitality of the PC. As a marketing platform, on the one hand, 360 smart business grasps the context of the times, quickly deploys the AI upgrade of the whole marketing link, and helps partners from all walks of life to activate new growth momentum in the AI ? ? era. On the other hand, with powerful products and technologies, conforming to the trend of the times and innovating marketing strategies, 360 Smart Commerce will "feed back" while accepting and applying new technologies, which will fully help the marketing growth of AI tools and the whole AI industry.