In the K12 education industry, how to expand into lower-tier cities and acquire customers?

As the concept of sinking begins to penetrate into all walks of life, sinking has also become a new battlefield for major training institutions to compete. "OMO and offline large classes with two teachers" have gradually become a powerful tool for sinking.

No.1 The next growth point of the K12 education and training industry?

After online large-class courses with two teachers, will “OMO+offline large-class courses with two teachers” become the next growth point of the K12 education and training industry?

The boundaries of K12 education and training business have ended in first- and second-tier cities. If you want to expand the market, you must sink the business; users in first- and second-tier cities still have a certain understanding of the brands of traditional education and training institutions, while in third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-tier cities as well as townships, everyone is still in a melee and starting from the same starting line. Online education has broken down the barriers built by traditional education and training institutions, including the ability to select and train teachers on a large scale, quality control capabilities under large-scale replication, teaching and research capabilities accumulated over many years, and repeatedly deduced offline product models. Online education has magnified the effectiveness of high-quality teachers several times, and the focus of the threshold has shifted to the quality of service and the competition of products, giving latecomers the opportunity to overtake on the curve.

Why are various institutions choosing the "OMO+dual teacher" model when moving down to the grassroots?

1) The business model of K12 large-class live streaming with two teachers is already a proven business model. What will be tested next is the execution and operational efficiency of each company. Online dual teachers are designed to solve the problem that students cannot concentrate during online live streaming and the main teacher cannot pay attention to all students; offline dual teachers are a way for educational institutions to empower small and medium-sized institutions and expand into the lower-tier markets.

2) There are huge differences in the difficulty of textbook versions, teaching progress and examinations in different places. Parents are particularly cautious in choosing educational institutions. If a decision-making chain is very long, it requires heavy participation and interference. Therefore, when the market reaches a certain boundary, it will enter the next battlefield - the delivery of localized products and localized services, and expand through direct sales, franchising or empowering small and medium-sized institutions.

3) Online traffic is becoming more and more expensive, and the main consumption scenarios of users in third-, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-tier cities are still offline. At the same time, purely offline enrollment methods have become ineffective, and technology is needed to move from offline to online.

4) Local parents and classmates know each other. This advantage brings a lot of convenience to online enrollment. Everyone finds that many of their classmates are also studying. This way, students have a smaller sense of distance and stronger interactivity. They can also match online school courses according to the original teaching situation of the class, and can match content more specifically.

5) The way the new generation of parents obtain and consume information has changed fundamentally. If institutions stick to offline teaching, they will inevitably be eliminated in future competition. As parents become younger, raising children at home after giving birth is no longer a lifestyle for young people. They are more willing to put their children in an education complex on weekends and enjoy a relatively relaxed lifestyle themselves. Therefore, education complexes are appearing in various cities. (Yu Minhong)

No.2 What has each institution done to ensure the quality of teaching?

1. Famous teacher strategy

GSX, Lisicheng, and NetEase Youdao use the famous teacher strategy to differentiate themselves from the competition. To prevent famous teachers from leaving, each company also uses its own strengths:

Lisicheng Chinese adopts a method of four people working together in the classroom, with one teacher only teaching 1/4 of the class. In this way, even if a teacher wants to resign, he or she cannot take the students with him or her.

One problem with four-person classes is that it is difficult to evaluate the teacher's performance, so satisfaction is used instead of renewal rate.

NetEase Youdao creates the IP of a team of famous teachers rather than individual IP.

2. Localization of teaching and research

There are great differences in education in various places. It is difficult to achieve downward expansion without regional settings. It has become an objective fact to polish the teaching and research and curriculum systems according to local conditions. Localization, everything is customer-centric and serves customers. Adjustments will be made based on the actual situation.

TAL provides AI offline dual-teacher (AI pseudo live broadcast) solutions for offline small and medium-sized institutions, converting live classes into AI classes. Local institutions can organize their own classes to cope with regional differences in teaching progress and difficulty.

3. Standardization of teaching process and visualization of teaching effect

Standardization is something that almost every tutoring institution has to do, including standardization of the curriculum system, standardization of courseware, standardization of teaching processes and standardization of tutors' work steps.

In addition, it is necessary to communicate with users about the corresponding improvement goals of the course, the abilities of different class types, the number and intensity of training, so that they can clearly understand the functionality of the course, and then generate a dynamic ability analysis report for each student.

4. Ensure course quality

Zuoyebang prepares the teaching syllabus 6 months in advance, determines the lecture content 3 months in advance, and conducts trial lectures and trial operations 2 months in advance. During the trial lectures and trial operations, quality control teachers observe the courses and make corresponding suggestions for improvement. Who's Who has polished its high-quality open courses dozens or hundreds of times.

5. Involvement of the head of the organization

The process of implementation of the new model is very complicated. Those who can make decisions may not be able to implement them, those who can implement them may not really want to implement them, and those who really want to implement them may not be able to control every teacher. Every teacher has different needs, so we must pay attention to the participation of the top leader - if the principal attaches importance to it, the director will attach importance to it, the management will attach importance to it, and the teachers will also attach great importance to it.

The purpose is to set an example from top to bottom and form an organizational atmosphere. To expand the education and training business, it is actually about monitoring from top to bottom and capturing every detail.

There is no best organizational structure, only the most suitable one. However, there is one principle that the channel should be wide and the speed should be fast. If the channel is not fast, there will not be so many positions for everyone, and so many people cannot be trained. If the speed is not fast, a person will not be able to be trained if he stays in a position for too long.

6. Teacher training system

New Oriental focuses on teaching quality with teachers as the core. The assessment system and evaluation standards are the driving force of an enterprise. New Oriental adjusts the salary and promotion system, with two windows a year. On the basis of the excellent teachers, excellent new teachers and excellent managers in the past, it has added the selection of excellent mentors and excellent R&D personnel, and encouraged teachers to participate in teaching and research. In addition, it has increased the proportion of teachers with a master's degree background from prestigious universities.

No matter how the hot topics change, we must be responsible for the essence of education, that is, to give students the greatest growth and value per unit time, while making a good balance between personalization and standardization; the latest large-class courses have gradually formed a form of large-class live broadcast, small-class interaction, and one-on-one service.

No.3 How to implement refined operation strategy?

Slowing growth and difficulty in acquiring customers are the main problems faced by both online and offline K12 education and training companies. Online education is a long-chain and service-intensive industry. Whoever can reduce the cost of attracting new customers will have more funds and energy to provide better services to teachers and students and achieve long-term growth.

1. Internet platform placement

For pure online education institutions, external investment has become a must on the road to scale.

When purchasing educational products, users have a relatively long decision-making chain and need to know what the course content is, what the teacher is like, and what the learning method is like.

Short videos are more suitable for explaining educational products than pictures and texts, and as parents are getting younger and younger, Douyin and Kuaishou have become the battlefields for K12 training institutions.

Judging from the user groups of Douyin and Kuaishou, Douyin is more suitable for advertising in first- and second-tier cities, while Kuaishou is more suitable for advertising in lower-tier cities.

Yuanfudao, Zuoyebang, and Xueersi Online School's pure online courses use low-priced courses as an entry point for attracting traffic. After testing the low-priced course product models many times, they finally selected the 49-yuan model, which is relatively safe and has a higher conversion rate.

Lisicheng Big Chinese has created Douyin's big V teachers. Big Chinese is a pan-cultural field. Parents are also the audience group of Big Chinese, and they are also the decision makers in the selection of educational institutions. If its content can attract parent users, then it can reach student users.

At present, the famous teachers with the highest traffic in Chinese language should have 8 million fans. Currently, there are 6 celebrity teachers with millions of fans on Douyin. Douyin has become one of the positions for Doushen Chinese language to externalize the famous teacher effect.

How much value can the advertising bring? This is still a question that needs to be considered. As more and more educational brands begin to place advertisements, the influence on users will gradually decrease. The advertising itself is not cost-effective. It only makes users aware but cannot make users like it or be loyal. The final battle will still return to the test of large-scale product services and delivery.

The core of this business model is not the conversion of low-priced courses brought about by the investment, nor the conversion of full-priced courses brought about by low-priced courses. The core is the conversion from full-priced courses to full-priced courses, that is, the competition of class renewal rate.

In addition, social media algorithms determine that online education companies have the same exposure among parents in the same group, so parents will have more choices. Because the prices are relatively low, many parents even sign up for multiple trial classes at one time. At this time, the quality of the course and service become a key to whether or not conversions can be achieved. How to build your own traffic pool and how to convert internal traffic are more important.

2. Create a reasonable equilateral triangle structure

For training institutions, the primary school stage is a battleground. It is a huge reservoir. Only by grasping the primary school stage can they grow upward continuously. If it is an inverted triangle, the pressure to attract new members every year will be very high.

Why do most online education companies choose to start with senior grades?

For start-ups, survival is the most important thing. The higher the grade of students, the more anxious they are. The more scarce the excellent teachers are, the more difficult it is to improve their scores, and the more expensive the fees are. However, for lower grade students, the bonus is thin and the price that can be charged is small. However, with the expansion and long-term development of the business, the unhealthy student source structure has to be solved. To make the business develop more healthily, it is necessary to expand from younger to older students and use the scalability advantage to acquire customers.

Judging from the current form of the entire industry, it has become a major trend to connect online and offline, aggregate advantages, connect businesses at different stages of education without barriers, and reduce operating costs.

New Oriental merged its two independent brands, Bubble Children's Education and Youneng Middle School Education, and connected the price system of teaching and research materials to achieve linkage, ensuring efficient flow from primary school to junior high school, and allowing primary school students to lay a good foundation for the subsequent middle school business. This operating method is a very smart strategy compared to the operational pressure brought by low-priced classes, the huge influx of users, and the loss of profits caused by stratification pressure; although the total amount has decreased, the actual efficiency has been greatly improved.

3. Multiple scenarios connected

Lisicheng has opened up a wide range of channels and comprehensively laid out its layout to achieve the coordination and integration of internal resources, forming a product system that includes knowledge payment, book clubs, large-screen video distribution online platforms, and K12 dual-teacher face-to-face courses to cover the needs of K12 students of all age groups. Secondly, it slices up the large Chinese language knowledge points, and then connects each fragment to form a network diagram to reach all scenarios, and each scenario can interactively use products from other scenarios.

The multi-layout strategy is to obtain clues through user habits to connect with users and convert users to other products without increasing any marginal costs.

4. Start from hardware devices

NetEase Youdao uses pen and paper to digitize the learning process without changing students' learning habits.

Behind the remote paper-and-pencil practice system are the question bank system, the intelligent adaptive learning system and the companion learning system. The system can realize automatic grading, wrong question analysis, and is equipped with one-click question-and-answer functions.

Compared with taking photos to search for questions, the user group it screens out is more accurate. The users of the product are basically people who are self-driven in learning; and the data collected in this way is more granular than that of taking photos to search for questions.

5. Public account matrix to acquire customers

GSX is a major representative of this method of acquiring customers, and is described in detail in the previous article.

People’s restlessness has become a social phenomenon, but growth cannot be rushed and needs to be achieved step by step.

Author: Li Xiaoming

Source: Li Xiaoming