Inventory of low-cost traffic-generating methods, 4 major rules!

This article briefly summarizes the three major traffic-generating models of online education, namely paid traffic , platform traffic and fission traffic. It also proposes four golden rules for traffic generation, namely accurate user positioning, clear user pain points, reducing behavioral costs, and reasonably controlling ROI.

Online education is particularly lively this year, especially K12 online schools. More than 10 players have invested heavily in various channels and frantically staked out territory, causing the entire industry's customer acquisition costs to soar. The spectators are no longer just spectators, but are instead suffering.

As traffic becomes more expensive, how to obtain traffic at low cost has become a difficult problem faced by most online education companies. The big players who have spent money to buy traffic are also trying to figure out how to digest or find more accurate traffic to recover their costs.

So, what can we do to make traffic acquisition low-cost and sustainable? This also requires starting from the main traffic strategies of online education companies. It may be more meaningful to discuss solutions on this basis.

Three ways to attract traffic to online education

When talking about traffic-driving methods, everyone can cite many, and most of them are divided according to channels, such as Douyin, WeChat, community, search, information flow, etc. In fact, there are only two types of traffic-driving methods, online traffic-driving and offline traffic-driving. This article only talks about online traffic-driving.

Regarding online traffic, the author divides it into three categories based on the specific characteristics of traffic: paid traffic, platform traffic, and fission traffic.

(1) Paid traffic generation

As the name suggests, it means spending money to buy traffic and then convert it.

There are many forms of paid traffic, such as search engine keywords, information flow advertising, short video advertising, KOL promotion, circle of friends investment, public account delivery, etc. There are many specific channels.

However, each channel has very different delivery requirements in terms of form, price, effect, target audience, etc. Therefore, it is very important for professional delivery personnel to be familiar with the delivery rules of the platform. After all, spending money cannot be done casually.

On the basis of being familiar with the rules, how to accurately manipulate the delivery price and how to polish out good conversion ideas are the basic skills of paid traffic and the key to success.

(2) Platform traffic diversion

Compared with paid traffic generation where you cannot spend money casually, free traffic generation on the platform is much more casual and is the second way of online traffic generation.

In fact, platform traffic also requires understanding the rules, and being good at using the rules to operate, such as uploading content that complies with the platform, participating in platform activities, etc. to attract traffic. Otherwise, this method is not as effective as spending money.

For platform traffic, in addition to content and products being the core, how to maintain fan stickiness on the platform and use this as a basis for conversion strategies is the focus of this traffic generation method, such as giving away benefits, comment draws, etc. Of course, this requires long-term investment.

Although the above two methods of drainage have their own advantages, they both follow one rule: it is very important to choose the right platform.

The selection of a platform generally follows two principles: either the platform has a large amount of general traffic, that is, a large traffic user, such as BAT; or the platform's traffic is vertical enough and in line with the main user groups of online education products, such as Babytree.

The general traffic platform must be the first choice, because it is large enough. Whether it is a cold start or expansion, it is necessary to occupy this part of the traffic as much as possible. However, the investment is large, and it is often used more by large institutions.

As for vertical traffic platforms, small institutions tend to try more because, compared with large traffic players, they belong to new traffic pools with relatively fewer competitors and lower costs. However, as the platform traffic range gradually expands and the number of players increases, prices will also rise.

In fact, for any platform, as long as competition intensifies, the overall customer acquisition cost will rise wildly, and this is often caused by large institutions competing for territory. The most typical example is the battle for low-priced summer entry classes among K12 online schools.

Xueersi Online School, Yuanfudao, Zuoyebang and others have invested over 100 million yuan in marketing fees across all platforms, and have enrolled over one million students. However, their traffic costs have also more than doubled compared with previous years, making other online education institutions reluctant to enter.

(3) Fission drainage

Compared with attracting traffic from the outside through paid or free methods, acquiring customers through fission in the largest traffic pool - the WeChat ecosystem is another more popular and very effective method.

Group buying, distribution, bargaining, crowdfunding, group fission and other methods are used by various online education institutions. Although they face the risk of official traffic restrictions or even account suspension, the lower traffic cost is indeed attractive and worthy of deeper exploration.

Like other traffic-generating methods, whether the content and products attract users to participate is the core factor affecting the fission effect. However, in the actual process, how to better stimulate the dissemination power of old users is also critical.

In this regard, we can learn from a certain children's English institution, which has adopted a series of measures to stimulate old users to share, such as rewards for recommendations, coupons for friends and relatives, and personalized posters, which has helped it greatly reduce customer acquisition costs. It is said that 50% of new students are recommended by old students, which shows the power of fission.

Whether it is paid traffic, platform traffic, or fission traffic, the effects on different online education institutions are different, for example, some are good and some are bad. Only the one that suits one's own business is the best, but this is only a premise.

In order to truly make any kind of traffic diversion method play its due role and resist the pressure of rising traffic costs, we still need to work hard on the specific details of traffic diversion. I summarize them into 4 "golden rules" of traffic diversion.

4 golden rules for online education

Rule 1: Accurate user positioning

The prerequisite for any traffic-generating method is to choose the right group of people. If you choose the wrong one, what you attract is invalid traffic, and there is no need to think about monetization.

Therefore, positioning the target audience is the first step to successfully attract traffic. To be more specific, first determine who the product is to be sold to, describe the user portrait, and then find a platform where users gather to prepare for the second step of attracting traffic.

Regarding user portraits, we can consider them from the following dimensions:

• Basic information: specific objects (such as primary school students and college students), object segmentation (such as grades 1-3), age (such as 6-12 years old), region (province, city, school), gender, and educational background (mainly adult users).
• User habits: time of using the product (specific time periods in the morning and at noon), form of using the product (offline, mobile phone, computer, app, mini-program), way of getting information (new media, community, forum), social platform (WeChat, QQ, Weibo), active status (what to do at what time period).
• User needs: feelings of lack in certain aspects, such as adults’ lack of career planning, professional certificates, workplace skills, etc., and parents’ lack of parent-child relationships, further education guidance, subject methods, etc., which should be divided according to specific objects.

As long as you have a user portrait based on the above dimensions, you can basically know which platforms and their segmented channels to direct traffic to.

Rule 2: Identify user pain points

With precise user positioning and determined platform goals, the next step is to provide specific traffic-generating products to attract users. The product can be a course, information, or an activity.

If you want to attract users, you must first identify their pain points, that is, the part that users care about most among all their needs, such as Sudoku and calculations in mathematics, words and reading in English, etc.

There are three main ways to identify user pain points:

• Survey questionnaire: Design a questionnaire based on the user portrait, run it after passing the novice test, collect and analyze the questionnaire results, find out the issue that users are most concerned about, and design the product accordingly.
• Observe your competitors: If your competitors launch a popular event, follow up immediately. However, this requires that there is sufficient user overlap, otherwise the desired effect may not be achieved after copying.
• Hot calendar: List the activity calendar (including universal festivals) in advance according to the characteristics of the industry, and make early design plans for related traffic-generating products to avoid missing the opportunity for traffic generation.

In addition to clarifying the pain points, the traffic-generating products must also include characteristics such as "universality, interest, low price, great value, and systematization" so that they can be more attractive through different forms of packaging during promotion. This can be seen in the recruitment posters of most traffic-generating courses.

Rule 3: Reduce the cost of behavior

The traffic generation process is actually the process of user migration. Whether it is across platforms or inviting friends, loss will occur. However, in order to try to alleviate this situation, the fundamental principle is to find ways to reduce the cost of user behavior, and the only measure is to optimize the process.

The so-called optimization process is to adjust and iterate every detail from the release of the drainage product to the user obtaining the drainage product, so as to achieve the purpose of reducing loss through layer-by-layer control.

For example, a leading online education institution once used a fission-based traffic-generating method of unlocking for 1 yuan. In the unlocking process, it used the A/B test method to test different ways of guiding people to follow the official account. Later, it adopted a step-by-step guidance method to increase the attention rate to 95%.

It can be seen that by optimizing the process, the drainage effect can be greatly improved.

In addition to reducing loss, when designing the drainage path, you can also use the idea of ​​process optimization to pay attention to the details of communication, such as designing different posters for testing, considering setting the frequency of sharing tiers, etc., so as to increase the scope of drainage and attract more users.

Rule 4: Reasonably control ROI

One reality that needs to be exposed is that any form of drainage carries a certain cost to a greater or lesser extent.

Needless to say, paid traffic generation is clearly priced. Although you don’t have to spend money directly to attract traffic to the platform, the investment of operational energy is the biggest cost, not to mention that it also costs money to give out prizes to maintain fans.

As for fission traffic, whether it is courses, materials, books, teaching aids, or other traffic products, most of them are offered at special prices or even for free, and the part given away can be regarded as cost.

Since it takes investment to generate traffic, wouldn’t it be better to find ways to maximize the conversion rate and offset it with revenue? This is indeed the case, but the key lies in how to transform it.

At present, there are two main conversion models for online education. One is the telemarketing model, in which sales directly follow up on the conversion regardless of the lead coming from which channel. The other is the community model, which introduces traffic to WeChat groups or QQ groups and realizes conversion through community operations.

It should be clear that both models will further increase the cost of traffic generation, and what can be done is to control the cost and make the conversion rate of any model reach a level that can offset the cost, that is, to ensure a reasonable ROI.

A certain K12 online school has done a good job in this regard. It has launched free activities on a large scale on official accounts and directly directed traffic to the group. It has converted low-priced courses through a lighter operating model (such as live lectures), and then used low-priced courses to convert into high-priced courses. It is said that the cost of acquiring customers is very low.

It can be seen from this that ensuring a reasonable ROI requires a complete conversion strategy, which not only takes into account the business itself such as form, price, and service, but also the conversion process, execution details, staffing, etc. If these can be done well, traffic generation will basically be successful.

Summarize

This article briefly summarizes the three major traffic-generating models of online education, namely paid traffic, platform traffic and fission traffic, and also proposes four golden rules for traffic generation, namely accurate user positioning, clear user pain points, reducing behavioral costs, and reasonably controlling ROI.

The above only represents personal opinions and is not completely correct. In addition, traffic generation is a huge project. Each channel and each strategy has many details that require direct exploration. Due to space constraints, we will not discuss them here.

I hope this article can help online education colleagues find the right direction for traffic diversion and achieve user growth in today’s world of traffic anxiety.

Author: Wild Solitary Fungus

Source: Wild Sophora japonica