How to establish a new user growth system?

As traffic becomes more and more expensive and customer acquisition becomes more and more difficult, as the self-media said, "In the difficult year of 2019, the anxiety of the Internet group reached its peak", and the usually calm B2B companies were not immune. "Acquiring 10 million users at zero cost, low-cost growth, sinking, fission, and community"... Being bombarded by such selling points every day, I believe that even the most "Buddhist" company would find it difficult to remain calm.

Therefore, acquiring the most customers at the lowest cost has become the highest expectation of B2B companies for marketing functions. Since 2019, it is not difficult to find that more companies have begun to emphasize the integration of brand and effect. Money is spent more cautiously, it is more difficult to occupy the time of target customers, and being able to more effectively support the continued growth of the company has naturally become a more important goal.

For B2B companies, growth mainly comes from two dimensions: acquiring new customers and adding value to old customers. The former tests the company's ability to operate the front end of the value chain, while the latter tests the back end, that is, the ability to retain old customers and conduct up-selling and cross-selling. Today we will first discuss the topic of how to establish a new growth system.

New growth must be considered from the perspective of the enterprise as a whole, not just one department’s concern.

First of all, we must realize that exploring new growth is a systematic project for an enterprise, rather than an indicator that only falls on a certain department, such as the marketing department. If we look at it from the perspective of a marketing funnel, from brand to market, to sales, and then to value mining of existing customers, there is potential for innovation in every link. Generally speaking, the larger the customer sales or the earlier the company is established, the more important the role of sales and old customers behind the funnel will be.

01Key points: From a higher dimension, brand is the most powerful private domain traffic pool

In the past few days, I have met intensively with several early-stage B2B companies with a scale of less than 100 people. What they have in common is that they all target large and medium-sized enterprises as target customers. However, after relying on the founders and founding teams to acquire early pioneer customers and now relying more on marketing methods to acquire customers, I found that the company’s lack of brand power has become a major constraint. Of course, there is no need to explain the reason. There is an unspoken rule that the larger the company, the more it hopes that the supplier's brand is a good match for its own brand.

If we extrapolate further to the front end of the marketing funnel, if a target customer searches for a manufacturer that can solve his or her problem through public channels, the one with a higher reputation will most likely become the one they directly learn about and study. For example, when several suppliers with similar product and service maturity are bidding together, the company with higher brand awareness and reputation will definitely have the first-mover advantage. In fact, brand has become the most important traffic pool for enterprises, but this is often overlooked by "pragmatic" B2B peers.

So, how can we make brands play a greater role in exploring new growth?

First of all, establish a brand identification system that enters the mind, eyes, and heart, so that target customers can "recognize you at a glance" in the crowd.

Anyone who has studied some basic brand theories will inevitably think of "brand awareness" first when talking about brands. No matter how good your products and services are, if they are only hidden in your own home and among a limited number of customers, they will certainly not be of any help in attracting new customers. In order to increase brand awareness, the brand needs to meet several conditions: easy to understand, easy to identify, and easy to remember.

B2B colleagues may wish to use these standards to measure their own company's brand name, logo, slogan, company introduction, product introduction and other basic brand information. We will find that many B2B companies' brand identification systems have not yet passed the passing line. If we cannot make target customers understand and remember us in the first place, it will greatly increase the cost of explanation and undoubtedly waste a lot of B2B companies' already very limited brand exposure opportunities and resources.

For example, in the example below, this company is actually a very distinctive professional company. Let’s take a look at the introduction of this company below. After reading it once, can you know what they do?

XXXX provides enterprises with integrated technical solutions to help them complete rapid product iteration, Internet transformation and digital operations, and use technology to accelerate enterprises.

With technology as the driving force, combined with the current core model and demand pain points of enterprises, we plan and implement complete technical solutions for enterprises in response to internal and external problems faced in the development process, helping enterprises that need it most to take an important step towards informatization and digital development...

In the previous article about brands, we mentioned that a clear brand core value proposition and positioning statement is the soul of the brand and the foundation of the brand concept identification system. Here we need to calm down and sort out clearly, "Who are the company's target customers, what kind of products and services do we provide to them, why are we a better choice for customers, what capabilities do we have to ensure our differentiated advantages", etc.

As shown in the figure above, after sorting out the core value proposition of the enterprise, we develop an identification system that adapts to the current stage of brand development through the three dimensions of concept, vision and experience. For target customers, it is to let our "core brand concept enter their minds, vision enter their eyes, and experience enter their hearts." This extends the brand's connotation into a form that can be perceived by users, turning our brand from an intangible statement of claim into a series of perceptible experiences.

The concept of brand sounds very abstract, so it is more important to make it real in order to make its value apparent. Since a brand is made up of a series of detailed experiences, we must grow from every detail.

02 Market Inbound: Strictly optimize paid channels and strengthen organic content channels

"Inbound Marketing" is an omni-channel digital marketing method system that attracts customers to find us through marketing channels that they can access. After observing many B2B companies, we found that new growth points brought by Inbound can be explored mainly from the following three aspects: rigorous optimization of paid channels, strengthening of organic content channels and optimization of websites.

1. Rigorous optimization of paid traffic channels

1) SEM should be continuously optimized from the end to the beginning

Judging from the new product development data of various B2B companies, new leads from search engines still account for half of the total. B2B companies do not have many options for channels to directly obtain leads. As long as target customers still rely on search engines to find manufacturer information, this channel cannot be abandoned. What we can do is to continue to optimize the conversion effect of paid channels.

• SEM advertising creativity can be optimized according to the principles described in the web page TDK

This is basic common sense. When placing ads on search engines, the creative statement of the ad must also be optimized in accordance with our TDK optimization principles for a particular web page. From the selection of title words, to keyword descriptions, to the official website landing page, we strive to use the most concise language and the most accurate descriptions to showcase the differentiated advantages of products or companies. To put it bluntly, it means reducing the cost of understanding and increasing the attractiveness at first sight.

TDK is the acronym for website title, description, and keywords, and is mainly used to summarize and outline the current web page.

• Pay attention to the landing page to increase the depth of engagement between target customers and business

Most of the click-through traffic comes from interests and pain points, and then they hope to get a solution. It would be best if there is a methodology, and it would be best if there is a practical case with a similar situation. This is the starting point for potential customers to have truly valuable interactions with us. We need to make the landing page meet the psychological expectations of potential customers and drive them to move forward more effectively in their purchasing journey. In this process, understanding the psychology of potential customers requires common sense and basics on the one hand, and continuous A/B testing of page details on the other hand to let the data speak.

For example, in the registration form page in the picture above, with the same content, when the number and order of fields in the entire form are the same, the test results show that most people prefer the second version. The consideration during optimization is that the latter has fewer fields, which reduces the psychological cost for customers to retain information, and at the same time, the copy is more immersive and emotional.

• Data visualization, every step can be measured to ensure continuous optimization

Since real money is spent every day in spending channels, "intercepting traffic" and "increasing revenue" are equally important. Intercepting traffic refers to improving the conversion rate of each link. From keyword selection, creative design, to delivery, landing page and conversion, each step requires thinking about the direction of optimization based on the feedback of data results. Therefore, an important prerequisite for paid channel management is data visualization. What data should we look at? The search engine display volume, user bounce rate and stay time of the landing page, etc. The data in each link are not isolated. There is a logical relationship between the data. Where there is room for optimization, dynamic testing and optimization are needed.

▲ Reference data sheet

2) Keep paying attention to other channels and try to promote and expand in small steps

Since the target market of B2B companies is relatively segmented, it is easier for each paid channel to reach its growth ceiling. So what we can do is to take small and active steps in emerging channels and see whether we can continue to tap into traffic pools in new areas based on data results.

For example, as the penetration rate of Toutiao products in the market continues to increase, many B2B companies are also watching. If you have not tried and do not have data results, you certainly have no right to speak. Our suggestion is to choose a precise audience, consider the usage scenarios of users of this channel, design creative ads in a targeted manner, and then conduct a period of experiments. Based on the results, we can see whether it is worth increasing investment to supplement traffic channels.

2. Organic content acquisition channels still have potential, and they need to be managed in depth to establish advantages

Because paid channels are more likely to reach their growth ceiling, organic content acquisition channels require longer-term planning and in-depth management. Content marketing itself is a marathon and requires long-term optimization just like polishing a product. Specifically:

1) Build a content matrix along the marketing funnel

• A solution for the enterprise, creating a content product portfolio for promotion

Strictly speaking, content is the product of the marketing function of B2B enterprises. Moreover, around any enterprise solution, we will plan a corresponding theme content, and around this theme, we will establish a content combination that integrates four dimensions: exclusive views, methodology, solutions and tools, and best practice cases along each link of the marketing funnel. In this way, we can establish our position as an opinion leader in a topic area and realize the possibility of gaining traffic and leads from awareness. This is the hard part of B2B content marketing, but it’s also the fun part.

• The differentiated value of content products lies in their exclusivity, depth and practical value

Since content products are marketing tools, they themselves need to have unique value in order to more easily gain the favor of target customers. As we said in the previous article, after content marketing entered the era of segmentation, insisting on quality in every article is the guarantee of good results, and the so-called quality content must have differentiated value. Past data tells us that the best content format for B2B companies to obtain leads is reports + cases, and their characteristics are exclusivity, depth, and practical value, which are undoubtedly manifestations of differentiation and the value that the B2B market must strive to create.

• Activities are more direct in acquiring customers, but the core is still content

The three major engines of B2B content marketing are basically writing public accounts, organizing activities and issuing reports. Activities, as an important part of it, are a very important tool to convert traffic into leads, because getting target customers to sign up for activities is a strong lead conversion CTA. However, in order to make the activities play a more important role, we must grasp two key points: first, the activities must also form a matrix; second, the biggest optimization space for B2B marketing activities lies in creativity and content itself.

The entire funnel process of online and offline activities, self-organized and third-party activities, from enhancing brand power, attracting traffic, exploring demand to sales conversion, can actually be a self-contained combination of strategies. Based on the one-year cycle, if companies want to make their activities more systematic, they need to combine and mix regular activities and brand activities according to different marketing goals to create a marketing rhythm that accompanies the business cycle. For example, the value of third-party activities focuses on attracting brands and traffic, while the focus of self-organized activities is on obtaining leads, exploring demand, and promoting sales.

Brand-level events among self-organized events are typical tools that can achieve both brand and effect, but professional planning of theme creativity and content is the key. For example, in 2017, when I hosted the User Ecosystem Conference for the second time at my old employer, I did a lot of preliminary professional research on everything from topic selection to content planning for the first and second half, all based on the development trends in the talent management field that year. From the final data, the total number of participants in the afternoon session even increased by 20% over the morning keynote session because the content was more segmented and focused. And judging from the feedback from the sales side, this content-focused event played a key role in the call highs and the finishing touches of multiple high-value customers.

2) Follow the footsteps of customers and build a content channel matrix

• Is WeChat still worth operating?

The average opening rate of WeChat public accounts is now far less than 5%. Many self-media have become anxious about the value of WeChat and are even pessimistic about it. But we did a small survey on WeChat content marketing some time ago. When asked, "How long is WeChat operation worth using for enterprises?", 75% of the partners chose "As long as people are still using WeChat, enterprises can continue to operate official accounts." So far, whether it is Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, or Instagram or vlog, they are still far from reaching the stage of competing with WeChat. Therefore, WeChat still has considerable vitality for B2B companies.

However, now that WeChat’s operations have entered deep waters, it is not easy to create an official account that is both influential and has conversion potential. As the trend of content audience segmentation becomes increasingly obvious, companies should pay more attention to segmenting operations among target groups when operating WeChat.

• Exploring the “surplus value” of professional social networking platforms

When companies operate content channels, they will basically have " one center and multiple tentacles ". For example, the main content channel is WeChat, but the content may need to be selectively released on other content channels such as Toutiao, Baijiahao, LinkedIn, Maimai and other channels. This is to maximize the coverage and value of the content. Of course, in addition to serving as a supplementary platform for content publishing, professional social platforms can sometimes also provide opportunities to find KOLs for our content creation. Previously, when we were organizing an international forum that required the participation of KOLs, we had established direct communication with the target people on Maimai and LinkedIn. This method may be more difficult than asking friends for introductions, but it also has its effects in actual application.

3. Very important: conversion-based content website

If we scan the official websites of B2B peers, we also find that relatively simple display websites dominate. But when search engines are still the main channel for acquiring paid traffic, a high-conversion website will be very necessary. A high conversion website must meet three conditions:

1. There is a clear North Star indicator for the entire site (what is used to convert leads?)

2. Website browsing and conversion logic design that matches the potential customer’s psychological journey

3. Build the content of each page based on a marketing perspective.

As the hub for converting traffic to leads, the official website is a sieve. Its density and size are critical. Some companies have a high number of PVs and UVs, so why are their conversions so poor? A considerable part of the reason is that the connection logic between each landing page does not conform to the user's psychological experience, and of course there are many details mentioned in the previous article. This requires us to dynamically optimize based on the data results of UBA (user behavior analysis). For example, the jump time of external links; which content on the page can be jumped and which content cannot be jumped; should the consultation window be placed in the upper right or lower left? What efficient online consultation language should be like...needs continuous optimization.

If the above-mentioned optimization has been increasingly paid attention to by enterprises, what is more easily overlooked by enterprises is the continuous accumulation of website content. In addition to continuously optimizing basic static content based on conversion effects, an increasingly valuable website should also accumulate all the content used by the company for content marketing mentioned above on the website after secondary creation. Because, without a continuous increase in original high-quality content, the website can only rely on paid traffic to achieve a hard landing, which is obviously not a wise move. Having written this far, the first two parts are basically the work that the large marketing department of a B2B company should lead. But as we said before, growth is not the business of a certain department, but the business of the entire enterprise. Therefore, there are two indispensable forces that must be incorporated into the growth system: self-sales development and customer referrals. Since there are many things worth discussing in depth in each channel, we will leave these two parts for discussion next time.

Last but not least, nearly one-third of the second half of the year has passed in the blink of an eye. I believe that all of my colleagues are frantically striving to achieve results. When the arrow is on the string, no matter how many rational words you say, it will inevitably seem redundant. However, according to my style, I will basically give a "earnest" reminder: the more anxious you are, the more you should not panic. The growth engine of B2B needs a very solid foundation to be successful in the future (such as the establishment of a strong brand traffic pool), so don’t skip the first 8 buns and expect to be full by eating the 9th one.

Slow is fast. I hope founders can hear this, and I hope your investors can hear it even more!

03Sales self-development: an indispensable force for innovation

The ideal of most B2B companies is: once the inbound market power is opened, they can continuously obtain new leads, and then the sales team will receive these leads at the downstream of the funnel and convert them to the greatest extent. The company can then successfully achieve new growth from lead acquisition to transaction.

However, in the practice of B2B enterprises, the division of labor between marketing functions and sales functions cannot be so clear-cut. What is the real situation?

The fact is, marketing and sales together as broad marketing functions form a cross-cooperation system in the company's large marketing funnel. The earlier in the funnel, the more dominant the market should play, and the later in the funnel, the more sales become the protagonist.

But at a certain point in the funnel, how do we determine the proportion of the two functions?

This also depends on the actual characteristics of the company's business. Taking the two links of lead acquisition and business opportunity mining as examples, the differences in the target customer portraits of enterprises, the complexity of solutions and the length of transaction cycles all determine the different proportions of contribution made by marketing and sales. If I may give you a number for reference, among the newly acquired customers of domestic enterprise-level SaaS companies, the market contribution percentage ranges from 15% to 97%. There are huge differences, so B2B companies cannot make a one-size-fits-all approach when breaking down their growth goals.

Specifically, the higher the KA level of the target customer, that is, the larger the customer, the higher the average order value, the more complex the solution, and the longer the transaction cycle, the less likely it is to rely solely on online customer acquisition methods on the market side to expand new customers.

This principle is not difficult to understand. For example, if the marketing director of a Fortune 500 company wants to introduce a new marketing software, he is unlikely to simply search on Baidu to find the right person. The most likely thing is that he will ask his colleagues or friends to recommend the product, or directly ask someone to recommend a reliable manufacturer for sales. In other words, he relies on the power of "relationships." Therefore, the sales team, which can hear the gunfire most directly, must become a very important force in new development. So what room for improvement is there in sales self-development?

1. Be sensitive and “mix” in valuable circles

Social media has greatly changed the way people connect and communicate. Today, the difficulty of finding a KP (Key Person) has been greatly reduced in a sense, but sales consultants must be sensitive enough to better seize these opportunities.

Participate in industry events, join communities of big names, make good use of professional social platforms, and keep a close eye on competitors' customer pools... Needless to say, these are conventional means of developing new products, and I believe that experienced sales consultants are basically already using them. If you haven't gotten started yet, go find an experienced salesperson to learn from him.

2. Equip your social business card with professional skills

The open opportunities are there, but not everyone uses them the same way. The difference lies in the professionalism of the sales consultants themselves. Perhaps several years ago, "Moutai" was a professional weapon for sales consultants. Today, in B2B business, although the relationship skills of sales consultants are still important, the biggest challenge is to arm their social business cards with professional skills.

For example, if you join a community of big names and see a group of sales VPs from different companies discussing how to activate sales organizations remotely, if you can contribute your solution ideas and explain the final results using a customer case study of your company in a timely manner, this will definitely be much better than rashly adding people as friends or making plans for dinner to promote your products.

3. Market empowerment at the right time makes sales and innovation more invincible

As shown in the figure above, from a broad marketing perspective, marketing + sales have a common goal in an enterprise: to ensure that there are a steady stream of leads entering the marketing funnel and a continuous output of transactions. Here, the market is like the air force, and sales are the ground assault force, so they must empower each other and work closely together.

When we talked about sales development above, we must be professional enough. In this matter, in addition to the role of the company's internal training system, the marketing department can also play a more valuable role. “If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools.” If the market can provide sufficiently professional sales tools for the ground assault troops, sales consultants will definitely be more comfortable in the process.

To give a specific example, many companies’ sales staff will look for connections on LinkedIn. But perhaps the moment the salesperson sends a message to a potential customer, it is already determined whether there will be any subsequent stories.

As shown in the above picture, it is not difficult to see that the first two lines of speech are basically non-targeted "copy and paste" products, and there is no sincerity in targeting any specific object. This contact action can actually be done more professionally. Tests show that an F-shaped email format and a targeted opening statement on a specific issue of the other party's company are more likely to impress the recipient. Such conclusions and experiences must be based on testing of large amounts of data. Understanding customer psychology and optimizing communication tools are actually the scope of daily research by the marketing team. If we expect "gifted" sales people to figure it out themselves, the efficiency will be too low.

So in this case, if the marketing team helps sales consultants with corresponding training and provides more "soulful" communication skills based on more customer research, it can change more than just the new customer development effect of one or two sales consultants.

This is just a small example. In fact, from Leads Gen to Demand Gen, from business communication to the final touch, the market's empowerment of sales can be reflected in the entire marketing chain:

When sales people first approach target customers, can the company introduction used reduce customers’ understanding costs and highlight differentiated advantages?

When target customers have needs, are there ready-made relevant cases, solutions, or methodological materials to provide sales support?

When a deal is made with a target customer, is there some external communication resource support?

When maintaining old customers, can you provide more theoretical + practical suggestions based on the customer’s demand stage and current pain points to support sales in upselling and cross-selling? etc.

The division of labor within an enterprise is to make work more efficient. In other words, the value of division of labor is not to clarify responsibilities and powers, but to enable different functions to maximize their respective values ​​in a more reasonable manner and ultimately achieve better results through collaboration. Therefore, how the marketing team can better understand the business and sales needs, and how the sales team can make good use of market resources and provide some business insights to the marketing team are all issues that B2B companies should pay attention to in the process of achieving growth.

(Note: In the past two years, there have been more and more discussions among colleagues about establishing an SDR team to specifically support the sales team in external customer acquisition. I have built such a team from scratch before, and there are many pros and cons to its management that need to be weighed. I will discuss this in detail when I have the opportunity in the future.)

04Customer referrals: One word is worth a thousand words

“One word from the customer is more effective than ten words from us.” This may sound a little sad, but it is an indisputable fact. If old customers are willing to help us introduce new customers, it goes without saying how much the customer acquisition cost will be reduced. With the endorsement of old customers, the value of giving new customers a preconceived good impression in reducing subsequent communication costs cannot be ignored. However, while more B2B companies are establishing customer success departments, new business from referrals still only accounts for a small portion of growth in most companies. Therefore, there is still a lot of room for profit from new customers brought by referrals.

The question is, how can we get old customers to speak up and help us?

1. Customers must be successful first before they can speak for us

The concept of "customer success" entered the vision of Chinese peers almost along with this wave of SaaS craze. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is recognized as the golden indicator for measuring customer success, and its core question is: "(Old customer) Are you willing to recommend this company's products/services to others?" This logic illustrates a truth that is not difficult to understand: if customers truly realize value and business success after choosing our products and services, they will not only renew their contracts, but may also recommend or refer other customers to us.

Simple enough, right? The problem is that although many companies say that "customer success" is the lifeline of B2B companies (especially SaaS companies), the focus of actual actions is still on mindless independent innovation.

For example, faced with the current situation where customer maturity in most enterprise markets is still relatively low and many companies' own products and services are still being continuously iterated, B2B companies need more professional services to help customers realize business value from products. The first step is to help customers use the product and increase their internal adoption rate. What business value can you talk about if they can’t even use it?

If we go back further, the success of our customers actually depends on whether they are the “right” customers for us at this stage. Frankly speaking, the reason is that, firstly, the value of an in-depth project is usually more obvious when the enterprise realizes the need to upgrade its system capabilities; secondly, start-ups have limited resources, and there is an inherent contradiction between their ability to pay and their expectations. They cannot ensure the maximization of customer value, so it is better to maintain contact and postpone cooperation.

Focusing only on customer acquisition without focusing on customer success or customer retention is like drawing water with a bamboo basket. How can the clients introduce clients to us if they themselves have not been successful? We have already done our best by not causing trouble for other clients.

2. Triggering customers’ willingness to refer others: Customer psychological insights

Customer success is a prerequisite for customers to be willing to refer others, but not all customers who say they are “willing to recommend” will eventually make a referral.

Therefore, once the prerequisites are in place, we also need to delve deeper into the psychology of whether customers are willing to make referrals. Put yourself in their shoes. Each of us is also a customer of other companies in many fields. Under what circumstances would we be willing to actively recommend the products we are currently using?

• Respect and cherish those customers who "give others roses and leave a lingering fragrance on your hands"

If I am a person who loves to share and help others, when someone asks me, I will introduce it, and sometimes I will even take the initiative to share some usage experiences in friend groups or circles. It is undeniable that helping others itself will make some people feel very valuable. If we find such customers, we must treat them as "treasures" and continue to ensure that they are satisfied with our products and services and feel our value. If such customers are dissatisfied, we must respond quickly and deal with them proactively.

• Brand equivalence is actually the need to maintain personal image

Just like people consciously manage their personas in their circle of friends, customers also have their own psychological secrets when making referrals. Is the client’s corporate brand equivalent to my company’s brand? Does it represent the professional image I want to maintain in my specific field? These may be psychological secrets that are difficult to express, but they are working quietly.

Of course, brand parity does not mean that our corporate brand must have the same popularity as our customers’ brands. Not every company can become Alibaba, and not every company needs to become Tencent.

Most domestic SaaS companies are very young and small in scale. How can they achieve brand parity with their major customers? In fact, we need to match the "breadth" of our customers with our own "depth". In the fields where we have been deeply involved, we have truly unique value propositions, a deep understanding of the future development of the industry, and sufficiently professional product design and service details. To put it bluntly, if we have enough capabilities to empower our customers in this field, we can achieve parity of brand position, "small but not rough."

To put it another way, branding does not mean advertising. Startups also need brand building, but the focus of brand building varies at different stages of development. Regarding the issue of brand building, we have touched upon it in several of our previous articles, including the “previous article” where we mentioned in detail that “brand power is the most powerful private traffic pool for B2B companies” for your reference.

3. Take into account both the business needs of clients and the personal development needs of KP

The brand parity and ensuring customer success we mentioned above are all about meeting customers' business needs, that is, helping customers achieve business success. But what we cannot ignore is that no matter whether it is a B2B or B2C enterprise, in the end, we are interacting and communicating with real people. In this case, they will have some specific personal needs besides business needs. In the professional scenario, the most typical ones are professional growth and building of personal brand.

Therefore, if we can professionally help KPs ​​better realize their personal development needs (Personal needs) during the cooperation process, it will undoubtedly be easier for them to become advocates and promoters (Advocate) of our products and services.

As shown in the figure above, if we meet the business needs of our customers, they are more likely to provide us with endorsements when asked, which is passive sharing; but if the personal development needs of KPs can also be better met by us, they may become opinion leaders who actively endorse us (Proactive sharing).

Speaking of specific methods, for example, holding high-end salons can provide these KOLs with a platform for communication and learning, helping them to build their own circles and connections; when doing large-scale brand events, invite these KOLs to share (of course, the value of this event must be higher than his expectations), which will have certain benefits for the brand image of his company and himself. We can even plan some interesting and meaningful projects to link them and the corporate brands behind them to create more integrated value. These are things that companies can focus on and operate at different stages based on their own resource advantages. Win-win is always the unchanging theme of this era.

Well, having written so far, we have introduced a four-in-one systematic thinking on how companies can achieve growth by gaining new perspectives: brand, inbound market, self-sales development, and customer referrals. Ultimately, we must return to our consistent proposition that corporate resources are limited, and which tasks should become the current focus must return to the thinking of the evolution of the corporate life cycle. We have mentioned this many times in our previous articles.

After all, marketing is not just a tactical function. I have always believed that it is a core strategic function of an enterprise, so we should think about and deploy marketing strategies from the perspective of strategic needs. If your company is still facing challenges in strategic choices, you are welcome to discuss it with us in depth.

Author: Gao Yan

Source: Luandun Marketing (Luandunyingxiao)