A good WeChat operation is better than 100 salespeople: In-depth analysis of WeChat operation

Introduction: Every time technology breaks through as a tool, if the operator can fully mobilize the subjective initiative of human nature, it will have a certain degree of impact on the company's business model in a certain link. The new media WeChat reduces the transmission of information flow and lowers the level of sales channels, although the essence of business has not changed.

Let's play a reverse comparison game first:

1) How do traditional companies that mainly engage in 2B business do sales? Divide regions - set up channels - collect sales leads - sales staff conduct point-to-point sales;

2) How do traditional media make money? Print media and television media operate high-quality content, which continuously penetrates the target audience and increases influence, which is reflected in circulation. Then they sell advertisements in different pages and columns in the form of title sponsorship, hard advertising, soft advertising, etc.

3) How can e-commerce companies in 2C business penetrate the market and increase sales? Open a store on Taobao, select products - art design - decoration - put on shelves - merchants place orders - improve ratings - Taobao customer distribution - face customers;

4) How does the company present itself? Buy a domain name - outsource the website construction - corporate culture, core business, team introduction, contact information - provide the website to customers for easy online access;

However, these are now a thing of the past. I will just list some stories of real friends around me, and let’s feel it:

1) The largest talent management consulting company in China has built its own WeChat self-media and opened three menus: one is customer cases in the energy, finance, and automobile industries, one is a research report on entrepreneurial talent genes, and one is contact information. The next day after the release, the sales staff posted the customer cases of a certain industry to their respective Moments and immediately received 2-4 potential orders on the same day; the psychological factor here is: the sales staff has the potential customers. When converting potential customers, if they actively convey that our company provides consulting services to companies that are more powerful than you, it will first enhance the sense of trust and secondly create a sense of crisis: if you don’t come to do it, you will fall behind!

2) A boy born in 1989, started to run Sina Weibo as a part-time job in the Sina Weibo era, and then in the WeChat era, he operated industry-specific self-media on WeChat, starting from reposting high-quality content to having nearly 500,000 subscribers. Relying on self-media advertising business and channel business, it is more than enough to have a monthly turnover of one million. Therefore, many media outlets have ceased publication or changed from biweekly to monthly publication to focus on new media businesses, because advertisers have been diverted.

3) 2C e-commerce companies open service accounts or subscription accounts on WeChat, publish high-quality content, tell product stories, build communities, and let customers become fans. The annual sales of dried fruit e-commerce companies exceed 10 million.

4) The owner of an offline hotpot restaurant cleverly opened an electronic membership on the service account, and regularly sent preferential benefits to members on the service account every month, which were delivered to the members’ WeChat portal as soon as possible to stimulate their desire to repurchase.

This is the role that WeChat now plays as a new media. Every time technology breaks through as a tool, if the operator can fully mobilize the subjective initiative of human nature, it will have a certain degree of impact on the company's business model in a certain link. The new media WeChat reduces the transmission of information flow and lowers the level of sales channels, although the essence of business has not changed.

1. Positioning: Enterprise positioning and user positioning are carried out in two directions

Heaven does not set up prisons, but many people often set up prisons in their hearts. When it comes to new media operations, many people will start talking about user positioning, how to write titles, how to design content, and how to promote it. I think this way of thinking is more limited to user positioning and ignores the demands of the company itself. If you are a business decision maker, you need to think about:

1) I want to be a new media. Should I be a follower or a leader? If I am a follower, then the core is to imitate and leverage. If I am a leader, then I must clearly judge where the trend of new media is? WeChat belongs to Tencent. The core of Tencent is "connection". The core of WeChat is to "connect" people. When the scale of people increases, WeChat will definitely promote micro-e-commerce and build an ecosystem on this basis, because this is close to money. This is the law of business. Self-media is the first step, and social e-commerce is the second step. Self-media has not yet been fully saturated, there are still many vertical blank areas, and social e-commerce has great potential.

2) I want to do new media, what is the purpose? Is it to serve the enterprise or to express myself? What effect do I want to achieve by serving the enterprise? To promote 2B sales or 2C? If I want to express myself by doing self-media, do I want to do industry self-media or personal self-media?

These issues need to be thought through clearly because they are the general direction. If the direction is not clear, and you just focus on content and promotion, how can you maximize the allocation of manpower, time and energy?

The process of corporate positioning is to understand who you are, why you do it, and what importance this matter has within the company. I used a mind map to categorize the roles played by WeChat subscription accounts and service accounts. All corporate decision makers should be able to identify themselves:

Secondly, it is user positioning: who my users are, their age group, behavioral habits, reading habits, preferences, price sensitivity and other factors are comprehensively considered, and then the content is determined based on these factors.

In general, enterprise positioning and user positioning are carried out simultaneously, and subsequent operations revolve around these two, with the ultimate goal of achieving growth in the enterprise's users, cash flow, and services.

2. Setting up the stage for the show: laying the foundation and building the framework

If you want to understand the positioning, it is like knowing what kind of building you want to build, sea view house, office building, commercial and residential, villa, etc., then the next step is to figure out where to build it, how deep the foundation should be dug, and how to build the overall frame of the building.

Where to fix: Service accounts are suitable for enterprises to display external communications, offline physical stores such as hot pot shops such as Zhao Xianglan Nanyang Hot Pot, and enterprises whose business is mainly service-oriented such as 020 Project Kung Fu Bear, Dudu Nail Art, and Aixianfeng;

I used a mind map to sort out how deep the foundation should be and how to build the framework. You will find that the menu frameworks of social e-commerce, industry/vertical self-media, self-media and corporate external display have very different focuses. Some have stronger promotional genes, some have stronger content genes, and some have stronger interactive genes. This is why I said at the beginning that we need to have a clear positioning. Not all new media have to put content first.

Specifically, the core content that social e-commerce needs to convey should be:

1) Product story: This link replaces the advertising expenses of traditional 2C enterprises in various channels and media;

2) The story of the founding team: This link is vivid and clear, which enhances trust and shortens the distance. Using the founding team to conduct 2C brand public relations is relatively low-cost;

3) Push content: incremental information about how to use the product, as well as related information about the target audience, information-based value-added services. A good salesperson will not tirelessly talk about his or her own products every time he or she meets a customer, right?

4) User community interaction: Provide WeChat lectures of interest to users, bring users to offline activities, set up user WeChat groups , collect user opinions, and be careful not to turn them into complaint groups.

5) Promotional benefits: Social e-commerce is ultimately about selling things, and all transactions involve pricing and promotions.

Take the agricultural e-commerce "Vijidani" as an example. The founder of Vijidani was Liu Jingwen, the editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Jingbao Public Welfare Weekly. He established a farmers' cooperative in Xinjiang, integrated Xinjiang's high-quality foods such as dried fruits, and sold them through Taobao and WeChat service accounts, with annual sales of tens of millions. What connects users and farmers are farmers' stories, customer stories (Cat Weekly), postcards (interactive tools), and Wei Kitchen (guiding information to teach you how to eat).

Media people are the best storytellers, and they also understand brands and public relations. So a good editor-in-chief is better than 100 salespeople, and media, public relations, brands, and social e-commerce will all have overlaps.

The core content that industry/vertical self-media needs to convey:

Content selection by category: Most of these self-media have reached the stage of content accumulation and need to be classified and summarized to understand what the audience wants and what their core is. For example, the core of Yidu New Media is video content, and other omni-media content is only auxiliary. The real business line lies in video services, so Yidu’s menu framework is as follows:

In fact, from the menu framework of YiDu, we can see that YiDu's core operation team has a very clear organization and structure of content. I have seen many industry self-media using menus to organize their accumulated content, but the classification is not clear, and they are not good at using technology to build wap for classification, and they fail to display the accumulated content well to users.

A very clever thing about Yidujun is that it enhances user stickiness through Yidupaiya, which is similar to the check-in points system. It breaks away from the traditional self-media with a heavy content gene, which only knows how to output the content it wants to convey but ignores why users keep visiting you.

Yidu’s summary page development is worth learning from in terms of product and technology:

3. Operation: content operation, user operation and event operation

The building is built, and the third step is to decide what to put on each floor (content operation), to whom to sell it (user operation) and how to sell it (activity operation).

These three dimensions of operations work together to achieve the following four goals:

(1) How to convert new followers into active users and get multiple clicks?

(2) How to attract lost users back;

(3) How to activate existing but silent users;

(4) Maintain the activity of existing active users;

I used a mind map to summarize the core elements of these three operations. Among them, event operations will have different focuses based on each company's promotion budget.

In content operations, the core logic of titles and content is: titles are used to stimulate users' desire to click and attract users, while content is used to stimulate users to forward and keep them.

What kind of title will inspire users to click?

What kind of content will arouse users' urge to forward?

(1) It is fun, interesting, and inspires some kind of emotional resonance in users;

(2) provide enough incremental information that users find it useful;

What kind of content would inspire users to follow a WeChat account?

(1) User experience: The layout is clear and comfortable, and the reading experience is good;

(2) Content: valuable, interesting, and useful to oneself;

(3) End picture: One picture clearly states who I am and what I can provide you;

This is a collection of tools I often use in my new media operations:

It is particularly noteworthy that the text in the end image with the company's QR code must highlight its differentiated advantages. Even if it is just one sentence, it must be clear. Otherwise, even if an article is read over 50,000 times, in the end users will not know who posted it, thus losing a large number of potential convertible users.

Regarding user operations, if you are still at the stage of attracting new customers through content, you are out. Attracting new members through content is in the genes of media people, and the more successful ones at present are "Sixiang Space" and "Mantou Business School". They attract new members through WeChat lecture content required by specific audiences. To sign up, one needs to forward a screenshot, which promotes article sharing and click-through reading. Finally, the lecture content is announced after the lecture, and secondary dissemination is achieved through text or video to warm up for the next lecture.

WeChat groups can be divided into WeChat groups for core loyal users and WeChat groups for lectures. The former can be sent to the group at different stages of development to collect user feedback, and the latter is used for re-dissemination and multiple dissemination, allowing these WeChat group users to help you forward the next event notice. As the number of WeChat groups increases, forwarding will be a multiplier effect. This is also the fundamental reason why the number of users will grow rapidly if the WeChat lectures are well conducted: continuous fission through WeChat groups.

The last step is promotion, which is event operation.

Let me focus on the smartest ways to promote:

Mutual promotion: It is not simply finding some WeChat public accounts with the same audience and tone, compiling them into an article, and then titled "XXX WeChat subscription accounts you cannot miss". That was the early way of playing WeChat. It needs packaging, such as 10 methods for new employees to develop habits, and then implanting 10 accounts that promote each other. This brings us back to the core logic I mentioned earlier: the title is used to attract users to click, and the content is to induce forwarding. Otherwise, users will rarely forward a collection of 10 subscription accounts, right?

Find partners to distribute benefits: Partners include apps and WeChat public accounts. Package your own products or set certain coupons. It is best to make the efforts "appear" to be larger. Find WeChat public accounts with the same audience and cooperate with them. Turn your own products or coupons into benefits given to users by the other party's account, but in the end, users need to follow your own account to receive them. This method can be done cumulatively and continuously, and it is the lowest-cost way to attract new users.

KOL leverage promotion: According to the characteristics of the audience, find matching KOLs, leverage their power for promotion, and thus import KOL fans to your own WeChat official account, but this requires good planning.

Soft promotion on WeChat big accounts: Find WeChat big accounts with consistent audiences, accurately place soft articles, and leverage the momentum to promote on WeChat big accounts that already have a user base. This method is more effective quickly, and content planning is the most important.

4. Review: Data Analysis

By analyzing the data of each communication, we can find the most suitable method for the target audience and continuously optimize it.

Recommend some WeChat public accounts that you often follow: