How to acquire customers through online event operations?

This article takes educational training institutions as an example.

As we all know, educational institutions are a golden track in the trillion-dollar market. The traditional education giants such as New Oriental and Xueersi are the first to make efforts in this track. As of now, these two companies are both companies with a market value of tens of billions of US dollars. However, latecomers are catching up with these two companies at a faster pace. Internet online education institutions like Yuanfudao and VIPKID are quietly rising to catch up with the capital boom and traffic dividends.

Traditional educational institutions have been very anxious in the past two years. The main source of anxiety is the increase in the number of students. It is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit students and the cost of acquiring customers is getting higher and higher. Some traditional ground-based educational institutions are being kidnapped by Baidu's advertising and channel enrollment. The principals of many institutions themselves lack professional knowledge of the market, and the marketing staff of the institutions have aging knowledge and are trapped by inherent ideas, leading to a vicious circle.

Fortunately, the rise of online education in the past two years has led to the emergence of a large number of new talents. The user growth and student acquisition methods of Internet education institutions have great reference and practical significance for the enrollment of traditional education institutions. Many traditional institutions have begun to try a series of methods such as online operations and new media promotion to attract students. This article will carefully break down the steps and methods for online operations to acquire students.

1. Establish a customer acquisition model (online + offline linkage)

Traditional ground-based educational institutions can acquire customers online, but conversions and transactions must be completed offline. This has a lot to do with user consumption habits and the establishment of trust. This is different from Internet online education institutions. It is very important to establish a complete online + offline customer acquisition-follow-up-transaction model.

This model includes new media operations, community operations, user fission and other methods that are often mentioned by institutions. The establishment of the model can help institutions’ marketing and course sales to better collaborate. The key points are as follows:

1. In order to complete the process of customer acquisition and sales, the concept of form resources must be introduced in each process. That is, everything you do must have a way to contact you, such as a phone number, WeChat ID, etc.

2. If online customers cannot come offline, they cannot be considered resources, so offline lectures must exist to take over the resources obtained online.

3. For marketing personnel, the core link is how to build a traffic pool. Whether it is a community or user fission, seed users are needed. Whether it is a paid or free channel depends on how much budget you plan to spend on it.

4. The functions of live open classes and offline lectures are the same, which is to narrow the distance with guests and build trust. but

2. Build an online traffic pool

Let’s take university exam products as an example to talk about the establishment of a traffic pool. First of all, we must know the scenarios of our target customers. What they often use, play, and eat are all what we need to care about. Here we need to extend another Internet concept - user portrait. If we have a chance we will talk about it in more detail. Only when we understand the target group can we find the right channels for delivery and promotion.

Here I have sorted out the online promotional channels that may be used by university examination products. Different types of products will have different channels.

1. Building a traffic pool model is crucial for a traditional educational institution. It not only helps the institution better sort out customer acquisition channels, but also helps managers allocate market budgets. And formulate corresponding performance appraisal.

2. A number of channels that can acquire seed users must be selected in the traffic pool to facilitate subsequent fission at a lower cost.

3. Principles, methods and techniques of fission

Anyone who has been working in the Internet industry for 18 years and does not know about growth fission is definitely not a qualified Internet person. There are already many ready-made cases of fission, and many educational institutions are using it, including NetEase Xijing and NetEase Fupan Course Fission, and Xueersi’s 1 yuan unlocking course. These are all very good examples of fission growth. Here I need to first give you a brief introduction to the principles and methods of fission.

The above is the evolution of a formula about virus fission in biology. Fission, after all, means that if one user can infect two or more users without interruption, the number of people that can eventually be reached will grow exponentially. This is a nuclear fission-style growth method. However, to satisfy the viral transmission chain, two conditions must be met.

1. Continuously increase the sharing ratio of fission products. The more people who start sharing, the more people will be reached in the end.

2. The number of people that can be brought back by sharing must be greater than 2. Otherwise the chain of virus transmission will be broken. Fission will not exist.

Regarding the sharing ratio of the products provided, this question can be broken down into two points:

1. Make users willing to share

2. Increase sharing points.

The reason why everyone is interested in the method of fission growth is that the cost of acquiring customers will be greatly reduced.

4. The core means of fission

The means of fission growth currently used in the market are nothing more than group buying, bargaining, inviting help, course distribution, etc., and the principles are the same. They all increase sharing and secondary fission by stimulating external interests or internal motivation.

As for which fission method to adopt, it depends on the enrollment period and product content. What we need to pay attention to is that we must not fantasize that fission can be successful once. What we need is to constantly try different fission methods and different fission processes. Constantly adjust the content of fission.

5. Analysis of fission cases and processes

We take Xueersi’s 1 yuan unlocking course as an example to analyze the setting of the entire fission process. This is a case with practical significance. We can think about the following points:

1. The attractiveness of the overall poster design, including the main title, subtitle, lecturer introduction, font size and content division ratio. The design of the poster accounts for more than 50% of the importance of whether the fission can be successful.

2. How many courses are provided when setting the course value? How is the price determined? This is also a crucial factor in fission.

3. The following formula can be applied to a successful fission poster

Fission poster = universal + pain point + psychology + ease of use + famous teacher + group + promotion + overall packaging

You can try looking at the poster below to see if it meets the above points. It is not necessary to meet all of the above points, but at least 5 of them should be met.

6. Use of collaboration tools

Finally, a table for coordination among departments is provided to help managers or marketing personnel better convert transactions. As mentioned earlier, we are an online + offline model, so offline work is also crucial. This form includes the following contents:

1. Time and node control, which can be specifically allocated to the day of the week.

2. Relevant personnel, including network operations (user growth and delivery team), ground marketing team, teacher sales, and managers

3. Budget breakdown, including performance expectations and network delivery costs

4. Assessment of the ROI of the online operation team and the resource conversion rate of sales.

The table content can be adjusted appropriately for different departments and product types. However, the relevant content involved in this form is quite complete, including personnel, budget, channels, and the collaborative process of how to undertake resource resale.

This article hopes to bring new thinking to marketing personnel in some traditional institutions. If the marketing staff of our traditional educational institutions do not make progress, sooner or later such jobs will be replaced.

Author: Yang Jie

Source: Yang Jie