How can educational products attract new users?

For a long time, I have always believed that the growth of online education must be driven by products first, with teaching and research being king.

Later I realized that it was too one-sided.

In particular, we have carefully studied some players in the field of online education: for example, GSX, which created a product that was as fast as the Blue Cup in terms of listing speed, and Yuanfudao, which poses a serious threat to the two giants of education and training. There are also many online education upstarts that people are familiar with, optimistic about, and even praise.

I found that teaching products are indeed the foundation and the prerequisite, but not the core (unless there is a disruptive innovative model or technology). Instead, they are a ticket to ensure that online education players can enter the market. As for if they want to gain a foothold in the market, they still have to rely on operations, especially attracting new customers.

After all, anyone can say that they are the best in terms of teachers, teaching research, experience, etc., but it still requires users to judge.

The users have the final say. The more users there are, especially the more users who say good things about you, the stronger the brand will be, the better it will develop, and the more likely it is that the products will be replaced and upgraded.

So, where do users come from? Did I find you myself?

Obviously not, it depends on attracting new users and operations, whether it is a cold start or expanding the scale.

Therefore, before new species emerge that change the industry, new customer acquisition operations are the key to determining the life or death of an online education company.

1. A reasonable framework for attracting new users

When it comes to attracting new users, most people think that the method is very simple. They think that it is just to try every possible way to obtain traffic through a certain channel in a paid or free way. It is something that can be done as long as you have money and resources.

This idea is totally wrong, because attracting new customers requires not only investment and resources, but also testing and operations. It is a systematic project with reasonable methods and effective framework.

However, every person and every company will have different views on how to attract new customers and the process of doing so.

As for online education, learning how to use the Internet companies’ process of attracting new customers may be a better choice.

What is the process?

It is a user growth framework called "bull's eye". Simply put, it is to determine the new user acquisition channels step by step like a shooting target and put them into operation.

This framework consists of three steps:

List the outer ring -> test the middle ring -> establish the inner ring

Next, I will briefly introduce how this "bull's eye" framework can help online education companies attract new users .

1. List the outer ring

The purpose of this step is to find all possible channels for attracting new customers. You can list them by yourself or through group brainstorming, and then evaluate and screen these channels separately.

The outer ring channels must be listed completely and no channel should be missed. Even if it is a channel you have never used, as long as it is used by competitors or other industries, you can list it and then remove it one by one.

Only by listing the channels completely enough can we avoid missing out on the best possible channels, strive to overcome prejudice, and not subjectively block some channels. Instead, we should decide which channels should enter the middle ring test through group discussion and in-depth thinking.

2. Test the intermediate ring

The purpose of this step is to further narrow down the scope of suitable channels by conducting low-cost tests on the channels screened out by the outer ring, in preparation for determining the real core channels.

When testing different channels, do not waste time doing them separately, but do them at the same time, otherwise your attention will be easily distracted. When doing it specifically, you can choose different methods, such as the a/b test that everyone hears most often.

Regardless of the method used, three questions need to be answered to determine whether a channel is effective:

• What is the acquisition cost?
• How much quantity to get?
• Are the target users being acquired?

Based on the answers to these three questions, you can basically determine whether a channel is suitable for you. Of course, more accurate results still need to be evaluated through test data. This is the basic principle of the middle ring test.

3. Establish the inner circle

After screening through the outer and middle rings, several relatively effective channels will remain.

These channels are the core channels for your user growth in the future, and all operations management will revolve around these core channels.

Among the several channels in the inner ring, one channel must be in a core position, that is, the channel with the best test effect in the middle ring. What you need to do is to "squeeze" the effect of this channel as much as possible.

As for the method, it is continuous experimentation, continuous adjustment, and continuous iteration.

Start with all the details. As for other channels, don't pay too much attention to them, but take them into consideration. The most important thing is to try your best to make good use of the most core channels.

The above is the growth framework you need to use to attract new users. Although it feels a bit empty, it is actually a very clear method.

For example: An online education player thought of 10 channels, which is the outer ring. After in-depth evaluation, 5 channels were identified to enter the middle ring, such as search, soft articles, Moments, communities, and local promotion.

After testing, it was found that the offline promotion effect was poor and the search cost was high, so the remaining three channels can be established as the inner ring, that is, the core channels.

After further testing, we found that soft articles were the most effective, so we started to use them as the main channel for operations and officially entered the stage of attracting new customers.

2. 19 Commonly Used Channels for Attracting New Customers

Although the bull's-eye framework can make attracting new customers easy, if you don't know all the channels, the effect may be greatly reduced. The following is a list of 19 channels commonly used in online education. This article will not introduce these channels in detail, but only list them. Readers can research and understand them on their own.

1. Soft advertising: advertising is placed in a non-obtrusive way, in the form of soft articles posted on official accounts, text or videos of product recommendations posted by Weibo bloggers, etc.
2. Mass media: Reports are conducted by education industry media, such as submissions, interviews, newspapers, television, and exposure through online channels controlled by the media;
3. Creative operations: Activities around product launches that allow users to participate and provide corresponding rewards, such as selection, voting, h5, and hot topics;
4. Search engine marketing: placing advertisements on search engines with huge traffic, such as Baidu and 360, mainly by purchasing keywords;
5. Online promotion: display advertising space used by high-traffic platforms, including social media advertising, information flow advertising, and short video advertising;
6. Offline promotion: refers to promotion in offline scenarios. The most common method is ground promotion, which also includes advertising placement in all offline scenarios that users can see.
7. Search engine optimization: that is, optimizing the content and links of web pages to increase the chances of being searched by users and captured by the system;
8. Content marketing: Publishing educational content on vertical platforms, which can be practical information, chicken soup, text, or video;
9. Push: It refers to email marketing abroad. In fact, SMS, app push reminders, WeChat QQ chat friends, and public account template messages all belong to this channel;
10. Fission: embed a recommendation mechanism into the product to induce user dissemination, such as public account fission, community fission, app fission, etc.
11. Mini Program Marketing: Provides free high-frequency application tools for users to use. Online education often provides photo search tools and question banks.
12. Business development: Cooperate with other companies whose businesses are complementary to each other, such as mutual promotion, content cooperation, or cross-border marketing;
13. Direct marketing: user leads obtained through other channels, which are contacted and converted by sales staff. The most common method is telemarketing.
14. Distribution: Agents recommend customers and give commissions after the transaction. The most common system is the promoter system, and channel dealers also belong to this channel;
15. Platform traffic: Educational channels in all high-traffic platforms, including educational applications in app stores and educational channels on e-commerce platforms;
16. Exhibitions: including enterprise exhibitions and user exhibitions, such as family education exhibitions, college entrance examination exhibitions, education festivals, etc.
17. Offline activities: Offline activities with shorter duration and smaller scale, such as teacher-student meet-ups, offline reading clubs, etc.
18. Offline lectures: user-oriented lectures focusing on industry pain points, such as family education lectures and entrance policy lectures;
19. Community: A seed user community gathered through other channels, which is used as a basis for launching a series of new user acquisition strategies.

Conclusion

A reasonable framework for attracting new online education users: list the outer ring -> test the middle ring -> establish the inner ring, called the "bull's eye".

19 channels for attracting new online education users: soft advertising, mass media, creative operations, search engine marketing, online promotion, offline promotion, search engine optimization, content marketing, push, fission, mini program marketing, business development, direct sales, distribution, platform traffic, exhibitions, offline activities, offline lectures, and communities.

Related reading:

1. User operation: What else can you do to attract new users without fission users?

2. How to attract new users through WeChat promotion operations?

3. What are the methods and means for new media operations to attract new users?

4. Growth case analysis: How to attract new users?

5. How to make an executable plan to attract new users?

6. Operational methodology: How to attract new users?

Author: Dugushang

Source: Wild Operation Community (id: dugu9bubai)