How to gain customers through Douyin promotion for online education!

Probably because it’s summer vacation, I can always see some educational ads on Douyin recently, such as “【Limited time grab】Summer class 50 yuan for 15 classes”, “Summer improvement class for primary and junior high school students, online classes taught by teachers who graduated from Peking University in Chinese”, “Fans benefits, two classes taught by real foreign teachers”…

It can be felt that compared with a few months ago, the number of educational advertisements on the Douyin platform has increased significantly during the summer vacation. As expected, what awaits you during the summer vacation is not only endless homework, but also educational institutions that "care" about how you finish your homework!

Relevant data shows that from the end of 2018 to the first half of 2019, more than 1,500 online education companies, including dozens of leading companies, began to concentrate on placing information flow advertisements on Douyin. In addition, data from Xinbang Academy also shows that the number of education advertisers on Douyin has increased by an average of 325% per month, and the consumption of information flow ads has increased by an average of 762% per month.

Douyin is "occupied" by online education company advertisements

2. Why is online education flocking to Douyin?

In May this year, WeChat banned the “inducement to check in” in Moments. For online education, this means that the previous "fission marketing" traffic-generating method is no longer effective. The traffic dividend of WeChat Moments has passed, but the cost of acquiring customers remains high, which forces the industry to seek new high ground for traffic growth.

At this time, the TikTok short video platform with one billion users a year came into the sight of online education and gradually evolved into a new battlefield for online education to compete for traffic and users. It can be seen that both emerging educational startups and large and medium-sized education and training companies have turned their marketing positions to Douyin, including well-known educational institutions such as New Oriental, TAL Education, Wall Street English, Liulishuo, and Zuoyebang. Making money on Douyin has become an industry consensus.

In addition to the huge traffic dividend, the performance advertisements placed by online education companies on Douyin also achieved a high conversion rate. According to incomplete statistics, 51Talk Children's English has 1.002 million fans and 1.562 million likes; New Oriental and its subordinate matrix Douyin accounts have more than 1 million fans and more than 2 million likes; Zuoyebang has more than 600,000 fans and more than 700,000 likes; Offcn Education has 442,000 fans and 2.089 million likes...

According to the marketing director of an online education unicorn company, Douyin contributed 60% to the company's overall customer acquisition in the 2019 summer enrollment alone.

Next, let’s discuss the educational accounts on Douyin through some Douyin cases that have quickly gained followers, and see how these accounts use Douyin to acquire customers. What are their operational strategies?

There are many educational accounts on Douyin, covering parent-child family education, vocational education, knowledge payment and other different directions. After analyzing and summarizing some of the more popular accounts, the following tips are summarized.

(1) Presentation of highlights of the class

In this fragmented era, people's reading habits are also tending to be fast-paced. This type of short video uses editing to "fragment the dissemination" of knowledge points, focusing on the essence of the class, which can better arouse the interest of potential users and achieve the purpose of attracting fans.

For example, Wendu Education Institution edits and publishes the teaching videos of existing teachers. Some of the content can get hundreds of thousands of likes from netizens.

Screenshot of the video on this account

(2) Explain the knowledge points in the form of pictures, texts or animations

This type of short video appears in the form of cartoon characters or pictures, and uses a vivid and interesting way to directly convey knowledge points, which is easy to understand and remember, but the amount of knowledge output within the effective time is relatively small.

For example, "English for Dummies", which focuses on teaching English words, helps users remember English words quickly and permanently in an interesting and easy-to-remember way by constructing animated scenes similar to English words, which has attracted the attention of many fans.

Screenshot of the video on this account

(3) Real people appear on screen and explain knowledge points in various situations

While real people appear directly on screen, the story is combined with a certain plot and various situations to tell knowledge points. This kind of real-life + plot video viewing experience is better.

For example: "Elite Education" usually uses the problems encountered during student life as the entry point, and shoots Douyin videos with plots such as "The love-hate relationship between the math teacher and the physical education teacher" and "Why the physical education teacher is always sick". It guides topics based on the interests of students and creates interesting content, which successfully attracts users to watch and receives tens of thousands of likes.

(4) Scarcity and systematic knowledge sharing

With the continuous influx of content creators and the increasingly perfect short video ecosystem, users' demands have also changed accordingly. In addition to killing leisure time, Douyin users' usage preferences have shifted from "simple viewing" to "deep exploration", and attention allocation has reached an important level of supplementing knowledge and learning skills.

For example, the Douyin account "Teacher Xiang Bo" mainly analyzes various little-known facts in a popular and easy-to-understand format, which has firmly captured the attention of users. As of the date of publication, the number of fans has reached 6.18 million.

(5) Combined with hot spots

This hot spot can be the popular BGM, topic or challenge on the Douyin platform, combining the latest popular elements with educational content, which is more likely to gain a lot of exposure and quickly attract fans. 

For example, when the song "Uncommon Characters" was popular, the "W2B teacher who teaches Chinese" combined it with Chinese language, teaching the specific writing methods of the uncommon characters in the song, and outputting Chinese language knowledge through the form of songs with a brisk rhythm, which brought a lot of traffic to the account.

Screenshot of the video on this account

(1) Account positioning

Before registering an account, you must think about the positioning of the account and what niche areas you want to focus on when creating content. This is the key to running an account.

In addition to being fast and quickly seizing early dividends; doing a good job of data operations; learning from account operation cases and techniques on other platforms; and combining the user characteristics, dissemination rules and content tone of the Douyin platform.

(2) Cleverly utilize the recommendation mechanism of TikTok

In the era of "two microblogs", traffic is obtained by relying on social relationship chains and content attention, but on the Douyin short video platform, the source of natural traffic is recommendation flow, and the operation methods and content selection have undergone tremendous changes. If you want to better operate your Douyin account, how can you make good use of Douyin’s recommendation algorithm?

1. Master the release time. There is no best time, only the most suitable time.
2. Improve the four indicators of likes, comments, reposts, and completion rate;
3. Actively participating in challenges can increase your chances of being recommended;
4. If the operation continues, maybe the old videos will be recommended after a while.

(3) Establish an account matrix and divert traffic between parent and child accounts

Not only Douyin, but when you create any account on any platform, you must build a matrix, create one big account, and then direct traffic to other small accounts.

If a user is interested in a video, he or she is likely to click on the homepage of another account and swipe up/down a few videos, thereby transferring core users from different accounts and quickly increasing the number of followers in a short period of time.

(4) Account personalization

In the "Short Video and Knowledge Dissemination Research Report", the top 100 knowledge creators in terms of the number of fans were analyzed, and 56 accounts showed obvious signs of personalization.

Creating a personalized account and regularly featuring real people is an effective method, because "showing your face" will allow users to quickly form memories, create a sense of intimacy, and attract users' continued attention.

For example, "Pandora English by Qingke" is shot with the beautiful female English teacher Crystal. The sense of interaction that a real teacher brings to users cannot be replaced by a virtual brand.

Screenshot of the account's homepage

Therefore, if you set the account as a real person and give it personality, users will feel involved when they see the corresponding content and will remember you in a short time.

Although online education companies all know that using TikTok is a wise choice, they still face some challenges and difficulties throughout the entire operation process, such as: the inability to accurately reach the target audience, user stickiness needs to be improved, and it is difficult to achieve brand differentiation and occupy the user's mind.

Faced with such troubles, how should online education companies obtain traffic and achieve efficient customer acquisition in the Douyin ecosystem?

The arrival of the big data era is bound to affect every industry. No matter what industry you are in or the size of your business, as data collection, analysis and interpretation technologies mature and become more popular, no business can avoid their impact. Big data can bring the following impacts to online education:

(1) Insight into user profiles

At present, the competition in online education is so fierce that using big data to analyze user behaviors, interest tags, etc. can help us clearly understand our users, allowing us to hit the target both in video content production and user operations.

(2) Refined content management

Whether it is a peer or a popular video, we need to summarize and analyze the data to see which topics are on the hot search list and whether we can take advantage of the popularity. Only through data can we understand what kind of content can arouse users' interest? How should the content be conveyed so that it can be accepted by users?

This cannot be achieved by feeling alone. In short, everything depends on data. It's that simple.

(3) Full-chain data monitoring

Through real-time monitoring and data analysis of published short videos through big data, each content release not only focuses on video views, likes, comments, reposts, and fan growth, but also focuses on user accumulation and conversion data in order to guide subsequent marketing activities.

In addition to working hard on the video content, the comments must also be maintained properly. Most users will spend a lot of time in the comment section after watching a video. If operators can make detailed responses and interact effectively with users, it can enhance users' sense of belonging and increase user stickiness.

As far as the overall short video presentation format of online education is concerned, there are generally problems such as boring content and high homogeneity. This means that all companies look the same to users, and none of them are particularly attractive to them, which weakens the brand's ability to acquire customers. Therefore, online education must differentiate itself from other brands in terms of content.

Educational accounts must establish their own unique identity in content planning, and create differentiated content from two aspects: their own positioning and building their own content system, so as to occupy the minds of users.

There is still a long way to go for educational accounts to develop good content and marketing and successfully acquire traffic in the future. But it must be admitted that for online education companies, Douyin is a new traffic price depression, and it is becoming more and more a trend for education and training companies to settle in Douyin. Whoever grabs the traffic first will have the opportunity to maximize the benefits.

Therefore, players who have not yet joined Douyin should hurry up and take advantage of the "traffic ride" to create a new world on Douyin.