In the process of community operation , some brand merchants often work for three days and rest for two days due to the lack of scientific and systematic methodology, which leads to poor community activity, low conversion rate and easy user inactivity.

How should companies solve these problems? Establishing a standardized community operation SOP can effectively increase community activity and improve the overall efficiency of community operations. Today, we will share with you how to build high-quality private communities and increase community activity.

01. Why are brands building communities?

1) Sediment private domain customers and accumulate own traffic pool

Traffic will only become more and more expensive. If a company does not have its own traffic pool and relies solely on advertising, it will be difficult to compete with leading companies in terms of capital investment. Relying on advertising to make profits will also lead to lower and lower profit margins for companies, as revenue will stop if advertising stops.

Competition between enterprises is becoming increasingly fierce, and a company’s private community is the moat that enables the company to develop in the long run.

2) Connect with customers, continuously optimize products and operations. In the era of traditional brand marketing, brands are very far away from consumers, and there are dealers and stores between brands and consumers. It is difficult for customers to convey their feedback on products to the brand.

If a brand establishes its own community, users only need to say something in the group, and the community operators will receive direct feedback. Brands can also initiate questionnaire surveys, new product testing and other activities directly in the group, and optimize the company's products and operations through direct connections with consumers.

3) Convert customers in batches to improve ROI. According to our actual operating results, one community operations manager can operate 100-150 groups, covering 30,000-50,000 users. By establishing standard SOPs and FAQ documents, the number of users covered can even reach 100,000-200,000.

4) Cultivate loyal and KOC users

For users, joining a group is not only a link with the brand, but also a link with other consumers. The defensive mentality of joining a group will not be particularly strong. The relationship connection based on the community gives users a feeling of "being one of our own", which makes it easier to enhance the stickiness between users and brands.

There are more and more homogeneous products. The more choices customers have, the lower their loyalty will be. Community operations increase the contact points and interaction frequency with customers, allowing customers to remember you and continue to consume your products.

02. Which brands and products are suitable for community building?

Which companies are suitable for community building? We judge based on customer attributes and product attributes respectively.

1) From the perspective of customer attributes :

① The number of customers is huge, and it is difficult to provide timely and efficient services to customers by relying on one-to-one services, such as catering and daily chemical brands. ②Customer needs are clear and unified, and pre-sales service costs are low (no in-depth pre-sales consultation and service are required). This is common in low-priced, high-frequency consumer products, such as fresh food e-commerce, travel services, and daily necessities. ③ The customer repurchase cycle is short, the purchase frequency is high, and users are highly sensitive to price. This type of brand is suitable for creating welfare groups and membership groups to increase private domain repurchases.

2) From the perspective of product attributes :

① Standardized products, no need for creative or personalized customization. ② Products with relatively low average order value and low decision-making threshold. ③ Products with certain social topic attributes, such as beauty products and medical beauty products. ④ Products that need to use the community to provide in-depth services and answer questions, or the company itself needs the community to connect with customers and listen to their voices.

For example, brands such as Luckin Coffee, Nayuki Tea, and Starbucks are all building communities because the catering category is very suitable for building communities regardless of its customer attributes or product attributes.

03 After the entire process of private domain community planning and construction has clarified the need to operate the community, how should brand merchants build and operate the community?

1) Clarify the community type based on the operational objectives

There are many ways to classify communities. Today we will share three classifications of private domain communities that we have summarized through practice.

① Brand welfare group——Strong sales

Brand welfare groups are suitable for high-frequency, easy-to-decision products. During the operation process, they generally focus less on interaction and more on promotion.

Common ones include flash sale groups, rush purchase groups, membership groups, and store groups . For example, there are welfare groups for picture books, welfare groups for brand shopping malls, and welfare groups for chain supermarkets. They will regularly push coupon information and promotional activities to guide user consumption.

② Service-oriented community: service-oriented

Service-oriented communities are suitable for products with relatively high prices, high decision-making costs, and high difficulty of use. During the operation process, we focus on service rather than marketing.

Common ones include course learning groups, practical information exchange groups, industry exchange groups, resource link groups, and after-sales service groups. For example, the IELTS course service group, the marketing tool after-sales service group, and the decoration service group are all service-oriented communities.

③ Interest exchange group - focus on emotional exchange

In the process of operating interest exchange groups, companies should pay attention to the introduction of topics and interactive guidance, and the atmosphere within the group must be in place.

For example, sports exchange groups, beauty exchange groups, mother and baby exchange groups, and travel exchange groups. Brand merchants need to choose which major group to join based on their own brand situation, and then finalize specific subcategories.

In addition, we need to see the complexity of community attributes. The same community may have multiple attributes. For example, after purchasing a maternal and infant product, you enter the brand's official social group. This group is likely to have the dual attributes of a brand welfare group and a maternal and infant communication group.

2) The whole process of private domain community planning and construction

① Community planning and writing: building a community operation framework

• Clarify community positioning and core value points

In this step, we need to clearly define what type of community we want to build and list the core value points of this community. All subsequent marketing plans within the community will be based on the community positioning.

For example, we hope to establish a deep connection with customers through the community and increase repeat purchases. You can set up a brand welfare group. The core value points of this group are welfare discounts, member day flash sales, and after-sales service.

• Develop community content planning

Community content can be mainly divided into several categories, including community norms content, valuable content, product marketing content, etc.

Community norms content : Clarify community norms and red lines to let users know what they can and cannot do in the group.

Practical value content : This type of content provides core value points to users and is strongly related to the users’ own interests. For example, in a beauty exchange group, the most valuable information is skin care and beauty teaching knowledge.

Product marketing content : This type of content is strongly linked to marketing conversions, such as new product discounts, limited-time benefits, and membership activities, all of which belong to the product marketing direction.

User interactive content : If a community wants to remain active over the long term, it must include interactive content, such as quick questions and answers, lucky draws for red envelopes, and chain subscriptions.

After-sales service content : such as upgraded services, logistics consulting, and return and exchange processing, the corresponding scripts and process designs must be formulated in advance.

Community culture/value-based content : The activity and conversion of a community are linked to the stickiness between users and the community. A community with its own group values ​​and cultural atmosphere will leave a deeper impression on customers.

After formulating the content plan, in the actual community operation, you need to plan the community operation content for one week in advance, and then be precise to the morning, noon and evening of each day, and decide what type of content to push, to form a community push table. A coffee brand created a community SOP framework (scan the QR code at the bottom of the article to get the full content)

For example, our private domain operation project team helped a coffee brand to build a community SOP framework. The type of content to be pushed at each time point was planned in advance, such as pushing good morning + coupon information in the morning and hot-selling recommendations at noon.

When it comes to a single week, the copy pushed within the community will also be written in advance. The push copy from Monday to Sunday will be convenient for direct push using mass customer group messaging in daily operations.

• Determine community personnel planning

Group management personnel and division of labor, such as Naixue’s group announcement, which provides a detailed introduction to the members of the group, so that users know who to contact to solve what problem? Among them, the store manager and Xiaonai are partners of the store. Nai Xiaoxue provides online service support. When the store is busy, Nai Xiaoxue can provide support online.

The atmosphere group is responsible for creating an active group atmosphere. They are mainly responsible for guiding the rhythm of the community and creating the atmosphere. According to our operational experience, a group should have at least 3-5 accounts that are controllable within the enterprise, which are used for daily activities within the group, responding to communication topics, and controlling the group atmosphere.

Community KOC, community key opinion leader, has professional knowledge or strong social skills. He is a non-official but authoritative person.

Group KOCs are either directly invited into the group in the early stages of operation or grow up during the group operation process. For example, Xiaoliebian set up a private domain communication group and invited many private domain big names to take charge. These private domain big names are authoritative and influential.

Brands can pay more attention to active users in the group, encourage group users to speak and interact, and actively cultivate KOCs.

Ordinary group members, finally, ordinary group members, the company needs to determine the size of the group, whether it is a group of 200 or a large group of 500. According to our operating experience, we do not recommend that you form a group of 500 people, but rather a group of about 200 people, which will be better in terms of user activity and user management difficulty.

• Determine community value incentives

Discounts and benefits : Which products have discounts? How much discount? How often are discounts offered? Additional prizes : Which products can be used as additional prizes? Such as brand peripherals. Honor incentives : Honorary titles and incentives that can be given to users. For example, honorary titles include skin care expert, beauty expert, and selfless sharer. For example, you can create a ranking of the top 20 most active users in the community and give rewards to users. You can also make formal commendations within the group on a regular basis, giving both honors and prize incentives.

3) Build a community: Implement community planning

① Create a group and set a community name. The group name must contain brand information. The group name cannot exceed 12 characters, otherwise the display will be incomplete. For multiple groups, there must be group numbers or obvious location marks so that operators can distinguish them. Emoji expressions can be added appropriately to the group name, but not too many.

For example, the JD Fresh and McDonald's groups in the picture below are not fully displayed in the chat list because their names are relatively long. The other groups, Qia Qia Guazi, Nayuki, and Oriental Selection welfare groups, basically meet the standards for community names.

② Set the group welcome message and group announcement content. After the community is established, you need to configure the group welcome message and group announcement as soon as possible.

The welcome message is automatically pushed to new users when they join the group. In the welcome message, it is recommended that you explain the positioning and core value points of the community to give users an intuitive understanding of the group's value . The welcome message can be accompanied by posters, mini-program links, text links, and other content, and can be configured according to the needs of the enterprise. When setting up group announcements , you can introduce the core values ​​of the community, explain the division of labor within the group, and the red line rules of the group. Whether it is a welcome message or a group announcement, try to present the core value information within one screen of the mobile phone.

③ Set group rules and community red lines. Through group announcements + group welcome messages, clarify the rules and red lines of the community.

Generally speaking, the red lines of social rules are as follows: involving pornography, gambling, drugs and political sensitivity, spreading false information; adding friends privately; sending irrelevant advertising information and links.

④Group member settings

The group administrator, group KOC, "atmosphere group" and ordinary members are in place. After completing the settings of the above three steps, we invite the group administrator to join the group. At this time, the community has completed the basic construction and can start to attract traffic. During the process of attracting traffic, you can arrange for "atmosphere group" members to join the group, invite big names to join the group, etc.

04. Brand community SOP writing and practice

1) Community new member acquisition

① Omni-channel traffic diversion to enhance traffic attraction

After deciding to start private domain community operations, we need to sort out the company's resource list, switch the private domain's traffic points to communities, or import them into communities after adding friends.

In the process of diversion, the core thing we need to do is to package the community value , that is, to package the positioning and core values ​​that we have determined in the community planning stage.

②Advertising and social media traffic exchange

Similarly, if the company does not have too many resources of its own to divert traffic in the short term, we can also use the form of investment or exchange promotion to do the first wave of traffic diversion.

③Group customer acquisition activities

The last part is to use group customer acquisition activities to quickly acquire new customers. You can see that JD Fresh, Daily Limited, Dingdong Maicai and other fresh food e-commerce platforms that mainly operate through community are all doing online customer acquisition activities. Let me show you a group customer acquisition activity of a fresh food e-commerce platform.

The prize for the event is oranges. Users generate and share their own exclusive posters and invite other friends around them to join the group. Only 8 people are needed to join the group to receive a free orange. After the oranges arrive, post pictures in the group and receive other benefits.

④Activate and import old groups

Many companies have many WeChat groups or previously dormant groups. These groups can be activated by sending red envelopes to mobilize dormant customers and direct them to new groups.

You can also announce the super benefits and value of the new group in the old group to attract still active users to switch to the new group. For example, New Oriental’s new live e-commerce project, Oriental Selection, is aimed at attracting traffic within New Oriental’s original education community.

2) Community retention

①Sign in and punch in

Community check-in is a common retention method, such as signing in to get points, signing in to draw prizes, signing in to unlock gifts , etc. Brands can initiate check-in activities based on their own mini-programs, member micro-mall, points mall, and check-in mini-programs. ② Community content output

The content value of the community is the direct reason for user retention . In the retention stage of the private domain, the community must regularly output valuable content. Avoid content that is only conversion-oriented.

For example, tutorials on how to use the product, interesting knowledge, and the latest information are all directions for producing valuable content.

For example, JD Fresh opens a column called "Xiaoxian Kitchen" in the group every day to share recipes in the group and attach purchase links for the corresponding ingredients, which instantly creates a consumption scenario for users.

③ Social interaction topics

Highly active communities often have high retention. In addition to signing in and outputting valuable content, it is also a common way of operation to appropriately raise relevant topics within the group and guide user interaction and discussion.

During the interactive process, the "atmosphere group" can play a very good role in livening up the atmosphere. ④ Gamification content

Community mini-games are also a way to improve retention. For example, simple third-party mini-games, mini-games developed based on one’s own mini-program mall, etc., can all improve private domain activity and retention.

Even if there is no technical support in the short term, you can still do some guessing activities, quizzes with prizes, and activities such as posting orders and getting gifts in the group.

3) Community conversion

①Conversion of new members into the group

This is common in e-commerce, catering, and retail companies. For example, in McDonald’s community, users are directly pushed links to the mini program after joining the group. Miniso guides users to the company’s WeChat account to receive coupons and place orders. ② Daily operation conversion

We will not go into detail about daily operational conversions here. We will carry out daily push and operations based on the product marketing content in the community content planning we did earlier.

③ Marketing node conversion

The last is the conversion of specific marketing nodes, such as March 8th, May 1st, June 18th, Double 11th, and New Year’s Festival, which can increase the intensity of discounts and the frequency of reach.

④ Flash mob group conversion

The fourth type is flash group conversion.

A flash group refers to directing users to a community, making deals through a quick sales method, and then quickly disbanding the community after the sales are completed. Flash groups are very suitable for making bulk deals because of their fast operating rhythm and short time.

From the user's perspective, the process of a flash group is that the user sees the event poster, scans the code to join the group, receives the rules of the event after joining the group, waits for the product to be released, and purchases the product after it is officially released.

From the perspective of the organizer, the entire flash group sales process begins with the confirmation of group rights. Whether joining the group is for discounted purchases, limited-time flash sales, or additional gift rights, this must be made clear. Then build the community and configure the group announcements, group welcome messages, and group members.

The next step is to open up all channels for community traffic. After users join the group, it is necessary to maintain the activity of the group and emphasize the time of the official release to users. For a normal flash group, it will not take more than a week from group creation to sale, because users’ attention is limited.

After entering the official sales stage, the official announcement will be made on time, and discounted purchases and sales will be made.

Finally, the day after the release, you can wrap up the group, disband the community, or preview the next event.

4) Establishment of community anti-harassment mechanism

The corporate WeChat community has a built-in anti-harassment function. Group administrators enter the community management page and click on anti-harassment. Here you can create new anti-harassment rules. In the anti-advertising link, users who send random pictures and links in the group can be kicked out directly, and users whose nicknames contain keywords can also be kicked out. It can also prevent screen spamming and prevent employees from other companies from joining the group.

You can also customize the way to kick people out, whether to warn the user, kick them out directly, warn and kick them out, or give the user three chances and then kick them out after three chances. In addition, users can be permanently blacklisted and prohibited from joining the company's corporate community.

It should be noted that when kicking out a user, the official must speak out in the group to let other users know that the advertising party has been kicked out, which serves as a warning.

5) Summary of frequently asked questions in the community

Collect common questions from the community and compile a script document based on these questions, such as product Q&A, discount information, after-sales service, etc.

It not only helps to unify service standards and improve operational efficiency, but also facilitates synchronous work and the transfer of community operation work.

Private domain operations are becoming more and more professional and refined. As one of the key points of corporate private domain operations, community operations also need to be more standardized and standardized to achieve more efficient community operations and more sustainable and stable community conversions. In addition, community operation is a comprehensive and systematic matter, which requires accumulating more experience in daily operational practices and continuously iterating methods based on customer feedback.