The activities were also carried out, so why was the community still "killed" by the operation?

There are many entrepreneurial teams and companies around me. Once they launch a new product and have a few users, they will create a WeChat group. At the beginning, they are very enthusiastic and interact in the group every day, send red envelopes, and organize activities.

But as time went on, there seemed to be no obvious effect, and it didn't seem to help the company's business in any obvious way. The relevant statistics were also appalling, so gradually, the operators lost heart and the community came to an end. You can see how many of your WeChat groups have basically died out in the end.

Statistics show that the proportion of a person’s WeChat groups that have sunk can reach almost 70%. (I forgot whether it was data from iResearch or somewhere else, but I have this impression, but it may not be rigorous. If anyone knows, please correct me.)

Why on earth does this happen? I think in most cases, people simply haven’t thought clearly about the community itself.

If you are a long-term practitioner and observer in the operations industry, I believe you must have read a lot of articles about communities, including technical means, fission tools, operations skills, etc., but we will not discuss these details in this article. There should be many related articles. I recommend that you look for them in relevant professional media.

Note: Communities are generally divided into the following categories:

For the sake of rigor, the communities referred to in this article mainly refer to WeChat groups and QQ groups, and only the second type of community classification above is discussed. Other types of communities are not within the scope of discussion for now, but the principles are basically the same.

What role does the community play?

Recently, many operators have been criticizing operators in the industry and like to make up terms. That’s right: private domain traffic is the one that is criticized the most. In fact, if we apply this concept, the community belongs to private domain traffic.

• Public domain traffic generally refers to: users who come through television, advertisements, flyers, and platforms and leave after they finish consuming.
• Private domain traffic generally refers to: through the means of landing, users are accumulated into a certain traffic pool to maintain continuous contact with users.

And the community is an important traffic pool tool for private domain traffic. In this traffic pool, your product or brand can be:

1. Mainstream: The role of the community is just like the exhibitions or industry summits in traditional industries. No matter how popular your product is when you advertise on the streets, you will appear niche and alternative in the huge public domain traffic. As long as you cannot arouse a common discussion among a group, you will not be able to become mainstream. In a community, people with the same attributes gather together. Even if you operate a community for men's oral contraceptives, your product will become mainstream.

2. Accurate: If you strictly abide by the relevant operating standards in the initial stage of attracting new members when the community is founded, the accuracy of your crowd will far exceed other public domain traffic. However, once accuracy is involved, the initial volume will inevitably not increase. This is actually the most worrying thing for many community operators . The KPI is there, and how you strike a balance between accuracy and quantity is actually very important , but it is not the focus of this article, so I won’t go into details.

3. Exclusive: I believe that if you talk about Xiaomi in the Hammer friends group and talk about Ronaldo in the Barcelona group, there is no need to say what the result will be, right? The exclusivity of the community will infinitely magnify your advantages. Once you have such an advantage, it will be easy for you to jump out of the "joint evaluation status" (please search this concept directly on Baidu. I first saw it in Li Jiaoshou's article and I quote it here) . You are unique and incomparable!

4. Diversified landing: On Tmall, you can only land on stores; on search engines, you can only land on HTML sites; the landing methods on Douyin, official accounts, and Toutiao are also limited, but the landing methods on social networks are diverse. As long as the means are reasonable, users can connect with your product in almost any way you design. (In fact, this is the greatest value of the community, but the confusion and complexity brought about by diversity have made it difficult to quickly get started with this operating system.)

You see, the above is correct nonsense!

After talking about the nonsense, let’s get to the point.

How a "rough guy" from a traditional industry plays with WeChat groups

If you often read my articles, you should know that I may be a typical foodie, but today I won’t brag about how many interesting restaurants I have eaten in.

Among all my years of being a foodie, there is only one restaurant that left a deep impression on me. It made me realize that there are such "operation experts" in traditional industries.

It was my first time to go to this barbecue restaurant. When I was checking out, the boss told me: Add me on WeChat to join the group and you can get a 10% discount. When I calculated, a 10% discount could save me more than 30 yuan, which is also the same as a cup of Starbucks. I have to save this money. So I added my boss’ WeChat and was immediately added to the WeChat group.

At this point, the first step of attracting new customers has been completed.

Step one: Attract new customers very accurately, all of whom are paying users. Although it may be slow, traditional business does not actually require exponential fission. After all, the reception capacity is limited, so take it slow.

This boss has a very good understanding of his business model and industry. The rapid growth of social media users is of no use to his business model.

I originally planned to quit the group the next day. After all, quitting the group as soon as I leave the house would make me look like a bad person! As a result, I couldn't sit still as soon as I got home. This boss kept posting pictures of their new seafood hotpot dish, mainly pictures of the raw materials, the processing process, and the finished product. After the boss finished posting, different diners started posting pictures in the group, and they all showed the same dish... It's too obvious that this is a scam, right? But it does look enviable.

As soon as a new dish is launched, a group of people start posting pictures non-stop. This is similar to reading reviews with pictures when you go to a Taobao store to buy something. It is very effective in increasing conversion rates.

So I asked a price, how much! The boss told me that those who came from the group paid 168 yuan per portion! If I don't go, I'd be doing a disservice to my weight which is the same as my height!

The next day, I took my wife over and said we were from the group. I also gave them two cans of dark beer for free. However, if they wanted to get a 10 yuan discount on the bill, they had to take a photo of the dish and post it in the group. I finally understood what was going on with those shills in the group, so naturally, I became one as well, and I didn’t know how many users I would convert.

Step 2: Conversion. Since the initial new customer acquisition was accurate enough, plus the pictures of the new dishes were well matched, and the agents were very cooperative in distributing the dishes, the conversion was quite good.

Later I thought this group was interesting, so I lurked there for a long time, and then even more outrageous things happened. The group owner started to send red envelopes in the group every day, and the person with the best luck would receive 2 free oysters when dining on that day.

If the qualification is not needed, it must be transferred. If transferred, 10 red envelopes of 5 yuan will be required. You see, even if you don’t go out to dine, you can actually get red envelopes every day. You know, not everyone is making a million dollars a year, so the more red envelopes you can get, the better!

The third step: retention, it’s done, by sending out red envelopes every day and giving away dishes, we can establish high-frequency links with everyone and form user retention.

You see, in recent years, everyone has been paying attention to the integration of brand and effect. What exactly is the integration of brand and effect? Maybe this boss doesn't understand, but he has done the following things perfectly:

1. Whenever I want to eat barbecue nearby, the first thing I think of is theirs, because the connection between the community and users is so frequent, making people feel that this is a living restaurant. Every day diners update photos, update menus, and give out red envelopes every day. It is hard to forget, and it has achieved the effect of brand promotion.

2. Establish your own private traffic pool. If you go there once, you can save dozens of dollars by grabbing the red envelope of the day in the group. No one’s money comes from the wind. In this way, people who have joined the group will not be willing to leave! If you have any impression, you will remember that due to various reasons such as demolition, many old stores suddenly disappeared. If there was the concept of community at the beginning, it might be just a matter of sending a message in the group!

3. Once you want to consume, just make an appointment in the group. For three people at 7pm, the boss will reserve a seat for you and notify you half an hour in advance. You see, this is simply VIP service!

Wait, after saying so much, you will definitely say, we actually also know how to use these tricks! That’s right, I’m not telling you these tricks at all. The important content has just begun.

Why can he do this, but you can't do it by following these routines?

In fact, when building a community, you must know the following things

1. Community is a strategic weapon

This community is run by the boss himself. Half of his daily work is store work, and the other half is the operation and maintenance of the community. It is fully guaranteed that the boss will personally promote and execute this project. For example, discounts, gifts, and new products are often just something they decide on on the spur of the moment and are not necessarily thought through clearly. If the above work was given to the store waiters who were half-hearted, it would have been a failure long ago!

So, what level of weapon is your company’s community? Is it enough to rise to the strategic level? Just a few WeChat groups dare to talk about strategic weapons? You must be surprised! Dear, this is private domain traffic! This is the same as advertising on Baidu, Toutiao, and WeChat Moments. Isn't that enough to attract the boss's attention?

My suggestion is that due to the special nature of communities, when you are setting up a community, you must not have a playful attitude, otherwise it will eventually come to nothing. If you want to do it, do it well. (This is also the reason why I still don’t dare to play with the reader group)

1. Products are the foundation of the community

This is nonsense that almost everyone knows. If the barbecue taste of this restaurant is not up to average, I guess I would quit the group that day. After all, foodies are not so easy to fool. But the key to the problem is that there are always people who have the whimsical idea of ​​making up for the shortcomings of the product through superb operational means. There are too many such entrepreneurs in this circle. I believe you have seen this news in the past few days.

Here is a small example:

• A product community I used to join always asks everyone to check in. In fact, there is nothing wrong with checking in. The question is what benefits can checking in provide to users? If you just complete your KPI, and you don’t pay your users, why?
• Also, in the BETA version, the seed users were grouped together, which was just terrible. The community simply became a group of trolls. Even if it was for users to give feedback on problems, it couldn't be done this way, right? Do you really think that small companies don’t have their own brands?

1. High frequency of contact adds points to the community

Catering itself is a high-frequency consumption, so the community makes it possible for every touch to be realized, and this is the appeal of this community operation. If you are running a fan community for a certain brand of mobile phones, you may hold two press conferences a year and release four new mobile phones. It seems that the nature of the community is exactly the same. So, what solutions do you have for solving the problem of low-frequency reach?

In fact, the solution is what we said above, diversified implementation. Since we can’t always have products, is it possible to have offline activities, CEO face-to-face meetings, or fan festivals? Of course, this goes back to the first question above: can you operate the community as a strategic weapon?

postscript

This article discusses how WeChat groups are operated through the three key nodes of how operators in traditional industries achieve: attracting new customers, conversion, and retention. In fact, it is still the same old way. There is nothing new under the sun, but the degree of execution is different. I hope it will be useful to you.

In fact, by sharing cases from traditional industries, I hope that everyone can see the application of operational knowledge in different industries from these cases that are everywhere around us. In fact, there is no need to copy other people's models and routines. Differences in industries, timing, and degree of execution will lead to a huge difference in results, but as long as it attracts your attention and makes you think, then the purpose is achieved!

Source: Barley