Operational promotion: How to break the dilemma of weak traffic growth?

As competition in bidding advertising becomes increasingly fierce, information flow delivery and media purchasing have entered deep waters, and traffic traps have become an open unspoken rule in the industry. The cost-effectiveness of traffic purchase and paid delivery to obtain traffic is getting lower and lower. With the downward economic situation in 2019, companies are tightening their budgets and have fewer and fewer operating means available.

How to break the dilemma of weak traffic growth? How to find a new user growth flywheel? This is an issue that has been discussed in the circle recently.

With the prosperity of the O2O industry and the borderless expansion of e-commerce and new retail, scene traffic is being mentioned more and more frequently in actual operations. For example, Meituan’s food delivery business is being promoted in business districts, unmanned cargo containers are expanding into office buildings, and JD.com and Suning are testing community convenience stores, all of which are active explorations of offline scenarios. Judging from the current main business forms, offline and online businesses cannot be separated. Deepening the research on business scenarios will help enterprises to connect business scenarios and achieve a soft landing of core businesses offline.

I have been obsessed with growth hacker theory recently. In the process of sharing scene traffic operations, I will also combine some growth hacker theories.

New user acquisition growth pole: scene traffic

Generally speaking, students who work in operations will position themselves into one of four categories: user operation, event operation, new media operation, and e-commerce operation. The same is true for related positions in the operations departments of large companies. Think about it, besides this, are there any new traffic continents that have not been developed?

I take the automotive aftermarket industry as a research object to explore scene traffic and tap into traffic value, and will also involve some user operations and event operations. In complex business scenarios, everyone can quickly find accurate channels, obtain high-quality traffic, and after the traffic pool is formed, know how to improve traffic utilization efficiency and activate traffic to achieve performance goals.

Do a good job in the four quadrants of scene traffic: scene diversion, marketing middle platform construction, efficiency improvement and traffic activation.

1. Offline scene diversion: find traffic in the secondary scene and make conversion in the primary scene

By listing the main businesses in the automotive aftermarket, you can quickly find the first-level scenarios (also called vertical scenarios) related to direct businesses, such as gas stations, charging stations, and maintenance shops. Taking the site of each first-level scenario as the radiation radius (for example, a gas station can radiate to users within 3 kilometers), explore the second-level scenarios (also called pan-scenario) within the radiation range of the gas station - communities, parking lots, stations, business districts, etc. You can use enumeration and field research methods to exhaust all possible secondary scenarios.

Traffic from the secondary scene can be obtained through ground promotion, card distribution, resource exchange, roadshows and other operational forms. Users converted from the secondary traffic will directly flow into the corresponding primary scene and become direct users of the primary scene. Free trials, exclusive gift certificates for new customers, and gifts are commonly used operational tools for acquiring new customers, and can also be used to explore scene traffic.

1. Marketing platform construction: equipping the flywheel of traffic growth with engines

For a platform-based enterprise, the marketing middle-office capabilities are crucial to improving traffic acquisition efficiency.

From a horizontal perspective, it can connect business lines and improve the efficiency of traffic flow; from a vertical perspective, it can empower merchants and partners to quickly promote the implementation of cooperative businesses in scenarios. The construction of middle-office capabilities can be proposed by the operations department, but it cannot be accomplished solely by operations capabilities.

This is a systematic project that requires collaboration among the product department, technology department, and data department to complete.

The construction of the marketing platform needs to follow three principles: data visualization, marketing precision, and tool efficiency

Pain points solved by marketing platform construction:

1. Single customer acquisition method: relying on natural customer flow;
2. Lack of user operation thinking: no effective means to increase user efficiency and reduce user churn rate;
3. Lack of marketing tools: merchants rely on door-to-door sales to distribute gas cards and vouchers;
4. Limited business scenarios: The diverse needs of users cannot be met;
5. Lack of traffic pool ecology: the value of traffic needs to be explored.

The construction of a marketing middle platform first solves the problem of marketing tools, making marketing tools and strategies intelligent. After their own capabilities mature, they are output to merchants to empower them.

The smart terminal checkout system that Meituan has developed for merchants is the best proof of the middle-office’s capabilities. This situation also confirms what Wang Xing said, “20 years for 2C, 20 years for 2B.” It is conceivable that if Wang Xing's idea is successfully verified 20 years later, Meituan's subsequent growth direction will not be top-down, but bottom-up, and all merchants' scene traffic will be the main source of Meituan platform traffic.

The key points of middle-office capability building and user AARRR model are consistent: acquiring users (Acquisition), increasing activity (Activation), improving retention rate (Retention), obtaining revenue (Revenue), and self-propagation (Refer).

(1) Customer acquisition capability

How to enable the platform to have strong and continuous customer acquisition capabilities is a question that every user growth team needs to think about. The middle-office capabilities for customer acquisition are divided into two aspects: customer acquisition tools and attractive strategies.

Fission-style new customer acquisition posters and invitation reward links are currently the mainstream and effective means of acquiring customers through social media. Credit Suisse Coffee’s “Invite a friend for a drink” campaign takes this new customer acquisition tool to the extreme. I won’t go into too much detail on the new employee reward strategy as it varies from company to company.

(2) User tag system

The user labeling system needs to be jointly created by the operations and data departments. Through the user's basic information and behavioral data, a complete portrait of the product user can be formed. Through the user source channel, accurate distribution channels can be found. Through the distribution range of the crowd, cross-industry partners can be quickly identified, which has practical guiding significance for customer acquisition and finding more external users with similar portraits.

With the user tag system, it is like equipping a fighter jet with a positioning radar, which can achieve accurate shooting of potential attackers. The following pictures are from the Operations Research Society's "Operation Skills Map 2.0"

In addition, studying the user behavior of competitors can help to attract competitive users. For example, placing competitor keywords in app stores and mining competitor app data for Android phone users are both relatively effective operational methods to divert competitor users.

(3) Intelligent marketing system

The intelligent marketing system includes card and coupon tools, intelligent pricing tools, promotion strategy tools, reward recommendation tools, etc. Due to space constraints, this will be discussed in a later article.

(4) User recall capability

User churn recovery is a problem that gives many operations colleagues a headache, and many companies will not spend too much energy on this aspect. The stratified research of users cannot just stay on active users. More importantly, it is necessary to conduct a stratified research on lost users. According to the user's LTV, consumption amount, and consumption frequency, a stratified research should be conducted, and a long-term and continuous silent user intelligent awakening model should be established. Through active push tools, user loss can be blocked or recalled.

Measured by user value and user acquisition cost, the cost of successfully recalling a valuable user needs to be greater than the cost of attracting a new user, because the cost of a user who has created a high LTV is far higher than that of a new user.

The following pictures are from the Operations Research Society's Operations Skills Map 2.0:

1. Efficiency improvement: making traffic conversion more efficient

The problem of efficiency can be solved through data analysis, the establishment of standardized processes, or horizontal platform governance. The ultimate goal is to increase the speed of traffic acquisition and the comprehensive benefits of traffic. At the same time, the improvement in efficiency will directly affect the user's NPS value.

1. Activating scene traffic: making the marginal effect of traffic approach infinity

Activating scene traffic is not only crucial for multi-business ecological enterprises, but also for small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in vertical businesses. As long as a traffic pool is formed, we need to work hard to activate the traffic.

Take Meituan as an example. When completing the hotel reservation result page, it will intelligently push KTV and foot massage parlors based on LBS technology analysis to users. Through user behavior and scenario research, it can dig out the user's potential needs and push them at the appropriate time and space, so that one UV can generate double value. There are many similar examples of scene traffic, which are not listed here one by one. Students who are interested can take a look at some of the gameplays of mobile phone brands and e-commerce platforms, which are of great reference value.

The basic principle of activating scene traffic: high frequency leads low frequency, high frequency is responsible for increasing volume, and low frequency is responsible for increasing profits.

The actual traffic activation is to solve the problem of traffic efficiency. As shown in the first picture at the beginning, a traffic pool is created through high-frequency businesses such as refueling, charging, car washing, and ETC, and then low-frequency businesses (maintenance, auto insurance, vehicle rental and sales) are driven through operational means and related scenarios to achieve a two-way increase in order volume and profit. This principle is similar to the way e-commerce works. In a store, it is always the hot products that drive volume, and the flagship products that drive profit.

As mentioned earlier, if you are a company doing vertical business, you don’t have to worry about the single business and lack of comprehensive business scenarios. You can look for companies upstream and downstream of the industry’s ecological chain. As long as the two parties are not direct competitors, business cooperation can be carried out with an open attitude, and we should not just stick to our own little piece of land.

Satisfying users' pain points will make them more dependent on your brand, which in exchange for richer business scenarios and cross-traffic from friendly companies is beneficial to the long-term development of the company. 4S shop + auto insurance and maintenance shop + auto insurance are good examples.

The above are some of my thoughts on scene traffic. In this era where traffic is king, I hope that operations students can dig up more gold in the scenes.

Source: Lory