How to build a WeChat public account for merchant services?

This article introduces in detail the process of building a merchant service WeChat public account, which is worth your reference and study.

1. Industry Background

Catering, as one of the four basic life needs of residents, is huge in scale.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in 2017, the national catering revenue reached 4.0 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.7%. From January to April this year, the national catering turnover reached 1.2736 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.1%, maintaining double-digit growth.

At the same time, catering is a very fragmented industry. The revenue of the top 100 catering companies only accounts for 6.1% of the national catering revenue, while a large number of small and medium-sized businesses dominate the industry.

Although the payment collection products serving merchants are currently a fiercely competitive market, there is still a large share of the industry to be expanded. With the wider promotion of mobile payments, fourth- and fifth-tier cities or counties will become new battlefields.

2. Sifang Company Industry Solutions

Any four-party company that provides collection-based services will inevitably provide multiple solutions for the industry .

for example:

• Provide payment hardware, the common ones are fixed QR code stands, payment boxes, smart POS machines, etc., connect the payment collection function and hardware, and provide different products according to the different positioning of merchants, so that cashiers do not need to hold the mobile phone to collect payments while solving the problem of voice broadcast.
• Embedded in the merchant's existing cash register system, this type of solution is common in chain restaurants, supermarkets, etc. Merchants do not need to replace the existing ERP system and scanning hardware. The product uses a small plug-in to automatically capture the amount, achieving the purpose of not adding additional payment steps.

While Sifang Company has expanded its merchants in multiple dimensions and continuously expanded its business, it has also led to the dispersion of merchants.

Just for message notifications, you need to consider the ways in which various products can be reached. Their common problem is the lack of a unified entry point for maintaining and reaching merchants. However, WeChat public accounts can solve this problem very well.

Currently, many companies have also built their own official merchant accounts, but the positioning is not clear. Therefore, the push of articles and functional modules plays a greater role in promoting the brand, similar to the official website, and cannot solve the current problems well. Therefore, how to build a public account that serves merchants and increases their stickiness to their products is the issue I would like to discuss with you in this article.

3. How to build a merchant service public account

First, it is necessary to clarify the target audience and positioning of the official account. The target audience is merchants, and the positioning is to provide further services to merchants, improve merchant stickiness, and reduce merchant loss.

Based on this positioning, we have the following thinking path:

According to the mind map, the main functions of a public account serving merchants should include:

1. Product function explanation, including introduction of existing and new functions, and sales introduction of hardware equipment;
2. Store operation methodology, including introduction to store operation methods, activities promoted by third parties (WeChat, Alipay, etc.), and activities held by Sifang itself to promote merchant activity;
3. Troubleshooting, including policy explanations, machine and manual customer service on product features, and application progress inquiries for other additional services;
4. Emotional communication.

Of course, this official account should also play a certain role in brand publicity and promotion. Finally, when it develops to a certain level, the merchant account can be bound, making it convenient for merchants to check bills and perform other operations directly from the WeChat public account. For the construction of a wide range of public account functions, we have the following solutions:

1. My Service (Solving Merchant Problems)

• My customer service (machine and human);
• Product introduction (basic functions and special functions);
• Tool Mall (selling payment hardware);
• Increase income (the methodology of store management, which can be a collection of business tips with high readership);
• Functional services (depending on the company’s own situation, it can decide whether to bind the merchant account and WeChat account and provide corresponding services).

2. This month’s push (emphasis on new product features and third-party and fourth-party activities that need to be promoted)

• New features:
• Third and fourth party promotions.

1. Merchant application (undertaking the functions of company brand promotion and recruiting merchants and service providers)

• Merchant application;
• Application from service providers (the development of most four-party companies is inseparable from the expansion of merchants by service providers);
• Company introduction (branding);
• Download the APP (to promote your own payment products).

4. What kind of public account tweets can get a high number of reads

Among Sifang companies, Shouqianba has aspects worthy of learning and reference for the industry, whether in terms of product functions, hardware equipment or customer service.

Combining the 100 recent tweets of the “Shouqianba Merchant Service” public account and analyzing their reading volume, we came to the following conclusions:

1. Summarize

A. Shouqianba’s public account tweets are divided into 7 categories, and the order of average reading volume is:

• Function Introduction (4372) : An article that introduces Shouqianba’s product functions and hardware equipment, which can not only promote new functions but also answer questions in a timely manner.
• Brand Promotion (3294) : Some official PR articles of Shouqianba have a high readership, but there is a large amount of promotion.
• Business Tips (1728) : Introducing some methodologies for store operations.
• Gold Coin Mall (1660) : Shouqianba’s self-built virtual currency mall. Gold coins are used to maintain emotional ties with merchants, increase stickiness, and achieve the purpose of monetization.
• Brand Story (1258) : Tells the business stories of some stores and ends with the payment service, which is soft PR.
• Emotional communication (1219) : Maintain emotional connections with merchants through small tests, topic answer collection, etc.
• News Push (1043) : News related to business operations are pushed regularly every month and have a high readership.

B. Among the 100 articles, 48% have more than 1,000 views, 43% have between 500 and 1,000 views, and 9% have less than 500 views.

C. The top three articles are as follows:

1. Function Introduction

A. The highest reading volume of function introduction is 28142. Excluding this extreme value, the average reading volume is 3183. It can be seen that articles introducing functions are easy to attract the attention of merchants.

B. There are 21 articles in total about function introduction, of which 12 articles (57.14%) introduce hardware broadcast, and the rest are about APP basic function updates and marketing function updates.

C. Shouqianba Cloud Speaker broadcast focused on promotion, with a total of 4 articles, and the reading volume was 28142, 9952, 2624, and 1211 respectively.

D. There are 3 articles in Scan Code King 2, with the playback volume of 861, 1659, and 2290 respectively.

E. By comparison, it was found that the first two highly read articles on Yunlabao were probably promoted on other platforms.

F. The reading volume related to the promotion of marketing activities is also very high.

1. Brand promotion

A. Shouqianba's brand promotion starts from two angles. One is brand promotion articles, and the other is merchant story articles ending with Shouqianba services.

B. There is a clear differentiation in the reading volume of the two types of articles, which shows that the promotional ones are also promoted on other platforms.

1. Business Tips

A. Business tips are divided into two categories: 3-sentence tips with fixed titles and other push notifications;

B. The 3-sentence tips are in the form of paragraphs + pictures, with a total of three groups. They are short and concise, and have a high reading volume. The titles related to the title and sales have a higher reading volume, while the titles related to store location have a lower reading volume among customers. This shows that merchants are more concerned about their own income;

C. The top two articles have three common features: long pictures, a monthly summary in the title, and sales related in the title (very high reading volume, so the possibility of promotion on other platforms is not ruled out);

It can be seen that articles whose titles directly refer to turnover and revenue will more easily arouse the interest of merchants.

1. Gold Coin Mall

A. Shouqianba merchant public accounts do not have any advertising embedded in them, but they will use the gold coin mall to promote products and advertisements to achieve monetization purposes;

B. When using the official account to communicate with merchants, they also increase the activity by adding virtual currency coins;

1. Emotional communication

A. There are 31 articles involving emotional communication, of which 9 articles have more than 1,000 views, accounting for 29.03%;

B. There are 3 types of emotional communication:

1. Test: Tests on zodiac signs, personality, wealth, and stores
2. Interaction: Ask questions to trigger interaction, and give out coins for comments with high likes
3. Videos: Videos related to merchants on short video platforms, mainly funny

C. Articles related to income still have the highest number of readers;

D. The popular article was named "Boss, how many Mid-Autumn Festivals have you missed going home?", which touched upon the bitterness of the little people and aroused resonance;

1. News Push

Shouqianba pushes out a piece of news about the catering industry every month, which has a high readership.

Based on the reading volume of Shouqianba articles, the following suggestions are given for the public account tweets serving merchants:

1. Article types include five categories: brand promotion, new feature promotion, business tips, emotional communication, and news push;
2. New feature promotion includes hardware and product features. The new media group of the product portfolio needs to be synchronized in a timely manner. In particular, functions related to marketing can be pushed multiple times;
3. The business tips suggest shortening the reading length, combining pictures and text, and making the article titles closer to increasing merchant revenue;
4. The business tips can be pushed out monthly summary, with the title in the form of month + these stores + increase income;
5. Push catering news at regular intervals.

The above is my thoughts on building a WeChat public account to serve merchants based on the merchant positioning and Sifang Company’s own situation. I hope everyone will give me more criticism and suggestions and discuss with me!

My WeChat public account is “A Group of B-side Product Dogs”. I hope everyone will continue to think, discuss and output with me.

Source: Axin