[Business Closed Loop Design] Analysis of Dingxiang Doctor's Business Model

Since the short video industry shifted to the mobile medical industry, there has been more and more interest in, insight into, and thinking about the business model of the entire mobile medical industry. It happened that I met Ren Ming, the founder of Kanchuan, some time ago. He provided me with a very good business model analysis tool . So I tried to use this tool combined with my superficial understanding and cognition of Dingxiang Doctor, and present it to you for sharing. Since I have no work experience at DingXiang Doctor, many of my understandings lack real data, but that does not prevent everyone from thinking about it based on this.

1. Product Introduction

Dingxiang Doctor is a brand under Dingxiangyuan that provides health consultation and popular science information services specifically for the general public on the C-end. The main products currently include the DingXiang Doctor APP and mini-programs that focus on online consultation services, and the DingXiang Doctor WeChat public account that focuses on popular science information, knowledge payment and e-commerce , which is the main media matrix (as well as DingXiang Mom, DingXiang Health, etc.). At present, the number of daily user consultations on DingXiang Doctor APP has exceeded 10,000, and the number of fans of DingXiang Doctor WeChat public account matrix has exceeded 20 million.

Dingxiang Doctor's business closed loop design (picture from the screenshot of Kanchuan Mini Program)

2. Ten Modules

These include: user needs, solutions, target users , communication methods, user relationships, income types, partners, core competitiveness, and important businesses.

1. User needs (pain points)

What help do users need?

(1) Healthy and sick people

• Before seeing a doctor, when you feel a little unwell, it is impossible to go to the hospital to see a doctor immediately because it is too troublesome.
• During your consultation in the hospital outpatient department, the doctor does not have much time to communicate with you because there are too many patients waiting in line, so the doctor objectively cannot give much time to communicate with you.
• After the consultation, it is difficult to keep in touch with the doctor, and the doctor is unlikely to let you add him on WeChat or leave you his mobile phone number. The confusion in disease cognition has not been resolved. When it comes to daily health, there is too little trustworthy medical science content on the Internet, rumors are everywhere, and when parents are not around, it is easy to be harmed by unscrupulous health products and quack doctors.

(2) Doctors

• The doctor-patient relationship is tense. It is not easy for doctors to explain in a simple and easy-to-understand way to patients who have no professional background and let patients understand the doctor's treatment strategies and the risks and benefits they face in a short period of time.
• Communication habits have not yet been established and are not professional enough: doctors are not used to solving problems from the user's perspective. The knowledge I have learned cannot be explained clearly in just one or two sentences. Without a careful understanding, when encountering the core parts of the profession, I will still fall into textbook writing.
• There is not enough time. There are so many patients, and so many appointments in the morning. How can I have enough time to explain the disease to the patients? I keep repeating the same thing and asking the same question over and over again.
• Restricted by professional titles and the hospital's existing incentive system, the income of some departments and doctors is not commensurate with their efforts and is not high.
• Due to the need for scientific research and improvement of physician capabilities, there is an urgent need for accurate and high-quality patients.
• In the context of multi-point practice, there is a great need to improve personal brand building.

(3) Pharmaceutical and health-related companies

• Pharmaceutical companies: The country's medical reform measures are gradually being implemented, and pharmaceutical reform is entering deep waters. The medical representatives' gold-winning sales model can no longer continue. The OCT drug market is highly competitive, and the depth of patients' understanding of certain types of drugs affects their market share. Patient education and brand promotion have important value in certain categories.
• Health-related companies: similar to cosmeceuticals, health-related food and beverages, are in urgent need of opening up the market and accurate crowd matching... the same is true for other similar companies

(4) Hospital

• Distrust between doctors and patients often occurs. There is no good way to improve doctors' communication skills and cultivate their trust among patients. There are no effective tools and methods to systematically and scientifically improve patient satisfaction.
• The department’s status and influence in the industry are not high, and competition from peers is fierce, especially for several newly established departments;
• The department lacks experience in building its brand, and has no systematic methods and means to operate the department’s brand and enhance its brand power.

2. Solution (altruism)

What help is provided to users?

(1) Healthy and sick people

Doctor consultation is different from the current situation of uneven quality of doctors in Chunyu Doctor. Dingxiang Doctor mainly selects attending doctors from tertiary hospitals based on the data of millions of doctor users of Dingxiangyuan. After the doctors are admitted, they need to receive relevant training, review the consultation services, divert high-quality doctors, eliminate unqualified doctors, and encourage the sharing of high-quality question and answer content. The differentiated efforts of professional doctors in operation improve the user satisfaction during consultations. It provides services such as text and picture consultation, voice emergency (connected within 60 seconds), online prescription medicine, free consultation by famous doctors, etc.

(2) Doctors

The picture comes from Dingxiang Doctor's official website

High-quality doctors have joined the DingXiang Doctor Platform, which provides them with a great experience through training and sharing of high-quality consultation cases, allowing them to quickly adapt to the consultation platform and have the ability to output high-quality question and answer consultations.

By cooperating with pharmaceutical companies and providing consultation subsidies to users through the platform itself, certain cash incentives are given to doctors for their consultations. In order to take care of the doctor's brand and user experience, the platform even provides free headshot shooting services for photo studios near the doctor's hospital, provides follow-up consulting services for the doctor's patients, and directly customizes seals containing consultation QR codes for doctors.

For old patients who have consultation needs, the QR code is stamped on the patient's case booklet so that the patient can scan the code for consultation when he remembers him. This also avoids the embarrassment of the patient asking for the mobile phone number but worrying about affecting his life and work. Through the platform's community and offline business activities, other forms of income are provided ( live broadcasts , free clinics). Currently, the daily number of consultations for doctors has exceeded 10,000.

By submitting relevant medical popular science content according to the content selection requirements given by Dingxiang Doctor, you can earn royalties. The demand for this was relatively large in the past two years, but after the content library was built, the demand for doctors in this area is no longer as strong as before.

Targeted recording of video courses related to professional fields, packaging them into paid knowledge courses, and obtaining course share income. Currently, Dingxiangmama is an important platform for its knowledge payment, and this area is growing relatively fast.

The operational details and plans for the doctor group are very challenging for the doctors.

(3) Pharmaceutical and health-related companies

Provide brand marketing services to 30 million healthy people, mainly including hard advertising, title sponsorship, content customization, column co-construction, product distribution, integrated marketing and other services.

Provide patient education programs for precision doctors sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, screen department doctors who meet the needs of pharmaceutical companies, and provide targeted free clinics, live broadcasts, and content cooperation related to medication scenarios and diseases for patients.

We provide services such as recruiting KOLs to experience new products related to health enterprises, group purchasing of discounted products, product e-commerce channel distribution cooperation, offline marketing activities, online content and advertising marketing, etc.

At present, Dingxiang Doctor has already explored very good experience in the commercial operation level and quality of such enterprises, with overall turnover in the tens of millions or even over 100 million.

(4) Hospital

All doctors who meet the requirements will be stationed in the hospital departments.

3. Target users (users)

What groups of users are included?

(1) Healthy and sick people

Most of them are between 20 and 40 years old, mainly married women with children and urban white-collar workers. They are mainly distributed in first-tier and second-tier economically developed cities. The main users are those with high school education or above.

(2) Doctor

The majority of them are doctors from Grade 3A hospitals across the country, and most of them are physicians with attending physician title or above.

(3) Pharmaceutical and health-related companies

Corporate managers learn courses on human resource management, training, education, etc. to improve their work capabilities.

(4) Hospitals: mainly tertiary hospitals

4. Mode of transmission (delivery)

How to spread the value and concept of products and services?

(1) Healthy and sick people

Dingxiang Doctor APP was incubated in the early stage by realizing the original accumulation of doctors and users through the Dingxiang Doctor WeChat public account matrix. In the later stage, the customer acquisition channels became increasingly diversified. On the one hand, it attracted traffic by inputting consultation capabilities and coupon models into other types of channels. On the other hand, it acquired customers through the doctors' own old patients. This part of offline customer acquisition in the hospital is an important source of traffic .

Therefore, it is very important to provide good doctor service. If the doctor experience is good, the source of traffic coming from the doctor's own patients is a good guarantee.

(2) Doctors

In the early stage, we relied on the millions of doctors accumulated by the online Dingxiangyuan community, and in the later stage, the offline doctor BD team went directly to the hospital for precise ground promotion .

Through overall strategic cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, we can also use the pharmaceutical companies' department relationships to introduce some cooperative doctors through doctor subsidies, free clinics and patient education by famous doctors.

(3) Pharmaceutical and health-related companies

Mainly rely on offline sales team to acquire customers.

By understanding the company's marketing strategy and product promotion needs, we match customers with personalized marketing plans to convert revenue.

Rely on better communication data, high-quality creativity, and good e-commerce data to promote incremental customer cooperation.

(4) Hospitals: Offline, mainly local promotion

5. User Relationship (Maintenance)

What relationship does the product maintain with the user?

(1) Healthy and sick people:

Free consultation for 1 yuan, activate new users, guide novices to use consultation services, and establish the first service relationship with users.

Health insurance fund provides users with a total amount of 1,000 health insurance funds, requiring users to complete different tasks, such as: binding mobile phone numbers, turning on APP notification permissions, completing medical consultation experience, completing knowledge course purchase experience, and gradually accumulating about 1-20 insurance funds from small to large amounts. By submitting invoices issued by their own outpatient clinics, ensuring that the hospital they visit is a second-level or above public hospital, agreeing on the invoice submission date, invoice type, and starting insurance amount, the customer will be reimbursed after review.

This method greatly promotes the acquisition of new users, daily activity and revenue conversion, effectively avoids malicious order fraud and subsidy loss, and at the same time, proper techniques can also increase revenue (experience consultation and knowledge course experience are paid).

Coupons, through special products and discounts, attract users to form paying habits in e-commerce channels.

The doctor service annual card, by packaging family doctor services, is cheaper than a single service and is suitable for people who need long-term chronic disease consultation. Establish service stickiness with users.

(2) Doctors

• By leveraging the doctor resources of the Dingxiangyuan doctor community and relying on Dingxiangyuan's reputation and brand, we can quickly establish a trusting relationship with doctors, which will greatly help expand the number of doctors to join the Dingxiang doctor platform.
• By establishing a field sales team and focusing on precise departments (departments with high traffic, reaching out to all qualified doctors in a certain department), we can quickly establish relationships with doctors, provide doctors with cash subsidies, exquisite seals, photo shooting and other services to increase doctors' favorability.
• By forming doctor communities and offline activities , we share high-quality consulting and Q&A experiences, provide training guidance, and increase doctor activity.
• Through the Q&A review of high-quality doctors, the doctors providing services are selected based on their quality, ensuring that good doctors have a continuous source of consulting users, and poor doctors are eliminated to avoid affecting the platform's image and user experience .

(3) Pharmaceutical and health-related companies

Recruit a marketing team, package classic marketing cases in various industries, and establish all-round contact and communication with target customers through sales staff visits, agency recommendations, offline salons and annual health forums. Attract target enterprises from platform awareness, demand matching, solution matching, price negotiation, contract signing, implementation, case closing report, later in-depth cooperation and customer re-referral, and improve the relationship of the entire chain.

(4) Hospital

The hospital’s brand exposure and precise patient flow enhance the doctor’s personal brand.

6. Income Type (earned)

What does income mainly consist of?

(1) Consultation income

Text and pictures, 49/time, phone call 90/time, emergency: 69-128 yuan/15 minutes. Based on the daily volume of over 10,000 consultations, excluding the adjustment of the 1 yuan consultation subsidy, it is estimated that it will take time to increase the revenue in this area.

(2) Knowledge payment income

Dingxiang Mama's various courses charge a fee ranging from 66 to 200 per course. Based on the powerful WeChat public account channel monetization, the revenue is increasing rapidly. Dingxiang is expanding the recruitment of team members related to knowledge payment. It can be seen that the revenue is continuing to increase. Thanks to the strong demand from beauty-loving women and parenting mothers and the high-quality content of the courses, it is estimated that there will be better development, but it is not the main source of income.

(3) E-commerce revenue

It is the main means of increasing company cash flow, not the core source of profit, but a useful supplement to digital marketing.

(4) Advertising and content marketing revenue

This source of revenue is the core of Dingxiang Doctor's income structure. Relying on the strong self-media matrix and the core monetization of WeChat official accounts, in addition to the platform's advertising revenue sharing, the integrated marketing revenue for pharmaceutical companies and health-related companies is the focus of the focus. This is conservatively estimated to have contributed tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to Dingxiang Doctor.

(5) Other income

The health calendar product increases the company's brand influence and also brings in a portion of copyright income and calendar distribution revenue.

7. Partners (win-win)

What are external resources?

doctor:

Dingxiangyuan has accumulated more than three million high-quality doctor resources over the past decade. Although it is just one system, it collaborates to obtain high-quality doctors and regards them as important internal partners.

Hospital:

This is inseparable from the support of hospitals. Some hospitals have issued documents prohibiting doctors from engaging in online consulting services. Skillfully handling the publicity needs of the hospital's publicity department can also help alleviate resistance encountered when promoting products in hospitals. At the same time, hospitals are also a very important source of patient traffic. If used well, you can get twice the result with half the effort.

Pharmaceutical and health-related companies:

Money is an important source of revenue for a company.

WeChat public account:

It is the core distribution channel for content and the main source of customer acquisition. Maintaining good relationships with the platform, actively following up on the content strategies of the content platform's operations team, actively participating in their various annual conferences, and providing appropriate sponsorship can help obtain operational traffic support, increase advertising revenue sharing, and bring in some commercial monetization clues.

8. Core Competence (Capabilities)

What is core competitiveness?

User resources:

The nearly 3,000 users accumulated by the WeChat public account matrix are a core resource, and the accumulation of these resources has high time and financial costs.

Physician Resources:

It has been repeatedly emphasized that the platform has accumulated 3 million doctor resources. Without doctors as connectors, the entire consultation model will be abolished.

Brand support:

It took more than ten years to build up the brand support of Dingxiangyuan, and doctors recognize it. It is difficult for other similar platforms to obtain such brand support, which provides good support for doctor expansion and related monetization.

Product and Operations Team:

I won’t say much about the talents. The content operation team, product architecture team, and product operation team introduced by Dingxiang Doctor are all very good. They are familiar with the essence of user growth and have a strong ability to iterate products and operations based on user experience. The new media operation team is a breath of fresh air in the science popularization industry. Of course, some of the content is controversial, but the published Ding Xiang Calendar has brought the company great brand premium and user reputation.

9. Important business (execution)

What are the key tasks?

Content Operations:

Consultation mainly involves maintenance and update of daily truth and disease dictionary content.

The WeChat public account is responsible for the content operation of the Dingxiang Doctor main account, Dingxiang Mom, Dingxiang Health and other matrices.

Toutiao (including Douyin ): Normal articles are basically synchronized with the content of WeChat official accounts. What is more eye-catching is the rapid development of Douyin. Through Dr. Tian Taiyi and several colleagues, they focus on producing interesting health science videos on Douyin, and publish them on the Douyin platform through post-packaging and editing. Through strategic cooperation with Douyin’s marketing department, they provide traffic support and quickly become a large account with millions of fans.

Consultation Operation:

The 1-yuan free consultation is an important means to guide new users to convert. It strengthens the value of consultation services through initial services and guides users to make subsequent purchases.

Voice emergency is aimed at women who are confused about nighttime emergency situations and anxious people seeking consultation. It opens up a voice consultation channel to solve everyone's urgent needs and at least relieves anxiety, guides patients, and provides preliminary diagnostic recommendations.

Doctor outreach and consultation content review: important work to ensure the doctor consultation ecosystem and user experience.

Knowledge paid course operation:

We focus on course operations in areas such as skin care, sexual positions, mental health, pregnancy, parenting, health diseases, etc., including expert course recording, packaging, uploading, traffic import, course poster fission dissemination, discounts to guide paid conversions, etc.

Commercial product monetization operation:

Building sales teams, planning teams, customer service teams, etc. The operation of commercial products is relatively heavy, and requires high quality of talent and accurate insight into customer needs. Providing customers with the best solutions based on product genes is the only way to sell them to customers at a premium, create a large source of revenue for the company, and achieve a qualitative change in the company's revenue.

Product planning and development:

Product iteration based on the premise of improving user experience is very important. In this area, Dingxiang has an excellent architect and product team. Its user growth team is also very professional and can provide good improvement suggestions and high-quality requirements for products based on data and feedback.

Brand and promotion:

• With respect to the marketing activities of pharmaceutical companies, the image positioning of the leader in health marketing is effective and has been firmly established in the minds of some of the cooperating customers.
• Outreach activities for doctors, community building, doctor packaging, etc.
• Daily publicity and traffic introduction for the general public.

10. Cost Type (Expense)

What does the cost include?

Office and labor costs:

Rent, administration, staff salaries and bonuses.

Platform operation and promotion costs:

Cloud leasing, server and other hardware and software, new channel promotion costs and financial subsidies for doctors.

Content cooperation costs:

Mainly the doctor’s royalties.

Doctor cooperation cost:

Take photos of doctors, customize seals for doctors, provide consultation income for doctors' consulting services, receive royalties from doctors, and provide subsidies and services for doctors' live broadcasts and free clinics. The 1-yuan subsidy for free clinics is a very important component of the doctor cooperation cost, and the investment in this area is relatively large.

Technology investment and cooperation costs:

The construction and development of knowledge payment platforms, the construction and development of APPs, the construction and development of e-commerce platforms, the promotion and cooperation of major traffic channels, etc.

The above ten modules systematically analyze Dingxiang Doctor's business model, and take the target user groups as the main line to make a detailed introduction to user needs, solutions, communication methods, user relationships, and partners. In addition, core competitiveness, important business, revenue type and cost type were also analyzed separately, and there are certain connections between the ten modules.

Conclusion

Dingxiang Doctor is one of the benchmark companies in the industry that I personally am very optimistic about. This article is only for everyone to discuss business models. The data in the article does not strictly represent the actual situation.

Source: Wang Cheng, co-founder of Baike Mingyi.com