Is it difficult to acquire accurate customers for B-side products? Use the "three-pool matrix"!

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend who operates a to B product . His product is a conference tablet that can replace a projector to complete remote meetings. He said to me helplessly: "B to B products are really difficult to make." I nodded in agreement.

He continued, “You know what? We used to get leads through SEM and advertising , but the cost was too high, so we later purchased a set of lead search tools . I was very excited at the time because our lead costs were greatly reduced. But I found that the paid conversion rate was still very low.”

I have analyzed customer acquisition for B products in my previous article. The fundamental reason why the effect is not good is that the purchasing decisions of B-end users and C-end users are different. The channel attributes of SEM and advertising determine that these channels cannot obtain the accurate leads required for B2B products.

What I want to share with you today is how B2B products can acquire customers through content. The article is divided into the following three parts:

• Ineffective to B content customer acquisition methods;
• Effective principles of acquiring customers through to B content;
• Content acquisition and implementation.

1. Ineffective toB content acquisition methods

1. 4 Ineffective Content Acquisition Methods:

1. "Big" content. Because big accounts started early, they attracted a large number of fans through their content. But we have missed the bonus, so it is difficult to effectively acquire customers using large-scale marketing methods;

2. "Buddhist" content, write your own content, or directly use the content for corporate promotion. It is completely impossible to acquire customers through this kind of content. This kind of content output method is something that companies need to take as a warning. We are not against corporate publicity, but corporate publicity content is not used to acquire customers.

3. "White paper" content, by providing industry white papers, it attracts users to retain information. If the quality of this kind of content is to be good, it is often necessary to be able to provide complete industry solutions. Therefore, companies need to invest a large cost. However, for many to B companies today, the so-called "white paper" is really just a title . If you think that a "white paper", whether good or bad, is just to attract users to leave their mobile phone numbers to facilitate telephone sales, then there is nothing wrong with this kind of content. What you need is precise clues, so this type of content can’t do it;

4. "High-cost" content is to output high-quality content in a very costly way. Because of the high cost, even if this type of content can effectively acquire customers, it is often easy to die.

Unfortunately, the above four content acquisition methods are not suitable for today's toB products.

2. Negative examples of acquiring customers through content:

Here is a screenshot of a case:

The reading volume is touching. Why?

Some people may say that it is because this official account has not been promoted at all. But I also want to say that even if it is promoted, the content of this public account cannot effectively attract customers. Why?

The content of this public account is email marketing articles translated from foreign websites. Friends who work on B-side products know very well, is there a habit of emailing in China? No, so this article is not written based on user needs at all, so it cannot effectively acquire customers.

2. Effective toB content customer acquisition principles

1. Content classification:

When acquiring customers through content for B2B products, content is often divided into two categories: organization-centered content and user-centered content. Here we recommend that you use user-centered content. Below is a comparison between these two types of content.

Organization-focused content:

As mentioned above, organization-centric content is a one-way structure, where the enterprise pushes content to users.

Companies can write whatever they want, but if they need to produce high-quality content, they will need to invest higher costs in the content team. However, there is a risk with this type of content, which is that companies can easily be self-satisfied and think that the content is really well-written, but the result is that users may not buy it at all.

User-centric content:

User-centered content is a two-way structure, that is, the content that needs to be output for B2B product customer acquisition is written completely with user needs as the center. Companies reach users through content that perfectly matches their needs. And users' needs can be fully collected by enterprises to generate new content.

2. Customer acquisition principle:

To B products, in order to acquire customers through content, they should have three factors: low cost, accuracy, and matching with user needs . Based on these three factors, the following analysis is conducted on the principles of content acquisition.

• Building demand channels

First of all, in order to ensure that the content is always centered around user needs, companies need to build a demand channel to obtain user needs. This can effectively ensure the match between content and user needs, and also ensure the accuracy of users who pay attention to the content.

For example, those who are concerned about how to use fission tools to achieve community fission must be B-end users at the execution level; those who are concerned about industry trends and market environment must be B-end users at the management level.

• Use the " UGC -like" method to build a network structure

In order to effectively reduce the cost of content output, a "UGC-like" method is needed to output content. (UGC, or User Generated Content, refers to user-generated content)

If building demand channels can ensure that content can always match users, outputting high-quality content based on demand has become a costly task. However, "quasi-UGC" itself is not UGC. We do not need to invest budget to encourage users to produce UGC, but instead effectively utilize the already established demand channels. In this way, the demand channel is not a linear structure, but a network structure.

To explain, the linear structure is bidirectional. You can collect user needs and users can also pass information to you, but there is no connection between users. The mesh structure is multi-directional. While you can collect user needs, in this mesh structure, user A’s needs will be solved by user B, and this is the "UGC-like" content that can match user needs. Enterprises need to organize such content so as to systematize and structure it;

• Finally, the traffic obtained through the content is introduced into the lead pool for subsequent lead cultivation.

3. Content Acquisition

The most important thing for acquiring customers for B products is to ensure that the traffic is basically accurate, and the "UGC-like" content output can effectively obtain accurate traffic at a lower cost. So how should this customer acquisition method be implemented?

1. Three-Pool Matrix:

Yellow box area: clue pool;

Blue box area: content pool;

Red box area: flow pool.

As shown in the figure, you can see the "three-pool matrix" of traffic, content, and leads. Next, these three parts will be analyzed and explained one by one.

1. Traffic pool : B2B products have many channels to acquire customers. The traffic from these channels constitutes the traffic pool, and the traffic accuracy of each channel is different. If the accuracy is high, it can directly enter the lead pool for subsequent lead cultivation; if the traffic accuracy is not high, it is necessary to first introduce the traffic into the content pool for screening and filtering, so as to introduce accurate traffic into the lead pool. Taking SEM as an example, this type of channel has low accuracy for to B products, so it should first introduce a content pool for filtering.

2. Content pool: We build user demand channels and use a "UGC-like" approach to generate content. The content itself will also generate new accurate traffic and introduce a lead pool.

3. Lead pool: The lead pool will help sales staff complete pre-sales lead filtering through lead cultivation methods.

2. Implementation:

How to implement the “three-pool matrix”? I will explain them in the order 1 to 6 as shown in the above figure.

1. Build demand channels

The purpose of online/ offline activities is to build a demand channel. In the network demand channel, target users can ask questions and encourage other users to answer questions. Questions are needs, answers are solutions. This demand channel is generally achieved through social methods because the cost of social networks is lower.

1) Online activities

The purpose of online activities is to encourage users to ask and answer questions within the community, and incentives are divided into material incentives and non-material incentives. Whether to use material incentives depends on the specific user group of the to B product. Non-material incentives can be used regardless of the user group of the to B product.

The specific method can be summed up in one word: social . Community users of online activities and users of offline activities form a funnel. Offline activities can help users establish strong social relationships, which is a common need of people in the workplace, namely, personal connections.

Therefore, the reward rules for building online activity communities can encourage users to ask and answer questions online. And funnel active users to offline activities.

2) Offline activities

The purpose of offline activities is still to allow participating users to ask questions and solve problems. This type of offline activity also has a network structure, where everyone has to raise questions and propose solutions. Therefore, this type of offline activity is not suitable for too many people, and it is generally best to control it to 6 to 8 people. The advantage of offline activities over online activities is that they do not require any incentives. As long as the activity rules are set, everything is ready.

Event themes: "XX Round Table", "XX Private Board Meeting".

Activity rules: Each person takes turns to ask a question; vote to select the three questions with the highest votes; the questioner should make the problem concrete, including the company background, business background, attempts made and the results; non-problem askers each take turns to ask a question once; non-problem askers write down the solution to the problem. For this offline event, the organizer needs to keep a record of problems and solutions in order to generate content later.

2. Output content

This is the "UGC-like" content output method. Each piece of content comes from the user, but is organized by the operator . The general format of the content here is as follows:

Problem; Problem visualization; Problem solution 1; Problem solution 2; Problem solution N.

For example, in our actual B2B product operations, one of the problems that arose from offline activities was that their products were seafood sold to supermarkets and C-end consumers, and the question they raised was how to attract new traffic. After the problem was visualized, three types of solutions were generated: methods of cross-industry cooperation; methods of community fission; and methods of how to get the boss to invest more budget.

For self-media that carries content, taking WeChat public accounts as an example, a tweet generally only needs to output 1 to 2 questions.

3. Distill the content

"UGC-like" content is inherently very accurate and can well match user needs. But there is a problem. When such questions are presented in the form of tweets, the content is too fragmented - this question is about attracting new members to the seafood sales public account, and that question is about car sales. Therefore, operators need to consider whether it is necessary to stipulate that only people in the vertical field can participate before launching offline activities. For example, today’s event is an e-commerce event, and tomorrow’s event is a finance event.

At the same time, in the middle and late stages, operators are required to sort out the problems and solutions of the same industry and extract solutions for the industry. For example, if the to B product serves the medical beauty industry, then solutions for the medical beauty industry should be refined, including how to attract new customers, how to keep users active, how to retain users and convert them to paid users, etc.

The refined solution should follow the following format: 80% solution + 20% product.

80% of the solutions come from the compilation of content produced by offline activities, and 20% of the products are about linking our own to B products and solutions, so that B-side users not only learn about the solutions, but also clearly convey to B-side users why our products can implement this solution.

4. Inject traffic

The traffic in the traffic pool will vary depending on the channel, so the accuracy will also be different. Traffic with lower accuracy should be introduced into the content pool, which has the function of traffic cleaning and screening.

The reason is very simple. For example, the contents in the content pool are all about how to cook seafood. Then when you get a batch of traffic through an offline exhibition, and you are not sure whether this batch of traffic is interested in seafood cooking, if you introduce the lead pool too early, it will increase sales costs. Therefore, this batch of traffic can be introduced into the content pool. If this batch of traffic is interested in seafood cooking, they will naturally stay in the content pool. If they are not interested, they will leave.

5. Inject into the clue pool

If part of the traffic in the traffic pool is relatively accurate, the traffic should be directly introduced into the lead pool. Otherwise, the number of leads will be reduced through the content pool and then to the lead pool.

6. Conversion of content pool

The content pool itself has the function of traffic cleaning and filtering, and also has the function of attracting new users. The traffic from the content pool needs to be introduced into the lead pool because the lead pool is the top layer of the entire sales funnel. A common practice here is to add a product introduction page or a product trial page to the content pool. After the user fills in relevant information such as company, position, contact information, etc., the traffic enters the lead pool.

Summarize

Today I shared how B2B products can effectively acquire customers through content. The summary is as follows:

1. The form of the content needs to be user-centric, which we call "quasi-UGC".

2. Content needs to follow the three elements of content (low-cost, accurate, and matching user needs). This can reduce the cost of content production and improve the quality of content.

3. Implement content acquisition by building a "three-pool matrix" of lead pool, content pool, and traffic pool. The purpose of the lead pool is to increase the conversion of leads to paid users; the purpose of the content pool is to attract new traffic and clean traffic; the purpose of the traffic pool is to carry the front-end channel traffic and provide support for the content pool and lead pool.

4. When acquiring customers through content, 6 complete steps are shared to implement operations.

In conclusion: To C products have a mature operating methodology , but to B products are currently vacant in this field, and the operation of to B products is extremely difficult.