Fan Deng Reading User Growth System!

Fan Deng’s annual revenue from reading books has reached 1 billion yuan. The original membership price is 365 yuan/year (388 yuan/year for Apple mobile phones). Based on the promotional discounts, nearly 3.5 million annual memberships are sold each year. In just 8 years, Fan Deng Reading APP has developed nearly 12 million paying members, 45 million registered users, and 900,000 monthly active users. Fan Deng Reading's business model is undoubtedly successful. The important labels surrounding it are personal IP, agency model, fission growth, sinking market and annual reading card.

These are important components of its user growth system, which I will focus on in Section 3.

01. Go with the flow and set up a reading club

During his college years, Fan Deng won the National Elite University Debate Invitational Championship.

He has been a CCTV host, a disciple of Cui Yongyuan, and hosted "Telling the Truth".

Later, I became a lecturer, giving lectures to MBA and EMBA programs in universities and other training institutions.

All these laid a solid foundation for him to become a storyteller. His decision to become a "professional storyteller" actually began on an ordinary day in March 2013...

At that time, he proposed the idea of ​​reading 50 books a year on Weibo, just to urge himself to keep reading, but many students asked him to recommend a list of books.

Most of the students asked for the book lists but did not read the books, so Fan Deng made a PPT of his reading experience and sent it to these students by email.

Just when Fan Deng was full of expectations, the feedback he got was that no one had watched it yet. So Fan Deng discovered a pain point of users - many people have a strong desire to read, but they don't have the patience or time to read.

Another reason that made him realize that there was a market for book reading was that he had a boss who was in real estate in Beijing and was very rich.

He wanted to read more but had no patience, so he hired two university teachers to read to him, paying each of them 30,000 yuan a month. They explained the lessons to him after he finished reading. In the evening, when he ran in the park, the teachers followed him and explained them.

Where there are pain points, there are demands, and where there are demands, there is a market. Fan Deng, who has started many businesses, decided to try book talk this time.

In June 2013, the first Fan Deng Reading Club began. It was an offline book lecture with more than 30 people attending, free of charge.

The first offline Fan Deng reading club in June 2013

This went on for several months, and after each lecture, there were students who bought the book that I was talking about, and the reading club was very popular.

So Fan Deng and his partner Wang Yongjun discussed and decided to operate the reading club in the form of a "membership system".

Later, as the function of WeChat groups became popular, they pulled students into the group and sometimes explained books to everyone in the form of voice. 50 books a year, and the annual membership fee was 300 yuan.

Fan Deng's team verified user needs in this way with the lowest cost and lowest risk, that is, by holding offline book clubs.

While carefully polishing the audiobook product based on user needs and feedback, they also attach great importance to user growth, usually using free marketing methods that save the company a lot of money.

02. The audience of Fan Deng’s reading

Before talking about the user growth system, let’s first sort out the target audience of Fan Deng Reading, because different audiences have different gathering places, needs, and occupations, and the user growth methods they use will also be different.

Therefore, studying this section will help us understand the user growth method in Section 3.

Fan Deng once said:

I never expect everyone to join Fan Deng’s reading club. I won’t send anyone who doesn’t like reading to the club.

Goodbye to those who believe that studying is useless;

Others who want to read novels for entertainment can all go their separate ways.

Those who love reading, but don’t have time to read, or who are not very efficient in reading, please watch me, I am here.

Mr. Fan Deng’s positioning of the target audience is indeed correct.

It is divided into four quadrants according to the willingness and ability to read. Among the many paid knowledge products, the audience of Fan Deng's reading is those with weak reading ability but strong willingness to read.

Divided into four quadrants according to reading willingness and reading ability

For example, those born in the 1980s who are over 30 years old have not received promotions or salary increases in the workplace. They have an urgent need to learn and improve their abilities, so they plan to use reading to quickly improve their cognition and perspective.

For example, small and micro business owners who have just started their own business face great market fluctuations, and are under pressure from both funding and talent recruitment. They need to improve their ability to regulate their emotions, and listening to books is a very quick way to do this.

For example, mothers who take care of their children at home will face the problem of educating their children in the future. They have no experience and need to learn parenting knowledge from books.

I don’t usually have the habit of reading, but when I encounter problems in life, feel anxious, and need to increase my knowledge and improve my abilities, I start to turn to books.

Next, we will analyze the two Fan Deng Reading membership data charts below.

Gender, age, and consumption level data of Fan Deng Reading members

Fan Deng Reading members' province and city distribution data

Combining the data, we can analyze and conclude that:

1. The majority of readers are female, 15.55 percentage points more than the male group (parenting and spiritual growth books account for a large proportion, and women have a greater demand for them).

2. Most of them are born in the 1980s (44.85% are aged 31-40), who have been in the workplace for 7-16 years and are usually middle and senior managers or bosses of the company; the second largest group is born in the 1990s (43.94% are aged 24 and below and aged 30), who are currently studying at university or have been in the workplace for 1-6 years.

3. Middle and high-end consumers account for the highest proportion, which is 36.27%, followed by middle-end consumers, which is 34.66%, with little difference. Middle and high-end consumers and middle-end consumers account for nearly 70% and are the main force in purchasing annual memberships.

4. The majority are first-tier cities (Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, etc., accounting for 43.88%); followed by second-tier and third-tier cities, with similar proportions (17.04% and 19.76%); super first-tier cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, accounting for 13.27%).

5. Among the top 10 provinces in terms of the proportion of reading members, 6 are developed coastal provinces, namely Guangdong, Shandong, Hebei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Fujian. This is actually related to the province's high consumption level and high acceptance of new things.

Through the above analysis, we can outline a typical user story -

Xiaofang, 35, works as the e-commerce director at a cosmetics startup in Hangzhou, with a monthly salary of 30,000 yuan. She has a 3-year-old child, who she lets her parents take care of because she is busy with work.

I was browsing Douyin and saw Teacher Fan Deng talking about parenting knowledge. It happened that I would be educating my child in a few years, so I followed the guidance and entered the APP to try it for free for 7 days.

While driving home from get off work, I listened to parenting books such as "Positive Discipline", "No Yelling", and "Raising Boys". They sounded very reasonable and I felt that I had gained a lot.

At the same time, there were some books related to the workplace and management that I needed, so I bought a one-year membership on the day the 7-day trial ended.

After sorting out this section, we will have a clear impression of who the main users are.

03. Online and offline user growth system

I used the underlying logic of making money through marketing, namely the three processes of capturing (acquiring new users) - captive (cultivating users) - rewarding (converting users) to dismantle Fan Deng Reading's user growth system.

It’s actually very easy to understand. Let’s imagine ourselves as a fisherman with our own fish pond. What should we do if there are no fish at the beginning? Then go fishing somewhere else, such as in rivers or fish ponds.

However, in such a short period of time, users do not trust us enough, and are not familiar enough with our products, so we cannot force them to buy. Therefore, we have to cultivate them slowly, and then hold large-scale promotions to acquire these users in large quantities.

The underlying logic of marketing to make money

In order to see the complete user growth system of Fan Deng Reading from a big picture perspective, I have sorted out a mind map, which you can save if necessary:

Fan Deng Reading User Growth System

1) Fishing (acquiring new users)

We imagine users as swimming fish. We need to direct them to where the target users are, that is, in the fish pond or river (public accounts, forums, APP platforms, offline stores, etc.).

Usually, you need to provide traffic-generating products so that users are interested in them and are willing to come.

The most common traffic-generating product for Fan Deng Reading is free trials. New users have a 7-day trial, and free trials are also offered during occasional events.

① Expand personal influence

Mr. Fan Deng's personal brand positioning is that of a storyteller. His shining points include being amiable, a life mentor, an EMBA lecturer, being good at public speaking and loving reading, all of which are easy to please people and thus gain fans.

Okay, now that you have your personal brand positioning, the next step is to find channels for external exposure and sustainable operations.

When he first started his business, Mr. Fan Deng told stories in offline book clubs.

In 2016, he took over as the host for an episode of Luo Zhenyu's knowledge program "Luoji Siwei", with the video being read 2.05 million times. During this period, more than 20,000 "Luo fans" became members of Fan Deng Reading.

On April 23, 2017, Fan Deng Reading Club and Guangdong TV jointly produced a cultural book-telling competition program "I am a Book-teller"

Recording site of the storyteller program

On November 15, 2019, "Fan Deng Talks about the Analects" was jointly launched by Youku New Knowledge and Fan Deng Reading.

…

Teacher Fan Deng mainly expands his personal influence through offline speeches, cultural programs, and live broadcast channels. He cooperates with well-known institutions or celebrities to achieve strong alliances. The most important thing is to persist year after year.

②Fission growth model

1. Invite registration: Each person you invite will receive 3 days of VIP, and so on, with no upper limit

2. Invite payment: Regardless of whether you are a VIP member or not, you can get 600 points by inviting friends to pay, and the invitee can also get 60 points as a reward.

In the invitation payment stage, Fan Deng Reading adopts a "reciprocity" mechanism, which is not distribution in the eyes of users, and effectively avoids the user's disgust of "making money from friends" when inviting friends to pay.

3. Badge Show-off: Take advantage of the user's strong desire to show off high-energy behaviors (reading) to encourage users to share. At the same time, make sharing extremely simple and easy to operate, and guide users to invite friends by showing off their badges.

Medals earned by completing corresponding tasks

4. Gift card giving: Fan Deng Reading uses the "gift giving" scenario to give gift givers a new option, which is "giving knowledge". From the location of this function, it can be seen that this function plays an important role in the user fission link of Fan Deng Reading.

Gift card purchase interface

4. Psychological assessment: The assessment content is divided into four categories: emotional relationships, personal education, personal growth and mental health, which are consistent with the types of audiobooks to ensure user interest.

If users want to understand their own situation, they will take an assessment, and after getting a score, they will be guided to share. The motivation for users to share is to have new and interesting topics to talk about with their friends.

Evaluation results sharing chart

5. Team reading: 3 people form a team, and friends can be invited to participate. After an individual finishes listening to 3 books on the list, he/she will be rewarded with 1 day of VIP. After all team members finish listening to 3 books, the team members can get an additional 2 days of VIP. The motivation for sharing is the 3-day VIP reward.

③Agency model

The reason why Fan Deng thought of developing the agency model was that once when he was hosting a cosmetics conference, a business tycoon told him: All the products in China would definitely be worth over 10 billion if they could be sold to the county level.

Moreover, the demand for reading is not only felt by the elite in first- and second-tier cities, but also by users in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities, who are also anxious about improving their studies.

It is feasible to promote Fan Deng Reading Club to the lower-tier markets. In the sinking market, acquaintance relationship chains and offline exchanges and negotiations play a very important role in promoting product sales.

It is most appropriate for local agents to find customers.

At the same time, many of Fan Deng’s friends have worked at P&G, including co-founder Wang Yongjun, making it easier for him to learn the essence of P&G’s agency system.

So Fan Deng decided to learn from P&G and build the Fan Deng Reading agency system.

He used the model of Procter & Gamble to sell laundry detergent and divided the agents into three levels: provincial agents, municipal agents, and county agents. (P&G is a regional agent, regional distributor, and distributor wholesaler).

P&G Agency Model

Fan Deng Reading Club’s initial provincial, municipal, and county agents are equivalent to P&G’s first-, second-, and third-level channels. Provincial chapters are based in a large city.

If you want to sign a contract to become a provincial branch, you must first become a city. Only after the city is well operated can you become a provincial branch. The county-level branch is to assist the city branch.

Fan Deng's initial agency model

According to the operating manual at the time, the franchise fee was relatively high: 1-2 million for a provincial branch. The size of the city-level branch varies depending on the level of the city, ranging from 200,000 to 500,000. The county-level branches earn 100,000 to 150,000 yuan, with profits distributed among all levels.

The agent develops user A, A develops B, B develops C... The agent can not only get the commission for developing A, but also get it from B and C.

In addition, the lower-level users of the agent, even if they have not become agents and are not reading members, are just registered users of the app. They can also generate distribution posters in the personal center of the app. They can make money by distributing them, and the agents can also get commissions.

Agents need to “stock up”, which means they need to buy annual reading passes in bulk and sell them to customers at retail to make a profit from the difference. The profit from selling a card is usually around 160 yuan. For details, please see the following figure for details:

Special note: In 2018, the "Fan Deng Bookstore" project has been separated from the Shanghai headquarters of Fan Deng Reading Club and is independently operated by "Xi'an Fan Deng Brand Culture Development Co., Ltd." (i.e. Fan Deng Bookstore headquarters).

The policy changes compared to 2017 are: branches at all levels (provinces, cities, districts, counties, banks, and enterprises) can recommend the establishment of "Fan Deng Bookstores"; and there are no geographical restrictions on recommending the opening of "Fan Deng Bookstores"; the bookstore member development performance is only linked to the performance of the recommending branch.

Designing the agency rules is only the first step. The ultimate goal is to allow the next level or terminal agents to sell products easily. To this end, Fan Deng Reading’s strategy is to continue to help them organize offline reading clubs, increase user trust and stickiness through offline interactions and exchanges, and complete the dual tasks of sales and brand word-of-mouth communication.

Fan Deng Reading Club Offline Salon

"They can drink tea together, talk about books and make friends." There are 80,000 such events every year. In 2016 alone, there were more than 1,400 events. In order to make this exchange more in-depth, at the end of 2016, Fan Deng Reading Club opened bookstores across the country, becoming the second largest bookstore system in the country, second only to Xinhua Bookstore.

Fan Deng Reading Club Offline Salon

Fan Deng Reading has a provincial authorization point in all provinces across the country, municipal authorization points in 90% of the prefecture-level cities across the country, and county-level authorization points in about 75% of the county towns across the country.

As of January 9, 2019, there are 293 prefecture-level cities in mainland China.

According to the data provided by Fan Deng Reading, they have set up authorized points in more than 260 prefecture-level cities across the country. Fan Deng Reading currently has more than 7,000 authorized points, which are its agents.

The key to the sustainable development of the agency system is to allow the headquarters to make money while also allowing agents to make money.

④ Leverage short videos

Douyin, which has risen in recent years, is indeed a platform full of business opportunities, so the Fan Deng Reading Team began to try making Douyin short videos in 2019.

Unexpectedly, in just one year, he had hundreds of Tik Tok matrix accounts with a total number of fans exceeding 100 million.

Some of Fan Deng's Douyin accounts/Tech Planet compiled

In fact, they did not put up a large number of TikTok ads, so how did they do it?

At the beginning, Fan Deng Reading’s Douyin operation team had only three people, a person in charge and two interns. They first produced some original videos with the aim of finding the production logic for popular videos.

During the trial process, I uploaded the first short video with Teacher Fan Deng (a live clip of Teacher Fan Deng’s offline course "Replicable Leadership"), and found that Teacher Fan Deng’s videos were particularly popular. This short video has tens of millions of views!

Teacher Fan Deng has been participating in speeches, programs and live broadcasts year after year, so naturally he has a lot of recorded videos, which can be posted on Douyin as long as they are edited into multiple short videos.

Since Mr. Fan Deng’s short videos are so popular, the next step is to add more Douyin accounts to get more exposure on Douyin.

At this time, Fan Deng Reading's agency system seems to be providing support behind the scenes. Thousands of Fan Deng Reading authorized points can be called upon to operate their own Douyin accounts, and everyone can form a Douyin account matrix together.

The official team will first pass on the successful experience of Douyin operation to the agents, and then incubate several successful agent operation accounts. These accounts can be used as success cases to inspire other agents to enter the market.

So within just one year, there were hundreds of Douyin accounts for Fan Deng Reading, and some people even joked that Fan Deng Reading was "crazily grabbing" Douyin's traffic.

So is it necessary to place advertisements on TikTok? The official team gave the answer, which is to release a short video first to see the data such as likes, comments, and attention. Those with particularly good results have the potential to become popular videos.

At this time, you can launch DOU+ to boost the popularity of this video, so that it can attract more fans. The returns from such advertising are huge.

So how do you guide users to place orders? Just go to your personal homepage to get [7-day free trial for new users]

Fan Deng's homepage guide copy

In this way, the monetization closed loop on Douyin was opened. When users saw the short video and thought it was good, they followed the account. Then the account homepage guided them to the app for a 7-day free trial. If they thought it was good and were interested, they would directly purchase an annual membership.

⑤Knowledge product cooperation

Teacher Fan Deng’s courses are co-published on major platforms. Including knowledge platforms Himalaya, Xiaoetong and Zhihu, and long video platforms Tencent Video, iQiyi and Youku.

The workplace courses include "Replicable Leadership" and "Replicable Communication Skills"; the Chinese studies courses include "Fan Deng's Analects"; and the parent-child education courses include "12 Lessons in Raising Excellent Parents".

Fan Deng courses on Himalaya

Fan Deng's course on Tencent Video

Fan Deng's course on Youku

In addition to collaborating on courses, Fan Deng will also work with publishers to include Fan Deng recommendations in published books.

The book "Napoleon" signed by Fan Deng on Dangdang.com

The paper book "Sleep Revolution" signed by Fan Deng Reading Club

2) Captive breeding (cultivating users)

During the captive cultivation stage, you may or may not have your own traffic pool. The purpose is to cultivate users, respectively to cultivate their trust in us and their familiarity with the product, thus laying the foundation for the third step of rewards (converted users).

Fan Deng Reading has a traffic pool, what are they? They are Fan Deng Reading APP, Fan Deng Reading WeChat official account (one subscription account, one service account), customer service WeChat account, and user WeChat group.

Agents from all over the country will also add their own WeChat accounts.

①7-day new audition

This is the most common and main way of cultivation, which allows users to understand the audiobook product, thus cultivating users' familiarity with the product.

Fan Deng Reading pays great attention to the creation of audio book products.

In addition to the audio of the books, each book also comes with a video, a mind map, a graphic introduction, an audiobook script, an e-book, a paper book (needs to be purchased separately), a self-test with multiple-choice questions after reading, and related course recommendations. Let users feel that the product is rich and worth buying.

Moreover, most of the lectures are given by Mr. Fan Deng, who has been a CCTV host, an MBA lecturer, and often gives speeches. His many years of lectures have ensured the quality of his lectures. When I listen to Fan Deng's lectures, he can not only stimulate my curiosity about knowledge, but also immerse me in them with his storytelling tone.

The 7-day free trial can be said to be a key link. It allows users to go from being full of doubts about the product at the beginning to being familiar with it, which facilitates users to place orders smoothly.

②WeChat customer service number

Any registered user can find the "My Shu Tong" function button in the personal center of the APP. After copying the Shu Tong WeChat ID, they can add it to WeChat. After adding the WeChat customer service, the customer service will guide you to join the user's WeChat group.

Whether it is a WeChat group or a customer service number circle of friends, relevant information such as online and offline activities will be released, including offline salons, online teacher live classes, and annual card discount promotions.

The conversion effect is slightly worse because it gives people the feeling that it is an emotionless advertising robot.

Content posted by customer service in Moments

③Offline reading club

This is the key method for agents to convert users to place orders. Through offline book clubs, we can cultivate friendships between users and between users and agents. Everyone is a member of this collective. When they get together, they can not only promote each other's learning by listening to books, but also enrich their lives through wonderful activities.

④Short video content

The content posted by hundreds of Fan Deng reading accounts on Douyin is related to life philosophy, workplace psychology, parenting methods, etc., and they are all edited videos of Fan Deng’s speeches and live broadcasts on different occasions.

As users watch more of these videos, more and more truths are deeply rooted in people's minds, and Fan Deng becomes more and more familiar. The status of such a life mentor will become higher and higher in your heart. When you want to learn knowledge, don’t consider other institutions first, just buy the annual membership of Teacher Fan Deng’s audiobooks.

⑤ Inspirational articles on the official account

Fan Deng Reading has four official public accounts, among which the subscription account is Fan Deng Reading, and the service accounts include Fan Deng Reading Service Account, Fan Deng Reading Classroom and Fan Deng Reading Selections.

The articles published are all spiritual and inspirational articles, and at the end of the article they will encourage you to try it for 7 days or purchase the course.

The subscription account Fan Deng Reading is the main platform for publishing articles, and basically 4 articles are published every day, both original and reprinted. One surprising experience is that each article has an official recording of the host, allowing readers to free their eyes and listen to the recording.

The following is the reading volume of the headlines of the subscription account Fan Deng Reading. There are 3 articles with more than 100,000 views in 7 days.

Reading volume of the top articles of the subscription account Fan Deng Reading

Article titles are usually:

Common article titles

Readers’ feedback: After reading the article, they felt more positive, learned how to get along with people around them, and relieved their anxiety.

Readers' comments in the article comment section

So where do the original articles of this subscription account come from? When collecting original manuscripts in the official account function column, the first requirement is whether the article hits a certain growth pain point, whether it resonates with people and provides a solution.

The content covers self-growth, parent-child education and intimate relationships, which are very suitable for the general public and consistent with the audience group of Fan Deng Reading.

The article strives to provide a solution in the hope of gaining recognition from readers, recognizing the service capabilities of the Fan Deng Reading team, and further recognizing the value of audio books, thereby encouraging readers to place orders to purchase annual reading memberships.

3) Return (transaction users)

After the previous stage of cultivating users, users have a certain degree of trust in us and are familiar with the product, but they are still hesitant, for example, they worry that the price may be too expensive and unreasonable.

Then we can use promotions to encourage users to place orders immediately. Many times, taking another look means never buying again, but using limited-time discounts, zero-risk promises and other methods can make users excited and place an order immediately in an irrational state.

① Teacher Fan Deng’s live promotion

On April 11, 2018, Fan Deng gave a New Year’s lecture on reading and did a group live broadcast promotion on WeChat. It was originally estimated that there would be around 1,000 WeChat groups, but less than two days after the event was launched, there were more than 8,000 groups, with 1.38 million participants. These groups are mainly formed by agents using their own connections.

Group live broadcast data

Fan Deng gives an in-depth interpretation of "The Power of Others", and teaches you how to seek interpersonal relationships that will benefit you throughout your life from the four levels of interpersonal relationships. After an hour of in-depth interpretation, group members actively asked questions in the question-and-answer session.

After the group live broadcast is over, guide group members to purchase annual memberships and generate their own posters to share and earn commissions.

On June 21, 2020, Fan Deng made his live broadcast debut on Kuaishou.

During the nearly three-hour live broadcast, the cumulative number of online viewers reached 2 million, with a total of 130,000 books sold, generating sales of nearly 10 million yuan. "I really like Teacher Fan Deng's explanation," "This form of recommending and selling books is really good," "I never thought that one day buying books would require speed"... This form of recommending good books has aroused enthusiastic response from friends. While everyone is discussing the high-quality books they are interested in in the comment area, they also do not forget to click on the shared cart to place an order and get their favorite works.

Some media also wrote that the atmosphere of Fan Deng’s live broadcast selling goods and promotions was not strong, and it was more like an intellectual talk show. "There is relatively little interaction with fans, and it is more about Fan Deng and guests chatting about books. There is no concentrated and high-frequency promotional recommendation of books, but it is full of cultural flavor."

Fan Deng's live debut

At 8:15 p.m. on August 25, 2020, Fan Deng, founder and chief content officer of Fan Deng Reading, appeared in Wei Ya’s Taobao live broadcast room for the first time, bringing a live book recommendation and in-depth dialogue on parent-child education.

With their witty and humorous language and interesting interactions, Fan Deng and Wei Ya attracted more than 4.6 million fans online at the same time. The theme book "Accompanying Children's Lifelong Growth" recommended during the live broadcast was sold out in an instant due to the combined effect of the two anchors. 100,000 copies of the book were sold out in an instant.

On Double Eleven 2020, Fan Deng did a live broadcast on Douyin for the first time, and sold 400 million annual reading passes in 3 days.

Now, Mr. Fan Deng insists on live streaming and selling goods at 19:30 every Thursday, selling books and annual memberships.

Fan Deng live broadcast every Thursday at 7:30 pm

In addition to live broadcasts on Kuaishou, Taobao, and Douyin, Fan Deng will also cooperate with some platforms with large user bases. This is the so-called "uniting all friends who can be united." For example, Ping An Financial Manager APP has about 10 million monthly active users, which is higher than that of Fan Deng Reading APP.

② Promotional activities

Fan Deng Reading Club often combines festivals for promotional activities, and on April 23, World Book Day, it offered a buy-one-get-one-free offer (buy a one-year reading membership and get a one-year reading membership for free).

At that time, my WeChat friends who had never sold Fan Deng's annual reading card before all took advantage of the discount to promote it. Some platforms even became agents to make full use of their exposure, as shown in the following figure:

Individuals and platforms promoting annual passes during World Book Day

I communicated with a WeChat friend and learned that a commodity group buying platform encouraged its own WeChat business agents to promote Fan Deng's annual reading card.

If I also join the promotion, the price must not be lower than 365 yuan (buy one get one free), and the supply price given to me is 190 yuan. If I sell one at 365 yuan, I can make 175 yuan.

After I find a customer, I need him to fill out a form and submit it. After the customer pays, the recharge can be successful in 2 to 3 days and the customer will get two years of listening rights. Moreover, buy one get one free, buy two get two free, there is no upper limit.

This makes me feel very emotional. Fan Deng Reading is like the Red Army back then, uniting all the forces that can be united. As long as you have traffic, you can cooperate with me. Every book sold is a book sold.

In addition, Moutai, Zhonghua cigarettes, and video memberships are hard currency, and Fan Deng reading membership cards also have the potential to become hard currency.

After all, Fan Deng Reading APP now has 45 million registered members and nearly 12 million paying users, and its audiobook content is very popular.

04. What can be learned

1) Insufficient

① Over-reliance on personal IP, lack of long-term stable competitiveness of the platform

Whether it is the name of the APP, the name of the public account or the name of the Douyin account, the keyword "Fan Deng" is used. Although the advantages of personal brand can be brought into play in the short term, it is unrealistic to let Teacher Fan Deng continue to give speeches in various places and record new book audio every week in 20, 50 or 80 years.

Luo Zhenyu initially developed "Luoji Siwei" to build a personal brand, but he realized that for sustainable development, the platform must run automatically so that even if Luo Zhenyu left the company, it could still produce knowledge products as usual.

So Luo Zhenyu later launched the app "Get", which has a set of course development processes. He no longer just makes knowledge products himself, but cooperates with well-known teachers, such as Xue Zhaofeng, Liang Ning, and Xiang Shuai. Their courses on Get have reached hundreds of thousands of purchases.

Currently on the Fan Deng Reading APP, online courses and training camps are produced in cooperation with external teachers. The Extraordinary Intensive Reading column is audio books recorded by some corporate executives, and the Author's Visit column invites Chinese book authors to explain the books they have written. These are all good preparations.

In the future, Fan Deng's reading APP can also be transitioned into the Get APP to reduce dependence on Fan Deng's personal brand.

②The operation and conversion of private domain traffic is a bit rigid

The Fan Deng Reading APP will identify the region where we registered our mobile phone number. When we go to add a book boy, we will be guided to add the customer service WeChat account of the agent in the corresponding region.

However, after adding the agent’s customer service, all that was posted in the group and on WeChat Moments were hard advertisements, which did not bring the company closer to users.

My suggestion is that you can create a customer service persona and put a real person’s profile picture instead of a random cartoon one. You can also post some information about your daily life or personal insights on your Moments.

Of course, this requires certain professionalism. Agents need to produce corresponding WeChat Moments copy and have copywriting skills.

The best way is for Fan Deng Reading to officially train its agents on how to write copy, how to operate private domain traffic, etc., to enhance each agent's private domain operation capabilities, thereby increasing the transaction conversion rate of new users.

In short, Fan Deng Reading still has a lot of room for exploration and improvement in private domain operations. Currently, common private domain operation methods include circle of friends operation, task treasure fission, flash group transactions, etc.

2) Reusable points

①Building a personal brand

In this era of the rise of the Internet, it is very suitable to build a personal brand, especially for young people who have no money, no connections, and no background. As long as you have a skill or are particularly good at a certain field, you can try it.

Personal brands are indeed more approachable than corporate brands. There is always a distance between silent trademarks and people's hearts.

Once fans recognize someone, they will have a sense of trust and goodwill in their hearts and will be more willing to pay for the products recommended by the other party. In addition, personal influence is sustainable, laying the foundation for sustainable development.

For example, on Bilibili, I continue to follow "Adou is Back" (which explains movies), Lukewen Studio (which explains international politics), and "The Idle Man Jia Bai" (which popularizes financial knowledge).

At first, I liked the content of their videos. I thought they were well-explained, well-produced, lively and interesting, so I started following them.

When you hear their real voices more often and see them in person more often, you will have a sense of familiarity and feel that they are old acquaintances. Naturally, you will be more willing to trust and pay for the products recommended to you by acquaintances.

At present, the fields of building personal brands include live streaming sales (Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, Luo Yonghao), education and training (He Chuan, Qiu Ye, Zhi Duo Xing), financial explanations (spenser, He Lao Shi, Jia Bai), comedy and humor (Zhu Yici, Da Lan, Baozou Comics), etc.

If you want to try to build a personal brand, you can refer to other personal brands in the same field that are doing well.

② Understand full network marketing

There are many online platforms now, each with its own characteristics, which can meet the different needs of users.

The graphic and text platforms include WeChat official accounts, Toutiao, Zhihu, Jianshu, etc., and the short video platforms include Douyin, Kuaishou, Huoshan, and Weishi;

The medium and long video platforms include Bilibili, Xigua Video, Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku;

Educational platforms include Tencent Classroom, NetEase Classroom, Qianliao, and Lizhi Microclass.

Each platform has its own users, and we can use these platforms to increase the number of followers for our own accounts.

When we first started, we first verified whether our content was popular, and then continued to polish and optimize the content. Because good content is the basic guarantee for gaining fans' support.

At the same time, you can publish content to the entire network (there are tools for one-click publishing to the entire network, such as Yi Xiaoer), but you must focus on making one platform popular.

Why should we focus on destroying one platform? Because the rules of each platform are similar, if you want to do well on each platform, you need to study the rules of each platform thoroughly, which is too much work.

In addition, try to direct fans from other platforms to one most important platform to make management easier.

Which one is the most important platform for you? There is no absolute answer, but you can weigh these factors.

For example, the highest fan stickiness means that fans on this platform often interact with you and leave messages, and often read your content. WeChat public accounts are a good platform for this.

For example, Li Jiaqi has the strongest ability to make money. His main battlefield is Taobao, and other platforms including WeChat public accounts and Douyin are auxiliary.

③Master the fission growth capability

The market competition is very fierce now. In Shenzhen alone, 1,300 new companies are registered every day. Taobao’s peers include Pinduoduo, and Douyin’s peers include Kuaishou. Because every company wants to advertise, the advertising costs are getting higher and higher.

And fission growth can effectively reduce customer acquisition costs. Its essence is that old users bring in new users, and the motivation is usually profit-driven.

When introducing the fission growth methods of Fan Deng Reading APP, we saw that these methods are all zero-cost.

For example, if an old user invites a new user to register, the annual membership can be extended by 3 days. However, the 3-day annual membership is basically free of charge, but it is of great value to the old user.

For example, in the case of a psychological test, after the user gets the test result, he or she can share it on WeChat Moments to get a topic to discuss with friends, and the app QR code can also be exposed, and the sharing cost is 0.

Common methods of fission growth include group buying, bargaining, task treasure, and distribution. If the products given away are virtual products (online courses, information packages, paid communities, training camps, software tools, etc.), the cost is almost zero.

Some activities will also give away physical goods, such as books, tissues, and thermos cups, but we can control costs.

Well, this article has come to an end.

After looking at Fan Deng Reading’s user growth method, it is not difficult to find that it has two advantages. It not only saves a lot of promotion costs, but also has the effect of efficiently increasing fans.

To expand personal influence, one can leverage platforms or celebrities with particularly high traffic. For example, Luoji Siwei, Kuaishou, Wei Ya, etc.

To be an agent system, not only does the franchise fee first, but the annual card wholesale to the agent is basically 0 cost;

The content posted by occupying Douyin is all about Fan Deng’s speech videos, which are just secondary use of materials, and also mobilized agents to "raise" Douyin traffic, with a huge lineup.

Author: Junkun

Source: Junkun