Practical online school operation: How to open a successful live open class? (superior)

Since live open classes are so good, should we start live streaming right away?

The significance of educational live broadcast

Suddenly, as if a spring breeze came overnight, flowers bloomed everywhere.

New Oriental, Xueersi, Hujiang, VIPABC, Xing Shuai, Xuebajun, and Yuantiku, from old brands to newcomers, from vocational education to K12, from large-scale open classes with tens of thousands of people online at the same time to one-on-one tutoring, it seems that all the more famous online education companies have started live streaming.

This year, online education practitioners may feel a little embarrassed if they don’t say that they are doing educational live broadcasts when they go out. Following this trend, almost all online education startups have started to do live streaming. But what about the effect? You bought a live streaming service with great expectations and prepared high-quality content diligently, but on the day of the live streaming, you were embarrassed to find that not many people came to listen? Or even if someone comes to listen, there is little interaction and a lot of people leave halfway, not to mention any revenue conversion.

Of course, there are also many who make the live broadcast very lively and effective. But as far as I know, this is really only a very small number of the total number of online education startups in China.

Whenever I encounter an open class with poor live broadcast effects, I will ask the principal of the online school the same question: Before starting the live broadcast, have you thought about the significance of educational live broadcast?

1. Solve the problem of students’ loneliness in learning

In my opinion, the significance of educational live streaming is first and foremost to solve the problem of loneliness among students in their studies.

Let us recall ourselves, do we often get stuck in the process of learning new knowledge and skills on our own? At this time, don’t we really hope that there is someone who can help us sort out our thoughts and solve this problem? Even if there is no one to counsel us, wouldn’t it feel better if someone could give us some encouragement or, most basically, someone could listen to us? This is normal. We have such needs, and our students will certainly have such needs during the learning process.

Why can educational live streaming solve this problem?

While listening to the teacher's lecture on the other side of the Internet, I exchange views with my classmates; if I encounter a problem, I raise it and the teacher will answer my question. If there is something I don't understand, I can communicate with the teacher in real time; the opinions I expressed in the live class were agreed by many classmates, and I was so happy! The teacher praised my answer to a question raised by another classmate, saying that I had a thorough understanding. I was so happy! Not only did I learn a lot from today’s live broadcast, I also met a few friends who share similar views as me. We exchanged contact information with each other privately. I am so happy!

Can the above-mentioned methods solve the problem of loneliness?

We originally chose live open classes because we got the inspiration from continuous communication with early users. And the facts have proved how correct this choice is.

2. Education live broadcast will also undertake corresponding operational goals

Secondly, I think that for online schools, educational live broadcasts will also carry corresponding operational goals.

1. Registration conversion - The registration conversion rate of KOL open classes can be 5 to 10 times or even higher than normal natural conversion.
2. Active/activated - regardless of whether they are students who registered in the last one or two months, or students who registered six months or one year ago, although they have not been to class for a while, they are mostly willing to attend an interesting and valuable open class.
3. Revenue conversion - group effect

In comparison, the main goal of one-on-one or small group (less than 5 people) educational live broadcasts is relatively simple - to achieve teaching service effects.

This is how 1-on-1 tutoring to solve problems (answering questions in K12, practical problems encountered in vocational education), how 1-on-1 oral English learning works, and how online flipped classrooms (moving group discussions online as well) work. Everything is done to ensure that the student's learning effect meets or even exceeds expectations.

So before we start a live broadcast, we must figure out why we want to start a live broadcast? What value can I use live streaming to achieve for my students? What value can I use live streaming to achieve for my online school? Only when we have a deep understanding and clear goals can we begin to prepare our own educational live broadcast in a targeted manner.

How to run a successful live open class

We mentioned above that live open classes can bring great value to online schools, including increasing registration conversions, increasing activity, recalling old users, sales conversions, etc.

Since live open classes are so good, should we start live streaming right away?

Of course not. If you don’t understand the following points, don’t even think about giving a successful live open class.

1. Goal – Is this to get more enrollments? Or do you hope to increase the user activity of online schools? Or hope to make money?
2. Content - Different goals require different content
3. User positioning - Who are the students of my open class (portrait)? Where are they ( channels )? How can I find them (how to get there)?
4. Process Design - What steps do I need to set up to achieve my goals?

1. Set a small goal for yourself first

It is best if this small goal is quantifiable.

Generally speaking, live open classes are like a group activity, and the increase in activity is inevitable. Of course, because of the different content, it increases the activity of different groups of people.

Registration conversion and sales conversion, these two goals may conflict somewhat (but not absolutely), so many times we have to choose a more important one. For example, if I have 1 million free students but only 1,000 paying students, I think the goal of paid conversion might be more suitable for me. But if my online school only has 10,000 or 20,000 students now, then it may be more important for me to attract new students.

2. Determine the content based on the goal

If you want to increase the number of registrations, then find a KOL/expert in the industry to give lectures. It doesn’t really matter whether this kind of open class contains useful information or not (of course, useful information is relative), and there are many people who come to support the opinion leader.

If the purpose is to increase sales, then find a teacher who has opened paid courses to teach some practical content, especially if his paid courses contain very valuable and popular content, which is very suitable for live open classes to increase sales.

3. Target users based on content

If I invite a data scientist ranked in the top 10 in the world to talk about how a big data scientist grew from a rookie to his current level, and the title or content is marked "Contains the Tao and Art of Big Data", then my target users are actually very large. All practitioners in the big data industry, whether you are a small shrimp or a senior executive, whether you are a developer or a data analyst , will be very interested. And all those who are interested in big data, are preparing to learn big data, are preparing to switch to big data or intend to switch to big data can come to this course.

Then we segment the users, locate where they are likely to appear, and find out how we can notify them.

Taking the above open class as an example, the target audience can be divided like this:

1. Those who have just changed their career or intend to change their career to big data, as well as college students who have just started working in the big data industry;
2. Senior big data practitioners (more than 3 years of experience), as well as middle and senior management and technical decision makers or technical R&D personnel of many companies that need to use big data

The first type of people may be fresh graduates, young people who have worked for one or two years, or workers who have worked for several years and hope to seek a breakthrough with higher salary. They are often active in various places where they can learn big data related knowledge for free - QQ groups, WeChat public accounts, Weibo, WeChat groups , community websites, technical forums/blogs, search engines, and of course, online education platforms.

Now that we know where they are, it would be relatively easy to notify them, right?

1. QQ group information, group announcements, group emails, QQ mailbox
2. WeChat official account advertising (articles or advertising space within articles)
3. Weibo large-scale advertising, fan communication
4. Ad space (buy ad space or DSP ads ) and posts/articles on community websites and technical forums/blogs
5. Search Engine Advertising
6. Courses offered on other online education platforms

The second type of people , a few of whom may be KOLs in some technical forums and blogs, should be senior R&D personnel in the company (members of a technical COE), or technical managers (project managers, architects), or even technical decision makers (chief architects, CTOs, data scientists). These people's time is very precious, so most of the time they will not go to QQ groups or WeChat groups to chat, and only a few people will go to technical forums/blogs to share. Of course, these people will more or less subscribe to some WeChat public accounts or big Weibo accounts. Of course, when they need to learn something they haven’t learned before, they will also seek information and answers through search;

This type of people is relatively scattered, but we can also reach them through WeChat public account advertising, DSP advertising, or search advertising. After all, this does not conflict with the channels of the first type of people. It’s just that the advertising copy and pictures may need to be changed accordingly.

4. Design the process based on the goal

This process not only includes the process of live open classes, it refers to all user processes that start when we come into contact with users.

It includes:

1. Advertisement Design - What information do we use to attract/inform users?
2. Landing page - what is the first thing the user sees? What kind of information can make users more willing to register for open courses as soon as possible?
3. Traffic diversion after successful registration - Weibo, QQ group, WeChat group or WeChat official account?
4. Pre-class warm-up - is it pre-class homework, pre-class discussion, pre-class Q&A, or a quiz with prizes?
5. Live broadcast - a lecture method? How to interact? Promotional methods (revenue conversion)? Rhythm? Water army or tap water? Sales equipment and support?
6. After class - homework? After-class discussion group (WeChat or QQ group)? How to convert course sales after class?

Continuing with the example above, my goal is to maximize registration conversions, so should I make the button for joining the course as prominent as possible? Should I refine the copy to make it more eye-catching? Should I make the registration process (because there are many new users) very simple, and also make the process of joining the course as simple as possible?

After we figure out the above questions, we actually have a plan in mind. Now we can prepare our own open classes. Of course, there are still some details, such as how to achieve a 70% registration conversion rate? For example, how can we use open courses to better engage users and activate new users? How to use open courses to better achieve revenue goals? We will explain this in more detail in our subsequent articles.

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This article was compiled and published by @奈何(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!