Three-level strategy for attracting new customers at low cost in the education industry

In this era when traffic is becoming more and more expensive, it is not an easy task to attract users' attention. Especially in the education industry , after several years of rapid growth, competition has become fierce. How can we achieve efficient growth? The author of this article has analyzed this and shared it with you.

In the past few years since graduation, I have learned and practiced a lot, and summarized and refined a lot of experience. As for the issue of growth, I started studying it when I was working in real estate sales in college. At that time, there were two main ways to acquire customers. One was to distribute flyers at regular intervals at fixed locations, and the other was to screen potential customers through call records. It has been seven or eight years.

Because he was not satisfied with the traditional offline customer acquisition channels, he engaged in the field of Internet marketing after graduation, focusing on the research of online growth operations, from free to paid forms, from traditional building advertising to community advertising, and then to Internet channels for digital marketing that combines brand and effect. It can be said that I have studied things that many people have studied, and I have also studied things that many people have not studied.

Does email marketing work? Yes, it does. Is SMS marketing effective? Yes, it is effective. Is telephone marketing effective? Yes, it is effective. Is QQ marketing effective? Yes, it is effective. Is WeChat marketing effective? Yes, it is effective.

Is bidding effective? Yes, it is effective. Is information flow delivery effective? Yes, it is effective. Tencent’s social media advertising is effective. It’s effective. Are stair advertising effective? Yes, it is effective. Are bus advertising effective? Yes, it is effective.

Since they all work, why is growth still a headache for everyone? Because methods have advantages and disadvantages, channels have advantages and disadvantages. Some channels either require huge amounts of manpower and material resources but have little effect, while others require huge amounts of financial resources and have high customer acquisition costs.

What is difficult for enterprises is to find a low-cost and efficient way to acquire customers. Does this method exist? Yes, it does. But testing successfully is not easy.

Channel delivery design is required, and the design chain is the most difficult. You need to be familiar with the methods and approaches of various channels, and superimpose all the best solutions to design an optimal route. This route is just the existing and perhaps the best solution route.

Every industry has its own three existing tricks, and for educational institutions, lectures, open classes, and low-price leads seem to be the most common ways to acquire customers. This is also the method currently adopted by the vast majority of institutions. Is it effective? Yes, it is effective.

If it works, why is it necessary to study and redesign it?

That's because all three approaches are too superficial. Why do I think the chain and method I designed are better than the existing ones? It is because of the extensive practice and research I have accumulated, which are the confidence and results supported by my years of hard work.

Some readers said that they wanted to see me update the long articles with useful information. Long articles with useful information require practice and time. On the other hand, I have been a little too busy recently. But in order to meet the needs of my friends, I decided to share and summarize my latest design chain in my spare time. Supply chain facing growth in education-related companies.

Applicable to educational companies with stores, teaching staff and marketing departments. I have put so much effort into this, and I believe that everyone will not hesitate to collect and forward it, so that more bosses in need can get inspiration and thinking.

Growth is a systematic project, not just the job of the marketing department. Managers should have a global awareness and a sense of the overall situation. Be able to look at the work of growth from a systemic level.

At present, private domain operation is a task that educational companies must carry out. The tools for private domain operation are very mature, including personal WeChat/enterprise WeChat, WeChat public account/enterprise account/video account/mini program, Moments, and one-to-one communication windows.

However, the core and key of private domain traffic operation does not lie in the tools, because the tools are very mature for every company, but the final results vary greatly. The core lies in the different operational ideas.

Let me take K12 as an example. Although the state has strict supervision in this area, I think this is a good thing. Losing money, gaining publicity and creating anxiety are indeed not worthy of praise. In the context of the difficult road ahead for the paid model, the three-level operation strategy I talked about today can play a greater role, and this is what education and training companies should do most.

It’s just that as capital enters the crazy market competition, education and training companies are collectively in a state of anxiety because they are worried about falling behind.

Because this method is a systematic work and involves the mobilization of many departmental resources, it is recommended that it be controlled and promoted in a hierarchical manner by senior management of the company.

First level: promote the marketing department and the discipline department

The organizational structures of many companies are not the same. In many cases, the marketing department is mainly responsible for channel development and delivery, while the subject department is responsible for traffic user conversion.

It belongs to the state of separation work. This division of labor model is also quite common.

(List of exposure points of the marketing department's traffic entrance)

The marketing department is mainly responsible for paid growth and customer acquisition, but it will also explore free channels and customer acquisition methods. Paid growth delivery must continuously reduce enrollment costs. Now the question is, how to reduce it? We should adjust the optimization path based on data analysis. In addition to not being able to add corporate WeChat as a delivery channel, building advertising and community advertising must be directed to corporate WeChat, and a fission chain must be designed in corporate WeChat.

This step is very critical. Only by guiding the users added by corporate WeChat to start fission can we maximize the acquisition of users. This involves the design of posters and the design of fission chains.

The design of the poster must be ultimately controlled by someone with a solid foundation in content marketing to ensure that the poster has the greatest effect in attracting new customers, and free is always the biggest help. Secondly, the marketing department must have fission thinking. For content related to fission, I recommend books and courses related to "Wang Liuliu's Fission System". If you don't have any, you can chat with me privately.

After all, as a veteran in the operations industry, I still have these experiences.

However, Liuliu’s course system is somewhat complicated. For enterprises, there is no need to adopt such a complicated system. The simplest sharing guide to add corporate WeChat will be sufficient.

The baits used to place posters and enter the corporate WeChat system must be different, and the same set of baits must never be used.

Let me briefly talk about how to design the bait. For example, the bait put out is a free open class.

Then the fission system can be used to share and receive physical materials and books of additional courses. The reason why the fission system cannot fission or is unsuccessful is that there is no match between user needs and the design of the bait. The best solution is to meet the user's needs without affecting the overall situation of the core courses.

After users are attracted, the first communication opportunity must be cherished. Many companies actually have a sales department. The sales department conducts the first step of in-depth communication with the attracted customers and conducts preliminary label management on the customers, classifying users into different levels of SABCD. S represents closed customers. According to the user's intention from high to low, they are classified into four categories of ABCD, and follow up step by step to eventually convert the users.

The Internet industry is a labor-intensive industry. As far as I know, in some online schools and in a single city, there are more than 100 people in pure sales conversion positions, who provide fine-grained management and follow-up operations for incoming users.

This is a laborious process, but it is necessary to do it this way if you want to achieve the best in enrollment. Otherwise, if the conversion path cannot keep up after users arrive, it will also lead to the loss of potential customers. Once the user is converted, he or she will be guided to the teacher’s WeChat portal. Enter the next step of more refined management.

The second level is to promote the teaching department - the construction of teachers' personal IP

Many teachers do not have the awareness of building their personal reputation. In fact, for teachers, it is the easiest port to establish IP and the most direct window to follow up customer service. Reputation building training and personal IP building on the teacher side and the operation of the circle of friends are crucial. The purpose of building teachers' personal reputation is to promote the process of old teachers mentoring new teachers.

The lowest cost way for recruiting students is for teachers to mentor new students.

The work of teachers guiding new students is based on users' trust in teachers. Therefore, the most direct way to build teachers' reputation, besides teaching, is through daily services and externalization in the circle of friends. The purposeful externalization in the circle of friends can be roughly divided into the following sections: The teacher's personal portrait: dedicated and responsible, passionate about education, strong in ability, excellent reputation, and collectively praised by parents. The operation of the circle of friends can start from the following aspects: [trust building, authority building, reputation building, value creation, daily life] and finally with the help of fission system, open classes, new user reward sharing, enter the marketing section, promote user sharing, and guide the continuous introduction of new users.

Improving the teacher's enrollment ability is a crucial enrollment link for enterprises, because enterprises must provide conscious training to teachers in this regard and guide them to manage their circle of friends.

The core of becoming stronger than becoming bigger is that the teachers are strong enough. How to reflect various aspects such as teaching staff strength requires continuous support from corresponding materials. Therefore, teachers need to have an awareness of material accumulation and content production. New teachers rarely have this kind of corresponding awareness because they need to be included in the training system by the training department or the teaching department.

(Brief introduction to the teacher's circle of friends operation strategy)

If it involves specific operation plans, or if you don’t understand something, please chat with me privately. After all, I am an experienced person and I have a complete set of logic and practical cases to demonstrate this after practice.

The third level is to promote the campus operations department to carry out campus externalization and campus reputation building

Campus construction is the most direct window for parents to establish contact with the campus, and it is also the most direct offline embodiment of the brand image. In addition to reception, campus operations also involve the handling and coordination of many affairs. However, the construction of the campus brand is the most intuitive place to highlight the strength of the enterprise. The operation of the campus brand image can be the most direct and leave a deep impression on users.

(Campus brand operation and construction)

Therefore, the brand operation and construction of the campus are of paramount importance. In the process of user follow-up and growth conversion, we always have to invite parents to the site to experience and check.

Therefore, if the campus' service and communication skills conversion skills are done well, it will greatly help user enrollment and growth. With the development of Internet tools today, campus brand building is becoming increasingly convenient.

Today’s major update to WeChat for Business is extremely beneficial to the online and offline education industry. We have reached the stage where we can achieve low-cost expansion through campus WeChat user operations.

Each campus is equipped with a corresponding campus reception and visitor consultation WeChat portal. We guide new visiting users to be added to corporate WeChat, and convey the information we need to convey through various operational means such as WeChat-based content operations, so as to achieve our desired goals.

Information carries what we want users to perceive, and this will become a weapon to influence users' minds. Therefore, educational enterprises must pay attention to this. According to my observation, the reason why many offline enterprises cannot advance is more due to the lack of talent.

Because the completion of this system requires people with strong comprehensive abilities, they need to be able to do marketing, understand brand reputation building, professionalism building, influence building, be able to write copy, be able to organize events, be able to do real-time design, understand operations, understand users, and also have a growth mindset and sales awareness.

But in fact, no matter how many campuses are in operation, as long as there is a controlling center that can grasp and understand these, and carry out overall synchronous promotion, as well as small-part differentiated display, it will be fine.

The market expands the traffic entrance, the sales team and the subject team follow up on the conversion, the teacher team builds personal IP to promote referrals, campus services are promoted, and the campus situation is promptly connected to the outside parent side by a display window and close contact. With such a combined system, the momentum of campus growth will increase several times.

There are many factors that affect growth, and teaching and research partners also have a great impact on growth. Books are one of the core carriers of the product, and the degree of match with students will affect the learning status of students and teachers, and thus affect growth. However, under normal circumstances, with many years of teaching and research accumulation, there will generally not be too many problems in this area.

Therefore, it will not be overly included in the growth link. But it doesn’t mean it’s not important, on the contrary it’s very important. It’s just that from the perspective of marketing and operations, they do not belong to the same system.

The marketing department promotes large-traffic exposure and traffic entry points efficiently and at low cost, disciplines and sales promote new customer conversion, the teaching staff promotes referrals, campus operations promote campus construction, and establishes brand trust from the most direct contact end. Only through these three levels of promotion can we achieve truly low-cost and efficient growth.

Running a business is a hard job, it is not even a job for humans. It requires painstaking management, and it cannot even be simply summarized as painstaking management. It is really not easy.

It is not easy to achieve real results in anything, let alone starting a business. You are right. If you are interested, you can chat with me privately. Tell everything you know and say it without reservation. Do things that benefit others with an altruistic heart. That's all.

Author: Fan Yiwen

Source: Teacher Fan's Text Gallery