How to effectively increase user growth?

" User growth is a term that everyone in the Internet industry knows about in recent years. It has become a must-have for communication between Internet people. So what is user growth? And how can we achieve user growth effectively?"

1. What is user growth?

Although everyone is familiar with it, what exactly is user growth?

Recently, the product was launched and the boss asked Jack to make a user growth plan. Jack thought, this is easy, so he found several channels. In the first month, he invested 100,000 yuan and acquired 10,000 new users, which felt good. In the second month, he continued to increase his investment and invested 200,000 yuan to acquire 20,000 new users. The boss was delighted to see the continuous increase in the number of users, but frowned when he saw the cost of acquiring new users, so he called Jack in.

Boss: This is not called user growth, you are setting a trap for me. I haven’t even earned any money yet and you’ve already scammed me!

Jack: I look confused...

Boss: First, customer acquisition does require capital investment, but the cost of acquiring new customers is 10 yuan per day. This cost is very stable, but you shouldn’t keep it at such a high level all the time. Have you ever thought about which channels have high customer acquisition costs and which channels have low customer acquisition costs? Should the high-cost channels be reduced in cost or directly cut off?

Boss: Second, I asked you to attract new users, but you spent half a year on it. All the competitors have started to pay for conversions, but you are still digging holes and spending money on me. Haven’t you adjusted the pace of growth? If we are still attracting new customers at this time next year, will our company still exist? Have you ever thought about it?

Boss: Thirdly, we have indeed attracted some new users so far. How is the quality of these users? How about user retention? What is the payment ratio? Am I buying real fans or paying for the freebies? Which channels have more zombie fans? Which channels have more free sellers? Have you ever thought about who you give your IQ tax to?

Jack: I think...

Boss: I don’t want to know what you think, I want what I think. The user growth I want is to get growth returns that exceed the natural trend at a lower cost, faster speed, and more precise targeting. This is called user growth!

2. Why do we need user growth?

With the rapid development of the Internet, the Matthew effect has become more prominent, Internet traffic has increasingly concentrated on giants, the demographic dividend has gradually disappeared, and the cost of acquiring customers has gradually increased. The era when any product could generate traffic is gone forever. The era of the Internet is the era of traffic. With traffic, you can really do whatever you want without any moral principles.

Back to the traffic itself, there are three major problems with the current status of Internet traffic.

1. Traffic entrances are becoming more and more dispersed

In the past, traffic could be obtained by distributing flyers offline and promoting in stores. Now, there are more traffic entrances, including paid promotion, brand placement, content distribution, and offline channels. The first three channels are mainly online, and offline is another battlefield.

Paid promotion can be said to be the most mainstream traffic entrance at present. Toutiao, WeChat Moments, Guangdiantong, Baidu Information Flow, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, different platforms have one thing in common, which is to nurture you first to form their traffic pool, and then they can take over the promotion conversion to make money. You waste your time on it, others consume you on it, and you get something for nothing.

Brand placement is even more common. Billboards can be seen everywhere, at bus stops, subway stations, and large stores. You are either being recommended or on the way to being recommended. The amount of traffic can be imagined, and the profits behind it can also be imagined.

Content distribution. Now the content era is gradually rising, and knowledge payment is also setting off a wave. Zhihu, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and various Toutiao accounts are all supporting high-quality original works. The purpose is to attract more users through high-quality content, continuously expand the traffic pool, and wait for various commercial realizations.

Under this trend, traffic entrances are becoming more and more dispersed, and brands need to take care of more and more entrances. It is difficult to ensure user loyalty when there are too many homogeneous brands and products.

And this is just the current situation. After the advent of the 5G era, user information reception will shift from mobile phone screens to more screens. For example, rice cookers, refrigerators, ovens, etc. will also become traffic entrances and can also display advertisements. For enterprises, how to find suitable channels based on their product forms and user characteristics will be a very important issue.

2. The cost per customer is getting higher and higher

With the dispersion of traffic entrances, the cost of acquiring high-quality and accurate users will inevitably increase. According to iResearch's consulting report, the cost of acquiring Internet users has increased year by year from 2012 to 2018, the ROI has continued to rise, and it is difficult to lower it.

3. Fake traffic is rampant

Companies are constantly expanding their private user pools, hoping to monetize traffic. However, users are becoming more and more savvy and are unwilling to become the capital for others to make money for nothing, so there are many water armies and fake fan groups. That’s right, as long as you are willing to pay, I can increase your fans, but these fans are often zombie fans, which is what we call fake traffic.

With the proliferation of fake traffic, we cannot figure out which traffic is from real users and which is from robots. How to spend money where it counts, on our targeted users, is the traffic dilemma we are facing now.

3. How to increase user growth?

The road ahead is difficult and long, but we still have to set off. The traffic will become more and more dispersed, and the ROI will become higher and higher, so we will talk about user growth all the time now. Personally, I think the following points are needed to achieve good user growth.

1. Make a good product

The simplest truth, the hardest thing to do.

Everyone knows the importance of good products. Without good products, there will be no high user stickiness and no long-term development of products.

However, driven by capital and interests, impatient people no longer have the mind to polish their products, because by the time you have polished your products, the market has been divided up. Sometimes there is no need to even have a mature product. As long as there is a market, capital will sweep in like a bloodthirsty swarm, madly subsidizing expansion, squeezing out other practitioners, and then merging and monopolizing to become the only dominant player. As for whether the product is good or not, the capitalists don’t care because they have already made a lot of money.

But for products, after this wave of capital dividends is over, what may be left is a mess, because the product itself is useless and it is useless to want to develop in the long term without the support of capital. The xradish that was very popular last year is a good example.

2. Find the right channels to reach your audience

Once you have a good product, you need to let users come into contact with your product, which is called user reach. In other words, what kind of target users should be found through what channels?

What kind of target users should be determined at the beginning of product design, that is, what problems does the product aim to solve for which people? At this stage, the user portrait of the target users should be relatively clear. What we need to do is to analyze where these users may be?

• External channels: search engines, app stores, social, short video and content platforms, pre-installation by manufacturers, pre-installation by operators, pre-installation by solution providers, etc.
• Internal channels: APP homepage, banner activities, operational activities, etc.

Generally speaking, external channels draw traffic from other traffic pools, while internal channels distribute and convert traffic from internal traffic pools.

The most common external channels are search engines. Baidu is a model. No matter whether its reputation is good or bad, people still think of it first when there is a problem. It has a large amount of traffic, so it is no wonder that Baidu cannot control itself and dares to accept any advertisements, allowing the unscrupulous merchants behind them to reach the users, making them hate it.

The other is the most popular short video, content platform and social scene channels, such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Toutiao, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu and other platforms. These platforms ruthlessly grab your time and want you to stay on the platform 24 hours a day. You keep swiping and swiping, a day goes by, and a year goes by, but you will find that these platforms will gradually have more and more platforms selling goods, promoting games, and promoting services. Your behavior on the platform has labeled yourself, so naturally there will be advertisements that match your tastes pushed to you, and it also makes you feel, hey, you still understand me!

The other is the inconspicuous, even somewhat rogue, but very efficient pre-installation of products by channels, manufacturers, and operators.

We should all have experienced this: when we buy a new phone, it has all the necessary software, and sometimes also has software that it shouldn’t have, and they can’t be uninstalled. Isn’t it very rogue? However, this way of reaching out is cheap and has sufficient data traffic. Isn’t it great?

For internal channels, products are generally promoted in product resource positions and operational activities. This is more dependent on the size of the private traffic pool and the effect of sharing fission. Otherwise, the channel's reach will be limited.

3. Build brand awareness

Brand awareness is a very abstract thing, so abstract that many people think it is unrealistic when it is mentioned. However, brand awareness is the most important thing. Even good wine will not be appreciated if it is not well known. Without the concept of brand building, even the best products will be buried.

“I won’t accept any gifts this year, the only gift I’ll accept is Melatonin”, “If you want the best excavator, go to Lanxiang in Shandong, China”, what do you think? Have these slogans ever occupied your IQ and made you lose your judgment?

But on the other hand, this kind of brand building is the most successful. At least when giving gifts during the Chinese New Year, the first thing that comes to mind is Melatonin, and if you want to learn about excavators, you go straight to Lanxiang. This simple sentence fully demonstrates the characteristics of the product. The key is that it is catchy and particularly brainwashing.

The purpose of building brand awareness is not to realize immediate profits, but to make users think of you first when they think of similar products. This kind of brand building is successful.

4. Viral Conversion

Viral spread is what every product dreams of, because it is the ultimate secret to user growth. There may be no need for special efforts to attract new customers. Through users' spontaneous sharing and word of mouth, it can automatically achieve the effect of new customers bringing old customers, and one customer bringing ten customers, and obtain the highest return on spread and conversion at a very low cost.

Among them, we have to mention Pinxixi, the best practitioner of the secret of viral communication. No matter when and where you are, you may receive group draws and help-cutting requests from friends. There are even professional mutual-cutting groups, which are honest and fair to everyone. There are many kinds of mutual-cutting groups, which have penetrated into everyone like a pyramid scheme. One invites ten, and ten invite a hundred. It is really like a virus, growing infinitely and penetrating every pore.

However, it has to be said that this routine and method has been proven to be effective, so much so that various products have adopted it. But everything has its limits. Endlessly consuming the energy and emotions of users is not necessarily a long-term solution. Over time, it will have a bad impact on the reputation of the product. At least now I dare not download Pinxixi easily, otherwise I will have to bargain with others every day, which is embarrassing~

If you really want to achieve viral spread, the most fundamental thing is to have hard power. This hard power comes from the product itself. The product really stands from the user's perspective and solves the user's pain points. Naturally, everyone will share it and spread it by word of mouth.

Author: Big Data Analysis and Operation Knowledge Planet

Source: Big Data Analysis and Operation Knowledge Planet