What are user portraits and user life cycles? 3 tips to teach you how to do user operations

User operations are people who deal directly with fans. Like all operations, the purpose of his work is nothing more than to attract new customers , retain existing customers , promote activation, and convert existing customers .

Common user operations include: backend customer service, WeChat group administrators, and personal accounts derived from public accounts .

Let’s look at the three prerequisites for doing a good job in user operations: creating user portraits , understanding the user life cycle , and building relationships with users.

▌Understand the User Profile

The first step in user operation is to understand the user profile of the target group.

User portraits are based on a large amount of data and are divided into two dimensions: user attributes and user behavior .

How to obtain this data?

The first step is to refer to some industry reports and look at some user data from e-commerce , apps, websites, and forums in this industry as a basic reference.

Another way is to look at the user data of benchmark public accounts and large accounts in the industry. Of course, these are all confidential, but some third-party platforms will provide some of them.

For example, you can use BlueMC’s public account portrait and Weibo KOL portrait functions to break down the public account’s data.

The user data in the KOL portrait is relatively complete, but it is from Weibo. But as long as the data volume is large enough, the user data of Weibo and WeChat are still relatively similar.

Now, if you want to create a public account for the maternal and infant industry, I will use the user data of Babytree to illustrate.

The data report comes from Analysys International . If you don’t know where to find it, just search “industry+report” on Taobao .

1. User attributes

User attributes refer to the user's gender, age, region, education, income, occupation, etc.

Look here, the main user group of Babytree is female users aged 25-30. 80% are women and 20% are men.

The user's gender determines the tone of your official account, which can be roughly described as rationality vs. sensibility. 80% of users are female, so they are definitely emotional.

Therefore, you should be more emotional in topic selection, writing style, layout, and tone. They are not interested in content made by straight men.

59.4% are between 25 and 30 years old, 25.6% are 24 years old and below, all of them were born after 1987, and quite a few were born after 1990. So the account should be younger.

A few days ago, I interviewed a editor born in 1994. He used to repost videos on WeChat, and his audience was all middle-aged people.

I asked him what experience he had in choosing videos, and he said he found that anything he liked would never become popular, but instead, content that he thought was very cliché or old-fashioned would often become popular.

The purpose of a public account is to communicate with users, and if the age difference between two people is too big, there will definitely be a generation gap.

However, another striking data here is that users aged 41 and above account for 6.8%, which seems to indicate that there are quite a lot of elderly pregnant women. This is a huge market with strong user pain points and high willingness to pay.

Looking at the user region data, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen account for 13.7%, and a considerable portion of them are in rural areas. I have seen an e-commerce data before, which said that a large proportion of the shopping population for maternal and infant e-commerce is in third-tier cities and even in some rural areas.

Shopping in these areas is not as convenient as in first-tier cities, especially for maternal and child products, which have higher requirements, so these people are more dependent on e-commerce.

In addition, if you want to organize offline activities or have offline business, user regional data is also an important reference indicator.

Judging from the geographical distribution of my backend users, the order in which I conduct offline training should be: Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou , Chengdu, Wuhan...

User education, occupation, and income are also an important reference for content and monetization.

There is a chain of contempt here. Generally speaking, the more educated the users are, the stronger their ability to pay is, but they are also more picky about content. You need to work hard to polish the content for these people.

On the contrary, if the cultural level of your target users is not high, then as long as your content is up to standard and your dissemination and fission are good, it will be fine. After all, not everyone can produce high-quality content, so it is a better choice to focus more on optimizing other aspects.

2. User Behavior

The behaviors of users on the official account are roughly as follows:

Follow, send messages, click the menu bar, like, read, reward, collect, forward, share in Moments
Click on the original text, share the public account business card, unfollow

Of course, user behavior also includes: one-to-one interaction and group interaction. Let’s not talk about this here for now. The most important thing about collecting these behavioral data of users is to label them.

The first step is to classify users, that is, to figure out the user structure.

Babytree divides the user structure into three categories based on their browsing behavior: pregnancy preparation, pregnancy, and postpartum.

Some user structures can be divided directly by age, while others are based on interests. Different accounts require different standards to divide the population structure.

After users are classified, labels should be assigned to each sub-category of users based on their behavioral data.

On the official account, it is expressed as keywords , such as keywords of some topics and titles . I have published an article before titled "I heard that you resigned, then you are very suitable for running a public account." To be honest, the title was rather random, but the opening rate was very high.

After several tests, I found that users are very interested in topics related to "career". The word "career" is a user interest tag.

The report divides Babytree's pregnancy users into early, mid and late pregnancy, and postpartum users into 0-6 months, 7-12 months, 1-3 years old, and over 3 years old. And the main tags of each type of user are summarized.

This is what I summarized using Excel.

If you want to create a mother and baby account, it is necessary to prepare a user tag list in advance. You will know what issues users are most concerned about, and you don’t have to worry about choosing topics.

The rest of the report contains some user data such as e-commerce and purchase conversion rate , which is far from most of us, so we will not elaborate on it.

In short, a user portrait is not a dead report, a chart with a little person standing in the middle and a bunch of information around it. It is the guideline in your mind for conquering cities and picking up girls.

▌Understand the user life cycle

There is a three-month curse on WeChat, which means that it usually takes about three months for a WeChat user to go from following a WeChat account to unfollowing it (not opening the account).

What does this mean?

Meaning if you don't earn his money within three months, you will never find him again.

Therefore, understanding the user's life cycle is very important for setting up conversion and monetization steps. You have to help him remove obstacles on his way forward, or even lay mines for him.

This requires you to know what to do at each stage, what are the key points now, and what need to be considered in the future.

For example, when you are with your girlfriend, you generally go through these stages: stranger, acquaintance, knowing each other, friends, good friends, ambiguity, passionate love, dullness, cold war, and breakup.

You can't hold hands the first time you meet and then just take her away the second time you meet. There must be a cycle, and each stage has different communication strategies and methods. Even the most annoying guy in the barbershop will at least be gradual when trying to sell you a card.

This is true for being a person and for creating an account.

Understand the user's life cycle, set up a corresponding growth path for the user cycle, and solve the various problems encountered by the user along the way. Only when you provide value to users will they be willing to give you something in return.

A user's life cycle on BabyTree starts from pregnancy preparation and lasts until the child is 3 years old, which is more than 4 years. Of course, this is the most ideal situation, but you have to design it according to the complete cycle to make it most likely that she will go through the entire process.

The interest tags of users at different stages are summarized above, which are actually the problems that users encounter during their growth process.

You need to provide various solutions to help users solve these problems and design a user growth path. For example, Babytree has posts, forums, courses, consultations, etc., which can be set up according to your own account attributes.

Moreover, this is not just about providing content; it requires coordination among various operations to help users solve problems.

The picture below is a typical user growth path of a college student job search account.

The user growth path of job-seeking accounts is that some accounts can last for two years, with students starting to follow them from their junior year until they graduate and look for a job.

Build relationships with users

There is a saying that Business is relationsh ip . The essence of business is relationships.

The same goes for user operations. The most important thing is to establish relationships with users. The most intuitive indicator is how many users’ WeChat accounts you have.

Why is this matter so important? Let me list a few benefits:

1. It is convenient for you to find users as soon as possible
2. When there is important information, it can be sent directly to users in groups
3. You can do circle of friends marketing for users
4. You can browse the user's circle of friends and gain a deeper understanding (collect user comments)
5. Operate user groups (various tests, voting, communication issues)
6. Convenient to promote new accounts
7. …

Among the big accounts that were blocked some time ago, some opened new small accounts and quickly became popular again. For some accounts, the number of readers is now less than one-tenth of the previous number.

Whether you have WeChat accounts with a large number of users is crucial to whether you can make a comeback. Many people, including many large operators, do not realize the importance of this issue.

Some time ago, a student came to me and asked me to help them plan a new account. Their official account has 2 million followers, and their entire online matrix is ​​around 3 million. I asked them how many fans they had on WeChat? Less than 5,000.

After adding a user on WeChat, check their Moments whenever you have time to see what content they usually forward. This will also give you a good understanding of their preferences.

I will try my best to import 1/5 of the fans of each public account to my personal account. It’s nothing more than adding a few mobile phones and a dozen WeChat accounts. A WeChat account with 5,000 real followers is much more valuable than a mobile phone.

There are many ways to import fans to WeChat accounts. For example, if users want to sign up for my weekly micro-classes, they have to add our customer service’s WeChat. This is a sustainable way.

Or like some original authors, attach your personal WeChat at the end of the article and let readers add you automatically.

In short, this is a long-term thing and you need to start planning from the first day you open your account. Importing one-tenth of the followers of a public account to your personal WeChat may sound like a lot, but if you break it down on a daily basis, it is actually not that difficult.

Final words

Three prerequisites for good user operations: create good user portraits, understand the user life cycle, and establish connections with users.

001 User persona is not a dead chart, but a clear guideline in your mind. Clearly know what kind of content users like and what kind of content users don’t like.

002 The user life cycle is the user’s growth path. You need to fight monsters with the user and help him grow. So a battle plan is needed.

003 To establish connection with users simply means adding their personal WeChat. If you can’t make friends with users, let alone get them to pay for you.