How to divert private domain traffic?

"Private domain" has almost become an unavoidable word in the marketing field.

The fading of traffic dividends and the environment of existing competition have made " private domain traffic " replace "growth hacker" since 2019 and become a hot term in e-commerce, marketing, retail and other industries. Then, the impact of the epidemic a year later made it a panacea for brand merchants to save themselves.

From official accounts, communities, and mini-programs in the WeChat ecosystem to official accounts, live broadcast rooms, and stores on other content platforms, everyone is talking about "private domains." How to operate private domains, utilize private domains, revitalize private domains, and what advanced ways to play with private domains are the core of industry discussion.

Such a hot "exploration atmosphere" in the industry actually reflects a current situation from the side - when it comes to private domains, people are not completely aligned in their cognition and actions.

Private domain is not a panacea. Ineffective private domain makes everyone exhausted and even hinders growth.

1. Why is it “invalid”?

According to the summary of private domain operation methodology by a number of private domain operators and private domain sales teams, doing private domain does not seem to be a difficult task.

First, attract traffic in the public domain and turn it into WeChat friends who can guide you to shop. Or, import it into the community, guide users to follow the brand’s official account, and register as members on the mini program. This will complete the accumulation of private domain traffic. Then, sales or operations post advertisements in WeChat Moments every day, send coupons in groups, and the brand regularly updates the content of the official account, which is private domain operation.

The first is to attract as much traffic as possible, and the second is to release marketing materials and irregular promotional activities. In fact, the private domain operations of many brands are simplified to these two links. This is an operation that ignores many details, and from decision-making to actual execution, these two links may "deteriorate", resulting in the problem of "invalid private domain".

One of the "deterioration" situations is over-emphasis on drainage.

Currently, the way of thinking that most brands have is to pull as many reachable users as possible into the private domain. The greater the traffic, the higher the possibility of conversion. Under the goal of "the more the better", brands seem to be doing private domain operations, but in fact the focus is all on traffic generation, and subsequent operations are neglected.

In fact, many offline stores have this problem. In the store, shopping guides use discounts or coupons to guide customers to join groups, follow official accounts, and become members. However, after completing this process, the brand's operations have not kept up - there is no one to operate the group, the official account is rarely updated, and only promotional text messages are sent regularly after becoming a member.

These low-quality marketing contents may not even reach users, because users will block worthless social groups and unfollow public accounts, and promotional text messages may be directly regarded as harassment and intercepted.

Bosideng, which is now an excellent example of private domain operation, actually fell into this misunderstanding in the early days. Bosideng's information director Zhu Aiguo said that Bosideng initially used private domains to frantically expand its customer base, and store guides had hard task targets for adding a certain number of people every day. But he soon discovered that the shopping guides were "like crazy" and were only focused on recruiting new customers. Although the number of customers increased, the quality of the customer base was extremely low, and it even affected the store's performance in the end.

Scanning QR code to order food in restaurants is also a typical case.

The original purpose of the QR code scanning ordering application was to allow merchants to simplify processes, improve efficiency, and free up manpower. The advantages are obvious.

But nowadays, processes such as following official accounts and filling in information to register as members have been moved forward to before ordering food, and are mandatory. Users clearly feel that they are being "marketed" and "information leaked." The goal of merchants to accumulate members and accumulate user data is actually difficult to achieve.

In addition to focusing too much on traffic, the second "deterioration" problem is that although many brand merchants are aware of the importance of operations, they have long been outputting advertisements from a one-way brand perspective under the traditional marketing thinking, and lack interaction with users.

It is not difficult to understand that everyone has many communities, public accounts, and personal WeChat accounts of shopping guides in certain brand stores on WeChat. But a considerable portion of these places are filled with mechanical and formulaic advertising information.

This situation occurs because one person manages hundreds of social networks, and mechanized synchronous push is the norm in operations. There is software that can automatically or semi-automatically write marketing content for public accounts, and "one-to-many" shopping guides are also mainly pushed in WeChat-style friend circles. Official accounts, communities and shopping guides’ friend circles have actually become a simple and straightforward channel for brand merchants, and their value is limited to exposure.

Of course, in addition to the above problems, the way many brands direct traffic to private domains also has problems.

For example, traffic that is obtained entirely through some viral social fission gameplay has low traffic value and is more likely to be invalid. Using fan club voting to attract fans of idol artists into the private domain may increase their number very quickly in the short term, but fans’ focus is not on the brand at all, and they may even develop a rebellious mentality in the end.

2. Why is it ineffective?

The leading platforms that can see further and the big brands that move faster actually already have a very clear understanding of the extensive, inefficient, and off-track private domain strategies that are prevalent in the industry.

For example, Nestlé, as a "super brand" with multinational business and extremely rich product lines, started operating public accounts very early, but initially it mainly output one-way brand advertising and it was difficult to get user feedback.

Last year, Nestlé officially began to build its private domain, and its layout and operations revolved around users. Starting from the traffic generation stage, Nestlé has emphasized the need to attract accurate users who are truly interested in products and brands through advertising, and avoid the entry of too much low-quality traffic. When it comes to the actual operation stage, Nestlé will use the content management system to produce and distribute content and continuously optimize it in the later stage. It will use digital tools to pay full attention to transaction volume and multiple process indicators such as open rate, interaction rate, reading rate, new product conversion, etc., to improve operational efficiency.

Nestlé attaches great importance to the combination of digitalization and private domain operations, and its goal is to communicate with users more accurately. For example, when going online, digitalization can allow brands to obtain more user information on traditional e-commerce platforms, WeChat ecosystem and other content platforms; at the same time, offline, the digital upgrade of traditional stores can also help brands observe consumers' post-link behavioral performance in real time.

This year, Tencent Smart Retail also proposed the concept of "effective private domain" for the first time.

In the "Smart Retail Private Domain White Paper 2021", Tencent Smart Retail believes that an effective private domain requires operations that go through five steps: multi-channel traffic, creating user favorability, stimulating social fission, promoting purchases through interaction, and deepening user loyalty. In order to achieve all five steps well, the brand must have its own organizational strength, product strength, operational strength and product technology strength as its foundation.

Obviously, no brand can confidently say that it can do every step on its own or has all the capabilities. After all, private domain operation is still a matter that requires cooperation among multiple parties, "adapting to the times" and long-term improvement.

But for many brands, it is necessary to establish correct awareness first. The private domain itself is not a hot spot or a short-term trend. If brands want to find the answer to "how to be more effective", what they need to do at this stage is to get out of the misunderstanding, change the extensive approach, and return to the scientific "intensive cultivation".

Author: Lv Yue

Author: New Marketing Engine