Is online and offline integration the mainstream strategy for community marketing?

Due to the increasingly fierce competition in traditional distribution channels and the disappearance of online traffic dividends, channel integration and innovation often become a magic weapon for some companies to achieve unexpected success.

Due to the impact of the epidemic, the commercial value of the community has been pushed to the forefront. Leading Internet companies have invested heavily in the community, and a super battle for traffic is about to break out.

Pinduoduo launched Duoduo Maicai; Meituan launched Meituan Youxuan; Tencent invested in Xingsheng Youxuan and Yippin Fresh; Alibaba established the Hema Youxuan business unit, relying on Hema Fresh's traffic and brand to rapidly expand its territory; even Dong Ge, who had disappeared for a long time, came out again to lead the team personally.

According to the "Special Research Report on China's Community Group Buying Industry in the First Half of 2020", the scale of China's community group buying market is expected to reach RMB 100 billion to 102 billion in 2022.

The rise of community economy is bound to be a new market dividend. However, whether brands can grasp traffic entrances and find Internet business opportunities dominated by themselves depends on their keen strategic insights. The future trends and mainstream strategies of community commerce will inevitably become the focus of brand attention.

1. It is difficult to make a line from a single thread, and it is difficult to make a forest from a single tree.

I think any good marketing strategy is based on a deep understanding of user needs and scenarios, and offline communities have their own distinct characteristics:

• Since community businesses with local customers are based in the community, rely on the community and serve the community, their customers are mainly residents of the community and surrounding areas, so they have obvious local characteristics.
• Community commerce with supporting business formats is mainly to meet the daily consumption needs of community residents. Its business formats have obvious life supporting characteristics, such as large and medium-sized supermarkets, convenience stores, beauty salons, water stations, restaurants, etc. Some large communities should also be equipped with facilities such as post offices and banks. Some mid- to high-end communities have incorporated more business formats such as pet hospitals, coffee and tea art, home living centers, and clubs to make the supporting facilities more complete and of higher quality.
• The daily nature of consumption is also determined by the consumption needs of the service objects of community commerce.
• Neighborhood affinity: Since community businesses have a relatively fixed and stable source of customers, they often establish a neighborhood-style harmonious relationship between operators and residents, and this relationship also makes the services of community businesses more friendly.
• Profit stability The factors that determine profit stability lie in the stability of customer sources and the stability of consumption of supporting needs in daily life.
• Supply and demand dependence The supply and demand dependence of community commerce is manifested in two aspects. On the one hand, it is the dependence of commerce on community residents; on the other hand, it is also manifested in the consumption dependence of community residents on commerce. These two aspects complement each other.

We can leverage the characteristics of offline communities to leverage their experiential marketing advantages, enhance customers' intuitive understanding of the brand through vision, hearing, etc., stimulate customers' understanding of the content of marketing activities, and ensure the effectiveness of creating interactive experience activities.

In experiential marketing, brand interaction can be promoted. Through timely feedback and timely dissemination of activities, the trust between customers and brands is enhanced, the accuracy of information data is guaranteed, the user experience value is improved, and consumers are given a dual psychological and material experience, which allows nearby consumers to become dependent, thereby forming consumer stickiness and generating more repeat customers.

I have always felt that offline scenarios are very rich and complex, and there are many scenarios that have the potential to increase conversions.

Of course, offline communities also have their obvious weaknesses. Offline communities are divided by region, and their traffic and audience are fixed.

Online communities have large public domain traffic, are not restricted by time, space and region, have diverse e-commerce operation tools, clear user behavior paths, are relatively easy to collect user data, and can execute marketing activities quickly and conveniently with strong flexibility.

Online communities are categorized by groups of people. The main work of community operation revolves around people, focusing on user stickiness and activity, and traffic conversion, with the aim of creating new growth and expanding new markets. However, as the Internet dividend disappears, user growth has reached a bottleneck, and major e-commerce platforms and various apps are frantically competing for consumers' attention and dwell time.

Internet platforms have also realized that as the "epidemic dividend" recedes, China's Internet traffic dividend is about to dry up.

During this year's Spring Festival, under the call for Internet users to "celebrate the New Year in place", a large number of young white-collar users stayed in first-tier cities to celebrate the New Year. Various mobile Internet platforms regarded this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to "drive growth".

In the past, every Spring Festival, major platforms would launch huge red envelope activities, but this year's red envelope scale is undoubtedly the largest in history. The top APP icons showed "share 2 billion", "share 2.1 billion" and even "share 2.8 billion", which became a spectacle that was reposted on social media.

But the most intense red envelope campaign in history has yielded unsatisfactory results. Douyin, Kuaishou, and Pinduoduo seem to have ushered in a decent wave of growth, but the ROI of new user acquisition activities on most other platforms has hit an all-time low, and the subsequent churn rate is also at an all-time high. Moreover, there was almost no upward trend in the total Internet traffic during the Spring Festival.

In the past, because the entire traffic pie was increasing, the platform could achieve a basic growth rate even if it did nothing.

Today, any traffic growth on any platform may come at the expense of a competitor. The end of the traffic dividend means that traffic alone can no longer achieve brand goals.

Therefore, both online and offline have their own weaknesses.

In the post-traffic era, if Internet platforms still want to try to achieve similar levels of growth as in the past few years, they must attack core territories.

This attack is not only an attack on traffic level, but also an attack on business model and ecology level.

By leveraging the complementary advantages of online and offline, sharing resources and data, using LBS to connect different consumption scenarios, and coordinating integrated marketing event planning and other measures, we can increase market penetration, strengthen user stickiness, and achieve refined and systematic operations.

2. Online and offline integrated marketing is the future of community business

Compared with traditional marketing, the online and offline integrated strategy can combine the characteristics of the community itself and integrate the advantages of online and offline channels:

1) Through large-scale data mining through enterprise big data, and then aggregating groups in society with roughly the same age, hobbies, education level, consumption habits, income level, etc., so as to accurately locate consumption in community marketing , it is possible to reduce the marketing costs of the enterprise during its operation.

Competition in the stock market is a zero-sum game, and using big data to optimize user transaction experience is the only solution to seek growth.

2) Further enhance user group’s attachment to the product through integrated marketing.

This mainly comes from the data collected through the community platform, and can classify and collect relevant factors such as consumers' personal consumption habits, economic income level, personal hobbies, etc.

By analyzing these big data, businesses can obtain the different consumption habits of each consumer group and carry out targeted marketing. For audiences that meet the criteria of permanent users, secondary coverage should be carried out around the applications they commonly use in their daily lives to awaken the brand memory they already have offline.

At the same time, both online and offline public domain traffic should add "retention" steps. Through private domain sedimentation, strengthen community classification and management, and obtain more effective user data.

In addition, in order to enhance the activity of integrated online and offline marketing, membership benefits, points consumption, holiday promotions, etc. can also be carried out simultaneously. It is more conducive to improving efficiency, reducing unnecessary expenses, optimizing services, optimizing marketing activities and media placement, further meeting user needs and enhancing user consumption experience.

With the continuous optimization of various data (user portraits, user behavior portraits, product demand dynamics, promotional information review, media placement monitoring, competitive product analysis, supply chain data), we can better utilize and allocate online and offline resources. Refined user operations will also increase unit value and empower product updates and iterations, making them more agile than previous single offline marketing.

Compared with previous single delivery, with the support of user IP address, mobile phone positioning (LBS) and user portrait, the integration of online and offline channels can fully combine user online behavior data + offline physical data to carry out precise marketing to potential customers and lock in the brand's target audience.

"Digitalization" will become an important trend in community marketing. At the same time, the media technology environment will continue to update and iterate, all communications will be Internet communications, and all marketing will be integrated online and offline marketing.

The real value of community marketing lies in the reconstruction of "people, goods, and places", and after the reconstruction, it forms a powerful explosive potential, helping the brand to grow from 1 to 100.

In the future, we need to connect online and offline, realize the integration of online and offline marketing, and achieve integrated development, rather than separating the two systems. Based on resources, using data as a tool, people as a carrier, and private domains as a foothold, we break down strategies into unified goals, work together online and offline, and defeat them one by one.

For offline channels with "people" as the carrier, store guides/pickers/cashiers/operators are required to actively interact with users while completing basic work, inform them of online activities and purchasing methods, and guide users to become private domain fans.

At the same time, employee incentives are crucial, and online and offline competitiveness needs to be replaced by cooperation to prevent "self-blackening". 

The unit that uses "goods" as the carrier is the entire store's SKU. Stores should know which of our products are traffic-generating items, which are popular items, which are profitable items, and which are suitable for packaged sales.

Based on this, promotional materials and in-store decorations should be given corresponding resource positions. In addition, customers should be encouraged to view more product information, user reviews, and one-click online coupons in online stores to increase the possibility of user retention and repurchase.

The unit with "field" as the carrier is the channel itself. Store signage/digital advertising screens: From the moment a user enters the store, online QR code advertising + online promotional interest points are added to the user's must-go routes, including the store entrance, the stacking area, the shelf pallets, the shelf baffles, the hanging signs and flags, the front columns, the wall posters, the store brochures, the store exits, etc.

One more attraction point brings you one step closer to conversion.

Author: Community Marketing Research Institute

Source: Community Marketing Research Institute