"Skills, Methods and Principles" in Internet Operations

The excitement that was very hot the day before yesterday cooled down yesterday. The strategy that worked very well yesterday did not work today. The APP made today will be full of uncertainty tomorrow. Our resilience is facing unprecedented challenges, and we have involuntarily fallen into the curse of "plans always cannot keep up with changes".

In order to escape this curse, I tried to find the antidote from the evolution of "technique, method, and Tao".

Technique

Since I started my business a few years ago, I have always been keen on thinking about "techniques". I cannot feel safe unless I come up with a specific strategy. Once I have a breakthrough idea, I am so excited that I cannot sleep. I was always fascinated to explore the optimal strategy: How to receive 500 business plans in a day? How to establish 100 “Shenzhen rental groups” in one day? How to get 1,000 car owners in one day...

For successful methods, I will replicate them horizontally and vertically, and for ineffective strategies, I will summarize and review them. Over time, I discovered the reason why techniques alternate between being effective and ineffective: the effectiveness of a technique (strategy) does not lie in the technique itself, but more in our understanding of user portraits and our exploration of the relevance of user needs.

For example, I want to create 100 WeChat groups in one day, and the target users are parents of young children. I will first look for inspiration for the strategy from the user portrait. A certain related word may be a clue, such as "toys", "picture books", "parenting magazines", etc. A keyword can pull out a clue, and then one clue after another is pulled out. Some become baits, some become channels, and some are both baits and channels. When they intersect together, the problem of user sources is naturally solved.

• A: The correlation between channel and bait is positive;
• B: The correlation of the bait is positive and the channel is negative;
• C: Channel relevance is positive and bait is negative;
• D: The correlation between channel and bait is negative.

A is valid, B and C are partially malfunctioning, and D is invalid.

As shown in the figure above, assuming that the horizontal axis of the operation strategy is the channel and the vertical axis is the bait (content or method), as long as you find the right channel and bait (the correlation is positive), you can acquire users of a scale corresponding to their potential, and the strategy will naturally work. When I use "toys" as bait and "picture book library" and "parenting magazine" as channels, because their correlations are both positive, the strategy is in quadrant A (the specific strategy is: leveraging the cooperative picture book library and parenting magazine to provide toys or related information to their users to acquire customers); of course, you can also use "picture books" or "parenting magazines" as bait and the other two as channels. Because the correlation has not changed, the strategy is still in quadrant A and has more possibilities. In short, the strategy we want must be within quadrant A.

From this point of view, the essence of the art of operation is our exploration of the relevance of user needs. In other words, as long as the user portrait is copied detailed enough, it is impossible to find an entry point. When I encounter a bottleneck in ideas, I will take out a piece of white paper and write down all the words that may be related to the target users. Sometimes I even write several pages of densely packed words. Some of them become channels, some become baits, and the criss-crossing of them will lead to a new hope.

User portraits are the main source of inspiration for "art"

Law

My obsession with art solved many of my immediate worries, but I still couldn't sleep because my thoughts were too divergent, and I fell into chaos. The effective period of the "technique" is becoming shorter and shorter. Although I am good at finding and creating baits and channels, once the scenario or tools change, they will no longer work. I am almost obsessed with changing my techniques in WeChat operations , but sometimes when I do operations outside of WeChat , many strategies that have always worked for me become less and less effective. So I tried to sort it out further. The ideas often come from the review of various activities and content by my teammates and in-depth discussions with hundreds of entrepreneurs on users in various industries.

My thinking slowly jumped out of the two-dimensional quadrant of technology and began to build "methods" (processes and models). Later, I gradually realized that this was inevitable as the team continued to grow, because it was no longer possible for me to lead everyone to try one strategy after another. I had to focus my energy on higher-level things to ensure that the team could continue to innovate in the same direction.

First, I assume that all Internet operations and marketing can be divided into four steps:

(You can even assume that all marketing is divided into these four steps)

As long as the process is established at a higher logical level, the various sections extending from it can function more freely. So I put all the skills I learned from team practice and hundreds of entrepreneurial projects (participation or consulting) into the model:

(The above picture is rough and for reference only. It is more targeted at specific projects when making it)

Attracting attention is actually the deployment of channels and promotion strategies :

(This picture is for reference only and may vary depending on the specific project)

Building relationships depends on your operational goals. If you are solely pursuing transaction conversion, perhaps you can achieve good results just by operating on WeChat friends (in fact, many successful small and beautiful brands have verified this). Why bother to create an APP or e-commerce website that will make you even more powerless? Therefore, how to build a reasonable user pool should be a question that should be considered more clearly than how to acquire users. Our current common method is to build a WeChat matrix + APP/platform, which not only ensures the fission propagation and closeness of the user group, but also ensures higher operational efficiency.

Community development can also be understood as trust development: first become friends with users, and then gradually convert them into transactions by building relevant scenarios. The principle behind all this is that all product and operational behaviors must be user-centric.

(Why are users willing to be trapped?)

Take content operation as an example. As the number of users grows, their needs become more diversified. At this time, the form and scenario of content presentation must keep up, thus gradually forming a content matrix:

(This picture is for reference only and may vary depending on the specific project)

In addition to the more common marketing tricks, transactions should also build a closed loop that meets user experience, and do everything possible to meet user expectations, or even exceed them.

These are the "methods" that I have been verifying step by step, and they make us perform more stably. Their effective period is longer than that of "techniques" and can, to a certain extent, cope with the "turbulence" in the Internet world. However, this requires a higher level of iteration capability in all aspects of the team. Just like a car made up of various parts, if only the engine is upgraded, other parts may become obstacles to progress. Therefore, the "method" will also be constrained by the "skills" of each link in the framework. If the iterations of the two are not at the same frequency, it will often consume the energy of the team.

road

In fact, "Fa" is a method that connects the past and the future. Downward, they guide the development of the art, and upward, they implement the direction of "Tao". Therefore, "Tao" is the Big Boss. Tao is roughly equivalent to strategy, which is more about the integration of internal and external factors, the thinking about long-term and short-term goals and the macro environment, and the justification of the overall plan.

(The BAT giants and even many startups have gradually shown the "Tao" as shown above)

Because I am too young, my thoughts on "Tao" are still superficial. I dare not claim that I have "attained Tao" and I am afraid to "discuss Tao". I can only say that I am still seeking it tirelessly and happily. Moreover, even if one has mastered the Tao, it does not necessarily mean that one has grasped the truth. After all, the only constant thing in this world is change.

Why write this article?

More than two years ago, because of the planning and organization of dozens of venture capital activities, I had many exchanges with many entrepreneurial stars who "rose" in the entrepreneurial boom. At that time, the climax of several waves of social dividends was converging like waves. The young trendsetters were full of passion, and they talked and laughed as if they were sure that millions of users would come after they woke up tomorrow. Looking back later, I gradually realized that the vast majority of opinions at that time were obsessed with copying and imitating various strategies and means, fantasizing about the trend never shifting, and clinging to the fantasies of various "techniques".

From last year when I became an expert in the industry until now, due to my topics (cold start of start-up projects, community operation, etc.), the 85 "students" who paid to meet with me are all entrepreneurs or project operation directors. Compared with before, most of them are Internet projects that are struggling to break through the capital winter or bosses of traditional businesses who have already deeply realized their precarious situation. Because of the richness and diversity of the "cases" I participated in, my horizons and ideas were broadened horizontally. During this period, I was also in the iterative period of leading the team to "break through", and the accumulation of operational strategies and models gave me more vertical cognition. The integration of communication, thinking and theory, coupled with iteration in actual combat, allowed me to comprehend the "skills, methods and principles" in Internet operations.

I would like to encourage my friends who have always insisted on iteration and combining theory with practice.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @梁剑伟 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!