What is the specific value of the community to the enterprise?

The emergence of the Internet has changed the way people connect with each other and has affected the entire world. As more and more connections are opened, many invalid connections will be generated, and these transitional connections will eventually become a burden on your information. The emergence of communities is to make connections more efficient and in-depth.

As one of the new three major economies, community is indeed a direction that all walks of life must pay attention to. But entrepreneurs need to solve two problems first:

1. What is the significance of community to enterprises?
2. How should the community do it?

What is the significance of community to enterprises?

Current status of enterprise development: customer acquisition costs remain high

Marketing and promotion have always been the lifeline of an enterprise's survival and development. Nowadays, the cost for companies to acquire users is getting higher and higher, and user loyalty is getting lower and lower, because there are too many homogeneous products and users have too many choices.

For the vast majority of companies, they have no brand advantage and after spending a lot of money on advertising and finally making some noise, they are immediately drowned out by the massive amount of information.

The essence of community is a low-cost, high-trust marketing tool

The traffic dividends from traditional channels including e-commerce , Baidu search, and advertising are gone forever. The community is the shortest and cheapest path for companies to communicate with users. E-zubao can appear on CCTV, Jackie Chan can endorse Bawang anti-hair loss product, Taobao can fake orders, and Baidu is full of Putian products. Users are increasingly inclined to circle recommendations rather than celebrity endorsements.

The Internet reduces the cost of information circulation , while communities greatly reduce the cost of trust. The community is essentially a low-cost, high-trust marketing and promotion tool .

The cost of corporate marketing will eventually be passed on to consumers, but communities reduce corporate costs and improve user service quality, which can be said to be a true win-win situation.

The community allows companies to build competitive barriers, making value wars and plagiarism no longer a threat

Companies can also build strong competitive barriers by creating communities. In the past, the main dimensions of competition were product and price, but with the upgrading of consumption, users are becoming less and less sensitive to prices.

By building communities and creating circles, companies can maintain strong stickiness between users and between users and between users and companies. Allow users' social relationships to settle and be bundled with product attributes, and eventually the cost of migrating their social relationships will become extremely high.

Unlike platform companies such as ride-hailing, group buying, and live streaming , which use capital to fight subsidy wars to directly consume competitors and remain the only dominant company. The community can truly allow small and medium-sized enterprises to eat and do business in peace. They cannot be simply swallowed up by capital or copying others.

The significance of community to enterprises can be summarized as follows:

• Know where your users are and can interact with them at any time
• Carry out brand promotion and dissemination at the lowest cost
• Serve users well with the lowest cost
• Collect user feedback as quickly as possible, facilitate user maintenance and product iteration and upgrade
• Uncover greater derivative value
• Price wars and product homogeneity will no longer be your biggest threat

Let's talk about some specific cases to be more down-to-earth

Case 1

Current situation of the enterprise: Difficulty in recruiting students, and online recruitment is very weak

The biggest problem a certain early childhood training institution is facing now is enrollment. The promotion methods they currently use are the following: shopping mall activities, large company channels, parent introductions, telephone invitations + door-to-door experience, etc. The average customer acquisition cost is more than one thousand, which is a huge burden.

One of their big problems is that they are not utilizing the mother customer base and are using a point-to-point service. Therefore, the effect of online enrollment has not been very good, with sales accounting for less than 10%.

The direct impact of community operation is:

• The Didui team can reduce investment and significantly reduce customer acquisition costs
• Two or three people can complete the entire social marketing planning and execution process
• Service costs are minimized, and many problems can be solved between customers
• Use extremely low costs to activate the mother group and make them form strong stickiness
• Use existing users to reach accurate potential users and generate conversions at a very low cost
• Cooperate with third-party complementary companies to provide benefits to mothers, serve their own users and let others pay for it
• As long as the gap between products is not obvious, competitors will not pose a real threat to you.

Case 2

Previously, we did marketing planning for Persian Shangpin, an Iranian nut import e-commerce company, and used multiple channels for marketing promotion. There are self-media placement, offline promotion , precision marketing (DSP), crowdfunding, and community marketing. The main forms of offline promotion include tasting and distributing flyers. The comparison of the marketing effects of each channel is shown in the following table:

From the table, we can clearly see that social marketing is far superior to other channels in terms of revenue effect, collaboration cost (degree of dependence on other work), conversion rate , and execution efficiency.

What is the value of community for crowdfunding?

It is necessary to talk about the crowdfunding channel. Most crowdfunding campaigns nowadays are about losing money but gaining publicity. A lot of money is invested, but in the end no one comes to promote the campaign. Many brands start crowdfunding without thinking through the underlying logic, thinking that this is a way to accumulate early users. In fact, it is just the opposite. The ones who really cheer for you are the seed users .

Therefore, we do not attract users through crowdfunding, but rather leverage the value of crowdfunding after we have seed users. Crowdfunding can only realize its greatest value when it is built on a community foundation. (Refer to the views of Mao Xiaojun, Marketing Director of Persian Shangpin)

Case 3

Current status of enterprise operation: service costs are too high and employees are overburdened

The membership quality of a certain entrepreneur social platform is extremely high and its social recognition is also extremely high. However, the cost of membership services is high and activities are too offline. However, the number of participants in offline activities is limited, the coverage of existing members is narrow, and employees themselves are under sales pressure so the burden is heavy.

What are the huge advantages that community operations bring to enterprises?

The comparison table of the effect of upgrading services through community operation and the traditional model is as follows:

By focusing on developing online services through community operations, we can minimize the marginal cost of services and greatly reduce the tolerance cost of members participating in activities, allowing them to receive the most suitable services. If the online activities are done well, it can stimulate the offline activities in reverse and make them more accurate and high-quality.

Only when an enterprise reduces its service costs to the lowest level can it scale and generate higher business value. Therefore, if this company does a good job in community operations, its prospects can be imagined.

Case 4

Current state of business operations: employee training costs are too high and the effect is limited

A certain company in the financial industry is also involved in training business. The company has a total of more than 200 sales teams distributed across the country. The company pays more attention to the training of employees' abilities. The company's training form is mainly to go to the headquarters for regular training every year, invite some well-known external lecturers to give lectures, and then invite some internal employees with outstanding performance to share. The travel expenses, loss of work time, and accommodation fees together add up to very high costs, so the frequency of this type of training is quite limited.

Moreover, these famous teachers are not familiar with the specific business within the company, and they use the same course outline wherever they give lectures, which makes it difficult to truly meet the specific work needs of employees. Sharing by employees with outstanding internal performance is purely voluntary, and there is a lack of sufficient motivation to make careful preparations. Many times they just entertain themselves on the stage, and only a few of them are truly responsible enough to do this job well.

The community can create a sharing internal atmosphere at zero cost and improve the overall cohesion and combat effectiveness of the company.

By establishing a learning community, internal employees can learn and interact better. The notification system changes the traditional closed-minded thinking of preferring to say less and not to be the first to speak. It allows some employees with relatively weak skills to get more comprehensive and practical information that is close to the actual business, and gives some capable employees more motivation to do this well.

The final result is that the business capabilities of all employees in the company have been greatly improved, the team cohesion has been greatly enhanced, and the company can customize some targeted courses more accurately and efficiently to maximize the value of training. And the cost of running these businesses well is almost zero.

The community is full of opportunities, but you still lack routines

So for some companies, you have to pay attention to the community. The good news is that the cost of playing in the community is very low for enterprises. Small and medium-sized enterprises can all play, instead of leaving you out just because the big guys play, and this window is still there. The community can make serious businesses more respectable. The bad news is that everyone is still only at the stage of forming groups and has no idea how to revitalize the market. However, there is a shortage of people who can manage a good community in the market, and it is difficult to find the right person even if you spend money.

As for how to play the community, in the next article I will talk about some ideas for community operation using gamification thinking. In short, regarding community operation, it is time for entrepreneurs to raise it to the company's strategic level and pay attention to it, rather than just being a hands-off boss and letting an operations manager take charge without giving him any power.