Analyzing the strategy of building WeChat self-media!

There is a saying in the Internet circle: WeChat is the end of all traffic. In today's Internet, no matter where the traffic originates, it will eventually settle in WeChat. To gain traffic from various e-commerce platforms and receive cashback for favorable comments after receiving goods, you need to add WeChat friends.

Therefore, the construction of self-media on WeChat is something that all companies cannot ignore. Moreover, every day 1.09 billion users open WeChat, 780 million users enter Moments, 360 million users read public account articles, and 400 million users use mini-programs. The scale of mobile Internet users in my country has reached more than 1.3 billion, and WeChat accounts for more than 84%.

Although WeChat’s growth has peaked, at this stage, no company can ignore WeChat’s traffic. So, for B2B companies, how to make good use of WeChat as a channel? How to build a self-media matrix based on the WeChat ecosystem?

1. Misunderstandings of Enterprises in Building Self-media

1. For enterprises, there is no need to pursue 100,000+

The core purpose of corporate WeChat marketing is to acquire customers and achieve sales. Hot-selling content is not necessary for enterprises.

From an industry perspective, the effectiveness of popular content within WeChat as a whole is declining sharply. The original 100,000+ content could bring in thousands of new fans, but now, it may only bring in a few hundred. From a corporate perspective, popular content and corporate advertising are essentially contradictory. At most, popular content can help with brand communication, but it has extremely low cost-effectiveness in terms of sales conversion.

2. To build a WeChat self-media, you need to make a breakthrough in a single point, not in multiple areas

Many companies start by thinking of all kinds of matrices, hoping to cover all customer groups. But it's easy to bite off more than you can chew. The core of matrix construction is to lead the small with the big. When you have a large account that can generate its own traffic, it is not too late to consider building a matrix.

In most cases, a breakthrough in one area is enough to meet demand, so there is no need to expand the business. Currently, most of those who build matrices in the market are professional self-media organizations.

3. Don’t imagine hiring all-round operations talent

Many companies do not have the ability to operate WeChat , so they hope to recruit professional talent to achieve growth. But when recruiting a basic operations staff, one is required to be able to follow hot topics and write popular products, as well as be able to write scripts and shoot videos. He or she would like to be able to work as a team by himself.

In this situation, the reason is that the company's own needs are unclear and it hopes to recruit people who know everything and can do everything. This is certainly unrealistic. As an enterprise, you may not be able to perform the operations, but you must have a basic understanding of it. Only then can you know where your shortcomings are and in what direction you can try to grow.

4. There are no outdated operating methods, only half-understood execution

In the Internet age, information gap will always exist. What seems like a commonplace operational approach to you may be a dimensionality reduction attack in another circle. The cute baby voting activity that was very popular in 2016/2017 was carried out in other fields in 2019 and was able to achieve a fan growth of more than 200,000. Similarly, distribution fission, which is very popular in the operation circle, can still be successful in offline stores.

So whether the effect is good or not depends on the details.

2. Construction and operation of self-media in different scenarios in WeChat

Having said so much nonsense, let’s talk about some practical content. Let’s talk about each function in WeChat separately. Taking this picture as an example, video accounts, live broadcasts, and small shops are functions that have only started in the past two years and are in the bonus period.

1. Official Account

Official accounts have been around for 9 years. Now it is basically standard for every enterprise. You can not have an official website, but you cannot not have a public account. Since everyone is already too familiar with this, for the official account, we will only talk about some misunderstandings and overlooked points.

• For corporate public accounts, don’t dream of relying on content for growth: producing high-quality content is very expensive. Most businesses can't afford it. I always think that I can run a corporate self-media by hiring one or two new media editors for a few thousand dollars. In this situation, either you are wasting other people's time or he is fooling you.
• For corporate public accounts, you can consider giving up subscription accounts and only using service accounts: the purpose of corporate public accounts is branding and service, which can be understood as official websites in the PC Internet era. The various functions and interfaces of the service account are also designed to serve enterprises.
• The official account is not everything, it needs to be used in conjunction with other functions: this coordination will be discussed later. Basically, every other function can be used in conjunction with the official account.

2. Personal account and corporate WeChat

Both personal accounts and corporate WeChat are one-to-one links with customers, so they are discussed together. After enterprise WeChat and WeChat were connected, WeChat officials have tightened their control over the marketing activities of personal WeChat accounts and cracked down on a number of WeChat plug-ins. It can be said that in the future, most of the marketing activities of personal accounts will be transferred to corporate WeChat.

1. The number of WeChat friends has been relaxed to 10,000, and corporate WeChat accounts can even add up to 20,000: The number of WeChat friends directly determines the effect of the early cold start of marketing, so increasing the limit on the number of friends can not only increase the number of people reached by each personal account, but also reduce the operational workload. Now one account can be equivalent to two accounts before.
2. The official account is the official website of the company, and the personal account is the face of the company: in an era where everyone is a customer service representative, customers’ perception of a company mainly comes from personal accounts. Therefore, providing service to customers or answering their questions is an important function of a personal account. The personality of a personal account can be displayed through chat and circle of friends, which will be discussed later.
3. The social relationship chain of personal accounts is very important to enterprises: there is no formal public domain traffic in WeChat, and most content is spread through social relationships. Therefore, we must pay attention to the likes of personal accounts, whether it is an article, a video, or a video account, which can promote the secondary dissemination of the content.
4. Enterprise WeChat personal accounts can implement some automated operations: In order to meet the marketing needs of enterprises, WeChat officially opened some automated interfaces for enterprise WeChat. For example, automatic replies, replies by channels, group messages, automatic group creation, etc., these functions that were originally only available through plug-ins on personal WeChat accounts can now be freely set up on corporate WeChat without worrying about being blocked.

3. Friends circle

The circle of friends is the main battlefield of WeChat marketing, and whoever controls the circle of friends controls the world. However, it should also be noted that the effectiveness of the Moments is declining and management is becoming stricter, especially for marketing content.

1. There are popular time periods for WeChat Moments marketing: morning rush hour (7:00-9:00), noon (11:30-14:00), and evening (20:00-22:00) are the peak opening times for customers, and ads posted at these times are more likely to be seen.
2. The operation of Moments requires the establishment of SOP (standardized procedures): if you want Moments to be effective, you can’t just post randomly. Is it necessary to establish a special SOP and send it out several times a week? How many posts do you post every day? Is each piece of content an advertisement or a personal creation? Everything you can think of needs to be planned in advance. If you don’t know how to do it, you can search for those fraud news on the Internet. The scammers’ practices are special SOPs.
3. Pay special attention to the copywriting and posters in the circle of friends: the above sop will involve copywriting and posters. But I still need to elaborate here. Every copy and poster must be specially tested before being released. Every small detail, such as the copy length, tone, poster size, color, etc., may affect the communication effect.
4. If you have the energy, you can also operate your Moments in groups: customers in different groups will see different content every day, making marketing as precise as possible.

4. WeChat Group

WeChat groups are a rare many-to-many scenario in the WeChat ecosystem. Community operation is a very arduous task. If done well, it can generate word-of-mouth communication, but if done poorly, it will also consume customer information. Therefore, it is a double-edged sword for enterprises and needs to be used with caution.

1) Determine the community positioning and create groups selectively, don’t create groups lightly

Communities can be divided into two categories: functional communities and communication communities.

A functional group is set up around a specific purpose, which can be an event, a live broadcast, or just a red envelope group. This type of group may not have a long life cycle and is easy to manage. And they can achieve the purpose of influencing each other.

The topics of communication groups tend to be vague and require long-term maintenance and activity. In particular, if negative feedback occurs, it needs to be dealt with in a timely manner, which places high demands on the company's operational and responsive capabilities.

2) There must be a “trustee” in the group

The biggest difference between a group and other scenarios is the ability to perceive each other. But don’t expect that customers will naturally start chatting after you create a group. The initial topic initiation and question answering must be done by the company's "agents". After group members become familiar with each other, the "shills" can gradually withdraw and maintain the group environment when necessary.

3) Make good use of the in-group chain

In addition to using "supporters" to create atmosphere, group owners can also consciously use some techniques to liven up the atmosphere. The most common one is the solitaire game. For example, in today's sharing session, half an hour before the start, after telling everyone the time and topic of the group sharing, everyone was asked to reply "See you tonight at 8 o'clock for XX sharing." Each person replies once, which serves as a reminder to other group members.

5. Video Account

The video account is the second official website of a company besides the official account, so it must be created. Now the video account has been connected with the official account. Not only can the video account content be directly inserted into the text and pictures, but there are also entrances to each other on the homepages of the two accounts.

1. The benefits of Video Account are still there: Video Account has just been launched for a year, and a large number of functions are still being iterated, so the benefits period is still there. If companies can make good use of this trend, they may achieve exponential growth.
2. Video is a better choice for both businesses and customers: for customers, watching videos is more convenient than reading text and pictures, which is why WeChat has invested heavily in making videos; and for businesses, the threshold for producing videos is lower than that for text and pictures (here it means getting started).
3. The cold start of the video account will be easier than other platforms: up to now, the spread of the video account still mainly relies on social relationship chains. There will be huge differences in the videos posted by an account with 5,000 friends and 1,000 friends. If you already have a certain amount of friends, your cold start will be very simple. At the same time, please also note that after the video is released, you should like it as soon as possible.
4. Video Account has the only public domain traffic currently open to WeChat: Video Account has a special "Recommendation" column, where high-quality videos will be recommended to more users. Such a formal public domain is of great significance for the dissemination of high-quality content.
5. Live streaming is a powerful tool for video accounts: compared with carefully produced videos, live streaming has lower production costs and lower user expectations, so it has better fault tolerance. Combined with the small store function, it can also generate direct conversions.
6. Video accounts can direct traffic externally: in the live broadcast mentioned above, traffic can be directed to stores. The video accounts that are released daily can also be linked to public accounts or personal accounts, which is very helpful for traffic sedimentation.

6. Mini Programs

A mini program can be understood as a small APP, so it involves a lot of things. Whether it is technology, operation or other modules, there will be many requirements. I won’t go into details here.

7. Combination of modules

The construction of corporate self-media in the WeChat ecosystem is based on the above modules to find a path suitable for one's own enterprise.

For example: Offline stores like Watsons achieve customer retention and repeat purchases through the path of "corporate WeChat (personal account) - official account - community"; online education like Shao Nian De Dao achieves customer management through "external delivery - official account - personal account - community - APP"; e-commerce companies like JD.com have also begun to try paths such as "official account - video account - mini program" to bring goods.

Taking Zhiqu Baichuan as an example of a B-side enterprise, they mainly provide customer acquisition and growth services to corporate clients. Their module combination is "Official Account/Video Account - Personal Account - Community - Zhihu".

The official account and video account are responsible for attracting fans with high-quality content, and share the cases and marketing methodologies of major companies here; personal WeChat (lead operation, i.e. SDR WeChat) is generally left at the end of the article, with one person having multiple accounts; then a theme operation community is established to increase user activity and brand awareness; finally, the user's UGC content is deposited on Zhihu, and can also supplement the content of the official account.

Through such a closed loop, the recognition established among marketers makes everyone think of them first when B2B needs marketing methods. I have given so many examples to tell you that it is very difficult but extremely important to find services that fit your company’s business model and to find your own operating path within the WeChat ecosystem.

Author: Kai

Source: Zhiqu Baichuan (ID: BesChannels)