Detailed explanation of how educational institutions and stores build a private domain matrix

Schools directly operated by the headquarters generally operate in an integrated model from "back-end supply, curriculum development to store site selection, classroom recruitment, and school enrollment." They are relatively operationally heavy and have high requirements for the company's financial strength and intellectual property rights.

Franchised stores generally only need to pay franchise fees and operating management fees to the headquarters to obtain the operating rights of the offline store brand. The headquarters provides relevant site selection services, teaching and research materials, and teacher training services.

The predecessor bosses of individual businesses are generally "former teachers" who have accumulated many years of educational experience and have in-depth knowledge of a certain subject. After retirement or when they have some personal ideas, they start "running schools" services.

Due to the impact of the epidemic, it is a huge "black swan" event for offline education and training institutions. Direct-operated schools have begun to think about how to quickly transfer students' learning and course marketing to online.

The headquarters of franchise stores have also begun to think about how to attract franchisees through online investment, while also empowering "franchisees" and finding effective solutions for customer acquisition. Most individual business owners have to temporarily suspend business due to high rental costs.

The traditional channel for franchise stores to recruit students and acquire customers is to obtain parent leads by distributing flyers in "shopping malls" or on the street. Better institutions have opened Meituan, Dianping, etc., but it seems that at the customer acquisition level, this method cannot effectively solve the enrollment problem in the long run.

Most quality education and training institutions have had to shift their "marketing" online. Moving online is not just about marketing in the circle of friends. It is also a new cognitive challenge for traditional institutions. How to build a complete private domain operation model for quality education stores has become a core issue.

01 “What is the private domain of an education and training store?”

Let’s talk about “private domain” from a more basic logic so that store owners and directly-operated institutions can more clearly understand the importance of private domain.

Baidu gives a clear definition of private domain traffic :

There is no payment required and you can directly reach users’ channels at any time and frequency.

In my opinion, from the perspective of quality education, private domain traffic is to build a complete closed-loop transaction model around the WeChat ecosystem to realize the online marketing model of the acquaintance economy. This model is also a natural advantage for the education and training industry itself.

However, most of the "offline education and training industry" understands the private domain as a simple circle of friends marketing , and reaches students' parents through crazy course price bargaining, fission, mass messaging, group marketing, etc. in the circle of friends, and finally forces parents to delete the sales of "institutional enrollment".

So what is the public domain?

Each campus store promotes its products offline, exchanging small commodities for parents' leads after school. This is public domain traffic, which you cannot control, and you need to pay extra costs to get parents' contact information, and the conversion rate is extremely low.

Compared with the "public domain traffic" of store operations, the private domain has more convenient accessibility and can be controlled and replicated. People who often surf the Internet have seen the following explanation of the public domain on the Internet: "The public domain is like the sea, with many fish in it, and the private domain is the pond and stream in your home."

To raise fish, you have to catch the fish from the sea and bring them to your own pond. To raise more fish, you have to expand the pond to form a perfect closed loop, and then use streams to connect different ponds so that the fish can swim between different ponds. In short, the fish "can't escape."

So in real life, from the perspective of franchise stores in the quality education industry, what are the public and private domain traffic?

1) In the O2O system, the public domain is Meituan and Dianping, and the private domain is “your store on Meituan and Dianping where you acquire customers”.

2) Short video system: the public domain is Kuaishou and Douyin, and the private domain is the personal Douyin account of the quality education store, where you use it to post student style and dance performances.

3) In the WeChat system, the public domain is WeChat users, and the private domain is the store’s mini-programs (to store content, students clocking in, teachers grading homework, and storing online courses), official accounts (to release information, store dynamics), WeChat groups (to promote strong relationships with parents, send notifications), and Moments, which is the place for marketing from weak relationships to strong relationships.

Operating a private domain is different from doing "micro-business". Many educational and training institutions' online IP operations have turned themselves into "micro-businesses", and they are low-level micro-businesses. They only know how to send group messages every day and have no social marketing.

The essence of WeChat business marketing is a business model aimed at profit. The core is distribution agency, which ultimately achieves the effect of selling goods. It attracts more downstream buyers than consumers. The marketing carrier (goods) must be high-frequency, high-gross-profit, popular and easy to spread.

The operation of private domain traffic by education and training stores is different. Although they are also engaged in the acquaintance economy, the stores operate with a "user mindset" and are a channel for direct communication with parents and students. Its core is products (courses) and services.

Even the value that products and services provide to parents, among which, selling courses is a natural result.

When you understand it this way, you will run your personal account in the private domain as your own store, instead of offering discounts on courses every day, flooding the screen with various advertisements, not operating your personal life, lacking value output, and even copying various chicken soups.

Think about it from another perspective. If you open a quality education store offline, will you post various small advertisements in your store? Would you not clean up every day? I believe it definitely won’t happen. This is the most important “cognitive gap” in “private domain” marketing, from the perspective of personal accounts.

Why do some independent stores and medium-sized institutions operate very well in private domains? Because they will train the sales team and the head teachers who operate the IP on the "basic aspects" of the private domain. They should treat the "parents" like your parents. Just imagine, would you send group messages to your parents every day? Obviously not.

Private domain is a kind of human nature. It is a process from reaching parents, providing value to completing course transactions. The underlying essence that supports this kind of thinking is a kind of "demand satisfaction theory". From the perspective of store operators, it will cost less to recruit students and make more money by splitting acquaintances.

In the process of business, profit is the basic "master key" to open the relationship between education and training stores and parents. Otherwise , there would not be so many parents willing to form a group to "listen to public trial classes" for their children, invite friends to buy double-teacher classes at a discount, etc. Of course, this is also a common means of acquiring customers.

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there is no one who dislikes marketing that focuses on "cheapness", but most parents nowadays have a strong sense of independent thinking and pay attention to the experience. They should not blindly use "cheapness" for promotions, but think more about how to explore high-quality service experience.

At the same time, the underlying logic of building a private domain is based on "trust" , and from the perspective of payment, it is also based on "sincerity". The basis of trust lies in whether the promises made in the products or services, activities or behaviors provided by the store are fulfilled.

Of course, private domain is also a kind of herd mentality. For example, if your friend is using a certain reading club and he recommends it to you and tells you that millions of people are also using it, would you be tempted?

Store owners who operate their brands based on quality education also follow this logic. When you maintain good seed parents, they will bring you a steady stream of social sharing.

Analyzing the private domain from a bottom-up perspective, operations begin with following the crowd, are helped by trust, and the benefits lie in insight into demand. If these three aspects are used well, good operations will not be a big problem.

To build a private domain, we must first understand the underlying layer and conduct in-depth analysis from the perspective of business model and human nature. This will help us to have a deeper understanding of the private domain and better promote operations. However, we must note that "private domain is not omnipotent" and the store's services and products are the foundation of the business.

02 “Several weapons to build a closed loop for a single store”.

According to a large amount of data research, in the operation of educational training institutions in the lower city market, for franchise stores and individual stores, there are not too many operating staff. At best, large stores have a few teachers, and some of them may be responsible for enrollment and sales part-time, and all payments are based on offline payments.

The most that can be used online is a "basic mall" that can provide trial classes or column courses and has basic marketing functions. The headquarters' ability to empower franchised institutions is relatively weak, and most of them usually provide some textbook promotion support. However, from a "marketing perspective", it still cannot solve the "enrollment" problem.

So in this situation, how can a single store implement online closed-loop marketing?

First of all, I will introduce to you some closed-loop components in the WeChat ecosystem to help you build a "fish pond" for your own store. Then, from a public domain perspective, think about online enrollment, lead mining, in-store introductions, trial classes, and subsequent conversion tracking.

I will mainly share how quality education stores can build a private closed loop on WeChat through official accounts, WeChat groups, personal accounts, corporate WeChat, video accounts, and mini programs. I will first briefly share official accounts and personal accounts.

Most people have a clear understanding of public accounts, which are divided into two parts: subscription accounts and service accounts. They are generally used by medium-sized organizations. They need to be managed by operations staff specialized in content production. It is a long-tail cycle job.

In fact, new media such as pictures and texts represented by official accounts have made many educational and training stores successful, and have also brought a lot of "enrollment leads" through pictures and texts. In the four years since WeChat official accounts, their original intention has not changed, but there are many more "routines" at the marketing level.

The three common ecosystems of public accounts are: "Traffic, content and products. The three are not independent of each other, and only when they are closely connected can a closed loop of enrollment be formed .

Compared to now, it is obviously a bit outdated to run a public account. I have to admit that it is indeed difficult to run a public account relying solely on content. The way for subscription account content to reach users is simply "notification". Based on past experience, the probability of opening an article through a public account message push is around 20%, and the probability of opening an article through a public account message push is even lower than this number.

In addition, there are too many public accounts and the content is highly homogenized. If a single-store education and training institution needs to produce high-quality content, it will have to invest a lot of energy and manpower. Therefore, most offline education and training institutions now create public accounts essentially for "display" purposes.

Of course, there are some education and training stores that want to create public accounts to accumulate students’ demeanor. Here are a few suggestions for you:

1) Clear positioning : You must choose a good direction before creating content. It is recommended to focus on the core business of the store. Early readers may come from the "circle of friends" of the store owner or teacher.

2) Brand building : Brand is IP. The brand design for the official account, including the LOGO, introduction, welcome message and keyword replies, should be done well. A good IP has a memorable point that people can associate with it. Stores generally use chain brands and regional names more often, which is also convenient for nearby parents to search. Don't use weird names.

3) Content planning line : If you are a teacher who has transformed and opened a personal education and training store, you can plan 1-3 content lines based on the positioning of the official account. For example, if you are teaching dance, on the one hand, you can output some knowledge about the dance industry, and on the other hand, you can output some presentations about the style of the "students" in class.

The content of the official account is also centrally managed by the headquarters. Many franchisees or directly-operated stores adopt unified writing and distribution by the company to form a matrix, which reduces the troubles of independent content operation of stores and is also to create brand consistency.

If an individual boss does it himself, it should be noted that the "public account layout" is also very important. Content layout is like a person wearing a nice piece of clothing. Good-looking layout is not only convenient for readers to read, but also can improve the pass rate of the article. After all, accessibility is the best standard for measuring the quality of content.

The ultimate goal of a store to set up a public account is definitely to "recruit students and retain customers." Usually, recruiting students can be done through forwarding in Moments, sharing articles in social communities, other public accounts, or off-site traffic. Retention is mainly based on "content as the core" and contact information, and finally imported into the personal WeChat account.

Commercialization is very important. If the content of the official account of an education and training store does not leave contact information or activities related to "course promotions", then an article becomes information and its value and significance are reduced, so the "commercialization" part must be well designed.

03 “Start with the operation of personal account”.

Personal accounts are the most important carrier of traffic after sales leads are obtained, but most institutions have turned personal accounts into "micro-businesses". The core of personal account operations is to establish strong relationships through weak relationships, thereby establishing trust between users and education and training institutions.

Personal accounts have three main functions:

1) For users, a personal account can add 5024 friends.

2) Post to Moments, link to users, like users, and build relationships as the IP persona of the organization.

3) Super connector: personal accounts link to communities, public accounts, and mini programs.

Educational and training institutions must have "asset awareness" when operating personal accounts. Many sales staff or teachers use their personal accounts to add parents. In the end, due to the resignation of teachers, many sales leads are lost in vain.

Therefore, educational and training institutions should try their best to equip people who have direct contact with customers with a "personal company WeChat account" and use the company's account to carry out marketing.

In real offline store scenarios, each account carries different categories, such as sales customer service, dean of studies, teacher, principal, etc. In the operation of private domain accounts, different personalities must also be well positioned.

Many small educational and training institutions are not aware of this. Blurred avatars, random signatures, and different circles of friends every day cannot highlight the professionalism of the institution.

For medium-sized education and training institutions, who should use the "company's personal account"?

The first is the teacher, followed by the course consultant (sales consultant), and then the principal, because these three groups of people are the closest to the parents, and in social occasions, they will inevitably encounter the situation of "adding WeChat".

Regardless of the size of the organization, providing mobile phone numbers is to lay the foundation for future "online operations", to achieve unified management standards, and to avoid "disconnection" and inconsistency in subsequent online marketing.

Starting from basic marketing, the personal positioning of the IP is very important. Try to give each IP number a high-definition avatar. This is also one of the most important means to increase the emotional connection between people. It is also called the "visual experience" part. When others see a very professional teacher, they will naturally want to establish a connection with you.

I have also seen that many educational institutions do not use personal IP for positioning. They use virtual characters, such as cartoon characters of "dolls and animations" used in enlightenment education and children's education. Virtual IP representing brands is also acceptable. Different images can be set for different education.

A charming personality is the core of your circle of friends. It can make you a KOL among more than 5,000 friends, allowing everyone to understand you. This is also the most important core of creating the online "law of attraction".

Many consumers will not establish a relationship with an education and training institution just because of a LOGO or brand, but people are different. They have warmth. Parents will not talk to products or cold courses, but they can "place an order" with your institution because of a few different words and are willing to entrust their children's growth to you.

Maybe many direct-operated organizations will ask, I am a big brand, how can I achieve IPization through chain franchise?

You might as well think about whether most of the current leading education companies are upgrading the brand itself to IP content and giving the brand a friendly image.

04 “Customer relationship transformation”.

The essence of social interaction is the process from "stranger" to "familiar". For educational institutions, after obtaining sales leads, most institutions are driven by the method of "selling courses". Within a few days of adding a friend, they start sending group messages to promote courses, bargain, and even "open classes".

You have to know that a stranger does not care about these marketing. From the perspective of customer relations, he is more concerned about the brand power and teaching staff of the institution. If I leave my child here, I can feel at ease about the child's growth.

I have seen many educational institutions calling parents the next day after adding them on WeChat, and their words of advice were very rigid, for example: "Mr. XX, I am a course consultant for a certain institution and would like to invite you to come to our institution to listen to a trial class."

In fact, this kind of marketing method is very offensive to parents. One reason is: "The era of telephone sales has passed" and the other is "I am not familiar with you and I am busy with work and have no time to attend the trial class." In the end, it just comes to nothing.

So how should a normal small organization or college do online WeChat marketing and sales? The answer is to start from the core area of ​​the social circle, the “circle of friends” .

The circle of friends is the main battlefield for the dissemination of institutional content, but many institutions use it in the wrong direction. Why is it that after we add some people, we almost want to block them? Because "he does not think from the perspective of a parent."

The value of the circle of friends is to attract more people to pay attention to what you do through content. Any content that is not distributed from a "parental" perspective may be blocked.

Moments has media attributes. If you regard Moments as a TV station, imagine what you would like to see on the TV station? Most people’s answer is “high-quality programs or content that they want to see”. Then, from another perspective, if others open their computer and see only advertisements, do you think they will still want to get to know you?

I guess what he must have been thinking was, "Hurry up and change the channel." Human nature is the same. No one will specifically watch a circle of friends that is filled with courses being sold every day. The circle of friends is a Feng Shui treasure land for institutions to display themselves, and it is a small store.

There should be various value outputs in a store, so what does value output include? First of all, it is an IP, so the content must be related to the IP. For example, a certain child dances well and the video can be recorded and disseminated, or there may be some tips, notes, personal life status, etc.

The key to whether something is good or not lies in "value packaging". I have seen many small organizations that do not understand "packaging marketing" when operating their circle of friends.

For example, the students’ children can recite well and dance well, but the teacher does not clean the video lens, so the video is blurry and does not pay attention to the framing. After shooting, he does not know how to “edit and modify” and just sends it out.

In fact, these are all details. The original decoration of the classroom space was very immersive, but it seemed to lack style because of the "poor handling of the details".

For large institutions and chain institutions, I have also seen many marketing in the circle of friends desperately sending group messages to "parents" because they are doing course sprint performance during the holidays. The language is also very stiff, and they are trying to achieve performance and give discounts on courses. Such screen swiping and group messages are mostly ineffective. Marketing without communication is not far from being blocked by parents.

There is a function called tags in WeChat. When the number of people in a small organization is small, the tag function can be appropriately used to "group parents", such as "communicated", "pending communication", "paid", and "potential customers". Then the organization can communicate in a more refined manner during holiday marketing.

Remember not to send messages to a group . Even if you do, you must think from the perspective of the "parents", what language they will listen to and how they can reply to you.

A certain chain organization I saw had very good online operations. When they sent a group message to users, they would first say a few words of greeting, such as "Where are you now?", "How are you doing recently?", and other question sentences.

After throwing it out, we will guide friends to reply, and then promote the activity by saying "We have a course activity today, which feels particularly suitable for your child. We would like to invite you to come and listen", and wonder if it can help your child grow.

You see, this kind of marketing method will not only not disgust users, but also bring them closer together. Remember, the most important role of the circle of friends in the private domain traffic system has three core elements: one is to establish trust through personal positioning, the second is to increase parent stickiness through value output, and the third is to promote the contentment regularly.

All of this is laying the foundation for future online marketing. Parents should be treated as "real friends" rather than traffic. When you treat parents as traffic, they are not far from "flowing away".

In conclusion:

The essence of all marketing is based on human nature. If educational institutions want to successfully move online, they must understand the basic "concepts of public and private domains" and "several weapons for building private domains", as well as how to maintain a strong relationship with users in the WeChat ecosystem.

The private domain is a fish pond model, which is a process from fishing in the public domain to operating a "personal fish pond". Of course, from official accounts, mini-programs, corporate WeChat, personal WeChat, and communities, each one is a small fish pond. All the fish ponds are linked together to form a perfect online closed-loop matrix of the organization, reaching parents 360 degrees.