WeChat’s private domain traffic business

In recent years, the term private domain traffic has been very popular. Many companies have started to engage in private domain traffic, especially community operations in WeChat scenarios. A high-quality community operation can keep the community active and increase conversion rates.

1. Start by building a good WeChat group

In the past two years, with the rise of online education and community group buying industries, the term private domain traffic has become increasingly well known. However, I really hate the term private domain traffic, as if it does not treat people as human beings, but just a traffic data indicator.

So what is private domain traffic? In a word, private domain traffic is a way to get closer to customers and reach users most conveniently.

In this, human touch is the core, and what is being competed for is execution, which is a matter of slow and careful work.

The core of running a private domain well is the operation of users and content.

Today I will talk about a category in the private domain, community operation

The entire system involves polishing the product, how to achieve growth, how to ensure user activity, how to produce content, and how to serve the diverse needs of users.

I believe that everyone here has more or less encountered communication problems when dealing with users in the private domain.

There is a core idea to solve communication problems: every word you say and every thing you do must be sincere.

The two cases we are dissecting today are: one is the largest venture capital technology media on the Internet and also a Nasdaq-listed company; the other is the largest paid knowledge course for corporate executives in China.

There are also a series of private domain cases, some of which I am deeply involved in, some of which I play an auxiliary role in on a daily basis, and some of which we operate on behalf of others (but due to customer privacy issues, I am not in a position to disclose the specific names of some cases).

I guarantee that 80% of the people present in today’s two cases have used their products to some extent or have heard of their names.

2. Cold start of social products

Why do I put cold start first?

Because the quality of a cold start is directly related to the effect of subsequent distribution and monetization.

Let me talk about XX Innovation University first.

Currently, many leading knowledge-based payment companies on the market have begun to provide IPO guidance. Don’t be naive to think that these companies have grown up on their own. In fact, they have local stations in many cities.

It seems very impressive, but you know that they also fell into a lot of traps during the early planning process.

The essence of a local knowledge payment website is an agency business. Since it is an agency business, it is easy for executives to operate the site according to the original scripts and some behaviors of attracting traffic, but they soon discovered problems.

One reason is that there is a huge gap between local awareness and that of first-tier cities.

I wonder if you can find the obvious generation gap when you chat with your friends or local entrepreneurs when you go home for the New Year.

Many local traditional business owners I know still have a huge gap in their understanding of the Internet and new media marketing.

Secondly, it is because of the local age gap.

We found that local business leaders and company executives are mostly in their forties or fifties, and spend relatively little time online, let alone converting transactions.

Based on these two issues, we launched a series of attempts to overcome difficulties.

First of all, we used a lot of our connections to connect with many outstanding local entrepreneurs offline. During the process of contact, we found that everyone had an urgent need for how to transform traditional industries during the epidemic, and they spent much more time offline than online.

In view of this, we plan to start from offline communication and sharing sessions, and sell the services of the exchanges together with virtual memberships. This will not only increase the average order value but also develop many offline distribution channels.

So how do we do a cold start offline?

Because for us, the amount of offline traffic is directly related to our transactions and brand potential, including the establishment of subsequent distribution channels.

Because we target more entrepreneurs, that is, B-side users, they cannot invest and calculate ROI like C-side traffic. A good cold start is critical.

At that time, we thought of a lot of fancy operations, but what finally enlightened us was a sentence said by Wang Xing.

Wang Xing’s favorite saying is, “Build a strong camp and fight a stupid battle.” Do you know who said this? It was Zeng Guofan.

Zeng Guofan once submitted a memorial to the Qing court, in which the original text reads:

"I am not good at riding horses, and I have not been able to personally lead the troops in front of the enemy. Moreover, I am too slow in marching. For more than ten years, I have only known how to build strong camps and fight stupid battles. I have never used any ingenious strategies or tactics to defeat the enemy beyond their expectations."

To put it bluntly, what is being talked about here is to advance step by step, steadily and cautiously, without any surprise attacks, and to defeat the enemy.

We often say an old saying: You have heard so many truths but still cannot live a good life.

Let me ask you, how many of you can stick to your fitness plan for 100 days? Therefore, everyone's ability to grasp execution needs to be improved, because most people may not have the ability to get involved.

Take our hometown, the local operations center in Hebei Province, for example. We have also taken care of the details to the extreme.

In the early stages, we used our connections to allow everyone to participate for free to enhance the initial offline momentum.

For users who have purchased the product but have remained silent for a long time, we will conduct recall calls one by one or offline one-on-one. Let me say one thing here, a girl with a nice voice can indeed make users listen to you talk for one more minute.

At that time, I could meet more than 30 people offline every day. My throat was dry and I was really tired. However, as long as it was effective, I would just do it.

We tried our best to find a joint transport party. At that time, we were honored to find a very famous agent for studying abroad. But everyone should remember that in the early stage of the joint transport, the rights and interests of both parties must be clearly written down, otherwise there will be many troubles in the later stage.

Mobilize all the people you invited and ask them to post on their Moments, because their entrepreneur Moments are relatively accurate.

At that time, we spent more than half a month visiting all the local entrepreneurs and initially gathered more than 2,000 people.

Just imagine what kind of influence it would have if thousands of local bosses, big and small, posted on their Moments at the same time to help promote your product.

Make good use of your personal IP to create content and maintain your personal content output.

In this way, we can basically carry out small-scale screen swiping locally in the early stage.

In the later period, we continued to enhance our online influence. Among the platforms of Douyin, Kuaishou and Video Account, we finally chose to focus on Video Account. We used the entrepreneurial resources we already had to conduct live broadcasts on WeChat Video Account. Through social relationships, we quickly covered most of the entrepreneurs in the city, which not only enhanced the brand's influence, but also gradually strengthened their online usage habits.

Only then did we slowly begin to leverage the brand’s influence to start fission distribution.

I believe that many people care about the conversion of communities and the establishment of distribution systems; however, it is unrealistic to achieve everything in one go.

There is another very important step before distribution conversion, which is activity.

3. Community Activity and User Stickiness

This case is a community of industry media.

In the above, we listed various methods for cold start. After the start, I believe many people have encountered a problem. The community has a life cycle. We will use the community of this industry media to break down the issue of active life cycle.

As an industry media, people pay more attention to the content it brings, so in terms of community activity, user loyalty must be measured by the value of the content.

So what is valuable content for an Internet venture capital media?

1. Depends on the target user positioning

The audience of venture capital media is mostly people working in the fields of Internet, advertising and marketing, and finance, as well as some entrepreneurs and students interested in business technology; so when choosing topics, we also write articles around these, and try to find topics that everyone is interested in to spark discussion.

2. It is necessary to create a divergent topic and a good discussion atmosphere

How to create a topic for community communication?

My summary is: trust + information gap.

The so-called sense of trust comes from users' trust in the brand and group members' trust in the group owner. The vast majority of people do not have the influence of top brands, so you should focus more on building trust between you and your group members.

What is information gap? As the saying goes: When you haven't seen someone for three days, you should look at him with new eyes.

Why do people distance themselves from each other so quickly? The reason behind this is that their cognition and information gaps are different.

There is an information gap between countries and between industries. So what about the information gap?

Let me give you an example!

I ask you two questions:

• We all know that the United States has more advanced science and technology than us, and the Internet was popularized earlier. So why has mobile payment become so popular in China?
• Why are people so reluctant to sell credit cards door-to-door when Ant Huabei and JD Baitiao are so popular in China?

These seem to be business issues about mobile payment or Internet finance, but underneath this simple question we have buried more than a dozen topic points for everyone to discuss through word clouds.

There are at least three discussion directions in each word cloud point. Think about why Aquaman always has something to talk about with girls.

So when this kind of content is disseminated and output, it is the valuable content that everyone expects.

As a good group chat topic, it has a rhythm. From raising the topic, to discussing the topic, and finally summarizing the topic, it is a process with a beginning and an end. Therefore, as a group owner, think about the discussion points of this topic, control every link, and avoid overly intense debates in this link.

If so, you need to use your emotional intelligence to alleviate it; never judge whether what this person said is right or wrong. In fact, in my opinion, there is no right or wrong in the world, only appropriate and inappropriate.

3. Share topics regularly

There are two forms of sharing: one is to invite guests, and the other is thematic discussion.

We will use customer platform resources to invite guests. Or invite group friends to share.

Some group members may not have such systematic output, so you can hold a theme meeting. For example, I once invited operators of e-commerce platforms, MCNs, and brands to give keynote speeches on brand marketing from various angles.

4. Use small KOLs to influence more people

So what kind of people in the group meet the criteria of KOL?

It is not easy to be a qualified KOL. You need to know everything about astronomy and geography, be good at both literature and martial arts, maintain your style, and be approachable. You cannot let group members look up to you too much or be too distant from them; you still cannot let group members look down on you and turn you into a "customer service girl" who only provides individual services.

So what is the funnel model we use for screening?

• Those who are willing to share leave
• People with meticulous thinking and unique understanding of the industry stay
• People with unique analytical perspectives and correct values ​​stay

Everyone must serve these people well, whether it is to do a business or make friends. These discovered KOLs are your strategic allies in expanding your territory in the digital world.

Their unique ideas will surely attract the attention of others in the future.

In the process of sharing, we must encourage the sharers a lot. After all, who doesn’t like to be praised? No matter what the sharing is like, it is good to be able to share; we must make sharing a virtuous circle within the group.

However, no matter how active you are, you will definitely encounter the problem of dead groups; many people who work in the WeChat ecosystem are very twisted and always feel that disbanding a community is a very embarrassing thing to do.

For some dead groups, I will disband the community and reorganize them to make them active again.

Every blood transfusion means the reconstruction of living cells.

How do you understand this sentence?

In fact, the essence of the community life cycle is the same as the composition of cells. From a biological point of view: human cells have a lifespan and are renewed every day. Aged and dead cells will be replaced by new ones.

However, human brain cells remain unchanged. Even after a 7-year cycle, your brain will still be the same.

So for the community, the group owner is the brain of this living organism, the group members are the cells, and your information and content are the flowing blood.

Don’t be afraid of the life cycle of the community. As a living organism, taking in more amino acids and vitamins and finding new sources of cells are what the brain should consider.

When a community reaches the point where everyone can talk about anything, new communication needs will emerge.

Some people in the group talk about life, some talk about work, and some talk about the industry.

It takes time for everyone to go from strangers to familiar with each other. Everyone who is willing to chat in the group has a reason for his existence, and every group member who speaks deserves to be taken seriously.

4. Some of the simplest methodologies for building communities

1. Learn to copy

For most people, when they first enter an industry, the best way is not to innovate, but to copy the mature models of the leading players to ensure that they can quickly get through the cold start period in terms of industry understanding, team structure, technical operations and other capabilities; therefore, every Internet person should have the ability to analyze projects, disassemble projects, and copy projects.

We need to stay sensitive to the strategies of industry leaders, while at the same time trying to integrate knowledge across industries.

2. Human touch

The group owner is a group member himself. We are both the operators of the community and members of other people’s communities.

When you break away from the data perspective of KPIs and use a humanistic perspective and empathy to understand the community, you will discover a bigger world.

3. Curiosity

Curiosity means being curious about everything.

One of my favorite sentences is: Curiosity is my never-ending passion for the world.

4. Utilization of Gadgets

In the history of human evolution, humans are human because they can use fire. To survive and evolve in the digital world, we also need to make good use of all tools that can assist operations so that we can manage with greater efficiency.

5. A final digression

I often ask myself a question: What is the end goal of a knowledge community? Where is the ceiling of the community model?

Let me first state a conclusion: in the long run, the community will inevitably become silent. The community-based business model is also destined to have a ceiling.

The community economy is more about serving adults. From an active perspective, no one has time to chat in the group every day. Moreover, with the development of the community, the traffic will gradually become inaccurate, and the group will gradually become "watered". This is one of the reasons.

The second reason is that as the community grows in size, standardized processes must be implemented.

Do you know what standardization is?

Standardization means industrialization, and in the process of industrialization it is difficult for the executors below to take into account both interaction and emotion.

However, interaction and emotion are particularly valuable in a digital society. This is why the organizers gathered us offline. Every nod and every frown we make offline is a good emotional exchange, which is actually difficult to achieve in an industrialized community.

But this does not mean that the community business is not profitable. An efficient community must pay attention to standardization, and only a sufficiently stable SOP can scale up; therefore, the regenerative energy and emotional transmission ability of community organizations are the ideas we should think more about.

The solution to the problem may not be found right now. While everyone was mocking Pinduoduo's Pinduoduo strategy, Huang Zheng was already thinking about life sciences and food security.

My superficial belief is that this was destined to happen when he and Teacher Duan met Buffett at the age of 22.

Being a cutting-edge e-commerce company is not sexy; using science to provide value to society is sexy; being a data-driven community is not sexy; making the community vital and regenerative is truly sexy.

Author: Wang Dongdong

Source: Dousheng Buddha Group