How to break out of the circle of Internet growth operations!

In all operational divisions, growth is the eternal and most important topic and the foundation of all businesses. In all industries, companies of all sizes, if they want to develop over the long term, they must attach great importance to growth. Among the core operating sectors that bosses care about most, growth is always the biggest stone in their hearts.

Without growth, there is no development. Even for listed companies, their valuations may be cut in half. For small and medium-sized enterprises, without growth, there will be no breakthroughs in business, no possibility of becoming bigger, and they may even face the risk of bankruptcy. Growth is so important, yet so difficult.

For a business, how to break through is crucial to growth. You can't just give up because this thing is difficult. There is a saying that goes, nothing is difficult for one who sets his mind to it.

An era where channels are king.

The current survival situation of traditional enterprises is very difficult. Anyone who has worked in a traditional enterprise should know that before the rise of the Internet, the growth of traditional enterprises was based on channels.

Why can channels be king? Because they control users and customer flows. So many times, the rise and fall of a traditional enterprise depends on the expansion and stability of channels.

For example, traditional companies such as Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Danone, Yili, Mengniu, Wahaha, Gree, etc. have established strong offline distribution channels across the country.

Because of their professional backgrounds, some of my friends also work in these traditional companies, engaged in channel expansion and maintenance. Some are responsible for business development in cities, some are responsible for the maintenance of key KA channels, and some friends engaged in overseas business are responsible for channel management in some countries.

It is indeed not easy to get up early and go to bed late every day.

This situation began to loosen with the rise of the Internet, which added a new channel window for enterprises.

For example, the rise of Alibaba has added new windows for the flow of goods. For example, the rise of Taobao, JD.com, and Pinduoduo has created countless possibilities for small businesses across the country. The rise of Meituan and Ele.me has injected new vitality into localized lifestyle businesses. All walks of life have flourished because of the Internet.

In the early days of the Internet industry, the communications industry saw a large-scale expansion of computer and mobile phone hardware, the existence of its own growth dividends, and the rapid increase and influx of low-cost Internet users. Traditional industries have joined the Internet to enjoy the opportunities brought by this wave of dividends. During this period, everyone's life was relatively easy.

However, before the early Internet boom took off, the Internet industry could be said to be the most traditional industry. Let’s look at the early stages of an Internet company, Alibaba, which had the famous China Supply Chain Iron Army, whose main focus was to expand users and channels.

When Meituan and Ele.me conquered a new city, they started by building up local marketing channels, using free trials or subsidies, and conquered cities one by one at a time while spending a lot of money. Looking at it now, these teams have basically been banned. Why?

The money-burning stage is completed. Now everyone has accumulated enough users and strong enough brand influence to enter the revenue stage. Users have also formed a dependence on usage. Everyone is using it, and if you don’t, you will have no business to do.

Before the Internet advertising industry matured, software sales relied on traditional methods such as offline sales and telephone sales. Even today, Baidu, 360, Sogou, Meituan, JD.com, Zhaopin.com and other industries still use offline sales and telephone marketing to negotiate cooperation with paying B-side users who can truly bring value.

There is nothing wrong with these two methods in themselves, and there is nothing wrong with the expansion of traditional channels in itself. What it ultimately boils down to is the core, which is to expose yourself to potential groups of people, convey your own information, and acquire corresponding target customers.

Where are we now? The platforms that can be established and the tracks that can be explored in various industries have basically taken shape. Of course, this is not absolute. With the continuous growth of young forces and the emergence of new demands, new forces will definitely continue to emerge, and the Internet industry will gradually become a traditional industry in the eyes of future generations. Now the Internet industry is actually a traditional industry compared to the blockchain industry, isn’t it?

ByteDance can be said to be a rising star in the growth circle. It uses algorithms to drive growth and distribute content that users like, and it continuously provides products that satisfy human weaknesses. Who can fight against human nature? No, the iteration of the algorithm is aimed at satisfying human nature, and it will definitely become more and more powerful.

However, behind ByteDance's road to commercialization, there are countless difficulties and hardships. Some of my friends are leaders at ByteDance. Behind the commercialization team are busy and hard work every day. The turnover of personnel is also astonishingly high. Behind their path to monetization, apart from acquiring users through advertising and business systems, there are no particularly sophisticated methods for telephone sales and face-to-face discussions on cooperation. All of this is the result of human effort, and behind it is the traditional industry's customer acquisition and growth methods.

For self-owned platforms, except for those who do not have to pay extra for acquiring customers on their own platforms, others actually need to pay to acquire customers. This is the current situation of the vast majority of companies.

When Xiaomi was just starting out, didn’t it spend every day on forums chatting about mobile online games? Now, after becoming successful with its cost-effective products, it has also entered the offline market to set up Xiaomi Home stores. After Three Squirrels and Bestore started out as Taobao brands, they have now opened franchise stores. What is the reason behind this?

It is because the cost of acquiring users through advertising is too high, and it is necessary to establish its own store support system to facilitate offline customer acquisition and maintenance. Comparing offline and online systems, both are difficult, so after the news came out, the valuation of Three Squirrels still did not increase much, which shows that the capital itself is not very attractive to what this story can bring, and is not particularly optimistic about business growth.

It is unknown where the traffic that Three Squirrels has spent huge amounts of money to buy online over the years has gone; but Pinduoduo is smarter. After being incubated through WeChat, it quickly established its own platform. At least the money from acquiring customers has its own owner, and it continues to promote its own platform. At the very least, it has its own traffic pool. This is what we now call private domain traffic.

For enterprises with their own platforms, it is obviously more appropriate to focus on their own platforms. However, for small and medium-sized enterprises with average strength, in addition to traditional methods of acquiring customers through offline promotion, channel construction, and telemarketing, they still have to rely more on advertising to accumulate their own users.

The traditional implementation method is obviously not that easy.

The core of ground marketing is that you have to find the gathering places of the target groups of your business. Where are they concentrated? How to conduct large-scale exposure in the places where they are concentrated to convey information? What kind of value can the information you expose to them bring to them, and do they need it?

They will be attracted by the value you provide and take the next step according to your wishes. For example, if you want to get her WeChat and her contact information, don't just passively provide your own information, but provide them with a window to easily find you. The best way to acquire customers is to get it done in one step. You must take each step and the anticipation of user actions into consideration, which directly determines the conversion effect of your ground promotion and exposure.

The same is true for channel expansion. Who is your target audience and where are they concentrated? Then you just need to go to the corresponding places to expose information and deliver value.

The core premise of telephone sales is that you have to have a phone to make. What Internet giants can provide you now is the collection of intended call records. To put it bluntly, when you advertise, you are buying phone numbers, but phone numbers are more expensive. Real estate companies and the insurance industry basically also have to buy phone bills, but they are cheaper. By cooperating with other companies, they can buy the corresponding phone numbers and conduct large-scale manual screening.

Because these call records are reused, their value is getting lower and lower. In addition, mobile phone blocking software is becoming more and more advanced, so this method is obviously very inefficient.

More and more companies are beginning to adopt online customer acquisition methods, such as through the output of industry professional content, such as acquiring customers by shooting short videos to output, deliver and expose content.

Customer acquisition itself is actually the scope of the advertising industry. Before the maturity of the Internet industry, there were many offline advertising forms, such as paper media advertising, television advertising, and CCTV's ace advertising spots, which were also priced sky-high at the time; stair advertising, subway advertising, high-speed rail advertising, airplane advertising and many other channels were all choices of the advertising industry at the time. Compared with the current method that advocates the integration of brand and effect, this method seems relatively backward.

Nowadays, Internet industry advertising, through the background big data analysis, can let you know where the advertising money is spent and how to further optimize it.

For example: bidding advertising led by Baidu, e-commerce advertising led by Taobao Direct, information flow advertising led by Tencent ByteDance, and localized promotion advertising led by Meituan, etc.

Bidding advertising is too expensive for most businesses, unless the product has a very high average order value. Although the users are accurate, it is difficult to make money. In fact, the money earned may not be as much as the promotion fee. It is easy to fall into a loss and help you go bankrupt early. How embarrassing. Otherwise, you can see why medical products occupy the majority of Baidu's bidding ads. Apart from the medical sector, Baidu is falling into losses in minutes. With the resignation of big boss Xiang Hailong, Baidu’s management team is in turmoil.

When I first worked at Baidu, it was a time of turmoil at the highest levels of management. After I left, most of the big guys left too. hhh, just kidding, I don't have that ability. In short, bidding itself is not a good choice for most companies. Large KA companies can sign a consumption framework, which means they can ask for rebates from the companies. This can help companies reduce a lot of advertising costs. Therefore, there are still many KA companies that will talk to Baidu about placement. After all, for large enterprises, Baidu is an option that they cannot avoid when it comes to acquiring customers, so small enterprises can just sit back and relax.

I will make a simple demonstration using Baidu's backend. In the basic backend, you can carry out refined operations and optimization of the delivery, continuously adjust the delivery region, delivery click price, delivery target population and other information, conduct analysis, minimize costs and increase the possibility of acquiring customers.

However, in a bad environment, even the most sophisticated technical analysis will be vulnerable.

Taobao Through Train Advertising, if you don’t promote your small business and just open a Taobao store, there will basically be no traffic, that is, no users will come in. Without users coming in, what products can you sell? Even an e-commerce company like Three Squirrels is deeply trapped in the current situation of excessive advertising and marketing costs and greatly reduced profits. It can be seen that this is not a good choice.

Tencent’s Guangdiantong and information flow ads are good for exposure, but they are not very effective in acquiring and converting customers. The same goes for Toutiao's information flow ads. The accuracy is far from enough. To put it bluntly, the advertising business of these official media can attract customers, but the cost is too high and it is difficult to make money.

On the contrary, it is some small points under the official media, some small points generated by mobilizing the masses, and some mainstream methods that are worthy of exploration for business expansion.

The business itself is nothing more than analyzing user portraits, analyzing the characteristics of paying users, and conducting targeted delivery, targeted exposure, targeted cultivation, screening and targeted conversion.

In the early stage, we will invest money at a loss to acquire the first batch of seed users. After accumulating the first batch of seed users, we will carry out refined operations and strive to achieve the goal of profitability. This is basically the only way for enterprises.

From this we can see that people who can acquire customers for free are really attractive.

The wisdom of the working people is endless. There are policies from the top and countermeasures from the bottom. In this situation, how to acquire customers becomes so important. Hard-working people can always find the best opportunities to survive in the cracks under the platform.

Live streaming with goods became popular, and conversions were achieved while the product was being sold. I didn’t create a Douyin or Kuaishou account to accumulate a large number of fans. I just organized events, one after another, and converted while the product was being sold. Use the most direct way to realize cash, saving time and effort. It's useless for him to do so many empty things.

Isn't the purpose of business to go to places where traffic is concentrated, expose and spread information, shout loudly, offer benefits, and attract interested people to come to me to do business?

Doing things for free requires manpower costs, and doing things for paid ones requires money, but in the final analysis, no matter which method you choose, as long as the value he can produce is enough to offset the cost of hiring him, generate revenue surplus for the company, and contribute surplus value, isn't that good enough?

Oh, boss, it’s the hardest. Taking risks and facing the greatest possibility of integration management failure, we still have to keep moving forward. Therefore, the boss must gather around him a group of positive and optimistic people who are willing to solve problems. With so many difficulties, only those who are extremely optimistic and capable of solving problems will have the greatest chance of achieving business success.

At present, in the Internet industry, at the technical level, there are various methods, such as fission, social networking, and circle of friends marketing. To be honest, these are all minor ones.

In fact, there are many methods discussed in many books about growth, such as "Growth Hacker" and "Traffic Pool", etc., but in the end you go back and find that there are really no good methods for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the same is true for large enterprises.

Acquiring customers is a very difficult task in itself and requires a lot of effort. It is not easy. The ultimate solution is to do your job well, spend enough time and energy, start with the most ordinary little things, accumulate little by little, organize activities, build channels, promote products on the ground, and discuss cooperation.

Just like the accumulation of wealth, there is no such thing as getting rich overnight in this world. Just accumulate it bit by bit in a down-to-earth manner and work hard.

Author: Fan Yiwen

Source: Fan Yiwen