Live streaming and street stall economy

Operator thinking is a complete thinking framework. Once these ways of thinking and models are established, it doesn’t matter whether you are setting up a street stall or doing a live broadcast. The author of this article shares 5 kinds of operational thinking with you. I believe it will be helpful to you. Enjoy~

I believe the picture below has been all over the screen in the past few days, along with the stall setting strategies circulating in various social media groups! Today I want to talk to you about live streaming and street stall economy ! Of course, the main focus of our discussion is still around operations.

Live streaming and street stall economy are actually a business

What, you said I was talking nonsense? Let’s talk about this! The general route of the stall is as follows:

At the beginning, you have no experience and you set up the stall randomly. You find a remote corner where there is not much traffic. You mainly see what others are selling and how they sell it, pass them cigarettes and call them "big brother", and learn from them. At this time, you are still a newbie and you are very low-key in everything you do.

When you slowly figure out the tricks, find a location with traffic, set up a stall and sell your products. No matter what you sell, in theory, as long as the flow of people is large enough, even if you are selling shit, there will be people who come up and comment that the color of the shit doesn't look like it's left over from the night before. If you set up a booth on a famous pedestrian street in Beijing and the number of visitors is 50,000 a day, this is equivalent to about 50,000 impressions!

Gradually, you feel that the traffic is unstable, what should you do?

You will spend money and let the urban management or security guards reserve the best location for you, but how do you break even on your ROI? Pick categories, reduce costs, raise prices...

Later, you start adding customers on WeChat, and you can tell customers which days you will be open for business and which days you will not, so that they don’t make a wasted trip! Until one day, you don't want to spend money to buy a good location anymore, so you find a remote corner and rely on these old customers to basically bring in new customers. Although the revenue has dropped a bit, fortunately the cost has also dropped.

You see, this is actually the same business as live streaming selling goods! Let’s take Tik Tok as an example!

When you have no experience at the beginning, you just shoot some videos, put up some Taobao links to sell, learn as you go through the process, find categories, and what should you do when you slowly gain experience?

Spend money on DOU+ to buy traffic. As long as the traffic is enough, calculate the ROI. As long as it is a positive number, you can continue to invest!

Once the traffic is large enough, you should start considering data such as conversion rate, repurchase rate, and after-sales rate! This is actually the standard way of playing in e-commerce! (Now you know why I said in my last article: In fact, live streaming is still the way e-commerce is played!)

This is when refined operations begin, and what matters most is operational capability! More details later!

When many people start competing for DOU+, your customer acquisition costs will become higher and higher. At this time, if you have considered the construction of private domain traffic in the early stage, you can basically stop or invest less, and rely on a group of loyal old customers to take care of your business, and live a comfortable life!

This is actually the process of cold start, drainage, conversion, optimization, and private domain traffic construction of a project, or the process from selling thinking to brand building!

Without core resources, your project has little room for imagination

I often see people in the group saying that they are going to set up stalls or do live broadcasts! Let me ask you directly: What are your core resources? If you don’t have core resources, you are just working in the name of starting a business! It just takes more time for you (of course, this time investment will eventually pay off, but that’s another story).

What are core resources?

You said you have a lot of products? Sorry, you can put the things for sale and others can find the source of the goods by searching on Alibaba! Even if you discover a new product category today, if others see that you sell more, they can still wholesale it back the next day and sell it for one dollar cheaper than you! So, don’t say that you have a product that others don’t have. We are all wholesalers, so what core technology is there to talk about?

Marketing skills? Sorry, this thing is not a core resource either! If you shout with a loud speaker today, a lot of street stalls will have loud speakers tomorrow! Most of the little tricks taught by various online masters are just imagined and are basically useless or impossible to put into practice. Even if they do, they will be quickly learned by others! [Note that here we are only talking about some marketing ideas, not systematic thinking. Systematic thinking can become a core resource]

So, what might become core resources?

Others squat for 10 hours, you squat for 15 hours. The extra time you can invest is your core resource. In 2015, I started an offline store. The guy next door smiled and said to me: I don’t think you will last long! I say, look at our store decoration, brand image, and ability to attract traffic, it will definitely work! The eldest brother smiled and said nothing.

After half a year, we really couldn't bear it anymore, and then the eldest brother said: Catering is a hard job. Except for a 7-day break during the Spring Festival, it is open all year round. The reason why most young people can't bear it is that you simply don't have that much time to persevere!

You see, being able to invest time is actually a core resource! Unexpected?

The captain of the urban management team is your uncle. The land you can get at the same price others cannot! Some people say that you describe society as too dark, I can only say haha, I was chatting with an aunt selling pancakes: Look, the stinky tofu business is so good, why don’t you sell stinky tofu! The aunt said helplessly.

As mentioned above, no one is allowed to sell stinky tofu on this street, otherwise just don’t set up your business here! You see, this is the world of martial arts! So, why are there always category clerks being arrested for anti-corruption? It’s because they are the new uncles of certain merchants!

A factory cooperates deeply with you and only supplies goods to you, so you have a unique source of goods! But the probability of this happening is estimated to be low. After all, betting on one sales channel goes against the basic business logic for a company where everything is calculated based on shipment volume! Even if you are a wire operator, no one would dare to make such a big bet.

If you are a celebrity, you can bring in a lot of customers from other channels. Just post an advertisement for a street stall on your WeChat Moments and you will be surrounded by your fans offline immediately! For example, Luo Yonghao and Chen He chose Douyin. If they set up stalls, they would probably be able to sell their products even in a remote corner of the 15th ring road in Beijing!

In fact, to sum up, the core resources are just those: people, goods, and places!

As long as one of these is tough, you can do this job! In fact, for most people, the above things are meaningless!

What if we don’t have these core resources? Arm yourself with operator thinking

In fact, most people who set up stalls may not be able to get any of the core resources mentioned above. What should they do?

Then arm yourself with operator thinking and turn yourself into a core resource! Operator thinking is a complete thinking framework. Once these ways of thinking and models are established, no matter you set up a street stall, do a live broadcast, or run other small businesses, you will find that the only thing left is the problem of "field or business" (that is, industry knowledge).

Generally speaking, as long as you follow the following checklist, you will basically not go too far:

1. Traffic thinking

What are the characteristics of platform traffic? The traffic attributes of Douyin, Toutiao, and Taobao are naturally different! The traffic attributes of the commercial pedestrian street and the traffic attributes in front of the university are also different!

How much does it cost to get this traffic? You need to calculate the day's impressions (how many people pass by), clicks (how many people stop to watch or ask), and conversions (how many people place orders) based on your booth location, so as to calculate the cost per thousand impressions, lead cost, and transaction cost!

You say these data are difficult to count? That depends on how much effort you put in! I know a brother who runs a chain store. In order to inspect a store, he drove to the side of the road and waited there for 7 days just to calculate the flow of people and the number of people entering the surrounding stores. Only once you know these costs can you have the possibility of continuous optimization. This is the foundation.

How to turn public domain traffic into private domain traffic? These are all public domain traffic. How can you turn them into your own private traffic to ensure that the next time there are new products, stalls, changes of locations, etc., they can be delivered to old customers accurately at the first time.

Of course, limited by the traffic characteristics mentioned above, perhaps the traffic of some platforms does not have the attribute of repeat customers at all, and the value of private domain traffic is not great! This requires specific analysis of specific cases, but you must always keep this in mind!

2. Marketing thinking

When the display volume/traffic is certain, letting users see you first is the key to increasing click-through rate. You may need to stand out in places where you can be exposed!

For example: When setting up a night market stall, everyone is using small LED lights, but you are using small pink lights? When everyone is selling in a reserved way, why are you shouting loudly? When everyone is selling normally, you are acting like a jerk by wearing Deadpool clothes?

The second is how to increase the average order value. Assuming that the daily order volume remains unchanged, how to increase the average order value becomes an important means to increase overall sales.

In fact, the general method is: get a certain amount of discount when you spend a certain amount, the second item is half price, and there is a prize draw when you spend a certain amount of money. Old customers who scan the QR code and add WeChat will enjoy a 10% discount...

There are so many ways, I won’t give examples here! You can find a lot of tutorials by searching online!

But to be honest, most people can’t even put their products on display and clearly mark the prices, let alone design some sophisticated marketing plans!

3. User Thinking

What is user thinking? Simply put, what problems do users encounter here? How do you solve these problems!

Some operations or marketing people call this pain point thinking or customer perspective thinking, which actually mean roughly the same thing.

The first item above talks about traffic, but the basis of all this traffic is the platform! The platform not only determines the traffic, but also determines the attributes of the individual users behind the traffic!

On different platforms and locations, users’ pain points are different. As stall owners, we must consider things from the user’s perspective! Here are two simple examples:

When selling goods on Taobao, users usually trust you because there is a powerful Taobao system backing you up. All you have to do is explain the advantages of your product clearly! But if you switch to the TikTok platform, users can easily get product information through videos, but the focus of your operation is how to gain the trust of customers!

You see, the operational focus between the two is completely different, which requires us to think about the problem from the user's perspective.

So, when selling pineapple slices, you may need to stand in the user's perspective and decide whether you need to put out a bucket of water for hand washing. If you are on a shopping traffic platform, this is very necessary. Most customers will consider not buying it because of the hassle of washing hands after eating. But if it is in a school or residential area, it may be completely unnecessary. These people may just eat and stroll back home.

It is important to think about problems from the customer's perspective, and this is also a way of thinking that we must learn!

4. Product Thinking

For the vast majority of entrepreneurs who set up stalls or sell goods, they must have the ability to think in terms of product thinking. Simply put: your product has the ability to solve user needs and create as much profit as possible under this circumstance!

The first thing is to solve user needs. It sounds easy. Isn’t it just selling hot packs in winter and ice cream in summer? But in reality, it is not the case. In the business environment we encounter, customer needs are generally complex needs with nested needs. Let's take a practical example:

• In terms of selling stinky tofu, eating stinky tofu is the most superficial demand;
• Cheap and delicious, this is also a demand;
• How to avoid soup splashing on clothes?
• Trash cans for throwing away rubbish on site;
• Wet wipes for wiping hands;
• Can have a piece of gum.

These are all requirements.

In fact, product thinking and user thinking are inextricably linked to each other. We must continuously iterate within these links to upgrade our products.

The second is to create profits. Profit = sales - cost. This formula is easy for everyone to understand. For the same stall, with the sales volume remaining the same, sometimes your costs will be a little higher, and sometimes they will be a little lower.

For example: if you are at the entrance of a school or community, the same item worth 50 yuan may only have a purchase price of 30 yuan, with a profit of 20 yuan, which can ensure the quality of the product. But in the case of a big market, you can reduce costs and import products of slightly lower quality, such as those priced at 25 yuan!

Because, in the case of Ganji, you most likely don’t need to consider repeat customers!

The product must not only match the users for iterative upgrades, but also match the scenarios in order to maximize benefits.

5. Brand thinking

"Please bring me some stinky tofu. It's the one sold by an old lady pushing a tricycle at the third shop on the pedestrian street. What? There's a young man at the third shop? Then go find the old lady on the little red tricycle!"

"Let's go, Wanda, go eat the stinky tofu that is not stinky and uncomfortable for the driver."

What exactly is a brand? What is brand thinking? This is a very complicated project, so I won’t go into detail here! Sometimes you can just read some related books! A few days ago, a picture like this was circulated on the Internet: If you look closely, you can actually see that it contains quite a lot of information!

First of all, for the vast majority of small and micro entrepreneurs, it is too early to talk about branding, but at least they need to have a name and a trademark first, right? No matter how crude the design is, it is an important symbol that distinguishes you from others.

Secondly, the important role of a brand is to represent the views of a certain group of people and to give voice to a certain group of people. This brother’s career change from self-media, at least when the products are similar, if he sets up his stalls in Wudaokou or Xisanqi, his business will be much better than other vendors! Because all customers know that this is their own person.

…………

You see, I'm just throwing out a brick. Although I can't teach you anything, if you set up a stall, at least you can follow this framework and think carefully about how to make money, right!

Author: Barley

Source: Damai Operation View

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