WeChat banned WeTool, how to do social marketing?

Tencent's ban on WeTool brings not only risks, but also an opportunity for marketing change. The pain brought about by breaking an existing marketing model is inevitable, but whoever can change in line with the trend will be rewarded with a carnival after the pain.

Wetool officially announced that everyone should stop using it, otherwise their account will be blocked by WeChat.

This news came a little bit suddenly and a little bit inevitably:

The reason why it happened suddenly is that third-party auxiliary tools are an indispensable part of current social marketing . For chain store companies, the overall management of the community is achieved with the help of WeTool. At least WeTool provides a good data statistics function and automated operation function, which plays an irreplaceable role in labor efficiency.

The reason why it was inevitable was that corporate WeChat promotion personnel had already contacted me years ago. Their promotion efforts and determination were huge. Even their official personnel directly suggested stopping the use of wetool, revealing that WeChat officials would take action against wetool sooner or later. After the news was confirmed, it was indeed no less than a nuclear bomb in the social marketing circle, and there was immediate widespread grief.

Social marketing dilemma

WeChat banned marketing tools such as WeTool, and chain stores are now facing the following difficulties in conducting social marketing:

1. The reduction in marketing efficiency is accompanied by a reduction in labor efficiency

Wetool plays an irreplaceable role in improving labor efficiency. First of all, there are usually only three staff members in the front hall of our store, namely the store manager, the cashier, and the waiter. A very important scenario for attracting new customers through social networks is in stores. Stores need to migrate customers to groups to build their own private traffic pool. Wetool solves three major pain points. The first is that adding friends is automatically approved, so the store manager does not need to spend time manually approving it. The second is that the group invitation link is automatically pushed, and the store manager does not need to manually invite people to join the group. Third, after fans join the group, they can be automatically welcomed and given new member gifts. This cannot be done manually after there are five or six hundred communities. If it is done manually, it will take a lot of time, which obviously increases the burden for stores with limited manpower.

2. It is impossible to automate order taking and it is difficult to guarantee the fan experience

With the help of wetool, we have implemented an automated order-taking process. For example, when fans order cakes or bread in the group, keywords can trigger the robot's response. The paid version of wetool has a desktop reminder function. Once the content sent by fans triggers the cake ordering keyword, the store cash register computer will flash a reminder to take the order, and the store can quickly respond to fans' ordering needs. After losing wetool, the community can only be monitored manually. Once there are too many communities, it is inevitable that fans' needs cannot be responded to in a timely manner, resulting in a bad experience for fans.

3. Community order is difficult to maintain, and advertising fans can revel in their hearts and minds

The most troublesome thing about social marketing is that advertising fans sneak into the group and post advertisements at will. Without WeTool, the group owner or administrator needs to manually remove them, but the effect is minimal. On the one hand, manual removal is time-consuming and laborious. On the other hand, those who post advertisements will inevitably have small accounts lurking in the group, and they will be pulled back into the group immediately after being removed. The blacklist mechanism of WeTool perfectly solves this problem. Members on the whitelist can send a kick command to add advertising fans to the blacklist without the need for the group owner or administrator to operate. In addition, fans who are blacklisted cannot join the group again, which plays a great role in protecting the group environment.

For social marketing players without stores, the biggest impact of losing third-party tools is that they can no longer perform fission marketing. Generally, fission marketing will use wetool's welcome new members function, picture robot function, and automatic approval of friends function. This makes the path of poster fission no longer so easy.

Faced with such uncertainties, how should chain store companies respond?

When I found that wetool could no longer be used, I did not panic. At present, our private traffic system with 600+ communities and 200,000+ fans has already established a good operating system in the early stage of community marketing, so that the tool only plays an auxiliary role rather than a core role in determining life and death.

1. Community steward system - KOC determines the vitality of the community

First, let’s explain KOC and KOL

KOC, the full English name is "Key Opinion Consumer", which corresponds to KOL (Key Opinion Leader). Generally refers to consumers who can influence their friends and fans and generate consumption behavior. Compared with KOL, KOC has fewer fans and less influence, but its advantages are that it is more vertical and cheaper.

Many people run communities and often mention KOLs, but there are really no KOLs in the groups. Generally, KOLs are influential. For example, we can understand a food blogger with hundreds of thousands of fans as a KOL, but as an ordinary consumer, the influence of each person is often no more than 100 people, so we can only call them KOCs.

In the early days of community operations, we found that some fans in the group were very active and willing to recommend our products to other fans, so we began to establish a strategy for recruiting community managers. This strategy mainly introduces the community to form a community + community model, guides community fans to contribute UGC content to the community, and then encourages sharing of high-quality content back to the community, allowing other fans to have a deeper understanding of the product and forward it to their friends for secondary dissemination.

The standards for housekeeper recruitment are:

1. Senior fans of the brand, familiar with the products
2. Contribute at least 10 high-quality content articles, which can help operations understand fans' understanding of the product.
3. Active in the community, willing to share official activities or content with friends

After recruiting the housekeepers, they will enter the reserve pool of senior fans and be given special benefits. For example, the operation staff will regularly plan some offline activities, including in-store new product tasting activities, baking classes, etc., and give priority to inviting these fans to participate, and let the operation staff get to know them and contact them, so as to become acquaintances.

In the operation and management of the community, we have designed the butler on-the-job training, butler tasks, and butler work orders, so that a good operation mechanism can maximize the effectiveness of the butler's operation of the community. The housekeeper not only actively promotes products in the community and shares them back to the community, but also helps maintain community order and responds to fan needs, effectively solving the problem of human efficiency without tools. At the same time, in terms of labor costs, the salary of a full-time community operator can be equal to the cost of 40 housekeepers, which can be said to be the lowest cost.

2. Develop WeChat for Business – a tool for precision marketing

Years ago, when WeChat for Business was conducting grayscale testing of Moments, it already had a premonition that WeChat officials were going to stir up a storm in the field of private domain traffic marketing. When WeChat officials did not pay attention to this field, third-party marketing tools developed based on the WeChat ecosystem were very popular in the market. When the cheese was big enough and tempting enough, the officials could easily raise their butcher knives, kill all the market players without leaving a single piece of armor, and easily take the cheese into their pockets.

At this time, merchants who engage in private domain traffic marketing have only two choices:

1. Invest manpower to continue marketing in ordinary WeChat groups, and use manpower to replace the tool part of the work.
2. Invest in enterprise WeChat and explore new marketing models for enterprise WeChat.

Investing in enterprise WeChat is an inevitable choice for businesses, because there is no choice. The reason why WeChat has banned all third-party tools on the market is nothing more than to promote its own products to form a new type of private domain traffic marketing ecosystem, to hold the initiative of marketing in its own hands, and thus avoid letting outsiders take advantage of the benefits.

What capabilities can WeChat for Business bring to chain store companies?

1. Moments Marketing Empowerment

Only some enterprises were eligible to activate WeChat for Business during its grayscale testing before the New Year. Now it seems that all enterprises have directly activated the Moments marketing function. The biggest difference between corporate WeChat Moments marketing and personal WeChat Moments marketing is the commercialization of costs and fan assets.

• Cost: Enterprise WeChat is currently free to open, with a maximum limit of 8,000 employee accounts, which meets the needs of most companies. Personal WeChat accounts require registering WeChat with mobile phone numbers purchased in the name of the company. Each mobile phone number corresponds to one WeChat account, and the upper limit of friends is 5,000. In addition, the minimum monthly rental cost of the mobile phone number is 30+, which is a considerable expense and is also troublesome to maintain.
• Enterprise-based fan asset management: In order to save card opening costs, some companies use employees’ personal WeChat accounts to attract new members. Once an employee leaves, the corresponding fan assets are also lost. Enterprise WeChat accounts can redistribute fan assets to other employees after the employee leaves, effectively reducing the risk of fan asset loss.

WeChat official website has set rules for WeChat Moments marketing. Store managers can post a WeChat Moments post every day, and the visible range is the fans added by their own stores. Enterprises can post a WeChat Moments post every week, and the visible range is the fans of all stores. The following operations can be performed in terms of marketing:

1. The store manager’s circle of friends is mainly used to promote in-store promotions. This is the lowest-cost way to reach customers and solves the pain point that customers don’t know about in-store activities before entering the store.
2. The headquarters mainly uses WeChat Moments to promote major node promotions to warm up and attract traffic for major events.

2. Community empowerment, building corporate WeChat communities

Enterprise WeChat has also launched a community function. The upper limit of group members has been adjusted from 50 to 200. There is no limit on the number of groups. Although it cannot completely replace WeTool in terms of functions, some functions can still meet the company's automated marketing needs.

There are three ways to join a WeChat group:

1. Joining a group chat via a QR code is similar to the live code function. After setting the group name in the background, the group will be automatically created when the upper limit of 200 people is reached and customers scan the code to join the group. This function is undoubtedly a good alternative to the live code function of third-party tools on the market, and it is more convenient to operate. The function of joining a group chat through a stand is the same, but the display format is different. The stand can be directly exported and printed into materials, and there is no need to design new materials.
2. Adding group chat to the mini program is a new and creative way to play. The background configuration can generate a code for a [Join Group Chat] button. This code can be implanted into the merchant's mini program background, so that the mini program can be joined to the group with one click, and the traffic of the merchant's official mini program can be directly introduced into the community.

In terms of community operation, Enterprise WeChat provides group messaging functions, group chat data statistics, and group welcome messages. These functions can also better meet the needs of merchants. For example, there is no need to manually transfer content to the group for group messaging, which directly solves the pain point of inefficiency. Data statistics can help the headquarters control the effectiveness of community operations in each store, and the group welcome message can achieve some new customer conversion activities.

3. Tags empower, fan operations enter a refined era

In the Wetool era, fans can also be tagged. The fan group chat content can be analyzed based on preset keywords and tagged automatically. However, tagging on corporate WeChat needs to be done during the fan-adding stage, which requires stores to be able to implement this strategy well.

To give an example, when a cake shop asks customers to add membership, there is usually a birthday field in the registration field, and this field automatically obtains personal information from WeChat. The cake shop can send birthday coupons in advance based on the customer's birthday, hoping that the customer will come to the store to repurchase cakes on his birthday.

But in fact, this marketing method does not conform to customers' purchasing habits. Customers usually buy cakes for specific users, such as ordering for lovers, children, or parents. There is a marketing pain point here. How can we obtain these consumer psychology information more accurately, improve customer portraits, and thus carry out more accurate cake marketing?

The tag function of WeChat for Business can solve this problem, but it requires very good execution capabilities from the store.

During the store training stage, we emphasize that store managers are required to preset the above labels in advance. When customers come to the store to buy cakes, the store should ask customers to add the company’s WeChat friends and label them, such as the birthday month, who the cake was bought for, and the customer’s basic information. In this way, when the customer’s next birthday month comes, the store can accurately push birthday wishes and birthday gift activities based on the labels. This will help you retain your high-value customers better.

Existing community maintenance - small and beautiful marketing

In the Wetool era, we have a very practical methodology for ordinary WeChat groups, that is, to create a traffic pool through fission and automatically store water. Then the traffic pool converts target customers into a membership pool through event operations, and conducts continuous maintenance to promote repeat purchases. With the support of tools, it is not difficult to operate hundreds of thousands of fans.

However, without the support of tools, it becomes particularly difficult to operate a community with hundreds of thousands of fans. First of all, it is particularly difficult to maintain order in hundreds or thousands of communities, and they can easily become a stronghold for advertising parties to attack. Secondly, you cannot do automated marketing, such as welcoming new members, mass messaging, and fission.

At this time, the operation of the existing fan base can return to being small and beautiful, mainly reflected in:

1. The headquarters changes from being the operation leader to the operation supporter, the community returns to the store, and is operated by KOCs to assist the store manager. The store manager can devote his attention to interactive marketing in the community, such as enjoying group prices in the store, rolling dice to compare sizes and enjoying discounts in the store, etc.
2. KOC assists in managing the order of the community and ensuring a green environment for the community. In addition, a store owner is designated to be responsible for reminding about advertisements, cleaning up advertising numbers, etc.
3. Merge existing groups and import active fans and purchasing fans in the community into new groups. Each store only needs to operate 2 groups at most, which can greatly reduce the difficulty of operation.

I believe that Tencent's ban on WeTool not only brings risks, but also an opportunity for marketing reform. The pain brought about by breaking an existing marketing model is inevitable, but whoever can change with the trend will be rewarded after the pain. Let's see who will dominate the private domain traffic marketing!

Author: Zhao Wenbiao

Source: User Operation Observation (ID: yunyingguancha)