How to increase user growth?

In recent years, "growth hacking" and " user growth " are two very popular concepts. Especially with the gradual disappearance of the mobile Internet traffic dividend, more and more companies and brands have begun to pay more attention to user growth, recruiting specialized user growth players and setting up user growth teams.

Although everyone from ordinary product, marketing, and operations practitioners to company founders, executives, and investors always mention "growth", in fact, many people's understanding of "user growth" is still "muddy". Even in a large company like Tencent, not everyone can understand the work content of the user growth team and distinguish which are the core functions of the product and which are user growth functions.

I recently read "I'm Doing User Growth on the Front Line" written by Yang Hanqing, a professional user growth manager for Amazon, Didi, Baidu Tieba, ofo, and Beike. I benefited a lot from it and have a clearer understanding and cognition of "user growth". During the reading process, I also began to inventory and split the work content of my product operations, so as to set goals more effectively based on "product core functions" and "user growth functions."

So through this article, I hope to extract some key points about "user growth" and have a deeper understanding and discussion with other students.

1. What is “user growth”?

Yang Hanqing's definition of "user growth" is: start from the beginning and end with all resources in mind to allow more users to use core product functions more frequently.

There is a core point here. "User growth" revolves around allowing users to use core product functions, rather than simply attracting new users and promoting activation. Even if a lot of users are attracted through channel expansion or user subsidies, but these users only download and register for the App to get the free stuff and then almost never visit again, then this kind of work cannot be regarded as real "user growth". In other words, this kind of "user growth" work is ineffective.

Do not overemphasize attracting new users, but pay more attention to whether users have generated HVA (High Value Action) and whether the user's LTV (Live Time Value) is healthy. This evaluation standard actually puts higher demands on the work of "user growth". The reason is that the Internet has entered a stage where the stock market is getting more and more expensive. Relying on large-scale buying of advertisements, traffic, CPM/CPT will increase the cost and the effect cannot be accurately evaluated. Blindly buying traffic will disrupt the life cycle of the product.

2. How does “user growth” work?

The complete work promotion path of "user growth" consists of goals-projects-organizational guarantees-long-term goals-review, including:

1. According to the company strategy, determine the stage goals of growth
2. Combined with industry characteristics, in-depth thinking, reverse the realization path and corresponding growth projects from the goal
3. Think about the organization based on the project, set up a closed-loop team or break the tight coupling of department walls FT
4. Take into account long-term growth goals, think ahead about how to cross the growth curve and start the second curve of user growth
5. Design and execute specific growth projects under the assumption that individual growth projects will likely fail.

Let me explain in detail with some examples:

Phased goals: The goal of "user growth" is to increase the user's HVA, but depending on the product life cycle, HVA may have a gradual process or change.

Doing user growth is somewhat similar to choosing a company strategy. The biggest challenge is not how to do it, but where to prioritize resources. At this time, it is necessary to determine the strategic goals of the business at the current stage. If the strategic goals of the business are unclear, the user growth goal can only be set as vague, panacea indicators such as "increasing the number of registered users" or "increasing MAU." My own experience is that if we only set such a panacea goal without evaluating HAV, the biggest problem will be waste of resources, false prosperity, and covering up the verification of the core functions of the product.

The interim goals here are basically the same as the "North Star Indicator" in growth hacking, for example: the number of playlists produced by NetEase Cloud Music, the number of ride orders of ofo, the number of questions/answers on Zhihu...

Identify growth projects: What is called a "user growth project"? Points malls, red envelopes, coupons, and events like "xx Friday" and "xx Brand Day" are all typical "user growth" projects. The most important thing about "user growth projects" is "guidance", which is to guide users to make decisions in the process of generating HVA in the direction we expect. In "I'm Doing User Growth on the Front Line", the author also cites many principles on how to guide user psychology, such as: guiding users to have strong emotions, guiding by default options, inducing loss aversion, and creating a cognitive gravitational field. There are many books, such as "Influence", "Thinking Fast and Slow", and "The Power of Habit" that are all about the methodology of influencing brain decision-making.

To implement a "user growth project", you need to consider a lot of details, optimize and guide each process, and do everything possible to shorten the path to getting started with core functions. For example, for a project that sounds relatively simple, such as "sending red envelopes", it is necessary to fully consider "red envelope amount control strategy", "integration with core functions", "anti-cheating", etc. For example:

• The red envelope distribution strategy must be adjustable, and red envelopes of different amounts should be distributed according to the user's usage frequency during different periods of time.
• It is impossible for users to know about the red envelope function from the beginning, so a budget needs to be set aside for promotion
• After receiving the red envelope, we hope that users can actively share it, so we need a function to double the red envelope
• Circle the KOL users who usually share through data to increase their chances of winning the grand prize

The success of a growth project requires the cooperation of various types of personnel, such as growth project managers, product managers, R&D personnel, data analysts, marketing/PR/offline teams, etc. If any link fails, the project will not achieve the expected results.

A reasonable organizational structure is used to ensure: a dedicated project growth team is established, with product, R&D, operation, marketing, PR and other teams excluding BP (Business Partner) to support the work of the user growth team. The performance of these BPs is determined by the person in charge of the user growth team or mainly based on the opinions of the user growth team, thus forming a growth FT. If a product does not have a dedicated user growth team, many people from different departments will think that they are doing user growth. Once the growth does not meet expectations, these people who claim to be doing user growth will not feel that it is their responsibility, resulting in a situation where "everyone takes credit for the work and tries to pass on the blame." Therefore, if a company wants to achieve good user growth, it must have a reasonable growth organizational structure to guarantee it.

In summary, "user growth" is promoted with clear goals and relying on "user growth projects". "User growth projects" require suitable personnel to form a user growth team to protect them. "User growth projects" are effective in the short term but may fail in the long term. To achieve user growth, we must explore new growth curves. Finally, the "user growth project" is not 100% guaranteed to succeed, and the results may be good or bad. So at this time, it is necessary to "use the redundancy of testing in exchange for the certainty of growth."

3. “User Growth” and Product Team

Before discussing the similarities and differences between user growth teams and product teams, let’s repeat our definition of user growth: start from the end in mind and use all resources to enable more users to use core product features more frequently. The “more” and “higher frequency” in this definition actually correspond to the two multiplier factors of ALTV, namely the number of users and LTV; and guiding users to use core product functions allows the user growth team to focus more on target actions that can increase LTV.

This definition does not say that we need to build a product that users love and that satisfies their core needs in some way, because this is not the job of the user growth team, but the job of the product team. As mentioned earlier, the user growth team does the icing on the cake. Without a product that meets the basic user experience, user growth work cannot be carried out effectively. Even if we force ourselves to increase user growth, we will get half the result with twice the effort.

The basic user experience framework provided by the product team is the prerequisite for user growth; otherwise, growth will be in vain. In order to have a product framework that can meet the basic user experience and core needs, the product team has to do a lot of work, including but not limited to: market research, demand analysis, product definition, product design, project management, product promotion, product life cycle management, etc. For the user growth team, if they are working on the product's main experience framework, they must undoubtedly follow the product team's ideas; but if they are working on the HVA guidance logic, they must follow the user growth team's ideas.

4. "User Growth" and Operations Team

In form, there is some overlap between what the user operation team does and what the user growth team does. In fact, there are still quite big differences between the two in essence. Ordinary user operation teams often organize activities at key event nodes to stimulate user activity or transaction volume. For example, they may do some data inventory H5 and small games on Valentine's Day, April Fool's Day, Labor Day, Children's Day, Chinese Valentine's Day and other festivals, or create some festivals, such as shopping festivals. These are typical work of an operation team.

Although the work done by the user growth team looks very similar to that of the operations team, it is fundamentally focused on two purposes:

• Focus on repetitive cycles to change user habits;
• Focus on guiding users to generate HVA. The focus of growth-oriented operations is to increase LTV, and the increase in LTV is generally achieved by guiding users to generate HVA, so growth-oriented operations must focus on guiding HVA. The evaluation of growth-oriented operational activities does not lie in the results of a single activity, but in changing the user growth trajectory through the occurrence of HVA.

5. “User Growth” and Brand Marketing Team

Both user growth and brand marketing hope to influence user decisions. But there are also differences between the two: the decisions affected by user growth are more micro, and generally affect a certain aspect of the user experience of the product, such as whether to click a button to go to the next step, whether to use a certain function, whether to purchase a membership, etc.; while brand marketing affects more macro decisions, such as whether to buy a certain product.

Since Internet products generally adopt a model of free use or free basic services but charged value-added services, the threshold for macro-decision-making of such products is relatively low and the power of brand marketing cannot be fully exerted. For Internet products, it is the various micro-level decisions that contribute more to commercial value, which is exactly the area where user growth excels.

A successful user growth team must have the support of other teams behind it, so that it can achieve growth results beyond expectations. The premise for everyone to cooperate well is mutual respect. The user growth team must recognize the importance of other professional teams, and other teams must also recognize the professionalism in the field of user growth. If a company forms a user growth team, it is definitely because growth requires people with professional skills. Otherwise, the existing team can just do it part-time. There is no need to go to so much trouble. User growth is something that benefits the entire company. If all teams can work together, think in the same direction and form a synergy, it will definitely produce unexpected growth results.

6. Final Thoughts

With the end of the mobile Internet dividend, the importance of existing users has become increasingly prominent. This requires a better and more organic combination of user growth and user operations to allow the user's LTV curve to leap upward. The main purpose of this article is to make a summary of thoughts and let everyone know how to improve the value of existing users in a more systematic way.

Products, operations, user growth, data analysis... seem to be the manifestation of a more segmented PM industry. Actually, when it comes to work, I think higher requirements are placed on the capability model of every PM. After gaining a deeper understanding of the work of "user growth", my biggest personal gain is that I can better judge and distinguish the work at hand, and adopt different ways of thinking and action paths when planning core product functions and user growth functions, so as to better grasp the coordination rhythm between core product functions and user growth: user pain points - see the big picture from the small, insight and exploration of core product functions - growth function coordination - attract more users to use it.

Author:duoyu

Source: Tencent Lecture Hall