Online traffic generation skills for training institutions!

Education is the foundation of a country. Parents are all afraid that their children will lose at the starting line. Not only do they have to complete their homework at school, but they also have to take their children to extracurricular training classes. In order to reduce customer acquisition costs, many training institutions set up lead-in classes, which means offering a few full-priced classes at a low price, but the results are not satisfactory.

"From now on, our institution will no longer offer any low-priced traffic-generating courses!" The principal of a composition training institution said this to me at noon today. To be honest, I was quite shocked, because experience classes are a must for almost every institution's enrollment. Doesn't this institution have to worry about the source of students?

After chatting with them, I found out that this institution had spent huge amounts of manpower and financial resources on the induction classes, but in return all it got was the parents' excuse of "let's think about it again". What exactly is the problem? After communicating with him, combined with my experience of looking for art institutions for my daughter and taking trial classes everywhere, I found that at present, most institutions have the following two misunderstandings about lead-in classes:

1. Misconceptions about the drainage course

1) Thinking that a lead generation course is just about letting users experience 1 or 2 full-price courses

For example, at an art studio across from my house, the trial class was conducted in this way. The teacher scheduled a full-priced class for my daughter. There were a total of 8 students in the class at that time. The teacher took great care of my daughter in class and came to her seat from time to time to give guidance. As the only parent attending the class as an auditor, I also received special treatment. When the children were practicing, the teacher would observe my daughter's painting movements while imparting professional knowledge to me. I was deeply moved by the teacher's professionalism and responsibility, but when I looked at my daughter, I saw that her eyes were dull and she looked drowsy. She was mechanically coloring on the paper, completely devoid of her former passion for painting.

After class, my daughter said, "Mom, I don't want to study here. I don't understand." As a parent, I feel a little regretful because this institution is very cheap and the teachers are so professional. But after all, she is the one studying and I can't force her. I had to give up. Now, every time I meet that teacher on the road, I feel embarrassed.

Disadvantages: It is difficult for newcomers to keep up with the learning pace, which leads to loss.

See, that’s the crux of the matter. The students who come here for trial are newbies. There is a gap between their experience and your regular classes, which will cause them to be unable to keep up with the class. At the same time, since students taking regular courses have a certain foundation in painting and there is still a gap between them and novices, this will further discourage novices and make them lose interest in learning.

2) Open a separate class and take the first half of the regular course system as a lead-in course

The education and training industry is an industry where users and customers are separated. Trial classes must not only attract students, but also "please" parents. Therefore, many institutions have opened "full-price trial classes", that is, arranging trial students in a class and starting to take "cut-in-half" full-price classes, such as 12 classes for 198 yuan. This can avoid the problem of novices falling behind in the class, and at the same time allow parents to clearly feel the changes in their children and thus switch to full-price classes. But this situation will cause institutions to suffer even greater losses. Why do you say that?

Excessive cost:

The conversion cycle is too long, and the gap between the teacher cost, service cost and the amount paid by users is too large;

Negative impact on registered students:

It's like, you just bought a coat for 399 yuan on Tmall last month, while someone else bought it for 99 yuan. Although his may be a lower-end version, you would be very unhappy because of the huge price difference. Tmall is relatively humane and can refund the price difference, but can your training institution do the same?

So my suggestion is that, since we have decided to do the lead-in course, we should carry it through to the end and design a set of lead-in courses specifically for us, which will be completely separate from the regular-priced courses.

So, how to design a lead-in class? Many people will blurt out that parents should be able to see the results in the short term, that the product should be related to full-priced courses, etc. Of course, these are all good points, but they may not touch upon the core principles of product design.

That’s right, the traffic generation course is also a product. 360 founder Zhou Hongyi once said that currently, products widely circulated on the Internet generally meet three principles: rigid demand, pain points, and high frequency. As a product traffic generation course, it also needs to comply with these three principles.

2. Three principles for designing lead-in courses

1) Urgent need

What is a basic need? That is, all children in this stage of education can benefit from it and everyone should use it.

For example, punctuation, phonetic symbols, mental arithmetic, calligraphy, etc., these are all rigid needs. You can design drainage courses such as "Five-Day Phonetic Symbols Full Marks Class" and "Five-Day Mention Class" based on these topics. Seeing this, some teachers may ask, it may be relatively easier to set themes for cultural courses because cultural courses themselves are a rigid demand, so how should quality training institutions find the rigid demand? This brings us to the second principle.

2) Pain points

What unsolvable but crucial problems will parents encounter in the process of education and children in the process of learning?

The answer here can be found in the first article I wrote: "12 Tips for Online Traffic Generation for Training Institutions (1) User Portraits are Nuclear Weapons". Let me throw in a digression here. For example, recently, New Oriental Family Education released the "2020 China Family Education Status Survey Report". The report pointed out that children's procrastination, poor self-control, carelessness, etc. are the problems that parents complain about the most. So, can your courses be designed around these pain points?

How to extend it? For example, as far as I know, procrastination is mainly caused by the following four reasons: children have poor concentration, lack of interest and motivation, don’t know what to do, and have resistance to parents. Then, based on the characteristics of your subject and combining 1-2 knowledge points from the regular courses, you can design a course to improve this problem. Since the situations in each subject are different, I will not elaborate on this here. You can just do some mental exercises and start a discussion.

Zhou Hongyi said that rigid demands and pain points will create a huge pull for products on users. That is to say, even if the product has defects at this time, users are willing to tolerate its imperfections and continue to use it.

For example, the battery capacity of Apple phones is unmatched by domestic brands. For the sake of aesthetics, Apple sacrificed battery capacity, but why do so many people still support Apple? This is because it meets people’s urgent needs and pain points.

3) High frequency

You may not understand what you are seeing here. Compared with catering and travel, the training industry should be considered a low-frequency industry. Why is it still written as a high-frequency industry here? We need to change our thinking and convert low frequencies into high frequencies. How to do it specifically? The following case may give you some ideas. A beverage salesperson was selling bottled drinks to the audience in a circus. After several months of practice, the results were not satisfactory, so the salesperson changed his thinking and gave a free bag of peanuts to all the audience who bought tickets. Guess what the result was? Sales soared and he soon hit sales targets. How is it done? It turned out that he increased the saltiness of the peanuts, which not only made the peanuts more delicious, but also awakened the audience's desire to drink water.

In fact, this set of ideas has been quietly implemented in the training industry. For example, there will be multiple tests in a course, including an entry test, a test on each small knowledge point in class, an exit test, and a graduation test... This is converting low frequency into high frequency, making users feel "thirsty" all the time, so as to generate training needs.

Here, I suggest that it is best to do online testing to facilitate teachers to mark the papers, accumulate student data, and provide support for later conversions. You can use tools such as Questionnaire Star to create your own questions, or you can use School Manager Star Assessment, which can quickly set up assessments and automatically grade the papers.

To sum up, for a hit-selling course to attract traffic, it is best if it meets the above three principles at the same time. Of course, if the staff and experience are limited, you can meet 1-2 of them first.

Finally, I have two small suggestions for you:

1. After the lead-in course is created, a group of users can be selected from old users to experience it. The course can be optimized based on everyone’s feedback until the users are relatively satisfied. Then, consider launching it into the market. This can reduce the cost of trial and error.
2. When the course is more mature, it can be recorded and put on online platforms for display, such as its own official account, WeChat video account, Douyin, or online course display platforms such as Xiaoetong, School Manager Light Online School, etc., so that students and parents can quickly try the course and reduce the institution’s personnel expenditure costs.

Author: Auntie Cai

Source: Auntie Cai