B-side new media operation skills!

"Video" and "community" are undoubtedly the keywords most discussed by operators in recent years.

All walks of life have tried to shoot videos and build communities. Corresponding products and positions have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and many companies and individuals have also achieved remarkable results.

Compared with the C-end, which is constantly receiving good news and is being played very well by operators, the B-end seems to be particularly quiet, and there are not many industry-level cases.

There are even many B-side new media operators , including myself who just entered the industry a few years ago, who think: B-side does not need to make videos or communities.

However, with more personal experiences and case sharing from peers, I gradually realized that my original idea was wrong. Now, after some summary, I would like to talk about some of my thoughts on this, hoping to provide some thinking direction for B-side new media operators who are facing this problem.

Of course, if you have any other opinions, you are welcome to leave a message and share them. Let us encourage each other!

1. The B-side does not need traffic-based videos

In my thinking article at the end of 2019, I mentioned that B-side users are mostly decision makers in enterprises. They have a high time cost and are easily interested in useless, common, and worthless content, which may even affect cooperation.

Whether it is a video or an article, although the presentation form is slightly different, the essence is content. Therefore, B-side new media operators must be clear that every video you produce should be valuable.

Producing videos with a certain purpose is more valuable than videos that are simply eye-catching, and is more easily accepted by B-side users.

For example:

I used to work for a B2B company in a traditional industry. Due to the special nature of the industry and low user stickiness, external corporate users did not fully trust the product, which led to the fact that the operation was not smooth, especially in terms of promotion. Articles alone could not achieve good communication effects. In this case, the department decided to change the taste of users and make a few videos to test the effect.

During the preparation stage of video production, what impressed me most was a special meeting in which we spent a lot of time discussing one question: What are we shooting for?

Some people suggested that videos can be used to gain traffic, shoot funny videos to make people happy; some people suggested that they can shoot some industry education, spread knowledge, and build authority; some people even suggested making ghost videos... These contents are not difficult to produce, but we all know that they are meaningless. Apart from bringing in playback volume, they are of no help to the development of the business.

“Why shoot it?” No one could give an answer for a while. Then the operations director suggested that the company recently planned to launch a product, so they could think about it from this perspective. After another discussion, the purpose of the video was quickly clarified: to enhance user confidence in the product and increase product orders.

After the subsequent video promotion was completed, the effect achieved far exceeded expectations. Although not many people watched it on various video platforms, the dissemination effect within the industry was surprisingly good. The video was also used in subsequent industry exhibitions and corporate forums. The playback site attracted the attention and discussion of many corporate managers, and the number of users who consulted and ordered products also increased significantly, completing the target tasks set before the video production.

Compared with those humorous and messy videos, B-side users will be more likely to accept videos that seem to us to be very purposeful, which will make them feel real and more easily accept it.

In addition to the video having a purpose, the video script also needs attention.

A script is an executable file written in a certain format that is used as the basis for shooting a video. It is the outline of the video and will determine the development direction and shooting details of the entire video.

Many B-side new media operators are not graduates of film and television related majors. During the preparation stage of video shooting, they often ignore the role of scripts and think that it is enough to just shoot, so why bother doing this extra work.

If there is no script as a basis, once something unexpected happens on the set, such as an actor feeling unwell temporarily, or having to leave for something, you will find that subsequent shooting is prone to errors. Either the scene is wrong, or the actor is not clear about how to cooperate next. The final editing will be even more difficult, with no idea where to start. The result is naturally a mess, wasting time and energy, and affecting the video effect.

If you have professionals or outsourced teams to cooperate, you may not have to worry, but if it is just your own department doing the shooting, then the script can greatly improve the shooting efficiency and video effects.

How to write a good script? Here are two suggestions:

1. Make an outline first

A shooting outline is a set of key points for shooting a film or certain scenes. It only serves as a reminder of the shooting content and is suitable for content that is difficult to control and predict.

A shooting outline generally includes five parts: explanation of the topic, explanation of the perspective, explanation of the genre and form of the work, explanation of the style, picture and rhythm of the work, and explanation of the shooting content. The summary description of these five parts can help all creators understand the purpose and key points of the video more clearly.

2. Pay attention to the storyboard

A storyboard script, also known as a filming script, is a script created based on an outline or literary script.

The storyboard script will describe and present every detail in the video, including scenes, actors, narration, background sounds, etc., so as to construct the overall image of the screen and ensure the final effect of the video.

The following is the initial script developed by our department in the case, which is for reference only:

If the B-side new media operators have a certain foundation in drawing, when communication is inconvenient or they want to speed up and improve efficiency, they can conceive storyboards to help team members understand.

Example: A snippet from Zhang Yimou’s storyboard for Hero

2. The B-side needs a valuable community

The B-end market environment is extremely complex, and there are endless overt and covert means in the industry. Sometimes, there are many examples of people cutting off the source of funds in order to make a little money.

When I was chatting with a product friend before, he shared a case. He said that when he was working in a B-side construction company, the company's operations department wanted to bring existing users together to see if they could do some marketing, so they formed a number of communities. There were no problems at first and the activity was okay, but after a while, they found that the performance was declining instead of increasing.

During the investigation, it was discovered that some suppliers had found ways to sneak into the community and contact users for private transactions. Although it was discovered in time and warnings and penalties were given, it was difficult to stop once the beginning was made. Ultimately, they had no choice but to disband the community, and the company had to bear the losses itself.

If the B-side new media operation has not yet figured out what value the community can bring, then please do not build a community on the B-side easily.

B-side communities must be valuable to both businesses and users. If they are only valuable to businesses, users will gradually lose interest and eventually become silent. If they only focus on making users happy, then this is just self-entertainment.

So when building a community, how should B-side new media operations be carried out? Let’s look at a positive example:

The new media director of a B-end e-commerce platform decided to build a community in order to help the company maintain user relationships and improve conversions.

Instead of rushing to recruit people to form a group, he contacted the company's sales specialists and conducted a user survey on interests and hobbies. After obtaining certain results, he planned an outdoor activity with the theme of "hiking" and pulled those corporate users who liked hiking in the survey into the pre-prepared group.

Since the community is full of users with similar interests, everyone has many topics to talk about and is very active. In the subsequent outdoor climbing activities, he also set up various small levels. As long as corporate users accept and complete tasks in the community, they can receive rewards, which include a large number of coupons accumulated on the platform.

After the outdoor activity ended, the new media operators posted related online activities in the community, and the coupons that users received while completing tasks while climbing came in handy. Due to the income from their labor and the previous community operations, the number of participants and conversion rates of that online activity were quite good. The conversion targets were achieved at a lower cost, and the company was successfully helped to maintain user relationships.

The B-side new media operators in the case did not randomly pull people from the company's user traffic pool and create some meaningless WeChat groups. Instead, they segmented users through research, used interests and hobbies as a breakthrough, pursued quality rather than quantity, and emphasized the value that the community can bring through activities. These are all worth our consideration and learning.

Conclusion

If shooting videos and building a community on the B-side is ineffective, it is not because your shooting skills are not up to standard or your community operation skills are insufficient. It is very likely that you are just going in the wrong direction.

You need to determine the purpose of your videos, and you need to create value for your community. Only under the guidance of "purpose" and "value" can you find the right direction, use the right methods, and go better and further.

Finally, it’s the old saying: if a horse doesn’t think, it will easily become a mule. At that time, “whether it’s a mule or a horse, just pull it out for a walk” would be a joke. May we always keep thinking and stay away from dust and riding.

Author: Sanshui Yidiangen

Source: Sanshui Yidiangen