How to create private domain traffic for To B business!

What should be done specifically about private domain traffic for To B business? You can think about it from the following five aspects: public domain traffic operation; official account operation; personal account operation; WeChat group operation; public domain traffic + official account + personal account + WeChat group + official website.

In the past year, private domain traffic has been very popular. However, various topics and hot topics regarding private domain traffic are mainly concentrated on C-end business. However, few people talk about B-side business.

Based on my practice, thinking and observation, I believe that in the future in the To B business field, the topic of private domain traffic will become more and more popular.

It will become more and more popular, mainly for the following three reasons:

(1) The customer decision cycle is long. It may take up to one or two years for a customer to have a certain understanding of the company's products and place an order. During this process, the customer and the company may have the opportunity to have multiple contacts. Through the influence of various touch points, the customer finally places an order.

During such a long period of time before a customer makes a deal, customer leads need to be nurtured, and the best way to nurture customer leads is to operate the customer's private traffic.

(2) The customer acquisition cost of To B business is very high. Since the customer acquisition cost is so high, it is necessary to increase the customer's payment conversion rate and repurchase rate to spread the customer acquisition cost and thus achieve business profitability.

Whether it is to increase the payment conversion rate or the repurchase rate, it is necessary to do a good job in refined traffic operations and private domain traffic operations to ultimately achieve better results.

(3) If you want to run a better business, then it is worthwhile to manage the customer life cycle well and tap into more customer life cycle value during the customer life cycle.

An effective way to manage customer life cycle is to solve it through private domain traffic operation.

To sum up, I believe that private domain traffic operations for To B business will become more and more popular in the future.

Since it is a general trend for To B business to operate private domain traffic and it will become more and more popular in the future, what is private domain traffic?

Baidu Encyclopedia defines it this way:

In other words, in this era when WeChat is basically equivalent to mobile Internet, private domain traffic channels can basically be equivalent to: official account + WeChat group + personal account.

In other words, the operation of private domain traffic for To B business is: operation of official account + WeChat group + personal account.

So, how to deal with private domain traffic of To B business? You can think about it from the following five aspects:

1. Public domain traffic operation;
2. Public account operation;
3. Personal account operation;
4. WeChat group operation;
5. Public domain traffic + official account + personal account + WeChat group + official website.

Next, I will talk about them one by one.

1. Public domain traffic operation

What is public domain traffic?

Baidu Encyclopedia explains it this way: public domain traffic means that companies can only obtain traffic by paying or participating in activities, and by trying every means to meet the platform rules. This type of traffic cannot be retained.

In other words, public domain traffic is the first place where a company's products come into contact with users. This is also the beginning of the company's customer acquisition and the beginning of the entire customer life cycle.

What needs to be done at this stage is to improve customer acquisition efficiency and customer conversion rate (conversion here refers to leaving customer leads).

Here I will focus on how to improve customer acquisition efficiency and increase customer conversion rate for customers who come through channel promotion (for other methods and means of acquiring customers, you can refer to my previous article "How to acquire customers for To B business?").

How to improve customer acquisition efficiency?

In a nutshell, it means: have a deep understanding of various relevant channels, try more, evaluate the effectiveness of different channels through data feedback, and then selectively allocate budgets to maximize budget ROI.

This is very much in line with the idea of ​​project management, PDCA (P, Plan; D, Do; C, Check; A, Adjust).

How to improve customer conversion rate?

When promoting and acquiring customers in public domain traffic, there will be a landing page to convert customers.

There are 3 key points in the landing page that can be optimized to ultimately increase customer conversion rates.

• Key point 1: The landing page must have a clear value proposition. You need to figure out what kind of value you want to deliver to customers and what kind of value customers want to see, and express it in simple and clear words. For example: The value proposition of a certain data platform is that it is a data analysis and business intelligence solution service provider. This value proposition seems simple, clear and easy to understand.
• Key point 2: The landing page must have an attractive CTA reminder. An attractive CTA reminder is an important means to encourage customers to participate in the system you designed. For example: if your landing page is intended to send information to customers, then you can prompt them to register to receive the information; if your landing page is intended to allow customers to use your product, then you can prompt them to register to use it, and then they can get some rewards, etc.
• Key point 3: User experience process design. From the moment the user comes into contact with the landing page, each subsequent operation step should be made as simple as possible. The more steps in the process, the greater the possibility of user loss. Through the operation of public domain traffic, customer conversion has been initially achieved, and the converted customers will enter the company's private domain process pool.

Next, let’s start with private domain traffic channel one: official accounts.

2. Official Account Operation

The official account is a form of new media. It has the ability to connect data from all channels, including official websites, personal accounts, WeChat groups, etc. It is an important place for To B companies to speak out, and it is also a place for users to view industry information and learn knowledge.

Therefore, as long as you want to operate private domain traffic, whether or not you operate a personal account or a community account, the official account is a must-have channel.

For To B business, if you want to operate a public account, there are basically only two options: one is to create a media-type subscription account, and the other is a product-type service account.

What media-type subscription accounts need to do is to continuously provide users with high-value content and build media potential in the industry. The advantage of a subscription account is that articles can be published every day and it is in line with users' cognition and usage habits of media accounts. The disadvantage is that there are fewer functions available.

Product-type service accounts need to provide services related to the business itself, guidance on related operations, etc. Although service accounts can publish fewer articles, certified service accounts can use more functions. Certified service accounts have nine advanced interfaces (including important interfaces such as obtaining fan information and QR codes with parameters).

Different types of businesses have different ideas for building a public account matrix: for companies doing industry-wide business, it is generally necessary to build a public account matrix for each industry segment and business segment.

For example, if your company’s business is to help merchants across the industry solve business growth problems, then the public account matrix you build will look like this:

• Retail industry public account;
• Catering industry public account;
• Agent official account;
• Merchants College official account;
• …

Industry-wide businesses need to build a series of public accounts to operate customers' private traffic in order to generate greater commercial value.

For a company that is engaged in vertical business and is around the A round of funding, it is generally enough to have two public accounts: one is a media-type subscription account, and the other is a product-type service account.

The specific construction method is as follows:

(1) How to build a product service account. The navigation bar menu that needs to be built and the content that needs to be published on a daily basis are roughly as follows:

1. In order to guide customers to retain funds, a welfare gift package entrance is set up;
2. Customer success case entry;
3. Portal used for product registration;
4. The entrance for agent cooperation application;
5. Company introduction entrance;
6. Business cooperation contact entrance;
7. The articles published on a daily basis should be related to the company's business.

(2) For media service accounts, the navigation menu that needs to be built and the content that needs to be published on a daily basis are roughly as follows:

1. Article selection entrance;
2. Enter the community entrance;
3. Company introduction entrance;
4. Business cooperation contact entrance;
5. Various learning materials and industry information articles are published on a daily basis.

When building a public account, whether to build one or two depends on your company's business situation.

If you are building two, then a product-type service account + a media-type subscription account is the perfect combination. For businesses like helping merchants solve marketing and performance growth problems, the business includes consulting + software + hardware + agency operations, and building a service account + subscription account is a perfect combination.

If you are building one, you need to consider what type of official account is better based on your business situation.

For businesses like consulting and agency operation services, I think it is better to build media-type subscription accounts. These businesses have natural content attributes and are highly relevant to the media. For businesses related to SAAS software, I think it is better to build a product-type service account, so that users can directly experience the software on the service account.

The above are some ideas for building a public account. As for how to write each article in the public account, you can refer to my previous article "How to do To B business content marketing".

3. Personal account operation

After talking about the operation of public accounts, let’s talk about the operation of personal accounts.

Personal accounts are a very important channel in the entire private domain traffic channel. Not only can you send messages to reach customers through the circle of friends, but you can also send one-to-one targeted messages to customers.

Basically, it can be said that WeChat personal accounts are the channel with the highest old customer retention rate, conversion rate and multiple free information reach rate among all Internet carriers.

Since personal accounts are so important, how should they be operated? I personally think we can think about it from two dimensions:

1. Moments operation;
2. Label-based management operations.

Let’s talk about the operation of the first circle of friends first. The operation of the circle of friends can be planned from five aspects:

1. Daily life content;
2. Contents of opinion output;
3. Content about personal achievements/company achievements;
4. Content related to character setting;
5. Advertising content.

Basically, my personal public account is also made according to the above ideas, but the interesting thing is that I have never thought about how to plan the content of the circle of friends. I just post something sincerely and interact with friends in the circle of friends.

I didn’t expect that the content in Moments would appear to be valuable and rewarding to my friends on WeChat (a reader friend specifically told me about this).

Through a brief introduction to my circle of friends, I think you should understand one thing, that is, when you are building your personal image, you should regard your circle of friends as a presentation of your personal image and manage it carefully. Don’t just say nothing and then post advertisements, group buying links, etc. on your Moments. A Moments that has no value or emotion to customers is a meaningless Moments.

The circle of friends is a place where people’s images are displayed vividly.

After talking about the operation of the Moments, let’s talk about the second tag management operation. There is a tag management function on the WeChat address book, which can achieve refined management of customers by classifying them.

There are several main customer classification methods:

(1) Customers can be classified according to the various nodes of the customer life cycle

1. New friends;
2. Friends with whom you have interacted;
3. Friends who have purchase intentions;
4. Friends who have made purchases;
5. Friends during the beginner period;
6. Friends during the growth period.

(2) Customers can be classified by industry type

1. Friends in the catering industry;
2. Friends who travel;
3. Friends in the retail category;
4. etc.

(3) You can also classify customers by size

1. KA customers;
2. Regular customers;
3. Small and micro customers.

It can also be classified according to the free combination and mix of the first three types. Then, based on the classification, targeted conversion and services are provided to customers.

To sum up, the operation process of a personal account is the process of building a personal IP, establishing your image as an expert/teacher, and allowing customers to go from knowing you - understanding you - trusting you - being willing to do business with you - to finally being willing to form a long-term cooperative relationship with you.

4. WeChat group operation

We often talk about community operation. Let us first define what a community is.

Baidu Encyclopedia defines community as follows: community refers to: a regional community; or a network of mutual relationships is called a community. In other words, a network in which a group of people are connected together to achieve a certain goal is called a community.

Let me emphasize here: a community is only when a group of people are connected together to achieve a certain goal; if you create a group with a bunch of people, but there is no connection between them and no goal, it is not called a community. There are many carriers for community operations, but for To B business, WeChat groups are the main carrier.

So, next I will talk about how to operate WeChat groups for To B business.

According to my experience, there are three main types of WeChat groups for To B business: lead cultivation, conversion, and service.

• The first type is the lead nurturing WeChat group. The function of this group is to nurture customer leads and eventually hand over the leads that meet the sales lead requirements to sales staff for follow-up conversion.
• The second type is the conversion-type WeChat group, the function of this group is to convert customers into sales.

Let me tell you a case. Due to my company’s business needs, I needed to buy multiple social robots to perform community operations, and then I contacted the sales staff of the robot company.

In order to find out as soon as possible whether the robot meets my business needs, the salesperson provided me with a free trial and invited me to join a group. The group was basically filled with people who were trying the robot out. Someone in the group then answered all my questions and ultimately achieved sales conversion for me.

• The third type is a service-oriented WeChat group. For example, after a customer makes a deal, we need to provide services to the customer and help the customer succeed. At this time, we create a group to allow multiple parties to serve Party A. This type of group is a service-oriented WeChat group.

After understanding the types of WeChat groups, let’s talk about how to operate a WeChat group well?

To operate a WeChat group well, you can start from the following five aspects to achieve the WeChat group from 0 to 100:

1. Value determination;
2. Creation and user flow design;
3. Build membership structure and promote member connections;
4. Continuous operations;
5. copy.

The first aspect is value determination. It is easy to create a group, but there is a prerequisite: you must first be clear about what value your group can bring to customers. It can be one aspect of value or a combination of multiple aspects of value.

The value your group brings may include (but not limited to):

1. Let more customers know about your products and services;
2. Let more customers know about your solution;
3. Let the group members connect and form friendships;
4. Let people in the group learn and grow;
5. Let customers in the group get real-time response services;
6. etc.

Whether the value of a group can meet customer needs and whether it can make customers dependent on it basically determines 90% of the fate of a group.

The second aspect is creation and user flow design. After determining what value your group can bring to customers, the next step is to start creating the group and designing the process for customers to join the group.

Regarding user process design, the mainstream practice of general To B business is to invite customers to join the group through personal accounts. Therefore, in the process design of customers joining the group, we should pay attention to the design of two key points: before joining the group and after joining the group.

Before joining the group, two things need to be conveyed to customers: sense of value and the threshold for entering the community. You need to let customers know what value your group brings to them, and make them aware of the threshold for joining the group.

If you don’t express your sense of value and the threshold for joining the group, it may not attract everyone’s attention. The end result is that the customer may join the group and then immediately set the message to do not disturb, and not care about what is posted in the group.

After joining the group, you need to set up a welcome message and a sense of ceremony to create an atmosphere of welcome for everyone.

The third aspect is to build membership structure and promote member connections. The membership structure of a group includes: group creators, managers, experts, daily active people, and lurkers. During the operation process, one person may play multiple roles.

If a group wants to become active and extend the customer life cycle, then promoting connections among members is essential. The most effective way to promote connections among members is through topic management within the group and holding offline activities. Only through holding offline activities can the real connections between community members become deeper.

The fourth aspect is continuous operation. In order to bring sustainable value to community members, continuous operation is essential.

You can invite industry experts to share with everyone in a planned and rhythmic manner; you can organize and plan topic discussions within the group to ensure the quality of the community where there is something to talk about, something to do, and something to gain.

The fifth aspect is replication. If you want to grow the community, you need to replicate it, from building one successful group to building 10 or 100 successful groups.

Of course, copying is not something you do on a whim. It is the result of a comprehensive consideration of your company's business goals, as well as the company's human, financial, and material resources.

5. Public domain traffic + public account + personal account + WeChat group + official website

We have previously introduced public domain traffic, public accounts, and personal accounts separately. Here we would like to add one more: official website.

These five aspects can be seen as five independent yet interrelated elements. In order to achieve a certain business goal, these five elements are connected together to form a system.

Regarding this part, I just want to talk about three key points:

1. What business goals do these five elements connect together to achieve?
2. In order to achieve different business goals, such as consulting and agency service-related businesses, what is the combination logic of these five elements?
3. In order to achieve different business goals, such as software-related businesses, what is the combination logic of these five elements?

Let’s talk about the first point first. What kind of business is achieved by connecting these five elements: public domain traffic, official accounts, WeChat groups, personal accounts, and official websites?

This has to start with the customer's life cycle. Generally speaking, the life cycle of To B business mainly includes the following points: obtaining traffic - obtaining customer leads - lead cultivation - market recognition leads - sales recognition leads - sales conversion - customer novice period - customer growth period - repeat purchase - renewal.

After talking about the customer life cycle, we can clearly know that the business goals that need to be achieved are measured around the customer life cycle. The specific business goals that need to be achieved are as follows:

1. Get traffic;
2. Get customer leads;
3. Lead nurturing;
4. Customer conversion payment;
5. Help customers succeed;
6. Convert customers to repurchase and renew their subscriptions;
7. Enable old customers to bring new customers.

The above 7 points are the business goals that need to be achieved by connecting these five elements together (of course, among these 7 business goals, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 are the key points, most businesses at point 4 need to be followed up by the sales team, and point 6 is a natural result).

Now let’s talk about the second point. In order to achieve different business goals, such as consulting and agency operation service-related businesses, what is the combination logic of these five elements?

These five elements need to be combined and matched with: public domain traffic + official account + personal account + community.

The logic behind the combination of these four elements is: first, you must use various methods to obtain customers in public domain traffic. The obtained customers will be converted to the official account, the customers in the public will be converted to the personal account, and the customers on the personal account will be converted to the WeChat group.

Then, during the operation process, we conduct personalized operations of personal accounts and segmented operations of WeChat groups based on the different life cycle nodes of different customers, and ultimately achieve different business goals.

For example, there is a company that provides private domain traffic business consulting and agency operation services. The approximate customer combination and conversion process are as follows:

1. There is a public account that has gained a large amount of customer traffic through high-quality articles and some fission methods.
2. Then, through the welcome message and menu after the customer follows the official account, as well as the end of each article, the customer is reminded to add the customer service WeChat to join the private domain traffic exchange group.
3. Customers who enter the private domain traffic exchange group are further converted through funnel thinking, converted to the private domain traffic consultation group, and then further converted to the private domain traffic agency operation group.

Ultimately, this company that provides private domain traffic consulting and agency operation services completed the closed loop of business operations through the operation of private domain traffic.

Then let’s talk about the third point. In order to achieve different business goals, such as software-related businesses, what is the combination logic of these five elements?

These five elements need to be combined and matched: public domain traffic + official account + personal account + community + official website .

The logic behind the combination of these five elements is: first, you have to use various methods to obtain customers in public domain traffic. The obtained customers will first be converted to the official account and then to the official website/or directly converted to the official website, and then converted to the personal account, and then further converted to the WeChat group.

Through such combination and matching logic, the business goals at different nodes throughout the customer's life cycle can be ultimately achieved.

For example, there is a company that makes catering SAAS software. The approximate customer combination logic and conversion process are as follows:

1. Convert customer traffic to the official account through distributors and useful information sharing/convert customer traffic to the official website through SEO and SEM;
2. The staff will follow up by phone through the sales leads left by the customers;
3. After the phone call, add the customer’s WeChat account to operate the personal account;
4. After the customer sales are successful, we will carry out service operations in the WeChat group.

Finally, let’s summarize, how to generate private domain traffic in To B business? You can think about it from the following five aspects:

1. Public domain traffic operation;
2. Public account operation;
3. Personal account operation;
4. WeChat group operation;
5. Public domain traffic + official account + personal account + WeChat group + official website.

Author: Feng Xianfei

Source: Xiao Fei Ge's Notes