From 0 to 100,000+, a practical review of the entire process of B2B community operation

For B-side customer acquisition, the WeChat ecosystem is a very important link. The author of this article starts from the WeChat ecosystem and combines actual cases to sort out and analyze the entire process of B2B community operation and share it with everyone.

Let’s talk about why the WeChat ecosystem is important for B-side customer acquisition?

Taking the B-side corporate official website as an example, a 5% registration conversion rate is considered average, and a large number of customers who were invested in are lost.

However, given the long purchase cycle of enterprise-level services and the large number of purchasing decision makers, customers who leave after a quick glance at the official website may not buy now, but that does not mean they will not buy in the future; they may not be decision makers now, but that does not mean they will not be decision makers in the future; they may not have demand now, but that does not mean they will not have demand in the future...

Wouldn’t it be a pity to lose these potential customers who were hard-earned by the brand, bought with money, and have a certain interest in the products?

It becomes particularly important for B-side enterprises to continuously reach, cultivate and incubate these potential customers to avoid being preempted by competitors. As far as domestic conditions are concerned, the reach rate of emails and text messages is truly "touching", and the WeChat ecosystem is undoubtedly the best choice at present!

Table of contents:

1. Positioning: Determine what kind of community to build in practice
2. Building: 3 ways to provide a steady stream of traffic to your community
3. Operation: Regular community content supply system
4. How B2B communities generate effective business opportunities
5. Summary and thoughts on Luogongzi

01 Positioning: Determine what kind of community to build in practice

In October 2018, we began to explore the community. At that time, the only group was the customer QQ group, which was used by sales to serve existing customers. It was a mixed group of people, and customers who purchased various products were there. Since Kingdee started out as a financial company, the user minds we have captured are basically all financial software. Also, since the users and decision makers who purchase financial software are basically financial personnel (some of them are bosses), we chose to start with accounting personnel.

So how can we attract accounting personnel to join the group?

After discussion, we selected the junior accountant qualification that was about to start taking applications, invited internal experts to serve as lecturers, and opened a series of junior accountant qualification tutorials lasting six months.

That is to say, through the fission of this course, we accumulated the first batch of original traffic, fissioned 32 groups, and finally settled down nearly a thousand loyal fans in two groups.

With the help of this group of loyal fans, we later launched many types of community fission, gradually expanding the fission group to a scale of tens of thousands of people.

If you are interested, you can read my previous summary on community fission: "8 "plain language" experience summaries of 50 groups fission in 2 days with 0 cost"

Later, as more and more fission groups were created, it was discovered that fission groups were very time-sensitive and too easy to die. As the number of fission groups continued to increase, and the user needs of each fission group were different, the maintenance cost would become increasingly high.

So after much consideration, we started to build a long-term accounting community through the following six dimensions of community positioning.

1.1 Positioning Purpose

What is the purpose of establishing our community? The purpose of establishing B2B communities is mostly to acquire and convert customers, and some of them are also to serve old users.

Just like determining the North Star Indicator, identify the most important goal, is it to acquire customers, conversions, or to maintain old users and promote new ones?

Our goal for the community we are about to establish is to acquire new users as the main goal, with conversion as a secondary goal, and we do not consider the maintenance of old customers.

1.2 Locating Users

Determine who the users of our community are? We generally divide users of B2B communities into two types: users and decision makers. It is easier to attract users into the community, but more difficult for decision makers.

Further, users and decision makers can be further divided into five aspects: demographic attributes, social attributes, interest preferences, behavioral habits, and psychological attributes.

For the community we are about to establish, our target users are accounting personnel from all provinces and regions across the country (demographic attributes), who are mainly junior accountants (social attributes) and are eager to improve their practical accounting skills in the workplace (interest preference).

1.3 Positioning direction

What determines the direction of our community? Are they interest-based communities, such as various fitness groups, cycling groups, swimming groups, etc., which are formed by common interests and hobbies? Or are they knowledge-based communities, such as Fan Deng Reading Club, Logical Thinking, Wu Xiaobo Reading Club, etc., which are formed by a group of people who are motivated and love learning and constantly generate topics and content?

Or product-based communities, such as communities where good products like Tesla and Xiaomi directly attract fans; or other crowdfunding communities, vertical niche communities, etc.

The community we are about to establish is positioned as a knowledge-based community that focuses on finance and workplace practices. Financial software is required for practical operation.

1.4 Positioning Culture

Determine what the dominant culture of the community is? Let new users feel the community culture as soon as they join the group and integrate into it well.

For the community we are about to establish, our culture is positioned as one of mutual help and common progress. For example, in our community, new users will receive prompts when they join the group: first, a paragraph of text asking them to change their notes and self-introduction;

Second, a group rules chart should be provided to explain the community’s vision, community rules, community learning arrangements, etc. to new users as soon as they come in.

1.5 Positioning scale

How big is the scale of our community? Is it a small-scale community, such as a small and beautiful community with less than 150 people that does not expand indefinitely; or a large-scale community that requires continuous expansion of the number of members.

Since the main purpose of the community we are about to establish is to acquire customers, we position it as a large-scale community that needs to continue to expand.

1.6 Positioning Mode

What is the model that determines our community?

One is the model of external expansion; the other is the model of internal management.

To expand the community externally, do you need to share in order to join? Or do you need an invitation from group members to join?

It is necessary to establish a strict community invitation mechanism at the beginning of the community establishment.

To manage the community internally, we need to keep the community in a good self-operating state, so we need to divide the members into levels. The famous community pyramid management model divides members within the community into five levels. It consists of ordinary users, active users, contributing users, professional users and celebrities. If a community has these five types of people, it can run well on its own.

For the community we are about to establish, our model for external expansion is that you must obtain a "financial black card" to enter;

The internal management model also draws on the pyramid management model of the community, consisting of the boss, the junior boss and ordinary users of the community.

The Big Boss is mainly composed of KOLs recruited by us, which is equivalent to the celebrity and professional user level; the Little Boss is recruited by the Big Boss, and is mainly responsible for accounting personnel who manage the daily affairs of the community, which is equivalent to the contributing users and active users level. When the community is large in scale, establishing a pyramid system can greatly reduce the workload of community operators.

We just spend our greatest energy on the big boss at the top of the pyramid, so that we can maintain the self-operation of the community well, instead of spending it on complicated physical labor such as staring at social media advertisements, kicking people out, and pulling people in.

The activity of a community depends largely on the dedication of the KOL. As mentioned in the previous article of this series, we will provide a detailed operation manual to each community manager.

As shown in the picture below, the community of Daxiaodangjia is very active and basically does not require any maintenance from us, and it is very lively every day. Otherwise it would be very deserted.

Positioning in the above six dimensions can help us clearly determine what kind of community we want to build.

Instead of blindly creating a group and ending up with silence, it is better to think it through before doing it, which will achieve twice the result with half the effort.

02 Building: 3 ways to provide a steady stream of traffic to the community

There are many sources of social traffic, the most common ones are public accounts, posters, articles, mini-programs, and mentoring by old customers. We have gradually accumulated an accounting community of 100,000+ mainly through three methods: fission posters, community adoption robots and accounting black cards.

2.1 Fission Poster

We often conduct community fission through fission posters. Common fission baits include courses, materials, etc. A good fission also requires the right time, place and people. For accounting groups, the best time is when they encounter hot topics in fiscal and taxation policies or exam periods.

After a large number of users enter the fission group through fission bait, in order to prevent user loss, we need to post a group announcement in the group or change the group name before the fission bait expires, so as to guide users into the group that we have invested a lot of energy in operating for a long time.

2.2 Community adoption of robots

Community adoption of robots is the most time-saving and labor-saving way to expand community coverage. We quickly built an "Accounting Loudspeaker" through a third party.

WeChat users can adopt an "Accounting Trumpet" and activate it by adding it to the group. "Accounting Trumpet" will broadcast new fiscal and taxation policies, accounting tips and other valuable content to the accounting community within the group.

Since "Accounting Trumpet" is still relatively new in the accounting industry, we did almost no promotion and only launched more than a dozen of our own communities. Within a week, the number of members of its community grew by more than 10,000. For example, the operating trumpet of Zero One Fission (Jianfeng), according to their own review, through resource exchange and the launch of their own community, now covers an operating community of more than 200,000 people.

After this kind of social robot is pulled into the group, the group is basically composed of strongly related people. We can embed public account articles (to attract traffic to the public account), community benefits (to attract traffic to the community), product introductions, etc. in the morning newspaper.

At the same time, the robot is also in the adopter’s WeChat circle of friends, and can also spread our content through the circle of friends.

But the prerequisite is that our social robots must be valuable. The promotional intention of products, brands, etc. cannot be too obvious, otherwise you will be blocked.

2.3 Accounting Black Card

The Accounting Black Card is a fission landing page we made ourselves. Users need to share the card with three friends before they can activate the card and enjoy all the benefits of the card.

One of the benefits of the accounting black card is joining the community. Users can select the province they are in on the black card and enter the corresponding provincial community.

At the same time, as fission brings about the accumulation of Accounting Black Card’s own traffic, we can also continuously expand the user base of Accounting Black Card by exchanging resources with upstream and downstream resources, thereby continuously attracting traffic to the community.

Like our exchange of financial resources with Kingdee within the group. The discount benefit of Kingdee Express Discount was launched within the benefits of the Accounting Black Card and was replaced with the long-term homepage banner position of Kingdee Finance's official website.

While attracting traffic to the accounting black card, it also brought more effective users to Kingdee Express.

03 Operation: Regular community content supply system

When we operate a community, we will tell users at the beginning what we will do and when, that is, what users can get at what time.

Compared with irregular content supply, regular content supply will increase the opening rate of the community to a certain extent .

Users will subconsciously remember that we have a course on a certain day of the week, or that we have information on a certain date of the month. When the time comes, even if the community has been deleted, I will remember to check it out and take a look.

If you persist in this way for a long time, you can also improve the reputation of the community. You will find that the number of users who spontaneously invite their friends has increased.

Simplified Community Operation SOP

As shown above, for the communities we maintain for a long time, we will send out morning reports to all groups with one click every morning through the "Accounting Trumpet". We have regular content supply, such as: dry goods once every Tuesday, a course every Thursday, a discussion every Friday, etc. They will be sent uniformly by robots at fixed times and locations.

3.1 Essentials

The useful information is basically centered around finance, such as "xx Excel templates essential for finance" and "xx tax planning secrets".

It is sent free of charge to accounting groups in each province and region, and users in other groups need to share it to receive it.

3.2 Courses

Our courses are all taught by big bosses. Each of Dadang’s courses will be made into posters and sent within the community. After the course is finished, there will also be corresponding packaging articles by Dadang to promote the course for the second time.

Similarly, it is sent free of charge to accounting groups in each province and region, and users in other groups need to share it to receive it. Further guide users from other groups to enter provincial groups.

3.3 Discussion

Our discussions will revolve around weekly finance and taxation hot topics. We will find some of the hottest topics in relevant finance and taxation forums and post them in the community for discussion.

After the test, some interesting tests were released on Friday as it was close to the weekend, with several options given under one paragraph of copy. User engagement will be higher.

04 How B2B communities generate effective business opportunities

Now that the community has been established and can maintain good self-operation, how can B2B companies generate effective business opportunities? We mainly use the following two methods:

4.1 Product Registration: CTA at the bottom of the article

In the official account articles, we will add corresponding CTA at the bottom, and these useful articles will be distributed within the community and on personal WeChat accounts.

There are relatively few registrations in this area, but since clicking through means direct product registration, this part of the business opportunities will be directly given to sales for conversion.

4.2 Content Registration: Cultivation and Incubation

Our content within the WeChat ecosystem, such as courses, materials, white papers, etc., are all sent to users through the Zhiqu Baichuan system.

For users, registering once allows them to permanently receive all future information, eliminating the trouble of frequently filling in information and then receiving it.

For us, all user behaviors within the WeChat ecosystem can be recorded through this system.

In addition, since users who register through content do not have clear purchasing intentions, they cannot be directly referred to sales for conversion. We can also label and score users through this system.

Users who reach a certain score can be converted into sales. Users with different tags and in different life cycles can also be reached with different content through the system.

Publish general content within a large community base, and then conduct targeted content marketing by user group through channels such as WeChat service accounts, emails, and text messages. Our business opportunities within the WeChat ecosystem come from communities accounting for up to 80%.

05 Summary and thoughts of Luo Gongzi

It took nearly half a year for the entire community to grow from 0 to 1. Through repeated community fission and continuous improvement of community operation plans, we have also summarized some experiences:

5.1 The time of investing fission bait should be as short as possible

As mentioned above, our first fission bait was a six-month entry-level accounting course, which was too long.

As for courses, when doing fission for the first time, try to choose courses with short investment time, such as a class of several hours, or a one-day training camp to test the waters.

Otherwise it will take too long, and even if the fission effect is not good, you will have to grit your teeth and finish the six-month course by yourself. Fortunately, the first fission effect was good, and later we obtained more traffic through various posters and process optimization.

We would also like to thank our financial expert Sister Ting for her strong support, which enabled our first split to be successfully completed and gained a very good reputation among users.

5.2 Community content is high quality but not frequent

The community is in its early stages of being established, and we are starting with weekly sessions of practical information, courses, and discussions. At the beginning, the users in the group were very active and the number of registrations continued to rise.

But after a month, the high frequency of content output made users lazy (because they could watch the content again), and we ourselves were overwhelmed. Later, we made adjustments and changed it to only releasing practical information or courses once a week.

The content output of the community should be regular, but it does not have to be very frequent. A high-quality course once a month is also acceptable. After all, people are lazy, and scarcity helps reduce laziness.

5.3 KOL content should be reused more often

After our boss finishes the course, it is simply sent to various platforms in the form of video, and the reuse rate of the content is very low.

Ideally, a KOL course. The process can include: preview of character interview article (users can book courses) - KOL course poster - KOL course converted into article - KOL course converted into audio - content reuse process of KOL series courses, articles, audio, e-books, etc.

After all our big boss courses were completed, we made a collection of courses on a series of topics, and the results were very good.

5.4 Enhance community cohesion through multiple offline channels

We have held offline finance and taxation lectures in Shenzhen before. We found that the activity level of the friends we met offline at that time in the group increased a lot later.

As the saying goes, seeing someone once is worse than saying a thousand words, and it is true. If we need to build a highly cohesive community, offline activities are very necessary.

5.5 More sophisticated content marketing

Previously, the CTA at the bottom of each of our articles did not have a good tracking record due to the small amount of traffic it brought. As a result, operations staff are unclear about what kind of content will bring more registrations, and there is no data to guide the direction of the articles.

With the help of data analysis tools like GrowingIO, operators can quickly generate a dedicated CTA at the bottom of each article, so as to refine the number of registrations brought by each article.

In this way, operators can know through data which articles bring more registrations and which types of content are more likely to guide users to register, and then optimize the direction of content marketing through data.

Author: Luo Gongzi

Source: Traffic Research Society