The era of traffic is over. How can we carve out a new path?

From PC to mobile Internet , a group of Internet financial platforms that took advantage of the bonus period have risen rapidly.

But now, the traffic dividend has disappeared, and a crazy, legendary traffic era has ended in a hurry.

The cost of acquiring customers has soared from a few yuan to several thousand yuan, or even tens of thousands of yuan. Internet finance, standing at a crossroads, is at a loss...

With all the traffic divided up, users no longer interested in novelty, and traffic giants engaging in crazy exploitation after monopolizing the market, how can Internet finance survive in this bloody sea where there are no fish to catch and fierce competition?

01 Pushed to the edge

Starting around 2015, Internet finance platforms discovered that traffic diversion through Baidu suddenly "failed to work."

" The conversion rate was over 10% at its highest, but has now fallen to around 1,700," said Lei Zhou, partner of Wangcai Valley.

Baidu promotion used to be an important battlefield for Internet finance platforms to compete with each other. Under Baidu's bidding ranking mechanism, platforms competed to purchase keywords and competitive words , burning money all the way and engaging in an "arms race."

But after reaping the early user dividends, everyone suddenly realized that they were just cattle and sheep in the "pasture" of traffic giants, and almost all the profits they earned were harvested by the giants.

At this time, several keywords such as P2P , financial management , and online lending have been hyped up to sky-high prices.

The Internet finance platform even repeatedly reminded its employees, "Put our official website in your favorites and never search using keywords ." Just one click would cost them dozens of yuan.

Baidu’s traffic era has ended, and mobile and third-party channels have also fallen into silence after experiencing a wave of climaxes.

Since last year, the effectiveness of the same platform’s advertising on WeChat self-media has plummeted, with the effect reduced by 5 times.

Gao Chuan is the director of an advertising company. He roughly estimates that there are about 500 financial vertical accounts that can cooperate with him. Each of them has been bombarded with various Internet finance advertisements dozens of times. "But there are only so many existing users. After cleaning them over and over again, it is extremely difficult to dig out new users."

At the same time, third parties that control traffic began to realize the truth that "whoever gets the traffic gets the world". They were unwilling to continue to be a wedding dress for others, and began to build their own financial products to direct traffic to themselves.

Last year, Yourong Media launched mobile apps such as Aimi Finance, Wacai, and Suishuiji. After generating traffic and communities , it also began to sell financial products. 51 Finance, which mainly focuses on traffic diversion business, also revealed that it will soon launch a cash loan product.

Once close partners suddenly became competitors in a sense.

The CEO of an Internet finance platform said with a hint of melancholy: "In the business world, there seem to be no eternal friends, only eternal interests."

In order to survive, some platforms have to rely on gray traffic and seek help from the army of freeloaders .

The freeloaders are like drugs. Once you become addicted to them, you will find it hard to extricate yourself and eventually your whole body will become corrupted.

"Once the discounts are no longer available and the freeloaders withdraw in droves, the platform will be in danger," said Dai Xiaoli, the person in charge of a platform. She said that she has seen several platforms where the traffic has been hijacked by the freeloaders, and once they withdraw, the platform will be at risk of bankruptcy.

Unable to afford the giants’ high prices and abandoned by third-party traffic platforms, the freeloaders took the opportunity to hijack them. The Internet finance platforms looked around and found that they had been forced into a corner.

At the crossroads of fate, should we surrender or fight one last time?

02 Headless Fly

The anxious mood spread quickly among the crowd like a plague.

People are afraid of missing out on any bonuses or missing out on any bus of the times, so they run frantically, trying to seize any possible opportunity.

"During the meeting, we could all feel the nervousness of the senior management," said Han Bo, the public relations director of a certain platform. He found that this kind of tension made the team more impetuous.

"Any new channel must be tried." After the top management gave the order, Han Bo was like a headless fly, trying new things everywhere.

The first one is live broadcast .

Last year, live streaming suddenly became a hot topic, with the live streaming page of an internet celebrity easily receiving tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of traffic.

High traffic means "money-making prospects", so Internet finance platforms naturally do not want to miss this opportunity.

According to data from the Internet Lending Home, as of September last year, more than 20 Internet finance companies had participated in live broadcasts, and some even attracted millions of people to watch online at the same time.

The content of the live broadcast includes press conferences, celebration banquets, daily work scenes, or simply pulling the CEO out to sit on the stage and communicate directly with users.

Han Bo spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on live streaming, which achieved certain brand communication, but the traffic diversion effect is "better than nothing." Han Bo found that most live streaming platforms fake traffic and are completely false shows.

Han Bo believes that the direct reason for the lack of success is that "the users are completely mismatched. Most of the people who watch live broadcasts are losers or rich people who are just there for entertainment purposes. How can they manage money?"

A few months ago, the emergence of mini programs also made the Internet finance platform excited.

In Han Bo's company, the technology, product, and operations departments held meetings all night long to study how to direct traffic to the platform. As a result, they found that in WeChat's "use it and leave it" ecosystem, traffic diversion is a false proposition.

Moreover, WeChat mini programs are still in the education stage and have not yet become popular.

After burning two empty fires, Han Bo felt physically and mentally exhausted. However, the battle to break through traffic waits for no one.

In Luo Zhenyu’s New Year’s Eve speech “Friends of Time”, he mentioned a point: “If online companies don’t have traffic, they should look offline.” Tapping into offline traffic has become the direction that platforms are trying.

Zeng Cheng, CEO of Songguo Finance, said that competition is fierce in first-tier cities now, and Internet finance platforms can start from third- and fourth-tier cities, and can even try painting walls in rural areas. "Seemingly low-level promotional methods can often have unexpected effects."

As early as 2014, Internet companies including Baidu and Alibaba began to form groups to paint walls in rural areas; soon after, Internet finance companies also began to conquer China's smallest capillary rural areas, trying to "dig" out traffic from them.

"Loans are available to the poor and the rich, but not to the untrustworthy", "Low interest rates, fast loan approval, and door-to-door service", "Use XXX, and you can dare to have a baby or build a house". The distinctive slogans of Internet finance companies have squeezed out the old positions of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

"Some farmers don't even have bank cards, so how can they manage their finances?" said the head of an Internet finance company. This has had little effect. Rural areas lack basic financial services, and the concept of "credit" is unheard of.

After the three methods failed, harvesting "long-tail traffic" became their last resort.

In the era of mobile Internet , a large number of APPs have emerged crazily, but like fireworks, they are brilliant but short-lived. For example, the O2O field.

Although its glory days are gone, there is still some accumulated traffic.

Many Internet finance platforms have begun to try to cooperate with these apps in an attempt to squeeze out some traffic. As for the effect, it remains to be seen. After all, it is not targeted at a specific group of people, the number of users is limited, and the conversion rate is unstable.

In the anxiety and panic, everyone tried to fight their way out, but some people have found the light.

03 Fighting out of desperate situation

"Do you know where 30% of Lazy Investment 's investment funds come from?" Gao Chuan's answer was shocking, "It was converted from CEO Zhang Lei's WeChat public account ."

Zhang Lei founded Lazy Investment in 2014, but he had already started using the WeChat account "Big Player Zhang Lei" in 2013.

He published some personal sharings about credit card travel, consumption and investment on this public account . With these articles with strong personal emotions, he attracted a large number of fans and brought in particularly high-quality seed users in the early days of Lazy Investment's launch.

It is almost a consensus among everyone that the era of traffic is over.

What happens when no new fish enter a pond?

Fish will definitely flock to where there is bait, and the so-called "bait" is high-quality content.

The end of the traffic era is the beginning of the content era.

Players in the Internet finance industry are obviously aware of this.

The value of in-depth content is beginning to erupt like a volcano.

"On the first day of going online, two users invested 450,000 yuan," Zhang Lei said in a sharing session.

"This sense of trust is completely different from the users who come in through keyword advertising on Baidu," Zhang Lei believes that Lazy Investment's transaction volume has exceeded 900 million in 8 months since its establishment, and "an estimated 200 to 300 million people have converted from the WeChat platform."

“First, you need to have high-quality content, and second, you need to establish an emotional connection with users. Only such an account can stand out from the crowd,” said Zhong Ping, CEO of Yourong Media. “The reading volume and fans of this type of account are not as high as those of editorial accounts that have accumulated for several years, but the effect is doubled.”

Yourong Media launched Aimi Financial Management last year, and its current investment has exceeded 1 billion yuan. "80% of our customers come from our own official accounts."

On the other hand, content marketing has also begun to explode in power.

Ai Qianjin’s path to traffic distribution has always been talked about and envied by the outside world.

In 2016, after Ai Qianjin sponsored "The Lost Tomb", it gained both brand and traffic, but CEO Yang Fan said that this was by no means "luck".

"Before releasing the traffic, we will prepare several months in advance," Yang Fan said. In 2015, they collected a year's worth of data on various upcoming TV dramas and movies, compared and discussed them repeatedly, and finally decided to invest in "The Lost Tomb."

"Before the official broadcast, we had a prediction of the effect," Yang Fan said with a smile, "but before the official broadcast, I was still a little nervous."

The final effect far exceeded Yang Fan's expectations.

During the broadcast period, and for a considerable period of time thereafter, the number of active searches for Ai Qianjin in brand areas, application markets , etc. increased by more than ten times.

Since then, Internet finance companies have also begun to follow this model.

In-depth content and marketing implantation, like bait, attract fish with common characteristics from the fish pond. Compared with the era of traffic, these fish are more loyal and have greater conversion value.

This is also the core reason why content entrepreneurship began to explode. Internet giants began to realize that the competition in the second half will be a competition for content.

And the value of high-quality content producers began to double.

The content era directly triggered the second effect - the arrival of fan economy .

Shen Lei, CEO of LicaiFan, has participated in programs such as "If You Are the One" and "The Boss's Metamorphosis". He frequently appears in LicaiFan's offline "Fan Bureau" exchange meetings and communicates face to face with users.

With his young and friendly image, Shen Lei has a group of female fans.

Last year, Licai Fan encountered a "wave-like" attack. Shen Lei complained that this was a premeditated hack. On Licai Fan's official community, a large number of female fans "pledged their allegiance to the death" and shouted "Brother Lei, we support you!"

An interesting detail is that when searching for "Shen Lei" on Baidu , the first recommended search at the bottom of the page is "Shen Lei's girlfriend".

A star-like CEO brings a halo to the entire company, which is fearless regardless of wind or rain.

Another person who also possesses this kind of "star charm" is Zhou Shiping, chairman of Hongling Venture Capital.

But unlike Shen Lei, Zhou Shiping has won the hearts of the people with his "honest and simple" image. In the Hongling Venture Capital Community, users call him "Lao Zhou".

Before the general media paid attention, Lao Zhou "exposed his own dirty laundry" by talking about the problems in the platform project and how improvements were being made.

This clear image of sincerity has created a strong centripetal force. Hongling Venture Capital has had several problems with overdue large orders, and the media has raised many doubts, but users have been posting in the forum to support Lao Zhou and criticize overdue companies.

An industry insider once said bluntly, "The three words 'Zhou Shiping' are worth 100 million yuan."

Yibencaijing interviewed many practitioners and found that there are two main views on the end of the dividend of the traffic era: the breakout faction and the conservative faction.

The content era and fan economy are both trying to use warmth and humanity to attract more users - this is the core logic of the "breakout faction".

On the other hand, the main point of view of the "conservative faction" is to carefully operate existing users and squeeze more existing value.

Since adding new users is too expensive and difficult, wouldn’t it be more practical to manage your existing users well?

"Generally, about 10% of platform users reinvest. We can identify high-quality users from the remaining 90% and have them reinvest again. This is also a way to break through," said Gao Chuan.

Fang Cheng is the brand director of a top ten platform in Beijing. Their plan is to proceed with external traffic step by step, and internally, start to strengthen the retention of existing users.

"Enhancing users' desire to reinvest will become the focus of our work," said Fang Cheng.

In fact, both schools of thought, one outward-looking and the other inward-looking, have certain truths and can go hand in hand.

In the anxious atmosphere of the reshuffle period, many platforms blindly chased the traffic trend, casting a wide net but failing to catch any fish.

But relying on luck, the chance of hitting the traffic bonus is too low.

Even the envied Ai Qianjin has experienced situations where hackers stole hundreds of thousands of yuan in a few hours and its investment in iQiyi variety shows had poor results.

"Poor results do not mean no gains," Yang Fan believes that this experience of failure can also be summarized into valuable data.

Yang Fan promoted the theory of "growth hacking" in the team - traffic operation is definitely not a crude way of burning money, but requires intensive cultivation.

The end of the traffic era is not the end of the world.

Just by sowing a handful of seeds, the beautiful scene of flowers blooming all over the mountains is gone.

The era of extensive and barbaric traffic farms has ended, but the era of refined traffic farms is slowly coming.

Externally, we use high-quality content as bait to attract fish; internally, we carefully care for and feed the fish.

If you work hard, you will still reap rich rewards.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by @一本财经and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!