Paid gameplay for acquiring new customers

Acquiring new customers is an eternal mission for an enterprise. Why is it that acquiring new customers is an important task throughout an enterprise? Because a very basic principle is that there will be a churn rate when using any product.

Just like a pond, water is released out every day. If there is no channel for water to flow in, sooner or later the water (users) in the pond will run dry and it will become a waste pond. In the past, we understood that customer acquisition is a phased process. During the product promotion phase, we focus on customer acquisition, and in the later stage, we focus on operations.

It's just that the importance of work direction has changed. When a new product is just released, the weight of acquiring new customers accounts for 90%. After the product is stable, the weight of acquiring new customers accounts for 40%. In the later stage, although the demand for acquiring new customers is less, it must be more than 10%.

Look, QQ has been trying to attract new kids to join over the years.

There are many ways to acquire new customers. There are simple, direct and crude performance advertising, which charges a few hundred dollars per user. There are also those who take advantage of people's desire to get a bargain and create a virtual gimmick of a hundred dollars to get you to attract other people. There are also those who game the rules of the platform and take advantage of the platform.

Anyway, there are thousands of ways to acquire new customers, and the most important thing is to find an effective way that you are good at.

01 How to get new customers by paying

I have always understood one thing: any problem that can be solved with money is not a problem. Look at a certain instant messaging software that is used by everyone. It is so popular in China, but has almost no presence abroad.

Do you think this company is rich? I have money, but can I attract users? It cannot be solved, otherwise others would have spent money to solve it long ago. The problems that cannot be solved with money are the real big problems.

But for more than 90 percent of companies, there is basically no problem in spending money to buy users, because the risk is low and the results are controllable. Whether you can succeed depends on how much customer acquisition budget you have.

When we look at brand promotion ads, this is actually a way of paid customer acquisition. The difference from performance-based ads is that attribution is difficult to do. However, the difficulty of attribution does not mean that this is a different thing.

In my opinion, the money you spend, whether it is invested in information flow or subway or elevator advertising, is essentially the same. What is being tested here is whether your pitcher knows whether he can make a profit by advertising in this way.

I was working in B-side business at the time, and faced with a new form of advertising: bus advertising. I hesitated for a long time because I had never been exposed to this before. I spent tens of thousands of dollars a year on it, but I didn't know what the effect would be. If a friend of mine who has done it told me that he could invest $100,000 a year and get a $200,000 return, then I would definitely invest in bus advertising. The problem is that I can't find anyone to consult, and it's like a black box in front of me, with no idea what's inside.

If your company has enough budget, you can give it a try. But if it is a small company and the whole company depends on this budget to survive, it will be really difficult to have the courage to invest.

My solution at the time was to invest in search ads that all my peers were investing in. I invested 10,000 yuan and signed a contract worth 100,000 yuan. The input-output ratio was very good. Since then, we have increased the intensity of search advertising, and we became confident once it worked.

There are many ways to play paid advertising platforms. I will not go into details here. I will only talk about the most basic principle of paid advertising. Paid advertising is to spend money to buy exposure. What you need to calculate is the cost of exposure and the conversion rate of customer acquisition. If these two data are not outrageous, then this paid advertising is worth investing in. No matter how things change, the essence remains the same, and the same is true for paid advertising.

02 One of the new ways to attract new customers

I am going to write a separate chapter here to single out one of your unique tricks because my work experience over the years has taught me not to think too much about complicated things. It is very likely that your company’s success is due to a successful customer acquisition channel.

The APP company I worked for before acquired customers through pre-installation, the online education company acquired customers through SEO, and the traditional company acquired customers through bidding. If you say that a company has multiple effective ways to acquire customers, this is still rare.

Just like what a certain business leader once said: I have learned the hard way that it is a great achievement for a company to seize one platform in its lifetime. It is very rare for a company to become the leader on multiple platforms. You do well on Taobao, but just average on JD.com; you do well on Duoduo, but just a bystander on other platforms.

Therefore, if you can acquire most of your users through one channel with one unique trick, your business operations will be stable.

A unique way of acquiring new customers needs to be constantly tested, just like reform. There are many paths that can lead to the other side. Before practice, these paths are summarized by the brain based on past experience. The general idea is that if I take this path, I think I can get results.

Any plan that you come up with has a probability of not working, and this probability is estimated to be over 90%. This means that if out of 10 ideas you come up with, only one can bring about an effect, then it is something worth celebrating. Even if you are a god, it is impossible to achieve a 50% decision-making accuracy rate.

Another characteristic of unique advertisements is that, like a person’s unique skills, they are rarely known. If everyone knows the way to acquire customers, the opposite is not a good way.

Take the online education I did before. We didn’t spend a penny on customer acquisition, but in just one month we got the contact information of 300,000 potential users. What did we rely on? It's really true that I'm just lucky.

There are probably not many companies in China that acquire customers through that method. If you want to copy this method, I'm sorry, it's impossible. Our companies' businesses are different, and what works for us may not work for you.

03 How to attract new customers: referrals

I also attribute fission and new customer acquisition to referrals. Among all the ways to acquire customers, person-to-person referral is always the lowest cost and most effective. The conversion rate of referred customers from B-side enterprises is no less than 50%. If they are new customers from cold calls, the conversion rate is generally around 10%. This shows how good referrals are.

Everyone wants clients to refer clients to you, but the difficulty lies in why would others refer clients to you? Are you threatening him with a knife, or are you providing good service and others are willing to recommend your company?

The second way is what every company wants to do, but not every company can do it. Let’s talk about something metaphysical here. Whether an enterprise provides good service or not depends entirely on the values ​​of the company’s owner.

Look at a certain Ba, the boss must not be a person with courtesy, righteousness, and integrity, otherwise he would not have created such a business. If I provide services, I cannot say that I can completely eliminate scammers, but I will definitely not allow scammers to have a breeding ground.

After you have served a customer well, when the customer's friends ask him what company can provide a certain service, he will be excited to recommend you to the other party, because only good things are worth promoting, or things that can reflect personal dignity are also worth promoting. Even if the other party does not buy it, you have saved your face.

This is also the reason why international luxury goods can easily gain market share in China. Once a person has something, he or she will want to let everyone around him or her know that he or she is wearing a cool down jacket. Then, if people around him or her cannot afford it, they will find ways to borrow money to buy it for them. This is the top-notch way of referrals, but it is not easy to learn from a distance.

04 Last

Acquiring new customers is the core work of the company and a reflection of everyone's ability. I don't know much about performance advertising, but I am quite familiar with brand promotion.

Author: Tiger Talks Operations

Source: Tiger Talk Operations