Dialogue with Zhongguancun Kejin Feng Zongxin: How can financial institutions avoid "wine is also afraid of deep alleys"?

Author 丨He Sisi

Edited by 丨 Zhou Lei

There is an old saying called "wine is not afraid of deep alleys", but in today's rapid development of the market economy, this old saying seems to be somewhat invalid. Enterprises pay increasing attention to marketing methods, and try to use the Internet, communication technology and digital means to support the marketing process and attract more consumers.

Focusing on industry applications, digital marketing in the financial industry should lead other industries. Not only because the informatization and digitization process of the financial industry is relatively fast, but also because financial institutions have gradually touched the ceiling of traffic in the process of exhibition.

An industry insider from a state-owned technology subsidiary of Dafeng told Leifeng that the traffic dividend of the mobile Internet is no longer there, and the scale of banking and the growth rate of users may slow down.

The new rules on credit cards issued at the end of last year require banks not to use the number of cards issued, the number of customers, etc. as a single or main assessment indicator, and a series of policies also reflect from the side that "existing customer operation" is the main battlefield of the next stage of financial institutions.

So, how to develop a financial digital marketing solution for customers, and how to market existing customers through digital means? With these doubts, Leifeng network recently conducted an in-depth dialogue with Feng Zongxin, general manager of the digital marketing department of Zhongguancun Kejin, trying to find answers to questions through this dialogue.

Technology + scenario, the right hand of financial digital transformation

The concept of digital transformation has permeated thousands of industries, and industries, agriculture, services and even Chinese government affairs have begun to provide or use digital products to produce products or provide services. In recent years, concepts such as intelligent manufacturing, digital countryside, and smart city have gradually emerged and become the mainstream of the digital economy era.

Among them, digital service providers have taken on important responsibilities as the main partners to help enterprises achieve digital transformation. From the perspective of the current development of digital transformation service providers, it is mainly divided into four categories: digital marketing, digital management, digital technology, and digital supply chain, and each category includes hundreds of service provider enterprises.

According to the "2021 China Digital Transformation Service Provider Selection Directory" released by Yiou Think Tank, the proportion of digital management, marketing and technical service providers is more than 20%, and the proportion of digital management service providers is as high as 27%. The overall establishment time of service providers is short, 91% of service providers were established after 2000, and 64% of enterprises were established within 10 years.

It can be said that while enterprises are undergoing digital transformation, major service providers are also playing their own advantages to be selected by the market, some focus on the digitization of management, such as Feishu, Fada, etc., and some focus on the digitization of marketing, such as Youzan, Mingluo Technology, etc. However, mature service providers that integrate marketing, management and technology are a minority.

It is understood that since its establishment in 2014, Zhongguancun Kejin (hereinafter referred to as "Zhongkejin") has mainly provided digital solutions for leading enterprises in finance, retail, education, medical care, intelligent manufacturing and other industries. Different from other service providers, Zhongkejin is committed to empowering thousands of industries in the form of AI+ scenarios, not only paying attention to the self-research of the underlying technology, but also emphasizing the application of the next scene, and the digital solutions provided involve the pre-middle and late stages of the enterprise, including digital services, digital operations, and digital marketing.

Talking about why start with the AI track to do self-research?

Feng Zongxin explained that the core of artificial intelligence is AI research and development capabilities, and the selection of three parties is to use other people's AI technology to help customers do applications, not a pure artificial intelligence company. Our ultimate goal is to land on the business and solve the end-to-end holistic problem of an enterprise, which is still different from the traditional low-level AI companies.

In addition, Leifeng also noted that most of the customers of Zhongkejin come from financial institutions, including banks, funds, securities, trusts, etc. Objectively speaking, the digitalization of the financial industry has always led other industries, but with the gradual advancement of business and services, many drawbacks in the IT system that have been built for a long time have gradually emerged, such as technology, the transformation of the underlying digital architecture is more difficult; in terms of users, humanized service capabilities need to be improved urgently.

Feng Zongxin told Leifeng Network that compared with other industries, the financial industry has grown more steadily, and the service level requirements are relatively high, which is in line with the positioning of technology by the ZhongkeJin team. On the other hand, finance is now carried out around the concept of service consumers in all digital transformation industries, and the financial industry covers a large number of C-end customers, which is a very large market size.

"The digital transformation of the financial industry often starts from its own services and operations, and now most financial institutions have completed the digitization of services and operations, such as customer service, account opening, etc. have been realized, and the financial industry has reached a new era of marketing digital transformation," Feng Zongxin added.

With the change of time, digital marketing has become an urgent need

Digital marketing has become one of the main businesses of digital service providers, in 2021 the overall marketing investment in the Chinese market continues to grow, digital transformation enterprises hope to improve communication efficiency through digital means to achieve more refined management and better meet user needs. Under the influence of this background, digital marketing in the financial industry is imminent.

First, most financial institutions have adopted offline marketing methods before, but with the expansion of business scale and changes in customer groups, the shortcomings of traditional marketing models in the financial industry have become increasingly apparent, and extensive marketing has become more and more unworkable.

Feng Zongxin said that taking banks as an example, banks continue to operate active customers or customers who contribute more, but their service capabilities and screening capabilities for medium and long-tail customers are not strong enough. Suppose an account manager has thousands of customers, but his actual service capacity may only be 100, the remaining 900 completely unserviced, and so on more and more.

Under the influence of this factor, how to operate long-tail customers has become an important issue for banks, coupled with high labor costs, and the needs of medium- and long-tail customers are not understood enough, the portrait is not fine enough, potential customers are likely to become sleeping customers, which requires digital marketing to achieve.

Second, the marketing philosophy of the past was "product-centric". However, with the deepening of the market economy, the financial industry has always emphasized "customer-centric", but in practical marketing, it often takes the old road of "product-centric".

In addition, with the rapid development of the Internet, information is exploding, and it is difficult for customers to find and choose you. At this time, it is not enough to be "customer-centric", but also to establish a channel for rapid communication with customers.

It is not difficult to see that from the original traditional marketing to today's digital marketing, in addition to the drawbacks of traditional marketing methods, it goes hand in hand with the development of the Internet.

According to Feng Zongxin, the marketing of the financial industry is mainly divided into three stages.

In the first stage, through the offline operation mode, more outlets will be opened to do more customer acquisition or offline traffic;

The second stage, the development of the Internet, offline customer acquisition began to turn to online customer acquisition, the financial industry is relatively traditional, due to its relatively high requirements for fault tolerance, in the gradual exploration stage;

In the third stage, through the offline accumulation of the first stage or the accumulation of the second stage of the Internet enterprise entrance, financial institutions began to think about how to transform existing customers into real consumer customers.

"How to turn the annual contribution of customers from 100 yuan to 150 yuan and 200 yuan - this is the main goal to be achieved by financial institutions in the third stage of development."

According to Leifeng Network, the digital marketing business of Zhongkejin is later than digital services and operations, which is greatly related to the pace of digital transformation of financial institutions. In Feng Zongxin's view, financial institutions have their own business rhythm changes, and must follow the steps of operation, service and marketing.

Therefore, first of all, we must build operational capabilities, such as opening accounts and depositing loans; then on top of the operational capabilities, we must build service capabilities for various problems encountered by customers; and finally, after the operation and service are relatively stable, we are faced with the problem of business growth, which involves the marketing level.

Private domain traffic, opening a new era of "digital tellers" in the financial industry

For transformed enterprises, how to choose a service provider is the key, and how to create a customer-centric product is the key to the service provider.

Nowadays, the customer acquisition of the financial industry has successfully stepped from the 1.0 era to the 2.0 era, and the digital marketing of the financial industry has reached a critical period, and its advantages have gradually emerged.

Starting from the solution, it is generally divided into customer analysis, marketing strategy, and channel reach. Customer analysis is through digital capabilities, such as data modeling, rule engine, strategy engine, etc. to achieve accurate customer portrait, accurate grouping, etc., on the basis of which to develop marketing strategies, including content strategy, channel strategy that is, for different groups of people to develop different content, different channels of marketing strategy; after the above two parts are built, is the marketing reach, active communication with customers, promote products, including manual services, telephetch services, information services and online APP push and other forms.

Feng Zongxin introduced the characteristics of Zhongguancun Kejin's digital marketing solution to Leifeng Network, he said that the methodology is common to the entire industry, and the general-purpose solution developed by Zhongguancun Kejin can actually be applied to marketing problems in different industries, but it will be customized for the characteristics of different industries. It is worth noting that after the completion of customized development, the solution also has the versatility of the industry, and the versatility can reach more than 95%.

In this wave of digital marketing boom, more and more service providers are involved, but he said that the change is not different: most companies are making a fuss about how to get customers, that is, not only to be customer-centric, but also to establish a channel for rapid communication with customers, so that customers can take the initiative to choose you.

In fact, the financial industry is more difficult to obtain customers than other industries, mainly because the financial industry faces a variety of marketing objects, because the products of the financial industry are diversified, the audience is more segmented, and the audience-oriented attributes are more difficult to achieve.

Specifically, there are very big differences between users who buy trusts, users who buy bank wealth management products, and users who consume loans, but in some specific scenarios, there is a degree of overlap, and it is difficult to use ordinary methods to distinguish whether the user's demand in a certain period of time is a consumer loan or a trust product.

In addition, the conversion after customer acquisition is also a major problem, financial products due to the conversion variables, the marketing cycle is long. Users are easily churned, especially for some investment types of products.

Based on this, the micro private domain traffic operation mode came into being, which is relative to the concept of public domain traffic, which is mainly the process of establishing interaction with customers, and is also the solution for operating customers.

Feng Zongxin said that the operation mode of micro-private domain traffic is of great benefit to financial institutions. One is to establish a good brand image of the enterprise, and the other is to have a real-time online dialogue with customers and synchronously analyze the content of the dialogue to understand customer needs more accurately. In addition, enterprise WeChat can also solve a major pain point in the operation and management of banks, if there is an account manager leaving, the customer information is quickly and synchronously transferred to other account managers, effectively preventing and solving the problem of customer churn after the employee leaves.

"At present, most financial institutions are considering building their own private domain operation platform, and 2022 will be a big outbreak."

Write at the end

Today, the digital transformation of the financial industry has entered a new stage. Major financial institutions, especially the banking industry, have reduced offline tellers, increased the number of "digital tellers", and completed digital transformation from the perspective of service and operation.

Most financial institutions are still in the first stage of digital marketing, and there is still a long way to go if you want to achieve marketing goals and achieve significant results through digital means.