Private domain volume, how to break the game?

From the perspective of most operating methodologies, when Party A introduces three-party tools, the SaaS party will suggest that the brand introduce users into the community or personal micro-enterprises, and then pay attention to the public account to open the "contact link", which is an important link that cannot be missed in the middle. Secondly, through sales or pop-up groups, and then group content screening basic intended users have been guaranteed to complete the conversion.

In the process of being in a hurry, it is easy to ignore an important question, what do private domain users do?

Many brands think that the trend is that others should do what I want to do; but if the business department can't find a suitable reason to convince the management, it will directly appear that the input-output ratio is uneven; so the operation will fall on the "Topoker" level.

It is the focus on this perspective that causes another problem, the store shopping consultant (beauty adviser) or operation to complete the KPI use various means to pull users closer to the private domain pool, it is not clear what users, purposes, consumption attributes of the brand awareness.

The results are obviously easy to see, the portrait is not clear, the various users are mixed in a community; I often say that if it is not necessary, do not build a community to disturb users, for three reasons: 1) labor-intensive, 2) poor experience, and 3) caught in an inner-volume cycle.

And all this, in fact, we do not recognize the role of the brand's private domain, what role it carries in the digitization of the platform, and how to borrow it.

The relationship between private domains and digitization

How does a brand do private domains? Before answering this question, why not understand what digitalization is? The concept, scene, and context are different, and the meaning of the representation is also different, and I think it contains two perspectives: broad and narrow.

Broadly speaking, digitalization is a new generation of technologies such as the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain to systematically change the strategic architecture, operation management, production and marketing of various entities such as governments and enterprises.

Narrow understanding refers to the use of various information systems, machine vision sensors and other communication technologies to transform the complex and changeable data, knowledge, and information of the physical world into a series of binary codes. Then introduce the computer to form a number that can be recognized, stored, and calculated; and use the number for processing, analysis, and application.

That is to say, our various behaviors are captured by video and audio, and the system is recorded in the cloud, and through refining them into valid data, we can deduce what will happen in the future.

According to this, from the perspective of enterprises, digital technology is actually the reshaping of the entire organization, not simply to solve the problem of cost reduction and efficiency increase, but to empower model innovation and business breakthroughs.

The most intuitive is the various types of reports of the enterprise, through integration, multi-dimensional analysis, to ensure that the query backtracking to provide strong support for decision-making.

Then the entire chain of digitization includes the whole process of customers from understanding the enterprise, completing the purchase according to the needs to referring and sharing; it is split into more detailed, including orders, outbound, invoices, down payments, customer operations and other links.

What does a private domain carry in the middle?

Private domain is the main battlefield of brand self-management, which can fully grasp customer relationships to achieve the ability of online and offline links, with three key elements:

1) Have extensive external link capabilities, 2) user relationships can be copied and migrated, and 3) customer behavior tag sources can be precipitated.

In fact, the private domain is only one part of the digitalization of the enterprise.

How to establish a more efficient technical system for merchants to trigger users based on traditional business models, and how to open up all links around the platform are the topics that all players must deepen.

I think the main factor that makes it caught up in the inner volume is, on the one hand, that "the user's attention is being heavily contested."

From a developmental perspective, the 2015 WeChat User Data Report points out that the average mobile phone usage time is 2.5 hours, of which 1.5 hours are on WeChat; 0.5 hours are in native applications, and 0.5 hours are in other apps.

Today, according to Kuaishou's 2021 financial report, the average user time has approached 100 minutes per day. Another short video report on 2022 shows that users account for 56.6%; it is clear that head short videos have become the main force of fragmented time.

Secondly, for brands, customer acquisition and operating costs of private domains are also increasing.

In the first two years, the influx of social e-commerce to community group buying invisibly intensified the difficulty of competition, and there was no shortage of AII-in of Dingdong to buy vegetables, Pinduoduo, and Meituan.

In the past, it was the business logic of "people looking for goods", but now the head platform deeply realizes that people looking for goods cannot meet the needs of market increment, and it is necessary to guide users through private domain planting.

Under the three-way attack, companies in the middle waist began to pour in, such as Perfect Diary, Luckin Coffee, Anta and other brands, directly taking the store as the main body and cutting the private domain from the shopping guide, which is not uncommon. There is also no shortage of methods to start cultivating KOCs around their own brand users, causing everyone to scramble to copy homework.

On the other hand, from the perspective of the platform, once WeChat was a mandatory pool for brands to build private domains, now all platforms are shouting private domains, TOC head giants around the merchants to establish a "moat", such as: Alipay from the home page recommendation, search promotion, payment success page to start, around the small program, life number to do order promotion; vibrato directly from the global start; Kuaishou even proposed the "4S" methodology.

Obviously, the underlying approach of major platforms is the same. All of them are to attract merchants to settle in and create and distribute around the content, thus forming a huge traffic pool in the public domain, and constantly improving the user portrait and behavior label layering in the process. After sufficient traffic, design some channels with SaaS, and you can retain the public domain conversion in the hands of merchants and content creators.

However, specific to each module, the operating mode between platforms is different, Taobao is mainly through the content matrix to layout, the most important thing is "Taobao live broadcast", followed by Taobao headlines, good goods, micro-Tao, exclusive customer service groups as an auxiliary. The two platforms emphasize self-broadcasting by merchants; Weibo is fan-centric to help brands connect with e-commerce platforms.

The users of many platforms are placed in front of the brand, and it seems that the brand has sovereignty, but in fact it is still in the hands of the "platform".

So how do brands use various tools to dominate "intended users" in the face of responding to various rules? We have to re-examine the "private domain operation" thing.

Think outside the "traffic" mindset

I think that when brands begin to pay attention to the private domain, they should not only focus on the "traffic" itself, but should jump out of the traffic thinking and look at this matter from the perspective of "user operation" and "platform digitalization".

In terms of user operation, Bosideng had fallen into this misunderstanding in the early days, and its director said that the brand initially contacted the private domain to obtain customers, and how many people the store guide added every day was a hard KPI. It turned out that they were like crazy and thoughtful, although the number of people came up, but the quality of the customer base was low, and finally it would affect the performance of the store.

I often see this situation when serving other brands, the brand side introduces tools, the market side and the user link through the design of the growth model, all kinds of SOP-style talk, group building rules are not strange, directly causing follow-up operations to be more difficult.

The reason why it is not easy to do, on the one hand, is that it has never paid attention to the "customer experience", and it is more important to pay more attention to those users who have high customer orders, long decision-making time, and low repurchase in the WeChat ecosystem, just imagine these scenarios: a person manages hundreds of groups, mechanized synchronous push, marketing content is simply and straightforwardly written by software, even if the shopping guide "one-to-many" communication is difficult to ensure "effectiveness".

Assuming that the shopping guide only considers how to output content at low cost without considering interaction under the KPI focusing on target conversion, it is difficult for users to establish a relationship of trust.

Of course, some management has a bias in the perception of "interaction", they believe that after the establishment of the group, regardless of the value of speaking, as long as everyone chats, they can have more connections and exchanges. If you think about the "consumer itself" who has his own things to do every day, so busy, where is the time to interact with your brand?

Further, the output value of people who are often active and active speakers is not high; on the contrary, high-value people only pay attention to "interest points" and whether they have self-consumption demands, so different types of brands have two value points in building private domains:

1) Flash demand, tell users that there are preferential activities;

2) Fission demand, want to drive new people through interest points.

For high-end single products, there is obviously no need to build a group, and the maximum value can be achieved through one-on-one communication between shopping guides. Don't believe you see, international brands that sell famous watches and jewelry pull you into the group every day and push messages, which will not only produce disgust, but also will not consider "the brand" when there is really demand, right?

From the perspective of extensive operation, building a group is only what the last node of the private domain needs to do. When the interaction with users has not really occurred, we must first think about whether the basic skills of the brand are solid, such as the point system, membership system, user portrait, CRM perfection, etc.

When enough data is obtained, it can effectively screen different groups of people and target operations, so that people with the same attributes can play an incentive role together, and the generation of UGC can also help the community to spread itself.

However, at present, most brands only achieve the "membership system" in the Mini Program, and it is still linked to consumption, and the points brought by consumption do not have enough rights and interests to give users "exchange space". In this way, users do not feel that "points" have any big value points, so there will not be too much sunk cost in their minds.

Take the mainstream brand, I buy clothes every year to give tens of thousands of points, but when I redeem it, I don't even have enough threshold for a co-brand short T, as if it is done for the purpose of making points.

From the perspective of platform digitalization, private domain operation, if the operation mode is limited to the WeChat ecology, community, and membership, it is a bit sloppy.

I think that based on the process of platform Internet decentralization, we need to do the work done on the major platforms again on each merchant.

Why?

In the early years, when both information platforms and e-commerce platforms started, most of them solved the relationship between supply and demand based on commercial evolution; now merchants need to find their own users in the public domain pool of the platform and continue to operate.

When merchants gather a large number of private domain users on the platform, the gap between users and other elements has not disappeared, and the docking between them is still a centralized way.

Although this approach achieves efficiency improvement through re-decentralization, this new docking with the context of "platform" is nothing more than a deep reform in the commons.

Let me give you an example:

You used to like to place orders on Taobao, and now through the SCRM tool, the order information is connected with the third-party platform, and the shopping guide can directly see the label and behavior information on your personal homepage; this is actually a new transformation between the platform and the platform.

I think that the giant's action of demolishing the wall is a more in-depth and comprehensive digital process of the industry, and the deep integration of various links and processes is to achieve deep changes in the era of private domain.

This is also the true sense of DTC (Direct-to-Consumer), when the brand merchants directly integrate private domain users through their own CDP, CRM; no need to use wholesale retailers to directly trigger the market, and the third-party platform only extracts transaction (customer acquisition) commissions.

Brands communicate with consumers face-to-face and promote purchases through self-built channels and independent identities, which is an in-depth and comprehensive digital process.

Therefore, from another point of view, the private domain action that the brand is doing now is based on the use of SaaS technology under the WeChat ecosystem. On the contrary, the independent data in Kuaidi and Taobao did not achieve backhaul to the company's CRM data aggregation platform, and then centralized reuse and re-integrated marketing.

It can be seen that from the perspective of the platform, the private domain is a key part of deep digitization, but it occupies a small overall position; from the perspective of the merchant, it is just to take itself as a centralized node, and then aggregate "consumer" data through technical means.

In actual implementation, many merchants regard the private domain as a life-saving straw, in fact, users do not pay attention to the gameplay carried by "operation". This kind of excessive expectation will make the promotion of the private domain not as smooth as expected, and the operation itself should pay attention to "refinement".

Find refinement

From the above invalid private domain problems, it can be seen that extensive operation is bound to be difficult to achieve results, and refinement is the only way for brands. But to do this, there is no doubt that the difficulty will increase, and each link, including customer acquisition and maintenance, must be done more carefully; in simple terms, there are three aspects:

1) Increased human efficiency to cope with detailed and complicated work, 2) SaaS products from original standardization to custom development, 3) brand upgrade of data asset control and operation capabilities.

In essence, private domain operations have many commonalities, but the complexity of decision-making links in different industries is obviously different, and the content and services that brands need to provide to consumers are completely different.

Take the sports industry as an example: in the past, customers bought and left when they arrived at the store, and now the value chain extends to provide users with fitness courses, the brand Mini Program community supervises punching cards, and develops towards the self-incubation KOC and KOL routes, Lululemon and Perfect Diary are typical cases.

Assuming that we still rely on the existing methodology, there is a high probability that it will not be able to meet the needs of the brand, even if it is in the fast-moving consumer goods field that is running ahead of the times, it is still impossible to reuse.

Therefore, the brand must recognize clearly, any transaction is inseparable from the "human goods yard", your private domain is to provide the field to whom?

For example: stores do private domain, perhaps the important thing in the early stage is not the user at all, but how to empower the shopping guide, assuming that you can let the shopping guide do a thousand stores based on the brand mini program, is it easy to add leverage, and attract the "user"?

It's all left to SaaS companies, most of which are given standardized products, solutions and advice. Therefore, although the private domain has been operating for many years, it is still in the early stages of adding friends, promoting activities, and doing community.

Whether it is a technology provider or a brand landing, the difficulty behind it is still very large; the reason is that the market is abstract, there are many concepts, and the chaos behind the prosperity has not been solved, such as promoting the revitalization and retention of the problem.

So how do we refine users based on our existing experience? Private domains can currently start in these three aspects: 1) membership system, 2) distribution system, and 3) content field.

In terms of membership, it is necessary to recognize that the role of rights and interests is the core of the entire membership system, and it is an incentive for user behavior. What do you want users to do? How to pay and accumulate, you need to guide its behavior through rights and interests.

Secondly, the basic rights and interests include "member discounts, membership prices, points, free shipping, coupons", etc.; in general, the membership model has four types: stored value, growth, product subscription system, and equity subscription system.

Stored value is conducive to the rapid return of funds, requiring business must be high frequency, long consumption cycle, so it is more suitable for barbershops, restaurants, gyms, supermarkets, retail platforms.

Growth members are suitable for general scenarios, according to the degree of consumption contribution to divide different levels, and then give different rights and interests; if you want to stimulate more consumption, you will be divided according to the cumulative amount, and if you want users to distribute more, you will do rebates according to the number of distributions.

There are many references to the product and benefit subscription system, such as: FLOWERPLUS (Flower Plus).

The distribution system is part of membership, mainly involving "pulling new, free experience"; but I have seen many brands reduce it to a strong fission tool, and its practical use as a "premium service" is a good choice.

It's worth mentioning the content field, which you can understand as having a "content engagement community" for every brand.

The most commonly used community and circle of friends of Micro is the logic of information flow, assuming that customers do not brush your push information at just the right time, it is perfect to miss. In this case, the member community becomes a good complement, and the brand can better provide the carrying space for customers.

According to market insights, many merchants have laid out a "member community", which can be perfectly interacted with micro-enterprises.

In 2014, Starbucks launched the "White Cup Contest" to achieve multiple interactions with users, and users shared them through Weibo after doodling on the mugs. Later, the brand screened out hundreds of thousands of high-quality works, precipitated them as a waterfall on the web page, and the consumer works were arranged, causing a lot of attention; then after the users continued to share, the website became an active community for users.

It can be said that in the member community, you can complete user research, content co-creation, tasting officer recruitment, IP linkage, KOC building, live broadcast activities and other gameplay.

It is not difficult to see that the focus of refined operation is to select a group of like-minded super users, and then use the content they produce to spread the brand and bring compound interest.

Cultivate superusers

There is currently no unified definition of superuser, and it needs to be made clear that "superuser is not equal to VIP user". Traditional industries mostly measure user value by "money"; but in the private domain of the brand, in addition to contributing money, the greater role of users is to bring new users and stimulate demand, such as: willing to give feedback and suggestions to products, cooperate with the completion of survey questionnaires, and actively share various activities.

So we need to measure superusers in four dimensions: 1) recognition, 2) engagement, 3) stability, and 4) diffusion.

Recognition belongs to the user initiation behavior, investment represents time, consumption proportion, stability is the user portrait perfection and continuous activity indicators, expand you can understand it as "active sharing". These four dimensions are summed up before we can talk about the term Life Time Value.

In recent years, more and more enterprises have introduced the Net Promoter Score strategy to drive the organizational transformation of user centers, and all the groups under Ping An of China in the market, as well as Ant Financial, Tmall, didi Chuxing, etc., which are represented by the Internet, have set up relevant departments to land.

Many brands may have doubts, due to the imperfection of the company's technical infrastructure, not to mention the net recommendation value strategy, the above aspects of the brand can capture the proportion of consumption, user labels have been very good, what to do?

That can only start from these three aspects: 1) whether to pay for the old member, 2) whether you are willing to pay continuously, and 3) whether the intention is clear in advance.

Because the old user already has a consumption record, and establishes basic trust with the brand, then there is a repurchase, and only then is it willing to become a member and then a super member.

Therefore, paying in business is the basic means, but it is also necessary to distinguish between true and false fans, which can be matched through data filtering. Some users pay directly for the first time to become a member, perhaps not like but "see new members have benefits" marketing policy.

Secondly, for gaoke single brand, assuming that the user has more than 2 times of payment behavior (different brand positioning is different), it basically means that the goods and services are recognized and have the ability to consume.

In terms of clear intentions, the most commonly used marketing strategy is "prepaid system, lock quota", assuming that the brand can confirm which can be tapped in the private domain, it can be targeted to test the rights and interests of A/B services, and jewelry brands use mostly.

It is worth adding that I have also seen many brands capture super users on the Kuaishou and Douyin platforms. They usually use the explosive product method, before the launch, they cleverly borrow the native label, region, and portrait for screening, and then targeted streaming, and then guide the brand customer service WeChat after "direct conversion", so as to migrate the label portrait to their own platform.

It can be seen that the super user thinking is not limited to the stock, but also may be scattered in the major "public domain platforms", depending on how the brand uses the appropriate content to mine; what about the brand as a private domain? It should not stop at the WeChat ecosystem.

To sum up

Private domains are all doing, and the only thing that occupies my personal mind is "LEGO". Founded in 1932, the company's English name itself is short for Play Well in Danish.

Globally, its classics include the Star Wars series, disney princess series, etc.; the secret of its continuous growth is to use "super users" to create Lego Ideas 'online community: fans and creators from all over the world, here to imagine the next product, propose, and slowly produce geometric growth.