194 million, the total number of primary and secondary school students in China.
The 170 million is the total number of monthly active users of the app of homework help, the largest online education company in China.
Comparable to the Jin Yong novels of the post-80s and the small raccoons of the post-90s, the homework gang has become one of the common memories of the post-00s and post-10s. Of course, if you don't have a kid in your family who is studying at the K12 stage (elementary school to high school), your impression of it may only stay on this elevator advertisement:
Does this GIF have its own sound?
Behind this national-level super APP is an exciting business story. On December 28, HomeworkBang announced the completion of a new round of financing of more than $1.6 billion, with Alibaba, Tiger, SoftBank, Sequoia and others participating in the investment. This year, online education, as the hottest track, has poured in more than 50 billion yuan of funds, and most of this share has flowed to head online education companies such as Homework Gang. There are many reasons for the choice of top investment institutions, and in the view of "Private Domain Traffic Observation", The Operation Gang is an ideal model that combines private domain traffic, business system and social value.
On the private domain traffic side, Homework Gang has the industry's only education super APP "Homework Gang" with more than 100 million monthly active users and the only one that has entered the top 30 of the whole network, and as the largest K12 online education platform in China, it has activated more than 800 million user devices, occupying the largest traffic pool of online education.
At the commercial value end, the complete service conversion system, in-depth user needs and scene layout, but also makes its commercial efficiency outstanding, favored by the capital market.
The figure is derived from the collation of public information
On the social value side, it promotes the inclusiveness and fairness of education.
According to the "Report on the Development of New Forms of Education in China (2017)", the average off-campus training expenditure in first-tier cities is 7781 yuan, while that of second-tier cities is 4863 yuan, and other counties and cities are as low as 2395 yuan, and this does not take into account the differences in teacher level in various cities.
Homework Help, on the other hand, gives children who can't afford high-priced offline tuition classes, or whose parents are too busy with work to supervise, an opportunity to access quality educational resources.
The Homework Help APP covers a number of learning functions, including photo search, homework help live lessons, ancient text assistant, composition search, etc. In the homework help, students can get the analysis steps of the problem and the answers to the test points through taking pictures and voices; they can interact with the teacher through the homework to help the live class; they can quickly find their own knowledge weakness points and accurately practice and supplement; they can watch the live broadcast of the course and interact with the mobile phone; they can also connect the teacher to answer questions one-on-one online; after studying, they can also communicate with students of the same age across the country to discuss interesting things in learning life.
None of this is expensive, and even an obsolete older version of a smartphone can load and run them. Those complex image recognition, question bank matching, intelligent recognition learning shortcomings... All calculations, in the clouds.
Hou Jianbin, founder and CEO of Homework Help, once said that in the homes of nearly 200 million K12 students, the broadband penetration rate has already exceeded 90%, smart devices are everywhere, and 5G applications are just around the corner. How to use technology to improve learning efficiency is the mission of online education.
How did Homework Help achieve today's achievements? Let's start at one end of the line.
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01 Private domain traffic for job gangs</h1>
According to industry insiders, among the three giants of K12 online education with similar enrollment scale, homework help, and ape tutoring, the number of students in the regular-price class this autumn is almost the same, and the homework help even catches up with the traditional giant xueersi, and the homework help's customer acquisition cost is the lowest, "probably only half of the peers." ”
The key reason is that a large number of users of the job gang come from its private domain.
What is a private domain?
The explanation of Mei Bo, founder of Bending Bow Digital, is that "private domain traffic is a relative term for public domain traffic, with social media as the platform, user tag management as the core, to achieve low-cost and high repurchase as the goal, is the exclusive user pool and digital assets of enterprises." ”
Today, when the growth rate of Internet users is declining and the traffic dividend is gradually peaking, building a private domain traffic pool has become the mainstream way to improve marketing efficiency.
Wang Jiayao, head of public relations of Homework Gang, revealed at the Fifth China New Media Thousand Talents Summit that of the 1.71 million new people added to homework help this year's summer regular-price class, more than 67% of them came from private domain traffic and 33% from public domain traffic; that is to say, for every 3 new regular-priced class students, 2 from private domain traffic, 1 from Douyin, WeChat and other external delivery.
The contribution rate of 50%-70% of the regular-priced students in each quarter has become a killer of private domain traffic. At the moment when the cost of customer acquisition has soared from 1,000 per person to 4,000 yuan per person, it has become more and more a "life and death hand".
Homework Help not only built the "Homework Help", "Homework Help Mouth Calculation", "Homework Help Live Lessons" three major APP to form a linkage relationship, in the Homework Help more than 35,000 employees, there are more than 20,000 tutors, the corresponding teachers, parents and students WeChat group to build their own community operations, plus WeChat, Weibo, Vibrato, Kuaishou, video numbers and other new media, Homework Help has built a perfect private domain matrix.
But more critically, this model is gradually rewriting the traditional single "purchase traffic" marketing practice, making it more and more feasible to fully intervene in the user life cycle and carry out refined operations.
According to the relevant person in charge, the homework gang did not convert into the traffic of paid students after the external purchase, nor did it directly lose. More than two-thirds of this part of the traffic is precipitated in the Job Gang APP, and has been continuously activated for a long time, becoming a homework help user.
Chen Gongming, co-founder of Homework Gang, also revealed to the media, "Since the end of 2018, the traffic conversion efficiency within the Operation Gang terminal has increased by 10 times." We have calculated that the in-terminal delivery exposure efficiency is several times higher than in the head information flow channel, because our traffic is more vertical and accurate. ”
Where does this private domain traffic come from?
The traffic path of the homework gang just shows that most marketers pursue the "create customers" rather than compete for customers.
The repeated reach of private domain traffic is actually the continuous superposition of brand reputation.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Pragmatic thinking or traffic thinking? </h1>
No matter how big or small, the behavior pattern of a mature business organization is often not completely disordered and chaotic, and there is always a certain tendency to think within it, what is the tendency of the homework gang that can become a textbook model in the traffic world?
Is it the flow thinking that relies on the "quantifiable" attribute of the flow itself, calculates all the costs and benefits, establishes a KPI system that is not in detail, and is committed to maximizing efficiency?
Let's start with a small thing.
According to reports, Homework Help is the first company in the industry to respond to the call of the education department to "stop classes and not stop learning", launched a free live course for users across the country on the first day of the New Year, in the five weeks from February 3 to March 9, 2020, Homework Help 275 teachers brought 1832 online courses to more than 33 million primary and secondary school students across the country, with a total live broadcast time of 1174 hours, and the highest number of simultaneous online learning exceeded one million.
This sounds like a successful marketing case, but according to 36Kr, Wu Dongbo, head of the high school of the homework help live class, said that "the company asked the technical department to erase the contact information of the free class students from the background."
"Our course was 40 minutes, and there was no marketing session in between. At that time, the original intention was to provide a good curriculum for children. ”
If you look at it from another angle, you may be able to understand why the homework gang will give up "traffic thinking":
Because user reputation is the real psychological traffic.
Hou Jianbin replied in an interview with Sequoia Hui: "Of course, we have to consider ROI when making decisions, but we pay more attention to the improvement of cognition. Some things are focused on the long term, and short-term ROI is certainly not cost-effective. The more you focus on the long-term, the more you need to improve your cognition and be firm. If your cognitive dimension is high enough, you can make decisions in the form of dimensionality reduction attacks without having to calculate small accounts. ”
In this case, we can feel the existence of a kind of "traffic thinking" that relies on data feedback: it not only appeals to reason, but also emphasizes the emotional resonance with the user.
This line of thinking, which is more in line with the laws of the real world, can better allow brands to study and discuss specific problems and engage in practical, effective and pragmatic work. Because it is the opposite of "the void of business flow", we call it "pragmatic thinking" for the time being.
In fact, the "pragmatic" culture is one of the core corporate cultures of Homework Gang.
Homework help for online education is a core example of contemporary business competition. Online education has an online gene, but it is inseparable from the offline scene, and the future development space is large enough, which also makes it the most fiercely competitive capital track.
The traffic cost of online education has long been raised to a "sky-high price".
Tiger Sniff once made such a calculation: the lifetime gross profit that can be generated by the number of students in a new regular-price class S = the unit price of the guest * the number of students who report within 1.5 years * the gross profit margin = 1000 * (1 + 0.75 + 0.75 second power + ... + 0.75 fifth power) * 70% = 2296 yuan.
That is to say, when the cost of gaining the favor of a student is higher than 2296 yuan, it is not until the student graduates, and the merchant may not even earn back the cost. However, in the fierce capital white-knife war to seize the market, there are already many giants whose customer acquisition costs have exceeded this life-and-death line, and even exceeded 4,000 yuan.
In fact, this battle between capital and traffic is more like a prisoner's dilemma: everyone knows that it is not advisable to invest excessive budget in traffic procurement, but as long as one person adopts such an approach, others can only be "kidnapped" to do it, otherwise they will be robbed of a large amount of market share by competitors, thus crossing the threshold that produces the Matthew effect - then it will not be a monopoly, but a monopoly.
The same thing has already happened in the car rental market, the coffee market and other markets that are attracted to capital. Luckin Building collapsed Andmo smiled, but have you ever seen how the third four five six seven eight in the market that was overtaken by Luckin did it? Exiting competition, being acquired by mergers and acquisitions... It's not that burning money isn't terrible, it's that it's even more terrifying to not even have the opportunity to burn money.
So how to avoid being "kidnapped"?
Homework Gang's "pragmatic thinking" may be an answer.
Through the deep cultivation of user scenarios, Homework Help has exchanged the ultimate user experience for spontaneous communication among users. The data shows that the response time of the Homework Gang "Photo Search" product has been less than 0.8 seconds, the accuracy rate is more than 90%, and it has seized more than 75% of the user market in similar products.
Especially for students, it is precisely a group of people with the broadest social aspect and the most closely related groups. Adults may only have three or two friends, but students can radiate their influence to the entire class and whether they can bring spontaneous recommendations is far more important than a single ad placement.
Of course, there are many similar APP applications on the market, to confirm whose APP is most likely to be recommended by users, it is not realistic to do traditional questionnaire research in the face of hundreds of millions of people, we have also pondered for a long time, what kind of data is not affected by the main body of the survey, objective and difficult to falsify?
But then we found a subtle and interesting statistic that for several giants of online education, "whoever has the closest user ratio to the distribution of Chinese students is more likely to be the app with the highest user share rate."
Although it may seem a bit out of line, this statement should be true. This piece of logic is a bit long, and those who are not interested can skip it:
It is very simple to put in a marketing budget in a place, whether it is to do local push or online advertising, will bring a certain additional increment, this correlation between budget input and output, if reflected in the distribution of users, will be the corresponding regional concentration trend, and highly positive correlation. The increment obtained by spontaneous recommendation is based on the natural increment of the objective world (recommended to those around him), so as long as the fermentation time is sufficient, its user distribution will gradually approach the distribution of groups (students) in the objective world. It is worth noting that if there is an offline store business, how to exclude the incremental impact of the offline store business should be considered, because the operation of the store is a complete business form, and the increase it brings cannot be simply attributed to the marketing budget. In addition, the continuation of this line of thinking, the lack of marketing investment and the lack of market performance and market share of low-tier cities operated by stores are also a noteworthy place. ——Summary of the group discussion on the curved bow
According to the official data of the operation help, among the provinces with the top 10 per capita use time of app, non-developed provinces such as Yunnan, Ningxia, Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang and Hainan account for 60%. From 2016 to September 2018, the proportion of users in cities outside the third tier of the homework help has also increased significantly. As of September 2018, the proportion of activated users in third-tier cities and below rose from 65% in 2016 to 73% in 2018.
This is not a deliberate "sinking" of the homework gang, but a convergence with the distribution of Chinese students.
Therefore, we can conclude that as far as the homework gang itself is concerned, the traffic brought by the wide and natural population communication is far greater than the benefits brought by advertising delivery, which is also one of the main reasons mentioned earlier, "in the new number of new people in the homework gang regular price class, 50%-70% comes from private domain traffic".
It is not a cultural chicken soup, but in terms of business efficiency, it seems that "pragmatic thinking" is better than "traffic thinking".
Slow is fast.
- END -
Finally, we would like to summarize this article with a speech clip from the speech of the relevant person in charge of homework help at the 5th China New Media Thousand Talents Summit.
"The reason why the homework gang has such a large traffic stems from the solid underlying technology architecture of the homework gang: we actually have a team of 2200 engineers now, and the product I just talked about is actually composed of three big elements, the first is the image recognition technology, which needs to convert the picture into text; the second is that there is a search technology, and the third is that we have a three-hundred-million big data problem database." Behind the whole photo search, in the past five years, the homework helped the live broadcast class to carry out several major iterations, effectively ensuring the high concurrency scene of tens of millions of students live broadcasting at the same time.
Today, in the third wave of online education, homework help can already be taught according to people, and can already achieve personalized big data learning reports, while homework help live lessons can be done by the main teacher + tutor to serve a child together. ”
This is a triumph of the business model and a triumph of social value, as its internal mission says.
"Putting quality education at your fingertips".