In 2020, many companies that had been roaring forward were forced to slow down by the sudden pandemic.
Almost all companies, be it start-ups or mature ones, chose to tighten their belt and seek new sources of revenue to maintain growth.
The landscape is particularly bleak for retail companies, with surging costs to acquire customers and customers’ dampened willingness to spend. How can they expand their businesses and make it through the crisis?
W-axis Technology will analyze the “corporate energy model” to help companies find the answer to growth and conversion.
一、Community economy:
traffic with innate high conversion rates
Running a company is like pushing a boulder to the mountain top. In this era of Internet, are there new rock-pushing tools or methods that companies can utilize to boost growth?
Community economy may be one of them.
What is community economy? Communities are groups of people that gather up for a common interest. For example, people that want to learn knowledge created the Luojisiwei community; girls that love skincare and makeup joined the community started by Perfect Diary.
Back in the dawn of Internet, BAT gravitated the whole internet industry. When all traffic was in the hands of the three giants, every start-up owner had to purchase traffic from BAT for their primitive accumulation. But it has been an aching point for traditional companies, for such traffic was expensive and weak at converting customers. So even if the companies were providing good products and putting lots of money into marketing, they couldn’t gain the profits or customers that they deserved.
In this context, WeMedia operators took the initiative to bring their fans into WeChat groups and hold offline activities to forge stronger connections with their fans. This was how community marketing started, and it inspired companies that customers can be acquired simply through the strong links between people.
Later, more offline retailers started to build their own private traffic on WeChat. Walmart and Wanda put posters with the QR Code to their group chat accounts in front of their market doors. After the shoppers are gathered into their group chats, the stores will send links of Mini Programs that offer discounts into the chats.
It’s an inexorable trend for companies to build their own communities and pool private traffic. This is especially true in the face of the pandemic.
To navigate the pandemic, companies began to leverage the power of internet to promote sales. They gather the fans they accumulated into WeChat groups and think of ways to activate them, thereby making up the losses in physical stores.
二、Word of mouth economy:
fans who bring traffic
People say that the era of internet is the era of good products. But what are good products anyway?
Good products are defined by customers. In the past, a customer cannot easily express their love or hate for a product, nor can they influence others’ opinions with their own. Now in this new era, such a desire has produced the term of “word of mouth economy”.
It means that a product is so good that buyers couldn’t help but share it on social media, which increases traffic and conversion rates for the seller. Word of mouth economy brings real dividends for companies with quality products in this era of internet.
Take Xiaomi as an example. Before it launched its phone, Lei Jun led his team to send posts on influential forums to ask for design and production advice from potential customers. The 100,000 fans they attracted quickly formed a Xiaomi community.
When Mi phone went into market, Mi fans scrambled for it and recommended it to people around them, while the company didn’t spend a single penny. The power of word of mouth economy created the success of Xiaomi.
When a costumer becomes a patron, word of mouth economy is leveraged immediately.
The reputation the company has obtained will help their customer groups self-reproduce, so companies can sell products, earn sustainable money, and attract new customers at a cost much lower than before. The automatic enclosed circle of traffic, conversion, retainment, and fission is the trend of business development that dominate the future.
三、Individual customer economy:
traffic, free for life
Individual customer economy means empowering the internet and conducting targeted user operations.
Currently, the dividends brought by large-scale traffic acquirement is shrinking, while the spending power of individuals are strengthening. Thus, focusing on individual consumers may be the only way companies can boost their profit.
Direct and frequent interactions through the internet help companies to turn individual costumers into patrons and to enhance turnout. This is called individual customer economy. In addition to the purchases they make, an individual customer also enlarges influence of a company through social media.
Then how can companies use mobile internet to establish such connections and prompt customers to make repurchases for the rest of their life?
WeChat group chats have been important pools of private traffic that no retailer would want to miss out on. By transferring the traffic in group chats to Mini Programs, retailers can further expand the online interactions with customers, make it easier for customers to buy things, and create the online individual customer economy.
Build WeChat group chats
First, a company needs to analyze its user image. Only by knowing more about its fans and their level of trust can the company produce value out of their connection.
After the brand has established a high level of trust in its fans, it can start adding them to its WeChat account and do online marketing in group chats. Every business owner, be it a grocery store or a giant company, can build containers filled with its customers through WeChat groups.
After you have attracted customers with your product, you need to categorize them in the group chats.
Do you really know what your fans like? Because you cannot count on several promotional posts to produce millions of sales. You need to gain knowledge about your fans’ interest along the process, which may not be fully reflected by the numbers of views of your posts
Step by step, you can accurately analyze your customers and do targeted marketing. If you do not require feedback or reactions from your customers, Moments and official accounts are both good channels.
Build WeChat Mini Programs
In the process to form induvial customer economy, many companies took note of Mini Programs. The Mini Programs created by W-axis Technology is designed for e-commerce on social media. We have made it the most easy-to-use tool to open a Mini Program store, with its core being the connections between businesses and customers.
Now, more and more brands have built their own Mini Programs, because they help them to achieve hierarchical and fine-grained operations and to turn traffic into revenue.
With the abilities of Mini Programs to connect online and offline traffic, companies can boost repurchases by activating patrons and accumulate new customers through the fission effect of individual customers.
In a word, to leverage individual customer economy, companies need to offer valid value to their target customers and stimulate at least 10% of their buyers to make repurchases. They must read into the shared features of their customers and provide diverse products and services.
In the digital era, it’s getting harder to predict people’s spending behavior. After creating quality products, companies need to follow the above three models to keep up with the trend of time.
