What is more difficult than doing private domain business is recruiting private domain talents.

In the wave of digital marketing, the management of private domain traffic has become the key to brand growth. But what is more difficult than managing private domain? It is to recruit talents who can manage private domain. This article will explore the core qualities of private domain talents from six dimensions - understanding customers, understanding business, understanding sales champions, understanding technology, understanding marketing, and understanding data - and share how to quickly identify and select suitable private domain talents through 24 key questions.

Recruiting private domain talents has never been an easy task.

When we discuss private domain operations, we often compare the selection criteria for private domain talents with those of talents in other departments, such as the marketing department, brand department, and takeaway department.

Note the wording here, private domain management rather than private domain operation. "Operation" is usually in a relatively established environment, properly handling and maintaining established goals, which belongs to the "housekeeping type"; "management" is the boss's perspective, to achieve a brand new goal, which belongs to the "pioneering type".

Private domain management talents usually need to be considered from six dimensions: 1. Understand customers 2. Understand business 3. Understand sales champions 4. Understand data 5. Understand technology 6. Understand human nature

The more abilities you have, the higher the corresponding salary will be; especially when recruiting first-level leaders for private domain/membership departments, you can use these 24 questions for testing: 4300 words | Where will your company's private domain go in 2024?

1. Understand your customers

On the public domain platform, you can put products on the shelves, set discounts, do a good job of traffic, and start live broadcasting, and orders may come. On the public domain, you don’t need to understand the customers so well, and you can close deals simply and crudely.

In the private domain, brands need to rebuild a brand-specific system in the WeChat system, which is equivalent to making a miniature version of Meituan. And customers really hate being harassed by constant advertisements in the private domain of WeChat:

You have to understand the real reason why customers come back for repurchase. Besides the physical product itself, what else can impress customers? At least it is not a 50% discount coupon that damages the brand potential.

This is actually the boss’s thinking.

You may say that I have a CRM system. If you think about it carefully, CRM leaves behind RFM data (members' recent consumption, member consumption frequency, member consumption amount) and members' post-consumption behavior, which are records.

What we actually want to know is why customers come to consume, which is a prediction. System data can only tell us half of the answer, and the other half needs to be told to us by the customers themselves.

People who understand customers must be experts who can conduct large-scale and accurate research. They abandon harassing users and use their sincerity to feel the real needs of users. In other words, they should be loyal users of the brand and can find the pain points of customers.

2. Understand the business

The common and frustrating private domain operations we see are like this: the brand forces you to join a community, then click a bunch of things on the mini program link, and then give you an unnecessary benefit.

Wouldn’t it be better and easier to send the benefits to me directly through the mini program background and then tell me?

Or, you just finished lunch and got another coupon for dinner? Today's white-collar workers may not eat the same brand for a week.

This kind of suffocating contact obviously does not follow the cyclical nature of the business and does not understand the characteristics of its own products. Forcing customers to make a deal will only make them leave you.

The catering industry and private domain operations face the same difficulties, that is, the entry threshold is low, but the threshold for making money is high; especially when the two industries are combined, if one is not careful, the catering brand may offend old customers that it has worked so hard to gather.

People who understand business are usually very cautious about every interaction with customers. They will carefully craft every private message sent to customers and every picture in the circle of friends. They will use every function of WeChat carefully to let customers gradually accept the content presented by the brand and carefully mention the frequency of customers' consumption.

3. Understand the sales champion

A sales champion is a rare talent for any company. In some companies, the sales champion is even the boss himself. Nothing can improve performance faster than replicating the sales champion. Good store managers and good franchisees are the most valuable assets of a company, but usually they only account for 5% of the brand. How do they run stores, how do they impress consumers, how do they fight for their careers/livelihoods, and how do they show their best side to customers?

It is true that their experience and skills are difficult to be replicated in every store. However, how they do business online and how they attract customers from WeChat to offline stores can be completely replicated. The targeted group messaging/triggering function of WeChat for Business can be perfectly executed.

Those who understand sales champions, after a long period of on-site research in stores, research sales champions, learn sales champions, become sales champions, and finally replicate sales champions! They form altruistic cooperation with stores, on the one hand, replicate sales champions to attract customers to the store, and on the other hand, train employees and provide high-quality services. Each party completes what they are good at.

4. Understand technology

None of the domestic enterprise WeChat SCRM manufacturers are having an easy time, even Enterprise WeChat itself is not having an easy time.

After all, no one can make money.

But WeChat for Business is different. You can easily complete 10 small goals by paying 0.1 cent per follower for a year. Add to that the account management fees, interface fees, etc., and you earn money from the brand, but also kill the SCRM company. What China lacks the least is SCRM companies with extremely low renewal rates. They are naturally eliminated if they do not bring incremental performance to their customers. However, some unscrupulous SCRM manufacturers actually crack the underlying code of WeChat to reduce system operating costs. Once the brand does not understand the technology, and there is no restraint in the contract, the brand will be the only one who suffers in the end if the WeChat account is warned, blocked, or permanently banned.

After all, the account is gone, so what's the point of a private domain? No matter how good a soldier is, when he goes to the battlefield and is equipped with a gun that can explode at any time, his fate is the same whether he shoots or not.

People who understand technology will not easily launch a system directly for a brand. Instead, they will fully and detailedly communicate with the front-line staff in each department's business area, and use an altruistic mindset to see whether the system can help solve core difficulties. Even in the early stages of private domain business development, it is not recommended for brands to launch a system.

If once the system is implemented, the efficiency of reaching out is increased exponentially, but the content reached has not been verified and satisfied by the customers, it will only be counterproductive.

5. Understand marketing

The essence of private domain is content marketing. The Chinese chain restaurant industry has long passed the era of creating wealth with a single sentence. Look at the door heads, slogans and slogans of restaurants, which are almost exactly the same, full of "Chinese" style.

However, we have ushered in the golden age of increasing the number of users by more than 100 million with just one sentence on WeChat. This is a super opportunity to reach 100%. Although it is not easy, it is always the outlet.

The most terrifying thing is that the extremely precious 1v1 marketing opportunity, which may only have one chance to reach out, was actually given to a small operator with a salary of less than 10,000 yuan. A bunch of colorful emoticons, sloppy copywriting, and so many lines of self-entertaining advertisements, who else would you delete if you don’t delete them?

People who understand content marketing are scarce talents in domestic and foreign companies, no matter how many business cycles they have experienced. They will deeply explore all the connotations of the brand and have excellent text control ability. Not only will they not discount the products, but they will also let customers come to buy them automatically.

The last American company to accomplish this feat, Hubspot, is now valued at $20 billion.

6. Understand the data

On the basis of understanding marketing, what needs to be solved is obviously the ability to accurately push marketing content:

Send the right content to the right person at the right time.

This cannot be determined by simple CRM tools. Data analysis that is not based on actual business growth will greatly affect the business efficiency.

Take the following figure as an example, why do we pay special attention to the 28-day repurchase rate, rather than the traditional 30 days or 60 days?

Because according to data evaluation, if new members do not make any purchases within 28 days of their first purchase, it is basically impossible for them to make any purchases again. The data tells operators that they must reach out to them before 28 days, otherwise these people will forget about the brand.

Content marketing capabilities are often at odds with data capabilities. The former tends to be emotional, while the latter tends to be rational.

People who understand data usually don’t just rely on data. They will use financial data and front-line feedback to determine whether the issues behind the data are consistent with the company’s goals and strategies. They communicate with their bosses the most frequently. On the one hand, they need to warn their bosses of emerging risks, and on the other hand, they need to give the business departments enough suggestions to encourage them to improve.

7. Understand human nature

You need to understand what your boss is thinking, what your consumers are thinking, what your franchisees are thinking, what your corporate WeChat official account is thinking, what your consultants are thinking, what your competitors are thinking, and what your colleagues are thinking...

Every decision in this article (How the 118 million yuan increase in private domain sales and the tripling of repurchase rate were achieved) is essentially a test of human nature.

People who understand human nature are usually not young. They have enough experience to see through the essence of something or someone's thoughts in a short time. When they make strategic strategies, they often go against human nature; but when they manage and operate, they often conform to human nature.

Text/Liu Yucun CEO Zhu Yifei This article is written by the operator [null], WeChat public account: [Zhu Yifei Talks about Private Domain], original/authorized to be published on Operation Pie, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.