Four major marketing trends for private domain operations in 2024

Based on the marketing observations in the past year, the author summarizes the four major marketing trends in private domain operations in 2024 in this article - refinement, circle experience, vertical expert assistants and full-domain empowerment, providing some inspiration for brands that plan to make efforts and deeply cultivate private domains.

The public domain traffic dividend of a certain 3C e-commerce platform has become increasingly saturated and has reached its peak. Although its performance is acceptable, its repurchase rate cannot be further improved.

A high-end liquor brand

We have explored various marketing campaigns before, so how can we innovate at low cost in the new year?

A brand of maternal and infant milk powder

The infant formula market is declining. How can we achieve cross-category sales of adult formula, elderly formula, etc. to increase the average order value?

A national daily chemical brand

In the past, rich member data (such as phone calls) was collected, but it did not translate into productivity and actual performance.

Although the challenges faced by these companies belong to different business fields, they all share a common problem to some extent: after public domain traffic completes an instant transaction and user communication, it either becomes invalid (low conversion potential and low loyalty) or can only rely on resource investment to achieve proportional linear improvement, and it is unable to establish a low-cost model for long-term growth.

What is the long-term growth of the low-cost model? It is to use lower resource investment, more flexible community building, and rich scene scalability compared to large-scale marketing campaigns to explore the value of different circles (new customers, members, fans), and use normalized marketing content and activities to achieve goals such as crowd sedimentation, product repurchase, demand expansion, experience optimization, and brand co-creation. This is also the core content of most private domain marketing. According to variables such as product price, purchase frequency, cognitive threshold, and crowd characteristics, companies show differentiation in their strategies and methods of private domain operations.

Based on the marketing observations in the past year, Shiqu has summarized the four major marketing trends of private domain operations in 2024 - refinement, circle experience, vertical expert assistants and full-domain empowerment, providing some inspiration for brands that plan to make efforts and deeply cultivate private domains.

1. Refinement

For low-priced products, users are generally price-sensitive or early adopters. Gifts and benefits have become a standard tool to increase people's favorability and stickiness, or to attract new users. However, unlike holiday promotions on e-commerce platforms, private domain benefits do not have the large-scale traffic of the former, and require more refined operations:

• Welfare needs to remain "hungry". Reasonable welfare "pause" gives curiosity room to grow. Daily welfare will only increase the sense of cheapness.
• Turning welfare into "service power" and pushing "welfare activity calendar" is more personal and sincere than "we have many welfare benefits every day", "you will lose money if you don't buy this today" and "what is worth buying".
• Pay attention to the latest consumption changes of community users, create high-quality benefits through joint IP, and attract cross-field users as fans
• Taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of the community, collecting effective user research opinions on new products or community content information needs can solve the effect of empowering product development and content planning.

2. Circle Experience

Generally speaking, high-frequency, low-price products have a more obvious demand for private domain operations, which can create value for companies in promoting first-order conversions. However, for low-frequency, high-price categories, the core of private domain operations is to study the core characteristics of the circle and provide additional experience value accordingly.

For example, customers of categories such as liquor and cars are natural detail-oriented. Many details are only about feelings, but it is these details that determine various decisions in life. For example, when buying a car, the smell of the new car, the attitude of the salesperson, and the pride of driving an environmentally friendly car are more important factors affecting consumer decisions. A negative and unsatisfactory feeling will leave an impression of "value for money" and "goods not matching the description." Therefore, many times it is necessary to follow up with one-to-one service as soon as the user enters the marketing field of vision to lead their "first perception of the brand." This is exactly where private domains excel. A careful study of the user circles of liquor and cars will reveal that they:

• Generally self-driven, value time cost
• Care about elite social status and value social value
• Like to share interests, culture and lifestyle privately

They present typical characteristics of "high net worth" people. For this type of users, the private domain operation strategy recommends using high-level attitudes and high-quality information/experiences that are in tune with them to influence and touch their minds:

• Whether it is a trial or actual use, every communication should provide users with a new perspective on the product as much as possible, so as to create a feeling beyond practical value and create a rare experience.
• Produce professional content that matches their vision: Integrate brands and products into high-quality topics such as asset allocation, time management, art appreciation, market trends, etc., to establish a brand impression that is in tune with their minds
• Compared with the middle class, the rich have more rights to change brands. They value social identity more than material things. Create a comprehensive performance of hearing, vision and dynamics to give them a strong sense of social identity in the real experience.

FILA GOLF brings together three extreme lifestyles: helicopter skydiving, golf and sailing, on the seaside. By creating an extreme experience of riding the wind, it allows users in the circle to perceive the brand value through interaction with the same interests.

New energy brand ORA holds exclusive press conference for car owners at Chengdu Auto Show

3. Vertical Assistant Expert

For vertical scenarios and population categories such as maternal and infant formula, the more suitable role for the private domain is a life expert who does not disturb customers on weekdays and meets their needs.

Imagine this scenario: when a new mother who doesn’t know where to buy milk powder in the early morning finds a community assistant, the latter can promptly provide the address of shopping stores open for business and coupons. User positive endorsement and the “one to ten” word-of-mouth effect are a natural result.

In fact, private domains have more advantages in providing such services.

First, private domains can achieve faster responses than customer service. In the early morning, general corporate customer service replies automatically and are unlikely to provide targeted help. Second, private domains can define user labels in a more real-time and segmented manner. Taking mothers as an example, through group mechanisms and fragmented communication, operators of maternal and child communities can refine user labels into pregnant mothers, breastfeeding mothers, second-child mothers, anxious mothers, Cantonese-speaking mothers, and mothers who live nearby without flagship stores, etc., and provide targeted shopping information and life assistance for having and raising children, thereby generating a sense of trust and dependence on the brand.

In addition, women, represented by mothers, are also the leading influencers of many household consumption decisions. By organizing regular health reading clubs and accelerating the cognition of family members on health, it can effectively stimulate new product demand and shift the consumption demand of new mothers from infants and young children to adults and the elderly, thereby increasing the value of customer contribution.

Classic Organic Milk held a user-rewarded check-in event for health science popularization

4. Global Empowerment

In addition to driving sales and user loyalty management, creating a closed-loop marketing of private domain-global domain-private domain is also a new way for private domain to empower brand growth.

"Being recognized" and "being liked" are common human nature. In the community, each fan can find his or her own role - creator, promoter, sharer... First, stimulate the "creative passion" of community KOCs, and turn it into high-quality brand productivity to empower marketing. Enterprises actively share high-quality KOC content on the brand's global platform to help them increase fans and win likes, thereby achieving the effect of "joint efforts and common voices". Brand IP is also incubated and grown in the process, with extremely low costs and huge benefits throughout the process.

Under the background of the country's dual-carbon strategy, Liby Technology, a leading daily chemical brand, has activated its brand membership system and found seed users to serve as "communication support officers", "low-carbon product trial officers", "campaign inspiration contributors", "environmental protection knowledge sharing officers", "brand environmental protection ambassadors" and other roles, fully empowering its dual-carbon marketing, further deepening the minds of fans, and triggering more sales orders from environmentally friendly users.

V. Conclusion

Through sharing, we can roughly divide the direction of brand private domain operations into welfare type - e-commerce for the masses/3C digital, high-end experience type - liquor/automobiles, expert assistant type - mother and baby, content co-creation type - mind upgrade and IP co-creation brands. Together, they pull the brand from traffic to the minds of people with greater business value, repurchase and high loyalty, and complete the "last mile" of conversion.

In the "last mile", the best positioning of private domains is as friends who understand users - accompanying users to become better in a way without any traces of marketing. This is what different companies should do in private domain operations.

Author: Shiqu Research Institute; WeChat public account: Shiqu Research Institute