When companies engage in private domain operations, should they hire people or engage in marketing automation?

What options do enterprises have for private domain operations? Is the cost-effectiveness of real-person services still high in today's private domain operations? This article analyzes the current status of private domain operations, explains the current status of services in enterprise WeChat private domain operations, and objectively analyzes the advantages and usability of SOP in private domain operations. It is recommended for people who are confused about private domain operations to read, and I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Enterprise WeChat definitely hopes to find real-person service.

This is a bold claim.

Real-person service sounds good and makes customers happy, but it causes pain for the brand.

It doesn’t matter if the brand is in pain, as long as the customers feel comfortable. But real-person service is not just for you.

In other words, when WeChat for Business advocates "real people providing services", it is equivalent to directly excluding small and medium-sized enterprises that have difficulty surviving from the private domain.

Each additional operations person means a cost of 60,000 to 100,000 yuan per year, not including the invisible and uncertain talent costs.

A private domain team of 10 people would cost 800,000 yuan a year. Not every company can afford such a labor cost. And it is not certain that every person has the same ability!

At this time, you tell me that if you want to do private domain, you have two options:

1) You hire a bunch of people to do "real-life service", then buy some SCRM software to help people do the work and improve efficiency, and then each person earns 100,000 yuan.

2) You use SOP to replace real people, and do the work that was originally done by people, or even better than real people. You pay for the software and have a professional consulting team to serve you (50,000-100,000 yuan a year)

Tell me, what choice would you make?

Choosing the first approach is a kind of cynicism. What the official said is correct, but it may not be suitable for you, so it makes no sense for you to force real-person service.

We don't want to go against the authorities. As a company that is struggling to survive, with an imperfect private domain talent system, a shortage of talent, and a closed loop of private domain input-output ratio that has not yet been established, why should I pile up people?

What I said only represents the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises, and does not include those leading companies that are well-known through the official WeChat accounts of Qihoo.

If your company does not have private domain talents, cash flow is not sufficient, and traffic is not excessive, tell me, how to do your private domain? This is the current situation of many brands doing private domain. Obviously, we advocate the second type of "marketing automation": using SOP to replace people, solve 80% of the standardized work in marketing work, and use people to complete the 20% core work of the final transaction.

We believe that it is great for a company to have sales champions to get the job done, but there are too few of them. 80% of sales staff can only contribute 20% of the output.

Because not everyone can become a sales champion, and not everyone can become a sales champion as soon as they join, so you must think of a way to use an SOP method to clone the sales champion who understands the product, the business, and the most capable in the company as much as possible, and use tools to replicate the sales champion's capabilities.

However, the above claim only says that SOP should be used, but does not say how to use SOP or how it can be used.

What does marketing automation mean?

Those things that originally required people to do in private domain operations are now done by automatic algorithms and digital people, such as one-on-one push, posting to Moments, group messages in social groups, cumulative order consumption amount, cumulative order quantity, repeat purchase reminders, etc.

However, we do not advocate the automation of all work. We only need to automate the work of customer cultivation, retention, and activation. When customers actively contact us to chat and consult about our products, there is no need to automate the chat.

Because after the above 3 things are done, there will definitely be interested potential customers who will come to you for chat and consultation. Automation will only do more harm than good, because machines will certainly not be better than people at chatting. The automated system completes 80% of the manual work, and sales time can be 100% used for the last 20% of one-on-one real-person communication and transaction with interested customers.

So why can robots do the other three things better than humans?

This is both the logic of marketing automation and the logic of SOP.

However, this is not an intuitive and natural option. It is a very realistic problem that no one is doing private domain business. But when no one is doing it, what do brands think of first?

Definitely not a SOP substitute!

What is it? It is "private domain agency operation":

The actual situation of a certain brand’s private domain. This is the actual situation of a brand that came here for growth consulting. Is it very similar to you?

Both agency and real-person services sound great, but the former does not require you to provide human resources.

But there are too many pitfalls in agency operations, or in other words, the essential flaw of this business model is that you cannot expect agency operations to deliver private domain results that exceed your expectations.

After all, this is not their main business, not their company. They just come here to move bricks and do work.

The logic of the agency operation company is to earn service fees. A small number of companies will also earn CPS, but the CPS model has an essential flaw. Since I can share the money with GMV, how can they do private domain? Of course, they issue coupons! Do promotions!

If you issue coupons, you will make a deal. If you do promotions, you will make a deal. The gross profit has nothing to do with me. All I need is the CPS share!

There is no need to consider consumer experience, customer journey, or high-net-worth private domain...

Just send out coupons in bulk.

Well then, you hire an external team, they come and collect your service fees, and use your budget to issue coupons, and you still have to share the money after the transaction is completed.

Can’t you issue coupons yourself? No matter how you deduce it, the service fee model and CPS model of private domain agency operation will not make you any money.

Your consumer experience will not be significantly improved.

It's almost like a monkey moving corn, all in vain.

Do you expect to pay $100,000 a month to find someone to help you take off?

If they leave, it means you haven't done anything in the private domain and you have to start from scratch again.

They don’t have their own private domain team, their own private domain operation strategy, or their own consumer insights.

Having said that, since you don’t have anyone to do the job and the agency operation isn’t very reliable, what should you do?

This is the specialty of private domain operations.

The methodology, which is mastered by a very small number of people, is your way out in the private domain.

Everyone buys Micro-Enterprise SCRM, everyone uses the sidebar, everyone uses quick replies, everyone uses risk control, everyone uses customer radar, everyone uses tag group messaging, everyone uses tags for stratification, and everyone uses Micro-Enterprise. What is your advantage?

The internal circulation offsets it.

What can SOP achieve in the private domain?

Without any sales personnel, we used SOP to sell high-order products (50,000 to 100,000 per year) and survived in a highly competitive environment, and we were doing quite well.

One of our automotive clients, with no sales in a 4S store, used SOP to cultivate hundreds of leads for test drives in the store in a month.

One of our educational clients can arrange more than 100 parents to attend offline trial classes in a month even without any customer service staff.

So you ask me, can SOP replace people and complete the work of customer cultivation?

Our answer is of course they can, and they are much better than your people, with strong execution capabilities, the ability to clone sales champions, and extremely powerful lethality.

But why do 99% of brands on the market fail to implement SOP? Why do 99% of SCRM tools fail to be implemented?

….

But we think you don’t need to read more private domain case articles.

You also don’t need to go around asking SCRM software salespeople for case materials, feature lists, or product PPT introductions.

You don’t need to buy an SCRM tool that claims to be able to do everything.

You don’t need to hire more customer service and user operations people.

No need...

You need to tear off the label of real person service.

Light a cigarette that doesn't require a ignition, or pour a glass of free good wine, think carefully, and then choose one of the two options we provide above.

Now, tell us your options.

This article was originally published by @大保聊私域成长 on Operation Party. Any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

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