In 2023, what else can companies do to acquire customers online at low cost?

Corporate marketing has always faced an old problem: how to acquire customers at low cost? The traffic for acquiring customers is never evenly distributed, and most of it comes from customer acquisition channels. In addition to public domain traffic, another channel is private domain. In addition, a more direct way to acquire customers is the founder's IP. This article analyzes how to build the founder's IP to achieve low-cost online customer acquisition for the company, and I hope it will be inspiring to you.

In 2023, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Online marketing of enterprises has to face an old question that has been asked for a long time: Is there a low-cost channel for acquiring customers? Is there any low-cost content for acquiring customers?

The areas for acquiring customers are never evenly distributed, but there seems to be a shortcut to gaining users’ trust: a more convenient way to reach customers – private domain; a more direct way to gain trust – IP.

In this article, let’s first talk about how to build the founder’s personal IP?

(Note: Here we are talking about IP creation in a broad sense, not Tik Tok short video live broadcast in a narrow sense)

1. What kind of founder is suitable for building personal IP?

Some founders want to build their personal IP on the one hand, but on the other hand they are very afraid of the camera and dare not try. How to solve this problem?

If building the founder's IP helps the company obtain lower-cost customers and traffic, then it should be done! This was my answer at the time, and I would like to share it with you here.

In fact, if we translate the boss's question, this is actually the concern of most bosses:

• How can an introverted individual with poor expression skills effectively express himself in front of the camera and show his true strength?
• And is every founder suitable for personal IP?

So today I’m going to talk to you about personal IP.

1. Founders who are not suitable for personal IP

I have been in the industry for nearly 20 years and have come into contact with so many bosses. In fact, there are generally two types of bosses who are not suitable for personal IP:

1. The first category: Entrepreneurs in confidential industries (such as the military industry and government big data research and development related departments) do not need channels or customer sources themselves, but instead need to keep a low profile.
2. The second category: Dealer (agent) bosses, who work hard to build their personal IP, often end up facilitating other dealers and agents.

But it is undeniable that in the Internet age, building a personal IP is the most effective way to gain customer trust! Because the most effective way to gain trust is to give information and let the other party fully understand you first.

So how does building a founder’s IP affect a company? Let me share my story with you.

2. How does the founder’s IP affect the company?

In 2015, I resigned from Baidu and returned to Chengdu. At that time, talents who left BAT and returned to Chengdu were still very scarce, so I received attention from many online platforms. Fortunately, the Everyone is a Product Manager platform found me when they held an event in Chengdu. Since then, I have started long-term cooperation with various platforms.

After a year of course development, I launched the first systematic course in the operations industry in 2016, "Sister Jingqiu Teaches You Operations Step by Step". It was promoted across the entire Tencent Classroom as soon as it was launched, and I became the most popular Internet mentor on Tencent Classroom that year. This also established a deep connection for my further cooperation with Tencent.

Since then, I have been invited by various companies and marketing platforms to share my ideas. Through these activities, I have accumulated more than 10,000 students on WeChat who have absorbed and recognized my content. At the same time, I also often share my insights into the industry and the latest views and opinions related to corporate growth in my Moments.

During this process, the users covered by my circle of friends began to have clear labels on me, which revolved around the growth and operation of the enterprise. When I left Alibaba and started my own business consulting company, the influence of the founder's IP on the company became apparent.

Our company received a steady stream of customer leads at the beginning of its launch. Almost every once in a while, a friend on WeChat would contact me and say, "Teacher Jingqiu, we have such a demand recently. Can we communicate with your team?"

Whenever I share the cases we have done for clients in WeChat Moments, new clients will always come to me to learn more about our capabilities and services. They are either my original private clients or recommended by clients I have served. In this way, a very healthy closed loop of operations has been formed in the early stages of entrepreneurship.

And compared with all customer leads, the communication converted from private domains is always very smooth, because they have been observing me continuously in the circle of friends, and they trust my abilities and work attitude.

What we need from each other next is just a demand and a plan to open up a cooperative situation. It can be said that I personally enjoy the huge dividends of the founder's IP.

In fact, it is not just about personal IP. The underlying logic of all business operations is to influence decision makers, users and contact persons, so that they are more inclined to choose their own brands for use, and to repurchase and continue to use them.

Running a business is a grand game of brand influence.

The construction of personal IP is like a sharp sword, which directly strikes the minds of decision makers, users and contact persons, allowing them to fully and truly understand us from multiple dimensions. This understanding will nourish the feelings of users, gradually form a sense of intimacy in their mentality, and make them naturally choose us when facing a variety of competing products.

It can be seen that personal IP plays a very important role. So, what type of entrepreneurs can create personal IP effects more easily and quickly?

3. Entrepreneurs with personal IP who are more likely to produce results

Let me share with you a story about Lao Ji first——

Lao Ji, the founder of Haochedu, and his team of 9 people have achieved more than 1 billion yuan in private car sales. Before operating Douyin, Lao Ji was already well-known in the luxury car circle in Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

At that time, in the process of private domain operation, he relied on continuous service and only depended on the 8 customers when Haochedu was founded. Through continuous fission and word-of-mouth fermentation, he achieved the turnover of hundreds of luxury cars a year, among which the referral rate of his old customers was as high as 90%.

After operating his personal account on Douyin, the popularity of Laoji's IP has been greatly improved, and the target customer source channel has been expanded from Jiangsu and Zhejiang to the whole country. He did two things on Douyin:

1. Through personal accounts, they published stories about luxury car transactions and after-sales services, attracting the core target audience of Douyin and settling on WeChat.
2. The WeChat private domain marketing activities were shared as materials on Douyin. The WeChat Moments activity of "Looking for Lao Ji" has become a new way to explore private domain operations.

This operation model has made him more and more popular, and many video accounts have begun to disassemble and analyze his business model, which has brought him a lot of search traffic, and the popularity of his IP has become higher and higher. Therefore, the blessing of Douyin traffic + Lao Ji's extreme service has achieved the above-mentioned super marketing case of Lao Ji's team achieving a private domain transaction volume of more than 1 billion for 9 people.

So to sum up, the constitutions that are prone to fire are roughly as follows:

1. The first category: The industries that entrepreneurs are engaged in are relatively closed, and the outside world has a natural curiosity. For example, in the fields of high-tech, new energy, carbon neutrality, hydropower, aircraft, aviation manufacturing, etc., this kind of sharing with a revealing nature is deeply loved by the general users of the platform.
2. The second category: The industry you are engaged in is one that requires extremely high professionalism to close deals. In building a sufficiently professional personal IP, you will retain fans who are attracted by your professional ability and customers who continue to wait and see. Because it is a relatively long process for customers to contact and gain trust, and building a sufficiently professional personal IP can accelerate this process.
3. The third category: The founders themselves have many topics worth exploring, such as grassroots counterattack; extremely excellent family background; excellent self-expression ability; strong professional ability in a certain field. For example, the founder is a teacher who started a business with his students; or has a certain skill, such as taking pictures and painting. These unique labels allow personal IP to show its unique competitiveness.

Of course, some people may ask: Can founders who are not good at expressing themselves in words not build their own IP? In fact, this is not the case. Such founders also have ways to build their own IP.

For example, Luo Cheng, the second son of Holiland, has a character that is a socially anxious person who is not good at expressing himself verbally. In his video content, we can see his working environment, coupled with the voice-over, and he has also successfully shaped his own personal IP.

Therefore, you don’t have to worry about your sense of camera and expression ability. As long as you judge and choose this way to reduce the company’s customer acquisition costs, you can start!

2. Founder IP for Low-Cost Customer Acquisition

1. The effect of personal IP creation

When I was chatting with startup bosses recently, I found that many entrepreneurs commonly ask the question: If you want to build a personal IP, how many customers can you get in the first month?

Building a personal IP is like building a credit account, which requires accumulating credit step by step. This is a relatively long process, and there is an "impossible triangle" in customer acquisition: it is impossible to simultaneously meet the requirements of large customer acquisition volume, high investment-to-production ratio, and long duration.

It is not like selling goods in a live broadcast room, where high-quality goods can drive rapid conversions; nor is it like a popular account that constantly hits hot spots and uses a multi-account layout to create miracles.

Since we have chosen personal IP as a long-term, stable and sustainable customer acquisition path, we must give up the unrealistic short-term fantasy of getting immediate performance results.

Maybe by chance, you can get results quickly.

Entrepreneurs should always assume that we are not lucky, put luck aside, and then reap the fruits with a more stable mentality and continuous output.

Normally, if you build your personal IP according to the SOP standards, you can foresee the results as soon as you create an account. However, it is undeniable that in the process of building, factors such as luck, platform traffic support and natural resources may affect the final effect.

But as long as you start doing it, it will definitely work.

Here we can still give you some reference values ​​for IP creation data:

• On the Douyin platform, many of the founders’ accounts that we had previously supported started to generate conversions with just two to three thousand followers.
• On the WeChat private platform, there are also some founders who, with our help, continue to produce public accounts with in-depth thinking content. The number of readers is 200 to 300, but they can only get 20 to 30 customer leads.
• On the Xiaohongshu platform, we accompanied a founder in the jewelry industry. After publishing more than 30 pieces of content, she only had more than 300 fans. But after one piece of content reached 3,000 views, it brought her an average of more than 30 new orders per day.

We won’t be the lucky ones who will have an explosion of customers as soon as we start, but if we persist, we will definitely see results.

If there is an inevitable rule for the founder’s IP construction, then this rule must be persistence.

Just do it and stick with it, the results will often be better than you imagined.

2. When will customers convert?

It takes a certain amount of time for customers to get to know you, understand what you are doing, become interested and initiate inquiries.

The cycles in different industries will also be different. In the operational growth consulting industry that I am engaged in, many consulting clients have been lying in my circle of friends for two or three years before they initiated consultations with me.

This is because consulting requires a long period of customer education before ultimately completing customer conversion!

Therefore, continuously outputting content and shaping personal IP is essentially a process of customer education. And the support behind customer education is the continuous output of high-quality content.

Here I would like to share with you an AIDA model about content output.

In the process of content output, it will repeatedly affect the construction of the founder's IP. This construction needs to be emphasized repeatedly and rhythmically.

In order to continuously influence our customers and make them believe that we are craftsmen who do our work in a down-to-earth manner, while also showing that we are founders who love life.

Because only a living person can establish a connection.

3. Common pitfalls in founder IP creation

In the process of building the founder's IP, there are also several pitfalls that are easy to step on:

1. At the beginning, we blindly pursue quick results

Many founders fall into this pit. They don’t have the right expectations in mind and don’t know what pace and goals they should follow to achieve results.

In fact, we can determine progress by anchoring the effect expectations:

• For example, if you have accumulated a lot of old customers in the circle of friends, then posting about ten pieces of content to build IP will start to show conversion effects;
• If you start from scratch on the Xiaohongshu platform, it usually takes about a month to get more than 100 fans. Only after more than 100 will you start to see lead conversions.
• Correspondingly, it takes about a month on the Tik Tok platform to start converting leads after reaching 1,000 followers.

The cost of building a personal IP from Xiaohongshu and Douyin platforms is different:

• For example, recording short videos on TikTok requires the boss to invest more time in appearing on camera;
• But if the content on Xiaohongshu is mainly pictures and texts, more work can be handed over to the team.

2. Let all employees give thumbs up in the early stage of IP creation

On Xiaohongshu and Douyin platforms, asking all employees to like a post will cause a problem: it will make the account's fan profile and group match the employee profile.

In the subsequent recommendation algorithm, this content will be pushed to users who are similar to the employee portrait, but in fact our customer base may not be similar to the employee portrait.

Therefore, it is not recommended to manually intervene in operational behavior in the initial 30 pieces of content.

Creating an account is a set of test logic, testing:

1. title
2. Cover
3. Expression style suitable for IP
4. Suitable atmosphere for IP
5. Rhythm that suits IP
6. Choose a topic that better matches your IP
7. What kind of user profile do you prefer?

After testing the answer, we will start using large-scale operational methods and market investment to improve the account incubation progress.

Of course, if we are "RMB players" and enter the market with a large amount of funds, then the strategy will be different.

3. Talking about organization, management, and feelings, but no conversion

This kind of pitfall is quite common. Many bosses will attribute all problems to the organization. In the video, they talk about organizational management, feelings, hobbies, etc., but rarely talk about business.

However, on the one hand, such content is too general and the matching user group is not precise enough; on the other hand, this makes it extremely difficult to convert content into business.

In fact, there are several very important anchoring rules on the platform or in the circle of friends. In communication, facing all the objects being communicated, people can only remember a single piece of information.

Therefore, for personal IP, the more content dimensions there are, the more difficult it will be to remember!

Therefore, when building a personal IP, whether on WeChat Moments, official accounts or other platforms, you must consider what kind of core customer groups need to be converted at the moment, as well as the tags, information and pain points they care about.

We should make these questions the keywords that appear frequently in our topics and content. In this way, when we design content for customer groups, they can become the key touchpoints for business conversion. Instead of blindly pursuing exposure and likes, we should deliberately seek hot topics that are not related to the business.

After all, the purpose of the founder to build a personal IP is not for exposure, but to achieve business conversion. When we first start to build a personal IP, we often get confused and entangled about whether we should increase traffic or be a good business owner.

Let’s put this aside for now. In this article, our focus is always on how to build the founder’s IP.

4. Be reserved in front of the camera, but be open in front of employees

This is a very normal phenomenon. Not everyone has a good sense of camera and can adapt to it.

Faced with such a situation, there are actually many different ways to deal with it that can allow the boss to relax and face the camera with ease.

• For example, put the boss in his highlight moment. If the boss is particularly good at meetings, we can show his strengths by constantly asking him questions in the meeting scene;
• If the boss is good at one-on-one communication, we can let the boss be asked questions in a one-on-one communication scenario;
• If your boss is not good at expressing himself verbally, you can sort out the copy and story in advance, and then use voice-over with exquisite pictures to reflect the value of the content.

5. Exquisite makeup and high-definition camera

The more refined and well-prepared it is, the more it will give people a feeling of being unreal! Whether it is TikTok or Moments, the most important thing is to record the real and beautiful life. Of course, beauty bloggers are an exception.

Secondly, over-preparation is also a waste of unnecessary costs. In the early stages of building an IP, it is more important to find the entrepreneur's positioning and customer base, and to continuously output real and meaningful content when the product conversion logic is relatively clear, rather than a piece of exquisite content.

If over-preparing will delay the event by a week or even a month, then don't do it.

Because running through the relationship between your own positioning and users is the most important thing in the first stage of the account! After the number of fans and users increases, you can choose to make the content more refined.

So how do you find the relationship between IP location and users? Here we provide you with a tool.

The core of building IP in Moments is to reflect our values ​​by expressing our attitudes, lifestyles and opinions. Regarding the types of content to be output in Moments, we also have a suggestion for everyone.

In addition, it is important to note that the label output by the IP must be consistent with its own characteristics. After all, it is difficult for a disguised self to persist for a long time.

Let's not resist human nature.

6. Moments are visible for three days and have no content

It is recommended not to set the circle of friends to be visible for three days, as this will affect the precise customers’ understanding of the founder.

When you open your Moments, allow your customers to see at least 20 to 50 messages so that they can get to know you more comprehensively.

A customer who really needs to be converted needs to understand you in more dimensions, including professionalism, service attitude, values, delivery standards, and related cases. These contents need to be continuously conveyed to customers in a fragmented way to ultimately facilitate transactions.

7. Paying too much attention to video likes

This is also a very important misunderstanding. Likes are not the key factor in conversion. Sometimes content with a high number of likes does not have much conversion effect.

A common phenomenon: if you post life-related content in your circle of friends, you will get a lot of likes; once you post business-related content, the number of likes will decrease, but this content will activate customers to actively find you to chat.

Why didn't he like or leave a comment, but instead chat with you directly? It's because this content really stimulated his conversion motivation. He urgently wanted to communicate directly.

Of course, liking posts can easily be seen by peers in the circle of friends, so you get the idea, haha.

Therefore, we don’t have to worry too much about the number of likes. In the content planning of the entire IP creation, 60%-70% of high-like content and 30%-40% of high-conversion content together constitute a founder’s personal IP with monetization capabilities.

8. No live streaming or online streaming

Live streaming and connecting are very important sources of traffic for short video accounts. If you don’t do it, you will lose a lot of traffic opportunities. The evaluation of account weight is generally composed of three elements:

• E-commerce monetization capabilities
• The quality and stability of short video releases
• Live streaming traffic and stability

If you don’t do live streaming, you will lose some traffic opportunities, because live streaming users and short video users are not exactly the same group of users. Live streaming users stay longer, are more accurate, and have a higher conversion rate. It can be said that live streaming is a direct conversion field.

The conversion rates of many of the live broadcast rooms in the financial industry that we have supported are very high, reaching more than 10 percent.

Therefore, the live broadcast room is a very critical place for us to manage our core customer groups, which allows us to form high-frequency interactions with our core customer groups.

Of course, there is another problem here: if the founder is not good at expressing himself in front of the camera, how can he do the live broadcast? There are two options:

1. The first category: connect with and interview other people in the live broadcast room, especially old customers, let old customers tell their own cases in the live broadcast room, and help convert new customers.
2. The second type: match a live broadcast host and let the boss act as a spokesperson next to him. The active host will guide the interaction and reduce the boss's pressure.

The former is more suitable for entrepreneurs on the To B side; the latter is more suitable for entrepreneurs in To C retail-related businesses.

9. Work for 3 months and rest for 3 months

This is a typical case of "fishing for three days and drying the net for two days". Everyone knows that this is wrong, but they still do it.

The mouth knows, the body is honest.

10. The team of 3 people: shooting + editing + operation

Many bosses asked me, if you want to do short video live broadcast, how to build a team at the start-up stage? Do you need to configure editing, shooting, and operation personnel?

Consider this from two perspectives:

1. On the one hand, the boss is not sure whether he can recruit the right person in a short period of time;
2. On the other hand, the key task at this stage is to design your own personal IP. Only by generating a tag library and a topic library based on personal positioning, and then generating a large amount of content, can it be effectively presented to customers.

At this stage, operational work has a lower priority.

Therefore, the content should be based on the boss's cognitive output, and the shooting should also follow the boss's ideas. (Note: The boss should control his mobile phone and account.)

So my suggestion is: in the early stage, you can find an external team to do the editing. Getting the work done quickly is the first factor. It is not too late to form a team after things are on track.

At this point, the team already has a basic business base, and for the recruited team members, both stability and participation are more guaranteed, and relatively speaking, it is also easier to produce performance results.

11. All in TikTok

There are many platforms that can build personal IP, such as Moments, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Video Account, etc. However, in recent years, Moments is the inevitable choice for building personal IP, because customers acquired on different platforms will eventually need to be introduced to WeChat or WeChat for Business for longer-term and in-depth incubation.

If you want to make customer conversion easier, private domain becomes an inevitable choice.

To do a good job in the private domain, the IP creation of the circle of friends is the glue that makes the private domain and the public domain more smoothly transformed. This year, many big Internet celebrities have begun to invest resources in building private domains.

In addition to Douyin, Xiaohongshu is also one of the choices, because in the account creation stage, Xiaohongshu is relatively simple and easier to get output results. However, Xiaohongshu's customer base is somewhat restrictive and is more suitable for beauty, life and other related industries.

Therefore, Douyin is not the only option for truly low-cost customer acquisition. If our resources and energy are extremely limited, it is best to start with WeChat Moments!