I help big companies to attract new customers, costing 3 yuan per person, and earning tens of thousands of yuan a month

In the early years of the Internet, the market started with offline promotion. The lower-tier markets were once the "low-lying areas of Internet traffic", but now they are no longer popular. Online promoters are back in business, but this time they have changed their market targets. This article shares the story of helping large companies to attract new customers through offline promotion. Let's take a look.

In the early days of the Internet, it started with offline marketing.

At the beginning of Alibaba's development, it relied on a "China Supply Iron Army" to visit companies one by one and opened the door to the Internet. In 2006, the early "Xiaonei.com" used chicken legs and Coke in the cafeteria to convince students to register on the platform. In the following ten years, takeaways, O2O platforms, shared bicycles, taxi apps and community group buying also relied on the good words of local promoters, as well as eggs, soy sauce, laundry detergent and free discounts to accumulate users one by one.

In 2022, China has 1.051 billion Internet users - the scale of Internet users is unprecedentedly large, and almost everyone has put a part of their lives online, but ground marketing has never ended.

A large number of local promoters walk along the streets of various cities, with a small cart - often loaded with Starbucks cups, popular Bing Dwen Dwen pendants from a few months ago, or the most popular World Cup mascot "dumpling skin", attracting users to download software in exchange for traffic for big companies.

In the old square in the city center of Jiande, Zhejiang, there is a small cart filled with Bing Dwen Dwen and water cups. Xiao Chen, a former shoe factory worker, accidentally became a full-time App promoter three years ago, thus entering the edge of the Internet industry.

There are many people like him. Following the open secret of retail business, "location, location, location", salesmen will appear at the most bustling Chunxi Road intersection in Chengdu, the night market food stalls beside the Slender West Lake in Yangzhou, the big square in the center of Jiande City, a county-level city in Zhejiang, and even at the Lotus Peak of Huangshan Mountain in Anhui in July... In short, there are salesmen wherever there are people.

In places you can’t see, they are organized in WeChat groups: from the salespersons, to the upstream sales service providers, to the Yiwu merchants who are the source of low-priced gifts. The group has almost formed a "sales universe" with all the conditions required for Xiao Chen's job.

The capture and pursuit of traffic by Internet giants has once again returned to an old and primitive form. The reason is simple: the cost of online customer acquisition, which was once a low-cost and efficient method, has increased 10 times in 9 years. According to data from Marketer, CCID and Beijing News, from 2010 to 2019, the customer acquisition cost of Internet companies soared from 37.2 yuan to 486.7 yuan.

The lower-tier cities were once a “low-tier area for Internet traffic.” However, when this low-tier area was quickly filled, the apps originally targeting the lower-tier cities moved up to higher-tier cities with the flexible steps of the local promoters.

Users make a small profit, salesmen are able to make a living, Yiwu merchants use this opportunity to clear out their remaining stock, and large companies gain traffic in the hope of getting a good return on investment - a multi-end "conspiracy" industrial chain is thus formed.

1. “Fire one shot and move to another place”

At 8:30 pm on the weekend, at the old Linjiang Square in Jiande, more than 100 kilometers south of Hangzhou, the busiest time and the busiest place in the city, the aunties were dancing in the square, and the circular chairs under the trees were full of idle young couples. Tea and snack shops such as Cha Baidao, Zhengxin Chicken Steak, and Mrs. Yazhai were lined up, and the entrances were filled with takeaway riders and young people waiting to pick up their orders.

Xiao Chen’s cart is right in front of Cha Baidao, and it is filled with the “Internet celebrity” Bing Dwen Dwen that was hard to find online half a year ago. There is a poster hanging in front of the cart: TikTok Speed ​​​​Version, Kuaishou Speed ​​​​Version, JD Speed ​​​​Version - it is unexpected that a small cart can make the big companies appear together so harmoniously.

Thousands of kilometers away, a similar scene occurred at a construction site in Beijing. The only difference was that Bing Dwen Dwen was replaced with a "Starbucks" cup, and the promotion method was also more low-end: a piece of cardboard with a few large words scribbled in marker pen became a poster. This attracted a group of migrant workers to line up to download these "Starbucks cups" with ceramic bodies and plastic lids to give to their children.

While waiting for a cup of milk tea to be finished, several groups of people visited Xiao Chen's cart: three young people in their twenties and thirties, and several adults with children. They were all very interested in Internet celebrity products such as Bing Dwen Dwen, and were willing to download an app that they might not need in order to get it.

If he is lucky, one Bing Dwen Dwen can add new daily active users to three apps at the same time. As long as he successfully attracts one person, nearly 30 yuan of promotion commission can be deposited into Xiao Chen's account. If this user stays long enough and develops his own "downline", Xiao Chen can get up to 35 yuan. After deducting the cost of small gifts of about 3 yuan, and excluding the impact of weather and customer flow, Xiao Chen now makes an average net profit of about 10,000 yuan a month, and his income during peak periods was close to 20,000 yuan.

Before joining the local promotion, Xiao Chen worked in a small shoe factory in Wenzhou for 6 years. He earned more than 10,000 yuan in salary, but could only rest for one day a month. After a friend introduced him to a promotion channel company, Xiao Chen became a local promoter, saying goodbye to his previous life of being tied to the factory assembly line every day.

In the past two years, Xiao Chen and his friends drove a van worth about 10,000 yuan to visit all cities above the county level in Zhejiang Province. They also visited a few towns, but "too sinking" meant that the population was limited, so Xiao Chen soon couldn't push the van anymore, "because people got tired of pushing it for too long."

Which city to go to depends on how populated it is. How long to stay in a city depends on whether the city's express version users are "saturated". Xiao Chen stays in a hotel for about 60 yuan, sometimes for half a month, sometimes for a week. As long as he can still make money, he will stay.

Most of the salespeople are like Xiao Chen, who moves from place to place after each sales. They are either men working alone or in partnership with friends, or they are a couple. In short, it is best not to have any hindrances and be able to "go whenever you want." Single man Xiao Chen is obviously quite free. Once, after we finished talking on the phone, he asked, "Beauty, is Hangzhou under lockdown?" After getting a negative answer, he rushed to Xiasha, Hangzhou that day and set up his own stall in Xiasha University Town near dusk.

He often goes out in the afternoon, pushing his cart straight to the city center, or wandering along the streets, asking everyone he meets, "Beautiful ladies/handsome ladies, download the app, there are small gifts for you to take." After nightfall, when the crowds in the city squares disperse, he returns to the hotel. He spends about 8 hours outside every day.

After more than two years of field sales career, Xiao Chen has figured out a simple and crude, but scientific-sounding method of site selection - follow Mixue Bingcheng.

Whenever he arrives in a strange new city, the first thing he does after settling down is to search for the most lively places in the local area. The so-called lively places are nothing more than supermarkets, squares, and places where milk tea shops such as Mixue Ice City are crowded. He believes that the location of chain milk tea shops such as Mixue Ice City is "after research and investigation, and they will only open in places with high traffic flow."

This is indeed the case. Mixue Ice City franchisees need to choose their own locations, but the headquarters will review the store location, and only after the review is passed can the store be opened. The location is located in a densely populated area with stable consumer flow.

2. “Brokers” in WeChat groups and Yiwu merchants

There is an official name for ground promotion, called "APP promotion partners". Some of them are full-time like Xiao Chen, while others are part-time - promoting both mobile apps and banking services such as POS machines and credit cards.

In short, Xiao Chen believes that they are all the same thing, "sales." The only difference is that traditional sales sells goods to people, but now they sell people as a "commodity" to Internet companies.

The net income of more than 20 yuan per order and the easy work of earning tens of thousands of yuan a month with just a few taps on the phone have brought these partners together in various WeChat groups, and even formed a small ecological "closed loop" within the group:

The upstream App promotion service providers directly obtain new or active tasks from various Internet companies, then set up communities or proprietary apps, assign these tasks to local promotion "soldiers", and take the 1-3 yuan difference for each order. The tasks are clearly marked with prices, showing the value of a flow: a new customer of JD Express is worth 21 yuan; a new user of Taobao WeChat version is 17.5 yuan, while promoting the activity of an "old customer" and bringing a higher opening rate to the App is only worth 7 yuan. There are even regional differences, a southern user is worth 9 yuan, and a northern user is worth 6 yuan.

As a member of the scattered army, Xiao Chen and the other group members are both competitors and peers - a large number of coded messages pop up in the group every day: "Come for the code", "Come steadily", "Douyin is 3 points away from 28", which means that they can scan each other's codes to receive red envelopes and each get an income. Sometimes conflicts will arise for occupying the same golden spot offline.

The downstream of the ground promotion is the merchants who sell gifts. They post gift samples on WeChat Moments every day and also post gift lists in the group: various luminous or non-luminous Bing Dwen Dwen figurines, priced from 1.9 to 3 yuan; "Starbucks" style cups start at 2 yuan; "Internet celebrity felt bags" with Disney characters such as "Lina Belle" are the most expensive, costing 4.5 yuan.

Xiao Chen only needs to look at the pictures, choose the style, and pay the money. Within two days, dozens of Bing Dwen Dwen will be sent from Yiwu to the front desk of the hotel where he is staying temporarily. His criteria for choosing gifts are simple: cheap and look "good to sell".

As time goes by, the gift list gets longer and longer. Recently, the list has also added the most popular World Cup mascot "dumpling skin". Although the workmanship is rough, it does not affect its popularity.

Xiao Zhao from Shangqiu, Henan, ordered 600 pieces from a manufacturer in Yiwu and sold them all out within a day. When I asked her for the price, she kindly reminded me, "The price is high now. The non-luminous ones are 2.8 yuan, and the luminous ones are 4.8 yuan. If you are sure you want them, I will go and get more for you."

The World Cup mascot "dumpling skin" has become a popular item for salesmen recently. WeChat groups are unbreakable circles, and being in them means following the rules: merchants strictly adhere to the delivery time and guarantee same-day delivery; the coded statements are difficult for outsiders who have just arrived to understand.

This business is not illegal, but because it is in an ambiguous gray area, few people have mentioned it before. Xiao Chen sneered at the interest and curiosity we showed, and the promotion service providers were very secretive and directly stated in their WeChat personal profiles, "Do not disturb if you are not doing ground promotion." When I expressed my desire to join their ground promotion team and wanted to learn how to operate, the other party became suspicious and threw out a question, "Are you doing ground promotion?" and then never replied to my message again.

The WeChat groups where the promoters are located are quite active. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the "secret codes" between them.

3. They all know the glory and desolation of big companies

As the Internet skyscrapers are built, people become traffic.

Traffic is so important to companies. It is proof of the popularity of the app, and Internet companies chase it to convince investors and attract advertisers. At a time when traffic dividends have peaked, it has become an increasingly fierce competition among large companies. Product managers redesign the interaction process, programmers optimize pages from the backend to the front end, and the marketing department is responsible for promoting these changes.

To a large extent, the expectations of large companies for the capital market and the fierce competition among them determine how much money the local promoters make, especially in 2019, which is known as the "year of sinking".

The sinking market includes nearly 300 prefecture-level cities, 3,000 county towns, 40,000 townships, and 660,000 villages. It is a vast, boundless, and imaginative long-tail zone.

In 2019, Alibaba and JD.com both mentioned the "downstream markets" in their financial reports: 70% of the 20 million new annual active users of the former in the first quarter of 2019 came from underdeveloped areas; more than 70% of the latter's new users came from low-tier cities. Not to mention Pinduoduo, which has been listed for a year and is using "cutting edge" to conquer the downstream markets.

In the same year, Kuaishou and Douyin were also in a fierce battle, and both sides launched "Extreme Edition" in August 2019. Kuaishou Express Edition reached 10 million DAU (daily active users) 20 days after its launch, while Douyin Express Edition took nearly 2 months to reach 14 million MAU (monthly active users).

Compared with the main site, the express version has several features: first, it takes up less memory, and can be used smoothly even on low-end mobile phones; second, it saves traffic; third, it attracts people with its online earning model. You can make money by watching videos or by recruiting people to make money. With these features, the express version app has attracted more than 60% of users from third-tier cities and below (data from the Questmobile report in 2020).

In the year when the "down-market" began to be in the spotlight, Xiao Chen became a salesperson and experienced the best time to make money.

At that time, there were a huge number of apps available for Xiao Chen to promote, and big companies were willing to spend huge amounts of money to attract people. According to Questmobile data, there were more than 75 express versions of apps on the market at that time. ByteDance, known as the "app family bucket", launched express versions for its Douyin, Huoshan Video, Pipixia and Toutiao.

Kuaishou alone has recruited a large number of ground promotion teams across the country to promote the express version. Its 2020 financial report shows that Kuaishou's sales and distribution expenses reached 26.61 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of nearly 170%. Another set of unconfirmed figures is that the cumulative promotion investment of Kuaishou Express Version is nearly 10 billion yuan.

In 2020, Taobao Special App was launched to compete with Pinduoduo for the lower-tier markets. Since its inception, Taobao Special App has played the role of continuously acquiring new users for Alibaba. In the past two years, it has been one of the fastest growing businesses within Alibaba and the fastest growing e-commerce app in China. Today, Taobao Special App is still printed on the posters of many local promoters.

When Xiao Chen first started doing ground promotion, in addition to the express version, he also promoted Alipay and Taobao. He did not prepare any small gifts, and relied entirely on "making money out of nothing". He could earn about 100 yuan for every new customer he brought in.

But the good times lasted less than two years.

The high cost of attracting new customers and the gradually peaking dividends of the sinking market have caused many large companies to cut sales expenses. Since the beginning of this year, "tightening the belt and eating hard" has become the norm for Internet companies.

Chen found that many apps that once relied on subsidies to attract new users have given up spending money, and Douyin, Kuaishou, and JD.com, despite continuing to provide subsidies, have seen their commissions drop significantly, and more people are willing to share their commissions with them. According to his observation, there are at least a hundred people doing field promotion in Hangzhou alone. "Since the second half of this year, people are everywhere doing field promotion, and more and more people know that (field promotion can make money). All the downloads for these apps have been completed."

In the middle of this year, he and his former partner broke up. The limited income was not enough to be shared between two people. Xiao Chen continued to drive the van around Zhejiang Province, while his former partner went to Jiangsu Province, north of Zhejiang, to "continue his career".

They no longer specialize in sinking markets, but instead appear more frequently in residential areas or near office buildings in new first-tier cities or high-tier cities such as Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Yangzhou. Even in Chunxi Road, the busiest downtown area in Chengdu, there are many salesmen.

Originally, Xiao Chen thought that the business was "thriving", but now he is worried about the big companies, "the company that was so prosperous before seems to have no money anymore." But he is reluctant to give up this job, "There is no other good work to do now, so I will do whatever I can."

He witnessed the crazy period when big companies burned money to subsidize in exchange for traffic, and made a small profit from it. Now that subsidies have been cut in half, he is still like an external cell of the big companies, participating in their small cycles of beating and decay in another way.

Xiao Chen and his cart spend more time outside. The WeChat group he invited me to join has hundreds of messages popping up every day and is more active than before. A job with less income but still freedom is "enough" for Xiao Chen.

Author: Wu Lingwei; Editor: Xu Yiting

Source public account: Tianxia Wangshang (ID: txws_txws), recording the people and stories of Internet business.