An alternative player in the home decoration industry, "Zhufaner"'s WeChat ecological "grass planting cycle".
Author | Sloth Editor
Source | Sloth Life Fine (ID: huamian224)
01 Traffic Dilemma
After the journey code reached the stars, all walks of life saw signs of accelerating recovery. In the post-epidemic era, as an optional consumer category, it is quite difficult to quickly return to normalcy as home decoration is an optional consumer category. The low-frequency non-standard, high customer unit price, and decision-oriented attributes have indeed affected public consumer confidence.
In the existing market, companies have to face the practical problem of how to save themselves in this state. In particular, most aspects of home decoration are offline, and companies are not yet well prepared for the uncertain challenge of the epidemic.
But having said that, today’s difficulties cannot be entirely attributed to the epidemic, but a lot of discomfort has been exposed at the moment, and it is easy to impose cause and effect on mentality and emotions. Even if is not caused by the epidemic, this business has long passed the era of making money and has reached a point of reflection.
During our interviews with companies, everyone was worried that current traffic is too expensive and operating costs are getting higher and higher. Falling into traffic trouble has led to a series of problems. Everyone understands that only by conducting in-depth research on the demands of mainstream consumer groups for brands and entering consumers' choice lists can they survive.
The premise is to know where the consumers are and what they really need. There is also an additional condition. Companies cannot continue to use the original rough tactics. What consumers need is not a flood of marketing bombardment. This method has long been no longer applicable. It will only get twice the result with half the effort. You need to switch to a trust-building model. This is There is currently a gap between supply and demand in the industry. Consumers do not understand the industry and are not transparent, and they are always worried about being cheated. If this barrier is not broken, the situation will be more difficult in the future.
Today’s information carrier tools are more diversified and innovative. Consumers have richer information channels than at any stage in the past. They have many ways to verify the content promoted by the company, and their consumption decisions are also more rational. Start decorating There is a process of information search and learning and comparison before, such as looking for decoration inspiration and learning decoration knowledge. Obtaining high-quality information is becoming more and more important. Even in the process of buying a house, people have begun to consider incorporating decoration plans.
When diversified information channels encounter traffic difficulties, how to effectively capture users is a new proposition. The emergence of new content forms or social media tools such as live broadcast has changed the relationship between people. Today’s social relationships are basically on WeChat, with a huge user base of more than 1.2 billion. For enterprises, this is a private domain It is a natural platform and the best position to shorten the distance with consumers. It also has the opportunity to create new incremental markets. It is also a new field to gain brand reputation. How to use these tools is also worth thinking about.
In the home decoration industry, in the past, too much attention was paid to supply and too little to user demand. Today's market demands that companies' capabilities are not only reflected in products, but more importantly, they must truly start to pay attention to users, conduct refined operations for users through multiple online and offline touch points, rebuild industry trust, and become a new moat.
Home building materials retail service provider "中文儿" has always been an "alternative player". The most profound label recognition from the outside world is that it is good at operating private domain user traffic. It has more than 10 million fans on the entire network. This number of fans does not rely on singles. Instead of working alone to build a vertical community, we choose to be the leading IP for major platforms. After several years of exploration, it has become a benchmark case for seizing the traffic dividend of the WeChat ecosystem. On July 5, the Tencent advertising system reviewed how Zhufaner operates users in the WeChat ecosystem to build a closed loop of grass planting. This set Operational ideas may provide some inspiration for industry traffic anxiety.
02 A new marketing field under the WeChat ecosystem
Zhufaner’s initial positioning is not a home building materials retailer. It has previously tried soft decoration e-commerce, office renovation, and full decoration models. Each business started to satisfy consumer decoration. a certain need. In the process of model changes, we have always adhered to the path of content-driven, but the form of content has extended from the initial public account to the richer WeChat ecosystem such as live broadcasts and communities, and from online to offline, the points of contact with users have become more many.
Zhufaner uses online touch points (official accounts, video accounts, enterprise WeChat , communities, mini programs, etc.), offline touch points (wishlist, activity fission, scan code to follow, etc.), social touch points ( The linkage of the four major touch points (consultative shopping guide, service group, social games, gift cards, etc.) and commercial touch points (search portal, online advertising, mcn) opens up the people, goods and places of new retail.
Based on the WeChat ecosystem, Zhufaner has established a new marketing field in the home decoration business scenario. has formed a complete ecological layout of "diversion and grass planting - operation and grass cultivation - transformation and weeding - after-sales grass cultivation" to create a virtuous cycle. It is a complete closed loop covering the entire life cycle of users. Let’s break it down into four steps:
The first step: attract traffic and plant grass
Home decoration is an unfamiliar industry to users and lacks a foundation of trust. Zhu Faner passed the high-quality public account in the early days. The content subtly attracts users. It uses popular science and decoration information, home purchase avoidance strategies, case sharing and other content as hooks to establish connections with users. It has produced more than 2,000 decoration information and has 1.5 million fans. This is a live model. Establish a trust foundation for private domain users. The
public account represents a coordinate point for private domain operations. In terms of user reach, Zhufaner has also built service accounts, video accounts, communities, mini programs and other content channels to popularize knowledge on decoration, recommend group buying discounts, and serve as a platform for precise users. Reach and link, provide one-to-one consulting services, and form a unique private domain traffic pool.
The planting matrix created by Zhufaner also includes public domain traffic pools such as Souyisou, Moments advertising, corporate WeChat, and Tencent advertising to tap potential consumers in the public domain. continues to acquire customers at extremely low costs. Injecting "living water" into the private domain, expands the traffic sources of more precise customers through the linkage of public and private domains. From the public domain to the private domain, it can efficiently "reach-lock-undertake" users in one stop. This kind of online The following strategies can be applied to actual business scenarios to create more monetization possibilities for Zhufaner.
Step 2: Operation and grass raising
Can we pull out the grass after planting it? Not yet. As mentioned before, for users, decoration is a learning and understanding and long-term decision-making process, which should reduce the probability of being cheated. We must continue to provide high-quality content, and we must also consider how to solve various questions of people with decoration needs. Between planting grass and pulling weeds, what Zhufaner does is to "raise grass."
In-depth operation of users is also the area where Zhu Faner’s team has the genes and expertise. In 2021, Zhufaner will fully activate the enterprise WeChat, use the enterprise WeChat tool to conduct community operations, and provide users with advisory and accompanying community services. For users who have decoration confusion or needs, they will respond to customers at any time, answer decoration problems, and provide Decoration guide, currently has established a user community of more than 250,000+.
Based on the community, Zhu Faner has also done one thing: carried out hierarchical and refined operation and differentiation of user traffic, and established a decoration experience exchange group and an advertising group buying activity group. The former focuses on sharing useful information and pitfall avoidance guides, while the latter Focusing on product purchase, we will go one step further and refine the 1v1 exclusive VIP service group to provide more specific and comprehensive heavy services. In short, in this step, we should first make the community active, improve user stickiness, retention rate and open rate, and then consider group purchase and sales.Planting and raising grass are all preparations for later weeding and new retail business models.
The third step: Transformation and weeding
Weeding is a particularly core part, and it is also a very challenging part. The funnel from users planting grass to pulling weeds, attracting users to come in and retain them, and being willing to communicate and finally pay for the platform, is a very long conversion path.
In the weeding process, the model is divided into two lines: online and offline. The online version activates public and private domain user groups in the form of official accounts, circle of friends ads, communities, live broadcasts of experts visiting stores, etc. Each live broadcast has merchants cooperating to explain the products, for example, how to buy mattresses, Whether you should buy a sweeping robot or an all-in-one washing and mopping machine, through this kind of professional and real-time question answering, you can shorten the online purchase decision-making process, and finally complete the conversion in a mini program mall or an offline new retail store.
Offline, with Super Home MALL as the main scene, it combines online touch points with offline advertising, and diverts online traffic advertising to offline Super Home MALL to open up a unified online and offline scene operation and transaction conversion chain Road, creating a one-stop shop for users to buy all kinds of good things.
In March this year, the Zhufaner Super Home MALL with an area of nearly 20,000 square meters officially opened, and a live video account was also launched simultaneously. Since March, Zhufaner has completed 8 live broadcasts, earning a total of 3 million+ GMV, and the estimated conversion order value of intention gold and orders is 500,000+. Zhufaner CEO Liu Xianran previously stated at the Super Home MALL conference that in 2022, it will reach 15 million people with home decoration needs through content fans, paid placement, local traffic, brand contact and other methods. User portraits and detailed Based on the stratified operation, it is expected that the number of users visiting the store in Beijing will reach 100,000, and 1 million people will participate in group purchases. Annual sales are expected to reach 1.4 billion yuan, challenging the with a square footage effect of nearly 100,000 yuan. In the first month of opening, net receipts exceeded 140 million yuan.
There is a detail here. Originally, Zhufaner’s business was focused on the three cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu, but it will soon be discovered that not all users’ coordinates are in these three cities. If they are only in these three cities If we provide services, a large part of the traffic we have worked so hard to attract will be wasted. Therefore, in 2019, we began to test the waters of community group buying, build a group buying platform for home building materials categories, and complete transactions through mini programs. The conversion path of
, which links online and offline, has been verified. In 2021, Zhufaner conducted more than 300 community group buying events, with an average GMV of about 1.66 million, an average of 3,000+ ginseng groups per game, a conversion rate of private domain user orders of 25%, and an ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) of 8,000 for the whole year. Yuan.
Step 4: After-sales cultivation
Home building materials are an important category. The transaction is not the end of the service, but the beginning of the service. There will be a very long delivery chain in the future. Only by truly delivering well can it be possible to build up user reputation. Deterministic service is a shortcoming that companies easily overlook, and the cost of maintaining an old customer is much lower than developing a new customer.
In terms of after-sales service, Zhu Faner has created a team of 40 super customers and 60 delivery stewards directly managed by the CEO to quickly respond to customer problems in the after-sales process, accept and follow up within 12 hours, and provide implementation solutions 24 hours a day. Create the ultimate user experience with high timeliness, high standards and high commitment for customers, strengthen the mentality of ultimate service, and truly assume the service function of a "retailer". A good service reputation can continue to generate compound interest and rewards. In Zhu Faner's view, once it receives high-quality word-of-mouth from users, it can achieve user reactivation, enhance user loyalty, and even feed back into the brand's private domain pool to drive future repurchases.
03 Value and Copy
As a new brand in the industry, Zhufaner has its own understanding of the industry, so its approach is also different. It does not focus solely on product supply, but has chosen a different path - focusing on consumption. According to the real needs of users, allows users to become a digital asset of the enterprise.
From planting to cultivating grass, Zhufaner combines traffic, products and services based on the soil of WeChat ecology to create a full-link comprehensive competitiveness of marketing customer acquisition, transaction conversion and after-sales service. Every link All have corresponding key operational actions, showing strong operational capabilities. not only drives the operation of small program e-commerce and offline super home MALL, but also continuously opens up new business battlefields, which is equivalent to building a "highway for user growth". ", and this has also promoted the change of the organizational role. The original customer acquisition department of Zhufan'er has become a profit department, outputting an in-depth understanding of users and providing integrated marketing services to B-end brands.
In fact, Zhifan'er aims at two things. focuses on consumers, and grass planting and grass raising make it the decoration expert who understands users best, building a trust barrier; focuses on products, and Zhifan'er looks for high cost performance. Professional products, integrating top manufacturing capabilities, the most professional brand owners in each category, selecting high-quality, inexpensive and cost-effective products, becoming a reconstructor of the value chain in the circulation link. Consumers no longer suffer from low brand operation efficiency and hierarchical circulation links. There are many, and for this reason, you need to bear the high markup rate of and . The overlay of these two roles underpins the positioning of today's home building materials retailers.
From focusing on productivity to focusing on production relations , from the supply side to the demand side, we will be a reconstructor of the value chain of the circulation link, create higher channel circulation efficiency, and create a new model of "people first, goods later", which will be good Efficiently matching content with suitable products to consumers is a reshaping of customer relationships, and it is also the underlying logic of Zhufaner's outward replication.
On June 29, the Shanghai Super MALL store also officially started construction. The development plan is to expand to Chengdu and other places. It will expand to 10 stores in 2025 with sales of 10 billion yuan. The longer-term goal is to target 100 billion yuan. . The label "decoration" is becoming less and less suitable for residents. As the model of home building materials retailers is verified in more cities, it is a new unlock and breakthrough for the business model of the home building materials industry.
-Conclusion-
The home building materials industry does not lack production and manufacturing capabilities, but what it lacks is not demand, because the trillion-level market is there. The market lacks brands that can truly understand consumer needs and truly understand what consumers really want. , this simplest business essence has never changed.
In a state of fierce competition, they will inevitably face various operating pressures such as traffic anxiety. Enterprises still need to return to the most basic issues and find their own positions and growth methods for positioning their customer base. private domain represents a new model, the link between people. Zhu Faner uses this as a bridge to find his own replicable survival model, and also releases new imagination space and potential for future breakthrough and advanced development. Growth potential, perhaps it can provide the industry with a new reference for user operations?
