Editor's note: This article is from WeChat public number "GrowingIO".
This article is based on the July 18th GrowingIO Growth Community presentation by Yujie Yang, Chief Growth Officer of DailyVantage:
Hi everyone, I'm Yujie Yang, Chief Growth Officer at DailyVantage, and I'm excited to share my thoughts on growth with my friends at GrowingIO today.
Prior to joining DailyVantage, I was responsible for growth at several domestic and international organizations:
At Facebook, I was responsible for growing the user base of Messenger, an instant messaging app, from 100 million to 500 million monthly users;
During his time at Uber, he was responsible for the growth of Uber's drivers in China, where orders grew from 500,000 to 20 million per week;
During my time at Mobay, I was responsible for Mobay's product and growth, growing orders from 500,000 to 30 million per day, and users from a few million to 200 million.
Three months after I joined DailyVantage, the weekly activity of DailyVantage's app has increased by 4 times, and the weekly activity of the APP has also rebounded significantly after the Chinese New Year. These rapid changes are attributed to some growth methodologies summarized over many years of practice, combined with user demand and some of the big opportunities in the market.
We hope that through this sharing, we can discuss the methodology of growth with those who work on the front line of growth on weekdays, and help everyone to have a deeper understanding of what growth is, and how to polish the merits and weapons of growth, so that growth can empower the team and the business of the organization.
1. Understanding growth
First, let's explore what is growth? Why is everyone talking about growth?
Growth is, in fact, a process of constant insight into change and response to it.
Humanities, technology, social environment and so on, everything is changing all the time, these changes will bring inconvenience to our lives, but also bring a lot of opportunities to enterprises, learn how to deal with these changes, in fact, is the growth of the opportunity point. For example, generational changes bring many new needs, technological changes bring many new possibilities, and changes in the general environment also bring opportunities in various aspects.
Growth, too, is broadening the length and breadth of a business.
Long" is the margin of the market, such as how many users you serve; "wide" is the efficiency of your entire business, such as user retention, user frequency, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), user online time, pocket depth, etc., each business is different; "high" is the innovation of the business, whether you can tap into the core competitiveness of the business and continuously create more business models around the core competitiveness. Wide" is the efficiency of your entire business, such as user retention, user frequency, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), user online time, pocket depth, etc., each enterprise is different; "high" is the innovation of the business, whether you can tap the core competitiveness of the enterprise, and around the core competitiveness of the business to continue to create more business forms, more possibilities.
Secondly, the main reason why everyone is talking about growth, I think, is because growth has become difficult.
On the one hand, the user, technology, platform environment is changing faster and faster, some old methods will soon not work; on the other hand, in this economic slowdown, enterprises have a stronger demand for growth, the market competition is becoming more and more intense, so everyone has a kind of "growth anxiety".
Moreover, when it comes to growth, many people's first reaction is how to buy traffic, how to advertise, how to pull in new customers, and so on. But the environment is always changing, if only focus on the implementation of the method, I think it is very difficult to grow for a long time, so we need to summarize the methodology and find some methods that can be replicated, in order to be able to continue to bring growth opportunities to the enterprise.
However, I believe that more important than the method of growth, is the mindset of growth.
What is the growth mindset? I think it's fully understanding the business model of a business, such as the cost structure, the strategic life and death points, and at the same time being able to find out what the big factors for growth are at the current stage of the business. Below is a discussion of the three big factors, which can also be described as the three axes.
2. First order of business: market expansion
How we do market expansion can be broken down into two things:
One is called the depth of the channel, that is, how to better improve the efficiency of the new pull on the existing customer acquisition channels; the second is the expansion of the channel, that is, while we use the existing channels, how to find the future of the new traffic dividends, so as to reconstruct our traffic structure, to ensure that our new pull is sustainable development.
2.1 Channel depth
The core of market expansion, that is, the depth of the channel, to seize three elements: people, material and scene, that is, the precise segmentation of people, the material of thousands of people, as well as the scene to match the user's habits, preferences and needs, to improve the conversion rate of the final traffic.
Let's take a simple example. Now the cost of buying traffic online is getting higher and higher, so there are stricter requirements for the ROI of advertisement placement. Some time ago, we made a few moves on the placement of Daily Fresh, and doubled the ROI of advertisement placement within a month, how did we do it?
man
On the crowd side, we use a more accurate crowd package with ad technology to select a group of target users who may be most enthusiastic about fresh food, and the final portrait is about women between 25 and 40 years old, who may habitually use some of the food recipes APP, then we will conduct very accurate targeted advertising for these users.
source material (in literature and art)
At the material level, we keep putting out pop-ups like fruits and vegetables at very low prices, and we also put out food and recipe videos on the Jitterbug side. We keep a/b testing these materials to find the ones with the best user feedback, and then invest more in these materials and advertising programs.
take
Scenario, we put a lot of landing scenarios from the APP download, transferred to the small program direct purchase, and in the small program to do a "dollar purchase of the first order of the red packet" scenario, which greatly improves our traffic channels from the user traffic purchased in our APP scenarios and small program scenarios on the conversion rate.
2.2 Expansion of channels
The most important thing about channel expansion is to reorganize your traffic structure.
Every traffic platform will experience its spring, summer, fall and winter, we hope that in the spring layout of a channel, to get the dividends of traffic, summer to increase investment, the fall to do the last wave of harvest, in the winter we will give up the channel. At the same time, we also hope that in this whole process will continue to have the second curve and the third curve appear.
Traffic channels in the market now are basically categorized into a few of the following broad categories:
APP Download
WeChat small program
Self-media: the establishment and operation of the traffic pool of the double micro a jittery
New media: Shutterbugs, Xiaohongshu, Volcano video, etc.
Some new paths: geo-promotion, group fission, small program operation, follow the public number to pull groups, etc.
Other small programs
All of these may become a traffic entrance. For example, I recently learned that QQ push small program, some college students two days to do a small program, very quickly on the hand, and the DAU to do 1 million. So we have to choose according to the specific circumstances of the business, with your scene and the ability to match the traffic entrance.
Take the daily fresh, daily fresh APP download and use is the largest traffic entrance, but these two years small program is a huge wind mouth, and it is said that this year may produce a total of nearly 1 trillion retail GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume, website turnover amount). So even though the small program has been very hot, but we think it is still in the stage of spring and summer, so we have done a few actions to reconstruct our new customers, including the daily DAU traffic structure.
For example, for the small program to special selection, do small program exclusive offers, around the small program to do social fission, such as saving change, orders, withdraw cash, split the fairy coins, etc. Soon the small program traffic accounted for more than half of our daily DAU, and now compared to four months ago, the traffic has doubled four times.
Small program these are not traditional channels, we have to spend a lot of time to think: the market on this channel what user needs have not been met? How to produce scenes that meet the interests of users, can fission, and use familiar relationships to share? Around these scenes, are there any traffic channels that have already been built? If there is, then continue to plow and operate, if not then create it.
As an example, when the small program was first launched, it didn't support regular QR code scanning in, at that time I was in charge of product and growth in Mobay, so I found the person in charge of WeChat open screen, and the team of the small program developed this kind of small program to support the function of regular QR code scanning.
After the completion of this function, at that time for a period of time Mobike's traffic accounted for 80% of the entire small program, and then very soon other developers flocked one after another, and now the small program has become a very large entrance to the traffic.
3. Second axe: operational efficiencies
The second axe, in my opinion, is business efficiency, that is to say, open source and cut costs.
3.1 Open source
Open source, is based on generating more benefits from existing traffic.
First, identify what the business model is for the business or enterprise you are responsible for. For example, if the Daily Fresh is an e-commerce company, the Polaris goal is real revenue, and real revenue equals:
Traffic per day × conversion rate × ARPU generated per traffic flow
Once you have built a model around take-home, then think about how to go about increasing daily visits during this high growth phase, how to increase conversions throughout the transaction process, and how to increase the take-home fees that each user pays on our platform.
Daily Youfood has re-engineered category management through algorithms, the specific approach is: more exposure to fruits and vegetables, such as fresh pop-ups, then we did smart pricing, smart subsidies, to help users develop the habit of often coming to Daily Youfood to buy fresh ingredients, thus increasing the user's repurchase and conversion rate; at the same time, we also through the collocation of higher-value goods, such as buying dumplings can be combined with vinegar, fish can be combined with other condiments to increase the user's ARPU. At the same time, we also increase users' ARPU by pairing higher-value products, such as vinegar with dumplings or fish with other condiments.
For retailers who specialize in merchandise distribution, membership is a great way to lock in sales, to increase user loyalty to the platform, and to get users to give more of their budget and depth of pocket to the platform, so that means that we've put a lot of effort into our membership as well.
3.2 Throttling
Throttling also takes into account the company's business model. For example, Daily Fresh, Mobay, and Uber are all strong supply and demand business models, so the most important factor is to better match supply and demand.
To throttle such a model, we need to consider how to balance supply and demand, how to improve the efficiency of the subsidy, and think about whether our business model is a network effect, economies of scale, or economies of scope, because the ROI of subsidies is not the same for different economic models, as well as what kind of long-term impacts the subsidy will have on this business.
Let me take Mobay as an example. Mobay is essentially an asset management company that makes money not by deposits, but by constantly generating economic benefits through the bikes being used by people, and it's earned back dollar for dollar, dollar for dollar.
Mobike is actually a "scale uneconomical" business model, there are more bicycles after the operating costs did not decline, more and more bicycles will cause the use of each bicycle efficiency declines, and will not necessarily generate more value for the user, so it is no network effect.
Therefore, the most important thing to do to subsidize the bike is the turnover of this asset, and we are going to give a lot of subsidies to how to improve the turnover of each bike asset, and the biggest factor in this is the density of the bikes in the geo-fence and the density of the orders, and how to improve the efficiency of the repair workers and the porters in the process of repairing the bikes.
Finally, we combine the subsidy with the red envelope car scenario, that is, we give the subsidy to an ordinary user, so that he needs to do capacity scheduling of the bike to ride to our designated geographic fence, from which we get a certain amount of subsidies, which is the same as our bike scheduling problem to the user in the middle of the package.
4. Third axe: operational innovation
Business innovation, I think, is the most important part of growth and also the most difficult part. Business innovation is actually finding the second curve for the growth of the company, there are not particularly many sets of rules in this, I can only share with you some of my thinking.
Why does business growth require innovation?
The reason for this is that innovation can continually improve a company's competitive barriers. By innovating categories you can satisfy more of your users' needs and deepen your brand's transactional relationship with more users, while many innovations can give you amortization of infrastructure costs and improve your operational efficiency.
There are no sets of business innovations, but there are some big impact factors:
Subjective factors: whether your business is in an innovative environment; whether the company has an innovative gene; whether the boss is willing to provide a relatively independent environment and flexible space for innovation; whether the company has strong organizational power to quickly mobilize resources for innovation, and so on.
Objective factors: the enterprise's own user base; technical reserves, such as data technology, the ability of the technical engineers themselves; the ability of the workload, and so on.
Here are a few examples.
We all know that Uber has a food delivery business overseas, and now the growth rate of the food delivery business has exceeded that of the traditional taxi business, but we most likely don't know that Uber food delivery was just an experiment in the beginning.
At that time, the city manager of New York wanted to do some marketing activities through the Uber delivery, so a very simple function on the line, and then realized that many users have a very strong demand for this, and the United States does not have the United States takeaway, hungry such companies, Uber takeaway all of a sudden to do up.
Daily Yufu also independently incubated a company last year, called "Daily Yitao", mainly using Daily Yufu's fresh food supply chain, through social fission, to provide fresh food services for users in third- to fifth-tier cities. After the launch last year, the performance grew 80 times in 5 to 6 months, and the person in charge of this business is also another team completely independent from the main business.
The recent Daily Fresh also tested the water coffee takeaway, reuse a lot of our front warehouse, with which to spread the cost of many front warehouse, improve operational efficiency. By spreading the cost of the front warehouse, the price of the entire fresh products can be cheaper, and ultimately the money saved will be returned to the user. So users very much like these affordable goods, as well as home delivery service.
5. Summary
To conclude with a brief summary, there are three words that you can take away from listening to today's sharing:
5.1 Growth is a mindset
Practice makes perfect, the process of thought building itself is a method of thinking and problem solving, and this method is difficult to master through rapid learning, and needs to be applied and trained in different industries and different scenarios.
5.2 Growth requires continuous innovation to respond to changes and opportunities
Growth does not have a set of rules that can be put all over the world, no one can follow the knowledge in the book to make the growth, the application of many micro-innovation needs to be carried out by ourselves to be able to bring their own business and products continue to bring growth power.
5.3 No shortcuts to growth
People who do a lot of growth are faced with a lot of "hard problems". A lot of people talk about and study "growth hacking" and think there's magic and lots of shortcuts. But honestly, I don't think there are shortcuts to growth. Because the core of growth is always to face the most difficult problems, to solve those things that prevent us from providing better service and more value to our users, so ultimately we have to return to the essence of things.
For example, Daily Priority is all about solving the growth problem, which is essentially how to make products fresher, delivered faster, and cheaper. There are no shortcuts to these things.
But don't be discouraged, let's end with an additional message: the opportunity for growth is always there. Right now we have growth anxiety, probably because we're worried that we won't be able to grow anymore and that every year will be harder, but that's not how I see it. We see a lot of C-suite products iterating, and the big driver behind iteration is actually generational change.
That is to say, people will continue to grow old, get sick and die, and if the market has a population with spending power in the age range of 18-65 years old, there will be people leaving and coming in from this range every year, so there is unmet demand in the market every year, and every year there will be a lot of new growth, new growth opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities, and business innovation opportunities.
We have to believe that when we do the right things, the right results will come. Growth never ends and the journey is the reward.
