Recently, I have communicated with several big sellers doing cross-border sales B2B. The general feeling is that the quality of inquiries on the Alibaba platform is getting worse and worse, the price war is serious, and it is becoming more and more difficult to do business.
Try to expand other channels? I feel like I don’t know where to start. I went to a certain website to buy a bunch of so-called customs data, and after sending an email, I found that almost no one responded to the email; I asked the people below to register for Facebook, but they came to tell me within two days that all the accounts were dead and there was no way to use it; I found an outsourcer to build a website. It cost tens of thousands of yuan to build the website, but the website was placed there, and few people visited it throughout the year, let alone inquired. These problems are common problems encountered by many cross-border sellers. The fundamental reason is that the marketing thinking and capabilities of cross-border sellers have not been iterated and improved to match the development of current channels. In other words, the method of cross-border sellers customer acquisition is still more than ten years ago and cannot keep up with this era, so it feels difficult to do it and it is not smooth.
Today, based on the current situation,I would like to share with you friends who are doing cross-border sales how to develop and close customers through the method of owned audience.
First, let’s popularize a concept:
owned audience:Simply put, it refers to channels that can directly reach users at any time and frequency without paying, such as self-media, user groups, WeChat accounts, etc., which is the circle that KOC (Key Opinion Consumers) can reach.
The above official explanation is still too confusing for non-marketers.
Let me explain it to you in human words:For people who do cross-border sales, owned audience is to gather customers and potential customers to their own social media accounts for maintenance. Generally speaking, it is to gather them on Facebook and WhatsApp, and then build themselves into the image of the most professional industry experts. Through their understanding of products and industries, they become professional opinion leaders who purchase products that target customers trust. That is what you sell, and everyone thinks it is reliable.
The advantage of this isbrand yourselfYes,Reduces the cost of customers' trust in themselves. At the same time, customers gather in your WhatsApp and WhatsApp groups. Any product information, industry knowledge, industry experience, etc. you send can be seen by them at any time. At the same time, they will also spread the good knowledge and experience of your production and drive new customers to join. Of course, by adding new incentive gameplay, such as social e-commerce gameplay, the enthusiasm of these existing customers will increase to a greater extent, completing a closed business loop.。
We won’t go into details here. Today we will only talk about the concept of owned audience. Now that you know the concept, how can you create your own owned audience pool for cross-border sellers? Below we will go through the complete five steps to help you open up the ideas and practical methods of developing customers for cross-border salesowned audience.
▌The first step: clarify user portraits and find user channels
First of all, you have to clarify what kind of people your target customers are, such as their age group, occupation, their usual focus, hobbies, etc.
Only by knowing this can you know which Internet platforms they usually spend a lot of time on, and what specific content they pay attention to. Then you can go to these platforms and expose the content they are interested in, and they will be attracted to you. For example, if you sell small commodities in Yiwu, your target customers are local resellers, and there are many wholesalers. When these people need to purchase, they may need to go to search engines such as Google, or go to Facebook groups of peers to communicate. The information they usually pay attention to on Instagram, Facebook, pineterest, and Youtube must also be related to their sales categories; those who sell small beauty products must focus on beauty bloggers; those who sell home products must focus on home design. If your product is a more professional product, such as medical equipment or large-scale machinery, there will usually be a vertical forum, and for such companies, many of the people responsible for purchasing are industry engineers themselves.
Therefore, you must first clarify who your customers are, and then find an online platform where customers can easily gather as your marketing position. This is the first step.
▌Step 2: Position your account and create a professional profile
Positioning your account is a crucial step.
What do you want your customers to think of you?
You definitely don’t want them to think that you are that “stupid and annoying salesperson”, because by this time, you have already irritated him, and they have begun to hate you, a person who only knows how to post advertisements. How can they give priority to buying your stuff? What they definitely need is a professional and service-oriented sales consultant to cooperate with.
Therefore, you have to build yourself into a KOC (Key Opinion Customers), and you have to become an IP in a professional field.
For example, if you make pet products, you need to establish yourself as a pet product expert who loves pets and knows all kinds of pet products and styles. You have to study the effects of various pet products on different dogs, the benefits of pet products designed in this way, which styles have best-selling potential in which regions, etc., so that customers can consult you whenever they have pet product needs or questions. Or if you take good-looking photos and model various pet products, a person who can produce good-looking pet pictures and sell pet products will make everyone believe that you can find all kinds of new pet products and have a stable supply.
Don’t think that operating an owned audience means just adding friends and posting ads., this will only prevent you from finding high-quality customers, and various platforms will block your account, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.
When you have your own account positioning, build your own personality around your own positioning, operate your own Facebook fan page, Facebook group, own WhatsApp personal account, WhatsApp group, Instagram account, etc., your influence in your product vertical industry will become greater and greater, the cost for customers to trust you will become smaller and smaller, and you will become more and more successful.
▌Step 3: Continue content exposure, increase weight, and create hooks
Once you know where your customers are, the next step is to show up frequently in front of them. There is no essential difference between following a client and falling in love. When chasing a girl, you have to show up in front of her frequently and create opportunities for chance encounters to win her favor.
The same goes for customers. Your brand is often exposed in the channels where they appear. In addition, the exposed content is professional, creative, warm, and the value meets user expectations. Customers will be impressed by you.
For example, if your customers appear in large numbers on some overseas forums, you can go to the forum to find forum administrators and cooperate with master-level Internet celebrities to help you improve your brand exposure; if your customers basically find customer service through search engines, you can directly output high-quality product content and information on your own website and Youtube to improve the keyword ranking of your products. You can also spend money on paid promotion to allow your products to occupy better product search positions; such as If your products are products with strong communication power, such as beauty and fashion, the exposure rate on Instagram will be relatively high; if your products are products with strong design, you must not let go of Pinterest; if they are more professional electronic products, you can try the vertical related forums on Reddit; if you sell various Yiwu small groceries and need small 2B buyers, you must not miss Facebook...
These content channels have been found and the content has been published successfully. Does this mean that there will be traffic once it is published? That’s not necessarily true. You have thousands of competitors, so you need to increase your account weight and content weight accordingly to get more exposure opportunities. For example, you typically use peripheral accounts to increase the praise of your Facebook page, plan customers' positive feedback for your products, and gain more exposure by creating cold-start positive feedback. (LopGrowth will help you provide cold start positive feedback services in this area, if it is difficult for you to rely on personal accounts.)
After you have a good and professional personality on these platforms and provide relatively high-quality content, the next step is to attract traffic. You need to leave a hook for your good content for users to find you. This hook can be a direct WhatsApp account, a WhatsApp friend link or a link to your website, or you have optimized keywords for SEO.
Behind high-quality content is professionalism, and professionalism means reliability.
So, next you can introduce your first batch of fans who think you are reliable to your own owned audience pool through hooks, and bring them to achieve mutual success together. They need high-quality products, reliable after-sales, and a stable supply chain, and you need orders. When they find your website through your content and actively add your WhatsApp, you have succeeded in the first step.
Attached: Link to add WhatsApp friend tool.
▌Step 4: Start community operations and reach out to content repeatedly
When potential customers add your Facebook, WhatsApp, or LinkedIn, some of them will become your customers, and some of them will keep paying attention to you.
What to do next?
At this point you have only one goal:Let the people who become customers expand their business (his demand) and be willing to introduce more customers to you; let the people who are waiting to see you trust you and place the first order.。Therefore, you must continue to input high-quality content related to your products into your own owned audience pool, let your content be continuously exposed on WhatsApp, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and update it every day to ensure the frequency of updates. Persuasion is a process. Each of your content is shaped around the selling points of your product and the advantages of your brand. The content includes text, pictures, videos, etc., and constantly brainwashes users to let them know what you do and what you can help them accomplish.
The second is to do community operations.
What is community operation?
Community operation refers to thegroupMembers are connected by certain ties, so that members have common goals and continuous interactions, and group members have common interests.group consciousnessandnorm.
In layman's terms, you put customers and potential customers who know and trust you into a group. They are peers, and the link is you, a reliable supplier who can provide products and services. Every vote of confidence cast by your die-hard customers in the group will increase the trust of waiting customers in you. Similarly, you must also pay attention to the spread of negative feedback. In addition, you can create more connections between group members and help them grow, which will undoubtedly expand your influence in the local market. At present, the editor knows many great masters in the cross-border sales industry. The cross-border sales masters who have a complete understanding of the market segments of a country or region with a level of tens of millions, all play this way. The specific community operation methods will not be discussed one by one here, leaving it for a separate topic next time.
SocialEpochowned audience operation tool, apply for free trial.
▌Step 5: Design product activities to encourage user fission
The above three steps are all preparations for closing the deal, so this last step is the last step to actually start the deal.
As the saying goes, deals are designed. Doing business cannot rely on luck. Once you meet a customer, you will have sales, open an order, and stay there for three years. After all, there are only a few lucky people like this. Therefore, what you do in the first three steps is actually designing the transaction process. In this last step, keep working hard and use some tips, and you won’t have to worry about running out of orders.
When you have the previous activities, you have gathered some potential and regular customers in your owned audience pool.The next thing to do is to stimulate potential customers to make transactions, encourage old customers to grow, and actively recommend their products. Bundle old customers with their own interests to help them develop into large local agents; for new customers, strategies and methods such as creating scarcity and endorsement from old customers, and promoting quick transactions can be quickly used.For example, on its own website, a special agent account is opened for each old customer. As long as it is the next-level distributor recommended by him in the local area, he will give them rebates and let them become partners (LopDeals social marketing cross-border sales official website has its own agent distribution function to help everyone manage agents). For new small agents, distributors, and local businesses, it is easy to expand due to your own strong content and the endorsement of local old customers.
The above five-step method is a method we summarized after interviewing many senior cross-border sales sales and marketing people in the industry. If you follow the steps and practice it, you will definitely gain a lot.
Let’s summarize it together:
