After three years of operation, why is it still normal operation?

The wages of operators are generally lower than those of people with technology and products next door, because 80% of operators have made this mistake!

Fact: 80% of operations are reserved.

This is not right, and it is also the reason for the low salary of operators. Only when the operation is linked to the commercial value and the product is linked to the user value can the operator retain it. If you do the opposite, it will accelerate the death of the product. Who will pay you a high salary?

I wrote an article a few days ago, which deeply analyzed the relationship between products and operations and the scientific division of labor. I think it's king to do your job well. Therefore, in the "Operation Guide", I throw out three major responsibilities of operators: innovation, transformation and extension of life cycle. Not reserved.

Why? Many people asked me, and I joked that the industry knows that under the pressure of high kpi, operators have already become the king of routines.

Jokes are jokes. This paper makes a detailed interpretation from three aspects, from which you will find that male and female servants really can't keep operating. And 80% of the operators in the industry have been doing it for three years, but they still can't find the trick to get a high salary, because the retention pool is always small.

This article outlines:

1. What is real operation? Knowing this, you won't regard operation as operation.

2. What is a retained user? Many people can't understand the concept of retention pool.

3. Based on the above two points, interpret the three major responsibilities of operators.

What is real operation?

To understand the concept of operation, we need to start with what the operation department has done in reality. Take my professional experience as an example. From 2008 to now, I have been operating in four companies.

My first job was to do online education. I belong to the network marketing department. The top leader is the director of operations, and there is no post of operation manager. The online marketing department is divided into four groups according to the work content: SEO group, network editing group, design group and planning group (also divided into online activity planning and offline activity planning). I am a website editor, acting as product manager and network promotion (I always regard the position of network editor as product manager), responsible for the planning of related new channels and the implementation of low-cost marketing promotion. At that time, I made two products: the planning of new channels and the planning of advertising alliance platform. Through the content, the traffic increased by 10 times (now it seems that this is a vanity index). SEO group is responsible for website optimization and data analysis, design group supports front-end interaction and visual effects of network grouping and planning group work, and planning group is responsible for user operation.

The second job is to be an IT vertical portal, and I am an operation manager for the first time, belonging to the product technology department. At that time, the department structure was: the deputy general manager of the division was the top leader, and there were product groups, technical groups and design groups in the department. Later, I wanted to be an SNS community in the IT industry, and set up an operation manager post, which fell on my head and added an operation group. At this time, what I did was to build a community, promote the operation of core users from 0, and produce UGC. This is the time I miss most. We have done a lot of online and offline activities, content-based theme planning and promotion, and community marketing support for major customers.

The third job finally has a special operation department, which is an Internet operation center established by a traditional listed company. At this time, I began to have an official title. From this, it has also experienced a battle for performance and a battle for interests. The department is led by the director of operations, and consists of a network editing group, a customer service group and an operation support group. The network editor is responsible for the business contact of each branch of the enterprise, the customer service group is responsible for receiving the consultation and transformation of IM and 400 telephone services, and the operation support group is responsible for communicating with the technical department, product department and marketing department, and putting forward optimization opinions and suggestions to all brother departments according to the website data.

The fourth job is to do recruitment business. In fact, it was a mistake and crashed into the recruitment field. At that time, I joined the innovative business team within the organizational structure as an online education. Later, due to business failure, he turned to the core school recruitment business. From this, I experienced the operation of new media, APP and other services. At that time, the operation departments were scattered, and each project had an operation team. In the later period, the boss integrated the operation departments together, and there was no clear division of labor, which was generally divided into operation editing group, user group and channel group. Within the company, the product manager has the final say, runs the escort and does chores.

That is, in the process of my fourth job, I learned four or two thousand pounds of skills from the big leaders and began to study the word optimization in depth, and gave a unique definition to operation: operation is based on projects, with a starting point and an end point, and the key word is optimization variables. In other words, the operation needs to find the key problems that affect the performance of the final business objectives through data analysis, and then find the key variables (related variables or causal variables), establish projects and coordinate the superior forces such as products and technologies to overcome this problem. Ideally, all variables that affect key business indicators are frequency-modulated to appropriate gears, and finally combined to achieve the purpose of automatic and efficient business operation.

This is my operational definition based on my professional background and years of practical operation and observation.

With this definition of operation, have you found that in our concept, there is no inheritance and continuation of love, but the project has a beginning and an end (see below).

What is a retained user?

We continue to analyze the second definition to retain users.

Let's start with the conclusion. What do I understand as a retained user? It is a surprise moment when you have discovered the product, and regard your product as an indispensable hardcore user group in daily life.

For simple understanding, let me give an example from real life.

When you meet a beautiful woman or a handsome guy, you will ponder Racine: When you meet for the first time, leave a message on WeChat.

Then you take the user as the center every day, deliberately guide TA to discover your good, change from a weak relationship to a love relationship, and then go to the Civil Affairs Bureau for a candlelight night.

After obtaining the permit, the seas run dry and the rocks crumble. At this time, TA is your real retained user, and the probability of loss is very small, so it will be a lifetime life cycle.

The question is, how can we maintain this century of harmony?

The answer is keep it.

If you want to never leave (divorce), think about it, by these routines? Three parts water, seven parts solid? By daily means?

In marriage life, the daily necessities are real, and we can only polish and iterate the relationship between husband and wife by product thinking. What the operator can do is to analyze the reasons when the husband and wife run away from home, make a memory, make a confession, engage in a youthful and nostalgic activity, and try to pull TA back into the pool of marriage to help the product extend its life cycle.

Therefore, if you understand what the real retained users are, you will understand why the operation can't be retained. Operation can transform you into a new house of civil affairs bureau, but it can't achieve a hundred-year effect.

Well, after understanding what is operation and what is retaining users, let's briefly explain the three responsibilities of operators through AARRR model, which will open your mind.

Three responsibilities of operators

Look at a picture first:

Interpretation: According to AARRR model, the division of responsibilities, acquisition, activation and income stages are the main battlefields of operation. In the retention stage, the products go into battle and the operation is miscellaneous.

//Racine

Racine is easy to understand: bait to attract traffic through positioning, delivery and creativity.

In the new stage, there is a word to be deeply remembered, and that is cost control.

The first sentence when we met in Racine was: How much will it cost you to get 1 users? The boss likes employees who spend little money to do big things best. Spending a little money is the channel cost, and doing big things is the order of target users (note that this is the target users). Put the two indicators there and the new colleagues will start working. Although Racine's classmates spend money like water, they dance in chains. To make matters worse, most of Racine's colleagues even saved the task of cost control, because they didn't give you the cost at all and let you steal it empty-handed, which was terrible.

How to pull the new, simply say my understanding.

1, channel screening is actually a positioning relationship. For example, if my surname is Han and your surname is Han, you will find this relationship; Your name is Li Han, and I'm Li Han. Surprisingly, our names are twins and you are my brother. All of a sudden, we drew closer and established a strong relationship.

2, the design process, the profound meaning of innovation lies in new words. Many people try to pull new things, but they just cheat users, regardless of their lives. This is wrong and completely kpi-oriented. When I was making a new design for the small secret circle, the most complicated process design was the content of the article. My article is very long, and I have written more than 10000 words these days. In my plan, if you can read my article from head to toe, I think you are my core fan and will not lose weight after joining the small circle. I put throttling in a new link, saving me the cost of recalling silent users. Therefore, the essence of new words is new retained users, not new traffic. When calculating the cost, you can't use UV, registered users, etc. Instead, it is based on retaining users.

3. Self-help innovation is a new concept, and there are two methods. When doing online education, I built my own cps system. Those individual webmasters or community owners who have the desire to realize cash only need to register on the platform and get a promotion code. When I monitor that user A is you, I will give you a high commission, fully arouse the desire of small and medium-sized webmasters to realize cash, and the conversion rate of users is also high. The other is the popular sharing recommendation (circulated in AARRR). This is the lowest cost strategy for the new session at present. Through good content or word of mouth, let users share it and open up a new lifeline. Of course, sharing and innovation are generally done in the pool of retained users.

//conversion

What is transformation? Transition the user from one state to another.

In daily life, I like to make trouble. I want to make my son cry and let him release the study pressure in kindergarten. What should I do? I ate all the snacks directly in front of my son, chanting delicious, delicious, and my son was transformed by me on the spot and cried.

Transformation is divided into big transformation and small transformation. Great transformation is the transformation of the ultimate goal of products. Such as daily work, clinch a deal, etc. Minor renovations are everywhere. Any hierarchical relationship (funnel) can be called transformation, so we should always keep in mind the transformation consciousness when doing operations.

For example, in the activation stage of AARRR, what is the transformation goal? What indicators are used to consider? I have asked some colleagues, basically all of them are to improve the retention rate of the next day and 7 days, and a small number of people look at the retention rate of 30 days. The frequency of users' use varies from product to product. Take me for example, I usually watch news, social networking and reading products every day (reserved for the next day), and video products, such as Tencent video and iQiyi, usually have time to relax and feast my eyes on weekends (reserved for the seventh day). My bank card client was placed on the payday (on the 30th). All married men know that Wang's money was transferred by Ma Rong, just kidding. So in the activation stage, define the activation index according to your product characteristics, and finally turn users into retention pools.

In the revenue stage, the responsibility of operation is still: transformation.

The concept of income is very broad, and everything users do within my intention is income. For example, for UGC products, posting, commenting and praising are all positive behaviors, while complaining and unloading are not positive or revenue. Communication in a narrow sense is sharing and forwarding, and sharing is also a good behavior. Therefore, in order to explain the AARRR model in this article, I put communication after income, not just executing it.

So, in the revenue phase, what is the goal of operation? Taking social apps as an example, there are generally two major events: transformation into a communication ambassador (aiming at low-cost innovation) and transformation into daily work.

1, communication, operation When doing communication, we often make a mistake, that is, we can't choose the target users well, that is, we have to choose which users to focus on, so as to maximize the communication effect.

For example, making a fuss about the number of forwards, we will have users forwarding at each stage mentioned above. A new user just installed the APP and found a good article in it, so he forwarded it. Generalized communication is more complicated, and communication is word of mouth. It is necessary to continuously accumulate value in the hearts of users in order to generate a large-scale good reputation, and users will take it orally when they are convinced. Therefore, in order to achieve high conversion rate, we should focus on retaining users (once again remind the definition of retaining users), rather than investing in new users and active users.

2. In daily life, the revenue that most people understand is to make money. E-commerce is well understood, but social products have not achieved users. What is revenue? In reality, what does your boss or leader ask most of you? How much did you do today? How much did the daily work increase yesterday? These words make people nervous and are golden sentences that most operators don't want to hear.

The revenue from most social applications will become DAU revenue. Interested students will monetize their daily work, that is, how much a daily job is worth, which is easier to understand. There is a page monetization function in GA, which is the principle. After all, bosses are interested in money. After DAU monetization, the concept of transformation is naturally understood. DAU is similar to single-order conversion.

//Extend the life cycle

We have learned what retained users are. Once again:

Retained users are those who are interested in your product, find a surprise moment, and often visit it. Strictly speaking, they are not only frequent users, but also active users.

No one in the operation field dares to stand up and tell the boss that retention is not my job, and I dare to compete with KPI. I just said realistically: if the operation can't stay, the product manager is the main force to retain users. The operation here is just to constantly receive orders for products and assist products to do some odd jobs, such as research, dictionary making, copywriting optimization, recall and so on.

At this stage, the goal I set for the operation is to extend the life cycle of users.

As everyone in the industry knows, all products have a life cycle, and WeChat is no exception. Wechat official account products are sluggish. The product life cycle is closely related to the user life cycle. General orthodox Internet companies have an average user life cycle value, such as 100 days and 200 days, so I won't go into details here.

Retained users (please pay attention to my definition of retained users again) are also lost, so in addition to converting a large number of users into retained users in the activation stage, there is another important thing: recall.

Memory is the most exquisite operational wisdom, and it is also a hurdle for ordinary operations to move towards advanced operations. For example, it can do user-level operation, message mechanism (push, SMS, email), activity planning, copywriting strategy and so on. Of course, whether the lost users can be recalled depends on the charm of the product itself, and the operation is also helpless. Operation can only expose products to more users, and intentionally extend the life cycle of users.

In my small circle, many people ask me how to find reliable products when changing jobs. Because the products are reliable, our operation can follow happiness. I usually say: you can let your friends experience it privately for a few days, and then do a disappointment survey. Why should we look at disappointment instead of satisfaction? This is the suggestion of Sean Ellis, the founder of Growth Hacker. He believes that it is better to look at the magic of products and disappointment than satisfaction, and disappointment can better measure user loyalty. He gave a value: 40%, which means you do research and ask users, will you be disappointed if you stop using my product? If 40% of people are very disappointed, then the product is in jeopardy, the growth is in big trouble, and the probability of success is very low. Just like WeChat, if you don't take it out and brush it several times a day, you will be disappointed, so WeChat has the magic of sweeping the world.

Based on the interpretation of the above three parts, I believe that readers have understood my understanding of the operation, which is not necessarily correct, and is drawn from actual combat experience. I am also eager to communicate with you and collide with sparks.

To sum it up.

1. Definition of operation: operation is project-based, with a starting point and an end point, and the key words are tuning variables. In other words, the operation needs to find the key problems that affect the performance of the final business objectives through data analysis, and then find the key variables (related variables or causal variables), establish projects and coordinate the superior forces such as products and technologies to overcome this problem. Ideally, all variables that affect key business indicators are frequency-modulated to appropriate gears, and finally combined to achieve the purpose of automatic and efficient business operation.

2. Definition of retained users: loyal fans of products, those who discover the surprise moment of products and are indispensable and frequently used in daily life. In the user hierarchy, it is independent of the reserved pool.

3. Three responsibilities of operators in 3.AARRR mode:

Innovation: find the channel that is highly matched with the product, design the method of maximizing innovation, and optimize customer acquisition under the condition of controllable cost.

Transformation: constantly do qualitative and quantitative analysis, gain insight, feed back products and R&D, expand the pool of retained users, and transform users through the collaborative efforts of products and operations to maximize business value.