How can paint companies achieve sustainable and stable development?

According to media reports, insiders from Tencent revealed that the number of WeChat users has surpassed 600 million! WeChat's overseas business may develop independently. Earlier this year, in my article "WeChat: The Silent Evolution After 300 Million Users," I predicted that the number of WeChat users would exceed 500 million by the end of this year (excluding overseas users). Currently, the number of domestic WeChat users has reached about 450 million, so surpassing 500 million by the end of the year is not a problem (its overseas users should be around 160 million).

That's enough for the overview; now let's get to the point. Recently, I've seen many marketing agencies promoting WeChat marketing online, mentioning that WeChat is a low-cost, quick-effect, and easily spreadable marketing model, which is a marketing channel with small investment and high returns. This is almost the same situation as when Sina Weibo first emerged, as if anyone who doesn't engage in WeChat lacks marketing awareness.

Indeed, there are many successful cases of WeChat marketing now, such as Durex, Starbucks, Logic Thinking, and Shifeike. Of course, the models of these cases are not something every company can imitate. Let's look at our e-commerce, such as "Camel Shoes," "Jiyang," and "Handu Clothing," where WeChat is very suitable for e-commerce, perfectly aligning with the development of mobile internet. Users log into Taobao on the PC internet, purchase products, then follow WeChat, which regularly promotes new products, allowing users to place repeat orders through WeChat. This closed loop is a marketing model that aligns very well with ROI and allows for accurate KPI setting, so it can operate very smoothly.

Now, let's look at the situation in the traditional paint industry. The paint industry mainly completes sales through distributors or engineering channels, and the current proportion of e-commerce channels can be ignored. Moreover, WeChat is very suitable for fast-moving consumer goods, but for paint products, which are used in renovations, it cannot fulfill the task of repeat sales, making it very difficult for it to adopt an e-commerce model.

Some marketing agencies even recommend tools like drift bottles, shake to shake, and location signatures. If these are done in cooperation with WeChat and can be completed through the backend, that would be acceptable. However, if it relies on offline personnel, it would be better to have them distribute flyers, as the efficiency is too low. For a company facing the entire country, this method is indeed too inefficient.

Many people treat WeChat as a tool for promoting information, sending out corporate news or jokes from time to time. But WeChat is not like Weibo; its information dissemination effect is very low, the cost of forwarding is high, and it is difficult to achieve a user coverage of millions through the forwarding of Weibo influencers like on Sina Weibo. Moreover, a significant characteristic of the paint industry in promotion is "low attention." Who would casually look at the design of a paint bucket or see what activities a paint company is doing? Consumers will only complete the entire process from awareness to purchase within 1 to 3 months when they need renovations, and the next purchase may not happen for another 6 or 7 years. This creates a significant problem for information pushing: what information should be pushed to them?

WeChat's father, Zhang Xiaolong, once said, "How you use WeChat determines what WeChat is to you." So how should the paint industry position WeChat?

1. Information acquisition tool

The conventional thinking of marketers is to push the right content to the right users. Now, let's rethink this: let the right users acquire the right content themselves.

Custom replies are a very interesting feature of WeChat, similar to the custom replies of corporate QQ customer service. Users can obtain specified content by replying to designated keywords, turning it into the company's mobile customer service. When users are browsing the building materials market, they can obtain information such as addresses, phone numbers, activities, and products of paint brand specialty stores through WeChat. This can carry more content than our flyers and outdoor advertisements. This way, users do not need to log onto the official website or check materials; they can easily obtain the information they need by sending a few keywords, shortening the time for users to acquire information and allowing them to understand the company's information more deeply.

2. Social CRM

Many paint companies want to implement CRM systems, but due to our traditional model, customer data is mostly in the hands of distributors. The composition and preferences of users are mainly obtained through experience, lacking data support. However, with the emergence of WeChat, this situation will change. After users follow WeChat, they become WeChat members, and through a CRM plugin (which needs to be developed by a specialized technology company), each follower can be tagged and categorized. This forms a dynamic social CRM, allowing us to constantly monitor user changes and maintain users. With this dynamic CRM, we can conduct customer research and user structure surveys that were previously difficult to achieve.

3. Quick and efficient after-sales service

WeChat seems to inherently carry the gene for after-sales service. The after-sales issues in the paint industry have long been criticized. After users complain to distributors without results, they may turn to Weibo, forums, or even news media to complain. This undoubtedly causes significant harm to the brand. WeChat's one-on-one interface, along with its convenient text, image, and video transmission functions, is undoubtedly a QQ customer service on mobile. Users can send text descriptions, photos, and videos of problematic products to the paint company's WeChat, and then the manufacturer's after-sales department coordinates to resolve the issue, eliminating the cumbersome processes of reporting repairs, having a technician check, and then reporting back. A single WeChat message can complete the process. When the user experience improves, the brand gains a good reputation.

WeChat has many possibilities, but that's all for now. As for how WeChat should push content to users, I haven't elaborated much because content marketing has been discussed extensively. Moreover, for traditional, low-attention companies like paint, it is not advisable to push too much content; marketing is not just about pushing information to users.