---
title: "What's Next After the Eight Steps of Terminal Visits? Community!"
description: "Channel community management is bound to be the primary means of channel management for brands and distributors in the future. Currently, some forward-thinking brands and distributors have already begun such attempts. 1 What is channel community management? Simply put, it means using social tools like WeChat groups to effectively connect with your customers and consumers, using these connections to activate and effectively manage your customers and target consumers. Marketing, in plain terms, is about getting your customers to sell more of your products, keeping your users using your products, and getting your target consumers to buy more and keep consuming your products."
author: "鲍跃忠"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-04-15"
language: "en"
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# What's Next After the Eight Steps of Terminal Visits? Community!

> Channel community management is bound to be the primary means of channel management for brands and distributors in the future. Currently, some forward-thinking brands and distributors have already begun such attempts. 1 What is channel community management? Simply put, it means using social tools like WeChat groups to effectively connect with your customers and consumers, using these connections to activate and effectively manage your customers and target consumers. Marketing, in plain terms, is about getting your customers to sell more of your products, keeping your users using your products, and getting your target consumers to buy more and keep consuming your products.

Channel community management is bound to be the primary means of channel management for brands and distributors in the future. Currently, some forward-thinking brands and distributors have already begun such attempts.
1**What is channel community management?**
Simply put, it means using social tools like WeChat groups to effectively connect with your customers and consumers, using these connections to activate and effectively manage your customers and target consumers.
Marketing, in plain terms, is about getting your customers to sell more of your products, keeping your users using your products, and getting your target consumers to buy more and keep consuming your products.
How can you achieve such goals? The core lies in two points: **efficiency and trust.**
Efficiency means you first need communication efficiency and promotion efficiency, and then transaction efficiency, or in other words, omnichannel order efficiency and delivery efficiency. Efficiency is an important foundation for achieving marketing goals. Without these efficiencies, especially communication efficiency, you cannot achieve related marketing goals.
Trust means that to achieve good marketing goals, you must make your customers, users, and target consumers trust you. Trust leads to dependence, and with trust and dependence as a foundation, they will help you sell more, keep using your products, and continue consuming your products.
How can trust and dependence be generated? Besides ensuring good product quality, from a marketing management perspective, it's a communication issue. Marketing built on efficient communication, deep communication, and thorough communication can achieve corresponding goals. If communication has problems, marketing will inevitably have problems.
Currently, from the brand's perspective, an in-depth analysis of the main problems in channel marketing, terminal store marketing, and consumer marketing reveals that communication efficiency is low and communication is not thorough.
**Currently, brands' communication in marketing is single-form and has too many layers:**
Most current communication methods are still traditional documents and meetings. Internal business team communication mainly relies on various meetings at different business levels. External communication mostly consists of the annual distributor conference. Although many companies put great effort into making this conference successful, overall, **document and meeting communication is very inefficient.**
Of course, to do marketing well, marketing personnel at all levels are constantly visiting the market, with the main purpose of solving communication problems with customers. However, due to time and cost constraints, the number of customer visits marketing personnel can achieve is limited. Even frontline salespeople, **under the traditional visit model, have very low visit efficiency.**
Up to now, most brands' communication is limited to the distributor level, with little communication to terminal retail stores. Communication at the terminal retail store level is mainly delegated to distributors. However, due to limitations in capability, personnel, and the interest mechanism between distributors and brands, there are many problems in their communication with terminals.
In management theory, there is a basic principle about communication: each additional communication layer reduces information by 30%. So, imagine what happens to information from senior brand management as it passes through layers of teams and distributors, eventually reaching terminal stores.
For distributors, and also for brands like Coca-Cola that operate markets and take orders themselves, relying solely on salespeople visiting stores is very inefficient. First, salespeople must complete a set number of visits daily, limiting time per store. Second, a small store faces many salespeople and doesn't have the mood to communicate fully with each.
It must be clear: if marketing communication is insufficient, problems will arise, trust cannot be effectively established, and without basic trust, business cooperation will inevitably face many obstacles.
Therefore, the key to solving marketing efficiency is to solve communication problems. Improving communication efficiency will greatly enhance marketing capabilities. Implementing channel community management will significantly change marketing communication efficiency.
2**Brands and distributors need to plan channel community management from two aspects**
It should be said that communication has always been a major issue affecting the marketing capabilities of brands and distributors, including internal and external communication, B2B and B2C communication.
If communication effectiveness can be changed, a company's marketing capabilities will definitely improve significantly.
Objectively, there are many difficulties in solving communication problems: markets are dispersed, teams are scattered, and there are numerous distribution customers at all levels, more terminal users, and more consumer groups.
Especially in the era without internet connection tools, companies lacked technical support to effectively communicate with customers and users, let alone consumers.
However, the current internet, especially mobile internet connections, has provided technical support to effectively solve this key issue affecting marketing capabilities—communication.
Mobile connections are a major issue that companies must study carefully. Connections will bring about changes in marketing efficiency in the short term, and in the long term, they will reconstruct new marketing models, including marketing management models.
Currently, mobile connections can help companies improve marketing efficiency in three aspects:
1\. Technical connection: That is, through online trading platforms, establish connections with B-end customers, even C-end consumers. Connections can significantly improve transaction efficiency and ultimately enhance marketing capabilities.
Current B2B, or channel digitalization, uses online transactions and online customer connections to significantly change transaction efficiency.
Some companies also use one-item-one-code or mini-programs to establish connections with consumers, effectively improving marketing efficiency for consumers.
2\. Community connection: The development of mobile social platforms like WeChat, DingTalk, and QQ has provided companies with community-based connection methods with users, customers, and even consumers.
With the development of these mobile social platforms, more and more people are gradually forming a mobile social lifestyle. Moreover, this mobile social approach is gradually forming new social characteristics of stratification.
Companies need to use these community connections to establish links with customers and even consumers, improving communication efficiency and effectively solving long-standing marketing communication problems.
3\. Content connection: The content connection methods generated by the current mobile communication environment provide companies with another effective tool to connect with B-end customers and even C-end consumers. Companies can use content connections to establish links with B-end customers and C-end consumers, connecting your customers and target consumers to content platforms like WeChat Official Accounts and Douyin.
The important value of content connection is: **finding users (customers, consumers), establishing connections, and creating impact.**
Currently, innovative brands like Jiangxiaobai's official account have gathered over a million followers, who can basically be defined as target users. Their pushed content usually gets over 100,000 reads, and through comments, they can interact strongly with target consumers.
Brands must pay attention to these three new connection methods and use them to effectively solve marketing efficiency problems.
**Establishing your own digital distribution platform and achieving channel digital connection is a distribution model change that brands must make as soon as possible.** There should be no more hesitation. Without channel digitalization, your channel marketing efficiency cannot fundamentally change.
Content connection is also a marketing change that companies must attach great importance to. Don't treat it merely as a simple marketing promotion tool. Content connection can become an important platform for connecting customers and consumers. Especially for companies promoting consumer connections, content connection is one of the important means. Combine content connection with transaction connection to achieve the fission marketing effect of using content to drive transactions and spreading content through transactions.
In the mobile social environment, companies' marketing management must achieve channel community management. "Don't look down on it, and don't fail to understand it."
From the perspective of brands and distributors, achieving channel community management requires planning from two directions:
**First, plan from the perspective of strengthening channel management and improving channel marketing efficiency:** Channels must be connected. The more effective the connection, the more likely communication efficiency problems in channel marketing can be solved.
Community methods are a very effective communication channel. Whether WeChat groups or DingTalk groups, they can produce such effective communication. Mobile group communication can be anytime, anywhere, and is two-way interactive, allowing full communication. Moreover, group communication can use video, images, text, voice, etc., to produce better communication effects.
More importantly, group communication breaks previous management boundaries, enabling full-chain communication across the entire marketing system.
Of course, many companies have established many internal communication groups. From the perspective of improving marketing efficiency, companies should pay more attention to building a full-chain communication system that leverages overall marketing effectiveness. Use this boundary-breaking community communication to drive overall marketing capability improvement.
**Second, plan from the perspective of strengthening brand communication and marketing communication to effectively promote brand sell-through:** The new mobile communication methods and community-based communication environment have changed previous marketing communication methods. Marketing communication is gradually moving from mass communication to niche communication, from big media to small media, and from enterprise-led self-communication to other-communication that can produce communication fission.
In this transformation, communities play a very important role. In a community environment, community communication is a very important communication method. At the same time, good community operations can produce stronger fission communication effects.
Therefore, in the process of channel community construction, companies should plan from both channel management and marketing communication aspects, and balance both.
3**How can brands and distributors achieve channel community management?**
Currently, brands and distributors need to use community-based connections to effectively improve channel communication efficiency, enhance channel management effectiveness, and improve channel marketing capabilities. At the same time, they should leverage community communication energy to promote brand communication and marketing communication, maximizing brand sell-through.
To achieve the above marketing goals, brands and distributors should establish a B2B2B2C community matrix for channel community management.
**That is, establish a community matrix for distributors at all levels focused on management communication; a community matrix for different terminal stores aimed at activation; and a community matrix for target consumers, especially those who can connect with seed users, centered on communication.**
**Regarding communities for distributors:**
Many companies already have such communities, but their roles vary greatly in actual operations.
If we define communities as a very effective management tool in the mobile social environment, then companies need to establish a community management matrix for different distributors. Not just first-level distributors, but also community management matrices for different distributors at all levels of the distribution chain.
Doing well in distributor communities depends on the company's decision-makers' positioning of the group. To maximize the group's role, companies need to redefine the group from an auxiliary management tool to a primary management tool, upgrading from individual behavior of sales personnel to a unified company action, and incorporating it into the marketing management system.
Distributor groups can produce two major effects: **First, effectively solve communication efficiency problems** by using groups to solve communication efficiency, breadth, and depth issues in marketing. **Second, generate important value in activating distributors.** In a group environment, relevant means can effectively activate distributors, giving them greater vitality and confidence, and better promoting market development.
Doing well in distributor groups depends on the company's main decision-makers. They must personally participate, even personally create groups. Groups can become the best platform for main decision-makers to understand market information, strengthen relationships with distributors, and exert management energy.
From a management perspective, groups can effectively reduce management layers, or at least reduce communication layers. You can use the group platform to spread your views and ideas more deeply to distributors and teams.
The most terrible thing is: **if you create a group and the boss is in it but only lurks and never speaks, such a group will hardly create greater value.**
**Regarding the community matrix for terminal stores:**
This is the focus of channel community construction for brands and distributors.
Establishing a community matrix for terminal stores should focus on leveraging the community's connection function, ideally integrating technical connection, community connection, and content connection. Use technical connection to build the basic architecture for connecting terminals, community connection to enhance the warmth and efficiency of connections, and content connection as the lubricant and booster for terminal connections.
If a company hasn't yet established technical connections, it can first establish community connections to improve communication and communication efficiency, compensating for defects in traditional marketing models and transaction methods.
For companies that have already established content connection platforms, gradually import customers connected to content platforms into community connections, further improving connection efficiency through communities.
The main goals for brands and distributors in establishing a community matrix for terminal stores are: **First, achieve connection with terminal stores, solving the disconnection between brands, distributors, and terminal stores due to lack of connection in previous business activities**, turning it into a real-time online, real-time in-group relationship. Through this real-time connection, effectively improve communication efficiency, eliminate marketing obstacles, and enhance marketing effectiveness. **Second, activate terminal stores.** Use connections to effectively activate terminal stores, enhance their awareness of the brand, and use relevant means to effectively activate their motivation to promote the brand and products. **Third, improve communication effectiveness.** A terminal store is a community center. Terminal community communication will bring very significant communication value to the brand.
**To operate a community matrix for terminal stores well, grasp three points:**
> **Creating groups:**
Creating good groups is the foundation for operating communities well.
For terminal store groups, the main body should be regional markets, with each salesperson's service area as the basic scope. The goal is to achieve full community coverage of the entire terminal market.
When creating groups, **distinguish customer types, customer sizes, the closeness of customer relationships with the company, and customer management attributes.** Pull customers of the same type, similar size, similar relationship closeness, and similar future growth management attributes into one group.
Group size should not be too large, especially for business activity groups. Don't pursue 500 people. Practice has shown that groups of around 200 people are best for management, maintenance, and activity.
Groups should be established with the company as the main body to avoid management chaos due to personnel turnover. Groups cannot become private resources of sales personnel.
Groups generally should include the salesperson and their two levels of superiors. Groups are mainly maintained by salespeople, but generally, a dedicated group administrator should be responsible for overall community matrix management.
> **Activation:**
After creating groups, the most important action in group operations is how to activate group members, i.e., your target customers, with the ultimate goal being that group members develop high trust and high dependence on the brand and company, and can convert this trust and dependence into actual business operations.
The goal of activation is to increase the activity of target customers.
**Seven activation principles:**
1\. Emotional activation: A group must be a space for emotions. Groups largely convey emotions. Use groups to compensate for the emotional connection between the company and target customers, effectively solving the emotional connection between the company, an emotionless "legal person," and natural persons rich in emotions.
Groups should emphasize emotions and use emotions to connect with terminal customers.
In a group environment, first use emotions to narrow the social distance between the company and target customers.
If you don't emphasize emotions and maintain a "hard" selling relationship, you lose the important significance of creating groups and the value of channel community management.
2\. Product and promotion activation: Channel community management for terminal stores must ultimately be closely integrated with your product operations.
What kind of product information and promotion information is suitable for groups? It must combine the needs of B-end users: how to create topics, how to generate member resonance, and how to create explosive effects.
For B-end users, they focus on product selling points, how to drive sell-through, and prices and related policies.
In a group environment, combine B-end customer characteristics, integrate products and promotions with relevant content and communication methods, and use content to make products and promotions more understandable and operable. Use different communication methods (short videos) to increase customer attention, enabling the best effect of activation and continuous amplification of communication.
3\. Content activation: To activate group members, content communication is very important. Choose appropriate communication content based on B-end group member characteristics. Good content can act as a binder, lubricant, and amplifier.
Currently, there are many ways to create content, including graphics and text, and short videos. Especially short videos, their communication effect is very important.
Activation: KOL marketing refers to social media marketing communication behaviors involving KOLs, combining the advantages of group communication and mass communication. Its marketing value is very important in a community environment.
Brands should attach great importance to the value of KOLs in community marketing.
Combine community operations to cultivate your own KOLs: product experts, terminal retail experts, marketing experts, so they gradually play an important influential role in the community.
Use industry KOLs: based on customer needs, gradually introduce industry KOLs into relevant, especially key customer groups, such as new marketing experts, new retail experts, brand marketing experts, including brand endorsers, so they closely integrate with your community operations and leverage their value.
4\. Activity activation: Continuously organize various innovative activities, including integrating community activities with various offline activities.
In community operations, companies must combine actual business needs, organize more marketing innovation activities, and use activities to activate group customers.
Especially combine in-group activities with products and promotions, using groups to ignite and detonate activities, and through related product and promotion activities, further activate small stores.
5\. Red packet activation: Red packets are an important function set by the WeChat platform to activate group members. Use red packets scientifically and effectively. When to send, how much to send? You must design a set of rules.
Especially combine the actual situation of the group, closely integrate red packet activation with strengthening group member relationships, and combine red packets with your marketing activities.
6\. Mini-program activation: Mini-programs are WeChat's innovative technical tool for establishing connections, activating group members, and generating greater marketing value.
Mini-programs can generate systematic marketing value in a group environment.
To establish channel community management, companies should actively promote the application of mini-programs, making them play a more important marketing role in the channel community environment.
It's best to start from establishing connections, using mini-programs to achieve online connection with target customers, making mini-programs the main means of connecting customers.
After connecting, how to introduce related marketing actions? Companies need to configure appropriate online marketing platforms. Such online marketing platforms can establish more functions to meet online transactions, online marketing, and other needs.
In an online marketing environment, companies' marketing concepts and methods need adjustment. Marketing concepts should gradually shift to how to increase target customer activity, increase order frequency, and generate more effective repurchases as the main marketing goals.
There are many ways to activate, and more effective methods will be innovated in the future.
> **Operations:**
Although a group is a very loose organization, doing it well requires a complete set of management rules.
Choosing a good group administrator is very important. Observing many group management cases, a conclusion emerges: not everyone can manage groups. Many people lack social management capabilities, and many salespeople also can't manage groups.
This person must have strong social skills, especially the ability to manage acquaintances and semi-acquaintances, and the ability to turn strangers into acquaintances. They should be enthusiastic, meticulous, thoughtful, and have a certain style.
Groups must establish rules: groups without rules will definitely not do well.
Groups must determine themes: group communication should revolve around the theme. Try not to deviate too far from the group's theme.
Groups should establish daily, weekly, and monthly operations, promotion, and activity plans, keeping the overall group operation in planned change and innovation.
Facing the era of 5,000 friends, and more and more groups, doing groups well requires special attention: strive to create value for members and minimize disturbance from junk information.
Groups should be adjusted regularly. First, through group operations, gradually screen out valuable customers and optimize them into the company's VIP value customer group. Second, through appropriate adjustments, enhance the group's value and increase activity.
**Regarding the community matrix for target consumers:**
Establishing channel community management, for large brand manufacturers, not only requires community coverage of B-end users but also community marketing for C-end consumers.
For large brand manufacturers, facing hundreds of millions of consumers, it's currently impossible to achieve overall community coverage. However, from a communication perspective, capture relevant seed users, first achieve community building for seed users, leverage their important role in the community communication environment, and promote enterprise marketing development.
Therefore, for large brands, establishing a C-end community matrix mainly aims to use current community communication methods to promote brand and marketing communication.
In the current stratified and community-based communication environment, seed users and KOLs have very important communication value. A seed user or KOL can produce 1*1000 effective communication value.
**Establishing C-end consumer groups can be carried out at two levels:**
Enterprise level: First, through content platforms, import highly active users on the enterprise content platform, who are basically iron fans, into communities, gradually cultivating them as seed users. Second, gradually import industry KOLs who pay special attention to the brand into the enterprise's seed users to help with communication. Currently, innovative brands like Jiangxiaobai and Lidu attach great importance to the communication value of KOLs and seed users. They have established a set of communication systems supporting seed users, saving communication costs and bringing very good communication effects.
Grassroots team level: Combine local market characteristics and actual company conditions to establish related seed user and KOL groups. Gather local seed users and KOLs with certain community influence and communication capabilities into your community, such as group-buying leaders, mom group leaders, square dance organizers, fitness coaches, taekwondo coaches, senior nannies, and famous chefs. These people can produce very important communication value.
For these seed users, companies should use various means to form a mechanism of cultural identity, brand recognition, and interest driving, enabling them to have a strong desire for active and voluntary communication.
Companies should provide them with systematic and rich communication content.
At the same time, facing the current development trends of terminal retail stores and various social communities, companies also need to leverage various third-party communities and use various community communication methods to do brand and marketing communication well.
In summary, channel community management is an innovation in channel management that must be made in the current mobile internet environment. Brands and distributors must act quickly.
**-END-**


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