Douyin 618 marketing strategy in 2022!

Written in front

It is already the beginning of May, and this year's 618 promotion is just around the corner. Lao Zhao plans to talk to you through this article about how to play Douyin 618 this year. He hopes to help brands achieve growth during the mid-year promotion node through some refined operational details.

1. Several judgments on brand Douyin 618 marketing in 2022

To be honest, from the perspective of brand operation, I wish my competitors would not participate in this year’s Douyin 618 marketing . The reason is simple. As a major marketing node throughout the year, the role of 618 in brand growth cannot be ignored, not to mention the official support of Douyin. Lao Zhao will talk to you about why brands should do Douyin 618 marketing from two levels: market environment and brand strategy.

1.1 Judging from the market environment

From the perspective of the overall market environment, on Double Eleven last year, major platforms no longer announced transaction data, and it became an industry consensus that the growth of big promotions had peaked. Live streaming/subsidies have actually become normalized, but we cannot deny that big promotion nodes such as 618/Double Eleven still exist in the minds of users.

Secondly, brands are facing tremendous growth pressure this year, and seeking incremental business is a long-term need for brands. How to gain incremental sales during major marketing events such as 618 is a compulsory course for brands. If nothing is done during the major marketing event of 618, then we have reason to believe that this brand really has no growth budget.

Third, although on the surface everyone is shouting that they want to take advantage of 618, who knows whether competitors are secretly making efforts. If a brand does not prepare actively, but its competitors do, it will be too late to regret after missing the deadline. To take a step back, even if your competitors are not prepared and you are, you can really be happy. Not only will the pressure of traffic competition be much smaller, but you will also inevitably leave your competitors behind in terms of sales and gain the upper hand. Why not do it? Brand operations should often do the opposite.

Fourth, affected by the special period, delivery will become a negative force for major marketing nodes, but it can be overcome through operational means.

1.2 Judging from the brand’s strategic direction

From the perspective of brand strategy, we determine whether to participate in 618 from the following perspectives.

1) Is the brand’s strategic goal to seek growth or stability? If you are looking for growth, there is no reason to give up one of the most important marketing nodes of the year; if you are looking for stability and have no pursuit of growth, then you can indeed choose not to do it;

2) Brands should review their overall sales and brand presence in the first quarter. If they are not ideal, they should make efforts in the second quarter, and 618 is a very good opportunity to make efforts.

3) Have you prepared the best-selling products, potential best-selling products and supplementary products in the ratio of 3:6:1? If the production plan is well arranged, it is better to use the 618 shopping promotion to boost the inventory instead of just sitting there;

4) Compared with the situation of last year's Double 11, the situation of last year's Double 11 is likely to be similar to that of this year's 618. If the situation of last year's Double 11 was good, the situation of this year's 618 should not be too bad;

5) Count the sales share of each existing sales channel. If the Douyin channel ranks first in terms of both total volume and growth rate, participating in the Douyin 618 marketing is a very good choice;

2. Global thinking on how brands can play with Douyin 618 marketing

If you choose to participate in this year's Douyin 618 node event, Lao Zhao recommends that brands think deeply about two major issues from a global perspective. The first issue is what pain points were encountered when participating in previous major node events; the second issue is how to formulate a strategy to deal with it.

2.1 Pain points encountered by brands at major marketing nodes

Let’s first talk about the problems that brands usually encounter during major events like Douyin’s 618 event.

1) It will be more difficult to obtain traffic. Both natural traffic and commercial traffic will face competition from many competitors. When e-commerce traffic is limited, it will naturally be more difficult to obtain.

2) Whether it is live broadcast or short video, even the best content will face unstable natural traffic and competition for commercial traffic;

3) Compared with the normal sales month, the traffic cost is significantly higher;

4) Brands do not know how to obtain official support and miss out on event benefits;

5) The brand's front-end operations and back-end production are not matched. If you stock too much, you are afraid that you can't sell it; if you stock too little, you are afraid that you can't ship it.

6) Brands are not clear about the marketing rhythm of Douyin's 618 promotion, and are not clear about when to focus on promotion and when to focus on conversion;

The above pain points are common problems encountered when doing large-node marketing on the Douyin platform. Lao Zhao will give you some suggestions from 5 major aspects.

2.2 Five strategies for brands to respond

Lao Zhao suggests that brands address the pain points mentioned above from five aspects: crowd strategy, content strategy, product strategy, delivery strategy and event strategy, so that they can complete a large node event relatively perfectly and achieve growth.

2.2.1 Crowd Strategy

Crowd strategy is first and foremost the starting point of all marketing strategies. Before carrying out node planning, brands must first clarify the composition of crowd assets within the Douyin system and conduct a crowd asset inventory through the massive cloud map tool. The picture below is a diagram of the core groups of a leading brand in the skin care industry during the 618 period last year. Blue-collar workers, small town youth, and Generation Z were the original target groups defined by the brand. After using Cloud Map Insights, it was found that emerging white-collar workers, sophisticated mothers, and senior middle-class people have become the groups with high transaction conversion rates that can break the circle.

Secondly, according to the current composition of population assets, we need to do a good job of breaking down the population related to GMV, how much GMV each population will generate, how much difference there is in the number of each population, and what methods can be used to fill the gap in population assets;

Third, use the massive cloud map tool to detect the penetration of the 5A population, determine the effectiveness of the delivery action, and adjust the delivery rhythm in different periods.

2.2.2 Content Strategy

Content strategy is an extension of crowd strategy. The type of content determines the type of crowd attracted, which in turn determines the changes in crowd assets. It is a very reasonable strategy to determine the content direction through user insights, test the content repeatedly, and understand the user's feedback on the product and content. At the same time, in order to reduce the cost of content production, it is necessary to disassemble and reuse high-quality content.

Here are some criteria for judging the quality of content:

1) Is the character unique: expressive, sharp-tongued, different, memorable, etc., such as Han Moujuan;

2) Script creation ability: vertical content is professional, non-vertical content is interesting;

3) The products have a very strong memory point: good products mean good content;

4) Strong scenes attract users: there is a strong sense of involvement;

In addition, it is important to note that brands should pay attention to new content appearing on the platform. During the 618 period, the platform launched investment IP, with new content, deep interaction and full links as the core, to amplify the brand's potential and promote brand sales explosion.

2.2.3 Product Strategy

Product strategy is the implementation of crowd strategy. Brands need to think about what kind of products are more compatible with the target population and truly prepare for product implementation from the perspective of finding people with goods. This requires brands to conduct a detailed analysis of sub-categories and determine how to prepare products based on dimensions such as sales volume, growth rate, price range, sense of value, memorable points, and intensity of competition.

Last year, a brand in the skin care industry solved the problem of matching people and goods very well through a massive cloud map. During the event, a brand in the skin care industry conducted insights into the 5A population, product circulation analysis, and live broadcast influencer selection analysis, and conducted insights into the core population and opportunity population from the two dimensions of population attributes and categories. It conducted an in-depth analysis of the products based on the 90-day average CTR&CVR to find the brand's best-selling products, potential best-selling products, and problematic products. By adjusting the product inventory, the number of people in the live broadcast room increased by 1.5 times compared to usual days.

If you don't have such strong data capabilities, another important method is product testing. Brands should use live broadcasts and short videos in the average-selling months to preliminarily determine which products are hot-selling products and which are potential hot-selling products. Based on the test results, they can prepare goods relatively accurately, giving themselves more confidence.

The second product strategy that brands need to consider during the 618 period is the production time node and replenishment cycle, which must be smoothly matched and connected with the front-end operation to prevent insufficient goods and too late production.

2.2.4 Delivery Strategy

Big events like Douyin 618 are inseparable from the expansion of the business model. The quality of the delivery strategy is the key to big-node marketing. The delivery strategy should be considered from two aspects:

1) Brands can amplify their business models through business domain traffic, amplify content potential through buying content promotion, obtain more accurate traffic through buying bidding ads, and ensure exposure of their products by buying brand ads;

2) Brands use influencers’ traffic to complete marketing activities; on the one hand, they need influencers’ endorsement to improve conversion rates, and on the other hand, influencers can indeed help brands achieve certain sales. Therefore, when it comes to selecting influencers, brands must have a clear method to verify the influencer’s content capabilities, and at the same time finalize their schedules as early as possible to avoid the embarrassment of the influencer’s schedule being unavailable when the event begins.

2.2.5 Activity Strategy

Event strategy is a very important part in helping brands reduce costs and gain profits. There is a huge difference between having official support and not having official support. However, the prerequisite is that you need to know in advance what official support is available and how to obtain it. For example, during the 618 period of Douyin this year, there was corresponding support from live streaming to short videos, from small shops to platform tools. For example, Juliang Qianchuan provided tens of millions of red envelope subsidies and tens of billions of sales traffic subsidies. You must try your best to get these supporting brands, talk more with the corresponding KA sales to learn about the policies, and determine how to obtain them.

To sum up, Lao Zhao recommends that brands achieve refined operations from five dimensions: refined crowd operations, high-quality products, refined content operations, refined delivery and efficient conversion.

3. Implementation details of brands’ 618 marketing on Douyin

Earlier we talked about the five major strategies for dealing with Douyin’s 618 marketing. Now let’s talk about the execution details of each time node during Douyin’s 618 to provide a reference for each brand.

3.1 Preheating period of breaking the circle

The first important stage is the preheating period for breaking the circle. The normal operation of the brand is to start preparing for the major node of 618 in April.

Brands should pay attention to the following details during the preheating period:

1) During this period, brands should test content and products in all aspects. You can start content testing and product testing through Bytedance Cloud Map or through Bytedance Star Map influencers with whom you have had relatively smooth cooperation in the past, in order to run through the content model. At the same time, you can test out hot products and potential hot products through brand self-broadcasting, influencer live broadcasting, and short video content, in preparation for subsequent business expansion. The key to testing content and products is the selection of Bytedance Star Map influencers. Based on the target population, you should choose influencers with appropriate content and who are suitable for recommending or selling products, and select several marketing dimensions for testing. Pay attention to the traffic difference between the influencer's commercial and non-commercial ads, the recent traffic trends, the types of products the influencer has promoted in the past, and the crowd portraits. These details are very important.

2) It is necessary to utilize the materials from the cooperation with a large number of star map experts multiple times, rather than simply cooperating once. Because it is not easy to produce high-quality content. When brands are doing advertising, on the one hand, they need to amplify the sales brought by the high-quality content of influencer marketing, and on the other hand, they need to accumulate materials and potential groups for subsequent effect optimization;

3) The third detail is to lock in the influencer’s schedule in advance and purchase brand advertising in advance. It is necessary to determine the delivery strategy as early as possible to prevent the failure to purchase brand advertising and lack of influencers to choose in the future;

4) The criteria for selecting influencers are generally based on six dimensions: influencer attributes, content production level, commercial capabilities, fan portraits, growth trends, and service capabilities.

• Influencer attributes: Brand owners can clearly identify influencer attributes based on the 26 vertical categories and 166 sub-categories of Juliang Star Map to evaluate the correlation and match between brands and influencers.

• Content production level: completion rate, interaction rate, median number of plays of daily and commercial content, and account update frequency;

• Business capabilities: CPM (cost per thousand views), shopping cart click-through rate, GPM (growth per thousand views), store entry cost (suitable for driving traffic from Douyin to Maodian), and previous product categories;

• Fan portrait: proportion of heavy fans, mobile phone models used (representing purchasing power), age (representing purchasing power), city distribution, gender ratio, etc.;

• Growth trend: whether followers are increasing or decreasing, and the stage of the account (growth stage or maturity stage);

• Service capabilities: Check the fulfillment credit rate in advance, and make a comprehensive assessment based on the influencer’s platform credit score and the number of customer reviews to ensure that the influencer can complete the cooperation on time and in quantity.

5) Pay attention to whether the platform has new ways of playing, such as IP cooperation, and find out how it works in advance;

Through the above operational details, the core goal of the brand is to improve the overall 5A population, and convert more opportunity groups into A1~A3 groups (people who are aware of the brand, have a good impression of the brand and interact with the brand) through the huge number of star map influencers and brand advertising.

3.2 Water storage and grass planting period

The second important stage during the 618 period is the brand’s water storage and grass planting period, which generally takes place in May.

Brands should pay attention to the following details during the water storage and grass planting period:

1) Brands should continue to use a large number of Star Map influencers to endorse the hot and potential hot products they are planning to promote. In the process of cooperating with Star Map influencers, brands must use content promotion tools to amplify high-quality content, gain more attention and trust from consumers, and prepare for subsequent conversions.

2) In terms of content, we still need to continue to test different content formats and outputs, run corresponding popular content and popular products, and prepare for the big promotion conversion period;

3) If you are collaborating with influencers to bring goods, you can find through calculation that you can still make money after investing traffic in influencers. This can be done through Juliang Qianchuan to amplify the cooperation of short video or live broadcast to bring goods, and amplify the output of high-quality content;

4) Brands should continue to lay the groundwork for hot-selling products and potential hot-selling products through their own live broadcast rooms, which can be used to pull out weeds and plant seeds;

5) Pay attention to whether the platform has new advertising positions and advertising styles, and explore more traffic sources;

Through the operations in this stage, the core goal of the brand is to increase the number of active A3 people (actively interacting with the brand). The increase in the number of this type of people shows that the grass-planting action is effective, and the conversion rate of active A3 people will be much higher than that of passive A3 people. In addition, at this stage, brands should also pay attention to the changes in the 5A population.

3.3 Promotion Conversion Period

The most important stage of 618 is the big promotion conversion period. The first two stages are to pave the way and accumulate water for the big promotion conversion period. Today's big promotion conversion period is from June 1st to June 20th, a total of 20 days. During these 20 days, the brand’s strategy is more about gaining more product exposure and combining activities to achieve more conversions.

Brands should pay attention to the following details during the promotion conversion period:

1) Brands should continue to increase the production of high-quality content, and use Suixintui and Dou+ to continuously increase the conversion rate of short video content;

2) Brands should increase their efforts in performance advertising. Since they have made sufficient preparations in terms of content materials in the first two stages, they should continue to expand their efforts as long as the ROI is appropriate during this period!

3) Brands need to rely on head and shoulder experts to pull out weeds. If there is sufficient water storage in the early stage, the weeding efficiency during this period will be very high;

4) Brands should also use their own live broadcasts to pull out the weeds and amplify the traffic in the live broadcast room through the huge amount of Qianchuan;

5) To reach consumers through more touchpoints, continue to expand the traffic of the live broadcast room through search advertising + IP cooperation + Kankan tasks, and achieve all-round conversion of 5A people;

The above picture shows the trend changes in search traffic last year. Towards the end of the big promotion period, most businesses will launch search ads to increase the probability of users searching for them.

At this stage, the most core indicator for the brand is to increase the turnover rate of the A4 (purchasing) population and achieve full conversion through various touchpoints.

3.4 Sustained Growth Period

Many brands mistakenly believe that once the promotion conversion period is over, the entire 618 is over, but this is not the case. According to Lao Zhao's observation, some brands that are good at refined operations will use this stage after the big promotion conversion period to continue to grow the brand.

Brands should pay attention to the following details during the period of sustained growth:

1) Brands should make full use of the theory of seven touches to users. After the promotion conversion period, they should repeatedly touch the 5A groups to enhance users’ awareness of the brand.

2) Although the 618 shopping festival has basically ended at this stage, brands should focus on subsequent marketing nodes at this stage to pave the way for subsequent marketing and increase users’ repurchase rate;

After the entire 618 is over, brands should re-inventory their 5A population assets through the huge cloud map, understand the overall increase in the 5A population after the promotion, pay attention to the user's fan conversion rate and repurchase rate, and make a good summary of the promotion.

Final Thoughts

618 is still one of the important marketing nodes throughout the year, especially for the Douyin platform. It can not only realize the marketing closed loop itself, but also drive traffic to other traditional e-commerce platforms, which can help brands achieve all-round growth.