Learn how to operate the entire business from Li Jiaqi

What is your impression of Li Jiaqi? ——The No. 1 lipstick seller, the sales expert, the world record holder for lipstick application, the devil, etc.

The layman watches the excitement, while the expert watches the details. While everyone was amazed at Li Jiaqi's superb ability to sell products and his excellent luck, I saw the superb operational capabilities of the team behind Li Jiaqi from another perspective.

What is shown in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room are nothing more than two people, Li Jiaqi and his assistant. It is easy for people to have the illusion that one or two people can create the illusion that 14,000 lipsticks can be sold in one minute by just starting a live broadcast. You may not know that behind the live broadcast room is a 300-person operation team. In addition to Li Jiaqi’s own hard work and dedication, his achievements today are inseparable from the overall operational capabilities of the team behind him.

The starting point of Li Jiaqi's full network operation can be counted from December 2018. At the invitation of the boss of Mei ONE (Li Jiaqi's company), Zhao Yuanyuan, the person in charge of Taobao Live, paid a visit to Li Jiaqi. Regarding Li Jiaqi's future development direction, he gave suggestions on expanding his influence outside the site and converting and monetizing within the site, that is, to become a "global Internet celebrity." In the same month, Li Jiaqi's team successively opened accounts such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, and began full operations from then on.

Full-scale operation refers to the operation of all three ends, front, middle and back, that can reach users.

• Front-end: media exposure end;
• Mid-end: live broadcast platform conversion end;
• Backend: community maintenance end.

Li Jiaqi provides us with an excellent reference case. We should know that most companies currently only do the front-end and mid-end, but not the back-end.

Times have changed. The era of washing users has passed. Deeply cultivating users and working on the backend to increase repurchases are the major trends now and in the future.

1. Li Jiaqi’s front-end operations

The front end refers to the place responsible for exposure and traffic.

What media does Li Jiaqi’s front-end cover?

They are Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili. Looking at the properties of these media, we can find something interesting - these are all video platforms (although Xiaohongshu supports pictures, texts and videos, the audience of Xiaohongshu and Li Jiaqi's fans have a high degree of overlap, so Xiaohongshu must be operated).

Let’s first look at Douyin, which is currently the most popular short video platform, no doubt about it. Since Douyin is the best, it must be the focus of Li Jiaqi's front-end operations. Comparing the number of fans on several front-end platforms, this is indeed confirmed.

Li has 36.05 million followers on Douyin, 210 million likes, 284 published works, and an average of 4.5 videos per week. In the past 90 days, each work has received an average of 310,000 likes and 21,000 comments, ranking 11th on the entire platform (data as of December 2019).

Since front-end operations are responsible for exposure and traffic, content is the most core and critical. If the content is not good, there is no hope of attracting traffic.

Looking through Li’s Douyin, the early content was mainly short videos shot in the live broadcast room. In addition to what I have seen before, the content of other platforms is to edit selected clips from Taobao Live into short videos and publish them to other platforms. One material is published on all platforms. The advantage of this is that it reduces operating costs. We also used the same strategy when creating soft articles.

With refined operations, Li Jiaqi’s Douyin now includes some videos specially shot for Douyin. This is a strategy after becoming bigger. For companies that are just starting to operate the entire platform, this strategy may not be necessary; it is more appropriate to adopt a strategy of distributing one content on multiple platforms.

Let’s take a look at the data on other platforms.

Kuaishou, 5.34 million fans, 153 works, average playback volume of 1.9 million per work, platform ranking 279th. It seems that the ranking is a bit low. If an ordinary person had 5.34 million fans, he would have won easily; but for Li Jiaqi, Kuaishou doesn’t seem to have done a very good job.

Xiaohongshu has 7.37 million fans (even more than Kuaishou), 11.65 million likes, 221 notes, and the content is also an edited version of Taobao Live.

Bilibili, 586,000 fans, 28 videos, 220,000 likes, and 7.71 million views. There are not many videos on Bilibili. Looking at the release dates, the earliest one was released in January this year, and then it stopped; it continued to be released until June, and the number of releases increased to 7 starting in November.

The operation of Bilibili is very similar to the operation of new media platforms by ordinary companies. If there are not enough people, some media with weak effects will be selectively abandoned; if the company is profitable and has sufficient staff, any media with volume will be expanded. The latest video uploaded to Bilibili was on December 4 (as of December 7). Judging from the increase in the update frequency, it can be seen that Li Jiaqi's team has expanded and has new members.

Front-end operation is to cover all the media that can be covered. Those of us who work in self-media should be very familiar with various accounts, just like the names of dishes in crosstalk; some have good effects, and some have large scale.

But most platforms only have sporadic data, so should we do it? It depends on the manpower situation. If there are enough people, even a small fly is meat.

Who would complain about too much traffic these days?

2. Li Jiaqi’s mid-range operations

I define the mid-end as a conversion platform, such as e-commerce and app stores. Li Jiaqi creates so much content on the front end not for the purpose of becoming an Internet celebrity, but to drive traffic to the mid-end Taobao live broadcast.

From the way he positions himself, we can see that some people say he is an internet celebrity and a star; but Li Jiaqi said: Actually, I am just a salesman.

A salesperson's job is to sell things.

It can be said that the times created Li Jiaqi; if there were no Taobao Live, everything we are talking about here might no longer exist. Li’s core battlefield is Taobao Live. He broadcasts 389 live shows out of 365 days a year, which is also the main battlefield for profit. Of course, since platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou have a large number of fans, advertising can also bring in revenue, which should be considered an unexpected gain.

The cooperation mode of Taobao Live is service fee. On the Taobao V task platform, Li’s quotation ranges from 100,000 to 300,000 yuan. There are actually 12 contacts responsible for negotiating product access, which shows that there are too many companies that want to cooperate with Li.

Currently, Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room has 14.32 million fans, with an average of one live broadcast per day. I have also watched several of Li's live broadcasts. The time for a single product is not long, about 2 minutes, and some that require demonstration may take longer.

After the introduction, coupons and purchase links were released, 10,000 in quantity, and they were sold out in an instant. The most common comments in the comment section are “sold out” and “didn’t get it”. It’s harder than getting a train ticket.

I watched with my own eyes a product with sales of less than 4,000 units soar to over 20,000 units in one minute. If this had happened in the past, it would have been considered fake orders.

There is no need to say too much about mid-end operations. Regardless of whether it is mobile games, apps or real industries you have worked on before, the mid-end conversion stage must be the stage that consumes the least time.

The most time-consuming part is the front end. The preparation process is like a pregnancy of ten months, which is extremely long and may not produce any results.

3. Li Jiaqi’s backend operations

The discovery of the secrets of Li Jiaqi’s back-end operations came from accidentally entering Li Jiaqi’s fan base.

I have been studying community operations recently, and a friend told me that I could take a look at Li’s fan group, which is maintained by robots and can automatically respond based on keywords, which is very advanced. I became interested and went there. After entering, I realized that there was a reason why others could achieve such success.

Due to the barriers between platforms (you know), it is actually difficult to direct traffic from Taobao to a certain platform community. Previously, an official account on Kuaishou was locked in a small dark room by a robot for a day because it showed signs of diverting traffic - cross-platform traffic diversion is a taboo.

So, it took me some effort to find Li’s community, and after joining, I found that the group name and number was 136. Based on the calculation that each community has 400 people, there are at least 50,000 users accumulated in the community; if the community is randomly filled in, the number of users will be even higher.

In the community, the official will release live broadcast notifications, handle after-sales, collect user suggestions, etc. The community has strong stickiness. During live broadcasts, users in the group will discuss the products in the live broadcast room; during non-live broadcast periods, users will discuss cosmetics. Like fans of celebrities, users have a high degree of recognition of Li and leave many compliments.

The community is one part of the backend operation, and another part is Weibo.

I classified Weibo into the backend because at the end of a live broadcast, Li said that if everyone wanted to know the latest broadcast time, they could follow Weibo. Then I understood that Weibo is the platform that Li uses to communicate with users when he is not live streaming. Currently, Li has 8.41 million followers on Weibo. Weibo is an excellent platform for communicating with users in real time.

The above article briefly analyzes the appearance of Li Jiaqi’s overall operation. How does he do it specifically?

There may be a lot of details, and every company has its own strengths, and it is not necessarily possible to learn them all. Here I have listed the job requirements of Mei ONE so that everyone will know how the overall operation structure is divided and how to perform overall operations.

Currently, MeiONE has 115 job openings. Among them, the largest number of positions are in media, with 38 people responsible for front-end media exposure; operations and procurement are ranked second, requiring 24 and 25 people respectively (procurement belongs to the supply chain and will not be discussed here). Operations are responsible for content production and back-end user maintenance. The subsequent marketing, administration, design, etc. are auxiliary and will not be referred to here.

From the recruitment needs, it can be seen that front-end exposure and back-end maintenance are the positions with the largest number of people required, and are also the focus of the overall operation, while the mid-end only needs to avoid any mistakes.

The whole shape is like an hourglass, which is big at both ends and small in the middle. Users flow from the top of the hourglass, through the screening in the middle, and to the bottom. It is like the process where a user sees Li on a video platform, is converted in the live broadcast room, and finally settles in the community.

For our operations, this process is the overall operation.

at last

When Li first started live streaming to sell goods, he never imagined that he would achieve the success he has today. The company Mei ONE also never thought that live streaming sales would reach such a large scale.

The overall operation was not planned from the beginning, but the business reached this stage and encountered a bottleneck. After breaking through the bottleneck, it was found that it seemed to be a comprehensive operation.

Use copper as a mirror to adjust your attire, use Li as a mirror to understand the overall operation.

The inspiration for us operators is that we don’t have to make the same mistakes they made, and we can learn from the methods they have proven to be effective.

Front-end exposure, mid-end conversion, and back-end maintenance - have you learned the overall operation strategy?

Author: Hui Ge Xiaosheng

Source: Hui Ge Xiao Sheng