10 Brand Marketing Trends for 2022

There is no need to elaborate on how difficult the external environment has been in the past two years. The epidemic, capital withdrawal, and tax collection have made the brand's marketing budget increasingly tight. Correspondingly, the media environment is becoming more fragmented and decentralized. The budget is already limited and should be spent on the most effective things. So where should the limited budget be invested: in traditional media, brand advertising, or social media? Should I do variety shows? Should you gamble on content IP? Should we follow the trend of live streaming to sell goods? Should we develop private domain? These are both difficult problems and challenges for brands.

So for 2022, what are the new marketing trends that we must learn?

01 The understanding of brand marketing needs to be upgraded

For brands and marketers, I think the first thing to do is to re-understand brands. In the past, when people mentioned brands, they thought of traditional brands like Coca-Cola, KFC, and Starbucks. These brands formed consumers’ awareness of the brands through continuous advertising and brainwashing, which required long-term accumulation.

Now, with the popularity of social media and content platforms, brands are rising faster and faster. Brands such as Yuanqi Forest, Perfect Diary, Zhong Xue Gao, and Ramen Says have established their own brands in just a few years, driven by capital and overwhelming investment. After exploring the vertical needs of users, these new consumer brands quickly captured users and established their brands through one or two popular products.

Of course, it is still unknown how far these new consumer brands can ultimately go. Many new consumer brands are making losses to gain publicity, simply relying on capital to grow. They are still in the stage of burning money and have no core competitiveness. For example, Perfect Diary, a listed company, made its biggest expenditure on KOL investment, which ultimately led to huge losses.

No matter how far the new consumer brands eventually go, brand marketers should still learn from their strategies. For traditional brand marketing, as long as the advertising department has enough budget and finds a monopoly platform, it can build a brand. For a brand like Melatonin, by getting advertising time on CCTV, it can build a brand. A company like Jiaduobao was able to build a brand by sponsoring Zhejiang Satellite TV's China Voice.

In Dark Horse’s opinion, the traditional brand promotion department is actually the advertising department. Today's brand promotion department is more like a content department. It needs to have knowledge of content platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, know what kind of content consumers are easily attracted to, and co-create content with KOLs and KOCs to ultimately attract consumers.

New consumer brands not only need to invest in variety shows, but also in Douyin and Xiaohongshu KOLs, and also find Li Jiaqi to do live streaming to sell products. While promoting products, they also need to look at data and conversions. Today's brand marketing department has evolved from a simple delivery department to a delivery department, content department and data department. Not only do you have to choose a platform to place your ads, you also have to co-create content with the platform and KOLs, while also keeping an eye on data and ROI. It has to be said that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do brand marketing nowadays. Consumers’ attention is becoming increasingly fragmented, there are more and more platforms, and KOLs are a mixed bag. It is very difficult to spend the budget wisely.

Therefore, in the new year, traditional brands should learn the grass-roots and marketing strategies from new consumer brands. New consumer brands should also learn from traditional brands how to refine their brand investment. They can’t just burn money like Perfect Diary. Of course, if a brand wants to go far, it still has to rely on its own products and R&D capabilities.

02 Short video content entrepreneurship is becoming more and more popular

When Zhang became very popular, I wrote an article analyzing that Zhang’s popularity showed that there were no more opportunities for starting a business in short videos. Because short video content is becoming more and more inward-looking, the threshold for content production is getting lower and lower, but the requirements for content consumption are getting higher and higher, and everyone has become aesthetically fatigued with general short video content. For students like Zhang, not only do they need hundreds of shots, but they also need professional shooting and editing. It is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out in the short video track. Therefore, more and more MCN companies and Internet celebrities are gradually giving up on starting short video businesses. They either turn to live streaming to sell goods, or simply change their careers.

Some time ago, Brother Heima had exchanges with relevant persons in charge of some large MCN organizations such as Menya. Although it is becoming increasingly difficult to start a short video content business, the leading MCN agencies, especially beauty MCNs, are still showing a rapid growth trend in advertising, and many agencies have achieved a growth of 50% to 100% in 2021. This is all due to the strong commercialization of the Douyin platform in the past 2021. The explosion of Douyin live e-commerce has also driven the growth of short video influencers and information flow.

In 2022, influencer investment will continue to rise steadily, but with the increase in tax audits and traffic investment, the GMV of leading MCN agencies will continue to increase, but the profit margin will decrease. For small and medium-sized MCN agencies, there are indeed not many opportunities left in short video entrepreneurship.

03 Double Eleven is no longer sexy

Double Eleven, an online promotion event of Taobao Mall, has been held for 13 years by 2021. It has been the focus of many media attention for many years, but Alibaba was very low-key on Double Eleven in 2021. Because the turning point has really come, Double Eleven is no longer so sexy.

The reason is still because of live streaming. The original intention of establishing Double Eleven was actually for Tmall to create a discount and promotion channel for many brands, and to clear out inventory near the end of each year on Double Eleven. However, with the popularity of live streaming, big anchors and brands are offering promotions and discounts every day in their live streaming rooms. It’s like, if you usually stock up on paper towels and laundry detergent in Luo Yonghao’s live broadcast room, you will definitely not buy them on Double Eleven. Double Eleven was popular in the past because there were few channels and reasons for promotion. But now that anchors are promoting products there every day, Double Eleven is naturally less attractive.

Moreover, live streaming sales can be said to be an upgraded version of Double Eleven. You have a promotion once a year on Double Eleven. When you buy something, you have to go through pre-sales and get coupons. It is really troublesome. In the live broadcast room of the big anchor, what you see is what you get, and you can just place an order and buy it. Double Eleven and live streaming sales are both e-commerce promotion methods in terms of underlying logic, but live streaming sales are more direct, more frequent, and more likely to make consumers impulsive, so they are more lethal.

04 The era of big anchors is over

Ever since Taobao launched its live streaming e-commerce business in 2016, live streaming e-commerce has been the era of big anchors. In the era of Douyin, Kuaishou and Taobao, live streaming sales have always been monopolized by Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, and the big anchors have absolute dominance and bargaining power.

On Double Eleven in 2022, as the dispute between Li Jiaqi, Viya and L'Oreal arose, brands began to compete with big anchors for pricing power. In the past, in the era dominated by Taobao live streaming, if brands wanted to sell products, they could only go through Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, because the traffic was in the hands of the big anchors. With the launch of Qianchuan by Douyin e-commerce, brands can also acquire users by investing in traffic, and the monopoly advantage of big anchors is completely gone. Instead of giving cost-effective products to big anchors and letting them accumulate fans, it is better to put them in your own live broadcast room to accumulate private domain traffic for the brand. Therefore, more and more brands have started to broadcast themselves and cultivate their own anchors.

At the end of 2021, with the L'Oreal dispute and Viya being investigated for tax issues, the era of big anchors in live e-commerce has basically come to an end. At the same time, small and medium-sized vertical anchors will rise, store self-broadcasting will become a trend, and more and more brands will begin to build their own live broadcasts and store self-broadcasting.

05 Store self-broadcasting becomes a new trend

2021 is also the year when Douyin e-commerce and store self-broadcasting took off. The flood in Henan Province made the live broadcast room of ERKE, which was doing charity work during the flood, very popular. Not only did it make this domestic brand a hot topic, it also sold out the domestic brand ERKE, allowing everyone to see the advantages of self-broadcasting in stores. Under the demonstration effect of ERKE, many brands have started to broadcast live in their own stores, and live streaming DP has become a new industry. For example, Gree’s president Dong Mingzhu even hired an assistant to be the host for her store’s live broadcast.

Before 2021, live streaming e-commerce was dominated by Li Jiaqi and Viya. In the second half of 2021, with the launch of Juliang Qianchuan, a large number of vertical anchors emerged on Douyin. At the same time, live streaming sales in some brand live broadcast rooms also began to flourish. Douyin gradually formed its own interest e-commerce ecosystem, and live streaming e-commerce entered a true era of national sales. Live streaming will also become a standard feature of many fast-moving consumer goods, beauty and new consumer brands, and store self-broadcasting will become a new channel for obtaining private domain traffic, expanding customers and realizing revenue.

At the same time, with the end of the era of big anchors and the prevalence of store self-broadcasting, the myth of anchors making money by selling goods has also been shattered, and anchors selling goods have gradually become online salesmen. Because a large number of brands will set up their own live broadcast rooms, the demand for live broadcast hosts who sell goods is increasing. It is said that the demand for this position will exceed millions, and professional training for live broadcast hosts who sell goods will become a new trend.

06 The tide of self-media is receding, and the era of KOC and national sales is coming

Since 2020, classic self-media people like Heima Ge have felt that life is getting harder and harder. Since WeChat launched WeChat official accounts in 2012, self-media people like Heima Ge, who were originally media journalists, have been invincible on the online platform as public opinion leaders. However, with the rise of TikTok and short video platforms, short videos have become the most important way for mass content consumption. More and more people have given up reading, and self-media naturally has no traffic. As a result, the number of readers of public accounts has decreased, the influence of KOLs has weakened, and the era of self-media has come to an end.

At the same time, with the prevalence of consumerism and the rise of short videos, consumer recommendation has become a new trend. Relying on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, some KOCs have won more and more vertical fans by relying on their professional advantages in the vertical consumption field. Unlike KOLs who guide public opinion, the main function of KOCs is to guide consumption. Since KOCs are very close to consumer decisions, although their number of fans is not large, their conversion rate is very high for brands. Therefore, in the past two years, KOC promotion has also become an important marketing method for new consumer brands.

In the era of pictures and texts, all KOLs think about every day is what to write and what hot topics to create. In the era of short videos, what is important is what you want to sell and your professionalism and voice in consumption of certain categories. With the decline of self-media and the prevalence of KOC, the era of national sales has arrived.

07 Content seeding tends to be more refined

As mentioned earlier, a very important indicator for the promotion of new consumer brands is content promotion. To evaluate whether a brand is an Internet celebrity brand, you need to open Xiaohongshu or Douyin to see how many consumption diaries there are for this brand. If there are few consumption diaries, it means that the amount of content is not enough and the brand is not yet an "Internet celebrity".

However, as consumers’ awareness of content seeding increases, people realize that content seeding is not a panacea, and spending a lot of money on content seeding is not particularly wise. As capital gradually recedes, content seeding will not be as extensive as in previous years. It will pay more and more attention to effects and conversion rates, and content seeding will also tend to be refined.

08 Private Domain Marketing Explodes

In the past two years, the concept of private domain marketing has been quite popular, but it has never taken off. The reason why brands attach importance to private domain marketing and private domain operations is that the real economy is not doing well now, public domain traffic is becoming more and more expensive, and goods are becoming more and more difficult to sell. The main reason why the private domain has not exploded is that in the WeChat ecosystem, traffic is still relatively scattered and the efficiency of private domain marketing is not high. On the product side, video accounts are not yet mature, and there is no outlet for private domain live streaming and live streaming sales.

In 2021, with the launch of Douyin e-commerce, Douyin live streaming e-commerce will be revitalized. Let WeChat and even the Tencent system see the power of content e-commerce. In 2022, WeChat Video Account will focus on live streaming to sell goods. With the relaxation of WeChat Video Account traffic, I believe many businesses will invest in the WeChat ecosystem just like they invested in Douyin live streaming last year. After all, WeChat has 1 billion daily active users. With the launch of short videos and live streaming on video accounts, I believe that private domain marketing, which has been dormant for several years, will also explode.

09 The rise of virtual idols

The past 2021 was also a turbulent year for the entertainment, short video and live broadcast industries. Artists such as Kris Wu and Li Yundi have lost many fans due to scandals. Viya was investigated for tax issues, and Liziqi and the MCN agency Weinian were in a heated debate. These disputes between stars and internet celebrities have made everyone realize that while stars and idols gain attention, they also carry huge risks. This has also allowed the creators of virtual idols to see the opportunities behind them. 2021 is also the year when virtual idols come to the fore. Like Liu Yexi on TikTok, whose followers increased by 1 million overnight, allowing everyone to see the beauty industry, and the possibility of the emergence of virtual anchors.

In 2021, a popular saying in the short video industry is "If you want to keep the family together, you have to be a couple." This is because there is indeed a problem of difficulty in coordinating interests between Internet celebrities and MCN agencies. Each party feels that they have contributed more, and each party feels that they should get the largest share. Virtual anchors and virtual IPs do not have these problems. Not only will they not fail, they also have absolute loyalty. However, there is a difficulty with virtual anchors now, which is the high production cost and the difficulty in shaping their personalities. I believe that with the rise of the metaverse concept and the reduction of production costs, digital idols and virtual IPs will also become new trends and marketing paths.

10 AI tools to improve private domain marketing

As mentioned earlier, the reason why private domain marketing cannot be carried out is that the cost of user communication is high and it is difficult to scale. Because in WeChat and private domain ecosystem, the key to marketing is still dialogue. However, one-on-one conversations require a large amount of customer service, and sales activities are difficult to scale.

With the opening of huge amounts of data, content platforms like TikTok have greatly boosted the efficiency of live streaming e-commerce, ushering in an era of universal access. Although public domain marketing is efficient, as public domain traffic becomes more and more expensive, the traffic of short video platforms such as Douyin has peaked. WeChat, which has 1 billion daily active users, has once again become a channel for live streaming and e-commerce monetization. To this end, WeChat and Video Account have also released a lot of positive news. At the WeChat Open Class, WeChat officially announced that in 2022, Video Account live broadcast will invest 5 billion cold start traffic packages to help new anchors get traffic when they start broadcasting. In addition, paid live broadcast rooms will soon be launched on video accounts, and huge dividends from private domain marketing and national sales are coming.

The biggest difficulty for a private domain ecosystem like WeChat is the issue of marketing efficiency. How can we change the efficiency of conversational marketing? At this time, WeChat ecosystem and private domain SaaS came into everyone's view, and WeChat robots and AI tools were first applied to micro-business and private domain marketing. With the further development of private domain business, some private domain ecological service companies have enabled WeChat community operations of commercial customers through AI and Sass, improved the company's online service capabilities for consumers, activated traditional offline membership resources, and increased the full life cycle value of consumers.

For example, a company called "Unique Technology" uses AI+RPA technology to build an automated operation ecosystem for private users for commercial properties such as Beijing Fangshan's First Outlets, comprehensively improving the interaction between commercial shopping centers and consumers. The online consumer activity rate exceeds 40%, and the offline check-out rate exceeds 90%, comprehensively improving offline customer flow. For offline merchants, we have found a path for integrating online and offline private domain marketing. It can be foreseen that in 2022, the omni-domain marketing model that integrates public and private domains will become a new marketing trend, and AI, as a tool to improve efficiency, will become the key to the success or failure of marketing.

To sum up, the five most important keywords for brand marketing this year are: turning point, refinement, conversion, full domain, and efficiency improvement. The turning point of brand marketing has arrived, and pure brand marketing no longer exists. In the era of everyone selling goods, it is necessary to improve conversion rate and sales rate through refined operations. At the same time, as public domain traffic becomes more and more expensive, public-private domain linkage and omni-domain marketing have become more choices for brands. The key to omni-domain marketing is the activation of retained users and the improvement of the efficiency of private domain marketing. Ultimately, AI efficiency improvement tools become the key to the success or failure of omni-domain marketing.

Author: Dark Horse

Source: Dark Horse