Douyin Brand Live Studio Startup Guide

Hello everyone, we have been helping brands to set up live broadcast rooms on Douyin this year. Today’s sharing is also my reflections and summary of our DP services in this year.

We serve more than 20 brands this year, and we have long-term cooperation with 5 to 6 of them.

First, let me summarize the Douyin brand self-broadcasting in 2021. I have extracted 16 words:

High-handed,

Policy tilt!

Not satisfactory...

Profits in doubt?

Just at this time a year ago, when everyone went out to attend conferences in all industries, they would get a signal: 2021 is the first year of brand self-broadcasting, and you must do Blue V self-broadcasting on Douyin. And in this matter, Douyin will have policy traffic support and so on.

So at that time, both institutions and brands clearly felt the potential benefits of this opportunity. We also seized this opportunity and launched the Douyin DP service, becoming one of the earliest authorized brand service providers of Douyin.

I remember seeing a piece of data shared by FeiGua in the middle of the year. In just a few months, the growth rate of self-broadcasting by Blue V accounts was 3 to 5 times that of live broadcasts by experts. This growth rate is amazing. I think China's e-commerce brands have never lacked reaction speed, and the desire for traffic and new channels is innate. Therefore, whether it is a domestic brand or an international brand, they have begun to do self-broadcasting on Douyin.

We communicated with many brands and peers. I remember a top DP told me that their department lost 2 million every month for the broadcasting business. Another company told me that they lost 1 million every month. After working hard for a year, who lost more in the end?

After interacting with the brands, the feedback I got from the brand owners is that they are basically losing money now. As you can see, many brands have high GMV on Douyin every month, and the growth rate is also very encouraging. But when you add up the manpower invested in the whole thing, the commissions paid out, the marketing costs, etc., it turns out that we are losing money.

So the question is, DP loses money, the brand loses money, so where does the money go, and who is making money in the end?

And everyone can clearly feel that in the last two or three months of the year, the traffic in the live broadcast rooms of experts has quickly reached a peak. Why? It's very simple. The brand live broadcast rooms have not been doing very well in the past year. The platform has also invested money and effort, and provided support policies, but the conversion efficiency of brand live broadcast rooms for traffic is indeed much lower than that of expert live broadcast rooms.

It’s the end of the year, and the platform also needs to achieve good performance, so let’s quickly support Dabo.

To sum up, there seem to be very few brands that have sold well, made a name for themselves, and earned profits on the Douyin platform this year. This is my conclusion.

I have summarized several reasons why brands fail to broadcast themselves.

The first reason is the human problem. To be honest, all the operational talents you can recruit in the market are basically mediocre, no matter if they want 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 yuan.

We interviewed a large number of industry job seekers in Shanghai this year, and our HR department has established connections with tens of thousands of people on Boss Direct Hire. In fact, there are not as many live streaming e-commerce talents in Shanghai as in Hangzhou, so we keep searching, chatting, and digging in Shanghai.

Because whether it is the development of a DP company or the development of a brand’s own broadcast room, it ultimately depends on people to realize and complete it. If the live broadcast room is not run well, it is all due to human problems, so the shortage of talent in the industry is a common phenomenon, and this situation will not be alleviated within a year.

We found that for job seekers and operators in the market, no matter how great their achievements are in a well-known brand or team, in fact, their work ability has proven that we can train someone with a little operational foundation to be like him in basically one month, but the salary can be half or even one-third of his.

The reason is simple. The entry threshold of live streaming e-commerce is relatively low. Basically, if you are smart, willing to work hard, and teach yourself for a period of time, you can call yourself an operation operator. The money you earn from selling goods on Douyin is definitely much more than that from working in an office.

Therefore, all the excellent traders do it themselves, and the people you can recruit are basically mediocre. Then you need to use your industry-leading knowledge and experience to train them into talents suitable for your team. Therefore, if the person in charge of the live broadcast room or the leader of the brand does not understand the business and the business logic of Douyin e-commerce, this matter cannot be done well, so the core problem is still a people problem.

The second reason is a cognitive problem. I have met many brands who come to me and ask, "How much do you charge per month for being a live broadcast agent?" In fact, when they ask this question, they are just calculating one thing: how much money can you help me sell if I give you money, and how much money can you help me make in the end?

There are also many brands that don’t know anything, and right away they look for a few DP companies to race together and create matrix accounts. I can tell you that truly excellent brands don’t engage in horse racing, because this mentality is wrong.

What is the significance of having a matrix account? In fact, it is to explore differentiated user circles.

However, many brands do not have the planning capabilities to take overall control, nor do they know how to coordinate and plan the differences in goods and populations between various matrix numbers. The original hope was to make the cake bigger, but the final result was that everyone was competing for the cake. In the end, it is the brand that is harmed, and what is hurt is the brand’s time and money. With so many DP companies competing together, the brand's energy will definitely be stretched, and there will not be patience and trust in every DP. Do you think this can be done?

Many times, brands don’t think this matter through clearly. They think that at this stage, they will cooperate with whoever comes forward for a long time. But from the perspective of a DP service provider, all DPs are thinking about two things:

The first thing is to win with the winners. You are the winner, and I win with you. The winners include brands that already have a voice and recognition, as well as leading brands in the category that have the potential to explode on Douyin. No one is willing to train a weak person into a winner. If I have this ability, should I help you with live streaming?

The second thing is that all institutions that are willing to take on clients at low prices or on a pure commission basis essentially want to spend the brand’s money to incubate their own team. They just want a cooperation LOGO from you. Whether they can succeed or not depends on luck.

So back to this question, if you are a brand with little recognition and you want to find a service agency that is truly willing to serve you, please give money, time, trust and patience. Otherwise, you can quickly build an in-house team to do it yourself and use shares to attract high-quality talents. Many in-house teams do a very good job!

The third reason is a mentality problem. Everyone thinks that Douyin live streaming is popular and that live streaming e-commerce is golden. "I am in the same industry as someone next door, but it can't sell as well as me on Tmall, but it can sell five or eight million a month on Douyin." I've heard this too many times.

It is obvious that there is a way to overtake others in the field of Douyin live streaming. But in fact, many brands not only failed to overtake others, but instead overturned.

After doing this for a year, we found that unless you have super strong brand power, or a super strong anchor and super strong inventory, it is very unrealistic to simply reap the profits in the live broadcast room. What many brands think is: I can directly harvest Douyin users in the live broadcast room through bidding ads. How great is that? It combines multiple products and effects into one.

Anyone with a little common sense knows how this is possible.

Now the average stay time in Douyin live broadcast room is less than one minute, maybe 58 seconds 59 seconds. So if you hope to attract a brand new user to the live broadcast room and make transactions through your mediocre people and goods, your ROI will definitely be low. The brand thinks that it will start making money when the ROI reaches above 2, but in fact it can't even reach 1. In this situation, my mentality kept collapsing, and in the end, I failed despite overtaking others. I couldn't hold on after two months of work, and I still blamed the platform.

If you really want to build a brand rather than just want to sell goods, then you should follow the FACT logic of Douyin. You should do self-broadcasting, create an influencer matrix, carry out marketing activities, etc. This thing is indeed effective. It allows you to move part of your budget outside the live broadcast room, but reap the benefits within the room.

The fourth reason is the problem of execution. Many brands entered the Douyin market with a try-and-see attitude at the beginning, but their execution and reaction speed could not keep up with the pace of Douyin. However, we found that the Douyin platform requires you to invest 100% of your energy, time and resources, otherwise there is no way to do it well. Unless you say you don’t want this business, once you start, there is no such thing as a try. This is very cruel. You have to think clearly. Being superficial and indecisive will only make you pay more in silence.

The above are the main reasons I have summarized as the reasons why brand self-broadcasting was not satisfactory this year.

In August last year, the daily active user data released by Douyin was 600 million. In fact, at this stage this year, the number has reached 700 million or 800 million. The daily active users of Douyin’s live e-commerce are actually less than 100 million. This means that the current penetration rate of live e-commerce is less than 20%, which means that there is still a lot of room for growth in the future.

I think Douyin's live streaming e-commerce is still growing in a very healthy way this year and is not at full speed.

If Douyin wants to increase the penetration rate of live e-commerce from 20% to 40% and 50%, it can completely use the algorithm to quickly attract users to the live broadcast room. But Douyin did not do so. During this year, Douyin hopes that users will actively develop healthy, positive and natural consumption habits. Therefore, in the information flow of Douyin now, the inventory of live broadcast rooms selling goods is relatively low.

You will find that many short video influencers have good traffic after they start live streaming, because they have converted many users who originally only watched short videos into live streaming e-commerce users. This is what Douyin hopes to see. This is the trust that the anchor himself conveys to fans, and people who were not used to placing orders in the live streaming room are pulled to the live streaming room to place orders. Therefore, Douyin will give this type of live streaming room a lot of extra weight and traffic. This is Douyin rewarding you for helping it educate users and cultivate consumption habits, and for helping it establish and optimize e-commerce crowd labels.

So let’s summarize the current situation of Douyin live e-commerce.

There is huge room for growth in live streaming e-commerce, and the entire pool is expanding. There is no doubt that all those who are currently or will be involved in it will reap dividends and opportunities in this process. As we look at the next 2-3 years, I still think the opportunity is still in its early stages, first of all.

Second, under the mechanism of goods finding people, good products return to the center of attention. Last year, even if your product was not good enough, you still had the opportunity to get a lot of traffic, but now if your product is not good, you will be very limited when trying to get traffic in the early stages.

The third is to guide sellers to focus on long-term operations under the new traffic distribution model. In other words, you need to look at the long-term ROI and more comprehensively look at your user population assets on TikTok.

The last one is that the successful model has been continuously verified, and the creation cycle of Douyin live broadcast accounts has been greatly shortened. I have seen many excellent grassroots traders. During the process of creating an account, I cannot say it is 100%, but basically there is a 99% probability that they can successfully copy a new account.

Some time ago, I went to a very small county town and watched the process of setting up a live broadcast room. The success rate of this team in setting up an account was almost 100%. They used pure natural traffic to sell white-label beauty products, and could sell more than one million in one show.

I have also learned a lot of experience. I believe that such outstanding talents and such awesome operating methods exist among the people rather than in brand live broadcast rooms. The reason is very simple. I have a single-game sales of one million and a gross profit of 30-40. Why should I help brands sell goods?

So I think everyone should think carefully about their position and role on this platform today. As a DP, do you want to build a profitable company or a valuable company? Do you want to make short-term huge profits in this process, or do you want to earn a long-term stable traffic pool? I think whether it’s those who sell goods, the brands, or those of us who provide services, we should all think this through clearly.

You can't say that you are a brand while actually doing short-term business of selling goods, thinking about today but not tomorrow. If this is the case, then don't insist on saying that you are a brand. Just go to the platform to grab traffic and make money. There is no right or wrong choice, but don't be stubborn and torture yourself or others.

Next, let me talk about some recent practical information.

1. Short videos bring more stable and higher ROI traffic than paid streaming

This is also something we have been feeling very clearly recently.

In the first half of this year, including before October, we received some consultations on brand broadcasting, but not the entire brand case. The brand spent all its money on other channels, and then set very high KPI requirements for the live broadcast room I was broadcasting on behalf of. I want to ask, who are you?

You don't spend the money for your advertising and promotion on me, but you ask me to achieve the final sales performance closed loop for you. Any organization that can accept such a request is an irresponsible organization.

In the last quarter of this year, we contacted some brands, maintained cognitive alignment with the brands, and took on the client's entire Douyin project for next year. The whole case is this brand. You have to pay me for producing short video content, pay me for influencer promotion, pay me for Douyin product promotion, and pay me for the traffic of the bidding live broadcast room. Only in this way can I guarantee you the results of this Douyin e-commerce business.

In fact, you can find that in this process, the traffic fee of the bidding live broadcast room is only a small part of the money, but many brands have got it wrong.

When we can fully control all the money and rhythm that a brand spends on Douyin, we can guarantee the results of his live broadcast room and promise how much return I can bring to you for how much money I spend. This return is not only the return on the live broadcast room’s performance, but also the 5A population assets, long-term ROI, user repurchases, etc. These are all returns. You can't spend money with others and then expect me to bring you rewards in the form of bidding traffic directly in the live broadcast room. This is impossible.

Let's get back to the topic of short video traffic. We have a team in Shanghai that charges live streaming clients about 100,000 yuan per month for short video production costs. We specialize in producing high-quality e-commerce content for brands, about 5 to 10 pieces a day, and can produce 150 to 300 pieces of content a month. This is equivalent to me moving the 100,000 yuan that I originally spent on bidding ads in the live broadcast room outside the live broadcast room to pay for content production. Currently, 80% of the traffic in the live broadcast room of this account is free, which includes natural traffic and short video traffic. The overall production of the store is far higher than the industry average. It sold more than 2 million in a single month during the cold start-up period, and the brand also made money.

In fact, in just over a month, more than 30% of the traffic to this live broadcast room every day comes from short videos. These short videos not only bring traffic to the live broadcast room, but also bring precise conversions, so I hope every brand will pay attention to content production.

Although everyone agrees that short videos are useful, the threshold and ceiling of short videos are higher than those of live broadcast rooms, so many brand live broadcast rooms cannot do this well, but in my opinion, this matter has huge opportunities and dividends.

It has been often said before that paid traffic is a lever that can leverage free traffic. Now, in my opinion, short videos are also a lever that can leverage free traffic and higher conversions.

Second, the ability and cost-effectiveness of low-fan influencers to bring goods are seriously underestimated

Some time ago, a fan of my public account contacted me and said that the products made by their company are home fitness equipment for children under 14 years old. These fitness equipment are not expensive, and their main function is to help children grow taller by jumping and jumping at home.

Their team doesn't know how to do live streaming, but they know there is an opportunity in the Douyin track, so they set up a team within the company to specifically manually recruit pure-commission influencers on Douyin. All of this depends on the employees watching short videos themselves and sending private messages to these influencers one-on-one to send free samples.

In the end, they achieved monthly sales of more than three million.

The more than 3 million yuan was earned by these employees connecting with low-follower influencers on Douyin, sending free samples and promoting products through short videos. But if these people were to do live broadcasts, with their knowledge and operational capabilities of Douyin's live broadcast room, they might not even be able to sell 1 million in a month. They are not high-quality influencers on the Link Star Map, but rather low-follower moms, perhaps with only 10,000 or 20,000 fans. Many of the people they approached had never even brought in goods before.

Third, the rhetoric is more important than the anchor, the group product is more important than the goods, and high CTR = a steady stream of natural traffic

We have always emphasized how important people, goods and places are.

If your hosting skills are not strong, then if your rhetoric is strong enough, it can cover up the mediocre abilities of the anchor. After you have trained the anchor, he will be an executor in front of the camera. You have to understand that it is very difficult to find particularly strong anchors. People with such strong abilities are either poached by big brands or they start out on their own. Whether you recruit an anchor or an operator, you have to accept that he is a mediocre talent. This is the reality and current situation.

So in this case, what you need to provide to this live broadcast room is powerful rhetoric that has been continuously polished.

What is a product assembly? Maybe the product itself is mediocre, but by strategically reorganizing the product and coordinating with the process of the live broadcast room, you can also make the product have value and premium ability again.

Then there is a good scene = high penetration rate (CTR) = a steady stream of natural traffic.

The live broadcast room selling white-label cosmetics in the small county that I just mentioned has made two million in a single show without spending any money. I saw in the background that their penetration rate was 39%, close to 40%. With such a high penetration rate, there will definitely be traffic. So don’t blame TikTok for not giving you traffic. TikTok gives you exposure, but you don’t have the ability to get users to click in. This is your problem, not TikTok’s problem.

So when you look back at the exposure of your own live broadcast room, don’t blame your live broadcast room for having no traffic. If users are not willing to click in from the outside of the live broadcast room, how could they be willing to buy things in your live broadcast room?

I think in terms of live broadcast room penetration rate, there is a lot of room for improvement in a lot of live broadcast rooms. Don’t always think about how to buy traffic. First see if you can increase the penetration rate of your live broadcast room from 5% to 20%. This is a 4-fold difference in the number of viewers and a completely different level of traffic.

4. The volume and ceiling of paid traffic are smaller than free traffic

You may think that if you want to get 10,000 or 20,000 people online in your live broadcast room, you have to invest money. But how much money do you need to invest to achieve this effect? Unless it is what everyone often jokes about, if you want to maintain a certain ROI and care about the cost of the investment, it is impossible to say that you will invest as much as possible. Many live broadcast rooms cannot increase their popularity to tens of thousands of people online by spending money.

You will find that many celebrities or top live broadcast rooms have a large audience and a large number of online users. Most of the traffic in their live broadcast rooms must come from free traffic, because you cannot reach such a level by relying on paid traffic.

In fact, at present in the live broadcast room, everyone thinks that spending money is the easiest way, because it is the most brainless way. As long as you have money, you can burn traffic. Although natural traffic is good, free things are the most expensive. If you want to get free traffic, you need to spend time polishing all your links, including processes, words, product composition, and the ability of the anchor.

Let me give you another rule.

0 to 1, monthly sales of one million, relying on natural traffic

1 to 10, from one million to ten million monthly sales, relying on short videos + natural traffic

10 to 100, monthly sales of more than 10 million, relying on paid traffic + short videos + organic traffic

If a brand live broadcast room really wants to achieve, for example, sales of 30 million in a month, you must add paid traffic. Paid traffic can never reach the level of free traffic, but if you want to break the ceiling of the live broadcast room, you must pay for it. I have cases to prove this for you.

We run our own live streaming room for hairy crabs, and because the season is over, the life cycle of this account will end this month. Our GMV in October was 9.9386 million. This account did not invest a penny and relied purely on natural traffic. It cannot be denied that this product is indeed a top-notch product.

The picture on the right is Feigua Smart Investment, a screenshot of our bound live broadcast room. The traffic distribution in the lower right corner is all 0. This account went live on September 20th and has sold more than 17 million to date. In just two months, we posted 533 videos on the homepage, because without investing money you have to use other things to exchange traffic with Douyin.

The fact that we sell so well without any paid traffic further proves that if you have a good product and good people and a good place to buy it, you can achieve monthly sales of tens of millions simply by relying on natural traffic and short video traffic. But if this live broadcast room wants to achieve monthly sales of 30 million, I think it will require investment, but if it sells only 30 million, we will lose money. So you have to know what you want. If you sell it for 10 million, you can make some money comfortably, but if you sell it for 30 million, you will lose money after working hard. This is TikTok.

5. Burn your own anchor + excellent speech method, you can achieve a cold start of one million in a single game

After watching many live broadcast rooms, I think this is the path that brand live broadcast rooms can replicate.

The screenshot on the left shows that this account broadcasted for 37 minutes, sold 1.02 million, and had 300,000 viewers. The screenshot on the right shows that it was broadcast for two hours and 23 minutes, with 470,000 viewers and sales of 1.87 million.

You can see the source of traffic, it’s purely organic traffic, without investing a penny, how did they do it? I have summarized it into two points. One is to have an anchor who can burn himself. What does it mean to burn yourself? The penetration rate is 39%, which is called burning yourself. Based on the difference in ability, for some people, 20% is also considered burning. However, most of the live broadcast rooms with a penetration rate of 5% are obviously not burning themselves. The anchors are burning money while sitting there.

In our company, we require a store broadcaster to broadcast for 6 hours a day. If he really burns himself out, he can only broadcast for 2 hours. After these two hours, he will be exhausted because this state consumes a lot of physical strength and energy. You will find that the penetration rate, dwell time and conversion rate are different when the host is sitting or standing.

To explain this state in more detail, the host faces the camera and is truly and completely immersed in a state of passion and excitement, which increases the user's stay time. However, I have no way to show you what this state is. There must be a lot of people who have watched Zhu Guagua’s live broadcast. In her live broadcast, including the live broadcasts of her anchors, you can see that burning state.

Then when users see you outside the live broadcast room, they want to click in. They think you are doing something big in the live broadcast room. The host's exaggerated performance and the state of burning himself are very contagious. This thing is to attract free traffic, but most people can't do it, so traffic is fair. You get what you put in. Some people are born to do this, and it requires a little talent.

Traffic is always the 28 rule. 80% of the traffic goes to 20% of the live broadcast rooms. Traffic is a Matthew effect. Whatever you have, Douyin will give you double, making your traffic overflow and unable to be handled. Whatever you don’t have, you will give what you have to others. So you can judge for yourself whether it is worth burning yourself in this process. In my opinion, it is very worthwhile.

I don't think we need to improve the host's condition to such a talented level. I think it is possible to improve it by 30% compared to his current condition. A 30% improvement could double or triple your field of view, which is totally worth it.

6. Hot-selling products are still the most effective way for brands to live broadcast

In many brand live broadcast rooms, if you have 10 SKUs, we do not recommend selling all 10 SKUs in the live broadcast room. You can choose to promote a hot-selling product in the live broadcast room, but this hot-selling product must have high customer orders, high gross profit, and high conversion.

What should we do on Double Eleven? The price should be increased. What should we do on Double 12? The price should be increased.

You should create a product with higher order value and sell it in the live broadcast room. In fact, all of our live broadcast rooms basically follow this product assembly and pricing strategy.

I feel it has been very useful over the past year. We previously worked on a live broadcast room for high-end skin care products and a live broadcast room for functional foods. The first thing we did after taking over was to create a main promotion product with high customer orders in the live broadcast room. As you can see, these two live broadcast rooms became the top in the category, and we also became the showcase of the Douyin Service Provider Conference.

In October, we took over the live broadcast room of the Hujiaqing brand. Its average customer spending on Tmall is 129, while our average customer spending in the live broadcast room group is 489. So far, we have sold more than 200,000 units. For such a niche category, I am quite happy to be able to sell 300,000 in a day in the live broadcast room. The key is to group goods into groups with high customer orders. Traffic costs are so high that if you pull a user into your live broadcast room but don’t encourage him to buy something expensive, it’s not worth it.

Our current pricing in Douyin’s live streaming room is basically 3 to 4 times that of Tmall. I think this is the significance of doing interest-based e-commerce on Douyin.

7. Use good content, good products and good services to exchange traffic with Douyin

Good service is a basic need and a rigid demand. If you don’t have good service, don’t do Douyin live streaming. If you are unable to improve your store’s credit score and product reputation score, then you do not meet the basic requirements.

Good content includes both good short video content and good live broadcast content. Both are good content. Ask yourself which one you are better at. If you can produce good short video content, you don’t necessarily have to broadcast it 18 hours a day. There are a large number of accounts that only start broadcasting when the short video goes viral. The efficiency is also very high. There is no need to be so cost-effective or to support so many people. Millions can still be sold in a month, which is very profitable.

Some teams are not good at producing good short video content, but they are good at creating a human and goods platform for the live broadcast room, which is also acceptable. There are not many works on his homepage, but his people, goods and places are good, he can also attract traffic, and the paid traffic conversion rate is also high, so see which one you are better at.

If you are good at both short videos and people, goods and places, then I think there is no reason why you cannot make money in this market. There is no reason why you cannot earn a million a month. You can just run blindly and make money in the next two years. Of course, you have to abide by the law and pay taxes.

When it comes to good products, I think that in the face of truly top-notch products, all operational skills are rendered ineffective. If you put the really high-quality products in your Douyin live broadcast room, they will bring their own traffic. There is no need to hold back orders, promote sales, change prices, or use any other tricks. As you can see, there are basically no tricks in our live broadcast room where we sell hairy crabs.

That’s all for today’s sharing. I hope everyone can have a clearer understanding of themselves and Douyin, and I wish everyone can get a lot of orders.

Author: Taihuo Liangyi

Source: Taihuo Liangyi