How does Douyin e-commerce create a hit product?

Today, as the new consumer sector becomes increasingly competitive and new brands emerge in an endless stream, many brands are seeking to quickly transform new products into hits.

The reason behind this is not difficult to understand. On the one hand, new products will become popular as soon as they are launched on the market, which can accumulate momentum for subsequent growth and effectively promote the realization of the brand's long-term goals. On the other hand, with competition from new and old brands becoming increasingly fierce, any good product may be quickly copied by competitors, and only by becoming a hit as soon as it debuts can it have a greater chance of successfully capturing the minds of consumers and winning the growth window.

However, the common "goal" of new and old brands also shows that "new products are explosive products" is not an easy thing to achieve. In the ever-changing marketing environment, consumer tastes are difficult to grasp and marketing methods are rapidly iterating, which poses a challenge for brands to achieve rapid growth.

But there are always people who can break through the ceiling of new products and set a growth template for their peers. In September this year, Feike Electric Appliances, which launched a new product "Little Flying Saucer" on Douyin e-commerce , is an example of turning a new product into a hit. According to Douyin's e-commerce data, "Little Flying Saucer" has achieved a monthly GMV of over 16 million since its launch, thanks to a series of gameplay such as brand self-broadcasting.

How did Feike do it, and what is its secret to creating hit products?

01 Feike’s new product launch was an instant success with its marketing combo

An in-depth analysis of the Feike case reveals that this is actually a process of seizing opportunities and using a combination of marketing punches to drive growth explosion points.

Product selection is the brand’s primary task in this process.

In the past, when many brands promoted popular products, they mostly selected them based on their own perspectives. But in fact, the reason why a hot product can become popular is because consumers are willing to "pick" it, rather than the brand taking it for granted. This requires the brand to select products from the perspective of consumers.

When selecting its main products, Feike adopted a product selection strategy that focuses on consumers. "We found that Little Flying Saucer has a high frequency of interaction with consumers on the Douyin e-commerce platform, and has the potential to become a hit product. Douyin e-commerce itself is accurate and fast in verifying hit products, which provides us with key guidance." Han Liping, head of Feike Douyin channel operations, told "Shen Xiang".

After solving the product selection problem, Feike clearly divided the marketing of Little Flying Saucer into three stages: cold start, outbreak period, and stable period, each responsible for different marketing goals. Through gradual operations, it increased product sales.

During the cold start phase, Feike’s main task is to optimize product packaging and customize content to meet consumer needs and accumulate traffic in the brand’s own live broadcast room.

The reason for optimizing product packaging is that, based on the data provided by Douyin Store, Feike identified that the small flying saucer mainly attracts female users who want to give gifts. "Consumers are not sensitive to price attributes, but instead pay attention to the sense of ritual of the product. Exquisiteness and trendiness have become the keywords for Little Flying Saucer in this marketing campaign," said Han Liping. It can be seen that during the trial sales stage of hot-selling products, the user tags and data accumulated by Douyin e-commerce provided a clear reference for brands to choose appropriate new products to promote.

In addition to upgrading product packaging, Feike also optimized its marketing materials. Different from the previous content that mainly explained product functions, in order to adapt to the characteristics of gifts, Feike specially released creative content that is suitable for gift-giving scenarios on the brand's official account on the Douyin platform, and combined with the interests and preferences of Douyin platform users to increase the trendy attributes of marketing materials.

The social attributes of Douyin e-commerce also played an important role at this time. Users have developed the habit of interacting with anchors and brands through short videos and live broadcasts. With the help of content data feedback from the Douyin channel, brands can understand consumers' preferences for a single product or even advertising materials, and identify and seize hot spots. With the help of the platform's ability to identify potential hot-selling products, brands can grasp consumers' minds more quickly and catch the trend of the times.

After the cold start, the brand needs to consciously divert traffic so that the sales of new products can be gradually increased on a larger scale.

During the outbreak period, Feike carried out more refined operations and concentrated exposure on the Douyin e-commerce platform. By leveraging the three-step approach of entering the influencer matrix, taking over the traffic from the brand's own broadcast room, and expanding the traffic of super new product IPs on the cooperation platform, it quickly achieved sales growth and made new products a hit.

The first step is to build a matrix of influencers, penetrate into multiple circles, and expand brand voice.

With the help of a huge star map and selected alliances, Feike has screened out content seeding experts and product sales experts. They discuss the content promotion style and subject matter with brands, and while taking into account the content characteristics of influencers and the brand tone, they use short video creation to increase the voice of new products, and then connect with brands to create a synergistic effect. For example, the TikTok influencer “The King and His Wife in Japan” naturally introduced the new product, the little flying saucer, into his content in his usual funny style.

The second step is to increase the brand’s self-broadcasting and realize refined operation of the official matrix account.

Feike’s brand self-broadcasting matrix account effectively takes over the exposure of influencers and cooperates with more refined operations. In order to obtain more extensive traffic, Feike posted the video clips of influencers promoting products on brand accounts, and combined with the support of Douyin's e-commerce traffic, it accurately reached the influencer fans in the public domain and more potential customers of brands, effectively breaking the circle. Han Liping told Shen Xiang: "We have to update five traffic-generating videos every day, and update the mini-theater content every three days to settle consumers' minds and facilitate transactions."

In order to improve the granularity of content matching, Feike adopts a matrix operation route for brand official accounts. Since "Feike's different products target different user groups, multi-matrix accounts provide brands with a platform for refined operations within the same ecosystem." Han Liping mentioned, "In the live broadcast room mainly targeting female consumers, Feike can promote specific words and content based on the preferences of female consumers. In the live broadcast room targeting male consumers, not only are the materials different, but the product strategies we sell can also be adjusted.

The third step is to cooperate with the “Tik Tok Super New Product” event, leveraging platform-level resources to achieve traffic leap.

In addition to influencers and self-broadcasting, Feike also participated in the platform's "Tik Tok Super New Product" marketing campaign as soon as possible to expand traffic sources. Douyin Super New Products is a systematic marketing IP activity created by Douyin e-commerce to promote new products for brand merchants. The one-on-one in-depth operation plans, traffic support, influencer matching, marketing promotion, official recommendations, etc. it provides help brands complete the transformation from new products to hot products. Feike, which is involved in this, is leveraging the resources brought by this platform-level IP to amplify the influence of new products and make them "explosive products as soon as they are launched."

Douyin Super New Products uses the vast public domain traffic of Douyin e-commerce as a cornerstone to provide powerful support for merchants. In addition to targeted traffic support, "Douyin Super New Products" not only has an exclusive event entrance in the live broadcast room and search scenarios of the Douyin site, but also provides targeted expert matchmaking services to expand the sales of Feike Little Flying Saucer. The marketing promotion initiated by "Tik Tok Super New Product" has helped the brand achieve the effect of one plus one being greater than two in terms of voice. It has jointly promoted the event with multiple KOLs and the official self-media matrix of Tik Tok e-commerce on social platforms such as Tik Tok, Weibo, and WeChat, helping to maximize the exposure of Feike's new products.

The sales potential generated during the explosive period still needs to be maintained through "steady and long-term" operations. When it comes to the stable period, in order to avoid the pain point of traffic disappearing as soon as investment is stopped, Feike focuses on accumulating user assets and strives to extend the consumer life cycle.

Feike continues to follow the operating rhythm of the explosive period, steadily and finely adjusts its content strategy, launches content that is more in line with the brand's user portrait, and extends the frequency of interaction between the brand and users. At the same time, Feike also maintained a frequency of nearly 12 hours of self-broadcasting every day. Because for most consumers, it takes a long time from building awareness of brands and products to conversion. The medium of brand self-broadcasting actually acts as a glue between the two stages of brand exposure and conversion.

What is special is that, unlike the all-round traffic-driving purpose in the cold start-up period and the explosive period, the operating logic of the brand official account in the stable period is to aim at private domain sedimentation, aiming to answer questions and solve doubts for consumers who have not yet converted with immersive experience scenes and professional language, so as to obtain greater conversion volume.

Ultimately, with the help of a series of marketing combinations, "the sales of Little Flying Saucer on Douyin e-commerce exceeded our expectations," said Han Liping.

02 Douyin e-commerce has the "gene" to create hits

In Feike's opinion, many brands are often more accustomed to choosing influencers to promote products to boost sales, but this is actually far from enough. Only by properly combining and utilizing top influencers, influencer matrix, brand self-broadcasting, and marketing activities can marketing resources release greater value and cover the entire life cycle from new products to explosive products. Han Liping is also very sure about this: "Continuing to explore marketing methods such as Douyin e-commerce brand self-broadcasting and talent matrix, and investing more resources in product promotion will become Feike's next plan."

Douyin e-commerce FACT matrix model

This methodological summary of Feike actually corresponds to the FACT matrix model of Douyin e-commerce: F (Field) merchants’ self-broadcasting, which is the basic daily sales operation of the brand; A (Alliance) influencer matrix, which helps merchants to quickly enter the market and expand their influence; C (Campaign) marketing activities, which uses the power of the platform to achieve large-scale product sales explosion; T (Top-KOL) top influencers directly help merchants to make their voice heard.

These four major sections are independent of each other but collaborate and complement each other, covering the entire chain from product exposure to conversion. They can penetrate the entire life cycle of consumers and help brands of all industries and sizes achieve specific marketing goals.

Correspondingly, Feike’s explosive product launch this time fully coordinated the three sections of influencer matrix, marketing activities and brand self-broadcasting. These three sections have different meanings for the brand's advancement from new products to explosive products.

The expert matrix corresponds to diversified KOLs in multiple circles. While reaching users in different circles, it helps new products shorten the link from content to conversion. In addition, unlike the large-scale and comprehensive style of promoting products and recommending products, circle influencers usually focus on specific categories and groups of people, and the accuracy of their fan portraits is higher than that of the top influencers, which provides opportunities for brands to reach their target circles deeply. Therefore, with the joint efforts of multiple influencers, the brand not only expands the richness of its marketing materials, but also lays the groundwork for many subsequent marketing actions.

In addition, in terms of brand self-broadcasting, long-term and stable self-broadcasting means that the brand can consolidate the voice gathered in a short period of time into a core asset that can be reused in the long term, and it is also the basic foundation for consolidating daily sales operations.

At the same time, official matrix accounts are the main trend for brand self-broadcasting. It can be seen that the role of the brand’s self-broadcasting matrix is ​​more to enable the brand to provide more professional services to users. Multi-matrix accounts are equivalent to broadening the scope and duration of interaction between users and brands. Once the stickiness between the brand and the user is deepened and private domain traffic is effectively accumulated, the most direct benefit is long-term and stable conversion. At the same time, with the synergy of multiple accounts, they can also play a role in attracting each other and capture more users.

The significance of the marketing activities in the Douyin e-commerce FACT model is simply to activate traffic for the brand. During the process of Feike's new products being launched, the brand can smoothly utilize the platform's high-quality marketing resources by leveraging platform marketing activities represented by super new product IP. With a series of support and promotion, new fresh blood is poured into the brand's official account, allowing the brand to efficiently use its own broadcasting resources to drive the growth flywheel of new products. What’s special is that, unlike the brand’s existing old customers and potential customers, Douyin e-commerce, based on the interest-based e-commerce model, can open up new target users for the brand, and deliver the right content to the right people through the model of goods finding people.

As Han Liping said, "Douyin's super new product IP is an important driving force for the explosion of Xiaofeidie. At the same time, we cover the entire life cycle of users through Douyin e-commerce, and use a full-link marketing approach to drive new products to become hot products, thus activating the true value of marketing resources."

Seeing the big picture from the small, what is reflected behind a brand or a marketing IP is actually the capabilities and advantage barriers of the entire platform. Douyin e-commerce combines content, social attributes, and a complete live e-commerce ecosystem, and is a natural breeding ground for brands to discover potential explosive products and create explosive products. At the same time, Douyin e-commerce also leverages various platform resources to provide personalized gameplay for more new products, trying to become a guide for brands to continuously launch new explosive products.

Creating a hit product is not an easy task, but as the full-link gameplay of major platforms is becoming increasingly mature, platforms with advantages in traffic and resources will be good collaborators for brands.

Author: Deep Sound

Source: Deep Sound