A review of the top 10 Douyin e-commerce cases of the year!

Douyin e-commerce in 2021 is like the American West in the 19th century, with scenes of gold rush unfolding.

There are brands that have followed the trend and jumped on the express train of Douyin e-commerce, there are also brands that have been tempted by the smart distribution of interest e-commerce, and there are even some that have explored new traffic opportunities on the platform and created "big" news, with the effects spilling over to the entire network. For example, Herborist directly moved the scenes of palace dramas into the live broadcast room, YaYa Clothing went to the snow-capped mountains to sell down jackets, and Beautiful Girls performed disco and sold snacks in the live broadcast room... These eye-opening marketing actions spread from Douyin to Weibo hot searches and became a national topic.

In short, in order to make a fortune, brands are trying their best to do everything they can, and Douyin e-commerce itself is also working just as hard. After proposing interest e-commerce in April this year, the FACT business matrix and UP plan were launched simultaneously, followed by the self-broadcasting incentive plan, Douyin brand special support plan, etc., providing platform support for brands from various dimensions such as product category, marketing model, innovation implementation, and user traffic growth.

The striving brands and the platforms that constantly stir the water have worked together to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of Douyin marketing in 2021. And all this is because of traffic.

Decentralized and more accessible traffic is what brands desire most today. However, it is also because of the decentralized traffic distribution logic that the industry's overall traffic cannot be sustained and stable, and brands can only continue to act aggressively to capture consumers' interest.

There are stories of overnight success, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. What should brands do to gain sustained vitality and achieve healthy growth in Douyin e-commerce? After earning the first pot of gold, how to tap into a steady stream of gold? How should brands do Douyin e-commerce in 2022? What other growth opportunities are there?

With these curiosities in mind, we have reviewed the top 10 Douyin e-commerce cases of the year, and summarized 5 major trends from them. We hope to find a new starting point for Douyin e-commerce with everyone.

01 Brand self-broadcasting becomes the basic

The anchor image has become a powerful tool for brand dream creation

Self-broadcasting has become the new infrastructure for brands to deploy Douyin e-commerce.

Especially for the brands that entered Douyin e-commerce this year, most of them will use brand self-broadcasting as the starting point, and through a normalized operation rhythm, become an important channel for brand sales growth.

For example, with the help of store live broadcasts 7 days a week, the daily sales of the frozen semi-finished food brand "Da Xidi" have stabilized at 300,000 to 500,000; also in order to further promote sales, the clothing brand "Bai Xiao T", which achieved a GMV of more than 70 million on Douyin e-commerce last year, currently concentrates on live broadcasts for 5-6 hours every night, and the proportion of live broadcasts has reached 20%.

According to the data from Douyin's Double 11 Shopping Festival this year: from October 27 to November 11, the cumulative duration of Douyin's e-commerce live broadcast rooms reached 25.46 million hours, the total duration of merchants' own live broadcasts reached 12.27 million hours, and the total number of viewers reached 39.5 billion.

Behind this prosperous data, content attractiveness is the basis for the growth of transaction scale.

Because in addition to daily sales conversion, the brand’s own live broadcast room has a more important role, which is to accumulate and operate fans. Especially under the decentralized interest-based e-commerce logic of Douyin e-commerce, how to attract users’ attention through content is the real breakthrough point for the brand’s own broadcast room.

The Daofa Research Institute has observed that live streaming rooms are currently showing three major trends in shaping content appeal:

1. The high customer order model has gradually been verified
2. Scenario-based interaction mode to create a sense of companionship between users
3. Having anchors that match the brand tone is becoming a powerful tool for building brand power

Regarding the first point, the Knife Skills Research Institute has previously conducted a disassembly and analysis of the Douyin self-broadcasting rooms of "Bosideng" and "Swisse", and both have developed a model for communicating with users. The former broke through by incubating new products and creating high average order values, creating differentiated recognition; the latter penetrated Douyin’s e-commerce channels by establishing a brand self-broadcasting matrix.

This time we will focus on analyzing points 2 and 3.

The first is the scenario-based interaction mode. A brand’s own live broadcast room is not only a sales venue, but also a more authentic communication venue between the brand and users. Sometimes it even conveys information more directly than the brand’s public account or official website.

The "direct" here does not refer to the forced ordering by shouting, but the immersive experience created for users through the lighting, audio and video effects and background music of the live broadcast room, where users can listen to the brand story and feel the value of the product. At the same time, this interaction is two-way, and users can also get feedback from the brand, just like making friends.

The original women's clothing brand "Lola's Code" achieved the increase in fans, the transformation from offline to online, and the shaping of its brand image through this method.

As the founder of the brand and also the host of the store, Lola has established a "strong woman" persona. When communicating with users, she will help women find confidence through the clothes she designs. For example, if a fat girl was laughed at by her colleagues for not looking good in clothes because of her figure, Lola would personally alter the clothes. Through clothes, I want to tell everyone that chubby girls can also be beautiful.

While expressing care for women, these plots also promote the brand's philosophy: to make women better. Fans' user trust and loyalty will naturally increase. Currently, she has 510.5w followers on Douyin and 6683.3w likes.

The brand empathy and compassion created through scene interaction have also brought the brand impressive results. On the day of the "TikTok New Year Goods Festival" at the beginning of this year, Lola Code achieved a total transaction volume of over 66 million and the official account gained more than 100,000 followers. Lola Code's powerful offline supply chain also supports the high turnover of goods on Douyin's e-commerce self-broadcasting, gradually completing the change of business channels from offline to online.

In the case of Lola Code, in addition to the scenario-based shaping of the content and plot and brand awareness, there is another more important determining factor, that is - the anchor.

Having an anchor that matches the brand’s tone is a hidden “Buff” for Douyin e-commerce self-broadcasting and is also a powerful tool for building brand power.

More and more brands are looking for anchors who match their brand tone, especially some mid-to-high-end brands. For example, when Bosideng selects female anchors, they not only look for good looks and emotional intelligence, but also the ability to keep learning and iterating; the anchors who can dance and sing in the live broadcast rooms of other trendy brands not only need to have singing skills, but also need intensive maintenance and vigorous energy.

This is because, in the process of creating dreams for consumers and becoming friends with them through the brand’s own live broadcast room, the anchor is like the consumer’s best friend. To become besties, you must first have common topics, and even your growth experiences, education, and temperament must be equal. Then, through strong empathy and the ability to think from other people’s perspectives, you can sincerely recommend good products, so that you can retain high-value e-commerce fans. The lipstick king "Li Jiaqi" became popular on the Internet by becoming the male best friend of all the girls.

Nowadays, high-quality anchors have become a scarce resource. Recently, the Knife Skills Research Institute learned that in order to better leverage the host’s image to create the tone of the live broadcast room, some brands will invite hosts from competing products’ live broadcast rooms to broadcast live for themselves. There is even a phenomenon where several brands share the same host.

More and more brands’ own live broadcast rooms are no longer emphasizing the discounts in a shouting manner, but are using the host’s personal style and temperament to capture consumers’ minds invisibly and bring users a new live broadcast experience.

Human civilization began with the use of tools. If the live broadcast room was a tool or a channel before, then the brand’s own live broadcast room may have reached the stage of weapon evolution. As long as we make good use of the combination of the anchor’s image, scene interaction, and product combination, the brand’s own live broadcast room will be a powerful tool for brands to build their brand power.

02 Leverage platform node IP

Driving sales and volume growth

Creating festivals is a powerful weapon of the platform and also the "east wind" of the brand.

Douyin e-commerce has been very busy this year. In addition to the big promotion events that take place almost every two months, such as 818, New Year’s Goods Festival, and Double 11 promotions, it continues to attract brands to join. There are also various marketing IPs such as brand self-broadcast peak competition, Douyin Super Product Day, Douyin new release, etc., which continue to activate platform traffic.

Big sales promotions are like high-speed trains launched one after another by the platform, and brands that hear the news and catch this express train in time will also head towards their destination faster.

"Dr. Ling", a skincare brand founded in February this year, is such a "passenger". It is affiliated to "Natural Melody" and inherits the genes of its parent company. This brand is very good at traffic operation, and its sales in the Douyin e-commerce channel have increased particularly rapidly. According to statistics, from May to October this year, it took Dr. Ling only 5 months to achieve a GMV of over 100 million, becoming a phenomenal case among Douyin e-commerce's new products with sales of over 100 million.

At present, the brand has built a stable traffic acquisition structure through daily brand self-broadcasting and influencer matrix management. The corresponding sales ratio is 6:4, and self-broadcast sales exceed influencer sales. On the other hand, Dr. Ling also pays great attention to the "warm-up" before large-scale marketing activities.

During the cold start-up phase, Dr. Ling participated in the "TikTok Super New Product" event. Through short video promotion + live streaming + brand self-broadcasting + refined operations, he formed a complete set of combined punches and successfully achieved the result of "a hit as soon as it was launched" in the event. In addition, during daily promotions, they will also use SMS tools to provide advance notice and attract fans to the live broadcast rooms of influencers; they will also release preview videos to attract traffic.

Each node marketing of the platform has also become an accumulation of trial and error for Dr. Ling on the Douyin e-commerce platform, enabling him to gradually master the marketing rules of interest e-commerce. Nowadays, brands customize content ideas for each marketing campaign to achieve the effect of efficient traffic generation.

In addition to leveraging the momentum to increase sales, some brands are also using platform marketing IP to gain insight into the latest consumer trends.

By participating in the "Douyin Newcomer Release" event held by Douyin e-commerce in September this year, the instant fish maw brand "Guanzhan" strengthened the practice of Douyin interest e-commerce and FACT business matrix.

Since it takes time to build a self-broadcasting team, Guanzhan first focused its energy on cooperating with experts. The main logic behind choosing influencers to cooperate with is first to look at the crowd portrait, and secondly to look at the sales data, while taking into account both the brand promotion effect and sales volume. After several months of accumulation, Guanzhan has gathered a group of top talents with excellent cooperation results, such as Zheng Jianpeng and Yan Zhen, Lookocherry. Da Xu, Qian Hui, Tu Lei, etc., and locked in the schedule in advance.

At the same time, by the time the “TikTok Newcomer Release” event began, the self-broadcasting team had also been set up. The influence of the expert, coupled with the four self-broadcasting rooms that broadcast live for more than 14 hours every day, ultimately brought Guanzhan’s sales to 6.22 million yuan in one week.

This also allowed Guanzhan to develop a set of business logic for Douyin e-commerce. It is no longer the customers who search for products, but rather the products that find precise customers and match them according to their interests. Finally, we need to conduct in-depth research on FACT and combine self-broadcasting, cooperation with experts, marketing activities and our own products well.

Interest e-commerce does not only mean traffic, and big promotions do not only refer to sales. More importantly, the trend tags and smart distribution matching provided by more interesting e-commerce can help brands find more core target users.

Sales breakthrough is not the only measurement indicator. The numbers should be returned to the brand itself and the products.

03 Short video seeding

Focus on building highly interactive and highly trusted content marketing capabilities

Mass production of short video content that is topical, interactive, and can stimulate user interest is a must for brands on Douyin e-commerce.

This not only means the basic survival rules for brands on Douyin, but also the potential for brands to break out of the circle, because Douyin short video planting has a characteristic - users like to imitate and copy.

Ai Yu, a beauty brand launched in February this year, had accumulated sales of over 100 million yuan on Douyin e-commerce by the end of October. Its popularity was mainly due to the short video content of Douyin, which broke the circle and ultimately achieved big results with small efforts.

First, the official prepared a Tik Tok video posted by an ordinary person. The content was roughly as follows: the girl broke up with her boyfriend and cried in front of the camera, but the makeup on her face did not look smudged because she used Ai Yu's foundation. This content with strong contrast and emotional appeal has received a lot of attention on Douyin, and many girls will shoot it according to the same routine. Ultimately, this piece of content created a small wave of dissemination and also brought a wave of attention to the brand.

In the second half of this year, Ai Yu also teamed up with spokesperson Ju Jingyi to launch the #Ju Jingyi Star Eye Makeup Challenge# on social media platforms such as Douyin. Looking at the short video promotion strategies of brands, there is a common feature: constantly encouraging strong interaction between users and brands. It is worth mentioning that Ai Yu’s parent company, Pellet Group, has also incubated new brands such as UNNY CLUB and RNW. It is understood that in order to ensure the continuous production capacity of popular products, it has specially formed a large Douyin content marketing team.

In addition, the key to whether a brand’s content on Douyin e-commerce is truly good lies in whether it can arouse empathy from users.

What is empathy? Simply put, it is to find a language that consumers can understand, that is, to "speak human language."

Interesting, informative and practical short video content is the standard feature of Zui'e Niang's short videos. In order to make obscure wine knowledge understandable to more people, Zui'e Niang gradually mastered the "little tricks" of content operation through observation and communication with Douyin users. She and her team pay attention to fan comments, hot topics, and the hot words that young people are searching for recently. Whenever a hotspot is discovered, concentrated photography is carried out to make the entire process as smooth and efficient as possible.

In the first half of this year, @醉鹅娘小酒 launched a short video with the theme of "convenience store cocktails", which was very popular at the time. In the video, Drunk Goose Lady Wang Shenghan, wearing a cheongsam and with fresh makeup, paired popular convenience store drinks with various wines, and gave evaluations and scores for the taste one by one. As soon as this video was released, the number of likes reached 269,000.

On the other hand, by capturing user interest topics and preferences in Douyin's interest e-commerce, the Zui'e Niang team also gained more accurate consumer insights, which in turn fed back to brand products. Its independent fruit wine brand "Lion Gege" has launched 14 fruit wines including peach wine, grapefruit plum wine, and lychee sake since its launch in October 2019, which cater to consumers' tastes and have sold more than 2.5 million bottles across the entire network.

Short video promotion is an output of brand content. By gaining feedback from consumers on the content, it also feeds back into product and brand strength.

04 Talent matrix becomes a brand

An important track for the success of single products in Douyin e-commerce

In the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem, the commercial monetization capabilities of the influencer matrix are being amplified, and it has even become an important track for brands to conduct daily sales operations on Douyin e-commerce, especially for selling popular single products.

Live streaming and short videos are two common forms of cooperation in the expert matrix. Through different link settings, they can bring different values ​​such as breaking the circle and attracting traffic to the brand. For example, the lifestyle brand "PWU" has established video and live broadcast cooperation relationships with Douyin influencers such as Luo Yonghao, Chen He, Zhu Zixiao, Zhongcaocong, A Shou Jianhuo, and Grandma Wang who only wears high heels, penetrating multiple circles to create direct sales for the brand.

On the other hand, the brand has also cooperated with many vertical bloggers, borrowing the content output of the experts to produce content dissemination on the brand side. For example, there is a home furnishing expert who has come up with many tips for using fragrance beads. These videos, by presenting the usage scenarios of the fragrance beads, resonated with users and also conveyed the product and brand concept of "PWU Simple Things and Great Beauty". Ultimately, the users gained by these short videos will be directed to the brand’s live broadcast room and become the brand’s users.

Simply put, the idea behind the expert matrix of "PWU" is to deliver content that combines product features with user life scenarios through the two levers of expert live broadcasts and short videos, promote product selling points while conveying brand differentiation, and convert fans under the expert's interest tags into users of the brand itself.

This method of utilizing the excellent content output and sales capabilities of influencers is another interpretation of connecting brands, influencers and consumers.

Simply put, through the interest matching technology of interest e-commerce, the logic of a single product's popularity often follows such a cycle: top influencers - create popular products - important influencers promote popular products - the popular product effect fades.

How to enhance the vitality of products and brands in this chain, the endorsement of the expert matrix may be another key.

When the skincare brand "Xiwuji" cooperates with influencers, it will continuously pass on product endorsements, trial reports, and trial feedback from people around them to the influencers. On the one hand, this is to gain the influencers' trust and facilitate cooperation. In order to cooperate with influencers, brand owners will even move to their offices to work, because this will make the influencers feel that "you are serious about branding, I trust you, so I am willing to cooperate with you."

After reaching the cooperation, Xiwuji seldom asks influencers to add shopping links when promoting products. Instead, it adheres to the logic of co-creation with influencers and spontaneous promotion, and encourages influencers to produce content. Finally, the experts drove huge sales for Xiwuji. According to the data of the past month, the sales contributed by the experts accounted for nearly 45% of Xiwuji.

At the same time, the influencer's trust endorsement will continue to bring long-tail influence to the brand as the influencer grows and their influence increases, and gradually settle into the brand power of "Xiwuji" based on its professional image.

In a nutshell, as an important part of Douyin's e-commerce ecosystem, influencers are themselves one of the most recognizable users. They are naturally sensitive to platform rules and have a strong insight into fans' preferences. Therefore, co-creating content and products with these more perceptive influencers has begun to become a benefit for brands.

05 The new competitive edge of Douyin e-commerce lies in the building of brand power

In general, Douyin e-commerce's decentralized and more accessible traffic continues to attract brands to enter the market to make money.

But if brands blindly pursue traffic, the environment will only become more and more competitive. There is no permanent trend, and the platform's traffic will become more and more expensive.

Under the shelf logic of traditional e-commerce, consumers’ needs are not only met to a large extent, but even saturated. As Philip Kotler, the "Father of Modern Marketing", once said: "It is no longer enough to satisfy consumer needs; you must make them happy."

Making consumers happy means moving from basic needs to spiritual needs. When people’s basic needs are met, they will pursue higher levels. The brand’s next growth logic will not be traffic-driven, but “content-driven”.

Ultimately, content must return to people and the interaction between people.

Starting from the second half of this year, new consumer brands have begun to set up offline stores. Bananain, Sandunban, and Haomei have settled in Anfu Road and Huaihai TX in Shanghai, and have gradually become offline check-in points for young people.

Douyin e-commerce is more like bringing the experience of human interaction back online. The brand live broadcast rooms are like online stores, and the short video content of anchors, experts, and even amateurs are like "tourists" who shop around us.

The core of branding is people-oriented. Nowadays, if you want to achieve brand growth and brand power building, it ultimately depends on the interaction between the brand and people. After the traffic gold rush, the next step for brands is to leverage a series of advantageous resources such as Douyin and interest e-commerce, use content to drive brand building, and use content to tap into potential new growth.

The market always changes faster than marketing. Planting grass on Douyin e-commerce may have gradually transformed into planting trees.

Author: Knife Research Institute

Source: Knife Skills Research Institute