5 key points of Mixue Ice City’s social media marketing operations

Mixue Bingcheng sparked heated discussions on the internet some time ago, and the song "Mi Xue Bingcheng Tian Mi" became popular and became a hit. Why did Mixue Bingcheng cause such a hot scene this time? This is closely related to its online and offline marketing coordination. In this article, the author analyzes the marketing events of Mixue Bingcheng. Let’s take a look.

On June 3, 2021, Mixue Bingcheng released a magical and brainwashing promotional song MV on its official accounts. In the following month, major social media platforms continued to ferment.

On Bilibili, with "Mixue Bingcheng" as the keyword, the top 20 popular videos related to the theme song have a cumulative total of more than 60 million views. On Weibo, the reading volume of the two topics #Michelle Ice City New Song# and #Is this a new song from Michelle Ice City# exceeded 600 million.

On Douyin, the Douyin topic #蜜雪冰城# has been played 5.5 billion times, with a cumulative total of nearly 10 billion topics. In June alone, the topic of Mixue Bingcheng has appeared six or seven times on Douyin's hot search list.

How did the addictive theme song "You love me, I love you, Mixue Ice City is sweet" become popular, and what are the elements of its success?

First of all, the song itself is highly consistent with the brand's "people-friendly and popular" tone, and the theme song has a cheerful rhythm, simple and repetitive lyrics, and is very magical. It is called a "brainwashing song" by netizens. These three elements of the song itself have laid a good foundation for young people to play with memes.

Secondly, thanks to the huge and extensive offline channel advantages of Mixue Bingcheng, more than 15,000 offline stores have become the KOC-owned assets of Mixue Bingcheng's online communication, and the infinite fission of online traffic has brought high popularity to the offline. This offline and online mutually reinforcing model has jointly promoted the continued outbreak of events.

In addition, the most important thing is that in the theme song incident, Mixue Bingcheng used short video platforms as the main communication medium, and deeply connected with young people through platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishou.

It can be said that short videos have become the biggest depression in user traffic and attention.

Data shows that as of the end of 2020, short video users accounted for 720 million; the average daily usage time of short video users increased from 42 minutes to 85 minutes from 2015 to 2020, a year-on-year increase of 98.6%; short videos surpassed instant messaging to become a "time-killing tool", ranking as the top 1 application type in terms of user usage time.

Mixue Bingcheng is also following the trend of the times. In this theme song event, it has deployed platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, and WeChat.

So, how did "You love me, I love you, Mixue Bingcheng is sweet" spread on social media/short video platforms? How can other brands replicate this hot marketing event?

Weiboyi captured the social media voice distribution of Mixue Bingcheng keywords between June 3 and July 18, 2021, and conducted relevant data statistics and analysis, trying to restore the whole story of the incident, find its dissemination rules, summarize its methods, and help more brands achieve social media explosion. From the perspective of the overall communication cycle, the Mixue Bingcheng topic event was deployed on WeChat, Bilibili, Douyin, Weibo, and Kuaishou platforms. In the fourth week after the event started, it ushered in a highlight moment that exploded across the entire network.

In addition, in the early stages of the incident, Bilibili had a higher overall voice, followed by Douyin, Kuaishou, and Weibo, and at the end of the incident, the WeChat platform had an explosive voice.

From the distribution of Ice and Snow City’s brand voice on major social media platforms, we can more clearly identify a high-quality brand topic dissemination path, that is, brand creation of memes to KOLs’ playing of memes on major platforms - exploding memes - connecting with memes - and resolving memes.

1. The first stage: playing with memes

Joining the group at Bilibili, which has a strong circle attribute, UP hosts in each area "crazily" display their talents. UP hosts in the music area, ghost animal area, dance area, and handicraft area each show their magical powers, and make secondary creation and interpretation of the theme song, thus taking the lead in creating the "divine song" elements that young people talk about with relish at Bilibili. Specifically, within Station B, the Mixue Bingcheng topic event also formed a dissemination path that gradually exploded from the core music circle to the pan-entertainment content.

[Step 1: Core Music Circle] On June 6, the UP host of B Station's music section took advantage of the college entrance examination node and professionally adapted and recreated the magical brainwashing 2.0 version - the college entrance examination banned song Mixue Bingcheng. The UP host of the ghost animal area has continuously adapted and adjusted it four times, combining the national and city style characteristics to derive more magical and brainwashing versions of Mixue Bingcheng.

[Step 2: Pan-entertainment circle] After the core circle was instantly ignited, it quickly radiated to the broader sub-core circle of Bilibili. Cross-vertical UPs took advantage of the situation to break out of the circle, and the volume of the topic was rapidly expanded.

The UP host in the animation area uses professional two-dimensional content to show the magical brainwashing characteristics of the theme song of Mixue Bingcheng, effectively combines the anime preferences of Generation Z, accurately hits the users in the circle, implants the image and products of the Snow King of Mixue Bingcheng, highlights the "brainwashing characteristics" of the theme song of Mixue Bingcheng, and allows fans to consume it in a loop.

The UP host in the dance area integrated the memes into the content, which had an extreme contrast. The "greasy" tough guy image was matched with the cute Snow King look, which interpreted the magical and brainwashing characteristics of Mixue Bingcheng's sweet song. The fans' barrage of comments was enthusiastic, achieving a high-quality circle interaction effect.

The UP owner of the handmade area, with creative handicrafts, turned the new IP image Snow King into a fun toy. The bouncy rhythm combined with the BGM of Mixue Ice City's theme song made people exclaim that this advertising method is too addictive.

[Step 3: Successfully create a widespread hot topic on Bilibili] Official media, UGC users, etc. formed spontaneous follow-up creations, pushing Mixue Bingcheng to a climax. Chongqing University keeps up with current events and released a major branch version of the Mixue Bingcheng recruitment promotion song. Among the large number of secondary creative adaptations, there is also the figure of B station's "wife" Wang Bingbing.

In light of everyone's attention to the Shenzhou spacecraft and the space station, "CMG Observation" rewrote the lyrics and adapted the song based on the original arrangement by Mixue Bingcheng, and invited Yu Hewei to sing it. "Envious" netizens commented: "This wave of Mixue Bingcheng is making crazy money, and celebrities are giving it free publicity."

2. The second stage: the explosion of the meme

In the second week after successfully entering the circle at Bilibili, Mixue Bingcheng's popularity naturally entered the super-traffic social media such as Douyin and Kuaishou. However, unlike Bilibili's ghost-animal style and secondary creation style, Douyin and Kuaishou took the approach of offline store visits, and one extremely embarrassing "Mixues Bingcheng social death" scene after another went viral. Different types of KOLs at all levels on Douyin encourage users to create their own content, which in turn forms the Mixue Bingcheng social death culture on Douyin online.

Douyin #蜜雪冰城社死现场# has been viewed over 1.3 billion times

On Kuaishou, the topic volume is mainly contributed by the tail KOLs. In the early stage of the incident, Kuaishou's food, review, and local store exploration experts visited Mixue Bingcheng's offline stores in Chengdu, Xi'an and other places to verify the free bill rumors, echoing the large-scale social death topic on Douyin. Later, food experts led the way in hiding ways of eating Mixue Bingcheng and tasting and reviewing all of Mixue Bingcheng's products.

3. The third stage: connect the plot

Compared with Bilibili, Douyin and Bilibili, the gameplay of Weibo is richer and more diverse, and it promotes Mixue Bingcheng to a wider mass group through entertainment. From the perspective of topic types, it has evolved from "Mi Xue Bing Cheng Theme Song" to #What is it like to open a Mi Xue Ice Rink on JD.com#, #Join 10,000 Mi Xue Bing Chengs to sing Sweet Mi Xue#, #Sweet Ice City everyone has a girlfriend#, #Sweet Ice City emoticon package#, #Sweet Ice City imitation makeup#, #Wang Yuan buys Mi Xue Bing Cheng for fans# and other more diverse topic directions such as funny, beauty, and celebrity-led.

From the perspective of posting account types, it covers more than 20 types including entertainment, jokes, food, life, news, literature, etc.

From the perspective of the account level of posting, 60% of KOL posts leveraged 40% of the number of active UGC posts. The most commonly used account types are mid-level accounts, followed by top-level accounts, and finally tail-level accounts.

In terms of specific content, it includes voting, dancing, grass-growing, jokes, anecdotes, imitation makeup and other content types.

4. The fourth stage: solving the problem

Starting from about the fourth week, various WeChat self-media began to show their prowess, analyzing the internal causes of hot topics, brand stories, etc. from various angles.

From June 3rd to 25th, there were 12 popular articles about "Mi Xue Bing Cheng" with over 100,000 views. The most reposted article was "Mi Xue Bing Cheng's counterattack and explosion, what are the secrets besides the "low-price strategy"? ", which was reposted 29 times, and "Mi Xue Bing Cheng, an underestimated entertainment company!" which was reposted 25 times.

In terms of the content of the articles published on the official accounts, one type mainly analyzes the origins of the hot events from a marketing perspective, with high-frequency words such as "behind the scenes", "explosive", "divine song", "out of the circle", "secret", and "advertisement". The other type digs deep from the perspective of brand and finance, with high-frequency words such as "underestimated", "valuation", "counterattack", "strategy", "company", "brand", and "founding".

Looking back at the entire process of the Mixue Bingcheng hit incident, Weibo summarized and tried to refine its communication model.

Brands create memes → [Play with memes] Generation Z on Bilibili are the first to play with the theme song in a fun way, laying the groundwork for subsequent dissemination → [Explosive memes] Douyin and Kuaishou platforms conduct offline store visits to create the topic of "Mi Xue Bing Cheng Social Death Scene" and a low-threshold event trend that everyone can participate in → [Continue the meme] Weibo continues the popularity of the topic and evolves it into a richer entertainment-oriented gameplay to reach a wide range of people → [Unravel the meme] WeChat official accounts conduct in-depth multi-dimensional analysis of the topic, and use media accounts and marketing accounts to continue the popularity of the topic.

V. Conclusion

Do you have such a question, why did Mixue Bingcheng Tianlian become the first to explode on Bilibili? Instead of traffic-based platforms such as Weibo or Tik Tok? Why are the topic directions of Bilibili and Douyin obviously different? Why are the topics on Weibo richer than on other platforms? Next, we will deeply analyze the marketing characteristics of each major platform from the perspectives of traffic characteristics, user characteristics, and delivery costs, and dig deep into the internal logic of social media topic marketing.

From the perspective of user traffic, WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, and Kuaishou have large user bases, and Bilibili has the fastest user growth.

From the perspective of user stickiness: Bilibili and WeChat have strong user stickiness. Bilibili’s active fans have the highest average daily viewing time for KOLs and the highest number of clicks on WeChat.

From the perspective of user age distribution: Weibo has more users under 30 years old, WeChat has more users over 30 years old, Bilibili mostly gathers users aged 18 and below, Douyin and Xiaohongshu have more users aged 26-40, and Kuaishou has more people under 18 years old.

From the perspective of user interests and hobbies: Weibo and WeChat fan users have a wide range of interests, Douyin users are most interested in entertainment, beauty, and games, Kuaishou users are most interested in food and games, Bilibili users prefer 3C and food, and Xiaohongshu users like women's areas.

In terms of commercialization concentration: Weibo, Xiaohongshu, WeChat, and Douyin have a high commercialization concentration and are currently in a red ocean where brands must compete; there is less competition for advertising on Bilibili.

From the perspective of conversion ability: Xiaohongshu and Bilibili have the highest conversion power: Xiaohongshu users have the highest product click-through rate, and Bilibili users have the strongest landing page traffic generation ability.

From the perspective of delivery cost: whether from the perspective of interaction cost or fan unit cost, short video platforms are more cost-effective than graphic and text platforms.

Based on the data analysis from the above perspectives, we summarize the marketing characteristics of mainstream social media platforms/short video platforms:

• Weibo: It has a large user base, a wide range of population distribution and interest preferences, weak circle attributes, and from a relative cost perspective, it is suitable for taking over a large number of KOLs and KOCs' diverse content and fissioning topics in topic marketing. This is why the topic of Mixue Bingcheng’s sweet incident on Weibo is so rich and the content is so diverse.
• WeChat: It has a large user base, a wide range of population distribution and interest preferences, strong user stickiness, and relatively older users. It has a high delivery cost and is suitable for precision investment. In addition, its graphic and text content characteristics make it suitable for in-depth interpretation of topics.
• Douyin: It has a large user base, with more users in developed cities. It has obvious entertaining content and a relatively low unit delivery cost. It is suitable for generating entertainment topics for users in first-tier and new first-tier cities. Mixue Bingcheng officially took advantage of the huge traffic and pan-entertainment of TikTok and quickly became popular.
• Kuaishou: It has a large user base, with a large number of users in lower-tier cities. It is obviously entertainment-oriented and users are extremely interested in food-related content (this also explains why Kuaishou later took the route of promoting food). The commercialization concentration is currently low, making it suitable for triggering topics in lower-tier cities.
• Bilibili: It has strong user stickiness, mostly young people, and low commercialization concentration, making it suitable for topic placement and allowing young people to unleash their creativity. These are exactly the reasons why Mixue Bingcheng was the first to be played on Bilibili.
• Xiaohongshu : It has strong conversion capabilities and can be used to promote products after an event occurs.

The release of Mixue Bingcheng’s theme song may seem like just a simple topic event, but in fact, all major social media outlets are secretly leveraging their respective marketing advantages, connecting with each other, and working together to quickly detonate the brand. I believe that more brands will use this incident and rely on social media to find their own topic marketing codes.

Author: Micro Broadcast Easy

Source: Weibo