Analyze the marketing strategy of maternal and infant brands!

With the implementation of the "Three-Child Policy", the per capita disposable income of residents has increased, making childcare expenses an important part of family expenditures. From the five perspectives of policy, user, economy, market and channel, the upgrading of maternal and infant consumption is underway.

01 Target four types of mothers and identify their characteristics to create sales legends

Judging from the city, unit, education level and income status, mothers born in the 1980s are mostly from middle-second-tier affluent families, and most of them work within the system; those born in the 1985s and 1990s are highly educated, and most of them are white-collar workers in foreign companies in first-tier cities, while those born after 1995 are mainly young people from small towns, who marry early, have children, have low incomes and low education levels. We propose the following four types of mother-infant population portraits:

• The caring "housekeeper" mothers born in the 1980s: family and children are their top priorities, family recognition is the source of their satisfaction, children's health and education issues have become their focus, and obtaining parent-child information through long and short videos is a characteristic of mothers born in the 1980s.
• The sophisticated working moms born after 1985: They strive to live the way they like, and showing their self-worth is their goal. While pursuing their careers, they also pay attention to their families. They trust maternal and child experts, and short video platforms are their active areas.
• New white-collar mothers born in the 1990s: This is a group of "new" mothers who grow up with their babies. They have broken the traditional concept of "husband supporting the family" and are trying to find a balance between life and career. They recognize the professionalism of maternal and child vertical platforms, and social media platforms have become an important source of maternal and child knowledge for them.
• Young small town mothers born after 1995: Ordinary life and raising children happily are their attitude towards life. They generally give birth early and have many children, and spend most of their time taking care of their children and families. They gradually abandon the backward experiential parenting methods of the previous generation, attach importance to professional parenting, form their own parenting concepts, and develop healthy maternal and child consumption habits.

When facing maternal and infant consumer groups at different stages, the key to success for maternal and infant brand owners is to conduct brand education based on differentiated parenting concepts, life attitudes, and media touchpoints.

02 Make the product selling point equal to the category growth point so that the growth can be sustained

The growth of product categories can promote the iteration of the industry. From the consumption and product preferences of infant food products, it can be seen that the consumption amount of milk powder and diapers accounts for a relatively high proportion, while complementary foods and nutritional products as supplementary nutritional products have become a blue ocean market.

From four aspects, namely, overall category trend, channel performance, product pain points and population opportunities, the opportunities and pain points of milk powder, complementary food and diapers are analyzed with a focus on them.

Taking milk powder as an example, we proposed a full-coverage marketing model for brands from building awareness to achieving repeat purchases:

• Overall trend: Infant milk powder consumption accounts for the highest proportion, but the share of children's milk powder has increased significantly, and brands are showing a trend of localization. Organic, healthy and natural have become the main selling points of milk powder categories, and raw material formula is still the top priority for consumers.
• Channel performance: Online e-commerce has increased significantly, and social e-commerce has performed outstandingly. Many milk powder brands choose short video social e-commerce such as Douyin as a brand promotion platform, using more interesting gameplay to boost product sales.
• Product pain points: Product selling points such as independent packaging and efficient brewing are favored by consumers. Intellectual development, immunity and intestinal health are the functions that mothers value most. Brand reputation and food safety are the decisive factors when purchasing.
• Opportunity groups: Nearly half of consumers will buy more than two brands of milk powder, and they will prefer to buy the product based on which ingredients are beneficial to the baby's health.

For diapers and supplementary foods, the category opportunity lies in leveraging content e-commerce to concentrate efforts, form a brand memory and parent-vertical influencer sales matrix, and combine e-commerce nodes to promote consumer conversion. How to define the relationship between baby's health and products becomes the key to building brand power.

For brands, how to utilize social media content interaction and the joint efforts of experts + KOL + KOC to achieve the entire process from building brand awareness to purchasing decisions and then to product repurchase has become a category marketing opportunity.

03 Social Increment X Scenario Marketing = “Hand of God” for Growth of Maternal and Infant Brands

The GMV of Douyin e-commerce in 2020 exceeded 500 billion yuan, a three-fold increase year-on-year. On the day of the 618 promotion this year, Taobao Live exceeded the 2 billion mark in just one and a half hours. It can be seen that the celebrity economy is still the highlight of future marketing development, and content e-commerce is also expected to surpass traditional e-commerce. Celebrity traffic has become a powerful external aid for traditional e-commerce platforms. Faced with a huge traffic growth pool, brands need to have a keen insight into the gameplay and strategies of celebrity content marketing in order to follow the trend.

In the social media marketing of maternal and infant brands, we selected four leading brands in each category, and used Weibo’s own data to gain in-depth insights into the strategies and methods of maternal and infant brands’ social media marketing. Overall, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin and Xiaohongshu have become the main battlefields for maternal and infant brands’ social media marketing. Looking at the overall rhythm of marketing throughout the year, different categories have obvious differences in their grasp of marketing opportunities.

Relying on Weibo's massive user base to accurately target consumers in product categories, Weibo's advantages in maternal and child activities and the influence of celebrity topics have made it a marketing base for milk powder brands. Diaper brands choose Xiaohongshu as their advertising platform, and make advertising a daily routine throughout the year, using the changing seasons as a topic to create brand topics. Supplementary food brands focus on daily promotion on Xiaohongshu, with Tik Tok and Weibo platforms as secondary emphasis, forming a one-point, two-line matrix.

Among the diverse social media platforms, how to choose the right one to deliver brand content has become a core need for maternal and infant brand owners.

• Xiaohongshu's maternal and infant categories are growing rapidly, with high interaction in notes

On the Xiaohongshu platform, the overall maternal and infant category has a strong growth momentum, and the portraits of maternal and infant consumers are diverse, including sophisticated mothers, urban white-collar workers, small town youth and other maternal and infant groups. The content of maternal and infant notes has reached 180 million interactions, and maternal and infant topics cover different stages such as preparation for pregnancy, pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. On the Xiaohongshu platform, maternal and infant brands can, with the support of KOL notes, attract UGC for content sharing and secondary dissemination, so that the brand can be fully exposed.

• Douyin’s maternal and infant consumption is getting younger, the influencers are more diverse, and brand marketing is more scenario-based

The mothers and babies on the Douyin platform are generally young, with 60% of them under 30 years old. They like to share their parenting routines on short video platforms, and are willing to record every aspect of their children's growth through videos. From the perspective of KOLs, Douyin has more than 60,000 mother and baby influencers, including mother and baby experts, as well as knowledge, lifestyle or general mother and baby influencers. Brands can combine vertical and general lifestyle influencers to build mother and baby topic scenes, and achieve comprehensive traffic and sales through various forms such as short video influencers, live broadcasts, and store self-broadcasts.

• WeChat maternal and infant communities are highly active, covering a wide range of maternal and infant groups, and public accounts are highly trustworthy.

The maternal and infant population on the WeChat platform is highly active, and covers about 70% of the maternal and infant groups born between 1980 and 1995. They have a strong recognition of the professional knowledge of official accounts, and are extremely active in communities and friend circles. They have a strong stickiness in capturing and disseminating maternal and infant information. They enhance trust by combining professional posts from KOL official accounts, and seize important marketing nodes to achieve a combination of hard advertising, KOL matrix and offline.

• Weibo parenting topics are professional and can be used to promote long-term and hot topics

The Weibo platform can achieve long-term promotion of maternal and infant brands, and can also help to ignite brand topics. It has both first-tier celebrities and expert groups, as well as a joint matrix of top maternal and infant KOLs and mid- and tail influencers. On the Weibo parent-child platform, there are corresponding maternal and infant parent-child topics and brand activities all year round. Maternal and infant brands can achieve a cyclical linkage of content consumption, topic ignition, independent dissemination and in-depth promotion on the Weibo platform.

When it comes to selecting influencers, creating personalized IP has become a key focus for brands. Establishing the expert’s own professionalism, influence on precise groups of people, and strong cross-platform output capabilities have become the key to brand selection. Whether it is an old domestic brand like Feihe or a new consumer force represented by Babycare, establishing a diversified scenario and expert matrix, expressing the core pain points of the category and differentiated marketing at the brand stage have become common needs.

04 Focus on the "strategic growth" of new and old brands to make them deliver satisfactory results

For maternal and infant brands, we proposed two marketing scenarios: the process of established maternal and infant brands using social media to establish brand IP, and the process of new consumer maternal and infant brands using social media to create popular products.

Established maternity and baby brand renews social media strategy

It is suitable for established maternal and infant brands to use social media to renew their IP. We recommend that traditional established maternal and infant brands use brand day as a trigger point for renewal, use Weibo and WeChat to build a renewed persona on high-traffic platforms, use Xiaohongshu platform to deepen the professional selling points of brand renewal, and use Douyin platform as a channel for bringing goods to the brand.

• Preheating of minefields

We use Weibo to create brand & mother-and-baby bundled topics, with the theme of "creating the most suitable mother-and-baby products for Chinese babies" to create a national trend of mother-and-baby brand settings. At the same time, we use the relationship between Weibo topics and brand spokespersons to create a #brand+mother-and-baby topic community#, and interpret the definition of mother-and-baby parenting from the perspectives of product ingredients, brand value, etc.

• The tipping point explodes

Launch interactive challenges and national tasks about brand topics on Douyin, invite top influencers in the parent vertical, general life, and emotional categories to participate in the topic challenges, form a brand story linkage, and use event offers to attract amateurs to participate, trigger national interactive participation, and significantly increase the brand's social media voice.

• The overall spread of the spread point:

Celebrities and top influencers collaborate on cross-dimensional live broadcasts on brand event days, cooperate with brand stores to broadcast daily and attract traffic, and combine with e-commerce promotions to achieve concentrated conversions.

• Long-term conversion of retention points

We continue to build momentum through live streaming on Douyin, and through ingredient experts and high-quality users, we explain the professional composition of the product from different dimensions such as product traceability, product ingredients, and usage scenarios, and the close connection with Chinese mothers and babies, convey the core selling points of the product, and establish the latest image of the brand.

New consumer maternal and infant brands create social media strategies for hot products

For new maternal and infant consumer brands, since they do not yet have the mature brand influence of old brands, creating popular products as a means to increase brand voice has become their unique marketing model. They also gradually shape the brand image through node marketing and topic marketing, further consolidating brand awareness. Weiboyi proposed three steps: creating hot-selling products, expanding product categories, and building brands to help new consumer brands create hot-selling products:

• Hot Products

Maternal and infant experts endorse the products, establish a scientific image for the products, create core selling points with scientific ingredients and professional evaluations, and shape different usage scenarios for the selling points according to different categories. Mid- and tail-end influencers jointly promote products to continuously attract traffic, penetrate the scientific ingredient selling point, and make the concept of blockbuster products deeply rooted in people's hearts.

• Expand product categories

Transition from hot-selling single products to combination categories, starting with evaluation gift box sets and relying on KOL recommendations to expand the brand's social media voice as a whole, live streaming e-commerce forming an influencer sales matrix, with top influencers and maternal and child experts as the main live broadcasts, and coordinating information flow to drive traffic to e-commerce. The brand continues to broadcast in stores to increase fans and promote activation, achieving sales growth from hot-selling single products to all categories.

• brand

Leverage the topic of maternal and childcare on Weibo to enhance the depth of brand value and build a WeChat private domain D2C model to attract users

At the end of the plan, Weibo used the dimensions of influence and interest to find KOLs that echoed the identity of maternal and infant consumers and had diversified label identities, expanded the existing interest circles of maternal and infant consumers in a similar way, shortened the path to cultivating brand trust, and provided brand owners with a list of high-quality influencer recommendations through content output and influencer data dimensions combined with the differences in interest in maternal and infant content on social media platforms.

Conclusion

“Mother and baby care is everyone’s business, and no matter how trivial it is, mother and baby care is important.” “Weiboyi Mother and Baby Social Media Marketing Solutions” is committed to providing differentiated and multi-dimensional social media marketing solutions based on unique population and brand analysis and brand stages. It also provides in-depth and easy-to-understand social media marketing case studies in multiple categories to explore the secrets of brand success and provide reference and guidance for mother and baby brands.

Author: weiboyi

Source: weiboyi