The evolution of live streaming

When live streaming first emerged, it was mostly seen on niche entertainment platforms, with content mainly consisting of e-sports games and beautiful women singing and dancing. After 2020, live streaming suddenly became a life-saving straw for corporate marketing and became a mainstream trend. Countless consumers began to become interested in watching live streaming, and corporate brands also began to invest in the live streaming boom.

Unfortunately, there are many participants, but few outstanding ones. At that time, the people who were most active in live streaming and attracted social attention and heated discussions were Gree's Dong Mingzhu and Rucci's Yao Jiqing. The president personally participated in the live broadcast, which not only pushed the craze of live broadcasting to a new height, but also achieved remarkable sales results.

But if you study their playing style carefully, you will find that the live broadcasts that were successful at that time were more of a dissemination-oriented approach.

Its model is to use the live broadcast of the president or the celebrity as a topic event, design this topic event into a hard advertisement poster, and release it through the media to start exposure and traffic in advance. Then, employees from stores across the country and the dealer system were mobilized to participate. Actions such as traffic diversion and customer accumulation had been completed before the live broadcast began, forming a closed-loop model of offline customer accumulation and online transactions.

Live streaming is actually the final detonating link of this wave of campaign and is the carrier and platform for the final conversion of a whole set of marketing activities.

This gameplay is a typical reflection of the fact that when faced with the emerging marketing format of live streaming, companies have easily returned to their accustomed communication campaign model and carried out live streaming by creating communication campaigns.

This was a success at the time, but the campaign model is difficult to integrate into daily life and turn live streaming into a regular weapon.

When a corporate brand has to broadcast live every day, at least you cannot use hard advertising as a means of attracting traffic, you cannot use dealers as a way to accumulate customers, and you cannot use the president’s live broadcast as the daily highlight of the live broadcast room. The achievement of these marketing goals ultimately depends on live streaming itself.

Subsequently, live streaming entered the 2.0 era.

During this period, professional anchors became the leading players in the live streaming industry. Hanging out in the live broadcast rooms of these big anchors every week to buy good products at the lowest prices on the entire network has become a daily consumption habit for many consumers, just like hanging out in the Double Eleven and 618 shopping malls in the past.

By the middle of 2021, a new marketing strategy began to become popular on the Internet:

The rise of new consumer brands = 5,000 reviews on Xiaohongshu + 2,000 questions and answers on Zhihu + top live streaming rooms

After this combination of efforts, a new brand has basically taken shape. The main purpose of promoting content on Xiaohongshu/Zhihu is to build brand awareness and let consumers know what the brand does, what its product functions and quality are, and what its advantages and differentiations are. The purpose of the top live broadcast rooms is to increase brand awareness and let consumers see the existence of the brand and know who the brand is.

The reason why these top anchors can play the role of exposure that hard advertising did in the past and replace traditional TV advertising/outdoor advertising is because the traffic and audience base of their live broadcast rooms are really too large. The main reason why viewers are willing to linger in their live broadcast rooms is that as top traffic, they can get sufficiently competitive prices from merchants and maintain a strong position with brands and supply chains. Bargaining power + product selection ability + internet celebrity IP constitute the core competitiveness of the top anchors.

For enterprises and businesses, on the one hand, they have to pay high fees to appear in the live broadcast room of top anchors, and on the other hand, they have to provide the lowest-priced products on the entire network. Although it has gained considerable exposure and brand recognition, the pressure on the company is still very high. Live streaming often turns into a loss-making business.

Moreover, it may feel good for a while to be on the live broadcast room, but if a company relies solely on top anchors to sell products and opens up the market with ultra-low prices, users will soon lose the ability to perceive the normal prices of the company's products. As soon as the live broadcast stopped, sales were back to square one.

Therefore, this new consumer brand’s live streaming method is undoubtedly another campaign model, which uses the top live streaming rooms to gain brand exposure. The purpose of live streaming is to spread the word.

However, this type of live streaming neither helps businesses build their own sales capabilities nor truly establishes brand value. It simply changes the form of hard advertising and comes at the expense of product price cuts. A former client of mine once said bluntly that top anchors are like "Walmart on the Internet." They are sales channels that cannot be ignored and are important vehicles for reaching consumers. You have to enter, but if you do, there are very high entry fees and barcode fees. Especially on Double Eleven last year, the dispute between L'Oreal and the top anchors over the lowest price on the entire network caused heated discussions in the industry. Companies have been thinking and exploring what kind of live streaming method is suitable for their needs? In this context, self-broadcasting has become a significant trend and the choice of many enterprises and businesses.

From live broadcasts that promote communication campaigns, to live broadcasts that promote brand exposure, and then to daily store broadcasts and brand-run broadcasts, live broadcasts have completed their evolution to version 3.0.

The significance and importance of self-broadcasting to corporate marketing is unquestionable.

For enterprises, live streaming needs to carry more and more marketing scenarios today, not only daily promotional sales and brand exposure, but also node promotions, new product launches, rankings, membership, etc. These new marketing scenarios all require the use of live streaming, and live streaming has been integrated into the full-link marketing of enterprises.

When it comes to live streaming, the marketing costs of a company’s own live streaming room are controllable, the communication costs are low, and it can seamlessly cooperate with various marketing scenarios of corporate merchants. It is undoubtedly the first choice for companies.

Secondly, self-broadcasting truly helps companies make marketing a daily routine . Because for consumers, live streaming has become a lifestyle and an important purchasing scenario in daily life, companies must make live streaming a normalized marketing behavior. What is particularly important is that live streaming helps companies establish their own marketing positions , on which companies and merchants can display products in a way that is closer to users, interact with users in real time and in a two-way manner, and provide users with a more immersive shopping experience. Therefore, live streaming can not only bring better conversion results and improve store conversion efficiency, but also accumulate fans and establish lasting social relationships with users. Live streaming is a business amplifier. We can safely say that live streaming has become the second center of corporate marketing.

In this era of live streaming, all companies and businesses must think about and answer these two questions:

1. How to do brand self-broadcasting well?

2. How to coordinate daily live broadcasts and brand communications to create a dual center for corporate marketing?

Start broadcasting with Super Live

It is not easy for businesses to run their own live broadcast rooms well. Even for leading brands, audience attention is still a headache when they first start live streaming. No matter how well-known and influential a brand is, it is not easy to convert them into real viewers and fans in the live broadcast room. In addition to the long-standing problem of audience attention, after doing live broadcasts for several months, I realized that a live broadcast room actually has its own life cycle. In the different stages of the start-up, growth, and maturity stages, the strategies and methods for doing live broadcasts are also different. For a live broadcast room in its initial stage, the most important thing is “testing and finding the right thing”.

Haven’t you seen that many first-line celebrities, who have extremely high popularity and huge number of fans, cannot sell any goods in the live broadcast room? Even world-famous luxury brands will fail when they first start live streaming and be ridiculed by the audience.

Many companies and businesses are already experts in communication, but they are still novices when it comes to live streaming. In the initial stage, they faced not only a construction problem, such as building a team, recruiting anchors, and setting up a live broadcast room; more importantly, it was a testing problem, such as how to design the style of the live broadcast room, how to select and combine products, what the image and emotions of the anchor were, and what the live broadcast words and the rhythm of the explanation were.

All of these require merchants to run through a series of test logics to find the right answer. In order to conduct content testing and population testing well, it is necessary to base it on a certain sample size, which brings us back to the question of how to improve the field of vision.

For a live broadcast room in its growth stage, the most important thing is "fine-tuned operation". During this period, live streaming has already had a certain audience base and there are stable transactions every day. Merchants have accumulated a certain amount of experience in live streaming and have a clearer understanding of the crowd portrait in their live streaming rooms. At this time, marketing needs will become more refined and targeted. Because at this time the merchant has a stable private domain traffic and has a certain ability to carry the traffic, it is time to think about how to improve the efficiency of traffic use, whether it is to attract new customers or recall them, the focus of the live broadcast room operation is to promote fan attention, or to increase product clicks, whether to increase interaction or increase transactions. This includes making adjustments to the live broadcast theme and product selection. For example, there will be special sessions for different categories and interpretations of different products during live broadcasts every day to enhance the stickiness of the crowd and plan the rhythm of the live broadcast.

For live streaming rooms in the mature stage, what merchants need is "certainty and breaking the circle."

For example, during big promotions, how to ensure that the live broadcast room brings certain sales and revenue. And how to break the circle of the live broadcast room and take the traffic to the next level.

In order to do live streaming well today, we need more strategies, tools, and technologies, and major platforms have also launched products to help businesses with live streaming.

Like Alimama, it recently fully upgraded and launched a one-stop live broadcast promotion tool - Super Live Broadcast. Whether you are a store, merchant, brand, anchor, celebrity, or expert, as long as you use Taobao Live, Super Live will be an essential tool to help you increase your views, grow your fans, and promote conversions.

For live broadcast rooms in the start-up phase, Super Live has a targeted product, which is the butler version of live broadcast promotion. Because the pain points for start-up merchants are that they have to study content and products, analyze the users of the live broadcast room, and also study and learn the platform, and how to leverage the platform's public domain traffic through live broadcast. At this time, merchants can conduct intelligent hosting of the live broadcast room. With only three clicks, they can realize intelligent delivery. The operation is very simple and easy to use.

Of course, the biggest pain point to be solved is the viewing experience. Like Yunfeixiu, a plus-size women's clothing brand that has grown rapidly in recent years. When I started live streaming in 2018, there were only a few people online each time. I tried many methods, but there was no major breakthrough in audience viewing. During the 618 event in 2020, Yunfeixiu began to try out the newly launched super live broadcast. Now they invest 80% of their budget in super live streaming, and the conversions brought by super live streaming also account for 80% of the broadcast rooms. Super live broadcast has helped Yunfeixiu become the number one brand of plus-size women's clothing for three consecutive years.

For live broadcast rooms in the growth stage, Super Live will provide professional version products to customize marketing in more line with the refined needs of different merchants, provide merchants with more accurate traffic and crowds, and achieve stable fan growth and conversions.

Like Ulike, because its products are beauty devices with high customer unit prices, the cost of persuading customers to place orders is very high and the cycle is also very long. Many people in the live broadcast room just watch but do not buy, so the operation of Ulike's live broadcast room and the use of super live broadcast will focus on promoting conversions. In 2022, Ulike's expenses on super live broadcast have exceeded the entire year of last year.

There are also celebrity anchor Ye Yiqian. As a celebrity, the audience who first came to her live broadcast room came with a mentality of chasing stars and watching celebrities. Later, because of their trust in the products she had recommended for a long time, they gradually became fans. In their eyes, Ye Yiqian is not only a star, but also a mother who carefully selects good products, which is why she stays in the live broadcast room for a long time.

Therefore, in Ye Yiqian's opinion, the most important thing about live streaming is fans. Super live streaming has helped her gain hundreds of thousands of precise fans.

Finally, for mature live broadcast rooms, Super Live will provide brand refueling package products, which merchants can use during node promotions. It can accurately mine from the global traffic and link with natural traffic to help merchants ensure traffic and crowds. Another product that I am very interested in is "Live Explanation". If we want to increase our traffic, we should know which potential traffic pools are worth exploring on the platform. In the past, live broadcast rooms could only be promoted when they were broadcasting, and most live broadcast rooms were broadcasting in the evening. Then, the daytime naturally becomes a traffic depression. When using live streaming to explain products, merchants can mark high-quality product explanation content during the live streaming process, and then mark it into different highlights for continuous promotion after the live streaming. This not only allows you to obtain traffic 24 hours a day and find consumers through new scenarios such as recommendation and search, but also allows you to create popular products in the live broadcast room through targeted viewing options. It actually goes a step further, making live streaming ubiquitous and omnipresent in consumers' lives. Break the time limit of live broadcast.

It can be seen that super live streaming goes deep into the marketing pain points of different merchants at different stages, and solves them one by one with targeted products and tools. The traffic is richer, the products are more precise, and more incentives have been added on the operations side.

And when I interviewed Le Xi, head of content marketing operations at Alibaba Mama, she mentioned: In 2021, the traffic landing on Super Live Streaming increased by 1,300% compared with the same period last year, and the commercialization of Super Live Streaming contributed to a 3,300% increase in transactions.

For those who work in live streaming, it can be said that they use super live streaming as soon as they start broadcasting.

Dual-center iteration of live broadcast + communication

In this article, I mentioned a word called Campaign several times. For advertisers, this is a word that is often on everyone's lips. When advertising people meet and communicate, they often say things like “I’m currently busy with a campaign for xxx” or “Let’s have dinner together after I finish this campaign”. I also often say this word. It’s not that I intentionally use a mixture of Chinese and English, but the meaning of the word Campaign is rather long-winded and not concise enough to accurately describe it in Chinese. In the advertising industry, campaign refers to a wave of communication movements and brand campaigns launched by a brand at a specific point in time, with the aim of improving the brand's voice, popularity, sales conversion and other indicators in a short period of time.

For example, 618 is coming soon. In order to achieve a performance explosion in 618, some brands will launch a massive wave of brand communication from May 1st, which will continue until the start of the 618 promotion.

This communication can be divided into several stages, including the warm-up period, the accumulation period, the detonation period, and the continuation period. Each stage will have different content and communication methods, as well as corresponding media placements, such as hard advertising, event creation, hot searches, notes, short videos, seeding, live broadcasts, Tmall, and private domain connections... This is a standard campaign.

Campaigns are usually phased and explosive, and usually last no more than two months.

On the one hand, it’s because the time is too long and the popularity of the message cannot be maintained. Haven’t you seen that the lifespan of most social hot spots basically does not exceed three days, and no one is interested in them after three days.

On the other hand, companies must also concentrate their resources on short-term explosions when doing communication. If the limited marketing expenses are spread out and evenly distributed every day throughout the year, then the brand will not make any waves.

Finally, another point is to consider the actual situation of the corporate team, as time and energy are limited. A one-month campaign usually takes one or two months from planning, approval to preparation and execution.

The word "campaign" is originally a military term. Its standard Chinese translation is "battle, movement, activity". It refers to a series of military operations with a predetermined purpose launched in a certain period or region during a war. Later it was extended to the fields of business and politics. Just like the military, Campaign is an explosive mode. It requires concentrating superior forces in a short period of time and launching it at a critical time and on a battlefield in order to achieve the greatest results and influence the direction of the entire war. For a brand's annual marketing communication, being able to successfully carry out five or six campaigns a year is actually very impressive and is enough to guarantee the performance results for the whole year.

Therefore, when a brand does a campaign, it usually chooses those large and important marketing nodes:

The first is e-commerce nodes , such as 618, Double 11, Double 12, etc.

The second is traditional holidays , such as Mid-Autumn Festival, Spring Festival, Double Holidays, May Day, National Day, Valentine's Day, Women's Day, Children's Day, Youth Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and even Earth Day, World Book Day, 520, etc.;

The third is major social events , such as this year’s Winter Olympics, World Cup, and Asian Games;

Fourth, the company’s own marketing rhythm and product planning , such as new product launches or large-scale exhibitions within the industry (such as the Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou Auto Show in the automotive industry, AWE in the home appliance industry, and the Sugar and Wine Fair in the wine and beverage industry).

Another important consideration in selecting these nodes is that consumers' consumption behavior will occur in these scenarios. For example, buying New Year's goods for the Spring Festival, giving gifts for Valentine's Day, Father's Day and Mother's Day, and usually preparing a shopping list and waiting to clear it all out during a big sale.

However, as big shopping festivals have developed to this day, more and more consumers have given up the habit of not buying on normal days but buying desperately during big sales. In particular, the new generation of consumers are more pursuing instant gratification and believe that the earlier you buy, the earlier you can enjoy. If you are interested in a product today, you should place an order today.

This makes it inevitable that marketing will become a daily routine. In addition to the explosive campaign communication model, brands also need normalized marketing activities and brand management. The emergence of this marketing trend is also driven by changes in the media. In the past, when brands did communication, they relied on spending money to buy time slots and pages from TV stations, newspapers and magazines. These were third-party resources, and brands only purchased and used them when they needed them for campaigns. But today, with the advent of e-commerce platforms, social platforms, and content platforms, brands have their own regular marketing platforms, such as Taobao stores, official WeChat accounts, Blue V accounts, etc. These stores and accounts are private corporate resources, and brands can post content on them for promotion on a daily basis.

This kind of daily marketing behavior has been centered on new media operations in the past few years, with the brand’s official self-media accounts publishing content updates on a daily basis. The focus now has shifted to live streaming.

The ultimate purpose of a brand’s existence is to establish relationships with consumers and achieve real-time communication. The live broadcast scene is precisely the key to achieving this goal. In the future, daily live broadcasts may replace campaign-style communications and become the first choice for corporate marketing. The integration of the two will also give marketing more new space and imagination.

Communication focuses on exposure, while live streaming focuses on conversion.

Communication pursues short-term bursts, while live streaming focuses on long-term results.

Communication is reach-oriented, spreading brand information; live streaming is relationship-oriented, creating continuous dialogue.

Communication reaches passive audiences, while live streaming attracts active users.

Communication expands the breadth of brand coverage, while live streaming focuses on in-depth brand communication.

Campaign mode of communication + daily mode of live broadcast is the complete marketing ecosystem of the enterprise. The two should cooperate with each other and become the dual centers of corporate marketing and promotion.

For many brands, launching communication campaigns has been a familiar strategy in the past, but now brands also have to learn to pick up live streaming as a conventional weapon.

Author: Empty-handed

Source: Empty-handed

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The evolution of live streaming