Practical methodology for Douyin e-commerce promotion!

Since Suning.com launched the "100-day battle" and officially launched the "818 Shopping Festival" in 2014, 818 has been with us for 8 years. This shopping festival IP, which was originally planned to become the third largest marketing node in the mainstream e-commerce circle after Taobao Double 11 and JD.com 618, has failed to create a stir as expected in the past eight years, neither in terms of promotion scale nor influence, nor in terms of mental persuasion for advertisers and consumers.

The reasons for this can be analyzed. First, it is related to the influence of the initiating platform, Suning.com, which makes it difficult to call on other platforms and merchants to invest in this marketing campaign on a large scale. Second, the timing is a bit awkward. The attention of 818 is always snatched away by other marketing nodes, such as the Olympics and Chinese Valentine's Day. Naturally, it is unable to effectively undertake the important task of "replenishing" the nodes between 618 and Double 11 in the second half of the year.

However, this "lukewarm" e-commerce node is expected to be "picked up and revitalized" by Douyin e-commerce . With over 600 million daily active users, a unique way of exploring user consumption needs, and a "snowball" growth model, Douyin 818 has won the attention of more and more brands and is expected to become Douyin's largest e-commerce IP event of the year.

Compared with last year's "818 Wonderful Goods Festival", Kas found that this year's "818 Trendy Goods Festival" has undergone significant upgrades in both participating entities and platform investment.

In terms of the participants, last year's "Wonderful Goods Festival" still focused on influencers bringing goods - although Suning.com, Xiaomi and others jointly created a "super live broadcast room" with Douyin, but overall, the brand operation at this stage still belongs to the "benchmark building" stage, and this year's Trendy Goods Festival, we see: brands that contribute more than 60% of Doudian's revenue have entered the mainstream and become core participants; and from the perspective of platform investment , this 818 also almost covers all of Douyin's e-commerce traffic, interactive gameplay and generous benefits, including but not limited to: Douin hot list, topic challenges, qualifying competitions, high red envelope subsidies, etc., and will also join hands with Hunan Satellite TV to launch the first Douyin e-commerce customized party, while helping partners to trade efficiently, this e-commerce node will be strongly linked to Douyin and strongly bound to the minds of users.

01 Doing Douyin e-commerce: Why should we not ignore "marketing activities"?

For merchants, the importance of participating in major promotional activities such as 818 is self-evident. It helps to gather popularity on a large scale and trigger concentrated transactions with high turnover in a short period of time.

In the FACT business model launched by Douyin e-commerce, the important role of "activity marketing (C)" in business operations is also emphasized. Whether participating in platform promotions (such as 618, 818) or marketing IP activities (such as Super Brand Day, New Product Day), or industry activities (such as Beauty Festival, Clothing Festival, etc.), activities can help brands reach user circles that were difficult to reach in the past. It is an incremental battlefield that merchants cannot miss for e-commerce operations. However, because it is a battlefield, the competition is also extremely fierce. Grabbing traffic and achieving high conversions are the core goals of participating merchants.

By observing the monthly GMV and fan performance of @Peacebird Women's Clothing Official Flagship Store, we can easily see that platform activities have a positive driving effect on brand business.

But beyond the event itself, in Kass's opinion, strengthening the operation of Douyin live e-commerce has two other values ​​for brands and merchants:

1. Help brands/merchants break through the existing growth bottleneck . This is due to the fact that Douyin, which has 600 million daily active users, has different users from traditional e-commerce channels. Kang Zeyu, president of Douyin e-commerce, once said that more than 85% of consumers acquired by Douyin merchants are new customers. On Douyin, brands have every opportunity to increase their sales. Douyin, which focuses on interest recommendation technology, can also distribute content with different attributes and forms around the same product to users. While helping merchants expand their user radius and continuously import accurate traffic to the live broadcast room, it can also bring users a new "discovery" shopping experience.

Second, it gives brands at different stages the opportunity to start from the same starting line. In the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem, brand awareness is no longer the core reason for the platform to provide traffic inclination. Product quality, reputation, content creativity, traffic operation capabilities, etc. will determine the survival status in the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem. This means that the difference in traffic acquisition capabilities between new and old brands has been leveled, which also provides new brands with an opportunity to overtake others in their growth.

At this time, participating in the big promotion through official activities will undoubtedly shorten the brand's cold start time and achieve an explosion in voice and sales.

However, not all players can take off by taking advantage of the big promotion. We have also compiled some experience on how to become the leader of the Douyin-style big promotion rather than the "loser".

02 From the “preparation period – outbreak period – review period”: How do brands make the most of the Douyin promotion?

Taking the "818 New Trend Goods Festival" as an example, we might as well divide a big promotion into three stages: preparation period, outbreak period, and review period . The focus of work should be different for each stage.

In short, during the preparation period for a big promotion , product selection and testing are of paramount importance. Only by understanding the true preferences of users can a product strategy that is sure to win the market be developed. In addition, at this stage, brands should also do a good job of building the underlying infrastructure: focusing on self-broadcasting by merchants, making full use of short videos and live broadcasts to complete event previews, accumulate fans, and optimize scenarios. Focusing on influencers bringing products, early links and preparations should be made to link all possible top, shoulder, waist, and tail influencers to build a strong product-bringing camp.

When it comes to promotion strategies, the focus at this stage is still on "increasing fans" rather than selling goods. The value of increasing fans lies in two aspects: first, after the big promotion breaks out, various marketing tools can be used to accurately awaken the accumulated fans; second, it helps the system calibrate the target user portrait and improve the ROI (or GPM from another perspective) of large-scale investment after the big promotion breaks out.

Figure/Overall business rhythm of 818 New Trend Goods Festival

When we really enter the promotion period, the focus of brands/merchants should shift to the actual sales data explosion.

On one hand, it is necessary to review the data in the live broadcast room in real time and make adjustments and optimizations to "people-goods-place". For example, regarding the goods side, it is necessary to continuously optimize the product grouping strategy, self-broadcasting rhythm and product conversion language; on the other hand, it is necessary to make good arrangements for the influencers to bring goods.

Finally, returning to the review period after the big promotion, in fact, this stage is often overlooked by many brands and merchants, but if you grasp it well, the value may be beyond your imagination.

Most brands may have this feeling: participating in big sales promotions can indeed enjoy traffic accumulation and sales explosion in the short term, but after the big sales promotion, large-scale marketing investment cannot be exchanged for customer retention and a longer life cycle. Doing a good job of reviewing the situation may help reduce this problem.

As we all know, after the big promotion, the platform's traffic price will decline to a certain extent. At this time, merchants can completely use a new product grouping strategy to invite influencers to return to sell products in order to stabilize the sales peak during the promotion; on the other hand, merchants can authorize the top influencers to sell products during the promotion and release them in slices. This will not only strengthen the impact on the minds of users who have purchased products, but also further reach a wider range of users and accelerate the sedimentation of private domains; finally, merchants should also do a good job of reviewing the influencers, find highly matched influencers with excellent reach and conversion rates, and establish long-term and stable cooperation with them.

03 Taking the “preparation period” as an example: step-by-step explanation on how to seize the traffic from big promotions?

Next, we will focus on explaining how to do a good job in the preparation period for the big promotion. Merchants who missed the 818 event may wish to apply it to the Double 11 event that they will start preparing for at the end of August.

As mentioned earlier, product selection and testing during the preparation period is very important, as it directly affects sales during the promotion period.

Generally speaking, we can divide products into: hot products, new products and featured products . The so-called hot products, that is, super single products, are responsible for detonating sales and are often the main contributors to the GMV of big promotions. The value of new products lies in attracting attention and competing for more attention and traffic for big promotions. The role of featured products is to differentiate big promotion strategies, further attracting traffic while increasing the richness of products.

So, how do we determine which products have the potential to become hot-selling products? The short video platform provides us with two channels, one is short videos, and the other is self-broadcasting. Short video product testing mainly assesses the exposure and interaction rate of the content after the video is released, as well as the attention rate generated by the content; while self-broadcast product testing mainly tests the number of product exposures, click-through rates, and conversion rates, and uses this to understand the true preferences of users, increase the inventory depth of potential explosive products, and improve user customer service and logistics experience.

After determining the basic product palette and product grouping strategy, what should brands/merchants in the warm-up period do regarding the merchant self-broadcasting (Field), influencer matrix (Alliance), and top influencers (Top KOL) mentioned in FACT?

Watch the merchant’s own broadcast first. This can be divided into two situations: For live broadcast rooms with a weak original fan base, long-term preheating plans must be made to transmit event information and accumulate fans through videos and self-broadcasting ; for live broadcast rooms with a good fan base, medium- and short-term strategies can be adopted to release promotion information to the outside world 3-5 days before the promotion to reduce the impact on daily sales.

Taking "Winona Super Brand Day" as an example, let's analyze how it does a good job of warming up for the long-term live broadcast?

Winona Super Product Day Preheating Strategy

20 days before Super Product Day

Start long-duration daily broadcast, with a daily broadcast duration of 17 hours+

Goal : Cultivate users’ viewing habits and make the live broadcast room popular. At the same time, it also allows the delivery algorithm enough time to adjust the conversion rate and clarify the target user portrait of the live broadcast room.

15 days before Super Product Day

We will revise the official version of Douyin and invest in a team to update the video content.

Goal: Test products and attract traffic at low cost. Here is a reminder for brands/merchants: Never ignore the value of short videos in attracting traffic. Collecting videos of the same category and refining popular copywriting are all magic weapons to reduce traffic costs and accurately portray users.

5 days before Super Product Day

Use oral broadcast and H5 to make a countdown announcement for Bigday and reach targeted fans

1 day before Super Product Day

Top celebrities come on stage to warm up the market, accumulate popularity and break through existing users

2 hours before the Super Product Day

Announcement of the Super Product Day mechanism, recall of private domain users, and full expansion of commercial domain

Goal: Potential users "book live broadcast" or enter the live broadcast room to accelerate the conversion effect

Two pieces of information are emphasized here: First, when a live broadcast lasts for 2 hours, the traffic will reach a peak and then show a natural decline. In order to maintain the popularity of the live broadcast room, it is recommended that brands increase the traffic of the live broadcast room in a rhythmic manner through cooperation with experts, on-site and off-site delivery, etc.; Second, it is necessary to do a good job in optimizing the live broadcast scene. The optimized content includes but is not limited to: background walls, themes, product displays, welfare patches, etc. The advantage of doing so is: when conducting video streaming, the traffic will be more accurate, and it can also reduce the dependence of the live broadcast room on the anchor. After all, the users who enter the live broadcast room are mostly accurate users attracted by the content and benefits, and the anchor only needs to take over the traffic.

Author: Kas Data

Source: caasdata6