How should brands operate Bilibili in 2021?

The new year of 2021 is here. Recently, when I was connecting with many brands, I found a significant change, that is, almost all brands have increased their marketing budgets on Bilibili. This is related to the crazy popularity of Bilibili this year. Of course, more importantly, many brands have already smelled the huge business opportunities under the commercial cooperation with Bilibili. In fact, whether it is the nationwide popularity of brands such as Huaxizi and Perfect Diary on Bilibili, or the golden sales achieved by brands such as blankme and Ximuyuan on Bilibili... brands are gradually realizing that there is more than one way to market on Bilibili, and how to explore a way that is more suitable for themselves may become the focus of brands in 2021.

Of course, we have also noticed that many brands are still hesitant about brand marketing on Bilibili. Most of the reasons can be attributed to insufficient budget, unclear processes, unclear product effectiveness, etc. This is completely understandable.

Today, we take stock of several of the best brands on Bilibili in 2020. There are well-known big brands as well as emerging new brands. From their diverse ways of playing, we may be able to find some rules of Bilibili's brand marketing, and provide a feasible direction for brands' brand marketing on Bilibili in 2021.

"In 2021, Bilibili will continue to create an open business ecosystem." Liu Binxin said, we will continue to strengthen the construction of commercial middle platforms and the vitality of commercial products, and help brands establish a new type of trust relationship with the "rising generation" of young consumers.

We noticed that when a brand has built a complete link to its core consumer users, what the brand needs to do is to go deep into Bilibili, understand its culture, and find its own foothold in the community atmosphere of Bilibili.

I did a quick comparison of the data for these three brands over the past 30 days. The number of associated UP hosts is around 100, and the number of associated videos is mostly over 150. In terms of the total number of views, except for Yuanqi Forest, which had the blessing of the New Year's Eve Gala and reached a terrifying 22.8 million views, the other two brands' views were both around 8 million. I extracted the weekly rankings of these three brands in the past 30 days from Feigua data.

What we can see is that they are on the list almost every week and are ranked very high.

In fact, in the process of retrieving data, we found that Tangdao did not launch a large number of ads on Bilibili, but selectively selected some UP hosts whose lifestyle was consistent with their brand culture. Most of the topics were bedding sharing, single life vlogs, etc., but they achieved amazing sales conversions.

If we look at the comment sections of several UP hosts it has launched, we can roughly infer that its products have penetrated into the hearts of B station users, achieved true mental education, and laid a good foundation for e-commerce conversion.

We noticed that Blankme’s advertising on Bilibili seems to be ongoing all the time. According to FeiGua data, between October 2020 and January 2021, there were 86 associated UP hosts, with a total playback volume of 6.4 million. However, I pulled the top 30 UP hosts and found that more than 2 million of the playbacks were directly borne by several big UP hosts. But in fact, in July, Blankme's collaboration with "NYA's Life" became popular with the topic of women, with a single video having over 1.6 million views, and the data is still rising.

This open brand concept, brand promotion by top UP hosts, and large-scale delivery have allowed Blankme to gain a place among the beauty brands on Bilibili.

In analyzing its most-played videos, we noticed that it began to explore the breadth of content videos and tried Bilibili's most popular content formats, small theaters, etc., with very good results.

OnePlus phones have set a good example for technology brands. It not only demonstrates how large-scale technology brands should operate on Bilibili, but also shows which content directions can be used to achieve new brand leaps if there is not so much funding. In fact, this is also the basic logic of Bilibili’s brand marketing: instead of blindly copying, find a more suitable marketing path based on its own characteristics.

No.3. Find the marketing rules and grow freely

We found that in current brand marketing, many brands have a love-hate relationship with Bilibili. They love it because if one of their cooperative videos goes viral, the huge traffic it brings is mouth-watering, but they hate it because there seem to be many rules hidden in Bilibili, and if you are not careful, you will lose both your money and your products.

In fact, no matter how big the traffic pool of Bilibili is, and how many new consumer groups it has that represent the future. Its fundamental definition is just a platform, and its value relies on the high-quality content produced by countless UP hosts. These contents constitute the core value of Bilibili. For a brand, how to grasp this core is the most important thing.

This time, we selected representative brands in the three sectors of beauty, technology, and life. Some of them invested a lot of money, while others made more vertical placements; some chose top UP hosts for brand promotion, while others chose mid-level UP hosts or even those with fewer fans to connect with real consumers; some preferred to promote products, while others preferred creativity...

Although it seems complicated, there are some rules to follow. For example, high-quality content triggers dissemination, excellent product quality triggers good reputation, and advanced concepts trigger user resonance. These are the marketing core of these brands in B station marketing.

This is exactly what we need to study and learn.

As the Vice Chairman and COO of Bilibili defined the future of Bilibili at the 2020bilibili AD TALK Marketing Conference: Bilibili is a cultural paradise based on trust, and its core commercial value is to provide brands with a good soil for establishing a relationship of mutual trust with users.

In 2021, we will wait and see how many brands will bloom beautifully in this soil.