Douyin sells goods worth 200 million yuan! How do Tik Tok marketers break through?

As technology continues to innovate, media is also constantly upgrading, and all kinds of new things are emerging in an endless stream. This also creates more equal opportunities for marketers, allowing everyone to compete on the same starting line, and even take this opportunity to "overtake on a curve."

The media's communication forms have gone through the graphic and text era represented by websites, Weibo, and blogs, the voice era represented by WeChat, and the short video era represented by Douyin, Kuaishou, and Video Accounts. The rise of short videos has also allowed live broadcasts, which were once very niche, to enter thousands of households.

Every upgrade of the media form corresponds to every major technological change .

The global pandemic of the new coronavirus in 2020 has completely changed our social and economic landscape. The scale and pace of change are unprecedented, and all industries have begun to enter a turbulent, uncertain and complex business environment.

When this uncertainty becomes the only certainty, many companies begin to try multi-field layouts to share risks and hope to find breakthroughs. In the early days of the epidemic, the most popular anti-epidemic products in the industry were a typical example.

It is precisely the gradual transformation of this uncertainty into a new normal that has further exacerbated the impetuous and quick-success-seeking atmosphere of the entire business environment .

Today, although the domestic epidemic situation has improved slightly, many overseas countries still face severe challenges. In today's globalized economy, everyone is a stakeholder, and we all prosper together and suffer together.

Affected by the overall environment, the industry has frequently seen a series of problems such as chip shortages, rising raw material prices, difficulty in recruiting workers and rising labor costs .

1. Dilemma of Traditional Marketers

Under the epidemic, offline activities are subject to many restrictions, but new types of online consumption have shown huge potential. Companies have begun to pay more attention to the layout of online marketing and have used current mainstream publicity channels to carry out marketing activities.

According to data from Yuzhong Media, several companies including Han's Laser, Hongshan Laser, and Longxin Laser invested heavily in Douyin during the epidemic, and through this platform, they brought the companies project orders of 200 million, 200 million, and 20 million respectively. The marketing logic behind this is also very simple, which is to create a Douyin account matrix through full-staff marketing to attract traffic and fans .

Based on TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, the videos posted by these accounts can be more accurately recommended to relevant groups of people. Assuming that an employee’s account can bring 1,000 video impressions, not counting the secondary dissemination data, 1,000 employees can bring millions of exposures to the brand!

The most important thing is that the cost of running a million-level advertisement is zero! Assuming that the company invests 100 yuan in Dou+ for each account (which can bring about 5,000 impressions on average), it is equivalent to the company spending 100,000 yuan in advertising fees, which brought more than 5 million precise traffic exposures . The business value and opportunities behind this have unlimited room for imagination.

When I visited companies recently, I clearly felt that everyone was paying attention to the trends and developments of short video platforms. This also means that more and more companies will gradually shift to new marketing positions with an open attitude.

This is both an opportunity and a challenge for traditional marketers. How can we quickly update our skills and keep up with market changes when faced with unfamiliar fields? How to balance the relationship between performance indicators and business growth? How to quickly transform and break through to help the company achieve greater strategic development...

2. From product-focused to brand-focused

Precisely because the TO B field is highly professional and vertical, companies have higher requirements and standards for marketers. Only marketers who understand the industry and are familiar with the customer's decision-making process and cycle can better balance the relationship between product marketing and user needs, thereby helping companies maximize communication effects and growth needs.

Therefore, when companies recruit, they have a strong demand for "product marketers" who are familiar with the products and understand user needs. Often, such TO B marketers can also bring "resources" into the team.

It is precisely because of the low replaceability after having professional barriers and the ability to accumulate industry-related resources throughout the workplace process, and the trend of becoming more popular as you get older, that marketers are more willing to delve into product marketing.

With the rapid development of the economy, product types are becoming more and more abundant and more and more segmented, the functional differentiation of each product is becoming smaller and smaller, and homogeneous competition is constantly intensifying. Coupled with the industry uncertainty brought about by the epidemic, the importance of brands in market competition is also constantly highlighted.

Companies and marketers have also had to refocus their perspective, shifting from products to brands. The market is forcing companies to shift from thinking about the “hardware” of their products to thinking about the “software” of their brands .

Brand is a general term and overview of the comprehensive aspects of an enterprise, which includes the enterprise's operational capabilities, service capabilities, management capabilities, R&D capabilities, innovation capabilities, etc. At present, TO B companies are still in the early stages of brand building, especially in industrial categories.

The core difference between product marketing and brand marketing lies in who the users pay for. If your product is good, I will naturally choose you. When there are more and more similar products on the market, users have to go up another dimension to evaluate and compare. At this time, the key vote falls on the company's brand power. The competition in the market will ultimately be a competition of brand power .

The purpose of marketing is nothing more than to bring business growth to the enterprise, and the marketing process is to continuously expand the scale data of each link in the marketing funnel model. The brand plays a consolidating and strengthening role here, providing trust endorsement at every touchpoint in the user journey, thereby reducing the churn rate in each link of the marketing funnel .

1. Tags

To remember a stranger is to look for characteristics related to him, which can be found from the name, clothing, past experiences, values, family environment, etc. For example, there is an old man named Jing Ye Fu, Mao Tao from the Five People who wore slippers on "Summer of the Band", Li Guoqing who led several big men to seize the official seal, Louis Koo who silently donated to the school, Na Ying who has low emotional intelligence, and so on.

Labels are the most efficient way to introduce yourself. You can use labels to judge a lot of information about a person, including personality, preferences, areas of focus, behavior, etc. The process of labeling oneself is also to give the brand personalized characteristics such as emotion, attitude, and personality, which will help customers recognize the brand.

Of course, the previous examples are more of superficial labels, which are often untrue and purely fictional, commonly known as character creation . This kind of behavior, which is dressed up to cater to the preferences of some users, is destined to only bring short-term traffic dividends.

When a brand labels itself, it should highlight the point with the highest value. When users see a certain color, a certain word, or a certain product, they will naturally associate it with the existence of the brand, which is often different from the superficial label. Just like when you see a sunny and happy little boy, you will automatically think of your colleague who is full of positive energy and always passionate.

The marketing department needs to interact with corporate leaders to find the most appropriate and representative brand label.

2. Channels

Only by continuously spreading and exposing the information can enterprises continuously awaken customers' awareness of the brand. The process of communication requires the use of channels as a carrier for content display. Therefore, channels are the key link in an enterprise’s “monetization”.

In the early days, media channels were relatively single, consumers had very little say, and all kinds of indiscriminate advertisements were constantly infiltrating consumers’ lives. With the diversification of media forms, there are more and more channels for expressing opinions. The decentralized era has allowed consumers to take the lead in discourse. If we still copy the old ways of marketing, it will definitely not be effective.

The form of media is constantly upgrading and changing, and the communication position of marketing is also constantly changing. The channels that were once highly sought after have long since become obsolete, such as TV commercials, portals, B2B platforms, blog sites, etc. In this area, we should streamline those channels that do not meet current marketing needs.

At a time when attention is scarce, the key is to optimize marketing channels and prioritize user quality . But until now, there are still many companies that focus on the quantity of channels rather than the quality, and outsourcing service providers are still using "quantity" as the core selling point of their services.

In terms of marketing channels, I suggest that we can make layouts in two directions: building our own channels and building industry channels .

Own channels mainly include corporate official websites, self-media platforms (official accounts, Toutiao accounts, NetEase accounts, etc.), Zhihu, Bilibili, Douyin, Video accounts, Maimai, LinkedIn, etc. Their function is to shape the brand image and create brand IP .

Industry channels mainly rely on platforms such as industry associations, industry exhibitions, and industry portals for dissemination. Through industry channels, we can reach a more precise customer group and provide word-of-mouth endorsement for the brand .

3. From focusing on channels to focusing on content

Channels are the entrance to traffic. As the saying goes, whoever controls the channels controls the world. Companies have always attached great importance to the layout and construction of marketing channels, but rarely have they made any arrangements in content construction.

Content is the soul of marketing and the foundation and beginning of the entire marketing project execution layer. Everything will revolve around content. Content marketing is very mature in the TO C field, but it is a weak point in the TO B field.

This does not mean that companies do not value or have no awareness of content marketing. There are mainly two reasons:

1) Insufficient consumption capacity

Content marketing is a process of gradually influencing the target audience in a subtle way, so that they can achieve conversion at the right stage. TO B companies tend to pay more attention to efficiency and the value of short-term input-output. Compared with other channels that can quickly see results, content marketing does not have much advantage in the eyes of these companies. Moreover, budgets of hundreds of thousands or millions of yuan are not in line with the consumption capacity of most small and medium-sized enterprises.

2) Lack of professional team

The marketing team of an enterprise is more inclined towards the product side and is very lacking in insight and creative presentation on the content side. The existing team configuration does not have such capabilities, and finding an outsourced team will involve cost issues. In addition, the effect of content marketing is difficult to quantify and evaluate, so the enterprise has become more conservative.

In the past, the working model of the marketing department was to continuously add new things. The performance indicators that increase year by year force them to add a large number of promotion channels. If they customize personalized content according to the channels, the cost of producing such content will become very high, and it may not be done well. Therefore, everyone tacitly adopts the method of content transfer to directly distribute it to all channels simultaneously.

Next we should do subtraction. First reduce the marketing channels, then reduce the amount of content. This will leave more time for marketers to think, and we can make full use of this time to learn, think and test various possibilities.

If you were to say what kind of content is considered good content? I think the most basic evaluation criterion is the friendliness of the content . Are others willing to read, want to read, or understand your content? For example, relevant data can be obtained through the number of website views, the number of fans and interactions on self-media platforms.

Good content simplifies things and lowers the threshold for users to understand. However, many companies do the opposite and deliberately increase the difficulty of understanding the content, hoping to instill in users a very professional impression. This naturally has its considerations and value, but this behavior is destined to make your content more niche.

The reason why short videos are so popular is that users can obtain information more easily. You only need to watch a video to understand what the story is about and what point of view is presented. You can just be a like-clicking robot without thinking. Compared with graphic and text information, the threshold for understanding videos is much lower.

In addition, marketers must know how to leverage power and recognize the value of collaboration.

I see many people wearing multiple hats, having a lot of things to do, and being saturated with work all the time. It will be difficult for you to make any breakthroughs in the new era.

You can definitely ask the company to add more people or outsource services, but many people are very afraid to raise such ideas. On the one hand, they are worried that the company will discover their shortcomings and think that they are not capable enough. On the other hand, they are worried that their jobs will be replaced by outsourced teams.

In fact, there are some things that cannot be replaced by others, and the company's replacement cost is too high. Enterprises are unwilling to make this decision unless they have no choice. Collaborative teams can leverage each other's strengths and learn from each other, which is the best practical training for themselves and can also enable them to grow and make breakthroughs faster.

To sum up, high-quality content + precise channels can eventually create sparks of 1+1>2.

In the near future, I believe that the marketing department of TO B will also undergo two changes: "marketing moving towards digitalization" and "marketing department moving towards specialization" .

1) Marketing goes digital

In recent years, the concept of digitalization has been very popular, and everyone on the streets is talking about digitalization. I personally am very optimistic about the future development potential and value of marketing digitalization.

After a marketing campaign, the most headache-inducing task is to collect and summarize data from various channels. Each channel is unique and has different statistical indicators. In addition, you cannot obtain effective data indicators from offline channels, such as highway billboards.

Therefore, we can only collect statistics manually. In addition to low work efficiency, the inability to update data in real time, and difficulty in performing predictive analysis, the most critical problem with this method is that it is prone to errors. Data errors are a serious problem, which will affect the results of a series of subsequent analyses and predictions.

The core of digital marketing lies in data. All marketing data can be integrated to make marketing effects trackable, predictable, evaluable and assessable, which can effectively assist in the implementation of precision marketing projects. These data can also be directly shared internally, which is more conducive to collaboration among various departments of the company.

In the digital age, whoever makes the most effective use of data will come out on top .

2) The marketing department is becoming more professional

The marketing departments of most small and medium-sized enterprises are not very sound, and it is common for an entire department to be supported by only one person. Can such a department create value? able. Can you get it done? Can. Can it bring some breakthroughs? It's a bit difficult. No matter how outstanding this person is, his energy is always limited, and it is difficult for him to achieve results by "going it alone".

From the phenomenon of marketing department construction, we can see that it is not that enterprises do not attach great importance to brand building, but that enterprises’ determination is not strong enough. Everyone wants to first establish a department that can work, but how to make good use of this department is not included in the current plan.

But I believe that as market competition continues to escalate, companies will become more and more determined in brand building, and their marketing departments will gradually move towards specialization.

Short video operations will gradually become one of the mainstream channels for corporate brand promotion in the future, which is equivalent to the video version of the official account. The short video alone involves a series of standardized processes including theme planning, script writing, video shooting, video editing, post-production, operation and maintenance, etc. This process requires at least 2 to 3 full-time people to operate it.

Short video operation is just one of the daily tasks of the marketing department. It requires collaboration among multiple people and takes up a lot of time and energy. The current staffing of the marketing department cannot meet the workload of the department in the future.

In the future, companies’ demand for marketing talents will become stronger and stronger, and the demand for professional talents will also become stronger and stronger. The marketing department of the TO B industry is about to move from a "ragtag army" to a "regular army".

In addition, companies will continue to set higher thresholds for outsourced service providers, and those with "resources" will become more competitive service providers. For example, you understand the industry and you have connections and customer resources related to our industry. This will also trigger a transformation in the service provider industry, which will also show a trend towards verticalization and specialization.

Author: Hei Lai Gu

Source: Heilaigu (heilaigu01)