What’s new about live streaming sales?

First, the format of live streaming has become more vertically segmented. In addition to selling products in the studio like Li Jiaqi and Viya, there are also emerging segmented live broadcast formats such as warehouse broadcasts, origin broadcasts, store visits broadcasts, and live broadcasts to meet the different needs of merchants in different scenarios.

Secondly, the identities of some live broadcast-related service agencies are changing from simple third-party service providers to platforms with certain voice and strong supply chain capabilities.

Finally, KOLs and KOCs are undergoing "class changes". In the future, top KOLs will be more like big IPs in their own right, with a complete commercial monetization system of their own; while a large number of industry experts in the middle and lower levels, as well as internet celebrities who are willing to share their local lives, will be active in various segmented live broadcasts and have more opportunities to monetize.

"The marketing effect of live streaming is now better than before, so advertisers' resources are beginning to shift from traditional media to emerging channels such as live streaming." Jiang Songyang, founding partner of Weige, a third-party live streaming service agency, also told New Retail Business Review that the development of the live streaming industry is far from mature and everything still needs to be explored - segmented live streaming, as a necessary path for the development of live streaming, is just beginning.

01. What is segmented live streaming?

There is no clear definition of segmented live streaming in the market. Some people think that segmenting product categories is segmented live streaming, that is, the segmentation of goods. However, the segmented live broadcast discussed in this article is more about the segmentation of scenarios.

In Jiang Songyang's words, "Looking at the entire industry chain, segmenting the most suitable links for live streaming according to different industries and scenarios, so that live streaming can empower the development of the industry."

This is a transition from "live broadcast +" to "+ live broadcast". So, what are the existing segmented live broadcasts? What are their specific manifestations?

The earliest and most common one is the live broadcast from the place of origin.

In many tourist attractions and time-honored brand stores, you can start broadcasting with just a simple lighting, a radio and a mobile phone.

Shop assistants, residents, and internet celebrities will demonstrate the quality of the goods to the audience in front of the camera, and constantly praise the products for their authenticity and excellent quality.

In many variety shows, celebrities go to ethnic minority areas or impoverished mountainous areas to conduct live broadcasts selling local specialties, which is also considered as live broadcasts from the place of origin.

On Kuaishou, live streaming of agricultural products at their place of origin has an outstanding ability to sell goods . "Xishuangbanna Alang" conducted a live broadcast from the durian production area in April this year, digging out the plump and fresh durian flesh one by one, and got 3,000 people online to pay for durian with a sales volume of 510,000, which was a remarkable achievement.

Most live broadcasts from the place of origin are mainly to meet the merchants' needs for product awareness and sales, and are suitable for goods from the place of origin.

A larger-scale segment of live broadcasting is warehouse broadcasting.

As the name suggests, it is a live broadcast in the warehouse, which mainly sells goods through live broadcast and directly ships goods from the warehouse to connect the supply and demand sides, shorten the logistics links, and thus reduce costs. Consumers can also get more discounts and a more convenient experience.

Currently, many warehouse broadcasts are initiated by logistics companies or bonded warehouses with warehousing conditions.

For example, in May last year, Lai Meisong, chairman of ZTO, live-streamed the sale of goods for the first time at ZTO Cloud Warehouse. The entire live broadcast was watched by 8.1 million people, with total sales (GMV) exceeding 15 million yuan, and a total of more than 1.1 million packages generated. The goods in the warehouse were shipped out that evening.

In June of the same year, Zhejiang Shuangjie also carried out a warehouse live broadcast. CEO Feng Li made it clear in an interview with the media that warehouse live broadcast is to bring the two scenes of "live broadcast with goods" and "goods operations in the warehouse" to consumers through the warehouse scene construction.

In addition to logistics companies, third-party live broadcast service agencies such as Weige are also focusing on warehouse broadcasting.

This year, Weige conducted warehouse broadcasts twice to clear out the remaining stock for Red Dragonfly. In the first cooperation, Weige helped Red Dragonfly clear out more than 2,000 pairs of out-of-stock shoes in two days, and the second time, it cleared out more than 4,300 pairs of leftover shoes.

Jiang Songyang said that the products promoted by Cangbo are concentrated on consumer goods and fast-moving consumer goods, which are very suitable for companies that have leftover goods that need to be cleared out. In addition, logistics companies have natural warehouse broadcasting advantages, but they need third-party service agencies to provide help with influencers and technology, which has led to a win-win relationship between the two parties.

Another common segment of live streaming is store exploration live streaming.

During the stage when the epidemic is at a mild stage, store exploration live broadcasts mainly serve local lifestyle businesses such as hotels, medical beauty, and tourism. They are more like an advanced version of the store exploration pictures, texts, and videos on platforms such as Dianping and Xiaohongshu. Their purpose is to drive traffic to merchants' offline stores.

The last relatively niche segment of live streaming is live streaming with microphones connected, which is live streaming through multi-person interactive streaming.

After Clubhouse became popular overseas, it also led to the trend of live streaming in China, but it is still relatively rare to use live streaming in commercial scenarios.

Weige once cooperated with Tsinghua University and Peking University Online School to make attempts in this regard. Based on the special needs of educational customers, Weige developed a live broadcast and microphone connection method, which achieved the effect of significantly reducing customer acquisition costs.

02. New pain points

To sum up, the increasingly segmented live broadcasts have put forward higher requirements on anchors, platforms, and institutions, requiring more professional, refined, and invested new operating methods to capture today's increasingly valuable traffic.

But the current live broadcast market is clearly not fully prepared to cope with such changes.

First of all, the top internet celebrities and KOLs attract most of the traffic and resources, while a large number of mid-level KOLs and KOCs are still unable to master the code of commercial monetization.

Among them are many industry experts, local experts, or broadcasters with strong personal characteristics, whose value has not been fully tapped. This is also the reason why content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili have been emphasizing "ensuring that content creators have enough food" for many years.

At the same time, businesses are also troubled by the numerous KOLs and KOCs. They are not sure which internet celebrities are more suitable for their own brands and products.

This is to a certain extent related to the merchants' unclear understanding of their own live streaming needs. Many brands just want to follow the trend and do a live broadcast. As for why they should do live broadcast, what effect they should achieve, and what kind of live broadcast format is suitable for their own brands and products, they have no idea. Therefore, more mature institutions and platforms are needed to provide professional assistance to brands.

Nowadays, although Douyin (Star Map), Bilibili (Firework), Weibo (Micro Task), Kuaishou (Magnetic Star), Xiaohongshu (Creator Platform), etc. have launched their own KOL delivery platforms, hoping to become a bridge of communication between merchants and Internet celebrities, they are relatively closed to each other, limiting the multi-platform development path of Internet celebrities.

Moreover, the major platforms are still stuck at the “basic operations” of grabbing orders and issuing tasks, making it difficult to provide more sophisticated docking services, and there is no way to talk about effective communication and interaction between merchants and Internet celebrities.

So, how should these pain points be solved?

03. Identity Transformation of Live Broadcasting Service Agencies

After communicating with several live broadcast service agencies, New Retail Business Review found that the identities of many agencies are vague. They are both MCN agencies, marketing operations agencies, or live broadcast agencies.

With the development of the live streaming industry, from the incubation of internet celebrities and influencers to the promotion of goods, marketing, traffic diversion, and brand communication, these businesses have long been integrated into every service link provided by live streaming service agencies.

As a result, constantly adjusting business lines to suit customer and market demands has become the norm for these institutions. Take Weige as an example. This organization, which has served the live broadcast industry for many years, is transforming from "MCN+marketing" to a comprehensive service platform.

The first step is to be more proactive in discovering the potential needs of merchants.

For example, Weige found that due to the insufficient number of online sales orders, Hangzhou clothing manufacturers have a common problem of leftover goods being piled up, and these leftover goods are difficult to clear out through ordinary live streaming.

Therefore, Weige took the initiative to seek cooperation, using its rich resources of internet celebrities and live broadcast experience, combined with multi-channel communication, to target leftover goods to more precise user groups, thereby helping clothing manufacturers clear out leftover goods more quickly.

In terms of matching channels, Jiang Songyang told New Retail Business Review that different platforms have different requirements for internet celebrities and live broadcasts.

For example, the Douyin platform is mostly composed of young people, and its content is highly random and has low precision, so scripts need to be prepared in advance to perform. However, segmented live broadcasts such as warehouse broadcasts based on Taobao have a wider audience, but because it is a shopping platform itself, it has low randomness and high precision.

Therefore, the requirements for internet celebrity anchors in segmented live broadcasts have become more refined, and each cooperation requires a dedicated person to operate.

For warehouse live broadcasts, influencers who are more familiar with the products and brands are needed to conduct the live broadcasts; while store visit live broadcasts often require local influencers because they are more familiar with the products and local characteristics. In addition, the influencers who broadcast live the store visits must also have stronger expressiveness, which can bring advanced consumption experience to the live broadcast viewers and stimulate their interest in the store.

Based on this, Weige and many MCN agencies, live broadcast service agencies, and KOL delivery platforms began to change from serving top anchors to serving mid- and lower-level Internet celebrities.

"Now top internet celebrities like Li Jiaqi, Wei Ya, and Luo Yonghao have become their own IPs, formed a complete ecological chain, and can even build their own supply chain. We can't play a big role in it." Jiang Songyang said, "But at the same time, the live broadcast market is too crowded. Many mid-level internet celebrities and a large number of businesses are still confused and don't know who to cooperate with. We serve this type of customers."

04. Will a larger service platform be the answer?

Weige’s long-term goal is to build a large-scale service platform that spans platforms such as Star Map, Micro Task, and Fireworks.

But this is what Tianxiaxiu, which was listed on the A-share market last year, has already done. In addition to relying on Weibo's "micro-tasks", Tianxiaxiu has also expanded into platforms such as Douyin, WeChat, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Zhihu. Its main action is to integrate resources and use technical means to more accurately match a large number of merchants, influencers, and celebrities.

The 2020 financial report data released this year showed that Tianxiaxiu's WEIQ platform has 1.47 million registered users, the number of active merchant customers on the platform has reached 8,342, and it has served a total of 160,000 merchants with a total order volume of 1.247 million. Tianxiaxiu’s achievements are also gratifying - its revenue has increased by more than 50% for five consecutive years.

However, it seems that a completely "neutral" large platform has not yet appeared. One of the important reasons is that the characteristics of KOLs on major platforms are clearly distinct, and it is difficult to provide comprehensive services to them. In addition, large-scale platforms often lack refined services, so there are still huge market opportunities for live broadcast service agencies.

In addition, another major challenge for live streaming service agencies is to strengthen their own supply chain capabilities.

The basic idea of ​​Weige is similar to that of many MCN agencies and live broadcast service agencies: operating through establishing brands or stores, owning their own product production lines, and independently controlling the supply chain and product models.

"We have formed a closed loop in terms of influencer promotion and product sales, shifting from primarily serving brands to serving ourselves." Jiang Songyang said that this would allow us to go deeper into the source of the supply chain and have more sufficient bargaining power, thereby obtaining higher profit margins and further enhancing commercial value.

This is consistent with the idea of ​​logistics companies doing warehouse broadcasting - both hope to transform from a point in the original distribution network to an important link with the ability to select products in segmented categories.

Obviously, China's well-developed supply chain has expanded the number of players in the live broadcast industry beyond the industry...

Looking at the market in recent years, every brand and organization wants to become a platform, but the ending is basically that two or three giants swallow up other small fish and eventually grow into giant platforms.

Are the models and ideas described in this article feasible for the live streaming industry? Will they further cause market expansion and intensify the competitive landscape of survival of the fittest? Moreover, as the trend of segmented live streaming becomes more obvious, how many institutions and platforms will be able to avoid detours, leave their competitors behind, and carve out a niche for themselves?

The final answer is still unknown, because this is indeed a rapidly developing and ever-changing emerging industry...

Author: New Retail Business Review

Source: New Retail Business Review