How to make Kuaishou’s live streaming GMV exceed 10 million?

In 3 months, the number of simultaneous online users of Kuaishou anchor "Shadow's Light Luxury Outfit" (Kuaishou ID: XY20210331) has increased 7 times, and the monthly GMV has exceeded 10 million.

As an e-commerce anchor who had just entered the Kuaishou ecosystem, Yingzi encountered various problems during the cold start phase just like many people. Unlike others who only dabbled in the field, the Shadow team began to study the traffic tools and product tools on Kuaishou, consciously adjusted the traffic investment method, reduced the cost of increasing fans, and increased the traffic investment ROI from less than 1 to more than 3.

At the same time, Kuaishou’s well-known anchor Dandan also set her new personal record on October 9th - single-day GMV exceeded 1.2 billion.

Looking at the live streaming e-commerce industry, the good old days when gold was everywhere are now history. CNNIC data shows that as of June 2021, the scale of China's e-commerce live streaming users was 384 million, a year-on-year increase of 13.3%. Although it still maintains a relatively high growth rate, the decline in the growth rate also sends a signal that the pure traffic dividend is becoming increasingly tightened.

The performances of different anchors and brands in live streaming with goods began to diverge. While some live broadcast rooms are experiencing sluggish growth, more mature anchors like Yingzi and Dandan are still able to make great strides. The difference can be summed up in three words: professionalism.

"Whether it is the Kuaishou e-commerce platform, merchants or service providers, everyone knows that the era of extensive growth is over. Now is the era of competing in strategic thinking and systematic, professional and refined operations." Xiao Gu, head of Kuaishou e-commerce, asserted in the opening remarks of the newly launched "STAGE Live Broadcast Operation Methodology: Kuaishou Merchant Operation White Paper 2021". In Xiaogu's view, Kuaishou e-commerce completed the first stage of explosive growth and primitive accumulation from 2018 to 2020, and is now entering the second growth curve.

So, what does Kuaishou e-commerce rely on to support this curve? What merchants are concerned about is how to achieve certain growth on Kuaishou?

Specialization, creating a second growth curve

As an influential management scientist in the United States, Ichak Edith once proposed the famous theory of corporate life cycle. In his opinion, the development of an enterprise is similar to the growth trajectory of a person. After going through the germination stage, growth stage, maturity stage and reaching the peak, it is inevitable that the enterprise will face the fate of recession.

But Charles Handy, a management thinker from Europe, proposed the "second growth curve". In his opinion, organizations and enterprises need to plan ahead and find the "second curve" that will lead the enterprise to a second take-off before the first curve reaches its peak. In this way, the company's vision of sustainable growth can be realized.

For Kuaishou e-commerce, it is currently in such a critical stage of preparing for a rainy day.

"A few years ago, live streaming and short videos were a novel form of sales. Its rapid growth was brought about by its novelty and uniqueness, which released demand and supply capabilities," said Liu Lang, head of Kuaishou's e-commerce products, analyzing the rise of the live streaming sales trend.

He also mentioned that when a large number of entities began to pour into this battlefield, their fates were not the same. Those merchants who mastered the methods and tricks first got the first wave of dividends of the era. From the perspective of the platform, Kuaishou E-commerce hopes that the overall operational level of merchants can become efficient, and this requires improving the professional capabilities of platform players.

"The dividend of high-speed growth is still there, but it needs to be more sustained and lasting, and more merchants need to be able to enjoy the universal dividend. 'Universal' is different from other platforms, and it is the value that Kuaishou has always emphasized and advocated," Liu Lang told 36Kr. It is based on this prediction and insight into industry trends that professional operations are forming the second growth curve of Kuaishou e-commerce.

The emphasis on specialization is not sudden. If we track the development trajectory of Kuaishou e-commerce in the past year, it is not difficult to see that it has always been focusing on this point.

At the Trend Makers Conference held on July 22 this year, Xiao Gu proposed the "three big" strategy, namely, big development of trusted e-commerce, big development of brands, and big development of service providers. Among them, big development of trusted e-commerce clarified the tone and values ​​of Kuaishou e-commerce, big development of brands aimed at strengthening the supply chain and product resources of live streaming with goods, and big development of service providers aimed at improving the professional level of live streaming with goods.

In the past, Kuaishou platform’s services to merchants were often provided by internal industry clerks. When the scale of Kuaishou's e-commerce was relatively limited, this model had no problem; however, with the rapid expansion of Kuaishou's e-commerce ecosystem, the scale of merchants connected by industry waiters continued to rise, which would constrain Kuaishou's service capabilities for merchants.

Under such circumstances, enhancing service capabilities for merchants by introducing a large number of service providers has become a natural choice. By centrally training a large number of service providers and then having the service providers provide guidance to merchants, this point-to-surface approach creates a leverage effect, allowing Kuaishou e-commerce to use less force to leverage a larger market.

In fact, from July to September this year, in just two months, 400 service providers have settled in Kuaishou e-commerce and served about 15% of the merchants in Kuaishou e-commerce, helping them quickly pass the cold start period and accelerate growth. At present, more service providers are rushing into the market, and they will cover a considerable number of merchants across the country.

As a result of the acceleration of this process, the overall level of specialization of Kuaishou's e-commerce ecosystem has been significantly improved, and the starting point of the second growth curve has been seamlessly connected with the peak of the first growth curve.

Thinking Leap Makes Rapid Growth Reasonable

The Kuaishou E-commerce Merchant Conference held on September 10th became the stage for anchor Yu Mo (Kuaishou ID: YMJ20131030). In the fish tank-style fully transparent live broadcast room set up at the venue, she and the service provider team behind her are busy. They need to demonstrate their ability to sell goods under the attention of everyone.

In this reality show-like atmosphere, tension continues to rise, and the uncertain results of selling products to some extent affect Yu Mo's reputation in the industry. As a former TV shopping channel host, people naturally have expectations for her sales performance on Kuaishou live broadcasts .

On Kuaishou, Yumo, who has 1.5 million followers, mainly sells daily necessities. When the platform invited her to participate in the e-commerce merchant conference, the target for her to bring in 2 million products within two hours seemed to be an impossible goal. Because in the past, her highest sales of the same length of time was only around 200,000.

"The platform gives us resources, and the operations teachers give us ideas. I want to prove that we can do it." After much deliberation, Yu Mo and Kuaishou's strategic core service provider Laotie Culture accepted this seemingly difficult challenge together. The final sales results exceeded expectations, with the GMV reaching 2.33 million in two hours.

Most of the time, the unexpected is lurking within the expected. Yumo's performance beyond expectations is essentially due to the fact that she has been inspired by the professional operations of the service provider and has undergone a fundamental change in her thinking about bringing goods.

At first, her team consisted of only a couple, with no assistants, advertising staff or atmosphere group. But after an in-depth exchange with the service provider team, she began to master more tips for live streaming - for example, assistants, atmosphere group, customer service and advertising teams are indispensable, and during the live streaming process, product combinations need to be dynamically selected according to traffic conditions, and even the rhythm of the live streaming plays a decisive role in the final success or failure of selling goods.

“We must warm up the audience before the broadcast, and insert benefits during the live broadcast. When encountering hot products with good conversion rates, they need to be put on the shelves for sale repeatedly.” Now she is familiar with the key nodes in the live broadcast of selling goods.

Yu Mo's change in her mindset on selling products is exactly the effect that Kuaishou e-commerce hopes to achieve right now.

On different occasions, the Kuaishou e-commerce team has repeatedly demonstrated this set of formulas:

GMV=exposure volume*click rate*average viewing time*number of orders per unit time*unit price*number of items.

It is not difficult to find the importance of specialization from this formula. If most merchants can master professional thinking of bringing goods, then GMV will naturally be able to achieve good performance - efficient advertising can increase the click-through rate, a reasonable live broadcast rhythm can extend the average viewing time of users, and the wording and product selection strategy will directly affect the number of orders per unit time. The seemingly complex scenario is simplified into a few limited key variables, which all point to the degree of specialization of the merchant.

"Rapid growth must be based on evidence and reason. It's not enough to just rely on luck. Therefore, we need to standardize some of the previous methodologies so that more businesses can follow this set of rules to achieve success," said Liu Lang.

The "STAGE Live Broadcast Operation Methodology" recently released by Kuaishou E-Commerce can be seen as the official answer to this question by the platform. This is the set of rules that Liu Lang mentioned that more businesses can directly adopt to improve the live broadcast effect.

Liu Lang mentioned: "We look forward to using this set of operational methodology to help merchants smoothly overcome the development bottleneck period and grow from ordinary live streaming anchors in version 1.0 to live streaming e-commerce experts in version 2.0." To match this, Kuaishou E-commerce has launched corresponding traffic support plans and live streaming diagnostic products. On the one hand, it uses traffic to help merchants break through the ceiling faster, and on the other hand, it helps merchants better understand and improve operations through back-end products and data.

STAGE, bringing entropy reduction to live streaming

The STAGE live broadcast operation methodology consists of five parts, namely, inventory of products, inventory of live broadcast, inventory of commercialization, inventory of benefits and inventory of highlights, which basically cover all the core links of e-commerce live broadcast.

This methodology provides merchants with rules that can be directly applied in different aspects such as product selection, live broadcast, traffic investment, discounts and preheating.

In terms of "stock inventory", it is recommended that merchants provide different product specifications, quantities, prices and discount strategies for new and old fans;

In terms of "live broadcast", it is recommended that merchants create a complete live broadcast script, control the rhythm of the activity, and strengthen the anchor's personality;

In terms of "marketing", merchants are encouraged to direct public domain traffic to live broadcast rooms through the Magnet Taurus platform, activate private domain old fans through Kuaishou Fan Tiao, and enrich the level of traffic diversion;

In terms of "welfare", we use highly cost-effective welfare products to lock in user traffic and gain conversion opportunities;

In terms of "highlights", it is also recommended that businesses plan and release warm-up content in advance to attract more people to make appointments for live broadcasts, thereby achieving efficient water accumulation before the live broadcast.

"Through a lot of research, we found that the live broadcast process is not a long-board effect, but a short-board effect. So when we launched STAGE, we launched the five factors together, rather than one by one," Liu Lang told 36Kr.

Based on his continuous observation of Kuaishou's e-commerce ecosystem, a good live broadcast often focuses on five points at the same time; once there are major problems in one or two of them, the overall result will be poor.

To some extent, his words reflect the increasingly complicated reality of live streaming selling goods after years of development. Live streaming is like a giant machine with many parts that are precisely assembled. Any flaw in it may cause the machine to stop.

Unfortunately, many merchants still do not understand the operating principle of this machine. At this time, "STAGE" launched by Kuaishou E-commerce has become an entry-level work manual, allowing merchants to become more professional and thus find the underlying support with certainty in the uncertainty of the turbulent surface.

In fact, before launching the STAGE methodology, Kuaishou E-Commerce had already applied this methodology to the practices of many live-streaming merchants selling goods. Liu Lang mentioned in the interview that in less than two months, Kuaishou E-commerce, with the help of service providers and other partners, has supported more than 400 merchants to achieve a single live broadcast GMV of over 2 million, and more than 100 merchants to achieve a single live broadcast GMV of over 10 million.

The significant growth is due to the fact that under the guidance of the methodology, merchants’ businesses have freed themselves from the disturbance of many random factors, thus achieving more targeted growth.

From a macro perspective, the live streaming industry seems to be entering an era of increasing entropy.

The influx of more merchants, anchors, platforms, products and gameplay has caused the uncertainty of the entire ecosystem to surge along with the growth of scale, which means that companies are facing severe challenges while enjoying dividends; but the launch of the STAGE methodology, the introduction of the service provider role and Kuaishou’s current strong advocacy of professionalism show that Kuaishou is resisting this wave of uncertainty, allowing participants in Kuaishou’s e-commerce to usher in more certain and more inclusive growth.

Author: Brand Manager

Source: Brand Manager