From 0 to 1, how does a new brand cold start on Bilibili?

With more than 200 million young users, from the New Year's Eve Gala to "The Next Wave", Bilibili has attracted more and more cutting-edge brands to the platform to mingle with the next wave, such as the domestic skincare brand Ximuyuan, the national trend cosmetics brand girlcult, Yuanqi Forest, Sandunban, etc., all of which are vying to break the circle with content on Bilibili.

Earlier this year, domestic skincare brand Ximuyuan received tens of millions of dollars in Series B financing. This was its sixth round of financing since its establishment a year and a half ago. It is also one of the few brands that has received early investment from multiple leading funds focusing on the later stage.

At present, Ximuyuan’s video has been played over 10 million times and has received over 5 million likes on Bilibili, making it one of the few skin care brands that has entered Bilibili and achieved great success. Through brand analysis, we can view the specific data of the brand’s launch on Bilibili at different stages.

Data source: Feigua Data B Station

So how should emerging brands achieve a cold start at Bilibili? How can we leverage the power of UP hosts and platform tools to achieve explosion and seize the market among young people?

1. North Star Metrics: Building Brand Awareness

At a time when traffic is extremely dispersed, brands should not focus too much on short-term conversions, either in terms of platform attributes or brand development. They need to clarify the brand’s North Star indicator at different stages (the first key indicator - One Metric That Matters, refers to the absolute core indicator related to the business/strategy at the current stage of the product. Once established, it will shine like the North Star in the sky, guiding the team to move in the same direction).

Focus on a specific goal, such as volume, traffic or sales, and then break it down and improve this indicator, so as to become the entry point for brand communication. Avoid falling into the trap of traditional "bombarding" promotion and ignoring user experience.

The overall knowledge level of Bilibili users is relatively high, their spending power is strong, and they are more likely to accept and try new things. In addition to the product itself, they are more likely to pay for the spiritual needs that the product brings to them. They have a very strong brand awareness, and once they recognize a brand, they will not easily change sides.

In addition, the high creativity of Bilibili's content ecosystem makes Bilibili users extremely sticky, which can create brand awareness while improving the brand's long-term ROI. When marketing on Bilibili, brands can cater more to young users and guide their spiritual needs.

Take Yuanqi Forest as an example. It has carried out in-depth content innovation with the UP hosts of Bilibili and found the points of convergence with users' interests. With a series of advertisements full of Bilibili style, it used memes such as "one-click three-link" to make the product selling point of "0 sugar, 0 fat, 0 calories" pervasive and known to many young people.

2. Small budget testing to reach precise direction

When launching a new brand, it is often difficult to determine the direction of the launch due to insufficient budget. For example, the main battlefield for most beauty brands’ regular advertising is the beauty area. However, competition in the beauty area is fierce, advertising costs are relatively high, and fans are easily fatigued, resulting in unsatisfactory brand advertising results.

In fact, beauty products are a rigid demand category, and there are many demanders even in the living area, knowledge area, music and painting area, etc. New brands with insufficient budgets can involve more areas, select influencers with high-quality data and high cost-effectiveness through data analysis, and test the direction that is more suitable for brand investment.

According to FeiGua data, Ximuyuan, an early emerging beauty brand, allocated a small budget to test the waters in the living area, knowledge popularization area, and two-dimensional painting area, and found that in the knowledge popularization area not only the playback volume was high, but the store conversion data was also very good. Therefore, it opened up a new direction that is very suitable for brand investment.

In addition to selecting UP hosts who review food and coffee on Bilibili, the coffee brand Santonban will also work with UP hosts in the animation, film and television, life and other fields to create more fun and high-quality content to achieve brand breakthrough.

For example, in the collaboration with the film and television UP host Kuang Ami, based on the coffee product itself, Kuang Ami’s wife personally designed five cards related to the UP host’s career, as well as a customized joint easter egg video, which is sold in limited quantities. The comments in the video were all: "Let him eat it!", "Heart-beating" and so on. Afterwards, many fans made their own unboxing videos and posted them on Bilibili, and the feedback was quite good.

3. Reasonable use of UP hosts and platform tools

How should brands choose suitable UP hosts on Bilibili? Bilibili is a content community formed based on interests. On such a platform, the indicator that is more important than the number of fans is actually the influence of the UP host and the ability to create high-quality content.

Through FeiGua data, we can understand the basic information of the UP master’s account, such as the number of fans, personal labels, data performance and trends of previous works, and the classification of the UP master’s best video data, to judge the verticality of his account, the influence of the circle and the stability of his works.

View the UP host's fan analysis, and judge the fans' spending power and fan stickiness through the UP host's active fans and the proportion of fans, fans' gender, age, and region, etc.; analyze the match between the UP host's fans and brand products, as well as the fans' interests based on the fans' focus.

In addition, account public opinion analysis can help us understand the values ​​and consumption intentions of the UP host’s fans, as well as their attitudes towards the UP host’s “eating”; promotion analysis can help us understand the commercial value of the UP host’s content through the results of the UP host’s past brand collaborations.

On Bilibili, brand marketing is not about forcing fans to watch content, but about hiding products in attractive and valuable content. UP hosts provide brand owners with a good soil for building trust with consumers, which is the core value provided by Bilibili's commercialization.

Everyone can see how serious and dedicated the UP hosts on Bilibili are and how much they cater to the users' tastes. In the video shot by the beauty UP host "Duoduo Hualin" for the cooperation series between Girlcult and NASA, Duoduo Hualin wore a space suit, and the highly textured video production reflected the ethereality of space. Words such as "burning funds", "excellent shooting", and "excellent creativity" kept appearing in the barrage, showing users' high recognition of the brand and the UP host.

UP hosts are not commercialization tools of products, but masters of interest marketing for brands. From technical experts to plot fans, the ways in which UP hosts at Bilibili make money and become popular are very different, but they all set the correct direction for emerging brands, namely: content + scenario marketing.

In addition, brands can use the platform's information flow advertising to place ads, use the "Fireworks" tool to invite UP hosts to produce content, launch activities based on the "Reward" tool, offer prizes and bounties to attract UP hosts to participate, and actively participate in official marketing festivals and brand aggregation nights to give the brand greater exposure.

The establishment of Blue V accounts by brands is also a major trend in B Station’s brand operations. It creates a persona that suits the preferences of B Station users, produces content and places business order aggregation pages, and through matrix-based and sophisticated operations, truly plays with young people.

Summarize

With the continuous upgrading of Bilibili's commercialization, a new round of marketing dividends has arrived. As the largest youth life community, Bilibili has become a breakthrough for emerging brands to occupy market share.

1. Establish phased goals for the brand and build brand awareness on Bilibili.

2. With a limited budget, find the points of convergence with UP hosts in other industries and conduct small-scale tests to come up with new delivery directions.

3. Use data to analyze the quality of UP main accounts, create high-quality content, understand platform tools, and refine operations to gain more exposure

Author: Xu Yanbing

Source: Xu Yanbing