618 marketing earned 5 million in one hour, what do new brands rely on?

This year's 618 has finally kicked off. One hour after the official sale started, more than 1,700 brands achieved transactions in one hour, exceeding last year's full-day sales. Some cutting-edge brands participated in 618 for the first time and their sales were also unstoppable. Today, we have selected several brands that are participating in Tmall 618 for the first time, and will take a look at their growth paths from the perspectives of marketing strategy, brand positioning, vision, product pricing system, etc.

Among them:

Product-based strategy: Rely on products to gain reputation and loyalty, and rely on a large number of consumers to break through the circle and gain popularity;

There is a sales strategy: design product pricing and product form, seize the traffic of Douyin and live broadcast, start quickly, and sell products to realize cash;

Top-down branding: At the beginning of a brand, it has determined its own brand positioning and brand concept, has a large budget, plays it high, has top talents enter the market, and then slowly penetrates downwards;

There is a strategy of educating consumers: the average order value is not low, and it grows slowly by educating consumers through content.

Each brand has its own product pricing and categories and belongs to a different competitive environment, thus forming a growth path that suits them. This is for reference only. I wish you all a great 618.

01. Build brand power and market from top to bottom

The new brand Chillmore includes fragrance cleaning and home products. It was the first time to participate in the 618 event, with sales exceeding one million in one hour. The sales of the best-selling product "Amino Acid Fragrance Shower Gel" exceeded 10,000 bottles in the first hour. Squalane Body Lotion is also another main product of the brand.

Chillmore is not just playing with traffic, selling products, and building brands, it also has its own ideas.

Brand positioning:

There are already too many scented shower gel products, and Chillmore must have realized this. Therefore, when the brand was founded, he positioned his brand as: to convey natural scents, explore the fragrance of plants, help consumers create a relaxing scent space, pursue a more relaxed self, and enjoy life.

Positioning cannot be just a slogan, the brand is interpreted and unified through "color", "fragrance" and "texture".

Visually, the Morandi color scheme is gentle and calm, giving consumers a soothing and relaxing feeling.

On the packaging, free and casual painting strokes are applied to the product to express a relaxed attitude towards life from the inside out.

Marketing strategy:

In terms of delivery, chillmore has monitored less than 1,500 notes in the past year, but has reached cooperation with top KOLs and artists. The artists include THE9 members Zhao Xiaotang, Lu Keran, and Yuan Bingyan, and the top kols include Doudou, Zhang Kaiyi, Yang Kaiwen, Yang Meili, Xiao Enya, etc. This shows that the brand’s product strength is indeed good, and on the other hand, the budget is also relatively sufficient.

On TikTok, Chillmore continues to use a top-down approach, cooperating with bloggers such as Luo Wangyu, Xiao A, and Guangshi Lao Wu who have millions of fans and hundreds of thousands of followers, and monetizing through short videos and live streaming.

On Bilibili, chillmore does not cooperate with many up-hosts, and its focus is on cooperating with up-hosts with millions of fans, such as Bao Jian Sao, Dadada Buliu, and up-hosts with hundreds of thousands of fans.

The top-down approach, through the endorsement of top influencers, will greatly reduce the cost of the brand breaking the circle, as well as the cost of communicating with other top and mid-level influencers. It is also very worth learning from, but there are two prerequisites:

1. The budget is relatively sufficient;
2. Product strength that is resistant to impact;

Lao Wang's comments:

This approach is expensive, so at the beginning of the brand, you must do a good job in brand definition, brand concept, vision, and product development to form a unified whole. The top KOLs and anchors are very expensive, so the overall brand sense is very important and will greatly increase the conversion rate of orders.

In fact, many brands with large budgets often seek cooperation with leading companies, but they give people a very obvious sense of selling goods. This is because the overall brand is not unified. Consumers can easily buy products just because you offer a low price and have no impression of the brand.

In addition, for personal care products, it is also very important to do a good job in private domain, which will greatly improve brand loyalty and repurchase rate.

02. New categories, educating users, and choosing the right channels

Indie Pure was very happy. It participated in the 618 for the first time and achieved full-day sales of over 38 in one hour, with sales of over 10,000 of its best-selling products.

Indie Pure positions itself as the first domestic healthy skin care brand that combines "makeup and food" into one, combining skin care products with oral care products to provide a complete solution for internal and external use.

The brand positions its target group as the "casual and free-spirited" young group aged 18-28. In terms of design, IN is segmented as a logo to make the design more pure and reflect the values ​​of youth, vitality and health.

product:

The brand takes "anti-sugar" as its first series when entering the market. Its main products are the makeup and food combination of white kidney bean anti-sugar blocking tablets + Sanhao mask, as well as a water and essence as daily aids.

In terms of product materials, Indie Pure innovatively uses tinplate, glass and other materials to give the brand the hardness and edges of metal. The outer packaging of the anti-sugar tablets is a palm-sized tinplate box, just like the candy box we used to have when we were children, and is easy to carry.

Visual:

In terms of color, Indie Pure chose clean, vibrant, and angular contrasting blocks of color as the main visual of the product and brand. The color is more neutral and warm, making the brand not limited to gender.

channel:

In terms of channel selection, due to the product's average order value and the need to educate consumers as it is a brand-new concept, the brand brought in the well-known company in the industry, "Huaxi Biology", as R&D endorsement and chose to start with WeChat official accounts. However, the number was not large and was mainly concentrated in February and March. Therefore, it is obvious that the site searches in February and March increased significantly.

Xue Li and Zhang Mofan have both cooperated on Taobao Live, proving that the product is still strong.

In terms of building brand influence, Indie Pure first tied up with the first-line media "Rayli Fashion and Beauty" and won the "Annual Beauty Innovation Award" of the "Rayli Beauty Awards", which shows that the team's media relations are still good.

Lao Wang's comments:

Indie Pure has very few contents on channels like Tik Tok, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo. As an emerging brand, they still have a lot of room for growth. 618 is a training session for new brands, and it is already a good result to have achieved such results.

It is actually not recommended for new brands to work in the education market, but in reality, young consumers are willing to try new things, so product strength is very important, otherwise it will end up burning money to attract new customers. Content optimization is very important to improve conversion rate and reduce the cost of attracting new customers. With such average order value and concept, traffic-based gameplay is not very suitable for it. Otherwise, it is easy to have low exposure and low conversion.

At the same time, brands should consider co-building with content influencers to conduct market education and consumer operations to improve word-of-mouth effects and repeat purchases.

03. Selling strategy to quickly increase sales

Fullofhope formaldehyde remover saw a 300% increase compared to last year’s Double 11, with 20,000 cans sold.

FOH is a typical selling brand. Its brand concept, brand story, etc. are still inferior to other brands, but it will strengthen its professionalism through positioning.

product:

FOH cleverly achieved two things:

1. Consumers are required to drop the activator manually to activate the product, creating a manual sense of ritual.
2. The discoloration after formaldehyde removal is visible. Let consumers have no doubts about the effectiveness of the product.

When the founder was developing the product, he must have conducted research on consumer psychology.

Pricing:

FOH has set four price ranges, using 188 yuan and 99 yuan as anchor points, mainly to guide consumers to two products priced at 248 yuan and 299 yuan.

Traffic & Content Strategy:

When it comes to selling goods, FOH is not ambiguous at all.

FOH’s main traffic channels come from Taobao Live and Douyin’s self-broadcasting. There are also very few grass-planting notes on Xiaohongshu, and it is hard to find traces of it on Bilibili and Weibo.

On Douyin, FOH mainly publishes content through information flow and its own official account "FOH Formaldehyde Removal".

The store broadcasts live every day in two time periods, 6-13 o'clock and 18-24 o'clock, with a total of 11 hours of live broadcast per day, selling goods through live broadcast.

Taobao Live, FOH has only cooperated with 25 anchors in the past three months and broadcast 42 shows, but the anchor lineup is very strong, including Xue Li, Ma Ke, Hu Ke, Jin Xing, Zhu Dan, Li Jing, Wang Han, Wei Kaichen, etc.

Then we sliced ​​up the materials from Teacher Jin Xing’s live broadcast and put them into the Douyin information flow to increase the conversion rate of orders.

Obviously, FOH's live broadcast not only needs sales, but also requires the cooperation and endorsement of top artists and anchors, as well as authorization, to deliver information flow.

Due to FOH’s off-site self-broadcasting, a lot of traffic overflowed to the Tmall store, bringing very good sales growth to the Tmall store.

In addition, I found that Sydney is often on the list of emerging brands for live broadcasts. Does this mean that Sydney prefers emerging brands?

In terms of content, FOH educates users about the objects around them: furniture, carpets, curtains, toys, and plastic products all contain formaldehyde, which is released over a period of 3-15 years. Especially in summer, formaldehyde can easily exceed the standard.

Through content, consumers’ concerns about formaldehyde are aroused and their orders are completed. Compared with life, a few hundred dollars is not a problem.

04. Break through the circle of loyalty and build awareness

PURID participated in 618 for the first time and exceeded 4.64 million in the first hour.

PURID's products tend to improve skin problems, and the products are not expensive and have a high cost-effectiveness.

When I was running a Taobao store, I was already well-known in the domestic ingredient party circle. It is said that the ingredients party basically recognizes PURID, Shangsui, Jida, and Zhiben.

How popular is the product?

It is often sold out and fans wait for the store to buy it. Various bloggers spontaneously promote and endorse brands.

PURID’s growth path is completely different from that of most brands. It echoes the “three degrees of brand” that I mentioned before, starting with “loyalty” and then breaking the circle of “popularity”.

The brand’s founder, whose Weibo ID is @大老王女王 (actually a boy), is a national third-level cosmetics formulator. He has been sharing his professional knowledge of skin care on Weibo since 2011 and has accumulated a group of loyal fans. When PURID’s Taobao store opened in August 2016, we became the brand’s first wave of consumers.

The founder himself is also very individual, which of course also shows his extreme confidence in his own product. If other brands had this kind of service attitude, they would probably be too busy to lick the customers’ asses.

For brands that started out on Weibo, of course, early marketing and tap water positions are also inseparable from Weibo. Because of the strong product strength, they started to go viral on Weibo, and WeChat public accounts took over the overflowing tap water. In the past two years, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Bilibili have become popular, and a large amount of tap water has greatly boosted store sales.

Before 2021, the store had always existed in the form of a Taobao corporate store, and only opened a Tmall store in January this year. In less than half a year, the store has nearly 100,000 fans.

In fact, we can see from Purid that if the product is strong, you can really be a little arrogant and save a lot of money on marketing. Purid does not need any financing at all and is currently 100% controlled by its founder.

Lao Wang's comments:

What should a new skin care brand do if its founder is not a blogger with hundreds of thousands of followers? Skin care brand entrepreneurs often come to me and say: Lao Wang, my product is very good, the raw materials are very good, and the OEM factory is very good.

If your product’s main ingredient is a brand, you must focus on your ingredient and what problems it can solve. Can the ingredient tell a story? Either make consumers feel impressed, or make it known that you do better. Otherwise, it’s better not to mention this ingredient.

In order to solve the problem, it is necessary to find consumers to conduct preliminary tests. Many founders do not have a research and development background, and what is so-called good is what the OEM factories tell them. As a result, a lot of products are produced, and all the failures become inventory. Therefore, only products that can pass consumer evaluations can be shipped in large quantities and put on the market.

No money for investment? It doesn’t matter. If you can really make a good product, with clean ingredients and remarkable results, there are great opportunities to cooperate with many ingredient-loving bloggers and slowly break the circle.

05. Conclusion

These brands are just a drop in the ocean among hundreds of thousands of brands. Each brand is either exploring or has already found its own growth path. Each brand also has its own production rules, whether it is making quick money by speculating on traffic or pursuing a long-term brand dream.

In reality, don’t be impulsive after looking at other people’s paths, always thinking that if others can increase their volume, you can do the same. You may even think that other people’s brand positioning and brand concept are good, so you can take them and modify them. But the problem is that the founder does not have such genes. As a result, the brand concept cannot guide product development, content production, and visual packaging, and the team cannot reach a consensus, and it becomes the founder’s own self-satisfaction.

Take the essence and discard the dross, stand on the shoulders of others and you will be able to see farther, but you must also be down-to-earth and find a development path that suits you.

Author: Marketing Lao Wang

Source: Marketing Lao Wang