How can brands master the e-commerce operations on Douyin and Kuaishou?

Following the "bayonet fight" in concepts, Kuaishou labeled itself as "trust e-commerce" and hoped to reconstruct the consumption decisions of 1 billion people by building extreme trust. While creating a high market value ceiling, Douyin e-commerce also introduced the concept of "interest e-commerce", and is committed to connecting high-quality product content with a large number of interested users through recommendation technology, and through the accumulation of user data and transaction data, it inputs a steady stream of accurate traffic into the live broadcast room, thereby allowing merchants' business to achieve snowball-like growth.

After the concept was launched, Douyin and Kuaishou e-commerce faced the 618 mid-year test.

From the investment policy, we can see that Douyin e-commerce has firmly chosen to stand with brand merchants and launched a systematic gameplay similar to Tmall, including deposit pre-sales, interactive cities, qualifying competitions, short video challenges, etc. It also set up the "Festival Alliance Plan" for brand merchants for the first time, through joint marketing between merchants and Douyin e-commerce to divert traffic to each other and realize resource exchange.

Kuaishou did not make too many policy distinctions between brand anchors, e-commerce anchors, and expert/celebrity anchors. Instead, it used "TV and Internet linkage" as the central axis for its activities. Although it introduced a brand bonus plan and a partner plan for brand merchants, and provided resources, traffic, and marketing support to help brands bring goods during the 616 period, overall, Kuaishou e-commerce still chose to empower and serve brands on a regular basis, rather than just a short-term alliance during big promotions.

How can brand merchants do e-commerce business well on Douyin and Kuaishou? Before the big promotion, both parties have launched different e-commerce management methodologies. The former can be summarized as "FACT" and the latter is abbreviated as "STEPS" . In today's article, we will interpret and analyze the differences between the two? And combined with the latest cases, give the brand some down-to-earth suggestions.

FACT VS STEPS , how to interpret?

Regarding the "FACT business matrix model" launched by Douyin e-commerce, Kas Data has given a detailed explanation in the previous article.

The so-called "FACT" refers to the four positions that brand merchants need to manage well when planning Douyin e-commerce, namely Field merchant self-broadcasting, Alliance influencer matrix, Campain marketing activities, and TOP KOL influencers. According to Kas, this business methodology is a systematic methodology that Douyin came up with after visiting more than 50 internationally and domestically renowned brands and analyzing their successful experiences. Different brands can flexibly allocate operating resources and marketing investments in the four major areas based on their own business goals, user goals, marketing budgets, product attributes, and the depth of their entry into Douyin e-commerce, so as to achieve stable and sustainable growth in total GMV.

Under the same guiding principle, Kuaishou E-commerce has also refined a universal brand business management methodology, namely: STEPS.

Kuaishou believes that if a brand wants to do well in Kuaishou e-commerce, it cannot do without these five major operating components. The first is self-operation based on brand personality to establish its own base; the second is operation based on public domain traffic , which can accelerate the brand's climbing start in the initial stage; the third is to do a good job of elite distribution (Elite-distribution) to explore the brand's explosive coefficient in the Kuaishou e-commerce ecosystem; the fourth is to do a good job of private domain operation (Private domain) through daily content operation and data products to increase user attention, purchases and repurchases; the fifth is to recommend that brands develop separate channel-specific products for channels such as Kuaishou to better meet the consumption needs of Kuaishou's old friends and give them a customized product experience. At the same time, it will not affect the sales of brand products in other channels.

Careful readers may have discovered that "STEPS" is a plural number. At the online press conference of the 616 Quality Shopping Festival held by Kuaishou E-commerce, Zhang Yipeng, head of the Kuaishou E-commerce Marketing Center, also explained this. He said that the reason for using plural numbers is that Kuaishou's monthly repurchase rate reaches 65%, which means that it is a position that Kuaishou can operate for a long time and has a repurchase rate. In addition, plural numbers also imply that Kuaishou's e-commerce business is a long-term business. If you don't know how to layout the Kuaishou e-commerce brand, you can combine this methodology to make active attempts.

FACT VS STEPS , similarities and differences? 

If we look closely at the two business methodologies, we can probably clearly see the similarities and differences between them.

The same thing is that both Douyin and Kuaishou regard self-broadcasting by merchants as the core position. The difference is that even if it is a brand’s own broadcast, Kuaishou pays more attention to people’s values. At the Gravity Conference in March, Xiao Gu, head of Kuaishou's e-commerce, said: A platform with 300 million daily active users must be suitable for brands (self-broadcasting), but the way and method of self-broadcasting may be different. Compared with a brand opening a flagship store on Kuaishou and then arranging a salesperson to sell goods for a long time, Kuaishou encourages brand store clerks, dealers and other people in the chain to create real live broadcast accounts and establish healthy interactions with fans.

Obviously, Douyin did not make such a requirement for brand store broadcasts, but Douyin also mentioned that in the business’s self-broadcasting business, content creation is a core step, and the core of good content is to strengthen the "brand personality" to narrow the distance between merchants and users, thereby generating trust and laying the foundation for transactions.

Not only self-broadcasting, both methodologies also focus on influencer distribution and public domain traffic operations.

However, Douyin’s “FACT” divides influencers into two parts. One is the top influencers, which aims to “explode” brand promotion and sales for brands through their huge fan base and social influence. That is, among various indicators of e-commerce operations, top influencers shoulder the dual value of “gathering traffic” and “promoting conversions”. The other is the influencer matrix, which encourages brands to establish a stable mid- and long-tail influencer alliance to ensure stable sales growth on the Douyin platform. Obviously, the core value of the expert matrix is ​​still "promoting conversion".

However, in Kuaishou's "STEPS", there is no serious division between the top, middle and lower-level influencers, and they are unified into the subset of elite distribution. The reasons for this are: first, the strength of Kuaishou's top e-commerce anchors is too strong. If the contribution of top influencers is particularly emphasized in the methodology, it seems that it is not in line with Kuaishou's e-commerce efforts to vigorously "cut down the vassal states" and cultivate new anchors in the past year; second, on Kuaishou, every anchor can establish his own stable private domain through live broadcasts and short videos, so no matter whether he is a top, shoulder, waist or tail influencer, he can find his own loyal audience and bring certain sales and voice to the brand sales.

At the same time, in the business management methodologies offered by Douyin and Kuaishou e-commerce, we can also see that both have strengthened the operation of merchants on public domain traffic. Among them, Douyin reminds merchants to actively participate in various marketing activities (Campain) of the platform, including platform promotions, marketing IP activities (such as Douyin Super Product Day, New Product Day, etc.) and activities focusing on various industries, and to import public domain traffic into each live broadcast room by empowering the "small field" through the "big field"; while Kuaishou e-commerce directly puts public domain operations in the open, in order to enhance brand merchants' attention to public domain traffic, and to heat up the live broadcast room through multiple angles and multiple entrances to achieve GMV explosion.

Of course, in addition to the similarities, Kass found that there are also obvious differences in the business methodologies that each company advocates.

The most typical example is that Kuaishou e-commerce has put forward more direct requirements for "private domain operations" and "channel special products". The former stems from the essence of Kuaishou - the most trustworthy online community driven by "content + private domain". Whether it is a merchant or an entity, it should enhance private domain stickiness through continuous content updates and operational means to achieve long-term sustainable conversion; the latter draws on the experience of many brands that have done well on Kuaishou. Compared with other platforms, Kuaishou users are more down-to-earth. They have differentiated demands for products and prices, and also emphasize that brands should adapt to local conditions. It is not that they sell what they have on Kuaishou, but that they update and adjust product lines frequently based on the needs of old friends in order to continuously increase GMV.

 These brands: How to do a good job in e-commerce business on Douyin and Kuaishou?

Obviously, whether it is FACT or STEPS, they are both underlying framework theories launched by the authorities in order to enable brands to better adapt to self-broadcasting on their own channels. However, theories are dead. Different brands should flexibly combine these resources based on business goals, business stages, product attributes, etc.

Looking back at the brands on Douyin and Kuaishou that have fully implemented the theory, on Douyin, the first brand that comes to mind for Kas Data is Three Squirrels, while on Kuaishou, the one that has to be mentioned is Dora Doshang.

According to Kas Data statistics, from January to April, the cumulative sales of the Three Squirrels official flagship store (Douyin store) reached 217 million, ranking second in the food and beverage industry . Judging from the contribution of store-associated sales, top influencers, matrix influencers, and brand self-broadcasting all contribute.

By analyzing the anchors associated with the Three Squirrels official flagship store in the past 90 days, we can see that the dual accounts of @三只松鼠 and @三只松鼠官方旗舰店 contributed nearly 50% of the store sales. Secondly, through cooperation with top anchors @陈三废gg, @岳老板, and @七阿姨, 20% of sales were also brought to Three Squirrels, while the remaining sales were divided among the matrix influencers. In order to adapt to the high commission and lowest price requirements of expert anchors, Three Squirrels was the first to launch a factory direct delivery model, which not only continuously reduces logistics costs but also improves user experience.

Not only that, Three Squirrels will also actively participate in various official activities of Douyin. For example, during the Douyin New Year Festival, Three Squirrels achieved sales of 65 million in 20 days from its own live broadcast business alone, ranking first in the food sector and second in the entire track.

The success of Research Squirrel can be summarized into three aspects: First, it is equipped with a mature and professional anchor team. It will improve the rhythm of live broadcast by learning the language of external organizations and experts. At the same time, it also builds its own broadcast language rich in IP characteristics such as welcome, attention, and thanks to strengthen the brand user mind; second, before each big promotion, it will optimize the product combination and scene layout of the live broadcast room, and combine red envelopes, coupons and other tools to accelerate user purchasing decisions; third, the dynamic traffic delivery capability can flexibly adjust the delivery budget based on the live broadcast room products, real-time popularity, anchor status, etc., to achieve the highest ROI.

Looking at Kuaishou’s benchmark brand Dora Doshang, it can be said that it has fully applied the STEPS theory.

According to Kas, before Kuaishou launched its own brand live broadcast, Dora Doo Shang was already a supplier to many Kuaishou anchors. However, after a year of cooperating with the anchors to sell products, Dora Doo Shang found that all the profits belonged to the anchors, while it itself made very little profit. If it wanted to develop on Kuaishou, it had to build its own channels. So, in April last year, Li Haizhen, the founder of Dora Doshang, started broadcasting on Kuaishou.

Analyzing the success of Dora Doshang, there are four experiences worth learning: First, the creation of a differentiated personality. The founder’s own broadcast is more attractive to old friends than the brand store broadcast ; second, the product line is adjusted based on the needs of old friends . After discovering that the brand’s star product - body care products were not popular on Kuaishou, Li Haizhen immediately used the form of live broadcast surveys and gift giving to figure out the real needs of the old friends in the live broadcast room, and developed more than 200 products around the old friends in one year; third, use multiple channels to attract traffic to the live broadcast room . The core strategy is to hit the charts and launch small stores and small flames; fourth, provide good customer service and operations to increase the repurchase and praise rate of the live broadcast room, and drive more tap water users to support the live broadcast.

In theory, we believe that more and more brands will be able to take root and flourish on both platforms based on their own advantages and the successful experiences of other brands, and find the tricks to do a good e-commerce business in new traffic channels.

Author: Kas Data

Source: caasdata6