Inventory: 10 observations on e-commerce marketing in 2020

2020 has passed, and writing this article of 10 observations for e-commerce marketers is a summary of various phenomena in this industry in the past year. I write this for myself and for people who are going through the same thing.

Observation 1: Marketing budgets are more inclined towards e-commerce than in previous years

The outbreak of the epidemic at the beginning of the year caused many brands' offline stores to close. Without offline business, marketing budgets will naturally be more inclined towards e-commerce platforms that can bring real returns.

As a result, more and more brands are launching new products on e-commerce platforms; moving offline large-scale events to brand live broadcast rooms; and investing media advertising expenses into more media platforms that can deposit crowd assets into brand data banks...

Observation 2: Content platforms are fully committed to their e-commerce businesses

In fact, content platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou started building their own e-commerce ecological closed loop very early, but because they have been diverting traffic to traditional e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD.com, their e-commerce business has been slow to take off.

It was not until this year, with the widespread popularity of live streaming and Douyin's decision to fully develop its e-commerce business in order to make up for the damage to TikTok's overseas business, that Douyin decided to fully develop its e-commerce business:

Gradually build their own top anchor matrix, cut off all links to Taobao in live broadcasts, support traffic and invite top brands in the industry to join, and build Douyin service providers (DP) like Taobao service providers (TP)...

Where there is traffic, there will be business. The first batch of merchants who settled in Douyin/Kuaishou stores have enjoyed the traffic dividend and most of them have achieved good results.

Next, the platform will definitely rely on the achievements of its predecessors to convince more brands to join. Therefore, in the future, brand e-commerce departments may have to manage several more channels.

Observation 3: E-commerce platforms comprehensively improve content traffic weight

Just about a month before Double 11 this year, Taobao made an unprecedented mobile Taobao revamp:

Remove the top diamond booth, keep only the first picture and video, and adjust all the "You May Like" sections to picture/text/short video displays, move up and expand them.

This is actually a powerful attack by e-commerce platforms represented by Taobao to comprehensively enhance the weight of content traffic.

There are two main reasons:

1. E-commerce platforms, which are approaching the ceiling of traffic growth, must fight back by developing their own content in the face of the massive erosion of user time by Douyin and Kuaishou.
2. Based on the changes in users' shopping paths, more and more people may be tempted by a product in a short video they accidentally see, and then make a purchase.

It is said that Taobao will soon revise Weitao, imitating the information waterfall model of Xiaohongshu, and push more high-quality brand private domain content to the corresponding target groups. Therefore, the ability to create high-quality content will become a new tool for merchants to obtain traffic on e-commerce platforms.

Observation 4: The “content planting-live broadcast harvesting” model has penetrated into the hearts of e-commerce people

As emerging brands such as Perfect Diary, Huaxizi, Santonban, and Xiaoxiandun have become popular by promoting large-scale content on platforms such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Bilibili, more and more big and mature brands have begun to explore and imitate this model.

Creating content on a regular basis and harvesting sales through live streaming during big sales seems to have become the golden formula in the minds of brand e-commerce people.

But in fact, there is a prerequisite that many people tend to overlook, that is, your product must have points worth promoting, such as being super good-looking, having super awesome functions, being super cost-effective, etc., but not all products are suitable for promotion.

Another point to mention is that regarding content seeding, most brands are still doing it in a groping-by-the-stories state, because there is no set of mature and quantifiable effectiveness evaluation indicators, let alone a real content seeding methodology for each different category.

V. Observation 5: Crowd-asset chain operation has become a standard feature of major platforms

The crowd asset chain operation was first proposed by Alibaba as the AIPL model. It uses a quantifiable "data dashboard" to guide brands in making marketing investments in the e-commerce ecosystem. This is a sign of entering the era of refined operations.

As more and more brand customers realize the decisive role of crowd asset operation in e-commerce business, other platforms have also followed Alibaba's AIPL and proposed their own crowd asset chain operation methodology.

For example, JD GOAL model of JD.com, namely Targeting Group, Osmosis, Advancing, and Loyalty. Another example is the TRUST model of Douyin and the RISE model of Kuaishou:

Observation 6: E-commerce live streaming is more than just selling products to brands

When mentioning e-commerce live streaming, the only things that come to mind are large-scale sales events like Li Jiaqi and Viya. In fact, live streaming has become increasingly mature and normalized from its first year in 2019 to this year. For brands, it is not just for selling goods.

Store live streaming has become a standard feature of almost every brand. From the perspective of selling goods, live broadcasts like this that don’t have much traffic will definitely not be very effective.

But why do so many brands still broadcast at least four or five hours a day? It’s because it has many other functions. For example: through the host’s explanation, the user entry rate can be increased; by issuing fan coupons, new customers can be effectively attracted, etc.

In addition, live streaming will also present more content-based scenes, such as variety show elements, talk shows, immersive game interactions, AR panoramas, virtual IP live streaming, and so on.

Observation 7: E-commerce platforms are increasingly focusing on supporting emerging brands

Seeing the market dividends brought by the growth of new consumer brands, major platforms have increased their support for emerging brands, hoping to become the incubator for the next "super brand."

For example, Tmall, which has always regarded new brands as its core strategy, has once again upgraded its new brand plan, announcing that it will help create 1,000 new "dark horse" brands with annual sales of over 100 million and 100 with annual sales of over 1 billion in the next three years.

In addition to regular traffic support, many platforms have begun to go a step further and tailor IP-based marketing solutions for emerging brands.

For example, Tmall launched its first marketing IP focusing on new brands - Tmall Super Rookie. Through creative marketing methods with a strong sense of ritual and differentiated selling point packaging, it creates a different "personality" for each new brand and helps them debut in the C position.

Similarly, Juxing, a marketing IP brand born out of Juhuasuan's "sub-brand development plan", has also taken "helping emerging brands to rise strongly" as its mission in its business upgrade, and has used the creative form of the "kick-off conference" to concentrate on outputting the concepts of emerging brands.

This approach of approaching communication from the C-end, providing emerging brands with a full-link growth system from marketing creativity, channel communication to product innovation, may also become the standard for more platforms to help new brands grow.

Observation 8: E-commerce platform marketing IP is becoming more and more segmented

Regarding e-commerce marketing IP, I think most people have heard of it more or less, such as Tmall Super Brand Day, Gathering Day, Little Black Box, Club, etc. But I found that the marketing IPs created by e-commerce platforms now are far more than these, but are becoming more and more segmented and vertical.

For example, the "Tmall Super Rookie" and "Brand Star" mentioned earlier are aimed at emerging brands. For different popular fields such as e-sports, two-dimensional, animation, and games, they have launched marketing IPs such as "Tmall Tonghao π", "Tmall New Edition", and "Taobao No. 1 Player"; for trendy people, they have launched "Tmall Trend Live" and so on.

Observation 9: Double 11 has become the most important “brand effect” node of the year

This year's Double 11, the level of brand investment is very different from previous years. We can see that a large number of brands are officially announcing their celebrity spokespersons, launching blockbuster new products of the year, creating the biggest brand marketing actions of the year, and so on before Double 11.

It is obvious that brands have regarded this year's Double 11 as the most important "brand effect" node of the year, while in the past, the significance of Double 11 was more on "effect". On the one hand, this is because this year's Double 11 is the brand's last fight, and on the other hand, it is related to the "double explosion" rhythm of this year's Double 11.

Observation 10: New products and special products become the growth engine of big promotions

Let’s look at some data first:

• On November 11, the cumulative transaction amount of new products on Tmall reached more than RMB 50 billion
• During Double 11, more than 300 million users actively visited the new product venue
• During Double 11, the number of visits to HeyBox’s shopping guide matrix soared by 400%

It can be seen that Double 11 has become the biggest node of the year for Chinese people to "buy new things". Specialty products such as trend products, celebrity products, new products, and IP co-branded products have become new engines for business growth during big promotions.

11. Summary

Finally, I compiled these 10 phenomena that I observed in e-commerce marketing in 2020 into a picture.

Author: Pulang

Source: Planner (ID: planner2333)