Analysis of Perfect Diary: How should the beauty industry conduct online marketing?

In the Internet age, consumers are no longer so keen on traditional big brands, especially in the beauty industry. The most frequently used words in the past two years are "bringing goods" and "planting grass". To succeed in the beauty market, it may not be necessary to accumulate for years like big brands like L'Oreal and Estee Lauder. Perfect Diary 's parent company reached a scale that could be listed in just five years.

Perfect Diary's main business is the e-commerce platform. It adopts a DTC model that directly faces consumers and is no longer dependent on channels like the traditional model. The advantage of this is that it can better grasp consumer data and thus meet personalized needs. Perfect Diary is said to have a data team of about 200 people, which shows the importance of data in online marketing.

What inspiration can this textbook case bring us? How should the beauty industry carry out online marketing?

Understanding consumers

The rise of the millennial generation has changed the overall consumer concept. Their purchasing strategies are usually based on the product’s word-of-mouth on online channels and recommendations from friends or KOLs. As a result, mainstream consumers' loyalty to large international brands such as L'Oreal has been greatly reduced.

When it comes to products, they focus more on practicality and are looking for products that can meet specific needs. This also gives niche brands an opportunity to rise, and Perfect Diary has seized this opportunity. Traditional big-brand cosmetics have a very slow iteration cycle, and it takes a long time to release new products.

DTC is a consumer-centric model. In order to quickly satisfy consumers, Perfect Diary has launched more than 1,500 new SKUs in 2019 and the first three quarters of 2020. All of this is based on understanding consumer needs.

Understanding consumers is not just imagining things. In the online marketing channel, all understanding of consumers must be based on data, and data does not lie. As a cosmetics company, you may find it hard to imagine that Yatsen E-Commerce (Perfect Diary's parent company) has a technology and data team of more than 200 people. It perfectly illustrates what data-driven growth means.

To understand consumers, you can start from the following aspects:

Collect consumers’ real demands

Most consumers have a purpose when purchasing beauty products. For example, when it comes to facial masks, there are focus points such as beauty, hydration, and acne removal. If you cannot hit the real demands of consumers, it will be difficult to arouse their desire to buy. Let’s not talk about enterprises. If an individual wants to engage in the beauty and cosmetics industry, how can he collect consumer needs?

Here is a very simple method of data collection, by searching for keywords that generate demand. As shown in the following figure:

We can see from the data that the functionalities of facial masks that consumers are concerned about include: hydrating, cleansing, and whitening. The search volume represents the strength of demand. When resources and energy are limited, we can make decisions based on data. For example, there are obviously more consumers interested in cleaning than acne removal, which gives us guidance in publicity and copywriting.

This is just the simplest way to collect data, suitable for individuals and small companies without technical support.

How do consumers make decisions?

Every consumer has a psychological journey before making a purchase, and what we need to do is to exert a certain influence on these decision nodes. We have already mentioned it at the beginning of the article. In the beauty industry, the most frequently mentioned words are "promoting products" and "planting grass".

This reflects two decision-making methods. One is based on recommendations from acquaintances or content, which is called "planting grass", and the other is the most popular of the trends, live streaming with goods. “I’m not afraid of anything except Li Jiaqi OMG”, this popular saying reflects the influence that KOLs have on consumers’ purchasing decisions.

The starting point of content e-commerce is to influence consumers' decisions through high-quality content. We can see this in the overwhelming number of Perfect Diary’s recommendation diaries on Xiaohongshu.

How to build brand exposure?

1. Content Marketing

Whether it is pictures, texts, videos or live broadcasts, the essence is to output content to users. The core theme of the content is nothing more than highlighting the advantages of the product and creating a professional image. The content must be valuable, either being able to solve problems for consumers or enabling them to learn knowledge. Here we introduce a standardized content production model.

Everyone wants popular content, but it is too dependent on personal writing skills and is usually difficult to quantify. But it would be much easier if you create content based on user needs. This method is based on the keyword thinking of SEO.

Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, we can think of Xiaohongshu as a beauty version of a search engine. Users have two ways to access content: one is information flow recommendation, and the other is to actively complete the search.

This approach focuses on search needs and accurately produces content in batches to meet user needs.

Taking the keyword "What brand of men's facial mask is good" mined in the above text as an example, we completed the search in Xiaohongshu and obtained the following results:

There is no doubt that the higher the ranking of the post, the higher the click rate will be. Although there are other factors such as pictures and titles that affect it, it is not wrong to try to be at the top.

From the titles of the two posts ranked 1 and 2, we can see that the core keywords revolve around the concept of "men's facial mask review", which is basically consistent with the semantics of the search keyword. After clicking in, you will find that the content is bland and unremarkable.

Therefore, we can summarize some factors about Xiaohongshu ranking:

①The relevance of the title and keywords

This is also our core idea, using keywords to meet users' search needs. This point should be emphasized in the title. After all, whether it is an algorithm or a person, they need to judge whether the content meets the requirements in the title.

Your content titled "Women's facial mask" will definitely not be recommended in the search results of "Men's facial mask".

By the same token, searching for "acne mask" will definitely give priority to matching content in this area.

②Content quality

The quality of content does not depend on how awesome the article is, it must first meet the basic needs of users. For example, if you publish a 100-word text post, it is definitely not as good as someone else's 1,000-word post with pictures and text.

All in all, the article is well illustrated, rich in content and focuses on the theme. Also, be careful not to use banned words.

③ Number of likes

In addition to natural likes that resonate with the content, brushing likes is also a way that everyone tacitly understands. Because the number of likes is also one of the core factors affecting content ranking.

④Account weight

This is not difficult to understand. A content posted by Li Jiaqi will definitely be more favored by the algorithm than yours. For most people, the longer the account is, the more content is published, the higher the Xiaohongshu level is, and the better the ranking will be.

In fact, the above methods are also applicable to other content platforms such as Zhihu. The underlying principles are common and can be used flexibly.

2. KOL Marketing

Whether you want to increase brand awareness or acquire customers directly, KOL marketing is a good choice. If you have a certain budget, cooperating with big Vs such as Weibo, Tik Tok, and Bilibili may have good results.

You may have seen this with Li Jiaqi, but most businesses cannot afford such high advertising costs. In addition to these top Vs, there are also a large number of small and medium-sized KOLs. Although their influence is not as terrifying, they also have a strong ability to bring goods, and establishing cooperation with brands is also their urgent need. A single spark can start a prairie fire. The advantage of the long-tail channel is that it can retain the excellent ones and eliminate the inferior ones, leaving room for selection and continuous optimization.

Although choosing a big V has good effects, it also has huge risks. It is not uncommon for businesses to pay sky-high pit fees but lose all their money. This is also the reason why more and more brands and businesses are starting to cooperate with small and medium-sized KOLs, as they at least have a certain bargaining power. It is even possible to reach a favorable agreement on settlement based on results.

Multi-channel construction

Mobile Internet divides users into major platforms. If the budget is sufficient, it is necessary to set up stores on different channels. Because every consumer may be accustomed to using different apps. Common channels include Taobao, JD.com, WeChat mini-programs, self-built e-commerce websites, etc.

For a rapidly rising brand like Perfect Diary, after laying the foundation for online marketing , it even vigorously opened hundreds of offline stores in order to establish more channels to reach consumers.

Advertising

If you have money, you can do whatever you want. Common forms of advertising include SEM, information flow, patches, etc. The effects of each advertising platform may be completely different. Ultimately, it still needs to be ROI-oriented and the channels with better ROI can be screened out through data.

Everyone wants to do private domain traffic

First of all, we need to understand why we need to do private domain traffic. The fundamental reason is to establish long-term relationships with users, especially users acquired through advertising. Sometimes the profit from a single time may not be able to cover the advertising costs. At this time, we need a place to carry users to promote secondary consumption.

The concept of private domain traffic has emerged, which is manifested in the form of WeChat friends, WeChat communities, etc.

There are many ways to play with private domain traffic. Here I will just express my own understanding:

① Setting of conversion nodes. Private domain traffic needs to be guided by users to add, so it is very important to set up conversion nodes. For example, many e-commerce companies will place cards in products to guide users to join groups or add customer service WeChat.

②Private domain traffic operation. Private domain traffic is not just about adding users and then mindlessly sending ads. There are many tricks used by everyone. Some people are very arrogant and treat users as fish. This may work well in the short term, but it is harmful to the brand and even the entire industry in the long run. After all, users are not fools and they will become immune to the tricks after being tricked too many times.

This can be seen from the changes from the early days of the Internet to the present. In the early days, any marketing gimmick could make users excited, but now, even if you rack your brains, you may be met with a "that's it?" Therefore, if conditions permit, try to build a user portrait library, classify users with labels, and provide them with the services they need in a targeted manner. Only then can valuable services be provided over the long term.

③If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. If you want to do a good job of private domain traffic, tools are indispensable, such as the once popular wetool. Although it has collapsed, there are still various alternatives. In general, it can greatly improve operational efficiency. There are also some very practical tools such as live codes and short link tools. Live codes can help solve the problems of the upper limit of the number of people in WeChat groups and the expiration of QR codes. Short links can make a difference in content layout, traffic generation and customer acquisition, and data statistics.

In fact, whether online or offline, it still takes time to succeed in an industry. Although the job titles of most Internet professionals have not changed, the industry has been changing. Without a deep understanding of the business, it is actually difficult to understand the real needs of users. However, one has no choice when he enters the world. If given a choice, who would want to be a displaced worker?

Author: 3D Push

Source: Lu Songsong's blog