A few days ago, when I was watching TV, I found that Keep was embedded in "Tucao Conference":
By the way, I am also an old user of Keep (the kind that has long since left), so when I saw this news, I opened the APP after a long absence: As a result, when I opened the app, I found that Keep had actually collaborated with the talk show actor Hu Lan on a live fitness class. I have to say that it was amazing and fun: In addition to Hu Lan, there are many fitness experts I am very familiar with in the "Sports Master Annual Awards" that just took place, such as @帕梅拉, @星期野...
After further investigation, I found that the number of Keep users has exceeded 300 million without anyone noticing. It also recently completed a US$360 million Series F financing, and has become a "unicorn" in the sports and fitness industry.
Seeing this, I couldn't help but get sick from my occupational disease, so I carefully dug into the growth process of Keep's content. In today’s article, let’s take a look at how Keep built its own “moat” through content operations and gradually became the No. 1 in the industry.
1. Powerful PGC content productivity to promote activation and retention
When Keep was first launched, the content on the platform was basically PGC content, that is, courses developed and produced by Keep itself. Since most new users are new to fitness, Keep uses difficulty grading and category diversification to make it easy for more new users to get started and even fall in love with fitness. First, difficulty classification. Keep has divided its self-made courses into five levels, K1-K5, and users can choose according to their own circumstances. Second, product diversification. In the early days of Keep's establishment, it quickly launched training content such as fat loss, muscle gain, and plasticity, and established a complete action library. In 2016, Keep began to focus on the running function, and in 2018, it began to strengthen the IP attributes of the content and tried IP cross-border (My Emperor Sleeps IP running course, music run around the Pacific, Victoria's Secret courses, etc.). In 2020, Keep also began to focus on its own IP courses, launching fat-burning parties, hot sweat yoga, and temperament ballet, with more high-quality content focusing on the fitness demands of the target population. As the difficulty of the courses continues to increase, users can also intuitively feel the "pleasure" of exercise and the improvement of their physical fitness with the help of professional courses, and feel the "Aha moment" of the product as soon as possible. As the number of Keep users continues to increase, their needs are gradually becoming more diversified. Therefore, Keep's PGC content was iterated from two dimensions. On the one hand, it is an iteration of the content dimension. It has also changed from being mainly for beginners to becoming more segmented and professional:
"Basketball Physical Fitness Improvement Course" for student users;
"18 scientific fitness methods" for elderly users;
"Office Shoulder and Neck Relaxation" and "One Square Meter Stretching Course" for working people;
…
On the other hand, there is an iteration in the course format. Keep has developed the "live class" category, which enhances the overall course atmosphere and user participation through real-time interaction between coaches and users. Through continuous iteration and innovation, Keep's content has become more adaptable to diverse users. Whether you are a novice in sports or a user with a certain foundation, you can find course content that suits you in Keep's series of videos.
2. Localized operation to adapt to the exercise habits of Chinese people
In the 1980s, Nike signed Jordan with a sky-high contract and jointly developed the Air Jordan production line. Not only did it create a product line that is still popular today, but it also made its brand awareness catch up with Adidas. It can be said that for a brand, if it finds the best form of cooperation with a super IP, the brand and the IP can easily achieve a win-win situation. To this end, Keep has introduced many well-known IPs from abroad, such as personal IP Pamela, fitness content brand Zumba (relaxing dance fitness courses), Les Mills, etc. However, many foreign IPs face these problems when entering China: The intensity and duration of exercise are not in line with the needs of domestic users, the exercise needs are not matched, and the Chinese subtitles are not accurate enough... To this end, Keep has put a lot of effort into the "localized operation" of foreign IPs.
1) Localization of curriculum arrangement
For many foreign course IPs, how to localize them for domestic users is a big problem. For example, Zumba, a fitness dance course originated in South America, is inevitably a bit incompatible with the exercise habits of domestic users. There is also the world-famous Pamela. Although she has many courses, they are basically designed for foreign fitness users. There are some differences in intensity and movement arrangement from the exercise habits of Chinese people. In order to solve this problem, Keep has carefully optimized the course—— By analyzing user practice behaviors through data, foreign course IPs were localized in terms of “course experience” and “content arrangement”. For example, it helps Pamela produce exclusive courses that are more aggregated, have a more scientific course duration, and are more interesting to users, while maintaining the original course features. Currently, when developing courses together with Zumba, Chinese dance elements will be incorporated. As a result, Pamela launched 93 courses online in half a year, which is more than the courses on all other platforms on the Internet combined, and quickly established fan influence. In addition to recorded video courses, Keep also cooperated with Pamela to launch live courses that are more popular among domestic users, and the results are quite good. In the live class on January 20, a total of more than 40,000 users followed the class; the live class on the second day set a record of more than 25,000 Keep users online at the same time. Now, Pamela has 2.93 million followers on Keep, and 7.58 million users practice with her every month: In addition to the content, Keep has also made many detailed optimizations to the introduced courses. For example, in the videos, time and action prompts are set to enhance the course experience.
2) Course Competency Grading
For content brands that join the platform, Keep will classify their difficulty levels according to K1-K5, which not only allows novices to get started quickly, but also helps users with a certain foundation to advance quickly.
3) Chinese translation of the content
Compared with the wild subtitle groups on other platforms, Keep has a more professional Chinese translation team. Not only do they have good English skills, they also have fitness qualifications and relevant experience. While ensuring the accuracy of the translation, they can also make the course content easier to understand.
3. Inspire sports talents to create and expand the richness of content
In addition to Pamela, Keep has 3,000 sports experts who produce high-quality PUGC content for the platform - nearly 2,000 expert courses. What is PUGC content? Simply put, it allows users to produce more professional content that is closer to PGC (platform generated content) in the form of UGC (user-generated content). To be honest, PUGC content can greatly expand the richness and professionalism of the platform content. Many content platforms are very greedy, which can be seen from the actions of various platforms:
Official accounts have been using various strategies to encourage creators to produce “high-quality content”;
Zhihu launched the Yanxuan column, live lectures, magazines, and book clubs to provide incentives to creators by helping them monetize;
In order to enrich its PUGC content, Xigua Video hired a large number of up masters from Bilibili at a high price.
…
As a content platform, PUGC is also the top priority of Keep's content operations. In order to build its own PUGC ecosystem, Keep also uses a series of operational strategies to encourage influencers to produce more PUGC content.
1) Cash Rewards
For influencers, the purpose of producing high-quality content, besides seeking recognition, another important purpose is to make money. Therefore, in order to stimulate influencers to produce high-quality content, Keep first used the simplest and most brutal method - cash rewards. To this end, Keep will invest 50 million in cash rewards to support talents who can output high-quality content on the Keep platform at a high frequency. In addition to giving cash directly, Keep is also helping influencers "make big money." For example, we can cooperate with influencers through endorsements, activities, courses and other forms, provide them with commercial content training, and help them realize commercial goals.
2) Honor incentives
Secondly, Keep will also encourage influencers to produce content by holding events and awarding prizes, among other "honor incentives". For example, Keep has just held the "Sports Expert Annual Awards", evaluating influencers based on multiple aspects such as influence, popularity, and courses, and awarding multiple awards including the "Best Influence Award of the Year" and the "Best Popularity Award of the Year". Not only can you win awards and have a good reputation, but you will also have the opportunity to be promoted to fashion media resources - Keep cooperated with Harper's Bazaar to shoot a series of sports fashion blockbusters for 12 talent representatives.
3) Platform support
Recently, Keep announced the recent upgrade of the K-Star talent operation plan to provide continuous support to talents at all stages of content production and reduce the difficulty of producing PUGC content. First, promotion resources are tilted. For example, last year, Keep launched two "Experts Lead You to Practice" operations to help experts promote their own courses. Second, strengthen the IP label of experts. For example, the expert @就叫我小A is a professional Pilates instructor who is also good at posture correction. Her personality label of "patient big sister" helped her quickly gain fans on the Keep site. Keep also helped it create the celebrity topic "Teacher Xiao A's "Counterattack A Plan"" to increase user feedback enthusiasm and use users' real evaluations to feed back the influencer's reputation. Third, guide course production. If you want to produce courses but don’t know how to plan and produce them, Keep has "Expert Online Open Classes" to provide you with professional and systematic course production training. After the course is produced, Keep will use a professional "course evaluation system" to evaluate the content quality and provide course arrangement suggestions to experts based on both official reviews and user experience. After the course is launched, Keep can also provide experts with fan data monitoring and feedback, help everyone collect user suggestions, and review which aspects of the course still have room for improvement. Through these means, the resistance to content production by influencers becomes smaller, and their enthusiasm for content production will naturally increase.
IV. Conclusion
Science and technology review author @刘志刚 once expressed the following view:
A successful Internet product essentially evolves along the path of “tools → content → platform”.
From this perspective, Keep is a very successful product. From the initial "online fitness coach" to the current "PGC + PUGC + copyright introduction" content ecosystem has gradually grown, and Keep has now become a leading player in the sports field. Founder Wang Ning has said more than once in media interviews that he expects it to be "a lifestyle brand."
With more and more professional content support, Keep's ambition will surely be realized in the near future.
