Marketing Trends in the Second Half of 2020

As usual, I will do a marketing inventory and review in the middle of the year, but since I have already written something similar during the epidemic, I will simply talk about the trends and changes in marketing that we think will happen in the second half of the year and in the future.

There are two marketing topics that brands cannot ignore in the first half of this year, one about Bilibili and the other about live streaming. Let’s start with these two and then talk about other things, such as the marketing impact after the epidemic.

1. Live streaming sales have become a normal practice

Readers who are familiar with us should know that we have always been optimistic about live streaming sales, and believe that live streaming will be a widely used way of expressing information in the future. In terms of marketing, it will become like a details page, and the store anchor is essentially an online salesperson. Live streaming will become a standard feature of brand marketing and e-commerce platforms.

Although live streaming sales have been overheated recently and various pitfalls have been exposed, these are inevitable in the development of the industry and have not affected our overall positive judgment on live streaming sales. According to the data we have obtained from some brands on e-commerce platforms, live streaming accounts for an increasingly higher proportion of sales for many brands, and the growth rate is unabated.

Live streaming sales will of course continue to deepen, specialize, and diversify, gradually forming barriers and professional divisions of labor. This is also one of the reasons why Wu Xiaobo and others failed in their live streaming. We will write a special article to discuss live streaming in more detail (or you can also look through our previous related articles), but overall, how live streaming interacts with content and how it combines product quality and effect are areas worthy of attention in the short term. In the long run, live streaming may also become a type of cultural and entertainment product.

We still recommend that brands pay close attention to the live streaming policies of various platforms and try them out, especially WeChat’s moves on live streaming. Of course, brands also need to have the right mindset. Live streaming is ultimately just a marketing tool that cannot solve fundamental brand problems, and it is certainly not a panacea.

2. B Station’s Breakout and Generalization

Everyone has witnessed the growth of Bilibili this year. The increase in the number of users will bring greater marketing opportunities. After all, the principle of marketing is: marketing should cover where the users are. Obviously, the high-growth Bilibili will not reach saturation so quickly.

We have expressed in previous articles about community culture that Bilibili's growth beyond the circle cannot be achieved at the same time as a good community atmosphere. This is something that has been verified by countless community products such as Zhihu, Douban, Tieba, Weibo, and Moments, and Bilibili is no exception. However, the official B station still insists on maintaining the community culture, which actually prolongs the marketing bonus period suitable for B station's cultural content for brands.

Bilibili has demonstrated its marketing potential in the first half of this year. Typical cases are DingTalk's "DingTalk Bending", as well as Tencent's recent "Laoganma Incident" video and Bilibili's dynamics. Of course, Zhu Yici and Paperclip’s videos are also popular among users on Bilibili.

Interestingly, both DingTalk and Tencent’s B station marketing are responses to public relations crisis events, which may mean that B station’s ability to proactively create mass communication topics is still lacking, but it is very suitable for secondary dissemination among young groups. But another thing worth noting is that negative public opinion on Bilibili is also easy to spread, and there is quite a lot of negative public opinion (bullet screen) about videos related to Alibaba and Tencent. Overall, Bilibili’s communication power across the entire network cannot be ignored.

3. The new normal of marketing after the epidemic

Whether in the short or long term, the epidemic has an important impact on the marketing industry. The most important reason is that epidemic prevention and control is a long-term process. It is very likely that there will still be a resurgence of the epidemic in local areas in the second half of this year, and the epidemic will not be completely eradicated before the vaccine appears.

The long-term impact of the epidemic will shape public behavior and educate users, which has been very obvious in the first half of this year. In general, the epidemic will affect user behavior in two aspects:

First, from the user's psychological cognition, users pay more attention to health and quality and are willing to pay more premium for health. Health products and sanitary products are obviously popular. Although health has always been an important direction of consumption upgrading, users now pay more attention to it. In addition, this will also give rise to some hype about health concepts.

Second, in terms of user consumption behavior, users are more focused on online e-commerce and the virtual economy. Products such as live streaming, online education, online conferences, and entertainment variety shows have cultivated considerable user stickiness and have had a significant impact on offline business. We can also hear that many offline retail brands are facing tight capital chains or even bankruptcy, while online products have maintained good repurchase and retention rates.

Of course, the relaxation of offline consumption has increased the risk of an epidemic outbreak. The recurrence of the epidemic will be in waves, which has also caused repeated changes in user behavior and will to a certain extent affect the brand's online and offline marketing distribution. The competition in online marketing is obviously becoming increasingly fierce, while offline marketing has already been subject to greater uncertainty. However, it may also be a marketing depression during a period of easing of the epidemic, and there are certain marketing dividends to be tapped.

4. Outdated marketing distribution thinking

The creation of material content for traditional marketing is based on the law of large numbers, and the goal is to resonate with the largest number of target users. However, as soon as the advertising material is created, it will be covered across all channels. This is actually a distributed thinking because traditional media are homogenized as a whole.

However, this distribution idea of ​​"submitting one manuscript to multiple places" can no longer match the current media environment, because every important media platform now has its own unique characteristics and communication methods, and the corresponding communication content and materials need to be customized through channels. A video that is popular on Bilibili may not be popular on Xigua Video. A method that can be used to promote products on Xiaohongshu may not be effective on Weibo.

WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili...almost every one of them is a marketing hub, and each has unique characteristics. This unique feature can be clearly seen from the content released by brands on the platform. You may find that the highly popular content released by each brand on Bilibili has obvious contextual similarities, and this context is significantly different from other platforms such as Xiaohongshu. (Is this good or bad for the brand? Does the brand’s unique characteristics seem unimportant? We will write separate articles to discuss these issues in the future.)

In short, each individual platform requires sophisticated operations and communication planning, which of course increases the brand's investment in marketing resources. We have always been against marketing that casts a wide net and does a superficial job. In the future, when there will be segmentation of the population and channels, the efficiency of extensive marketing will only become lower and lower. We recommend choosing the most matching platform and working intensively. In other words, brands do not need to cover every platform. For small and medium-sized brands, penetrating one platform is already difficult enough.

5. Marketing is fully operationalized

According to our conversations with friends, for many advertising companies, traditional advertising marketing and delivery business is decreasing, while operational business accounts for an increasing proportion, such as new media agency operation, live broadcast marketing, social content dissemination, traffic operation, etc. Under the pressure of economic downturn, operational marketing actions are more in line with the needs of brands.

The operationalization of marketing is not a new topic, and the reasons are not difficult to find. On the one hand, as mentioned above, the differentiation of channels and populations requires a series of operational actions to support refined marketing. On the other hand, the cost of acquiring customers has increased, and brands hope to reuse traffic, which is actually the so-called popularity of private domain traffic. Private domain traffic marketing is essentially user operation.

For brands, distinguishing between marketing and operations may not be very meaningful (but it may involve issues of internal departmental division of labor and organizational structure), but the trend is that the previous marketing and communication actions, which were mainly short, flat and fast, are shifting to long-term interactive user reach. For many traditional brands, it is difficult to change their thinking in a short period of time, so some new retail brands have the opportunity to overtake on the curve.

For agents, the operationalization of marketing has also had various impacts. Traditional agents are good at public mass communication, while operational marketing actions require more energy and heavy investment in customized plans, resulting in a decline in agent profit margins. Simply put, operational marketing has intensified competition in the marketing services industry.

6. New opportunities in the WeChat ecosystem

There is no denying that WeChat's actions in the past two years have been noticeably slow. The most direct proof is that WeChat, as the largest app, has failed to grasp the important trend of short video content consumption among the entire population. WeChat has made a lot of product moves this year. Although it has received mixed reviews, it is clear that there are many opportunities in the changes.

There have been many functional optimizations in products such as Kanyikan, Video Account, Official Account, Mini Program Live Broadcast, WeChat Stores, Soso, and WeChat Circles. We believe that WeChat will not miss out on the important battlefields of video, live broadcast, and e-commerce. This is also a part that brands should pay close attention to.

Although we have reservations about some of the changes in WeChat, WeChat is, after all, a billion-dollar product. Any product change may generate traffic dividends, especially those related to e-commerce and product sales. In addition, WeChat for Business is also undergoing continuous improvement, which may bring many new ways of operating users and attracting new users to brands.

Due to its huge impact, WeChat has always been relatively cautious in making changes, but WeChat has also made repeated changes in the first half of this year. It can be seen that WeChat’s product adjustments are imperative. It is recommended to pay attention to the latest developments in WeChat stores and live streaming, and to conduct timely trials and errors.

In addition to the six points mentioned above, there is great uncertainty in the global economic and political situation this year. For example, overseas companies have been hit hard by the three "black swans" of the overseas epidemic outbreak, the black racial movement, and the removal of Chinese apps. In addition, the second half of this year is also a critical period for the US presidential election, and the game between major powers will also have a lot of impact on the business level.

All in all, this is an era of frequent black swans, and it is difficult for us to accurately predict the future, but as Churchill said, never waste a good crisis.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: Spread Gymnastics