7 Marketing Signals under the New Business Logic

This year, I have communicated with many brands and marketers, and found that everyone is actually quite anxious, but their points of anxiety are different.

Brands’ concerns are usually not about marketing itself, but about how the company can achieve sustainable business growth. As market trends and user preferences change at an accelerated pace, companies are anxious about how to seize the current market opportunity dividends on the one hand, and on the other hand, they are also anxious about how to build their own business moats after the dividends disappear to avoid being surpassed by new competitors. After all, it is impossible for a company to seize dividends every time.

Marketers’ anxiety lies more in the fact that traditional marketing theories are gradually failing, but new marketing theories have not yet been established. Moreover, in practice, each brand may have its own unique marketing methodology, and marketing will become more refined. If marketing services are viewed as a large industry, this industry is in urgent need of upgrading and transformation. Platforms, KOLs, MCNs and even ordinary users are putting pressure on traditional advertising companies to transform.

Although everyone is generally anxious, there are still a large number of excellent cases emerging in the market, such as Perfect Diary, Huaxizi, etc. By reviewing these cases, we may be able to find the future direction. On the evening of December 29, ByteDance announced the Engine Awards, with 25 companies on the list. Due to my work, I actually did research on most of the winning companies a long time ago.

A big reason why I pay attention to this award is that Bytedance’s evaluation criteria do not just focus on a particular campaign, but on the company’s operating conditions throughout the year. This means that we should not only focus on "increasing efficiency" of business, but also on "long-term effectiveness". Today, we have summarized seven insights from the practices of these award-winning companies, hoping that they will be of some inspiration to companies and marketers.

This article will be divided into two parts: "Marketing Trends" and "Marketing Strategies". The former mainly focuses on the overall trend changes in the marketing industry, while the latter mainly focuses on the responses of corporate marketing execution.

Marketing Trends

1. Say goodbye to "reinventing the wheel" in corporate marketing

In the traditional marketing service model, the platform usually exists as the executor of the delivery, earning media fees and advertising fees. But today, based on technology-based data mining and analysis, the platform can achieve more effective and accurate matching of advertising supply and demand. Therefore, the platform will not only exist as a media channel, but will also be able to provide services for corporate marketing and help companies formulate relevant marketing strategies.

If we continue to extrapolate, the result will be that the entire business system will undergo further social division of labor, enterprises will focus more on product capabilities, and the platform will take over marketing services. As platforms continue to launch relevant marketing tools, the focus of enterprises in marketing is on how to use these platform marketing tools most efficiently, rather than reinventing the wheel and starting everything from scratch.

We even found that even if a team does not have much marketing foundation, it can still create a marketing hit by using platform tools (of course, the premise is that the product is high-quality). For example, "The Strongest Snail", which won the Engine Award for Newcomer of the Year. During the launch of the game, we cooperated with ByteDance to launch the Douyin Challenge, and carried out content cooperation with many Star Map influencers to soft-implant game elements into it. Data shows that the total exposure of the challenge exceeded 15 billion times, and the number of views of the participating videos reached over 1 billion. It is understood that the game chose to allocate most of its publicity and promotion budget to the massive engine matrix. In the case that the domestic team had little experience in investment, it became the hit game of this year and even influenced the buying and publicity strategies of later games such as "Genshin Impact".

It can be seen that by making good use of the platform's marketing toolbox, enterprises can accelerate the realization of market breakthroughs from 0 to 1, and the platform is taking on more marketing service functions. As for traditional advertising agencies, their roles also need to be transformed, continuously extending upstream in the value chain and eventually becoming marketing strategy consultants for companies.

2. The platform ecosystem opens up the “ full link of product quality and effectiveness ”

"Integration of brand and effect" is a topic that has been mentioned countless times in the marketing industry, but it was difficult to achieve under the previous marketing model. One of the important reasons was the fragmentation of channel platforms. For example, platform A has media attributes and is suitable for brand advertising, while platform B has e-commerce attributes and is suitable for e-commerce advertising. "Brand and effect integration" is achieved through combined marketing by enterprises to platforms AB. But the problem is that platform A and platform B are often separated, and it is difficult for users to smoothly jump and convert, which greatly reduces the effect of the so-called "brand and effect integration."

But the situation is changing. From the perspective of the platform's ecological development, the boundaries between social, e-commerce, content and other platforms have become increasingly blurred, and the platform ecology itself is building a comprehensive field of "product and effect integration." For example, Douyin is no longer just a short video content platform. After entering the e-commerce sector this year, the link from content to conversion has been opened up on the platform, achieving complete product and effect integration.

For platforms, future competition will be a competition for resources between ecological niches. A single brand advertising platform or performance advertising platform will most likely not survive in the long run. For enterprises, especially under the influence of this year's epidemic, seeking a more efficient marketing platform has become a rigid need.

For example, in the online education industry, due to intensified competition, the cost of acquiring customers this year is already 100% higher than the same period last year, which requires brand communication to increase conversion rates. We must mention the unicorn company here - Yuanfudao, which is also one of the winners of the Engine Award's Annual Growth Award. Yuanfudao attempted a marketing transformation on Bytedance this year, expanding from bidding to IP cooperation. At the same time, it deployed e-commerce live streaming on Douyin, and achieved a monthly increase in fans to 100,000+ through small store operations + brand self-broadcasting + bidding in live broadcast rooms. Data shows that through continuous promotion, the brand communication index has increased by 166%, ranking first in online education brand customer acquisition.

3. Marketing methodology “moves towards science”

In the past, marketing could rely on the method of "positioning + TVC placement" to achieve effective coverage, but as mentioned earlier, there will no longer be a universal marketing method in the future. Corporate marketing has become more refined, and each company faces different user groups and market conditions, and therefore has its own unique marketing method model that suits it.

The key to finding a company's unique marketing model lies in the analysis and mining of relevant data. In fact, whether it is the field of marketing, or other fields such as corporate management, supply chain, product research and development, the future will need to rely on data, and data will become the oil and electricity of the future.

The data is divided into two levels. On the one hand, there is the back-end data accumulated by the enterprise itself, such as sales data, user service data, product data, after-sales data, etc. On the other hand, there is the front-end data deposited on the platform, such as user behavior data, user tags, user preference data, etc. Only by combining and analyzing the data of the two can we build a complete user chain and achieve accurate and scientific marketing, which also determines the co-creation model of future marketing.

Let’s take FAW Hongqi, which we recently came into contact with, as an example. FAW Hongqi has strategically cooperated with ByteDance to build the DTLab digital transformation laboratory. Through digital methods such as consumer graph analysis, efficiency measurement, and post-link conversion, it breaks through online and offline data barriers and restores user paths. At the same time, FAW Hongqi will send back all leads, transaction information, etc. for in-depth analysis. Ultimately, through continuous iterations, it will explore a marketing model suitable for FAW Hongqi to help the brand achieve long-term operation.

The enterprise marketing model requires continuous updating and iteration of data, which is unlikely to be achieved overnight. This is also the reason why many enterprises give up when they see that the early effects of marketing digitalization are not great. In fact, once the marketing model is running smoothly, the company will open up an increasingly larger gap with competitors under the traditional marketing model. Therefore, the digitalization of corporate marketing and platform marketing co-creation should be as fast as possible.

Marketing Strategy

1. Create private domain traffic and deepen operations

Private domain traffic is a key point that cannot be ignored in corporate marketing. After following the market in the past two years, most companies have built a certain private domain traffic pool. The earliest function of private domain traffic was to achieve low-cost repeated reach of brands, but in the future it will likely carry more corporate goals.

According to our grassroots research and analysis, there are currently two important trends in private domain traffic:

First, the demand for monetization of private domain traffic has become more urgent. A large number of corporate private traffic pools are built as new media channels, which are used to inform brand information and brand activities and conduct content-oriented user operations. Many of these companies have not actually built a closed loop of product conversion. In fact, the operating cost of private domain traffic is not low, which has also led companies to pay more attention to the closed loop of private domain traffic monetization, and even hope to discover new business growth points for the company by exploring user needs in private domain traffic.

The second is that the private domain traffic pool is also constantly developing in the direction of matrix. Currently, many brands are building a diversified private traffic pool matrix to cover different user scenarios, which also shows that private traffic itself has become more segmented and vertical. In addition, the company's private traffic pool matrix will continue to be connected and divert traffic to different business lines and product lines to become a "traffic middle platform." In other words, the private traffic pool within the company will be connected to become public traffic.

Taking the education industry as an example, Douyin’s current operating model can basically be summarized as 1+N+X. 1 represents the enterprise account, N represents the account of the teacher under it, and X represents the use of the expert account for further dissemination. In the cases we have come across recently, such as Xueersi Online School, in addition to the brand's official account, it also allows its teachers to open accounts to form a teacher matrix to disseminate learning-related content. This not only allows for a large amount of content trial and error iteration, but also forms a capillary-like penetration of public and private traffic. Data shows that the number of fans of the Xueersi Online School teacher matrix account is about 6 million, and it has operated a private traffic pool for the brand on Douyin, providing traffic reserves for commercialization.

2. Leverage live streaming to find a breakthrough

Live streaming with goods is a marketing sector that cannot be ignored in the past two years. Live streaming with goods has been developing rapidly for more than two years, and it is not easy for an opportunity to make a brand famous overnight to appear again. Although the benefits of live streaming e-commerce are gradually disappearing, the operational benefits have just begun. In the future, live streaming e-commerce will rely on operational capabilities and organizational efficiency.

We believe that live streaming marketing will have two major breakthrough directions:

First, there is room for diversified innovation in live streaming content. The traditional hawking-style live broadcast content format will inevitably cause users to gradually become aesthetically fatigued, so innovation in live broadcast content can bring more attention and user stickiness. We believe that live streaming content will gradually move towards variety shows, IPs, and entertainment, becoming a kind of column-style "content work", thereby attracting different target users and achieving product and effect integration.

For example, when Shiseido was promoting "Red Waist" this year, it took advantage of the IP and variety show nature of live streaming to expand its reach. It turned the live streaming on Douyin into a beauty-inspired live streaming platform, and invited bloggers from multiple circles such as fashion, art, and music, as well as Huang Xuan, Yu Kewei, Su Mang and others to conduct cross-border live streaming. Shiseido's live broadcast is actually more like a combination of a variety show IP and live streaming with goods, which can also be seen as content innovation in the overall environment of the live streaming industry.

Second, live streaming requires the organizational capabilities of the backend. On the one hand, this requires back-end guarantees in terms of supply chain, e-commerce, etc., and on the other hand, it also requires more refined and extreme polishing at the operational level, and the broadcast time has almost become a hard indicator.

For example, after HaiLan Home tried Douyin live streaming for the first time in February this year, it tested the waters for two months and then started broadcasting continuously every day after April 11, with an average daily broadcast time of up to 9 hours, achieving a breakthrough in the total GMV of its self-broadcasting from March to November this year. Of course, duration is only the most obvious indicator, and details such as the design of the live broadcast room, the design of the sales talk, the control of the time of uploading the link, etc. will all become part of the refined operation of the live broadcast.

We predict that next year a large number of brands and KOLs will broadcast daily. Just like Weibo and official account pictures and texts, live streaming will become a daily content scenario coverage for companies.

3. Everything can be content

When traditional marketers do content marketing, they are easily restricted by past content formats, which leads to corporate marketing content having "too much aesthetics" and "not enough internet sense", making it impossible to adapt to the new media ecology. In fact, breaking the understanding of "content" itself may be able to break the marketing circle.

Here we try to cite two short video cases to illustrate:

The first one is China Merchants Bank. China Merchants Bank released 178 short videos on Douyin in one year, but the most widely circulated video among them was actually a video edited from behind-the-scenes footage of daily shooting, recording every moment behind the short videos of China Merchants Bank. This video eventually received 240,000 likes. The expansion of content selection has attracted public recognition.

The second one is Heilan Home. In fact, the videos that Heilan Home first released on Douyin were mainly TVC marketing, with a "hard" style, which is not suitable for the current preferences of short video users. Later on, interesting content such as HaiLan Home's mini-theater and store stories were gradually introduced, which gradually gained recognition from users. Among them, the video collaboration between Heilan Home and Luo Yonghao had a single video playback volume of over 35 million and 450,000 likes.

In addition, the content is also constantly developing towards IP and native directions. For example, in the cooperation between JD Supermarket and "Da Zhangwei's Birthday Party", they took advantage of the "collision" between Da Zhangwei's birthday and JD Supermarket's 9.9 anniversary celebration to bring a "big" happy birthday concert, creating the first-of-its-kind gameplay of "star concert + live broadcast with brand". The live broadcast that night received 1.942 million views, 934,000 user comments, and a maximum of 124,000 users online at the same time.

IP content can help brands generate clear positioning awareness and stronger content stickiness, spreading brand concepts and tone while gaining wide exposure; while native content can open up the link channel between commercial content and user content, allowing companies to connect with users and output brand value more efficiently.

Let's extend this a little further. With the diversification of the platform ecosystem itself, the platform is also changing from a marketing field to an enterprise's business field. At this time, the connotation of "content" will not only cover pictures, texts, videos, and live broadcasts themselves, but the company's service system for users will also become part of the content, so everything is content.

4. Marketing organizational structure ushered in efficiency changes

Whether it is the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, the expansion of the leading platform ecosystem, or the closer relationship between enterprises and platforms, all require enterprises themselves to adjust and transform their marketing organizational structure.

We believe that in the future, companies will not only have separate video marketing departments and live streaming marketing departments (many companies already have these two), but will also set up departments for leading platforms to achieve refined marketing of the corresponding ecosystem and improve marketing efficiency. For example, we found that NetEase Games has already set up a dedicated volume-buying department and volume-buying middle platform for the ecosystem of Massive Engine, and thereby promoted changes in the internal budget model.

What's more, not only the marketing department, but the organizational structure and management structure of the entire group will also undergo changes around platforms and markets. Shiseido stated that it will build its organization in China into a "second headquarters" by 2023. In 2023, the proportion of digital marketing and online sales in China will rise to 50%. This requires Shiseido to adjust its traditional sales model and achieve digital upgrades of the organization.

The digitalization of organizational structure is a complex issue. For example, the construction of an enterprise data center not only involves the digitalization of marketing, but also involves all aspects of the overall operation and management of the enterprise. There is currently no mature path to refer to, and companies need to continue to explore it in their own digital practices.

Whether from the perspective of marketing or the entire business environment, we are in an era of change. Some people say that 2020 is the watershed between "industrial civilization" and "digital civilization", which also means that as long as we can seize the current opportunities, we may gain market advantages in the next few decades. The new world is not far away.

Author: Spread Gymnastics

Source: Spread Gymnastics