How to plan for Kuaishou and seize the traffic that 99% of short video players will miss?

As live streaming and short video promotion are in vogue, a common approach adopted by brands is to spend money on advertising and to have influencers promote products, but what follows is mostly a disproportionate amount of purchases compared to the capital investment. If you want to create a hit product, it is not enough to just rely on advertising. Using a corporate account matrix to run a campaign is the new way to do it. After all, own account = traffic + channel.

However, brands often encounter several pitfalls when establishing their own corporate accounts and building an account matrix - blindly pursuing the number of fans, investing heavily in shooting content, ignoring operations and user data, etc.

So for marketers and operators, how to solve the problem of easy mistakes, truly develop the Kuaishou platform, and promote the brand?

We shared the methodology for deploying the Kuaishou platform from three dimensions: the overall environment of short videos, layout strategy, and common problems on the enterprise side.

1. Common problems in Kuaishou

2. What should the enterprise do?

3. Kuaishou’s production and operation methods

1. What are the problems that all enterprises will encounter?

In 2016, Kuaishou's popularity and various data dimensions performed amazingly, attracting the attention of most people, and Star Station also began to make plans for Kuaishou.

Based on algorithm distribution, the team conducted tests on the platform in hundreds of dimensions, such as font, word count, font shape, etc., to understand the rules of popular videos on the platform and create a self-operated traffic pool with 200 million fans. As a result, monetization models such as e-commerce, live streaming, game operations, music distribution, and knowledge payment have developed.

Later, Kuaishou officials contacted Star Station and raised the problems faced by companies when placing DSP information flow advertisements on the platform: since there are no personal accounts, it is difficult for companies to receive the traffic after the advertisements are placed.

But it is not easy to create an account. Fans, traffic, data, etc. must all be taken into consideration. Even in the process of building an account, companies are likely to encounter some similar problems.

1. Blindly pursuing the number of views and fans, ignoring the purpose of the account itself.

There are a large number of high-quality content accounts, but the data on live streaming sales is not good. We think their jokes are funny, the hosts are attractive, and they have a huge number of fans, so why are their sales performances not improving?

This is because there are two independent logics behind it: on short video platforms, users will exchange their time for high-quality content; while on e-commerce platforms, users expect to exchange their money for better products.

These two logics are essentially incompatible, so how can they be connected? Trust requires long-term social interaction, as well as the content and values ​​conveyed by short videos and live broadcasts.

Short video fans, live broadcast room fans, joke fans, e-commerce fans, and chart-topping fans have vastly different values. The fans acquired through different methods and channels will greatly affect the back-end monetization capabilities.

For example, ranking was very popular in the past (ranking refers to a method of paying high-value gifts in the live broadcast room of a popular anchor to direct traffic to the anchor's sales account). However, everyone now knows that there is a high probability of losing money if you make it to the charts.

We have a client who is a distributor of a well-known sports brand and a chart-topping fanatic. At the time, his ROI was only 1:0.2. The changed growth strategy brought in shopping fans to the live broadcast room, with a single-game ROI of 1:10, and subsequently stabilized at around 1:5. Apart from the GMV performance, the value of this part of the growth in fans is very high. The platform's reference figures set the unit price of shopping fans in the live broadcast room at around 30 yuan.

For example, there was an account selling tractors at the time, with about 10,000 followers, which was considered a very small account. But this account sold 20 tractors in a three-hour live broadcast, with each tractor costing about 400,000 yuan. However, this is hard for some brands, especially big ones, to accept - after working for so long, they only get a small increase in the number of fans, while others have millions of fans and hundreds of millions of views...

So how can we form reasonable reports internally and coordinate the understanding of different departments? This seems to be a difficult question to answer, so most people can only helplessly fall into the vanity indicator of increasing followers. In fact, when companies enter social platforms, all plans are made from the end in mind. What brands need to think about is: Is their purpose brand promotion? Sale? Long-term layout of private domain traffic, or something else?

2. Are all Kuaishou users from the lower-tier markets? Do you have the spending power?

Such bias may cause you to miss an opportunity for growth in an era.

To understand the Kuaishou platform, I think it must be placed in the current context of the country. China's business depth is too complex and its infrastructure levels are inconsistent. There are both highly developed and quite backward areas. But almost every place shares a common infrastructure and operates under uniform rules.

China's next real development opportunity lies in huge changes in depth. The further development of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen is limited. Even if they develop faster, it will be difficult to compete with them in terms of scale. Let me talk about something that was hotly discussed not long ago. One billion people in China have a monthly income of less than 3,000 yuan. Imagine how many opportunities people have and how big changes will happen in the process of moving from 3,000 to 10,000?

In this context, the significance of Kuaishou is that it gives us the opportunity to reach these groups of people, and short video live streaming has essentially changed the production relations in society.

For example, in the past, a good salesperson could only serve 100 customers a day at most, but with short video live streaming, he can sell goods to tens of thousands of people in two or three hours, which has liberated the productivity of sales; an excellent teacher could only have one or two hundred students in a class, but with short video live streaming, tens of thousands of students can attend the class, which has liberated the productivity of teachers. Therefore, short video live streaming is an amplifier and an essential tool for all industries in the future, just as basic as water, electricity, coal and the Internet.

Based on the tool of short video live streaming, brands have the opportunity to reach a large number of users through the Kuaishou platform. In addition, we discovered some interesting phenomena: first, Kuaishou users do not need to buy houses and have money to spend; second, they have a strong and huge desire for a better quality of life and education methods.

They still have gaps in knowledge about many categories. They want to pursue good things but don’t know what is good. So they will rely on the anchors they trust, and the anchors will be like friends and tell them "this is better." It can be seen that Kuaishou's strong social attributes have brought strong e-commerce. In the Kuaishou live broadcast room, there are no fans, but old friends, family, brothers and sisters.

For example, I created an educational account, Dayuanbao. This account tried to sell courses at the time, with the average customer price of the course being 99 yuan for 50 minutes. 99 yuan, the price on the Get app is equivalent to that of a master-level person taking a full year course. I didn’t expect that the course received a lot of positive reviews after it was launched on Kuaishou. From the comments, I can see that the users are very cute and they really support and like you.

There are some prejudices that this platform is "rustic", but the essence of "rustic" is the information asymmetry. The greater the information gap, the greater the space for creating value. The large number of positive comments and likes from users just reflects that there is still a large proportion of the population living in an environment of educational injustice. If we can reduce educational inequality in this way, we will actually create huge value in the field of education.

In terms of goods, taking our customers as an example, the average order value of clothing is 100-700 yuan, jewelry and jade is 2,000-3,000 yuan, and there are even anchors selling luxury goods. These aren’t super large sizes, but they’re very consistent in shipment. Of course, to create such a customer unit price system requires good positioning in the early stages. If you start selling low-end products from the beginning, the fans you attract later and the recommendations from the Kuaishou algorithm will pull you towards a lower-end position, and your account will be sold at a lower price.

Therefore, different categories and different merchants need to formulate a complete set of strategies, including anchor screening, product scheduling and selection, matching of live broadcast room traffic and profit, etc.

2. What should enterprises do specifically?

In the future, short video live streaming will become a normalized tool. The way for an enterprise to accumulate this long-term value is to establish its own internal MCN. It can be a department or a team, and its core function is to create an e-commerce live broadcast matrix for its own stores on platforms such as Kuaishou.

Companies must be aware that relying solely on external influencers to promote their products will ultimately lead to price wars or product selection wars. If you focus on cultivating a big talent, the cost will be too high and the talent will be uncontrollable. What we should really do is to seize the golden time of traffic accumulation and run a store instead of a human being. A store matrix is ​​established on Kuaishou, and the sales staff are the anchors, selling goods on a regular basis in the stores.

One of Star Station’s corporate clients has a huge traffic matrix on WeChat. They wanted to move all of their 15,000 sales staff to Kuaishou, so they worked with us to help companies build their own MCN and do short video live streaming from 0 to 1. Assuming that each of these 15,000 sales people has only 2,000 fans on their independent accounts, the company will have a total of 30 million new fans online.

Kuaishou is a platform that combines the public and private domains very well. Such a matrix can continuously acquire new fans through the public domain and then accumulate them through private domain traffic. At this time, making full use of short video live streaming can liberate the productivity of sales personnel and increase the number of customers that sales can reach tenfold or a hundredfold.

To give another example, one of our clients is a domestic brand. In the past, it cooperated with KOLs, and its sales conversion rate after jumping to Taobao was in the single digits. In fact, 20-30% on Taobao is a pretty good number. By building an internal MCN, accurately positioning fans and establishing social relationships, the product conversion rate can reach 23%~96%.

With this basic matrix or MCN, the previous media means have become "icing on the cake" and bring better results. Whether it is a campaign or a single sales event, there will be an amplifying effect because of the complete MCN system. Based on this system, the matrix can capture every activity, repeatedly accumulate data, and improve LTV.

3. Kuaishou’s production and operation methods

Finally, let’s talk about Kuaishou’s production and operation methods.

The first is Kuaishou’s algorithm, which is the visual recognition mechanism.

The platform's machines will use visual recognition mechanisms to determine the category of the video. For example, for cute pet videos, the system will first push the video to a small number of fans with the cute pet tag, and judge the quality of the video content based on the content viewing rate, sharing rate, etc.

In addition, we also did a lot of AB TEST to test popular strategies under the system algorithm. When making videos, you can use some methods that are easily recognized by machines, including saturation, color space values, keywords, text descriptions, etc., so that the machine can accurately identify the content and push the video to the fans who really need it.

Secondly, brands don’t have to turn every video into a work of art.

The essence of making videos is to create social particles. I often say that when creating content with social attributes, one should start with appearance, fall into talent, and be loyal to character . At the beginning, users will be attracted by the good looks of the people traveling abroad and the product packaging. But on social platforms, appearance can only attract a small number of users who are easy to follow. The last two points are what really determine whether an account can have its own fans.

The so-called "talent" refers to the continuous output of content that is valuable to users; while "character" refers to the values ​​behind live broadcasts, short videos and other content. The users who will eventually become loyal fans are followers of corresponding values, and it is this user group that will trust and buy the products you recommend.

In the past, it was difficult for brands to attract a high-stickiness fan base through various means such as ranking, connecting to the live broadcast, or greeting the anchor in advance. Even some of the top families on Kuaishou have a super large account, but other accounts can only be diverted by the large account, and the fans are still the fans of the large account. If the large account does not broadcast, the small accounts will not be popular either.

What I want to convey to everyone here is that if you are already operating an account on Kuaishou, don’t worry about the number of fans you have. What is more important is to treat every fan as a living, lovely person, and you will reap great rewards.

The last key point is patience.

This market is very large and has a long life cycle. Many entrants cannot even make it to the day when magic appears. Behind every seemingly magical number is boring repetition and exploration day after day. Every high-intensity, long-duration continuous live broadcast and test review is in the hope of using human intelligence to outperform artificial intelligence, and through a lot of analysis and testing, to solve many problems that artificial intelligence cannot solve for the time being.

The era of universal e-commerce has arrived, and users are slowly getting used to e-commerce live streaming. The platform still has great value and space for everyone to express themselves. I hope everyone can start with appearance, fall in love with talent, and end with character on Kuaishou.

Author: Women's Knife Research Institute

Source: Business of Women Club