Is live streaming the lifeline for brand marketing?

Whether it is the product side or communication with consumers, brands should get as close to consumers as possible, obtain their most authentic feedback, and meet their needs.

In an overall low-growth market environment, the first thing many companies do is cut the budget of their marketing department. So, in the case of a low budget, what other ways can brand marketing help companies achieve growth?

My answer is to embrace change and communicate using channels and languages ​​that are close to consumers.

Whether it is the product side or communication with consumers, brands should get as close to consumers as possible, obtain their most authentic feedback, and meet their needs.

Here are some of my thoughts, I hope they can give you some inspiration:

1. Refined user operations

During the epidemic, there is no offline traffic and no income, it’s difficult!

But what is even more difficult is that brands lose touch with consumers. The onlineization of products and services is imminent, and private domain traffic will undoubtedly become a key link for most companies to overtake others in 2020.

My suggestions on how to fine-tune the operation of private domain traffic are:

1. Short video live streaming and other platforms are used to create content;
2. The Moments are used to retain users, strengthen relationships, and deeply convert users.
3. The community is used to manage user revenue and promote interactive conversion;
4. Mini programs can be grafted with products and carry out user fission.

Next, I will break it down into two parts: community operation and live streaming sales .

1. How to activate community users?

I often receive questions from many friends around me: Why don’t the users in my community buy in?

I observed carefully and found that his so-called community operation was quite simple and crude: he simply gathered users into a group, and started selling goods right away in order to realize the profits! There is no sense of ceremony, no atmosphere, let alone the organizational structure design of the group, the role design and division of labor of the staff...

I have always emphasized that if a brand only wants to lure users in like wooling wool and then go for the chance to reap the benefits, then I advise you to stop as soon as possible.

Community operation is a long-term job that requires user thinking and energy investment . For example, product selection before official sale: should it be a hot-selling product, a traffic-generating product, an event product, or an image product? The proportion of event products, poster design, event time, division of roles for group staff, wording, text for planting seeds in the circle of friends, how to attract traffic, etc. all need to be planned and designed in advance.

Take Inman as an example, which broke the impossible with social marketing and achieved 140% daily sales.

The number of daily active users of the "Inman Weidian" applet has exceeded 65,000, exceeding the number of active users on Double Eleven Day in 2019; the single-day sales of many stores exceeded 5,000 yuan, and some stores achieved single-day sales of over 10,000 yuan.

How did Inman do it?

From 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, owners of more than 600 INMAN stores across the country will launch specific products every half hour through Moments, WeChat groups, or one-on-one communications with fans, and consciously guide customers to place orders on the mini program.

In order to better empower community operations, the INMAN new retail team has established strict internal implementation standards. For example, arrange dedicated personnel to be on duty to answer store owners' questions at any time; the response time for each reply must not exceed 15 minutes, and if someone needs to leave for something, personnel handover must be arranged; each person on duty needs to prepare product promotion scripts one day in advance and distribute them to the store owner group in a timely manner.

2. Will live streaming be a lifeline for enterprises?

During this epidemic, short video live streaming has become a standard for merchants to sell products and has been raised to an unprecedented level.

Merchants who are struggling to save themselves have upgraded from the "everything can be delivered" model of takeaway meals, fresh food, and semi-finished products to the "live streaming with goods" model.

I have already written an article about live streaming last year: Taobao Live: 90% of the brands’ large-scale self-entertainment live broadcast illustrations! (Click on the blue font to review), I will not discuss this in detail here, but will only share two phenomena that I think are more representative.

One is that the domineering CEOs have transformed into the "Li Jiaqi of the e-commerce industry."

Faced with the heavy blow brought by the offline shutdown, these usually powerful and domineering presidents have become the new generation of traffic in the "darkest hour".

On the evening of Valentine's Day, February 14, Lin Qingxuan founder Sun Laichun made his first personal e-commerce live broadcast on Tmall. In just 2 hours, the number of viewers exceeded 60,000 and sales exceeded 400,000 yuan.

On March 8, the day of Goddess Day, the live broadcast of Qian Jinbo, chairman of Red Dragonfly, attracted 435,300 viewers and more than 3 million likes. Sales increased by 114% year-on-year, and with 310,000 views, it entered the top three in the real-time ranking of Peak Clothing Channel.

Septwolves CEO Li Shujun also achieved a win-win situation in sales and word of mouth through interactive chats, lucky draws, gifts for purchases above a certain amount, and other rich forms of activities. In just one hour, the total number of interactions in the two live broadcast rooms exceeded 130,000, the total number of viewers exceeded 29,000, sales in a single live broadcast room reached 380,000, and sales including flash sales during time periods exceeded 1.28 million. Many of Septwolves' 2020 spring and summer new products were sold out in an instant.

When CEOs do live broadcasts, their unique personalities are not only a selling point to attract audiences, but also a new endorsement for the products.

In addition, while earning enough hype, CEO live streaming is essentially listening to the voice of users on the front line. Only by putting user needs first, solving user pain points and other follow-up measures can the value of live streaming be further realized.

Another case is the familiar Perfect Diary.

Let's first look at a set of data:

In February, Perfect Diary’s Taobao live streaming sales increased by 170% month-on-month, and during the 38th promotion, it exceeded the overall sales of last year’s promotion in just 42 minutes. During the epidemic, Perfect Diary's performance remained remarkable.

Since I have been spending most of my time at home recently, I curiously watched several live broadcasts of Perfect Diary. I found that compared with many brands that only promote their products online, Perfect Diary’s live broadcast operations are also worthy of learning for many brands.

How does it do that? I summarized the following three points:

① Launch a live broadcast at 19:30 every night, and create a sense of freshness by customizing different topics.

For every day's live broadcast, Perfect Diary will warm up in the group in advance, inform fans of the live broadcast theme and lucky draw benefits, and attract fans to watch by creating different topics, such as the European and American texture makeup special, makeup artist online unboxing, cat and dog palette imitation makeup competition | Chengdu "Qian Xi" pk Guangzhou "Ren Jialun", fairy makeup for dating across the air, etc., which not only satisfies users' joy of shopping, but also meets their needs to learn makeup skills online.

② The host’s appearance, manner of dress, and conversation in the character’s character can eliminate the sense of distance and bring him closer to the users.

I want to say that Perfect Diary really knows how to tap into the needs of consumers. It started to hire professional beauty consultants and makeup artists last year, all of whom became anchors during the epidemic. The combination of handsome men and beautiful women is not only pleasing to the eyes for those who are obsessed with looks, but they can also learn makeup techniques from these beauty experts to pass the time. Why not?

③ Create your own mini-program live broadcast platform, with multi-channel and multi-touchpoint operation methods

It is worth mentioning that in addition to live broadcasting on multiple platforms, Perfect Diary has also created its own member mall mini-program live broadcast platform.

The advantage of using your own mini program for live broadcast is that the data of the mini program live broadcast can be obtained in real time, which helps the team understand the effect of each live broadcast and adjust the plan in time. On the other hand, for users who already use WeChat, the path to jump to the WeChat mini-program live broadcast is the shortest, and the experience is more convenient and quick, so the conversion rate will be higher.

It is foreseeable that I believe that for a long time in the future, social marketing and live streaming sales models will still be the mainstream business models.

What brands need to think about is how to become the brand that understands consumers best, find them, connect with them, guide them, and deliver productized solutions to the precise group of people as quickly as possible.

Create content products

The new generation of consumers increasingly values ​​absolute product strength. So at the moment, especially when budgets are shrinking, brand marketing must be based on product strength, so that marketing and products can be integrated.

My suggestion is that brands should dare to "develop" new products, develop marketing products, and experimental products, use innovative products to drive consumption, and use consumption to bring product reputation, so as to achieve sustainable growth.

For example, in order to fulfill netizens’ dream of “drinking milk tea as a revenge”, Nayuki’s Tea recently launched its own new product – a 5L domineering barrel of treasure milk tea, and preheated it through its official Weibo account.

This time, Nayuki adopted a hunger marketing approach for its #霸气桶装宝藏奶茶#, with the Shenzhen Futian Cocopark store selling a limited number of 10 barrels per day for only 3 days.

This wave of operations has made Nayuki's Tea dominate the social media platforms. The logic behind it is that Nayuki's Tea began to inject "content genes" when the product was being conceived, that is, "inject marketing from product research and development" to create "content products" and give the products content and stories.

We can imagine the process of consumers taking the powerful barreled milk tea home, and the barreled milk tea product becoming a giant mobile billboard. Because of its eye-catching design, it easily attracts the attention of others and forms social currency, serving as a wave of advertising for brand activities.

Secondly, Nayuki's Tea's operation has a lot of gimmicks and has captured consumers' psychological needs for drinking milk tea in retaliation. When consumers perceive the product through scenario-based scenarios, the product becomes emotional and can touch people's hearts.

Social media is an important channel for product dissemination, so brands might as well make your products social currency. With the convenience of new media, the social attributes of products have the possibility of "making a small difference with a big gain".

Cross-industry cooperation

According to the target users of the company's products, find some brands or small KOLs for cross-industry cooperation resources.

These cross-industry collaborations help to accurately develop new customers, and can be carried out in lightweight or heavyweight forms according to different partners and budget investments.

1) Lightweight cooperation

You can try to approach some bloggers in niche circles, maintain long-term cooperative relationships with these bloggers through gift exchanges, and build your own blogger resource library.

For example, Radio Lane Hotpot invites some influential KOLs in a certain circle to eat hotpot for free, and then uses their circle of friends to get exposure, which is also a good way of publicity.

2) Heavyweight cooperation

Undoubtedly, cross-border brand collaborations will still be the highlight of 2020.

One of the important purposes of cross-border cooperation is to break through the original brand level and user circle, realize traffic exchange and temperament complementarity between brands, and achieve an incremental effect of 1+1>2 through the marriage between the two major brands.

For example, Luckin Coffee launched the themed Purple Osmanthus Immortal Tea in collaboration with the hit TV series Eternal Love, which attracted a lot of attention from fans of the show and those who value appearance.

Before the Qingming Festival, Heytea and HEMA launched a co-branded milk tea Qingtuan, replacing the original limited edition Qingtuan with Ovaltine Bobo and cheese soy milk Bobo, creating a completely different taste.

Perfect Diary has also launched a new Explorer 12-color eyeshadow series, among which the 08 puppy palette is inspired by Li Jiaqi’s puppy Never, and Li Jiaqi was invited to match the colors of the eyeshadow palette.

Whether it is relying on the celebrity effect or the fan economy, smelling the new phone and taking the lead in planning new products, and then using the strategy of topic content + limited hunger marketing, the result is the dual empowerment of strong brand alliances, which can create a greater communication volume and create a 1+1>2 effect.

Find your own unique resources at low cost

Behind business competition is a competition for resources. The reason why some new brands can grow rapidly is because of their ability to integrate resources, including back-end industrial chain resources and front-end marketing resources. This integration ability can be said to be a brand’s “talent”, and it is also part of the brand’s core competitiveness.

For example, if you know a lot of celebrities or internet celebrities, a repost or a post on their WeChat Moments may bring you a lot of attention, which is resources you have accumulated over many years.

For example, sometimes the founders themselves are the lowest-cost marketing resource. People like Jack Ma, Lei Jun, and Luo Yonghao first create their own "halo" and then radiate it to the brand.

Take the well-known One Way Space as an example. This is a bookstore co-founded by well-known media people Yu Wei, Xu Zhiyuan and others. Due to the impact of the epidemic, the One Way Street Bookstore, which once created popular products and caused a follow-up trend, embarked on a crowdfunding path for assistance 15 years later.

And because of the influence of "Xu Zhiyuan"'s personal IP, it has laid the spiritual foundation for One Way Space and provided a "fan base" for its cultural consumption, so many users are willing to generously support it.

At the same time, the managers and founders of six bookstores, including One Way Space, Xiaofeng Bookstore, Pioneer Bookstore, and Utopia Bookstore, connected to Taobao Live and sold their own books through 99 yuan blind bags to alleviate the current survival crisis.

On the day of the live broadcast, Xu Zhiyuan also connected with his "old acquaintance" Viya, and the blind bags from his store also entered Viya's live broadcast room at the same time.

Many times, resources are opportunities. When the opportunity comes, companies or brands that have resource reserves or abundant resource reserves are more likely to become the pig that flies first.

summary

In an era of low growth, what brands should do is increase purposeful and valuable marketing budgets. Where should we direct our resources and which link is more closely related to the final results? These are all things that brands need to think carefully about.

Author: Sister Mulan

Source: Mulanjie (ID: mulanjie-)