Core summary:

Environmental scan: The emergence of the new coronavirus pandemic in 2020 has caused consumers to pay more attention and time online. Advertisers have also taken this as a sign and allocated more marketing budgets and investments to online channels. New media marketing , which has greater diversity and advantages in content formats and marketing methods, further highlights its value in attracting more users and their attention. The marketing service providers, new media platforms, MCN agencies, KOLs and other roles in the new media marketing market have shown remarkable development in recent years, jointly creating a good environment for the development of the new media marketing industry.

1) New media marketing service providers: linking the upstream and downstream operations of the industrial chain; simultaneously strengthening their own functions and external empowerment capabilities, reflecting high service value.

2) New media platform: Promote industry development through business standardization and expansion of marketing methods.

3) MCN agencies: their number is increasing and their development has entered a mature stage.

4) KOL: The ability to guide consumer consumption is enhanced and market attention is increased.

Strategy: For example, different types of new media platforms such as social platforms, online video platforms, short video platforms, e-commerce platforms, etc. have their own advantages in terms of the breadth of topic dissemination, consumer discussion participation, depth of content information presentation, and conversion efficiency. Therefore, according to the characteristics of the formulated marketing strategy, selecting corresponding types of platforms and integrating the advantages of each platform to enhance the marketing effect will become the development direction of new media marketing.

1. Scanning of China’s new media marketing environment

Overview of the new media marketing industry chain roles

New media marketing has attracted advertisers' attention and budget investment

Advertisers’ attention and marketing budget will continue to tilt towards new media marketing

According to iResearch's survey data on advertisers in June 2020, the types of advertising for which advertisers will increase their marketing budgets in the coming year mainly include content marketing (KOL promotion, etc.), e-commerce advertising, and information flow advertising. The new media marketing model based on KOL is also mainly included in the above three types of advertising forms. At the same time, new media marketing models such as live streaming marketing, short video marketing, and social media marketing, which mainly rely on KOLs, are the areas that advertisers are most concerned about. Among them, live streaming marketing and short video marketing, which have the highest KOL participation, have become the core marketing models that more than half of advertisers pay the most attention to, with selection rates of 52.8% and 51.7% respectively. In the future, KOL and new media marketing will also become increasingly important targets for advertisers' marketing budget investments.

Changes in the investment of advertisers in various industries in new media platforms

New media marketing investment has a high industry concentration

According to iResearch AdTracker monitoring data, between 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, approximately 70% of advertisers who chose new media platforms to carry out marketing campaigns in each quarter were mainly concentrated in the fields of fast-moving consumer goods, beauty, 3C/IT/electronics, network services, and retail, with a high degree of industry concentration. Beauty companies such as L'Oréal Group and Estee Lauder, Internet service companies such as Alibaba and JD.com, and 3C/IT/electronics companies such as Huawei and Midea have made high investments in new media marketing, driving its development from the demand side.

Advertisers from all industries actively carry out new media marketing activities

New media marketing has become the main form for advertisers to achieve diversified brand promotion goals

With the increasing diversification of consumers’ media-catalyst habits and the increasing fragmentation of their attention, the effectiveness of hard advertising with more direct and obvious marketing purposes in reaching and converting consumers has gradually weakened. New media marketing, which relies on KOLs with strong fan-pulling capabilities, high-quality marketing content design, and media platforms that conform to consumers' daily usage habits, is increasingly favored by advertisers in various industries.

From 2019 to date, advertisers in industries such as beauty, IT/3C, and film and television have stepped up their adoption and layout of new media marketing models. From increasing brand awareness, boosting product sales to promoting brand differentiation, all of these needs have been met through new media marketing that combines product and effect. iResearch believes that in the future, new media marketing will continue to be the preferred marketing model for advertisers to meet various marketing needs.

The number and influence of MCNs continue to increase

MCN helps KOLs achieve systematic and professional content creation and work docking

In the ten years from 2010 to 2019, the number of new MCNs has grown rapidly year by year. The growth between 2014 and 2016 reached thousands. The expansion in the number of institutions indirectly reflects the high market demand for MCN. In addition, the proportion of top Internet celebrities signed with MCN reached 93% in 2018, and KOL's dependence on MCN is also increasing. After a period of development and exploration, including exploring functions and improving operational processes, the value and role of MCNs in the new media marketing industry chain have been further highlighted by those that can effectively integrate KOL resources in the market, provide systematic content creation support for KOLs, and efficiently connect with new media platforms.

Analysis of Typical MCN Organizations

The diversified development of various MCN organizations has injected vitality into the new media marketing industry chain

Players in the MCN market continue to exert efforts from various angles such as content, marketing, products and services, providing a path to realize the diversified marketing needs of advertisers in various industries, while also injecting development vitality into the operation of the new media marketing industry chain. MCNs such as Dayu and Gumai Jiahe focus on the quality and output of content creation in their business development, building a foundation for deeply impressing consumers with soft content, while realizing advertisers' marketing needs and commercialization; while e-commerce MCNs that rely on KOLs to drive product sales, their business operations are closer to the actual increase in product sales.

KOL promotes the realization of marketing content on various new media platforms

Advertisers select corresponding types of KOLs to conduct marketing based on the characteristics of different new media platforms

Faced with new media platforms with different attributes, user preferences and main content expression forms, advertisers have different preferences in choosing KOL types when delivering new media marketing content. Take a typical new media marketing platform as an example:

1) As users are used to reading official account articles on the platform and forwarding and recommending them to acquaintances, emotional KOLs who can produce content that attracts users to read in depth and resonates with them and thus spontaneously recommend them have become the targets of advertisers with a high rate of placement on the WeChat platform. At the same time, long-image accounts that can carry more information in a way that is easy to read have also become the mainstream content form on the WeChat platform;

2) On the Sina Weibo platform, where users have a strong demand for browsing pan-entertainment information, KOLs who mainly produce pan-entertainment content are more favored by advertisers;

3) As for the TikTok platform, which uses short videos to carry rich entertainment information, KOLs with diverse and multi-layered plot-based comedy content have attracted more advertising investment.

The marketing method with KOL as the main body can effectively achieve the goal of planting and weeding

Diversify marketing content and methods to strengthen KOLs’ ability to guide consumers

With the strengthening of content construction on various platforms, various non-"hard advertising" marketing models have begun to emerge. Through new marketing models such as recommendation, evaluation, and sharing, and with the help of pictures, texts, short videos, and live broadcasts that fit consumers' content acquisition habits and preferences, KOLs, as the main body of disseminating marketing content, are constantly improving their ability to guide consumers' consumption behaviors and habits. Judging from the proportion of revenue generated by various marketing methods on e-commerce platforms, live streaming, short video information flow and graphic information flow advertising conducted by KOLs have rapidly expanded their share of revenue since their emergence, accounting for 23% of e-commerce marketing revenue in 2019, further highlighting their importance.

Advertisers’ advertising investment on various media platforms

E-commerce and short video advertising drive rapid growth in advertising revenue on new media platforms

New media marketing with KOL as the main body pays more attention to human expression, thus promoting e-commerce platforms, short video platforms, social platforms and online video platforms that can use people as the main body to market and display brands or products through pictures, texts, videos, live broadcasts and other forms to become the main carriers of new media marketing. As live streaming ads on e-commerce platforms began to monetize and quickly gained market attention in 2018, and the growth of short video advertising began to enter a period of explosive growth, the advertising scale of new media platforms continued to expand. In 2019, it accounted for 65.9% of the scale of online advertising revenue of different media types. It is expected that in 2022, this proportion will exceed 75%. New media platforms will become an increasingly important marketing target for advertisers.

User usage time of new media platforms

New media platforms have rich content dimensions and expressions, which continue to attract users' attention

With the gradual diversification of content presentation forms and the improvement of consumers' demand for content, new media platforms, with their advantages of strong content and diverse expression forms, have caused consumers' daily Internet usage habits to shift continuously to new media platforms. According to the monitoring results of user usage time of various types of media by iResearch's data monitoring product mUserTracker, new media marketing focuses on category platforms such as video services, communication chat, social networks and e-commerce, which occupy 4 of the TOP10 media types in terms of usage time. Moreover, during the period from Q1 2018 to Q1 2020, the combined quarterly effective usage time of these four types of media platforms among all media platforms remained at around 60%. In an era of fragmented attention, new media platforms have stood out and have maintained a high level of appeal to consumers.

Comparison between MAU of new media platforms and the size of netizens

The number of independent devices on new media platforms is growing rapidly, and the scope of influence is expanding

New media platforms not only have a strong appeal to consumers’ attention, but also continue to cover more consumers year by year, continuously expanding their sphere of influence. Taking a typical new media platform as an example, the average monthly number of independent devices of WeChat APP continued to grow at a compound growth rate of 9.4% between 2016 and 2019 to an average of 1.12 billion per month in 2019. Among the estimated 3.7 billion mobile Internet users in the world in 2019, the coverage rate exceeds 30%, with a wide range of influence. As for the short video platforms that have rapidly gained market attention in recent years, the number of independent devices of Douyin and Kuaishou apps have achieved significant growth between 2016 and 2019, with the annual average monthly compound growth rate of independent devices of Douyin app reaching 227.8%, and that of Kuaishou reaching 24.1%.

Analysis of the characteristics of typical new media platforms

The attributes and main marketing models of each platform help to meet diversified marketing needs

2. China's new media marketing strategy and gameplay guide

Overview of typical new media platform gameplay strategies

New media platforms have different strategic advantages, and multi-platform integrated marketing can enhance marketing effects

Social platforms represented by Sina Weibo and WeChat, video content platforms represented by Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishou, and e-commerce platforms with content community channels represented by Xiaohongshu and Taobao are the main platforms for new media marketing because they have content-carrying channels, high consumer activity, and social fission communication characteristics . Different new media platforms have their own advantages in terms of the breadth of topic dissemination, consumer discussion participation, depth of content information presentation, and efficiency of conversion from seeding to weeding. Based on marketing strategies, conducting integrated new media marketing through multiple platforms and integrating the advantages of each platform to enhance marketing effects will become the development direction of new media marketing.

Sina Weibo platform new media marketing gameplay

It is easy to create high-traffic topics in the pan-entertainment atmosphere, helping brands and products spread quickly

Features such as mainly general entertainment content, a relaxed communication atmosphere, and active user participation make it very easy for the Sina Weibo platform to create topic popularity and enhance the scope and depth of content dissemination by attracting users to engage in large-scale discussions and sharing. The marketing themes and content of brands and products can also be easily widely disseminated on the platform. The new media marketing approach of Sina Weibo platform is mainly to guide users' purchasing behavior or deepen their impression of the brand by relying on KOLs to jointly create topics, KOLs to carry out brand or product-related activities and increase users' participation in reposts, likes and comments in the form of rewards, and KOLs to share or recommend brands or products to fans and other users.

WeChat platform new media marketing gameplay

Deep reading and sharing habits among acquaintances are suitable for deep marketing content delivery

Since WeChat platform users have formed the habit of reading long text and pictures on official account channels, using pictures and texts written by KOLs to conduct in-depth marketing of brands or products has become one of the new media marketing features of the WeChat platform. In addition, the content channels gradually built by WeChat have also provided KOLs with more and more possibilities for displaying marketing methods. For example, KOLs can use pictures and texts to recommend products to consumers with relevant interests in WeChat circles with interest group characteristics. At the same time, KOLs can also use short videos in WeChat video accounts to deliver marketing content with more information to consumers. In terms of conversion, WeChat’s mini-program function, in addition to its micro-store and external link-jumping functions, can also help KOLs and brands guide consumers to directly jump to the mini-program mall to make purchases, making the conversion process of marketing content more convenient.

Bilibili platform new media marketing gameplay

Guided by interests, convey brand information to consumers through interesting and creative content

The Bilibili platform is mainly composed of young users, who follow relevant UP hosts based on their own interests. The general content dissemination tone of the UP hosts is more interesting, allowing users to receive content information in a relaxed and interesting atmosphere. The main new media marketing method of the Bilibili platform is to jointly conduct live broadcasts with UP hosts to promote brands and products, and to expose brands, recommend products, evaluate products, and guide purchases in videos shot and edited by UP hosts. With the help of the brain-opening and ghost-animal display features of B station videos, it quickly leaves a deep impression on consumers.

How to play new media marketing on Xiaohongshu platform

The content features are prominent, and consumers are highly receptive to the platform's seeding content

Xiaohongshu’s powerful content-sharing attributes make it a highly trusted object for consumers to generate shopping needs, select brands and products, and share product usage. It has also become a natural platform for KOLs to promote products. The new media marketing strategy of the Xiaohongshu platform is mainly to leverage the fan influence of top KOLs and consumers' trust in mid- and low-end KOLs. Through matching recommendations, reviews, product promotion, unboxing, notes and other methods constructed in the form of pictures, texts, short videos and live broadcasts, it deepens consumers' memory of brands or products and guides consumers to achieve conversions through the Xiaohongshu mall or external transaction channels.

New Media Marketing Methods on Tik Tok Platform

KOLs use short videos to enhance the depth and authenticity of marketing content

With the increase in mobile phone penetration and Internet speed and the strengthening trend of residents' fragmented attention, short videos have become the first choice for daily entertainment for more and more users due to their advantages of high information transmission and instant entertainment. As a pan-entertainment short video platform, Douyin has a wide audience and its short videos are widely disseminated. The platform's KOLs conduct marketing activities by sharing, evaluating and live-streaming products through short video shooting, and try on and test products in the form of videos or live-streaming, allowing consumers to have a more realistic understanding of the products. The influence or authority of KOL fans can also strengthen consumers' trust in brands or products, effectively helping brands achieve sales conversions through external link jumps or channels such as the Douyin Mall.

New Media Marketing Methods on Kuaishou Platform

KOLs have strong product promotion capabilities and enhance content conversion efficiency

There are many realistic life KOLs on the Kuaishou platform, and fans have a strong sense of trust in them. KOLs can then more effectively drive sales of products through video or live broadcast recommendations. The new media marketing approach of the Kuaishou platform is also centered around KOLs sharing and evaluating short videos of products, as well as live streaming. Its characteristics are that KOLs’ recommendations or sales are more “down-to-earth,” their connection with consumers is more direct, and they have a higher degree of fan-pulling power. In addition, in addition to its own Kuaishou stores, the Kuaishou platform has also opened up more marketing possibilities for KOLs by cooperating with Youzan Mall and jumping to external e-commerce.

Taobao platform new media marketing gameplay

The construction of content and live broadcast channels provides a platform for KOLs to carry out new media marketing

With the gradual improvement of the commodity trading system and the increasing demand of consumers for marketing content, in addition to hard advertising such as search and display advertising, the Taobao platform has begun to build content channels that carry pictures, texts, short video information flow advertisements and live broadcast advertisements in recent years, in order to use KOLs to provide consumers with an efficient way to promote products. At the same time, the shopping intentions of Taobao platform users are clear, which further improves the conversion rate of marketing content. The main new media marketing methods of Taobao platform are:

1) Arouse consumers’ resonance by displaying selected shopping reviews;

2) Enhance consumers’ real perception and experience of products through KOL unboxing and evaluation, thereby occupying consumers’ minds at a deeper level;

3) Through KOLs that are suitable for the brand tone, product type, marketing promotion stage and period, etc., they use their own fan influence to recommend products or use live streaming with limited-time discounts to enhance consumers' trust and attention to brands and products.

Author: iResearch Consulting

Source: iResearch