Content e-commerce has entered a very obvious explosive stage, and all kinds of celebrities and influencers with millions of fans have begun to engage in live streaming to sell goods. In addition, tens of millions of businesses have begun to enter the content e-commerce market.

In this stage, compared with the original platform, content e-commerce has expanded a new consumption boundary and has new features in the form of e-commerce, such as interest-based recommendations, multi-scenario coverage, efficient display and ordering links, and large traffic to reach a large number of new users...

At a time when short videos and live broadcasts are widely used, this article mainly shares how to drive business growth with content on Douyin for everyone to learn and refer to.

The operating logic of the content e-commerce era

The core logic of content e-commerce is to use high-quality content to drive efficient transactions. Short videos and live broadcasts can allow brands to be more intuitively presented to users, thereby stimulating users' purchasing desire, facilitating transactions, and increasing transaction volume.

Specifically, this process can be divided into three steps:

1. Maximize demand and create unlimited potential. Diversified content scenarios give brands more opportunities to appear in front of users and stimulate their purchasing needs;

2. The most simplified path, what you see is what you get. Buy while you browse, and remove the weeds as soon as you plant the grass, with an easy and fast shopping experience to improve users' purchasing efficiency;

3. Integrate into popular trends and integrate product and sales. While selling, we continuously shape the brand image through internal communications and help upgrade the brand.

From its launch in September 2016 to today, Douyin has grown into a platform with 400 million DAU (daily active users). At the same time, Douyin is providing more and more functions to e-commerce businesses.

As shown in the picture above, the yellow window on the personal homepage is equivalent to the homepage of the official flagship store; the video shopping cart is located in the lower left corner of the video, and its function is to place shopping links; the live shopping cart is located below the live broadcast room, which contains product information. After clicking on the product link, a card explaining the product will appear on the right side of the page to help users place orders.

The latest data shows that from December 2019 to June 2020, the number of users who opened the Douyin shopping cart function increased by 101%. The increase in users of the product sales function has driven the output of overall product sales content. There are two types of content output:

First, the number of short videos with shopping carts released. This figure increased by 173% from June 2019 to June 2020;

Second, live broadcasts with shopping carts. This figure increased by 876% from December 2019 to June 2020.

It can be said that the growth of Douyin's overall content and the number of influencers is very rapid. Of course, our e-commerce business is not only centered around TikTok. Various apps under ByteDance, such as Toutiao, Xigua, and Volcano, can all do e-commerce.

At the same time, we have also launched a series of product functions suitable for merchants to help their overall growth.

What do content e-commerce users look like?

Many people are curious about what kind of people these e-commerce users on Douyin are?

Only by understanding the attributes of users can we formulate a suitable overall strategy. The users on TikTok are very distinctive. Let’s take a look at some data:

First of all, the users on Douyin are very young and of high quality, and their overall activity level is very high. The 2019 Double 11 consumption data shows that 64% of consumers are between the ages of 18 and 29. This user group is relatively young and is the type of person who likes to try new things. They like movies, beauty, food, the second dimension, games, etc.

This is the consumer group on Douyin. If we look at the viewing group on Douyin, we can also draw the same conclusion.

From the two bar charts below the above picture, it can be seen that the video playback volume of those born after 2000 and 1990 accounts for 70% of the video playback volume of all generations, and the video likes also account for 69% of the video likes of all generations.

Such a high proportion of people born in the 2000s and 1990s is an ideal soil for e-commerce business. In this particularly ideal group of people, apparel, beauty and personal care, and food and beverages have become the top three high-profile categories:

Among all commodity categories, specific category consumers can more clearly see the behavioral characteristics of each category.

For example, in the portrait of people interested in fashion and dressing on Douyin, there are obviously more female users who like dressing than male users; the proportion of people born after 2000 and 1995 in the fashion and dressing population and the TGI index (an index that reflects the strength or weakness of the target group within a specific research scope, such as geographical area, demographic field, media audience, product consumers, etc.) are much higher than other age groups; people in first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities are much more interested in the fashion and dressing category than people in cities of other levels.

The beauty and cosmetics categories are somewhat different from the fashion and apparel categories. The gender ratio is still much higher for women than for men; those born after 2000 and 1995 also have the highest proportion in the beauty consumer population and the TGI index; however, from a city level perspective, there are no particularly large differences between the various city levels, and people at every level like to buy fashion and beauty products on Douyin.

The food category has some new features. Judging from the gender ratio, both boys and girls like the food category; but in terms of age groups, those born in the 1970s and 1980s account for the largest proportion among all age groups and prefer the food category. This is very different from the portrait results of clothing and beauty categories. Why is this so?

When we were doing research, we found that many people born in the 1970s and 1980s did not know about the lychee product category "Lychee King" before they came into contact with Douyin, nor did they know that there was a kind of fruit cereal that could be eaten directly... It is human nature to be curious about unknown things, so people born in the 1970s and 1980s will choose to try new things. Moreover, given their current family status, they need to buy more ingredients and snacks for their families. So looking at the food crowd on the entire platform, those born in the 1970s and 1980s have a higher index.

From the perspective of city level, the TGI index of third-tier, fourth-tier and fifth-tier cities and below is higher than that of first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities. This is because people in new first-tier, second-tier and third-tier cities have easier access to emerging or more novel products, and have many channels; for people in third-tier, fourth-tier and fifth-tier cities and below, TikTok is a very good platform for them to gain some new knowledge and new purchasing channels.

In general, compared with other platforms, Douyin has a very high proportion of young users, and there will be different differences in specific categories. Therefore, different merchants and different brands have different ways of playing on Douyin.

Of course, it is not enough to just look at the user's age distribution profile. We must also pay attention to more detailed operations in combination with the user's active time. From the perspective of the entire user portrait, users are more active between 9:00 and 11:00 on weekends; there is another small peak at 12:00 noon on weekdays, and the evening peak is between 19:00 and 23:00.

If you pay attention, you can feel that many top accounts choose to start broadcasting during peak hours. For example, "Lao Luo" Luo Yonghao starts broadcasting at 20:00 every Friday, which fully takes into account the peak traffic time of the matching platform.

Play content e-commerce

Now that we understand the portraits of merchants and consumers, how can we use content to drive growth? Before answering this question, let me share a case of the New West mystery.

Nussie is a skincare brand from New Zealand, founded in 2014. This brand previously had a very powerful product, which was a primer. At the beginning of 2020, they created another hit product - a wash-free sleeping mask. The overall growth of this mask across all channels exceeded 100% during the entire Spring Festival. During the growth process, they made use of many marketing methods of Douyin.

What are Tik Tok’s marketing methods?

All of Douyin’s traffic is based on content distribution. Content power = consumption power. The anchors and experts create diverse and interesting product content and recommend good products at low prices to users. If you want to know specific marketing methods, you need to break down the most basic logic of retail: "people, goods, and places."

From the perspective of "goods" , Douyin's requirements for goods are "good products at good prices". For example, the products must be novel and unique, but also have the characteristics of high quality and low price, and the overall quality must also be guaranteed to a certain extent.

From the perspective of "people" , Douyin, as an interest recommendation platform, will make recommendations based on interest tags and user needs. Because our personalized recommendations are very accurate, the repurchase rate of individual accounts on the Douyin platform is very high. That is to say, after a user purchases a product recommended by an account, if this account can continue to recommend products that he is interested in in the future, there is a high probability that he will continue to purchase from this account.

For example, the category of plus-size women's clothing is developing very rapidly on Douyin. Under our precise recommendation logic, all plus-size women's clothing content can be recommended to users who pay attention to and like plus-size women's clothing. Once a user makes a purchase, follows, or likes a post, more content about plus-size women's clothing will be recommended to this user, thereby improving their conversion rate in the entire clothing category, especially in the women's clothing category.

From the perspective of "field" , every account on Douyin is a "field". There are many diverse influencers and various forms of content presentation in the "field", which are then matched with specific operational logic, product matching, shopping methods and rhetoric, etc., and delivered to consumers, giving them a diverse experience.

When combining "people, goods, and places", different business forms will emerge in different scenarios.

For example, if we search for the brand “Fila” on Douyin, we will see multiple live broadcasts of “Fila” products: some are live broadcasts by sales staff in brand stores, some are live broadcasts of store visits by influencers; some are live broadcasts of Fila’s own flagship stores in shopping malls, and some fashion influencers will make some short videos and live broadcasts on outfits for Fila’s new products. All of these actions ultimately lead to the sales of Fila brand products.

So for a brand, there are many ways to influence the overall brand image and sales amount. Of course, roles such as influencers and celebrities can also influence a brand’s image and sales to a certain extent.

In 2020, many celebrities entered the field of live streaming selling goods. Take Chen He as an example. When he was doing a live broadcast late at night, he vividly performed a scene of eating crayfish for a midnight snack, which ignited the crayfish market, stimulated users' midnight snack black hole time, and increased crayfish sales data. So in his live broadcast room, he was enjoying his meal and users were also happy buying.

In general, from the perspective of merchants, if you want to sell goods on Douyin, it is recommended to follow the following process:

First of all, you have to settle in Douyin Store. After settling in, there are two ways to implement it: first, through cooperation with influencers; second, brand self-broadcasting.

Let’s take a closer look at these two cooperation models.

When working with influencers, the most important thing is not to see which influencer has the highest sales volume, but to see how well your product brand matches the influencer.

In the logic of overall matching with the influencer, on the one hand, we need to consider whether the user profile of our products matches the influencer’s user profile sufficiently; on the other hand, we need to choose suitable products for this influencer, because for different influencers, the sales pitch for the same product is different, and even the price design logic is different. During this process, we can cooperate more fully with experts, do more and try more, and continuously iterate the model of cooperation with experts.

What we want to remind everyone here is that while cooperating with influencers, merchants must also use their own brand accounts or corporate accounts to create a stable daily business scenario.

We mentioned earlier a product feature called "Product Showcase". The product showcase of an enterprise account is equivalent to the homepage of a company's own e-commerce store. Using an enterprise account for continuous live broadcasts is a basic way to continuously obtain traffic. By continuously accumulating fans, it can not only promote user repurchase, but also play a leading role when companies cooperate with influencers.

Here we take the example of Luo Yonghao and Suning.com. On August 7, 2020, Luo Yonghao reached a live broadcast cooperation with Suning.com. During the live broadcast, Suning.com’s official account continued to interact with Luo Yonghao. Luo Yonghao also mentioned Suning.com’s official account in his oral broadcast and encouraged his fans to follow it. The next day, Suning.com’s official account held a live broadcast and received a lot of traffic from Luo Yonghao.

Therefore, in terms of influencer cooperation and brand live streaming, it is actually a process that can be mutually integrated. Influencers can drive traffic for brand live streaming, and in all the processes, our fan management can actually feed back into the overall business logic of the store.

In addition to live broadcasts by experts, in the entire brand live broadcast case, there are actually some very good brands that have tried to live broadcast on the Douyin store platform.

For example, in the first live broadcast of Makefei, 17,000 items were sold in 20 hours, the total order amount exceeded 4.3 million, the exposure of the live broadcast room exceeded 10 million, and the total number of orders exceeded 20,000, creating the "strongest voice of the opening live broadcast."

How is its overall form achieved? There are actually three stages in between:

Phase 1: From March 1 to April 30, its makeup artist academy accumulated some basic fans through private domain traffic. During this process, there were relatively few live broadcasts and no particularly deep user awareness had been formed, but the increase in fans was still very good, with an increase of up to 855%.

Phase 2: From May 1st to May 5th, we made full use of the May Day holiday and created a super challenge to boost the brand's overall voice. During the entire process, we achieved 900 million interactions.

The third stage: On May 8, the brand did an extra-long live broadcast, during which they launched a new product, the Small Flash Box Celebrity Loose Powder. This new product topped the list of popular products after the entire live broadcast, successfully creating very high sales.

During the epidemic, many stall owners began to try to transform and enter Douyin live streaming . For example, Xin Xiaoqing, the owner of the Shisanhang stall, does not have a particularly large number of fans, but in one month she achieved sales of 1.22 million in a single live broadcast, with more than 100,000 viewers and nearly 7,000 orders completed.

The content positioning of short videos is very precise: the target users are young people who pursue fashion and choose new products from stalls to try on. In every short video she shares some useful information, such as how to wear one piece of clothing in multiple ways, dressing tips, etc. She also incorporates her own clothes into her videos. The content is practical and novel, creating hits. The fan stickiness is also very high, and it is easy for them to buy the same items.

In addition, she will release some short videos as a preview before the broadcast, which will include a series of content that can be obtained in the live broadcast room, such as the broadcast time, product types, gifts and benefits, etc. In addition to the short video content preview, a preview will also be pinned to the comment section.

There are many ways to play in her live broadcast room: for example, setting up special flash sales at the top of the hour, giving free orders to the first user to place an order, sending red envelopes, sending coupons from small stores, etc. During the live broadcast, 10 new products will be quickly added every hour to promote her main products during traffic explosion periods.

As a live broadcast of clothing, the overall categories are very rich, and all the products are new models from the stalls. The lowest price can be given to fans, and the number of selected products is generally 70+ in a single show.

In fact, short videos and live broadcasts are commonly used content forms to drive growth, and these two content forms can empower each other.

Short videos are more defined as a diversified grass-planting scenario, while live streaming is more defined as an efficient transaction scenario. When live streaming is started during the release of a short video, the traffic can be directed from the short video to the live streaming room; and exposing the short video in the live streaming room can have a secondary impact on the short video.

Let’s look at a case of dual-engine resonance:

The core logic of Luo Yonghao's short videos is to shape his personality, promote products and accumulate fans. Luo Yonghao's account was newly registered before the premiere, but it reached 7 million followers in just a few days. Many people know that Luo Yonghao’s logic is “make friends”, so his personality is the chief recommendation officer of “Make Friends” Technology.

During the live broadcast, he will make transactions more efficient, clearly display the selling points of the products, and remind everyone to make transactions. After the live broadcast ends, the live broadcast clips will be cut into short videos, and the products will be added to the short videos through the shopping cart function to realize secondary traffic monetization.

In fact, the case of Zebra AI course is the same. First, sales are carried out in the live broadcast room, and 10,000 copies are sold within 15 minutes. Then the content is cut into short videos. The Zebra AI class is still being broadcast live on Luo Yonghao’s account, and this material is used as an advertisement and re-released on Douyin.

In short, if you want to sell goods on Douyin, you must pay attention to the two forms of influencer cooperation and brand self-broadcasting, which must be driven by two wheels.

The so-called "dual-wheel drive" means that when creating content, whether you produce it yourself or cooperate with experts, you must make full use of the two content forms of short videos and live broadcasts to achieve a two-way drainage effect of the content, and jointly assist in the acquisition of the entire traffic, thereby improving the overall conversion efficiency.

Author: Chaos University

Source: Hundun-University