Live streaming + marketing, far more than just Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi

"At link No. 39, (everyone) remember to leave your mobile phone number!" After hearing Li Xiang's assistant next to him introduce the method of purchasing movie tickets, Xiang Zuo followed suit and shouted to the audience in front of the camera.

At 10 pm the day before "11.11", the method of actors entering the live broadcast room with their works to sell movie tickets also appeared in Li Xiang's live broadcast room. Here, viewers spend 0.1 yuan in the live broadcast room to get an electronic code, and then go to Tao Piaopiao to add another 19.9 yuan to redeem a full-price movie ticket.

After the regulation that “the price of a single movie show cannot be lower than 19.9 yuan” was issued last year, the marketing strategy of using ticket sales to boost box office revenue lost its footing. The 20-yuan movie ticket is attractive to the audience, but this is not the main purpose of the film company entering the live broadcast room. Compared with selling movie tickets, they pay more attention to the traffic brought by anchors and celebrity anchors.

In addition to the conversion issues that creators, anchors, and merchants are concerned about, there are actually a large number of brand marketing needs around the live broadcast ecosystem. They pay more attention to product promotion and care about cultivating user minds and building brand concepts.

As live streaming continues to attract public attention and change consumption habits, such demands have gradually surfaced.

1. Live streaming is not just about selling goods; budget reduction does not affect the rigid nature of “marketing”

On November 5, Wei Ya posted a link to the movie tickets for "The Beneficiary" for the audience. With her usual capable manner, she quickly and repeatedly explained the highlights of the movie and the ticket purchasing process, and counted down carefully in front of the camera. Dapeng sat behind her and Liu Yan, silently listening to Wei Ya's fluent expression at 2.0 times the speed, and then slowly sighed, "That moment just now was actually an important moment in the film industry, because no one has ever sold tickets in a live broadcast before."

The publicity for this live broadcast is also working hard to convey the concept of "the first live broadcast to grab movie tickets on the entire network."

According to data from the movie marketing platform Lighthouse, the first wave of 55,000 movie tickets sold out in 6 seconds after the link was released, and the final cumulative number of tickets purchased after adding them to cart reached 116,666. After the live broadcast, the number of people who wanted to watch the movie "The Beneficiary" and the popcorn index both increased by 30%.

This joint sales activity with the live broadcast field is also a marketing activity planned by the film company to impact the pre-sale box office. Although celebrities have visited the anchor's live broadcast room to promote their works before, they have not cooperated in sales.

If we calculate based on a movie ticket price of 35 yuan, the film company needs to subsidize 15 yuan for each ticket. If all the electronic coupons sold in the live broadcast room are successfully redeemed, the total subsidy will be 1.7 million yuan.

This figure is much higher than the slot fee of top anchors, but it is nothing in the budget framework of film and television marketing. After this broadcast, even if the user does not make a purchase, or does not successfully redeem the e-voucher through the ticket purchasing app, the purpose of brand exposure and content output has been achieved.

The connection between film and television promotion and e-commerce live streaming lies in the wide coverage brought by high-traffic anchors and the precise exposure brought by anchors with matching tonality.

We saw Xiang Zuo, who came to Li Xiang's live broadcast room with "My Boxing Boyfriend", chatting about his married life in a relaxed manner and recalling the moment of the ceremony. Such a conversation could not have been achieved without the facilitation of Li Xiang, who is a person in the circle.

One way to achieve coverage is combined exposure, which is to gather KOL groups from different fields, user portraits, and data highlights, and carry out personalized delivery in line with their tone. Cross-border cooperation is one of the most common marketing methods, and it has already appeared in the live broadcast field, ranging from film and television promotions to the collision of top streamers.

On November 6, American internet celebrity Kim Kardashian connected to the live broadcast room of China's Taobao sales queen Viya. This move sends out two signals: breaking the circle will become a trend; more overseas products and brand linkages will appear in live broadcasts, and foreign Internet celebrities will enter the live broadcast rooms of local anchors.

Just before connecting to Wei Ya's live broadcast room, Kim Kardashian had just finished the "Net Purple Avenue" party. As a typical super IP supported by Tmall International, Kim Kardashian's fragrance brand KKW has settled in Tmall's overseas flagship store. In simple terms, Tmall Global's Purple Avenue support plan is to support super IPs, foreigners, and local Internet celebrities in product recommendation, helping them to create personal brands and open expert stores to lay out an international shopping ecosystem.

In addition, some vertical categories and major consumer goods sectors have already seen brands naming/sponsoring anchors and live broadcast rooms.

The anchor "Jiawei Willie" has always maintained a cooperative relationship with Fliggy and Chimelong Group. He is also a host and travel expert. In Jiawei's live broadcast room, we often see him wearing T-shirts provided by brands, recommending their products through oral broadcasts, sharing the concepts of these brands, and often greeting the audience in the live broadcast room with the words "Hello everyone, this is Jiawei's personal live broadcast room broadcast simultaneously on Taobao and Fliggy", giving the cooperative brands corresponding exposure.

With the development of live streaming, vertical brands and products may be able to develop better integration with live streaming to achieve scale revenue. But so far, vertical categories with rational decision-making, such as tourism, automobiles, 3C, mother and baby, etc., still have a demand for live streaming for brand promotion, and they are the main body of current live streaming marketing needs.

Although Lei Jiayin’s record of selling 220 million yuan of Borgward cars through live broadcast is still fresh in our minds, we should not ignore the brand’s long-term mental construction. The promotion of transaction nodes is inseparable from the brand’s inherent voice, especially when it is a heavy asset. The limited-time, limited-quantity and limited-price gameplay targets products with low average order value, high consumption and repeated purchases. It is a transaction behavior oriented towards impulse consumption. It is difficult to shake users of high-average-order products who have not completed the seeding process.

By observing the performance of car live streaming on Taobao, we found that there are only 15 anchors with more than 10,000 fans on the Alibaba V Task Platform. Compared with popular categories such as beauty, daily chemicals, etc., the scale of car anchors is extremely small. Open the live broadcast of "See New Cars" on September 16, which has 163,700 fans. This is a content planned for the launch of new cars. Data shows that the live broadcast was watched by 875,000 people in total. Only a link to a 1 yuan experience coupon was displayed in the live broadcast room, and only 12 of the product were sold.

Vertical brands with high average order value and rational decision-making are currently still looking for identity endorsement in live streaming, and advertisers mostly want the host/celebrity to appear in the same frame with the product and repeat the brand introduction.

“The audiences for maternal and infant products are very picky, so when maternal and infant brands come to us, they don’t ask for conversions. They are satisfied if a mother with a good personality and high public recognition appears in the same frame with their products to endorse them,” said the founder of a celebrity live streaming organization.

2. More ways to play live broadcast: personal content, promotional content, professional content

To some extent, Li Jiaqi and Viya are impossible to replicate. They have strong business resources to ensure the unique advantage of the "bottom price" gameplay, and they enter at the best time to capture the minds of users.

It is understood that Qianxun's investment and product selection team has more than 80 people, and is constantly increasing its investment in the "goods" side. In order to achieve the goal of becoming a service provider for Taobao live streaming organizations, it launched the middle-office system Link. The platform brings together the industry's top product resources and opens big-name products and its own clothing, shoes and bags resources to all Taobao anchors. Basic services are free, while value-added services are charged.

In the fierce Double 11 war that just ended, as of the early morning of the 11th, the popularity of Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya was 349.2 million and 454.33 million respectively. Until 3 a.m. on the 11th, the number of viewers in Wei Ya's live broadcast room was fixed at 43.1 million, while Li Jiaqi, who ended the live broadcast an hour earlier, had 36.8 million viewers.

In the popularity list below, we can see that the celebrities below Top1-2, Top3-6, and Top7 belong to three levels. The gap is self-evident. The selling logic of "limited time, limited quantity, and limited price" is still the main condition for the two live broadcast stars to achieve their impressive results.

Zhao Yuanyuan once divided content marketing into three components: personal content, promotional content, and professional content. Rather than the performance at this stage, it is the undisputed leader in promotional content.

In addition, more possibilities of e-commerce live streaming may be hidden in two other ways of playing.

Personality content is the added value that the anchor gives to the product in terms of concepts and symbols in addition to the practical value of the product. It is the social symbol that users obtain when they get the same product as the anchor.

For example, Li Xiang, a "lady" and "social expert in the entertainment industry", not only recommends products but also provides entertainment industry gossip for the audience in the live broadcast room. The "products used by celebrities" give the recommended products the cultural connotation of "the choice of celebrities".

For example, we found Li Xiang’s “Ten O’clock Reading Calendar”. Its project leader Huo Yan once said in an interview with the media, “The calendar is a cultural and creative product, not a fast-moving consumer product. Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi and others are not very interested in cultural and creative products. As a traditional media person, Li Xiang pays more attention to cultural products, so this cooperation came about.” If the match is appropriate, the cooperation between the anchor who is known for his personality and the product can achieve a win-win result for both parties.

Personalized anchors do not have to be constrained by low prices; instead, they have more advantages in the field of consumption upgrading. There is nothing wrong with Li Xiang's logic in selling fur, but the timing of entry is a bit inappropriate.

The personality needs to be repeatedly output and consolidated, and the brands and products recommended by the anchor must also be consistent in terms of usage scenarios, average customer spending, etc. to form a unified whole. Perhaps more sedimentation is needed between skin care products costing around 100 yuan and clothing costing around 10,000 yuan.

The last type is professional content, which is the main direction of vertical anchors, but currently most of the top vertical anchors are absent.

There are three reasons:

1. The popularity and depth of live streaming consumption habits are not high enough. From the current absolute dominance of daily chemical clothing to the rise of various ideal sub-sectors, various types of consumers need to enter the market, and "people, goods, and places" must have independent business formats. If we were to rank the three content modes according to the development progress of the industry, it would be promotion → personality → professionalism.
2. There is a large lack of independent vertical anchors, and their monetization methods - marketing and conversion must first be successful, which does not seem to be available at present.
3. The content content of merchants’ self-broadcasting is relatively low. According to Zhao Yuanyuan, currently 90% of the broadcasts on the Taobao platform are done by merchants themselves, and only 10% are done by individual broadcasters. But we also see that so far no business has entered the public eye because of its super high live broadcast conversion rate. They rely more on the recommendations of individual anchors to achieve marketing or conversion goals.

However, some alternative players have also emerged in the live streaming world.

"Meow and Woof Canteen" is a live broadcast room for cute pets. The two anchors' daily routine is to explain to the audience how to raise cats and dogs, product selection, and pet-raising experiences. Behind the live broadcast room is the "Fulian Pet Products Flagship Store", which is a live broadcast room initiated by the merchant, but the sales links in the live broadcast room are not limited to its own products. According to Alibaba's V Task Platform, the live broadcast room has collaborated with other merchants 82 times, and the live broadcast has been viewed 21,100 times in 7 days.

Attract fans with vertical content and then convert them. This content traffic monetization method has now appeared in vertical live broadcast rooms. It is rare for both parties, who are merchants in the same field, to take on the demand for competing products. The reason for this may be that the income from the slot fee is greater than the gross profit of traditional goods, or the demand for products generated in the live broadcast room exceeds the range of what the merchants can sell.

Content, as an excellent means of harvesting traffic, has once again been verified by live streaming consumption scenarios. Live streaming merchants with content may be able to become the upstream of other competing products and expand more commercial possibilities.

Brands’ demand for “product and sales integration” has never been so strong. The basic operation of relying on the lowest price to hold the whole audience may continue to maintain the leading position for some time to come, but the imagination of live streaming will certainly not be limited to this.

The brand marketing needs of merchants have invaded major live broadcast rooms, and live broadcasting itself is also bursting with more ways to play. Self-broadcasting merchants take the lead with content, taking on the demand of competing products and leaping upstream; the Pizza Hut meal coupons in Wei Ya’s live broadcast room and Simba’s travel photography package e-vouchers are broadening the forms of consumer goods. Zhihu, which recently launched live streaming, will explore the possibilities between live streaming and knowledge payment.

Live streaming + marketing, there are still many stories to tell.

By Kyle Gesuelli

Source: Fan Dayong