Three strategies for using Bilibili’s performance advertising

Before we begin, let’s talk about the commercial value of Bilibili marketing.

1. The user growth momentum is very strong: as of Q1 2020, the monthly active users exceeded 172 million, a year-on-year increase of 70%; the average monthly active UP hosts reached 1.8 million, a year-on-year increase of 146%, and the number of UP hosts with more than 10,000 fans increased by 82% year-on-year.

2. Young users and extremely high user stickiness: According to China's 2010 census report, the total number of young people born in the 1990s and 2000s in China is approximately 320 million. On Bilibili, the proportion of young users is approximately 80%, which means that currently 40% of young Chinese people visit Bilibili at least once a month. As of Q1 2020, the average daily usage time of Bilibili users was 87 minutes, an increase of 10 minutes from the previous month; and the average monthly number of community interactions was as high as 4.9 billion times, three times that of the same period last year. The number of “formal members” who have passed the exam reached 82 million, and the retention rate in the 12th month exceeded 80%.

3. Rich and diverse circles and communities: Bilibili’s content ecology is flourishing, with more than 7,000 core cultural circles and more than 2 million cultural labels. The content categories can already cover and represent the content needs and preferences of China’s Generation Z.

When we do marketing and choose a platform, we first look at quantity and then quality. In terms of scale, Bilibili has already joined the ranks of large traffic users with over 100 million monthly active users. In terms of quality, Bilibili users are young, highly sticky, have high consumption, and have unique circle awareness, so it is a general trend to deploy Bilibili marketing.

Bilibili’s marketing “three links in one click” enables native exposure of brand advertising, communication with content marketing, conversion through performance marketing, and accumulation of brand content and data assets through corporate car-hailing services. This allows Bilibili’s ecological value to empower marketing, helping advertisers connect with users and incremental markets, and ultimately achieve growth.

For most companies, especially small and micro enterprises, they may pay more attention to performance advertising. To put it bluntly, it means "spending money and quickly seeing marketing results." This is also the meaning of our optimizers' existence. Next, I will talk about some strategies and methods for optimizing B station’s performance advertising for your reference.

Three strategies for using Bilibili’s performance advertising

Strategy 1: Video

Traditional information flow advertising is still mainly based on picture and text reading, such as some news and information platforms. However, the homepage of Bilibili has 1.1 billion video views every day. Video and dynamic content are more in line with Bilibili's user habits, and users are more receptive to video advertising materials. Therefore, if you want to place performance ads on Bilibili, it is recommended to use video materials.

Take a certain e-commerce app as an example. The outer layer uses a dynamic cover to attract users' attention, increase users' liking and acceptance of advertisements, and thus increase the click-through rate of advertisements. The landing page is also video-based, using vertical screen ads to dominate the screen and arouse users' interest through the details captured in the video.

After adopting the video gameplay, an integrated path from app download to installation was realized during video playback, which reduced the consumption cost of new users of this e-commerce app by 50% and greatly improved the effectiveness of advertising.

Strategy 2: IP

IPization of materials. When it comes to their favorite IPs, Bilibili users are fully committed. Just like fans buy products endorsed by a star because they like the star, IP-based materials can effectively improve the conversion rate of advertisements.

For example, China Unicom previously jointly launched an IP card with Bilibili - "bilibili2233 Niang Card", which incorporates the IP elements of animation into the inner and outer layers of creativity to attract users to click and apply. Through video and IP-based materials, we finally achieved good results with an average daily application volume of 4,000+, a comprehensive form cost of 22.38, and a card collection conversion rate of 56%+.

In addition to this type of anime and cartoon IP, the IP influence of B station UP masters can also be utilized.

Bilibili users trust and follow these UP hosts all the time. Just like e-commerce live broadcast fans follow Li Jiaqi, how can the conversion effect be bad with the endorsement of these IPs?

Let’s look at another case: usmile added elements of lifestyle UP hosts to the overall creative design. In addition to influential endorsements, the advertising format is also closer to the style of Bilibili. After it was put into use, the ROI increased by 7 times.

Strategy 3: Integrated Marketing

This is actually very easy to understand. It is to place advertisements based on the user's behavioral trajectory, with multiple links and multiple effects conversions. Judging from the data, integrated marketing-style conversions are more likely to impress users. Based on the demands and background of advertisers, the various marketing resources of Bilibili are effectively linked together to form a closed marketing loop, thereby improving the effectiveness of advertising.

So how does this integrated marketing work specifically?

Zhang Minghao, Chief Marketing Officer of e-commerce platform ZOZO China, shared ZOZO's experience at the 2020 bilibili Performance Marketing Partner Conference:

First of all, directly use the content produced by the UP host as the outer material of the information flow advertisement, and use the special page or activity page to take over the landing page, so that the advertisement will be more native.

Secondly, we select well-known UP hosts who meet the characteristics of ZOZO products to do UP host business orders, such as some Japanese fashion big Vs, and use the influence of the UP hosts and the trust of users in them to create word-of-mouth traffic.

Then, data mining is performed through DMP to find the user groups who have clicked on ZOZO ads, and then find the UP hosts followed by these users, and screen out the 20 UP hosts with the highest relevance to the brand for content cooperation to obtain more potential users.

Finally, through invitation advertising, we can undertake the above-mentioned recommended products or stores to achieve user conversion.

Through integrated marketing, ZOZO finally realized the marketing closed loop of "planting grass-growing grass-cutting grass" on Bilibili. Ultimately, the grass-planting power increased by 360%, the user scale expanded by 20 times, and the CPA decreased by 150%.

Whether it is video, IP, or integrated marketing, the essence is to get as close to users as possible, try to meet their aesthetics and preferences, and improve the penetration and conversion rate of our advertising. So how to easily acquire Bilibili users? Four key points to remember:

1) Translation methods and paths, that is, translating marketing into a way that users like, whether it is video or IP, so that users can accept our marketing.

2) User interests and hobbies. To do marketing, we need to understand what users are more interested in, find industries and products that match the interests of Bilibili users, and use materials that Bilibili users are interested in. By mastering these, we can control the direction of the materials and increase the CTR of the advertisements in a targeted manner.

3) Scale and budget of advertising. From a broader perspective, budget size is positively correlated with advertising conversion rate. The same is true from the perspective of personal optimizers. Only when the budget is sufficient will the account model become more and more stable and the cost of acquiring customers will have room to decrease.

4) Marketing results and data, flexibly utilize oCPX’s data feedback and DMP’s ability to expand the circle and volume, find more relevant UP hosts and active users, and stimulate their potential interests.

Finally, here are some tips for creating B-station performance ads:

1) About creativity : We mentioned above that the materials should be video-based and IP-based as much as possible. In addition, we also need to add some culture and elements unique to Bilibili, such as barrage, emoticons, animation, etc., to attract user attention.

2) About copywriting : Use the first person (to bring you closer to the user), interrogative sentences, tests, jokes, idioms, etc. in titles to attract users to click.

3) About the landing page : The content of the landing page should be closely related to the outer layer to prevent users from jumping out. At the same time, guiding copy or buttons should be highlighted to attract users to download/convert.

Author: bilibili

Source: Aichisem