How to promote brands on Bilibili | 6000-word strategy analysis

This article mainly aims to solve two problems:

1. How should brands enter Bilibili and how should they integrate with young people?

2. After becoming a diligent and high-quality UP host, how to monetize traffic in a formal way and try not to disgust fans as much as possible.

Before solving these two problems, let’s first review Bilibili’s commercialization strategy and current achievements.

B Station CEO Chen Rui once said: Many platforms are content-driven, but B Station is ecosystem-driven. What we are doing is not creating good content, but a mechanism to produce good content. If the soil is good, all kinds of flowers can bloom on it.

This sentence determines the tone of Bilibili: First of all, it is a very excellent content creation platform. With a good mechanism and ecology, UP hosts and brands can flourish on it.

In the early days, Bilibili grew wildly, with a large number of wild UP hosts providing content such as Youtube transfers, games, two-dimensional, fan creations, ghost animals, and daily life. They used love to generate power for a long time, and the platform and creators together went through the difficult period.

Nowadays, Bilibili’s financial report shows that more than 90% of the content on the website is PUGV.

That is, videos produced by professional UP hosts/production teams. This determines that Bilibili is composed of a group of professional content creators and a group of audiences with purchasing power and consumption ability.

So why did a UP persist in making videos for viewers almost free of charge for 6 or 7 years or even longer when the website was first founded? And you have to endure all kinds of positive and negative comments, barrages, private messages, and even misunderstandings from family and friends?

In fact, it is very easy to understand. The main reason is passion. Love gives us the motivation to create and spread. Coupled with years of persistence, weekly or even daily video updates, we have now become one of the top 100 high-quality UP hosts.

They have been working in their fields for a long time, have had cross-field exchanges and collaborations, continuously output high-quality content, and ultimately established their personal IP image, so it becomes natural for them to receive advertisements and business orders.

By 2020, traditional game operations, ACG action figures, and peripheral sales could no longer meet Bilibili's commercial needs, so UP hosts and live streaming value-added services became the main monetization direction.

At the same time, it is still very difficult to serve the audience well and balance the interests of the platform itself, advertisers, and UP hosts.

Friends at Bilibili have a clear love-hate relationship with commercialization.

Bilibili’s most valuable user group has undergone multiple funnel screenings. The first thing is to enter the site to answer questions, and the second is to buy a 168 yuan membership. In addition, the overall population is mainly young people under the age of 30. They may be big spenders on mobile games or kids born after 2005 or 2010 who have a lot of pocket money.

They may also be office workers who have worked in the workplace for two or three years and have accumulated a certain amount of savings. These factors determine the background color of Bilibili's user pool: the base is not large, the ability to pay is strong, they are good at identifying high-quality content, they like their own small circle, and are willing to pay for it in the long term.

According to China's 2010 national census, the total number of people born between 1995 and 2009 was approximately 200 million. If we add the period from 1985 to 1995 to maximize the potential active population of Bilibili, the total number is expected to be close to 400 million, which is twice as much. Currently, Bilibili has 130 million monthly active users and still has great growth potential.

After making 7 videos on Bilibili, which received 100,000 views and thousands of comments, I discovered that when the old men on Bilibili said they were in junior high school, it was because they were really in junior high school. Maybe they just clicked on your video and took a look at it in their spare time while taking DingTalk online classes.

For brands that want to reach young people to the greatest extent possible, they must capture the best groups on Bilibili. However, I have recently asked many brand owners, and they said that Bilibili's users are still too young, and their products cannot be sold to them for at least ten years, so they are in a wait-and-see state. So, for this kind of product, it is necessary to find more amateurs and small UP hosts to do some low-cost unboxing and experience, create some atmosphere, and preheat the product. In addition, it is very important to keep the team sensitive to one platform.

According to the latest financial report in March, Bilibili's total revenue was 2.0078 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 74%. In the fourth quarter of 2019, live streaming and value-added services totaled 570 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 183%. Advertising business revenue was 290 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 81%. E-commerce and other revenue was 280 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 241%.

In 2019, the proportion of gaming business has dropped to 43%, and non-gaming business accounted for 57%, which has proved to the capital market that it is not just a gaming company. There is a lot of room for imagination. The points that the corporate brand can be combined include UP host commercialization, live streaming, online and offline exhibitions, peripheral sales, etc.

Having written this far, some friends will definitely jump out and say: How can it be too commercialized? My youth is over, and I can never go back to that little broken station.

That’s not the case. Bilibili is going through a painful period of transition from not making money to making money, and this phenomenon is inevitable.

The original Bilibili was equivalent to a glass of water, and the proportion of non-ACG content was only equivalent to a spoonful of salt. Today's Bilibili is more like a pond, in which the two-dimensional content is just a small fish. There are also countless other contents such as shrimp, koi, crabs, etc., which together create the current Bilibili ecology.

Bilibili is not a charity, and it is unrealistic to ask UP hosts to generate power with love all day long.

As long as the core management team strikes a balance, the commercialization of formal channels will definitely bring more benefits than disadvantages. This is also the inevitable path for the development of video platforms, from the earliest Tudou, Youku, iQiyi, and Tencent Video to today's short video platforms Douyin and Kuaishou.

Rather than saying that Bilibili has changed (it has indeed changed a lot, even the area that criticizes people has emerged), it is better to take action yourself, take the initiative to maintain the community atmosphere, and contribute your own strength to this small broken site.

From my personal experience, a large number of marketing accounts have appeared on Bilibili in the past two years. The account names are "XX Sees the World", "XX Travels Around the World", etc. Some vicious marketing accounts even directly edit the content of well-known UP hosts and give them the names of foreign guys to harvest traffic.

Fortunately, the authorities have begun to crack down on it. The Beijing Internet Information Office has begun to implement the "Regulations on Internet Ecological Content Governance", which focus on: marketing that spreads rumors, marketing that infringes on copyright and counterfeit goods, "clickbait" marketing, marketing that violates regulations on interviews, and marketing that is pornographic, vulgar, and contains a lot of vulgar content.

The official B station has also stepped up its rectification efforts. At least from my personal experience, it is much better than it was two years ago.

The entry of marketing accounts is essentially because there is traffic dividend to be harvested, resulting in the emergence of a large amount of low-quality and low-original content.

Bilibili's traffic distribution system is an algorithm + manual review system. The current video review speed ranges from about 2 to 4 hours. Although there is human intervention, it is still a decentralized traffic pool as a whole.

The daily click volume of a video for each IP is only counted once, and it must be played continuously for a period of time after being clicked, which basically eliminates the existence of repeated brushing.

In 2019, a simplified video data weight formula was leaked:

Video weight = coins*0.4+collections*0.3+barrage*0.4+comments*0.4+plays*0.25+likes*0.4+shares*0.6, the latest video (published within one day) will receive [total value*1.5]

Therefore, coins, collections, likes, barrages and comments are all very important, and even exceed the weight of playback volume. It would be best if there are shares, because Bilibili is very eager to go viral. The last issue is timeliness. If the video is newly released, there must be a small part of it that has been privileged.

Next, Bobo will explain in detail how a brand can deliver high-quality PUGV content and how to communicate and collaborate with UP hosts.

Friends at Bilibili hate hard advertising, no matter what form it takes. If you want to successfully communicate with Generation Z users in a friendly way, you must master the following three points:

First, “real”

The second is "If you don't play with memes, you will die"

The third is "well-reasoned and convincing"

Let me give you a few simple examples, all of which are cases of collaboration between first-line UP hosts and brands.

UP host Shiyin is a UP host with millions of fans across the gaming and fashion areas. He once took the initiative to "expose" his cooperation with the Haitao No. 1 platform. The content was very detailed, including that after receiving the invitation for cooperation, he first placed an order to purchase products from the platform as an ordinary consumer.

Subsequently, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the Haitao No. 1 platform from multiple dimensions including delivery speed, customer service experience, and product quality, and only signed the cooperation agreement after confirming that it met our expectations.

We took a look at Shiyin's Bilibili homepage. He currently has 1.236 million followers, 3.21 million likes, and has posted 111 videos. He is definitely an officially certified top UP host.

For an UP host like Shiyin who has many fans, many business orders and is very careful about his reputation, the priority is definitely not brand awareness, nor how much commission he can earn, but the real feeling of using the product. After all, the biggest worry for a top UP host is: being unable to balance customer needs and fans' expectations.

On Bilibili, whether it is selling products or advertising orders, word of mouth and reputation are far more important than money. It is very likely that users will stop following a UP host for life because of his or her bad behavior once. The road to commercialization for UP masters is bound to be bumpy.

Secondly, brands that cooperate with UP hosts must adapt to local customs and integrate into Bilibili. The two are matched and even original. The advertisement itself is a high-quality content.

Lao Fanqie, a top UP host at Bilibili with 10.995 million followers, has an album called Lao Fanqie Work Diary, which records his working experience in different companies in the form of Vlog.

One of the episodes was a collaboration with NetEase Games, recording his feelings after working at NetEase Games for one day. The video style remained the same as always, taking the audience to experience the NetEase environment from a first-person perspective. The video has been played 8.344 million times.

For the viewers of Bilibili, they are not averse to making money, but they are against making bad money. They should not just focus on collecting money and ignoring the quality of the video, and blindly praise the sponsor without considering the actual experience.

One of the important differences between long video sites like Bilibili and platforms like Tik Tok and Kuaishou is that after users get used to long videos of about 10 minutes, they always expect high-quality content to convey some value to them ( even if they actually forget it after watching it ).

There are many criteria for judging this value, which can be practical value, entertainment value, practical value or even obscure knowledge and world view.

Bilibili has previously launched a new video format - interactive video.

Users can interact with the video, advance the plot according to prompts, and then watch it. Different choices will lead to different results, which is similar to the feeling of playing a stand-alone RPG game.

Bilibili once teamed up with 8 UP hosts to launch an interactive video with the theme of "Twin Vision". Different interactive branch options point to different plots and endings. Created by the UP host, the magical Lao Pi, they are very visually impactful and very interesting.

Cleverly integrating the brand into the video can be said to be the highest level of soft advertising on Bilibili. For example, Coca-Cola Coffee uses all kinds of strange challenges as topics and invites UP hosts to take part in the challenges.

There are often UP hosts on Bilibili who conduct various "suicidal challenges". The most famous one is Jing Hanqing, who has 8.505 million fans. He was the first person on the Internet to drink 1982 Lafite, generate electricity with tomatoes, and how much meat floss can be made from 1 kilogram of fish. These are all his representative works. Jing Hanqing followed suit and conducted the Coca-Cola + humidifier challenge.

If the UP hosts in the lifestyle zone mainly gain attention and fans with videos that are imaginative, silly, bizarre, and other tricky, then the UP hosts in the technology zone next door are the pioneers of hardcore content.

There are so many review videos that it is actually difficult to differentiate them. Mr. He successfully broke through the circle in the early days with a post titled "How Fast Can 5G Be?". In fact, his idea of ​​taking business orders is not much different from that of other similar digital review UP hosts. He still fully demonstrates the functions of the mobile phone and the feelings in different scenarios.

Mr. He's rise reminds me of Wang Ziru. The same youthfulness and passion for digital technology products have led to the emergence of generation after generation of such UP hosts. Mr. He, who is in his 20s, has the same future career path as Wang Ziru, who is now in his 30s. By then, the challenges and choices he faces will become more and more numerous and difficult.

But no matter what, I wish the UP hosts to keep their original intentions and keep improving.

After watching more than a dozen videos jointly created by brands and B station UP hosts, we firmly believe that different types of products can find UPs in corresponding sections for marketing.

Food, beverage and retail consumption are more suitable for living areas. Internet technology brands such as automobiles, digital products and mobile phones have special areas. They can pay more attention to black technology and even use interactive videos to showcase product features, triggering fission and dissemination.

As of the end of April 2019, there were not many corporate brands settled in Bilibili. Bilibili has set up an institutional account authentication system for enterprises and brands, which is divided into four major entities: enterprises, media, government agencies, and social organizations.

Overall, the entry of brands into Bilibili is still in a chaotic period. Compared with Zhihu, Douyin, Kuaishou and Weibo systems, it is quite rudimentary, roughly equivalent to Douyin 1.5 years ago, and major brands do not have many fans.

Companies with content brand awareness should rush to land and enter Bilibili as soon as possible.

Xiaomi first joined Bilibili because of its founder Lei Jun’s Are You OK ghost video, which had a strong influence. Later, when Lei Jun went to participate in the recording of "The Debaters", he even asked the host: Haven’t you heard me singing at Bilibili?

Lei Jun's strong IP attributes have prompted Xiaomi to gradually combine content and brand marketing, and even directly moved the live broadcast of the press conference to Bilibili.

In addition to Internet and digital electronics brands, the following three types of companies are also very suitable for Bilibili:

The first is beauty and fashion. With a large number of young users and the unlimited length of content, Bilibili is naturally suitable for producing beauty and fashion videos.

The second is online education, including knowledge payment, K12 education, vocational education, law, medical and other professional knowledge dissemination.

The third is game and film and television brands. Bilibili started with game content and naturally accepts game content. The official accounts of popular mobile games such as Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Onmyoji, and Identity V have more than 500,000 to 1 million fans.

After talking about which brands are suitable for settlement, let’s add a few more details.

Cooperation with B-war UP masters can basically be divided into three stages: early, middle and late.

The main purpose in the early stage is to clarify the communication template, formulate strategies, determine the video topics, and select suitable UP hosts.

Before starting the overall marketing plan, you need to clarify the purpose of the marketing campaign. Bilibili’s content marketing goals can be divided into brand promotion and brand-effect conversion. Among many platforms, Bilibili’s content is more vertical, its brand promotion is younger and more precise, and it also requires video content to be more in-depth.

Selecting UP is a science. With the same communication purpose and budget, choosing the wrong person may lead to diametrically opposed results. Many business owners prefer to hand it over directly to MCN agencies, and Bobo has also had friendly exchanges (cooperation) with a number of MCN agencies.

When choosing an institution, UP hosts should keep their eyes open. Top formal institutions are definitely one of the places that can be given priority consideration. It is the same reason as many graduates choose to work in large companies such as BAT, TMD, etc. after graduation.

Of course, the more ideal situation is to incubate yourself. As the saying goes, it is impossible to work for others, and it is impossible to work for others in this life. If you want to work, work for yourself, even if you are the boss during the day and sleep on the floor at night.

If you progress step by step by groping in the dark, the pace will be slower, but your personal growth will be faster.

After selecting the UP host, we enter the mid-term stage, which is mainly to confirm requirements, communicate scripts and review the finished film.

The digital area can conduct evaluations in a question-and-answer format with a professional attitude. The living area can choose natural implants with a sense of scene, such as a list of UP hosts’ favorite products and recommendations for various holidays. For fashion, you can invite good-looking girls and boys to shoot Vlog documentaries and implant products according to the tone of the UP host.

(Photo source: Report Master)

In the later stage, it is necessary to review and verify the communication effect and public opinion analysis. It is recommended that brand owners pay more attention to the following indicators:

Whether the video's 72-hour playback volume reaches the average of the 20 recent works;

Whether there is data fluctuation in the video 3-15 days;

The proportion of positive content in the bullet comments;

Analysis of each node of the high-energy bullet screen;

The popularity of product discussions in comments and reviews;

Based on our actual experience in the conversation, there are many excellent mid-level UP hosts with 50,000, 100,000, and 150,000 fans emerging on Bilibili. Brands don’t have to focus on the schedules of the top 3 to 5 first-line UPs. Many small and medium-sized UPs are superior in terms of cost-effectiveness and video quality. Investing in a dozen small UPs at one time to spread the risk may produce better results.

Why is Bilibili’s commercialization process slow and cautious? Bobo summed it up in one sentence: treat users as human beings.

If we do not cherish our users and do not treat each ID as a flesh-and-blood person, but rather as traffic that can be seen everywhere on the Internet, then it will inevitably lead to the website being filled with pop-up advertisements, new versions of legends everywhere waiting for you to play, UP hosts making a living by doing nothing can be seen everywhere, and the value of the entire community will be greatly reduced.

In the words of Professor Luo Xiang, this is "the exploitation of the weak by the strong." It’s just that the method has changed to traffic harvesting.

Bilibili has long adhered to some basic principles: commercialization is allowed, content expansion is allowed, and brand entry is allowed, but it cannot easily damage the user experience, and try not to produce extremely low-quality content.

Making money from food must be based on mutual respect, only then will users recognize it, and even hope that the UP host makes more and more money, and the better the money, and hope that the UP host can make his life better with his own ability just like an ordinary person.

The three-foot-thick ice does not form overnight. Day-to-day maintenance and operation, as well as the interaction between the majority of UPs and the audience, have created the unique B Station today and raised the moat bit by bit. We sincerely feel that this is not an easy task.

Come on, little broken station.

There is no need to be too anxious for the majority of brands and manufacturers. Since you haven't caught the earliest dividends, there's no need to worry. Just keep moving forward step by step, and you'll eventually bear fruit.

What else do you want to know about Station B? Welcome to leave a message and we will continue in the next issue. In addition, all friends who are working on Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishou and need coverage can also find me. As long as you have useful information, you can make the headlines.

For advertising at Station B , please contact Qinggua Media

Author: Shen Shuaibo

Source: Shen Shuaibo

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