An inventory of major trends in the offline marketing and promotion industry in 2019!

Why has Alibaba held the Double Eleven offline shopping gala for three consecutive years?

Why does Tencent bet on industrial Internet?

Why did Alibaba and Baidu both invest in offline elevator media?

Why does Douyin want to open offline "pop-up stores"?

Why does Zhang Xiaolong emphasize that mini programs are designed for offline use?

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When smartphone shipments no longer grow, when the total time spent online is approaching its ceiling, traffic anxiety is spreading among Internet giants. The former online kings have all extended their tentacles offline without exception. All of the above phenomena confirm this.

Because in a sense, the scale and imagination of offline traffic compared with online traffic determine whether the giants can get a ticket to the second half of the Internet. It summarizes several important trends in offline marketing in 2019:

Trend 1: Product Mediatization

Product mediatization is a very important trend. The so-called product mediatization is to transform a normal product into such a media.

Why can products become media?

The logic behind this is that the reason why the media business model can be established is that it occupies our time and attention, but we often overlook the reality that the products we come into contact with every day also occupy our time and attention.

Therefore, NetEase Cloud Music cooperated with Nongfu Spring. At this time, Nongfu Spring's products became a media. It takes at least one minute for consumers to finish drinking a bottle of Nongfu Spring. This means that within this minute, the NetEase Cloud Music on the Nongfu Spring bottle will at least occupy the consumer's attention, and countless bottles of Nongfu Spring constitute a large-scale media group.

There are usually two ways to realize product media:

The first way is to turn the product into media to promote certain characteristics of the product itself, thereby generating specific media value.

For example, a certain brand of juice has "Listen to your mother, you have to drink juice" printed on the packaging box. Coca-Cola's lyrics bottles and nickname bottles are also important representatives of this trend. These "product media" have undoubtedly obtained sufficient exposure in a free way, allowing consumers to deepen their impression of the brand in this way.

Why do many clothing brands such as Uniqlo and MUJI spend a lot of effort designing their shopping bags? It is because they deeply understand that "product is media". A bag itself can be exposed multiple times as a mobile media, and this is an important moment in shaping the brand image.

Three Squirrels, a snack brand that has risen in recent years, is also well aware of this - Three Squirrels' packaging reveals the brand's tone from the inside out, from the express packaging to the inside pages of flyers, and the product is completely managed as media.

The second way is to promote products that are consistent with or complementary to one's own tone through cooperation or sales . For example, the cooperation between NetEase Cloud Music and Nongfu Spring is a typical cross-border cooperation. Through Nongfu Spring, NetEase Cloud Music gained exposure, and through NetEase Cloud Music and Nongfu Spring, it also improved its own brand tone.

Another example is the collaboration between Pepsi and QQ . Pepsi printed an AR icon on the cans, and by scanning it with the AR of the QQ client, one can enter the World Cup interactive page of the collaboration between Pepsi and QQ. This is another example of product mediatization.

Trend 2: Digitalization of offline traffic

We usually think that offline traffic is called offline traffic because it cannot be digitized. However, with the advancement of technology and changes in business models, the digitization of offline traffic has become an important trend, and it is also an important way to improve offline marketing efficiency.

Let’s take Hema Fresh as an example. As an offline new retail company, Hema Fresh requires all customers to pay and place orders through the APP in order to digitize each transaction. Combined with the data related to Alipay, Hema Fresh can conduct a detailed user portrait and user behavior analysis of its customers, which is difficult for traditional retailers to do.

Another example comes from the catering industry. Word of Mouth provides offline business digitization solutions for many catering companies . For example, Jindingxuan launched mobile ordering, and more than 90% of customers have placed orders through mobile phones. The number of waiters in a single store has been reduced from 11 to 7. This alone saves 240,000 yuan in labor costs a year, and the cost of paper menus can be saved by 350,000 yuan a year;

Users can place orders before arriving at the restaurant, which reduces waiting lines and effectively improves table turnover rates. More importantly, after digitization, it is possible to accurately identify users' preferences for dishes, track repeat customers and conduct online remarketing.

Zhang Yong pointed out at the "New E-Commerce Summit": "A very important sign of moving towards new retail is to make consumers identifiable, reachable, insightful, and serviceable. Every enterprise must move towards a data company before it can move towards new retail." Zhang Yong's words are also the goal pursued by many offline traffic owners.

There is also the case of Guazi used car direct sales website.

Recently they opened an offline retail store. For example, the flagship store in Beijing has thousands of cars. So how to count the number of times each car has been viewed by customers? Guazi has made a smart key cabinet. If a salesperson wants to take a customer to see a car, he needs to apply for a work order in the APP first. The work order will guide him to cabinet No. 12 to get the key and return the key after viewing it. In this way, the system knows exactly how many times each car has been viewed by which salesperson every day. The digitization of these offline data also allows Guazi to better grasp the supply and demand relationship and thus better price used cars.

Let’s look at another popular case - the traffic and digitization of elevator advertising. As an elevator media company in middle-class communities, Xinchao Media has performed extremely well in the digitization of offline scenes.

Traditional elevator advertising delivery methods are costly, inefficient, and lack high flexibility . To address these pain points, Xinchao Media has developed the Bee Intelligent Delivery System BITS to support advertisers' programmatic delivery. Advertisers can flexibly use pricing and bidding to purchase advertisements, which changes the previous single sales method of elevator advertisements.

Xinchao Media has developed "Xinqutong", an advertising product that runs both online and offline. Simply put, before offline delivery, advertisers can circle target users through online data, thereby improving offline delivery efficiency. At the same time, after offline delivery, by using LBS data and partner data, Xinqutong can achieve secondary online coverage, which can add a three-dimensional impression to the target consumers.

Trend 3: Scenario and efficiency become the key to offline marketing

Although offline traffic is extremely abundant, it is not easy to use it effectively. The reason is that offline traffic is extremely scattered, difficult to manage, and has poor economies of scale. As a result, the efficiency of offline traffic utilization varies greatly. Many chain stores themselves have a large amount of offline traffic but their own utilization efficiency is low, which is called "sitting on a mountain of gold and eating steamed buns" by many people in the industry.

So how to effectively utilize offline traffic? The answer lies in scenarios and efficiency.

Why did the O2O boom in 2014 recede so quickly?

One of the important reasons is that the key factor of efficiency is ignored . For example, making an appointment for door-to-door car washing through an APP seems simple and convenient, but in fact it requires at least two people with various professional equipment and transporting enough water to the consumer's parking place. Two people can wash a maximum of two cars in an hour, and compared with car washes in fixed stores, the efficiency is much lower. When the price increase that consumers are willing to pay is lower than the decrease in efficiency, the business cannot be sustained.

You walk into a shopping mall and connect to the mall's WiFi. The WiFi connection page will give you a coupon for Haidilao in the mall and also inform you that Uniqlo on the third floor is having a 50% discount. The marketing efficiency in this scenario is very high. You bought a movie ticket on WeChat's Maoyan mini program, and 10 minutes after you finished watching the movie, you received a push notification inviting you to write a movie review. This scenario is very accurate.

In addition to replacing the functional parts of the original KTV, mini KTV can also automatically record, store, transmit and share through the background. Therefore, KTV has changed from a machine to a social tool, satisfying another social need of some people. This is scene reconstruction.

New retail focuses on "people, goods, and place". One of the important meanings of "place" here is scene. When a suitable scene is found for people, consumption will become easy.

The closer the distance to people and the more frequently the scenes appear, the more they will naturally become the focus of marketing, such as the elevator scene that everyone will experience. Xinchao Media focuses on elevators in middle-class communities. It occupies a high-frequency life consumption scene. When a family goes out, the first thing they pass is the elevator screen.

At this time, when advertisements suitable for family consumption appear, they will naturally trigger discussions and fermentation among family members. Compared with the crowded and serious business elevators where effective communication is impossible, advertisements are more relaxed and have better effects.

At the same time, Xinchao Media's vertical screen is more in line with the requirements of the social media era. Watching vertical Douyin videos on mobile phones and vertical advertisements in elevators has low scene switching costs and natural connections. Therefore, Xinchao Media has been favored by household consumer advertisers.

Trend 4: High-quality offline traffic becomes a scarce resource

As online traffic becomes increasingly saturated, the competition for traffic has begun to shift offline. Since 2017, China's smartphone shipments have stopped growing, and the time netizens spend online has gradually approached the ceiling. "Total national online time" has become a stock concept.

Under such circumstances, one result of advertisers continuing to pursue the online market is that the price of online traffic has skyrocketed and has reached a stage where it is unaffordable. Against such a backdrop, it becomes natural and more logical for both giants and startups to choose offline.

The most obvious signal was Alibaba's 15 billion yuan investment in Focus Media in July 2018. If Alibaba wants to continue sailing at high speed, it must rely on the support of offline traffic.

Coincidentally, in November 2018, another giant Baidu invested in Focus Media's competitor Xinchao Media. Compared with Focus Media, you may not be familiar with the media, but it is such a dark horse in elevator advertising that has grown rapidly into a competitor that Focus Media cannot ignore. Let's take a look at the underlying logic behind its rise.

"In China, all business is worth redoing." The end of elevator media is far from coming: Xinchao Media has found a new blue ocean against the backdrop of consumption upgrading - elevators in middle-class communities.

According to statistics, the national market size is 5 million elevators, and Focus Media only covers 10% of them, leaving a huge market for Xinchao Media.

Focus Media has a 97% coverage rate of commercial office buildings, and its advantage lies in commercial office buildings, while residential elevators have become a blue ocean - currently Xinchao Media has covered 700,000 elevators in 100 cities across the country, becoming a leader in this field.

Although residential elevators do not have the advantages of high mobility and wide coverage compared to commercial office buildings, they cover a high-frequency consumer group - household consumption.

For many families, a considerable proportion of their consumption demand is driven by the elderly, children, and housewives. They are the main force and decision makers of daily family consumption, and often play a decisive role in some important family consumption. These groups are not covered by office elevator advertising.

An important feature of offline traffic is dispersion. One result of dispersion is low utilization efficiency. Therefore, media with economies of scale such as Focus Media and Xinchao Media will be favored by capital.

The above is a summary of several important trends in offline marketing in 2019. Against the backdrop of increasingly saturated online traffic, online giants will extend more tentacles offline driven by growth. This trend will only continue to strengthen amid increasingly fierce competition. Let us wait and see what the offline drama will be in 2019.

Source: Weixizhibei