How should brands do live streaming marketing?

At present, a large number of platforms have basically created live broadcast functions, which have attracted a lot of traffic and have more or less achieved their respective conversion goals. Since live streaming attracts and activates traffic, it is naturally a marketing opportunity and channel that brands cannot miss.

If Li Jiaqi's rise to fame in 2019 brought live streaming into the public eye, then the epidemic in early 2020 completely made live streaming a form of entertainment for all.

According to data from Baidu Index, the search index for the word "live streaming" increased significantly after mid-January, even exceeding the level during the "Double Eleven" period last year.

Baidu Index for the term “live broadcast”

1. In 2020, brand marketing must understand live streaming

As live streaming has become more popular, it has begun to become an underlying capability of products for platforms. In addition to traditional Taobao Live, Douyin, and Kuaishou, JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Bilibili have all opened live streaming functions. Shopping guide communities such as Xiaohongshu and Mogujie have already made many attempts in the live streaming field. Even music products such as QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music are also focusing on live streaming.

For brands, live streaming has become a means of communication that must be seriously considered in today's media environment. In fact, a large number of brands have achieved rapid growth during the epidemic through live streaming.

According to Caijing.com, Liuliumei achieved a 264% year-on-year growth through livestreaming marketing, Mengjie Home Textiles’ Tmall store sales increased by 11% year-on-year, and COFCO Fortune gained 9,000 new customers every day through Taobao livestreaming and other activities...

A major principle of brand marketing is that marketing should occur wherever the users are; today, we can say: If brands want to do marketing in 2020, they must understand live streaming.

In addition to the user education that has been carried out throughout the entire industry chain through the epidemic, live streaming marketing currently has two major advantages:

• On the one hand, live streaming is currently a relatively efficient way to convert product sales. In other words, live streaming has a stronger ability to sell goods. Live streaming stimulates users to make direct purchases during the viewing process through on-site interactions. Usually, large-scale anchors can obtain greater product discounts for users, making users more likely to make impulse purchases.
• On the other hand, although live streaming has become well known to all netizens, for brands, live streaming marketing is still in an early stage. Currently, the product categories involved in live streaming are mostly limited to women's products such as beauty and cosmetics, and non-standard products such as jewelry and jade. Brands that respond quickly and take the lead in live streaming marketing will have the opportunity to obtain more industry dividends.

However, at present, corporate live streaming marketing in the market generally has problems of being rough and non-standard.

Alex, general manager of Shiqu South China, pointed out: "There are four common pain points in corporate live streaming marketing: boring content, too tight schedule, lack of sustainability, and low quality." Live streaming is a long-term battle for enterprises. In the future, the frequency of corporate live streaming may reach hundreds of shows a year. How to conduct live streaming marketing will be a course that enterprises currently need to learn.

2. How should brands start live streaming marketing?

There is no need to explain the importance of live streaming marketing. So, how should companies start live streaming and how should they choose a live streaming platform? We have done some sorting out of the major live streaming platforms.

At present, the application thresholds for live streaming on major platforms are not high, and they are all in the stage of attracting new users. Taking Taobao Live as an example, as long as the categories sold by the brand merchants are not within the restricted categories and their past business conditions have been good, they can usually apply successfully; and experts and consumers can also become anchors by passing relevant qualification reviews and examinations.

However, selecting a matching live broadcast platform and using an appropriate live broadcast method are more important to the final effect of brand live broadcast. Among the current platforms, Taobao and Kuaishou are more likely to bring goods. If you cooperate with suitable anchors, you can quickly convert goods into goods. JD.com and Pinduoduo have also begun to focus on live streaming business, especially Pinduoduo, which started to focus on it at the end of 2019, which is more suitable for village broadcasts and agricultural specialty products in the sinking market.

It is worth noting that the live broadcast content of various platforms is still in the process of business exploration. For example, the live broadcast function in the WeChat ecosystem has been in the internal testing stage. Although WeChat Live obviously has huge traffic, the commercial opportunities therein still depend on WeChat’s official policies and functional openness. Therefore, brands need to make choices based on the platform’s subsequent policies and content strategies, and communicate more with the platform to obtain more traffic resources and recommendations.

From the perspective of brand live streaming marketing methods, taking Taobao live streaming platform as an example, there are currently four mainstream methods: finding anchors to sell products, participating in PGC columns, building your own live streaming team, and live streaming agency operations.

It can be found that the live streaming marketing techniques in the past few years were mainly focused on finding anchors to sell products and participate in PGC columns. Since the epidemic completely broke the circle of live streaming marketing, more and more brands have begun to build their own live streaming teams. At the same time, various marketing service companies have also begun to increase live streaming agency operations. It is expected that in the future, brands' demand for new media live broadcast talents will increase significantly, and the live broadcast operation industry chain will gradually improve.

3. How can companies seize the benefits of live streaming?

The impact of live streaming on corporate marketing is not just a change in marketing methods, but also a renewal of corporate marketing ideas. We predict that in the future brand new media communication and operation, there will be not only text and image information represented by “WeChat and Weibo” and short video information represented by “Tik Tok and Kuaishou”, but live content operation will also become standard for enterprises.

How should companies respond to this? Shiqu has the following three suggestions:

1. Establish a live broadcast operation team

As early as 2003, e-commerce gradually emerged and became an important sales outlet for major brands. Since then, the e-commerce team of enterprises has become a standard feature of almost every consumer brand.

After WeChat opened the public account function in 2012, WeChat public accounts became an important window for brand promotion. Most companies were able to formally establish new media teams. Today, new media teams have become a standard feature of corporate marketing departments.

Since 2018, short videos represented by Douyin and Kuaishou have begun to rise. Many quick-reacting companies have successively established video editing teams, and many of them have also seized the dividends of short videos.

Compared with pictures, texts and short videos, live streaming is closer to e-commerce sales. The establishment of a live streaming team will become a must for marketing . A complete live streaming team usually includes the following five types of people. In a small live streaming team, one person may have multiple roles. Brands can also entrust some roles to professional marketing service companies.

The points worth noting are:

• Ideally, when a brand broadcasts live on different platforms, it needs to have content that matches the corresponding users, which means that the content needs to be customized. For example, the term "old iron" is often used in Kuaishou, but rarely in Douyin.
• The data operation level needs to coordinate with the e-commerce department, and the anchor's words and content creation direction need to be optimized based on continuous data feedback.

2. Creation and accumulation of live broadcast IP

During the live broadcast process, users' motivation to convert to products comes more from their trust in the anchor himself. Excellent anchors will almost always end up on the path of IPization, and the brand's creation of anchors is essentially a process of building personal IP under the brand.

Wang Zude, corporate brand consultant and SVP of Shiqu, once pointed out that brand marketing has been evolving over the years. We have gone from the functional marketing stage of Brand 1.0, through the experience marketing stage of Brand 2.0, and the value marketing stage of Brand 3.0, to the individual marketing stage of Brand 4.0. In the scenario of live streaming marketing, the need to build a brand’s personal IP is more prominent.

Of course, for a brand, live streaming IP is equivalent to the creation of a team of experts, which needs to be based on the entire brand framework. The anchor may be similar to a "saleswoman". Every consumer has his or her favorite and closest "saleswoman" in his or her heart, and each anchor will also carry out refined operations such as social networking for its corresponding users.

3. Creation of brand live broadcast room

The traffic of each anchor and each platform is very scattered. If they are operated independently, they will be very passive and costly in the later stage. In the end, they will probably get half the result with twice the effort and will not be able to form brand stickiness and private traffic pool.

Therefore, companies need to aggregate traffic and strengthen the overall brand IP through brand live broadcast rooms, so as to ultimately achieve true integration of product and effect. In other words, no matter what the platform is or who the anchor is, the brand needs to have its own recognition in the live broadcast room, so that the audience knows that they are watching the live broadcast for the brand itself.

The creation of a brand live broadcast room is actually a systematic review of brand value and strategy, and requires rich practical experience in e-commerce operations. It is easy for companies to fall into pitfalls if they carry out internal execution alone. Not only is resource preparation and integration difficult, but the cost of trial and error is also high. Companies can achieve more efficient and low-cost construction and trials by finding experienced marketing service partners.

At present, major brands can try live broadcasts through the "Shiqu Brand Live Broadcast Room". The live broadcast room is based in South China. It matches the brand tone in the early stage, creates a professional, exclusive and brand-textured live broadcast scene for the brand, and then helps the brand formulate live broadcast content strategies and live broadcast traffic operations.

4. How will live streaming change the marketing industry?

The rise of live streaming has had a significant impact on the entire mass entertainment life. With the advent of the 5G era and the further maturity of video technologies such as VR/AR, there is obviously still a lot of room for development in the content and form of live streaming. But for the marketing industry, live streaming may change the entire marketing ecosystem in the future.

1. Upgrading the skills of marketers

For every marketer, we expect there will be two skill upgrade points:

First, marketers’ broadcasts will become a daily routine.

Just as writing WeChat articles and operating new media have become basic requirements for marketers today, future marketers themselves will have certain anchor functions and will need to get used to expressing themselves verbally in front of the camera.

Second, data-driven business will become more important.

Due to the complexity of user behavior, the planning of instant content such as live broadcasts must be driven and optimized based on data feedback. For example, from the content point of view, it is difficult to judge in advance which slightly different expressions users prefer, but data can help you discover these details. At the same time, it is also essential to review the sales data of the e-commerce platform after the broadcast. In other words, the user feedback loop is shorter and the impact of data on the business is more obvious.

2. E-commerce platforms will become a major content platform

In the past, e-commerce platforms were more focused on selling goods, which were equivalent to online sales points. For example, e-commerce operations on Taobao were mostly promoted through traditional traffic purchases such as Diamond Ads and Through Trains.

However, with the popularization of live streaming, e-commerce platforms will be transformed into live streaming content platforms, and the so-called live streaming with goods can actually be seen as a form of content e-commerce. The introduction of content elements will also make e-commerce platforms a battlefield for new media operations. An obvious phenomenon is that a considerable number of users on Taobao "only look but do not buy" because the live broadcast content itself is attractive to them.

In a media interview in November 2019, Jack Ma also revealed that about 17 million people visit Taobao every night but buy nothing. In fact, the Taobao mobile homepage we first see is a content information flow display format that is different for each person, transformed from early user searches to today's content recommendation model.

If the emergence of short videos has transformed “two Weibo” into “two Weibo and one Douyin”, then the emergence of live streaming may transform “two Weibo and one Douyin” into “two Weibo, one Douyin and one Taobao”. In short, e-commerce platforms are beginning to have certain content and media attributes.

3. Increased competition from MCNs

As more and more companies begin to set up live broadcast teams, the business of traditional MCNs may come under pressure, because when companies set up internal live broadcast teams, they are actually taking on some of the functions of MCNs. From a certain perspective, there is a certain competitive and cooperative relationship.

Zhao Yuanyuan, the person in charge of Taobao Live, once said in his personal public account:

"The competitor of live broadcasting agencies may not be MCN agencies, but advertising companies. Advertising companies are closer to brands, understand customer needs better, and have stronger content planning and project execution capabilities. Today's advertising companies are a bit like regular soldiers driving cars, but once they learn to fly planes, they may launch a round of carpet bombing."

As for what the future live streaming influencer ecosystem will be like, it is hard to say at the moment, but what can be predicted is that more and more live streaming influencers will come out of teams incubated within brands, and brands have strong control over such IPs, and the media market may see significant changes.

Of course, at present, live streaming marketing is still in an early bonus stage, and its subsequent impact on the entire industry needs further observation. However, what is certain is that in 2020, it will be too late for brands to do live streaming.

Author: Interesting

Source: Shiqu Interactive