On the calm 6.18 node, live e-commerce without giant anchors unexpectedly became the "hottest" battle situation in the big promotion.
This year's June 18, two New Oriental teachers successfully "crossed the bat".
The former New Oriental teacher Luo Yonghao announced to quit the social platform and start a new business, but the New Oriental teacher Dong Yuhui, who just started to be an anchor, has suddenly emerged, helping the "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room to increase to tens of millions of fans in seven days.
This year's June 18 live broadcast e-commerce is still an indispensable and important stage in the e-commerce field.
However, the most intuitive feeling of merchants is that no matter Kuaishou, which emphasizes "persistent people have constant production", or Douyin, which emphasizes algorithm distribution, traffic is becoming more and more expensive, which also means that in most cases "only Spend money to achieve the unity of product and effect.”
At the same time, this year's 6.18 video account brought a huge number of WeChat users into the game, which allowed a number of brands to find a new stage.
Although the final data has not been released, the video account, relying on its strong private domain, high customer unit price, and uncommercialized dividends, has become the focus of brand merchants, and may even change the battle situation of live broadcast e-commerce.
The "6.18 Big Sale" was originally the store celebration day of the e-commerce platform JD.
During the June 18 promotion this year, the live e-commerce field showed a different "hotness" in terms of content, traffic and pattern.
The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter interviewed a number of anchors, service providers, brand owners, and industry analysts who have experienced the 6.18 big promotion, trying to restore the "ice and fire" of this year's 6.18 big promotion.
"Giant" anchor is absent after 6.18
Both the live broadcast of Daren and the self-broadcast of the brand
On June 13, Luo Yonghao appeared in the "Make a Friend" live broadcast room the day after the official announcement of "exiting the network". Third-party data showed that the live broadcast accumulated 4.707 million viewers and sales reached 11.109 million yuan. The popularity of the live broadcast room has peaked in recent months.
At about the same time, Dong Yuhui sold steaks bilingually in the live broadcast room, shared his thoughts after reading books, and swiped the social network because he missed his colleague Baofeng crying, which made the "Oriental Selection" popular.
As of press time, the number of followers of the "Oriental Selection" account has risen to 17.042 million.
Whether it is the original "Make Friends" live broadcast room, or the "Oriental Selection" live broadcast room, or even the Jay Chou and Luo Dayou concerts on the video account, they all reflect users' expectations for high-quality content.
According to iiMedia Research's consulting data, 67.7% of online live broadcast users believe that the current live broadcast platform has a wide variety of content and rich choices. With the disappearance of the Internet demographic dividend, diversified live broadcast content is the key to retaining users.
iiMedia Research analyst Zhang Yi told Shell Finance reporters that in addition to high-quality content, the popularity of "Oriental Selection" is also inseparable from the support of Douyin. people).
In fact, it's not just Douyin. For all platforms, head anchors are still important, but now it is safe to increase the number of anchors around the waist and neck.
An analyst in the entertainment field told Shell Finance reporters that in the field of live broadcast e-commerce, the most uncontrollable thing is "people".
For example, in this year's 6.18 e-commerce promotion, the "four kings of live e-commerce" - Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi, Simba and Luo Yonghao, have all been absent.
In order to diversify risks and enrich content, Douyin intends to support new anchors.
In May of this year, Douyin e-commerce launched its first new star anchor support plan, "Anchors, please be in place". By providing official professional content guidance, targeted support for tens of millions of traffic, star big coffee leading the team and June 18 peak live broadcast room Big resources, mining talented anchors.
In addition to supporting new anchors, Douyin and Kuaishou also hope that brand self-broadcasting (the live broadcast conducted by the brand itself) can create more good content and achieve the purpose of attracting new and solid fans.
In 2022, Douyin e-commerce will launch the "DOU2000 Plan" for leading brand merchants, and at the same time continue to promote the "Douyin Brand Plan" for emerging brands.
At the "2022 Kuaishou E-commerce Gravity Conference", Kuaishou E-commerce stated that the goal of this year's "big brand" strategy is to achieve a 100 billion-level brand business scale, and at the same time create 330 brands with a business volume of over 100 million; "The plan is to support more than 500 benchmark fast brands within the year. The characteristics of fast brands are that the content of the live broadcast room and the goods are equally important.
The anchor Xiaohan (pseudonym), who is self-broadcasting for the oral beauty brand, and Ms. Zhu, the live broadcast operator of Xtep, both told Shell Finance reporters that the brand side attaches great importance to major platforms, but the focus of different platforms is slightly different. Brand self-broadcasting is the main focus. On Kuaishou, people (also known as head anchors) are mainly invited to live broadcast, while on Taobao live broadcast, the brand tone is more important.
Both of the above-mentioned respondents said that brands put more manpower and material resources into Douyin, and self-broadcasted high-quality content is therefore more likely to be produced on Douyin.
"Douyin is an incremental business for many brands, happy with good performance, and happy with exposure if bad performance", "Kuishou mainly cooperates with celebrities, and private domain traffic (referring to the traffic generated by fans who follow the anchor) is all At Daren, we do not operate Kuaishou users very much in our self-broadcasting, but the investment cost of Kuaishou is the highest, because the live broadcast of Daren is more expensive,” Ms. Zhu said.
Xiaohan also said that the "main position" of his own brand is Douyin, and Kuaishou mainly broadcasts live broadcasts by cooperating talents.
"What we value most is the Douyin platform at present, because the traffic is larger, and the play method will generally set up some product mechanisms according to Douyin. The channels mainly include brand self-broadcasting, paid streaming, and a certain budget to large live broadcast rooms. At the same time, find some mid-waist accounts to cooperate with pure commissioners to promote." Gao Lijuan, general manager of the yoga new media platform Qingjia, told Shell Finance reporter that compared with Douyin, Kuaishou has more new product brands, and more The channel is the group leader mode, "that is, the group leader will represent a lot of products, and find talents at all levels to bring the goods."
Data from iResearch shows that in order to obtain more controllable cost input and more stable sales growth, companies have increased their store broadcasting efforts. In 2020, the sales volume of store broadcasting accounted for 32.1% of the overall live broadcast e-commerce, and it is expected to account for 2023. close to 50%.
Regarding whether there will be a relationship between brand self-broadcasting and Daren live broadcasting in the future, Tang Xin, an analyst at Aurora Data, believes, "Live broadcast experts are similar to entertainment stars, and the communication effect must be dominant. But Daren is also like a star. In the same way, it is easy to get out of breath, and new talents need to continue to follow. I believe that in the future, live broadcasts will become standard for brands, but from the perspective of traffic, talents may still be more dominant.”
Zhang Yi said that there will be more and more brand self-broadcasting in the future.
"The current live broadcast e-commerce is still in its infancy. It is by no means that after Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, there is no other possibility. In fact, it is also a problem to concentrate too much on the head anchor. In the future, the contention of flowers will be a good thing for the brand self-broadcaster. "
Traffic prices are getting more expensive
Will brands make money on June 18 this year?
In the live broadcast room of less than 10 square meters, the anchor and the team are cooperating. The anchor reads the oral broadcast at "1.5 times speed", and the assistant behind him holds the display card high, and sometimes shouts "500 orders are gone"; Outside the camera, the operator reminded the anchor to replace the next product as soon as possible, and communicated with the streaming team behind him (the team that purchased and delivered traffic) from time to time, paying attention to the number of users and the conversion rate.
In the eyes of the anchors, the above scenarios happen almost every day, but the difference is that the price of traffic is quietly becoming more expensive.
"Especially this year, if the brand does not have a certain budget to invest in public domain traffic (referring to the public traffic of the application), it will be difficult to do it." , the people who come in will be relatively accurate. At present, the customers who come in with our paid traffic will have a transaction rate of about 4% to 5%." The anchor Xiaohan told Shell Finance reporter that she is a senior self-broadcast anchor of an oral beauty brand. It has been in the game since Douyin laid out live e-commerce.
"The public domain traffic of Douyin in the first two years is still in the bonus period, and the platform needs to be updated, so it will give the brand a lot of sweetness, and it will push a lot of natural traffic to the brand. The bad part is that it is not accurate, and people may come in. , but it is not the target customer, for example, our brand was 'public domain traffic live broadcast + short video' content drainage at the beginning, but the effect was relatively poor." Xiaohan recalled that he just said during the live broadcast on Douyin.
"Now we have to rely on payment to get traffic, especially when it comes to big promotions. The general impression is that big promotions are very profitable, but as the competition becomes more and more fierce, the price of traffic rises, and it is not necessarily profitable during the big promotion, and it may even lose money than usual." A founder of domestic skin care products said that the brand was also the first to enter Douyin e-commerce for live broadcasts.
According to the above-mentioned respondents, they usually pay for commercial products such as “Huge Thousands of Rivers” and “Small Store Push” every day to obtain more accurate traffic for the live broadcast room. Now the average conversion cost per order is higher than that of last year and the year before. Much higher.
Many Kuaishou live broadcasters also reported to Shell Finance reporters that whether they are purchasing public domain traffic or accessing their own private domain traffic, they need to purchase specific commercial products (the former is "Magnetic Taurus", the latter is "vermicelli").
A special profession has even emerged as the times require - "streamer". The streamer will dynamically adjust the conversion rate of "Magnetic Taurus" and "Noodles" on the day, as well as the cost of streaming in the live broadcast room. Delivery ratio.
"Businesses can only control themselves, and if they want to play, they have to follow the rules of the platform. If there are bright spots in short videos and live broadcast content, the platform can give more free traffic, such as the recent 'Oriental Selection'; the content is mediocre, and if you want to get a lot of traffic The most direct way is to spend money." Mr. Wang, who used to serve as a live broadcast e-commerce service provider for many brands, told Shell Finance reporter that the brands he previously served covered beauty and skin care, maternal and child products, food and beverages, small household appliances, etc. an industry.
Why is traffic getting more and more expensive, but more brands are entering the field of live e-commerce?
In Mr. Wang's view, the current trend is that brands are more inclined to put out effective advertisements, which can directly bring orders, and can bring data retention without orders, so that the communication can be traced, which also makes the subway, outdoor and other hard work. The vacancy rate is high.
According to data from iResearch, in less than 4 years, domestic live broadcast e-commerce has grown from zero to a trillion-dollar market.
In 2017, the transaction volume of live broadcast e-commerce in China was 26.8 billion yuan, and in 2020, it was 1.29 trillion yuan, an increase of over 4,700%. It is expected that the scale of live broadcast e-commerce will exceed 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023.
The video account strongly cuts into the live broadcast and brings goods
Private domain traffic is a weapon?
"In the past month of this year's April 23 World Book Day, the sales volume of Fan Deng Dushu on the video account exceeded 10 million yuan." Li Yangyang, the head of Fan Deng Dushu's video account, said in a telephone interview.
According to reports, Fan Deng Reading started to operate the video account in October 2020, and began to try commercial operations on the video account in June 2021, and the cumulative sales volume reached 18 million yuan in the following six months.
Fan Deng Dushu is just one of the merchants in the field of live streaming on the video account platform.
On May 31 this year, the video account launched the "June 18 live broadcast of the Good Things Festival" in a low-key manner.
Since the live broadcast function of the video account was launched in October 2020, many brands have started the operation of the video account.
MINISO is the first batch of merchants to try live video accounts.
"In the beginning, I was just testing the water, but later I found out that the video account GMV has grown rapidly, and the unit price is three times higher than offline, so I was determined to reach more than 10 million private fans." Wei Xiaoya, director of user operations of MINISO, introduced.
Take the "Yugui Dog" doll jointly launched by MINISO and Sanrio as an example. Its unit price was as high as 520 yuan, but it was sold out in a short period of time, which made MINISO noticed the consumption of video account users. ability.
According to Wei Xiaoya, MINISO's offline and online user systems are fully connected at the data and operation ends, which can form a closed loop for users. For example, the early fans of MINISO's video account were mainly converted from offline stores and official accounts. After the video account starts, users with public domain traffic will come in to watch the live broadcast. By adding a pop-up enterprise WeChat QR code during the live broadcast, they will become fans of private domain traffic.
According to data from the Vision Lighting Research Institute, in December 2021, the monthly activity of the video account will increase by 78% year-on-year, and the user usage time will increase by 84% year-on-year.
According to the data of the video account team, at the end of 2021, compared with the beginning of the year, the sales amount of live video accounts with goods increased by 15 times, of which private domains accounted for 50%, and the repurchase rate reached 60%.
This huge traffic and conversion rate is the reason why merchants are flocking to it.
However, unlike Douyin and Kuaishou, which currently require paid access to public domain traffic, the video account has not yet been commercialized, but subsidizes merchants in the form of traffic subsidies, including platform traffic incentives, exclusive red dot recommendations on the discovery page, and the core of the main venue. A number of measures, such as recommendation display and live streaming support, are similar to the "tens of billions of subsidies" on other platforms, but they are just for resource slots.
"The disadvantage of the video account is that there is less public recommendation traffic, and it needs to rely on its own private domain traffic. The advantage is that the video account and WeChat are completely connected, and the business card can be popped up directly in the live broadcast room, and it can be sent in the WeChat community. Targeted live broadcast Red envelopes, live broadcasts in the circle of friends." Gao Lijuan, general manager of the yoga new media platform Qingjia, told Shell Finance reporters.
The above interviewed brand self-broadcast anchor Xiaohan and Xtep self-broadcast operator Ms. Zhu said that at this stage, the private domain traffic attribute of video accounts is relatively heavy, and the brands they work for hardly do it.
Xiaohan's explanation is that the oral beauty brand he works for is built on Douyin, and there is not too much private domain traffic accumulation in the video account.
And Ms. Zhu's explanation is, "Our path is generally to build self-broadcasting first, and then cooperate with talents. Otherwise, the growth of pure self-broadcasting performance will be too slow, and there will be no good performance highlights."
As one of the key businesses of Tencent Holdings, the video account will move frequently in 2021. Tencent mentioned in this quarterly financial report that it will continue to invest in strategic growth areas, including video accounts.
At the above-mentioned performance conference call, Tencent executives said that the development of video accounts is very good, the number of users and duration are good, the realization of video accounts should be similar to the realization of similar products, and the company will make a difference between user experience and realization. The best balance, this is similar to the circle of friends.
At the same time, various products of the future ecosystem, including official accounts and small programs, will become better with the blessing of video accounts, users will spend longer on the platform, and there will always be opportunities to monetize.
"Douyin, Kuaishou and Video accounts can be roughly divided into two camps. Douyin is a public domain traffic platform with weak social relationships, while Kuaishou and Video accounts are private traffic platforms with strong social relationships. The frequency of free use of domain traffic is low, and the repurchase rate of consumers is low. Many brands, even first-line big names, may not be better. Private domain traffic platforms require strong operational and organizational capabilities that deeply interact with users, and are slow to take effect. For public domain traffic For traffic, you can rely on new products, holiday promotions and the talent economy. For private domain traffic, you can use the internal price of employees and in-app purchase benefits to increase the repurchase rate.” Mr. Wang, the above-mentioned service provider, analyzed.
Beijing News Shell Finance reporter Bai Bai Lei Sun Wenxuan Song Meilu editor Yue Caizhou proofreading