In this article, we will explain Douyin’s main features, and outline video marketing’s latest trend in China.
What is Douyin (TikTok China) ?
Douyin is now the most popular video clip platform in the world, with 800 million daily active users in China. This figure explains why foreign companies choose Douyin as their marketing tool in China.
In traditional channels, brands lose their influence over time. Douyin, on the other hand, is a new medium where new brands can get a chance to rise and old brands can get a second chance to grow, as long as brands can produce engaging content and win wide attention.
Why use Douyin to promote your brand in China ?
All the brand’s users are on Douyin
Douyin has a large user base, covering all regions and age groups in China. So for brands, Douyin is a natural gathering place for users and one of the best social media platforms. Generally speaking, where the users are, the demand is there. Based on the demand characteristics, brands can more easily identify their selling point, and develop strategies to achieve higher conversion rates.
Douyin: advanced and scientific algorithms
Although there are large numbers of content contributors on Douyin, Douyin gives a lot of fairness to new content creators in the form of both videos clips and live streams. Therefore, both new and old brands have equal opportunities to become popular in Douyin.
For example, Douyin’s recommendation algorithm has added a new feature: after an influencer’s account publishes content, it will give priority to fans who have followed this influencer for a long time. The video will be rated according to audiences’ behavior (like & share & comment), and then promoted on a large scale when its play & share rate reaches 60-70%. This is fairer for new users, making the traffic distribution more balanced, and is also good for the stability of the account.
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For live streams, Douyin’s traffic mechanism is “decentralized”, meaning that there are no “monopolizers ” in Douyin, which is also very advantageous for new brands to become popular among users and to compete with chinese companies.
Douyin: flexible and efficient marketing methods
The integration of e-commerce offers a variety of ways and tools for brands to find their own marketing methods.
Juliang Engine: Through this platform, advertisers can advertise, view data, optimize advertising times, locations… within Bytedance’s ecosystem such as Toutiao (headline)and Xigua Video.
Juliang Qianchuan: Two types of ads are available for brands.
- Brand advertising: Douyin opening screen ads (Top View & Top Live), Douyin feed ads (Feeds Live & Video Live), Douyin search ads. These practices will increase brand exposure, enhance brand influence and maximize audience reach rate.
- Performance-based ads: A variety forms of advertising can be realized in Douyin, including: video clip feeds, Feeds live, short video lead-in live, search ads, keyword bidding, …
Douyin provides flexible ads’ placement strategy, with accurate reach and monitorable advertising effect.
Juliang Chuangyi: it is the official video creation tool provided by Giant Engine. It searches all platforms for creative ideas, and provides regularly updated methodology to guide users to produce an ad video within 5 minutes,helping users succeed in video content marketing.
Juliang Xingtu:Through industry analysis, Juliang Xingtu combines the trend and KOL (acronym for Key Opinion Leader) profile analysis for brands to find more suitable KOLs, so as to achieve efficient and highly accurate placement.
Douyin (TikTok China) E-commerce integration
Douyin e-commerce has changed the purchasing behavior of users to a large extent. The purchase process on Douyin is: content browsing – information stimulation – demand generation – purchase order. This is now the popular “interest-based e-commerce”, through the “interest-based e-commerce”, whether it is graphic e-commerce, video e-commerce, or search e-commerce, live e-commerce, it allows brands to easily achieve brand exposure and sales conversion, the brand can fulfill both the target of enhancing brand exposure and increasing product sales.
So, having understood the importance of Douyin in China, we’ll give you the answer to the question: how to use Douyin in China?
How to use Douyin (TikTok China) for digital marketing in China?
Having understood the importance of Douyin in China (click to find out more), we find that Douyin carries an important marketing function. So on top of live entertainment, Douyin has innovated the commercial play of live e-commerce and sees live merchandising as the focus of Douyin’s future development.
Therefore, we summarize the marketing methods in Douyin as three points: advertising, producing engaging content, and developing e-commerce.
How to advertise on Douyin (TikTok China)?
Guiding users to participate
Unlike traditional advertising methods, advertising on Douyin must be done in a way that Chinese users like, focusing on universal participation and two-way communication.
For example, when setting up challenges, this type of marketing cares less about the creativity of the advertising material and more about how to run events that increase exposure and sales. In the age of digital media, brands must learn to increase ‘user engagement’ to achieve their marketing objectives.
To encourage this approach, Douyin has introduced a “challenge” game, with a variety of task types for brands to choose from. Challenge topics and gameplay require creativity from marketers: easy to participate, effective, fun, in line with the brand’s philosophy and with attractive rewards, such as cash and gifts.
Precise placement
Precision placement means that the new brand has to find the right KOLs, who can be non-vertical to the product area, but whose persona should be positioned in line with the brand image and create a good brand association.
Originality: the content should be real, informative and credible, i.e. the product can satisfy the user’s needs in a real scenario, preferably with evidence.
Finally, after the video has been created and released, select users who match the brand’s objectives.
Extensive promotion
Extensive promotion means that brands should not be limited to one mode of promotion, which is to seek cooperation with KOLs, but can carry out multiple forms of advertising simultaneously to form a “matrix”, such as open screen ads + feed ads + search ads, etc.
How to create quality content on Douyin (TikTok China)
Account positioning
Account positioning is “finding an empty space in consumers’ minds and occupying it”. Account positioning refers to finding a suitable position for a brand in the major content performance areas of beauty, talent show, knowledge share, drama and other categories, and creating unique content through differentiated personas and expressions.
Mining content
Brands can identify the top search terms associated with their industry at the moment, and then analyze them to decide whether they should move closer to them or eliminate them when creating content, whether they should follow the trends or create unique content.
Creating content requires a keen sense of professionalism and innovation. When a brand has a unique insight into its own content presentation area, it should be bold enough to add elements from other areas to discover content that is unique to it and successfully optimize its brand positioning. Examples include science-themed videos with performance elements, painting-themed videos with rap elements, etc.
Shaping the persona
The key to creating a persona IP is to impress audiences, how do you do this?
It is important to create a unique IP based on the profession, personality, clothing, accessories, voice, body language and behavior of the person featured. If there is no real person, you can create a unique caricature or a unique voice to create a persona IP.
Putting on DUO+
Simply put, DOU+ means paying for impressions. “DOU+ ” likes fuel and power; it adds to the content’s impression. You can put DOU+ on your own videos or on other people’s videos. For example, we can start with ” recommendations” , and then choose five benchmark accounts that match the brand’s image. Display your ads on douyin to “followers” of accounts that are “similar to brand” . The reason is that it can reach users who may have the most desire to watch brand’s content.
Keep on trendy topics
In the long-term operation of a brand account, brands can continuously pay attention to the trends of Douyin, as long as the hot topics do not destroy the current account content positioning, you can create content accordingly.
When posting, you can enter “hot topics”, “content topics” and “domain topics” in order to get Douyin’s traffic recommendations. In this way, you can get the traffic recommendations from Douyin without destroying the long-term positioning of the brand.
How to develop e-commerce on Douyin (TikTok China)
Creating a Live Streaming Room
In China, live e-commerce is already very mature, after full development, now the live e-commerce has essentially no longer relied on price to obtain users, but on content.
The live-streaming room of Douyin is made up of scenes, script sales pitch, emotions as well as the display of goods.
Great scenes, such as virtual scenes or real scenes such as factory floors or natural environments, which determine the atmosphere, brand tone and pricing level of the live stream.
The anchor is important, who adopts a unique discourse and must be able to deliver knowledge or emotional value to the audience, interact closely with them and be able to transfer them to loyal customers.
The all-round display of goods is the largest advantage of live e-commerce. Even if traditional e-commerce product’s description and products’ pictures display are very persuasive, audiences still prefer to watch live-shopping. They can observe products in 360 degrees vividly, and the live anchor’s explanations are more convincing than words.
Douyin Shop
Douyin small shop is an e-shop opened in Douyin, similar to a Taobao shop. The important thing is that now the Douyin small shop is still in its early stages of growth; Douyin offers a lot of benefits for newcomers.
Douyin e-shop’s advantages
First of all, Products sold o, Douyin Live are from Douyin e-shop.
Secondly, the cost of customer acquisition is low with less competition. The 600 million daily activity of Douyin constantly refreshes the data of live-shopping , which obviously has more opportunities compared to Taobao shops.
Thirdly, transactions can be completed within Douyin, and the conversion rate is high. Previously, Douyin worked with a third party APP to complete the transaction, while Douyin e-shop as a built-in module of APP, transaction can be completed within it.
Fourth, multi-channel synchronized display, higher exposure rate. After opening Douyin e-shop, the brand can not only promote its products on Douyin, but also show it in other channels such as Toutiao, Xigua Video and Huoshan Video.
How to operate the Douyin (TikTok China) e- shop ?
Once the products are on the shelves, it’s time to focus on traffic. Because the more exposure the shop has, the more transactions will be made.
At present, the two most effective sources of traffic for Douyin small shops are organic traffic and KOL.
Organic traffic
After the merchandise is on the database, it will enter the organic traffic flow, which is recommended to users according to the algorithm. There are various operational features available such as :
- Choosing goods that are popular on the Douyin platform and match the interests of Douyin users when selecting products.
- Operating the e-store with a positive product rating of over 90%.
- Having a shop experience score of preferably more than 4.75
- Being familiar with the rules of Douyin to avoid rule violations.
- Beautiful and highlighting main images of products, and constantly optimizing keywords in product titles.
Matching with KOL
If you are a new shop with few fans, there is another effective method: find influencers and let them help the brand with orders, and the brand pays the commission. Brands can go to Dou Laoban, Xingtu or ChanMama to find them; or they can just go to Live Square and search for products and look for influencers who are on live.
Overall, Douyin is strategically important to Chinese consumers and the Chinese market, and brands need to fully understand the mechanics and features of Douyin in order to successfully market on the platform and achieve sales.
In this process, the consumption habits, psychology and marketing culture of Chinese consumers are again of paramount importance and play a decisive role in the outcome of the marketing. This is why it is crucial for brands to find a professional marketing partner for themselves.
Want to learn more about Douyin (TikTok China) ? Get in touch with STAiRS.We offer advice on Douyin related issues: account registration, content creation, account operation, advertising and e-shop management etc.
With a professional team and extensive marketing experience, STAiiRS provides digital marketing services and solutions for all kinds of brands to help them expand their reach in the Chinese market. If you have questions and needs, don’t hesitate to contact us for a consultation!
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