China Marketing Insights Monthly Newsletter [August 2020]
Hello,
Welcome to our August Newsletter.
China is further easing restrictions within its border as we see from news headlines, Wuhan held a weeklong beer festival and, internationally much covered, thousands dance away in a pool party; Beijing is reducing restriction on face mask requirement in the capital. More brands are planning for an expected surge in domestic travel especially to Hainan & Macau as border opens progressively to different provinces in China.
First & foremost, together with our partners, we are hosting the first Douyin live-streaming for celebrity Angela Zhang, we have a few slots left for brands, reach out if you want to learn more.
This is an “insights” issue – we have 3 major reports covered – a detail look at Kuaishou audience profile; deep insights into live-streaming; KOL Marketing on new media.
More travel & tourism related media are partnering with e-commerce to expand their services, we cover 2 news this month – Live streaming on XiaoHongShu can link directly to Tabao product page; Ctrip & JD.com join to promote tourism & e-commerce.
Finally, in our app of the month, we take a closer look at XiaoHongShu app.
From all of us here at OctoPlus Media, we wish you and your family great health and safety.
Sincerely,
Mia C. Chen
CEO & Co-Founder of OctoPlus Media
THE VALUE REPORT OF KUAISHOU’S USER
Kuaishou is the second most popular short video platform in China with over 300 million DAU, about 85% of users are from tier-two and lower cities, rapidly becoming popular in China’s lower-tier cities. After growing mostly from popularity in China’s rural areas and lower-tier cities, Kuaishou moved into live streaming, e-commerce, and long-form videos in the face of more competition. As Kuaishou continue its monetization initiatives, it also made some strategic updates. In May 2020, it has announced a strategic partnership with Jing Dong (JD.com), another e-commerce giant, and a direct rival of Alibaba. With this partnership, Kuaishou users can complete the purchase on JD.com without leaving the Kuaishou app during live streaming sessions. Kuaishou has 3-5 times higher e-commerce conversion rates compared to other similar platforms.
Recently, the CBNData collaborated with Kuaishou, to release a new report “The value report of Kuaishou’s user” (快手人群价值报告), based on the consumer insights of the Kuaishou users, to analyze the new consumption situation of the population characteristics and provide brand marketing insights.
Key Insights from the report:
- Kuaishou is a popular short video platform in China with over 300 million DAU, more than 3/4 of users are 85s, and the proportion of millennial users is significantly higher than Douyin and Taobao.
- Young users showed super purchasing power; top categories include – used cars, customized home decoration, training, electronic products, pets and food.
- In the GMV monthly ranking of E-commerce Live-Streaming anchors in 2020, 50% of them are from Kuaishou.
- Interest consumption is the main feature of young people. Beauty makeup and skincare products are popular, mostly from post-95s.
- 89% of fitness users have consumption behaviour through Kuaishou. In the past year, 54% of users spent more than 1,000 RMB on fitness products, and 15% of users spent more than 5,000 RMB.
- Among the game users of kuaishou, more than 50% of them will pay for the game every month, and more than 80% of them will play mobile game for more than 1 hour every day.
- The content of “cloud tourism” was very popular during the epidemic. The live streaming of the hotel/homestay attracted a large number of users, and the video was played over 4 million times.
- In terms of content in the education field, there are 120 million short videos and 400,000 live streams. Each video has an average playback amount of 12,000 times and user browse the knowledge content for about 15 minutes a day.
- 70% of Kuaishou users are willing to pay for knowledge, and more than 50% of parents invest more than 10,000 RMB in “early education/interest classes” for their children.
- The number of users who are recommended to purchase on the Kuaishou platform reached 76%; 40% of them are because they trust the anchor and 33% love the anchor.
The purchasing power of Kuaishou user not only reflects the commercial value brought by the vertical interest circle but also represents the explosion of private domain traffic in the social circle. As a video platform with 300 million daily active users, Kuaishou has more than 400 million likes per day. It has a leading position in the field of video and e-commerce. It also lays the foundation for community marketing.
Kuaishou Platform:
300 million + DAU
20 billion + Average daily video views
15 million + video created per day
200 million + interactions
100 million + Live-streaming DAU
Kuaishou Content:
Challenge + Magic Emoji + Brand live-streaming
Kuaishou Ad Type:
Open screen ads + Newsfeed ads
Kuaishou has stronger user engagement, rich live streaming content, higher e-commerce conversion rate, and more social functions. All of these advantages provide customers with good market opportunities.
2020 LIVE INDUSTRY ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH REPORT
The live streaming industry has once again become the focus of attention due to the rapid rise of e-commerce live streaming. Various platforms and companies have increased their investment in live streaming. At the same time, the scale of anchors and users are also growing rapidly.
According to “2020 Live Industry Ecological Research Report” released by the NResearch, by March 2020, the number of live streaming users had reached 560 million, accounting for 40% of China’s total population. 62% of netizens are live streaming users, with 265 million of them using e-commerce
Key Insights from the report:
Education Sector
Due to the impact of the epidemic in 2020, the attention of education live streaming content has increased. Taking the WeChat platform as an example, in March 2020, the number of articles mentioned in education live-streaming content reached 2,134, and the number of readers exceeded 12.49 million, an increase of 56 times over the same period.
Pan-Entertainment Sector
With the rise of live streaming, the production method of pan-entertainment content is also changing, with “cloud tourism”, “cloud travel museum”, “cloud concert”, etc. Besides, due to restrictions on offline activities, “slow live streaming” has also attracted users’ attention with typical content includes “live stream of construction”, “live stream of sleeping”, and “live stream of pets”.
The educational service platform includes Kuaishou, Huya, XDF, Xueersi, Nail, DIngtalk, WeChat work, Xiaoe-tech, etc.
E-commerce Sector
The report shows that from January 2019 to April 2020, the peak of the number of articles and readings number mentioned in the WeChat official account of “e-commerce live streaming” appeared in April 2020, with nearly 25,000 articles and total reading number nearly 60 million.
The industry chain of e-commerce live streaming is also improving. Various industries are trying live streaming, such as automobiles and real estate, etc. Meanwhile, Kuaishou, Douyin, Bilibili and other video platforms also provide traffic and operation support for e-commerce businesses.
Corporate live streaming has also become a new trend. The Boss speaks for his own brand, and actively links the platform and KOL to expand influence, increase conversion rate, and bring more traffic and exposure to the brand.
With the development of the live streaming industry, diversified content types, vertical content fields and refined content operations will be the future development trend of the live streaming industry.
KOL MARKETING ON CHINA NEW MEDIA
The emergence of Covid-19 has made consumers pay more attention to online. With the diversification of consumers’ exposure to media, new media marketing has become the first choice of advertisers.
The roles of marketing service providers, new media platforms, MCN agencies, and KOLs have developed impressively in recent years, and they have jointly created a good environment for the development of the new media marketing industry. The demands, such as enhancing brand awareness, driving product sales and promoting differentiated features of brands, are all met by new media marketing forms.
1. New media marketing service providers: The upgrade of marketing data helps brand owners effectively connect with consumers, and can also provide brand owners with instant and complete data support.
2. New media platform: KOL-based new media marketing is carried out on e-commerce platforms, short video platforms, social platforms, and online video platforms through various forms, with rich content dimensions and expression ways, which continue to attract users’ attention. At the same time, the data and influence of mainstream new media platforms continue to expand, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Taobao and other major mainstream platforms can help brands achieve diversified marketing needs.
3. MCN agencies: The new number of MCN is growing rapidly year by year, and its development is becoming more and more mature, which is helpful for KOL to realize systematic and professional content creation and inject development vitality into the new media marketing industry chain.
4. KOL: The diversification of marketing content and methods has enhanced KOL’s ability to guide consumers’ consumption and enhanced market attention.
New media platforms have different strategic advantages and multi-platform integrated marketing can enhance the marketing effect.
The following are the main platforms with high consumer activity and social fission spread characteristics.
- Social Platform: Weibo, WeChat
- Video content platform: Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou
- E-commerce platform: XHS, Taobao, etc.
What is worthy of the brand’s attention is the new media marketing strategy on WeChat platform:
- In-depth marketing of brands or products with the content written by KOL has become one of the new media marketing features of WeChat platform.
- The content channels gradually created by WeChat also provide more and more marketing strategies for KOLs. For example, KOLs can recommend products to consumers with relevant interests in the WeChat group. Meanwhile, KOL can also deliver more informative marketing content to consumers in the form of short videos in WeChat video account.
- In terms of conversion, WeChat’s mini-programs and other functions make the conversion process of marketing content more convenient.
LIVE STREAMING ON XHS CAN NOW LINK TAOBAO PRODUCT LINKS
Xiao Hongshu, known as the Chinese version of Instagram, has more than 250 million users. As the young people’s lifestyle sharing platform and the entrance to the consumption decision, it provides a highly advantageous platform resource for brand reputation marketing. With the continuous development of social e-commerce, Xiaohongshu vigorously develops its own E-Commerce business (like the APP function combined with Instagram and Amazon)”, such as XHS note content is linked to XHS store, live streaming function, etc., but its disadvantage is that it is only limited to XHS’s e-commerce platform, and it requires companies to open the XHS store, especially for overseas brands, the requirements are relatively high.
According to China media reports, the well-known Xiaohongshu blogger “Ai Chou Mei de Gou tian er” who with 1.58 million fans posted a Taobao link in the live-streaming room on August 16, allowing users to click on the link and go directly to the Taobao page. In response, Xiaohongshu responded that the function is currently in the testing stage and only a small part of the link path is open to Taobao.
This cooperation between Xiaohongshu and Taobao help to complement Xiaohongshu’s young female users and community attributes with the Alibaba e-commerce brand’s desire to expand consumer groups and seek breakthroughs in the social field, it will greatly help the brand marketing on the Xiaohongshu platform.
In addition to the Taobao link in the internal test of Xiaohongshu’s live streaming, on August 15th, Xiaohongshu also officially launched a video account (short video content marketing).
This is one of series of new development from Xiahongshu, we will start seeing more features rolling out soon to help brands take advantage of the user base.
CHINA’S LARGEST TRAVEL AGENCY AND AN E-COMMERCE GIANT JOIN FORCES TO EXPAND COOPERATION IN TOURISM AND E-COMMERCE
During the COVID-19 epidemic, cross-border cooperation has become one of the major expression of the transformation of the tourism market. Ctrip and JD.com signed a strategic cooperation agreement on August 16. The two parties will carry out all-round cooperation in user traffic, channel resources, cross-border marketing, business travel expansion, and e-commerce cooperation. High-quality service + high-quality supply chain will infinitely amplify the value of both parties, and will also bring more business opportunities to the tourism market and e-commerce industry.
Ctrip and JD.com each own over 400 million active users. Ctrip Group has sustained its role as a leader in China’s business travel market, while JD.com owns 8 million corporate clients and tens of thousands of selected merchants. After resuming of cross-province group tourism in China, both sides fully seize the opportunity and carry out efficient cooperation, and it is expected that Ctrip products will be launched on JD platform within 8 months.
Through the strategic cooperation, Ctrip will not only bring JD.com highly competitive tourism products and services but also, with JD.com’s support, further extend the tourism-related business, providing more diversified products and services to more than 400 million Trip.com users worldwide. In the future, the two parties will work together through the perfect combination of travel and physical objects, logistics, and big data to continuously introduce new business models to cater the diverse needs of consumers before, during and after travel.
Resource: https://kr-asia.com/jd-group-and-trip-com-partner-to-catch-travel-industry-rebound
CHINA BLOCKED THE LIVE-STREAMING OF “BIG STOMACH KING” IN FIGHT AGAINST FOOD WASTAGE
The behaviour of some food vloggers entails serious wastage of food in China. On August 13, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV criticised online eating programmes that show participants consuming an excessive volume of food, and even spitting out the food after eating, describing them as “an extreme example of food waste”. Chinese mainstream video media such as Douyu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Station B, Xiaohongshu, Weibo have all responded by deleting or removing relevant video content, and even suspending broadcasting and banning accounts.
In fact, eating live-streams are one of the most popular video content. For example, the topic of “big stomach king” videos on Douyin has been played 7.16 billion times, and various forms of eating live-streaming content are endless, such as the challenge of ten burgers in 10 minutes, eat 20 ramen noodles in one hour, etc.
Compared with other live-streaming categories that require performances, the “eating live-streaming” is a lower standard. You can accumulate attention as long as you can eat. Many anchors earn huge profits through users’ rewards and cooperation with businesses. To get more engagement, some anchors pay the cost of their health and lives, bringing negative impacts to individuals and society. Also, some anchors try to cover up the “fake eating” through editing and other tricks.
Although the negative images and fraudulent method of “eating live-streaming” emerge one after another, it still attracts the attention of many viewers. The reason is that this kind of live streaming cater to the psychological needs of users and makes up for the lonely feeling of eating alone. Another reason is that many anchors give detailed descriptions of the feeling and taste of the food in the process of eating, which makes up for the “substitute taste psychology” of the audience.
XIAOHONGSHU - ONE OF THE LARGEST AND FASTEST GROWING SOCIAL E-COMMERCE APPS IN CHINA
Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book, It’s one of the largest and fastest growing social e-commerce apps in China, and unlike other e-commerce platforms, it started as a community where users can post product photos with reviews and tips for other users to read, comment, and save to their boards, It describes itself as “a sharing platform for young people’s lifestyles through deep-rooted UGC shopping sharing community”. But now this community has became what is known as a cross-border social e-commerce platform, threatening Chinese giants such as Taobao, JD, etc. This platform is designed to help users discover and purchase products, share recommendations, and provide helpful tips. Users often go on Xiaohongshu to investigate products and look for in-depth reviews and tutorials created by other users. Think of Xiaohongshu as a combination of Instagram and Pinterest.
XHS platform value:
- 60 million MAU
- 200 million Registered user
- 250,000 new notes posted/day
XHS Ad type:
- Search ads
- Stream Ads
XHS user:
- 85% of users are female, 84% are under age 30
- 60% from 1st tier 1 & 2nd tier cities
- 60% IOS user
- 600+ Celebrities join and share notes
-End of the Newsletter-
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