Douyin Reaches 100 Million Daily Video Views. Practical Tips for Marketing on Douyin.

Short music video Douyin has quickly become soaring popularity among the Generation Z consumers in China.  Even for 70s and 80s, they also start to play Douyin.  Frankly, I’m not a Douyin user and I’ve just downloaded the app last week.  But as a marketer, we need to keep in touch with the latest trend and understand why people love it so much. 

Douyin Annual Marketing Conference was just kicked off in Shanghai recently to demonstrate how brands work with Douyin.  As introduced, many big brands from different industries including adidas neo, Pepsi, Tommy Hilfiger, Toyota, Audi, Under Armour, Jeep, Ctrip and Pizza Hut have already run campaigns on Douyin.  Adidas neo is the Top 1 brand page in Douyin with astonishing result: 1.2 million fans, 150 million video views and 2.8 million engagement.

Some people ask whether they should also consider Douyin as a marketing tool for their products.  Marketers are already frustrated by the high cost and increasing difficulty to reach a young consumers on Weibo and WeChat platforms. They are afraid of missing any new opportunities so they are eager to experiment with Douyin for advertising and marketing campaigns. 

Due to the fast growing demand from brands, Douyin is no longer a “cheap” promotion channel.

What’s Douyin?

“Douyin, brings you a wonderful feeling of life experience.” said Ms Zhang Nan, General Manger of Douyin in the conference.

Douyin, aka Tik Tok outside China, was launched as a music video platform and social network in September 2016 by ByteDance, which owns popular Chinese news app Jinri Toutiao and video social network app musical.ly. The music video app is growing to over 100 million users within a year and now becomes the number one ranked app overall in the China Apple’s App store.

Similar to the American social video app musical.ly, Douyin makes it easy for users to create and share music videos by providing powerful and easy-to-use editing tools that add catchy music and special filter and sticker effects to videos. 

Celebrities and influencers use 15 second short videos to engage with their fans and grab mobile users’ attention, while many Gen Z consumers follow the format as a way to express themselves.

According to Douyin, most users of Douyin are teenagers and young adults under 35 years old and live in tier one and two cities. 60% are female users, and over 60% with university education. 

4 Tips for Marketing on #Douyin

Everything has its pros and cons, and Douyin is no exception. Before blindly rushing in, companies should evaluate carefully whether the platform is suitable for them.  There are four fundamental questions you need to consider:

Does Douyin match with your brand attribute?

What kind of brands are doing well on Douyin? For those popular products, they possess the following attributes:

• Frequent purchase
• Low customer involvement
• Low barrier of trial

Haidilao (海底捞，a popular hot pot chain stores) creates a Challenge campaign of “Douyin” recipe, driving online customers to their offline restaurants. It attracts 15K Douyin users to participate, making about 2000 UGC (user generated content) of short videos with 50 million video views.  Sales of the Douyin recipe has increased by 17%.

DIY food is not a new concept but it immediately produces chemical reaction when making it as an interesting music video on Douyin, which triggers people’s curiosity to participate and try by themselves, as a result, generating high O2O sals conversion rate.

If your products fulfill the above three attributes: low value, high frequent purchase and low involvement, like FMCG, you can consider to try Douyin marketing.  However, it’s still a tremendous challenge to create high quality short video that can attract audience’s attention within 15 seconds. 

A creative hashtag “Challenge” is definitely crucial to the success of a Douyin campaign.  Without a good trigger for call-to-action, a campaign can easily fall flat.  Another common approach is to use humorous content which is easy to catch audience’s attention on the app.  Nevertheless, not all the brands are appropriate to associate with comedy.  

Does your brand itself generate buzz? 

Car purchase definitely belongs to high value, low purchase frequency and high involvement. Whereas, Toyota, Audi and Jeep are doing very good promotion in Douyin.   There is another factor we can’t neglect when evaluating Douyin — brand value.  

For example, if you get 10 millions exposure in Douyin which converts to just 1% of sales increment. It’s still worth investing for car brand because of its high profit margin.  However, if you are only a small company with low sales volume, you may get negative ROI even though you can achieve 10% sales increase after using Douyin.

Brand itself has value with intrinsic power to generate buzz.  Apple ranks No 1 in the world’s most valuable brand list with $170 billion worth of brand equity. Even if something small happens, Apple will immediately get high public attention without much media investment.  For an unknown brand, how much do you need to invest to achieve the same level of publicity?  Do you have budget to hire influencers to make your campaign go viral? If not, Douyin is a nice-to-have but not must-have for your marketing.

Does Douyin match with your marketing objectives?

For giant brands, the purpose of using social media is not solely for sales.  They are willing to spend to enhance brand exposure, influence and preference.  If you are only a SME with limited budget, growth is the key of survival and hence, sales conversion rate is a crucial evaluation factor for every marketing expenses.  Douyin may not be a good choice for you because no one can guarantee your return of investment.  In order to limit your possible risks of zero returns, you can first use  A/B tests with small budget to measure effectiveness of Douyin marketing.  Once you’ve learnt some possible ways to increase sales conversion rate on Douyin, you can gradually increase your marketing budget.

Do you have a local team to manage Douyin? 

The majority of Douyin’s target audience is Generation Z, which is defined as post-millennial demographic group.  You definitely need a local team that speaks the same language with them and understands their behaviors in order to craft the right marketing campaign.  Not to mention that your team needs to be creative and have the ability to generate good quality of short music videos constantly.  Alternatively, you can hire an ad agency to help if you do have marketing budget.

Another factor you should consider is risk management.

Douyin is a social platform for UGC so it’s totally out of your control.  It’s obvious that quality of contents on Douyin in general remains quite low and a lot of videos are boring to watch.  Even for the Challenges, your campaign may end up with hundreds of videos that all look the same.  Besides, it is inevitable that some people may deliberately produce contents that cause damage to your brand.  You also need to take good care of your content released to social medias, especially when your team is not mature or lack of experience to judge the potential risk.   

In China, any negative word-of-mouths once go viral will be a disaster for a brand.   

Please also read: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/douyin-reaches-100-million-daily-video-views-does-your-eddie-hung/

About Author