Douyin and Meituan are once again involved in local life live streaming

Driven by the wave of digitalization, local life services are undergoing earth-shaking changes. The participation of platforms such as Douyin and Meituan has made live streaming and low-price strategies a new trend in the local life field. This article deeply analyzes the impact of live streaming on local life services, explores how this emerging model can increase sales while coping with the problem of write-off rate, and looks forward to the future development potential of this trend.

Local life cannot escape the influence of live streaming and low prices.

The birthplace of this movement is Douyin. After physical e-commerce made its way into the market, Douyin's local life has also conquered the market with short videos + live broadcasts. The live broadcast rooms of catering, leisure, cultural tourism and other brands are on par with physical e-commerce. Although they are trapped by the problem of low write-off rates, leading companies such as Dongfang Zhenxuan and Yuhui Tongxing have already tasted a lot of sweetness in cultural tourism.

Under this wave of impact, Meituan officials also personally stepped in, using low-priced group buying coupons as a stepping stone to promote the integration of catering, cultural tourism and other fields with live streaming.

Different from the platform models of Douyin, Video Number, Kuaishou and other companies, Meituan’s official live broadcast is a bit like e-commerce self-operation. Limited by the attributes of the trading platform and the restrictions of the self-operation model, the scale of live broadcast transactions is also limited.

However, this does not hinder the enthusiasm of local life to rush to the live broadcast room. After all, in such a depressed environment, any possible increase cannot be missed. It's just that things may not be as simple as they imagined.

1. Live streaming, the “new antidote” for local life?

Like e-commerce, offline businesses hope that live streaming will be an antidote to break the downturn.

In April this year, founder Zhou Chengjian worked hard to attract customers to Metersbonwe's offline stores. He sold group coupons through short videos, live broadcasts, and expert broadcasts, and guided consumers to visit the stores to select items and experience them. After more than a month of the service going online, the cumulative sales exceeded 100 million yuan.

It is not just offline clothing stores that are selling group-buying coupons, even the shopping malls that everyone is familiar with are looking for new possibilities through online channels. Group-buying coupons are sold in live broadcast rooms, and users redeem them offline. These are the members that can be seen with the naked eye.

The live streaming of local life seems to be an irreversible trend.

In 2023, the total transaction volume of Douyin's life service platform increased by 256%, and its stores covered more than 370 cities. Compared with last year, the platform's short video transaction volume increased by 83%, and the platform's live broadcast transaction volume increased by 5.7 times.

Meituan, a platform known for its transaction genes, has also found a sense of presence in the live broadcast room. Whether it is Douyin or Meituan, the leverage factor of the live broadcast room is still low prices.

At Meituan’s third quarter earnings conference last year, a full quarter had just passed since the launch of Meituan Live, and Meituan management mentioned that in the past quarter, in the hotel and travel businesses, consumers paid more attention to cost-effectiveness and used multiple channels to make purchasing decisions. Meituan attached great importance to consumers’ in-store discounts. Therefore, Meituan integrated the existing model and enhanced the special discount section to promote low prices.

Soon after Meituan Live went online, GMV surged. Management mentioned that in September last year, the average daily live broadcast volume of Meituan Live increased by more than 300% compared with June, and GTV increased by 40%.

Meituan's low-priced live broadcast room also transfers pressure to merchants. In the second half of last year, Hua Xia Liang Zi, a company specializing in the health and wellness industry, could broadcast live on Meituan for 5-6 hours each time. Meituan's official live broadcast staff once mentioned to the media that for large merchants like Hua Xia Liang Zi, the product prices are determined by the merchants themselves, but if the brand participates in the official broadcast in Meituan's official live broadcast room, the supply price must be at least 30% off the platform's selling price.

This was also a helpless move by the platform. At that time, Meituan Live was a new channel, and the platform's official live broadcast room was still in the "startup" stage. For each directly-operated city, the platform would create an exclusive city account, and the use of the account would be controlled by Meituan employees. In other words, in Meituan's official city live broadcast, the platform would invite different merchants to enter, and sell group purchases of a group of merchants in the same live broadcast room.

36Kr also interviewed an insider from Meituan who mentioned that in the early days of Meituan Live, commercialization was zero and no merchant slot fees or commissions were charged. After Meituan Live went online, its GMV increased several times month-on-month, and the live broadcast format also changed from relying entirely on official live broadcast rooms to nearly 300,000 merchants participating independently by the end of last year.

Since July last year, "Meituan Live" has been placed in the recommended position on the homepage of the Meituan APP. Entering through the first-level entrance, the page presents a live aggregation page - near the consumer's location, there are a large number of different takeaway and in-store local life merchants broadcasting themselves.

Meituan mentioned in its first quarter financial report this year that "Meituan Official Live Broadcast" has expanded to more regions, the frequency of live broadcasts is increasing, and the discounts for merchants participating in "special group purchases" are increasing.

2. From Talent to Broadcaster

Live streaming is a content channel for local life, and anchors are an inevitable part of it. The earliest form of anchors in the local life field is store explorers.

Because Douyin has entered the local life field in a high-profile manner, the number of views on store exploration topics has exceeded 300 billion. Expert store exploration has helped Douyin open up the monetization link on the merchant side. It can be said that in addition to the low-price strategy, the model of expert store exploration is also the "contributor" to Douyin's conquest of local life.

In fact, at the beginning, in order to quickly expand the scale, there was a big shortage of store exploration experts. For this reason, Douyin not only held talent recruitment activities and shouted the recruitment slogan "Many merchants! Many orders! Few Internet celebrities, and the accounts are simply not enough", but also launched the "Store Exploration Team Contribution List" to stimulate the enthusiasm of experts to explore stores.

At the end of 2021, some national or local KOLs and KOCs began to emerge and produce popular content. For example, the well-known Langweixian, Mizijun, Erbaizheye, Baibing, Ulala, and True Detective Gao Wenqi, etc.

At the same time, the carrier of group buying has also undergone subtle changes - some group buying packages have entered the live broadcast room from short videos. The era of group buying live broadcast has arrived. The big mouth girl of T97 Coffee became popular in this round of transformation cycle of Douyin local life.

In September 2022, this female anchor with bright red lips became a phenomenal anchor at the time with her rhythmic "RAP+shouting" live broadcast style, and also shaped a new paradigm for local life live broadcast at the time. The brand founder of T97 Coffee even regarded her as the next "Li Jiaqi" of local life.

According to relevant media reports, during the period when Big Mouth Girl was live streaming, T97 Coffee gained 1.47 million followers in 2 months, the highest number of viewers for a single game reached 10.82 million, and the highest number of people online at the same time was as high as 173,800.

The personal IP of "Big Mouth Girl" was quickly formed. In addition to T97 Coffee, she has appeared in the live broadcast rooms of brands such as KFC, Niu Yue Burger, and Gu Ming. With her extremely high popularity at the time, as long as she appeared in the live broadcast room, the number of online users could basically reach 100,000+. Live broadcasts of experts and merchants have become the key support targets of Douyin's local life in 2022.

Ziqian, the founder of MCN Maodou Media behind Dazuimei, once mentioned in an interview with Doujiao TMT that local life can indeed obtain traffic support from the platform, and the local life live broadcast room with Xiaohuangwu has better traffic than the e-commerce live broadcast room with Xiaohuangche. For example, the e-commerce live broadcast room is not allowed to heat up the content, and it is not allowed to invest in Douyin+, but the local life live broadcast room can, and it will not be restricted by the traffic level.

Live streaming has thus become a new addition to local life. If brands adopt the investment ratio of "40% of merchants' own live streaming" + "30% of experts' live streaming" + "30% of experts' short videos", and implement the matrix strategy of "1 merchant's own live streaming" + "1 super head + more than 10 local experts' live streaming" + "3000+ experts' short videos", they can further impact a better GMV level.

In the past two years, in addition to Douyin, Meituan and JD.com have also launched local life live broadcast rooms. However, compared with the Douyin live broadcast room that focused more on popular content in the early days, the live broadcast rooms of Meituan and JD.com focus more on product transactions.

Regardless of its form, live streaming has penetrated into every aspect of local life today and has become a core business strategy in the field of life services.

3. Difficulty in Write-off

Although live streaming has brought new growth to local life, it is not a "panacea" for local life.

One fact that platforms and merchants have to accept is that no matter what form it takes, the difficulty of moving local life online is always that due to the limitations of time and space, the group purchase coupons sold cannot be put in the pocket until the consumers finally redeem them.

Ge Juan, the on-site general manager of Guangzhou Baiyun Hotel, once frankly mentioned in public that Baiyun Hotel has made many attempts to sell goods through live streaming, including with Ctrip, Meituan, and Douyin, but it is undeniable that the write-off rate has always been a headache for the company.

The write-off rate of group-buying products has always been a difficult problem. As early as 2021, Douyin launched catering group-buying coupons, and the order write-off rate was less than 30% at that time. Even two years later in 2023, the write-off rate of Douyin catering group-buying coupons was only up to 60%, among which fast food and tea and coffee group-buying coupons had the highest write-off rate.

The write-off rate of hotel and travel group purchases is even much lower than that of in-store dining. According to the survey data of Yibang Power in July 2023, hotel and travel have the lowest write-off rate among the three main businesses of Douyin Life Services. At present, the write-off rate of hotel and travel merchants' orders is below 30%.

Yuan Dapeng, deputy general manager of Mangshan Forest Hot Spring Hotel, started live streaming local life in 2020. He can be said to have witnessed the entire process of the development of local life on Douyin. At present, there are two main forms of live streaming for hot spring hotels: live streaming with Douyin and live streaming with Xiaohuang Car. The other is live streaming on Video Number and Xiaohongshu to the private domain.

Last year, the overall write-off rate of his hotel was about 35%. In order to concentrate the traffic, they would choose to hold large promotions with a relatively short cycle to increase the write-off rate, but it can only reach 40%. In the hotel and travel category, although the write-off rate of 35% to 40% is relatively ideal, it is still far from comparable to physical e-commerce.

It's not just Douyin. The settlement situation of Meituan's live broadcast room, which is defined as a tool, is also not much different from that of Douyin.

According to data disclosed by Tianfeng Securities Research Institute, during Meituan’s live broadcast event from April to June last year, the average conversion rate of merchants’ live broadcast orders was 30%-40%. According to data from service providers interviewed by 36Kr at the end of last year, the overall write-off rate of Meituan’s live broadcast room (orders ultimately converted into store sales) is currently around 60%.

The data from the merchants confirms this. Jiang Xiao, head of Meituan's live broadcast business at Hua Xia Liang Zi, said last year that Meituan's online group purchase write-off rate is higher than that of offline platforms, and the write-off rate on the day of sales can generally reach 50%. After Meituan's live broadcast in August last year, the overall write-off rate of the entire store increased by another 15%.

In order to break through the limits of the write-off rate, the platform will also make some intervention actions and strategic arrangements.

For example, in Meituan's live broadcast room, Xinmei Daybreak observed that after the anchor posted the product link, he would constantly remind consumers not to forget to go offline for redemption. However, whether a coupon can be redeemed is always in the hands of the consumer.

Douyin teaches merchants in "Douyin Group Buying Live Broadcast Methodology" that "if you want to achieve a rhythmic step-by-step increase in GMV while maintaining a stable redemption rate, then you should do a large-scale live broadcast at least once a month." Because data shows that the longest time period for user redemption is the 25th to 28th day.

While trying to resolve the obstacles, the platforms also recognized the facts. So we can see that both Douyin and Meituan tend to choose categories and brands with stronger e-commerce attributes.

For example, chain brands with a large number of stores across the country - coffee, milk tea, fast food chains, restaurants, or tickets to scenic spots with a wider user base.

In the second half of last year, Xiao Kun, head of flash sales, also mentioned the role and limitations of live streaming in Meituan at the Meituan Flash Sales Conference. He said that merchants who have tried live streaming will basically increase their investment in live streaming, except for some merchants with "limited number of stores."

In the early days, even though T97 Coffee had cultivated top-tier anchors, it was still limited by its offline store layout. Although fans in the live broadcast room purchased coffee vouchers, there were no stores where they could be used, which affected the final redemption of the vouchers. Ultimately, the GMV of the live broadcast room could not be converted into real sales.

After all, local life products are sold offline in-store products and services, and there are too many variables that affect the final redemption of group purchase coupons. Platforms, merchants, live broadcast rooms... No matter who it is, except consumers, they can never control the final destination of a group purchase coupon.

If you can't decide where the dice will land, then increase the number of times you roll the dice. This may be the only way out in this uncertain moment.

Written by Li Huan, edited by Zhai Wenting. This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Xinmei daybreak], WeChat public account: [Xinmei daybreak]. It is originally created/authorized to be published on Operation Party. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.