For businesses with a large number of physical stores, Video Account may be your last chance to transform online

For businesses with many physical stores, digital transformation is not easy, but the emergence of video accounts may provide new opportunities for their online transformation. In this era where traffic is king, how to use video accounts to achieve seamless online and offline integration has become a direction for many brands to explore. This article will deeply analyze how video accounts can become an effective tool for businesses to transform online, explore its unique advantages in the WeChat ecosystem, and how to accumulate and operate private domain traffic through video accounts.

At the end of last year, I invited Mr. Sun Laichun, the founder of Lin Qingxuan, who was a student of the third session of the "Founder Global Growth Strategy Class", to record a conversation on Haoyouquan. When I mentioned that the current traffic environment is very complex, many brands, in the process of chasing "traffic", easily overlook the essence of business, which is to make solid products, channels, and consumer services. Therefore, many brands that have become famous because of "traffic" can easily fall from grace after the traffic disappears.

In this regard, Sun Laichun also gave a positive response. He said: As a high-end domestic skin care brand, Lin Qingxuan seems to have missed the Taobao brand era, the WeChat business era, and the Douyin brand era. It has only been honestly doing research and development and opening stores. But looking back at the path it has taken over the years and the collapse of peer brands, you will find that although the pace was a bit slow, it actually did not miss anything.

In his heart, he always has an idea: "Instead of following the trend, it is better to build a ship."

The "ship" that Sun Laichun wants to build can be understood as the Lin Qingxuan brand, the IP, and the brand potential and consumer loyalty it has established. On a smaller scale, it can be interpreted as the offline stores that Lin Qingxuan has opened across the country. According to Sun Laichun, as of 2023, Lin Qingxuan has opened more than 400 offline stores across the country, and Sun Laichun is also one of the founders of the beauty industry who is most obsessed with opening offline stores.

Many people may ask: Isn’t the migration from offline to online the overall trend of commercial retail in recent years? Is it necessary for offline stores to invest so much attention like Mr. Sun? Is there a risk of loss when opening an offline store?

In this regard, I would like to put forward two personal opinions: the first opinion is that although the general trend of commercial retail is to migrate from offline to online, and this trend is still in progress, the offline business ecosystem is unlikely to disappear, and it can only migrate. For example, the inherent functions of offline stores have changed from mainly selling to mainly acquiring customers and providing experience; the second opinion is that future commercial customer acquisition must be integrated online and offline. The fundamental reason is that in the era of stock competition, companies need to compete with their peers in operational efficiency, and an important way to improve operational efficiency is to reduce customer acquisition costs. Obviously, compared to acquiring customers only online, offline can also become an important traffic supplement.

However, it is not easy to integrate online and offline customer acquisition and operations, which is limited by subjective and objective conditions. From a subjective point of view, even within a brand, the retail department and the e-commerce department are often two teams, with great differences in terms of product inventory, consumer group portraits, and management assessment mechanisms. Therefore, there are natural barriers to breaking through the internal brand; and objectively, there is also a lack of a handle or a centralized field that can effectively promote the transformation of brands to online and offline integrated operations.

1. Video accounts make online and offline integrated operations a reality

However, the emergence of video accounts is expected to make online and offline customer acquisition and business integration a reality. Why do we say that? As we all know, many brands have a large number of stores and dealers. During the epidemic, some stores and dealers have already started the rhythm of live broadcasts to minimize operating losses.

However, teaching this group of people to make Tik Tok and strive to get the top 5% or 10% of traffic in the track according to the rules of the track has a very high threshold and is very difficult. Moreover, as the scale of revenue grows, it is also necessary to reach all consumers (including those who have purchased and those who have not) through repeated advertising, which also leads to higher and higher labor costs and customer acquisition costs.

Therefore, we see that when the offline economy has slightly recovered its vitality, those stores that had already started the normal rhythm of self-broadcasting on Douyin have returned to the offline physical business order. In 2023, we can see that a large number of brands’ "matrix self-broadcasting" on Douyin are already in name only.

But compared to Douyin, Video Account is more suitable for matrix self-broadcasting.

There are three reasons. First, Video Account grew up in the WeChat ecosystem, and WeChat is centered on "people", which means that Video Account has more operational compounding potential than any other platform. Second, Video Account is positioned as an atomic component, which means that its traffic sources are extremely rich, and it can achieve connectivity between public and private domains, and between online and offline. Therefore, the threshold for starting a Video Account is relatively low, and multiple traffic entrances will also bring about a continued decline in the operating and customer acquisition costs of Video Account.

Most importantly, the most distinctive value of the video account is that it can activate the private domain capabilities of the store, conduct matrix management of the store on the video account, and use the private domain to manage the customer's entire life cycle. The recommendation rules and customer acquisition methods of "private domain + content + social + live broadcast" are obviously more in line with the company's long-term business expectations.

Of course, to improve the feasibility of long-term operations, the brand needs to make two changes.

First, the functions of the existing store shopping guides need to be upgraded. In the past, store shopping guides were only responsible for the sales actions of customers from entering the store to leaving the store, but now the store shopping guides have to manage the entire life cycle of customers. In plain words, shopping guides must not only do a good job of in-store sales, but also learn to add customers to WeChat, operate in the circle of friends like WeChat merchants, and actively introduce the activities of the video account live broadcast room through social groups, circle of friends, 1V1 private chats, etc., to guide users into the brand live broadcast room. Imagine that if a brand has tens of thousands of stores, and each store has 5 shopping guides, and each shopping guide can maintain a private domain with more than 1,000 people, then the private domain that this brand can operate is thousands or even more than 10,000 people. Don’t think this is difficult. Watsons has moved the main battlefield of live broadcasting to the video account based on its 20 million private domain users.

Second, it is necessary to build a content middle platform with training as the core. This content middle platform should not only provide the team with professional training on systematic business capabilities, but also be responsible for the output of a large amount of content, including popular short video copywriting, live broadcast operation Sop process, main product selling point analysis, and also be responsible for the supply of content materials for the circle of friends.

For stores and operators that are capable of broadcasting, they can find new business venues outside the store through professional empowerment. For stores and dealers that are unable to broadcast on their own, they can be asked to distribute the video content provided by the headquarters and accumulate private domains on the video account. They can also divert the accumulated private domains to the headquarters' live broadcast room and activate these people's transactions.

I want to talk about an important product here. The PC version of the video store has a [Store Sharer] function. Brands can enter the business and personal WeChat accounts of shopping guides, community operations, customer service and other staff members to make them sharers. The transaction performance generated by the shopping guides and others entering the live broadcast room can be calculated to the shopping guides, so as to enhance the shopping guides' long-term maintenance enthusiasm and connect the online and offline business models.

I believe that connecting online and offline business models is a future business model that most brands will find hard to resist. Video accounts + private domains are an important way for brands to achieve online and offline integrated operations, and an important model for changing the business ecosystem. I interpret it as the biggest business change in the next five years.

2. With video accounts as the central field, these brands are taking action

So which brands have already started joint operations on Video Account?

From my personal observation, clothing brands that are positioned in the mid-to-high-end market and mainly target women aged 35 and above are the first brands to bet on video accounts and have reaped the benefits of integrated online and offline operations.

Typical representatives include: Ying'er Group, a "top student" in private domain operations, which has multiple accounts broadcasting on video accounts. According to the observation of the Kas Consulting team, during the 618 period in 2023, 7 brands under Ying'er Group were listed in the TOP50 of the video account's sales list (such as Yin'er, Psalm, etc.); secondly, there are mid-to-high-end women's clothing brands such as Gloria and Gedi Zhenhao, which have also built a live broadcast matrix of headquarters + regional stores.

Here I will focus on the brand "Gedi is really good". Gedi is a brand under Gedi, originated from Taiwan, China, founded in 2011, and positioned for younger people. The characteristics of the brand are unified pricing across all channels, no discounts or promotions throughout the year, and it is famous for the "god-level matching ability" of its sales staff, and the quality of the brand is very good.

Affected by the epidemic, Gedi began to explore Douyin live streaming in 2020, and got on the right track in 2021. According to data compiled by the industry analysis team of Kas Consulting, in 2022, the sales of Gedi and its sub-brand Gedi are expected to exceed 1.2 billion on Douyin. By 2023, the group's expected GMV on Douyin is expected to exceed 2 billion.

With a relatively mature live broadcast operation methodology, "Brother Di is really good" also entered the video account track in April 2021, with the headquarters flagship store taking the lead. By the beginning of 2022, offline stores also joined the video account live broadcast queue. It is one of the first brands to establish a live broadcast matrix of "group headquarters + nearly a thousand offline stores" on the video account.

According to relevant data, in less than a year since its official launch, the monthly turnover of "Brother and Brother are really good" on the video account live broadcast has stabilized at the tens of millions level, and the total monthly turnover of stores has exceeded the monthly turnover of official stores, and a store live broadcast room with a daily turnover of 100,000 to 200,000 has been created.

In order to study Gedihao, I followed no less than 10 live broadcasts in a row and found that its "people, goods and venues" have not reached the ceiling level. For example, the live broadcast of Gedihaohao headquarters adopts a multi-platform streaming model. The advantage of streaming is to reduce operating costs, but the disadvantage is that it cannot make customized operating results plans based on each platform, and the anchor cannot take care of the user experience of all platforms. Although the central control will actively answer user questions in the comment area, it feels that the effect is not as good as the anchor's personal answers and the conversion is fast.

From the perspective of matrix construction, the store matrix of Brother is really good is a bit similar to the "violent" account creation method of Douyin in its early days. Judging from the account names alone, there are still stores named with numbers, such as @哥弟真的好-8156 and @哥弟真的好82862. In addition, the store's inventory is relatively unified, relying on the headquarters' planning, and there is no personalized operation layout based entirely on the store's population portraits, regional population preferences, conversion preferences, etc.

But this does not seem to affect Gedi's positive results on the video account.

Analyzing the reasons, first, the brand started to deploy video accounts early and was one of the first brands to launch live broadcast rooms that never set. Moreover, the target audience is highly consistent with the audience of the video accounts, so there is a dividend for development. Second, the brand’s reputation and the perception of high quality and “worth it” that has been formed in the minds of users over a long period of time. Third, GeDi insists on the operating principle of linking public and private domains.

According to Li Shurong, the person in charge of live broadcast operations of Gedi Video Account, in a previous response to the media, before launching store live broadcasts, Gedi headquarters consciously built a closed loop based on the WeChat ecosystem during live broadcasts. For example, before important live broadcasts, Gedi would make a preview through its official account to guide fans of the official account to make reservations for live broadcasts. During the live broadcast, Gedi would also embed links to the official account to guide users to settle on the official account.

After the store joins the queue of video account live broadcast, the store becomes the core node of "public-private domain linkage diversion". Before starting the live broadcast, the store manager and shopping guide will make full use of private domain resources (including Moments, WeChat groups, private chats, etc.) to warm up before the live broadcast, so as to achieve extensive reach of precise users. It is reported that all Gedi stores have established WeChat groups. In the past service process, store managers and shopping guides are also accustomed to adding customers on WeChat. As a result, each store manages thousands or even tens of thousands of old customers. These customers have also become early customers of Gedi video account live broadcast, which improves the certainty of store account establishment.

On Zhihu, a user posted a document that was said to be from the internal department of Gedi. The effort put into maintaining old customers was terrifying: 10 phone calls a day, 20 1V1 WeChat contacts, and 50 posts a day on Moments. But what's interesting is that users are not too disgusted with such marketing, and the brand's invitation success rate is relatively high. One important reason is that the salesperson knows his customers very well, and will match them based on the height, figure, and preferences of the users. The recommendations are basically accurate, and the details of human relations are also very detailed.

Of course, the most important value of the linkage between public and private domains is to help brands achieve continuous accumulation of people.

By using the public domain (live broadcast room) to divert private domain (official account), "Brother and Brother are really good" has gained more than 200,000 followers in less than half a year. Brother and Brother stores use the "private domain" accumulated in the early stage as a fulcrum and the crowd portrait of the private domain as a label to leverage the distribution of more public domain traffic. The precise users in the public domain traffic will be precipitated as new increments in the private domain, continue to feed back the public domain traffic, and drive the continuous expansion of the transaction scale of the live broadcast room.

Here, I once again call on brand merchants who have a large number of offline stores and physical distribution to join the video account matrix live broadcast team.

The reason is not only because of the low entry threshold mentioned above and the long-term operation of private domains, but also the key point is that the video account grew up in the WeChat ecosystem and will definitely stick to the "decentralized" traffic distribution route.

Whether now or in the future, the scale of video streaming for a single live broadcast room is limited, which also means that the transaction volume of a single live broadcast room will not show explosive growth like Douyin, and matrix live broadcast is an important way to expand the transaction volume.

In my founder's global growth strategy class, I repeatedly emphasized that the "field" of Video Account is more like a county town. Compared with Douyin, users trust the recommendations of "acquaintances" more. Therefore, even if the competition among merchants becomes more intense in the future, users will be more willing to stay in the live broadcast rooms of influencers they are familiar with and continue to consume. The users of Video Account, both in terms of liquidity and bounce rate, will be lower than expected than Douyin.

Finally, I would like to end this article with a quote from senior tech self-media person Wei Xizhibei: If you dig deep into the Tencent ecosystem, every well will have water. That is why, if you want to do video account e-commerce, you must learn to dig more wells.