Hebei Chemical Plant Becomes TikTok's Top Streamer. What Inspiration Does It Have for To B Enterprises Doing Short Video Marketing?

This article mainly discusses how Donghua Jinlong, a chemical company in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, conducted short video marketing through the TikTok platform, which attracted domestic and international attention and heated discussions, and provided new marketing ideas and reference significance for the company.

"Donghuajinlong is the world's best quality glycine", "Go to Donghuajinlong to buy glycine". Since when, Donghua Jinlong, a chemical company from Shijiazhuang, Hebei, has suddenly become a top streamer on the foreign short video platform TikTok.

Countless foreigners expressed their love for Donghua Jinlong's glycine products on the TikTok platform and created a large number of related videos. Some created a "glycine espresso" video, some did professional science popularization, and some designed a joint game of Donghua Jinlong and created "Donghua Jinlong Song". Even the well-known foreign media "Washington Post" paid attention to the Donghua Jinlong explosion and directly stamped it as "TikTok's top streamer in 2024".

However, when analyzing the overseas explosion of Donghua Jinlong, Morketing found that this was all due to the marketing attempts of Donghua Jinlong, a To B enterprise, on the C-end social media platform. Therefore, today we will talk about the topic of how To B enterprises can do marketing on short video platforms.

1. The Hebei Chemical Plant That Got Popular Overnight

Donghua Jinlong has become so popular on TikTok in recent months that it has almost become a MEME. MEME refers to a popular Internet cultural gene that is copied and spread in a derivative way. Simply put, it is a "viral" thing, such as the recent videos dubbed with magical cat materials by many brand official accounts.

According to data from the Echo Tik platform, the traffic of videos released by Donghua Jinlong on TikTok has surged since April. Not only have the videos released by the company become more popular, but netizens' various videos of Donghua Jinlong's secondary creations have also received a lot of attention and traffic.

In just a few months, Donghua Jinlong's official account gained tens of thousands of followers, more than 500,000 likes, and 1.8 million views for a single video. The two topics #glycine and #DonghuaJinlong have been viewed 65 million and 17 million times respectively, which can be said to be extremely popular.

If we only look at these achievements, some people may think that this is nothing more than the result of a popular online consumer brand spending a lot of money on promotion and marketing. But as mentioned above, Donghua Jinlong is not a popular online consumer brand, but a chemical company that is far away from the public, and it also produces industrial-grade glycine products. In other words, Donghua Jinlong is a typical To B company, and there are no products that can be directly provided to ordinary consumers.

So how did Donghua Jinlong, a B-to-B chemical company, set off a viral craze on the TikTok platform? According to Morketing, Donghua Jinlong originally wanted to expand overseas markets and establish connections with potential customers of glycine chelates, so it found a company to promote it overseas. But I don’t know if the agency company had less experience and posted the promotional video for B-to-B companies on the TikTok platform.

Objectively speaking, the plain, stiffly edited and robotically dubbed promotional videos released by Donghua Jinlong are factory promotional styles from five to ten years ago even in China. But as luck would have it, it was these "obviously tacky" promotional videos that received a huge amount of traffic from Generation Z overseas on TikTok.

It is hard to say how Donghua Jinlong's earthy videos first became popular among overseas young people, but according to Donghua Jinlong, it was probably when users were scrolling through TikTok to watch all kinds of funny clips and handsome men and beautiful women, suddenly a video from an exotic country appeared with a stiff robot voice-over to promote industrial raw materials and factories that they had never heard of, and tried to sell you industrial additives that ordinary people would never buy. As more and more users were exposed to these videos, the absurd and bizarre experience brought by the videos gave overseas netizens something to play with, and as the memes spread, more netizens joined in.

Since Donghua Jinlong has become a popular video app on TikTok, it seems that expanding overseas markets will not be a problem. However, this is not the case. According to Zhang Jianfei, chairman of the company, in an interview, although the video gained a lot of traffic on TikTok after it became popular, it was not very effective in finding real customers.

In fact, this is exactly the dilemma that Morketing believes To B companies will encounter when doing marketing on short video platforms: either because To B products are too far away from people's lives, boring publicity cannot attract attention; or like Donghua Jinlong, after accidentally stepping on the traffic trend, it finds that only traffic is attracted but no orders, resulting in a mismatch between traffic and corporate needs.

2. New inspiration for B2B enterprises to bring goods

Similarly, when we turn our attention to China, we will find that the marketing of To B enterprises on C-end short video platforms can also be described as "difficult". Since Douyin and Kuaishou brought the domestic mobile Internet into the short video era, To C brands have undergone multiple rounds of evolution around the traffic dividends of short video platforms such as live broadcast and slicing. But for To B enterprises, although they know that short video platforms have many advantages, luck and strength are indispensable to reap this traffic dividend.

Take the two strong performances of To B enterprises in the live broadcast room of short video platforms as an example. One time, the top anchor Wei Ya and Taobao platform sold rockets in the live broadcast room, and the other time, Luo Yonghao sold a satellite worth 1 million yuan in the live broadcast room. Whether it is rockets or satellites, they are absolutely To B attribute businesses, and it is quite appropriate to use them to represent To B enterprises.

After analyzing the marketing cases of the above-mentioned To B companies, Morketing believes that To B companies should pay attention to the following three aspects when empowering short video marketing:

1. Understand the characteristics of each platform and find the traffic scenario suitable for the brand

Frankly speaking, participating in offline industry exhibitions, holding summit forums, salons, private meetings and other marketing activities have always been an important way for To B companies to conduct industry exchanges and acquire customers. Because in these scenarios, the proportion of business practitioners is relatively high, and the participants are basically industry-related people.

However, as short video platforms and live streaming have become new productivity, companies have begun to realize the importance of acquiring customers through public domain traffic. For To B companies that want to make money from public domain traffic, different short video platforms also have different properties and positioning.

For example, traffic on Douyin and Kuaishou mainly comes from recommendation and attention flows. The platform features weak relationships and strong content. The quality and interestingness of the content can enhance the recommendation strength of the system and easily form the effect of PGC to UGC imitation . For example, Donghua Jinlong’s popularity on TikTok overseas can be regarded as the result of PGC and UGC content to a certain extent. Therefore, light-hearted and lively content is more likely to be popular on Douyin and Kuaishou. These two platforms are more like a propaganda platform for corporate brands to potential users.

The characteristic of WeChat video accounts is strong relationships . A lot of the traffic of video accounts comes from likes, group sharing and Moments. Compared with Douyin, this kind of communication is more accurate. From the perspective of content orientation, WeChat short video content is not so lively, and it serves more as a corporate business card. To B companies can spread partial brands and product cases here.

As for Bilibili, traffic mainly comes from zone recommendation and attention flow. The platform is characterized by a strong community atmosphere and a user group with obvious characteristics of learning and knowledge dissemination. To B companies can regard Bilibili as a platform for sharing knowledge, and high-quality professional content will be more popular with platform users.

2. Change the logic of content creation to let To B products be seen by the public first

Since To B products are far from the lives of the general public and have many complex and abstract concepts, the audience of short video platforms will have a high cost of understanding. Therefore, for To B companies, they should choose the appropriate content output method on the platform to explain their products and services, which can be divided into two aspects: one is to be seen by everyone, and the other is to be understood by everyone.

Let’s take being seen by everyone as an example. The products and services of To B enterprises are not for ordinary people, so they have no advantage on short video platforms that are more entertainment-oriented. Therefore, enterprises should do everything possible to make themselves seen. For example, Wei Ya selling rockets and Luo Yonghao selling satellites mentioned above, the enterprises do not necessarily expect to rely on the audience in the live broadcast room to take pictures of rockets or satellites worth millions, but want to use the huge traffic of the live broadcast room of top anchors to let more people see their products.

In fact, To B products have indeed achieved this after entering the top live broadcast room. For example, before and after these two live broadcasts, the topic of selling rockets/satellites has been searched many times on social platforms and received a lot of attention. The live broadcast also attracted a large number of viewers on the day of the live broadcast. From this perspective, regardless of whether the products are sold or not, at least these two To B products have successfully gone viral.

Next, the marketing content creation of To B enterprises needs to be simplified and made human-friendly so that people on the short video platform can understand it. In simple terms, it means expressing complex and professional terms in the simplest and most vivid words, and using the vivid and intuitive characteristics of short videos to present the advantages of products and services.

Here is an example of an industrial Internet company doing short video marketing. The company's products and solutions mainly provide factories with safety management system integration based on AI visual recognition. It is difficult for non-professional practitioners to understand this product. Therefore, in order to let people intuitively feel the value of the product solution, their promotional short videos are mostly real monitoring data, such as the AI ​​smart video in the cement plant identifying the smoke on the conveyor belt and quickly triggering a safety warning , and the factory conveyor belt tearing triggering an alarm, etc.

These videos of theirs are based on the demand scenarios of corporate users. Even without too much text description and professional data, they can still attract potential customers, thus achieving the purpose of short video empowerment marketing.

3. Looking at the long term, live streaming for B2B companies may not be aimed at short-term sales.

Whether it is short videos or live broadcasts, it is like a long-distance race for To B companies. This is because the transaction process of To B companies is often more complicated and takes a long time. Even if the needs of both parties are in line, they still have to go through a series of links such as signing contracts and technical cooperation. It is far from being as simple as "paying and receiving the goods" in ordinary shopping.

Furthermore, from the perspective of the shopping decision-making process in the live broadcast room, To C purchases in the live broadcast room are often emotional consumption. The live broadcast room is more like a decision-making chain designed for the C-end group. For example, the anchor in the live broadcast room will output a lot of information to stimulate consumers to place orders quickly. However, at the corporate level, it is usually the team that makes decisions. The long and complicated decision-making process greatly reduces the possibility of emotional consumption. Therefore, it is difficult for To B companies to complete transactions directly through the live broadcast room.

On the contrary, To B companies can use live streaming as a way to display information and reach target customers, thereby promoting people's recognition and understanding of brand products.

Take the example of a "priceless" live broadcast on WeChat last month, where the host brought the first batch of public data products in China, such as meteorological data products covering precipitation, wind speed, and temperature, and Fengyun satellite atmospheric motion observation products . Due to the particularity of the data products, the host did not "link up" like other live broadcast rooms, but carefully introduced the application scenarios of meteorological data in agriculture, transportation, low-altitude economy and other fields, and said that the data products have no fixed price, but will be negotiated according to the situation.

As for the reason for holding this special live broadcast, Wang Guangsheng, Chairman of the Greater China Region of the International Data Management Association, once explained that in the past, some data products had been listed for more than a year without any clicks, most likely because people did not know the existence of these data products. Now data suppliers are taking the initiative to use live broadcasts, a form that is well known to the public. Even if the products are not sold, more people can learn about the products, which is also a good way to attract potential customers.

In Morketing's view, short videos and live broadcasts are both carriers of corporate brand communication. To B marketing, like to C marketing, ultimately aims to reach potential target customers. At a time when short videos have become the basic market, although To B short video marketing cannot directly sell goods and boost sales, it is also worth further exploration for the long-term development of corporate brands.

Author: Lumens

Source: Morketing