Tmall's top massager, became the new "gold owner" of B station

Miaojie, the sales champion of massage devices on Tmall, has become the new "gold sponsor" on the Bilibili platform. Through extensive publicity and investment strategies, it has successfully improved its brand image and sales performance.

Following Mengyajia and Pinduoduo, Miaojie has become the new "gold sponsor" of B station UP masters.

If you are a Bilibili user, you may have noticed that over the past six months, the promotion of a massager has almost swept the platform - from food exploration, film and television complaints, to life, reviews, and even current affairs UP hosts, all have been cared for by Miaojie to varying degrees.

According to third-party data, Miaojie has been ranked first on the B-station's list of brands that bring goods for seven consecutive months from the end of last year to May this year. In the highest month, there were 477 videos related to Miaojie on B-station, with a total of over 100 million views, which can be called a "breakthrough" debut. Many users on the Internet complained that "almost all the UP hosts I follow are promoting Miaojie."

This "wide-ranging" advertising campaign, combined with subsequent conversion strategies, has enabled Miaojie to make the leap from a "semi-white label" to a well-known brand, and become a choice for consumers besides big brands. In the Tmall flagship store, Miaojie's R3 mini shoulder and neck massager, priced at 418 yuan (618 discount price), has sold 200,000 units, with an estimated sales contribution of over 80 million yuan, ranking first on Tmall's cervical massager hot-selling list; the second-best-selling U-shaped neck pillow has sold 60,000 units, contributing sales of over 10 million yuan.

How did Miaojie get to "speed up" Bilibili?

1. Miaojie "contracts" the UP host of Station B

Miaojie was officially founded in 2021. At that time, the founder Jin Yuanliang withdrew from the driving school training industry and urgently needed to find a breakthrough for his second entrepreneurship. After a series of attempts, he and his team came up with the idea of ​​building their own brand, and then targeted the massager track.

This judgment was based on the market size of massagers, which had been rising steadily for many years. According to the data from the Health World Research Institute, from 2016 to 2020, the market size of my country's smart wearable device industry increased from 17.52 billion yuan to 63.22 billion yuan, with an annual compound growth rate of 37.8%.

In the massager segment of the health vertical, the feasibility has already been verified by "predecessors": in 2021, SKG achieved a revenue of 1.06 billion yuan; Beurer not only achieved a full-year revenue of 1.19 billion yuan, but also went public in July of the same year, and was known as the "first portable massager stock" on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

Jin Yuanliang's choice was proven to be correct. In 2022, the Miaojie massage pillow became the top waist massage product on Tmall; in 2023, the Miaojie brand revenue exceeded 200 million yuan, and a popular massager achieved annual sales of more than 90,000 units in the Tmall flagship store alone.

Spending a large amount of money on marketing may be the fate of massager brands. Since 2021, Beurer has signed Xiao Zhan and Yi Yang Qianxi as brand spokespersons, and placed the main marketing platform on Douyin; SKG signed Wang Yibo and expanded its brand voice by sponsoring many variety shows such as "Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves".

In contrast, Miaojie did not do more to enhance its brand power through marketing, but instead allocated its budget to maintaining its reputation. On the marketing front, it turned its attention to Weibo and Bilibili, and initially selected lawyers and postgraduate entrance examination bloggers as the first batch of KOLs.

The reason for choosing Bilibili is that, firstly, brands such as Beurer and SKG have already occupied the minds of consumers on Douyin, while Miaojie’s average customer price is not low, so it is difficult to gain an advantage in terms of price. Douyin’s traffic strategy may not be suitable for Miaojie. Secondly, the main consumer group of massagers is getting younger, and the young customers of Bilibili are not so attached to mature brands. In the words of Jin Yuanliang, “They are more willing to believe in good products and are more willing to listen to recommendations from recognized experts.”

If we summarize Miaojie's advertising strategy on Bilibili, it can be summarized as "large quantity and sufficient content". The brand promotion covers multiple vertical UP hosts such as film and television, food, life, current affairs, etc., forming a "human sea tactics". From the perspective of ordinary Bilibili viewers, that is, when watching videos of different UP hosts, they will repeatedly see Miaojie's advertisements.

For example, @特厨遂卞, a food blogger with 1.5 million followers, received 5 Miaojie ads within 30 days, 4 of which were from massagers and the other 1 was from the brand's eye protector; his other account with one million followers, @遂卞做, received 3 Miaojie ads within 30 days.

To some extent, it is not an exaggeration to say that "Miaojie has contracted the entire B station UP host". According to third-party data, in 2023, Miaojie deployed 492 UP hosts and 1,100+ videos. Since June last year, Miaojie's deployment on B station has gradually increased. By May this year, due to the Mother's Day marketing node, Miaojie's related sales videos in a single month reached 440+, ranking first in the brand deployment list. The second brand is PROYA.

Although it looks like "indiscriminate delivery", upon closer inspection, Miaojie's delivery strategy can be said to be well-targeted.

2. Two-way cooperation with mid-level UP hosts

Compared with massager brands such as Beurer and SKG, which have already enjoyed considerable popularity in the market, Miaojie's own brand power is not outstanding, and its price power does not have a clear advantage. How can it expand its brand popularity and make consumers want to buy? Miaojie's solution is to target the crowd and reach out repeatedly.

Looking at the brand's placement on Bilibili, its three main products are the Miaojie R3 Neck and Shoulder Massager, the U-shaped Neck Pillow, and the R3 Eye Massager. Among them, the R3 Neck and Shoulder Massager is a big hit that frequently appears in UP main videos, with 400+ UP mains associated in 2023.

In Miaojie’s Tmall flagship store, this hot-selling product is priced at 418 yuan, which is not low in terms of average order value. Even if consumers have shopping needs, consumption decisions may be a slow process. Therefore, repeated exposure is very important.

Specifically, on the one hand, Miaojie prefers to cooperate with UP hosts in the life, knowledge, food, games and film and television sections. For example, @格里老哥, who focuses on daily pranks with his girlfriend, released a total of 3 videos in May, one of which was a promotion for Miaojie. The traffic in these sections is large enough, and most of the influencers work at desks for a long time, which is a group of people who have a strong demand for massagers. They can give the brand more accurate feedback on product improvement, and they are more persuasive when promoting.

Miaojie also collaborates with UP hosts in the health field to endorse its products. For example, @孔博士工作室, which has 590,000 followers, promoted Miaojie massagers in a video about relaxing the neck and shoulders, which received 9 million views. According to Titanium Media, six months after the video was released, the video still brings in about 10,000 GMV per day for the brand.

On the other hand, Miaojie has completed a "two-way rush" with mid-level UP hosts on Bilibili. The aforementioned @特厨遂卞 and @格里老哥 are already top UP hosts, but Miaojie's most extensive and frequent cooperation is with vertical UP hosts with 10,000 to 500,000 fans. This type of UP host may not be enough to go viral, but has a stable and highly sticky audience for vertical content, and has a certain fan appeal, giving Miaojie the opportunity to leverage high exposure at a low cost. In particular, most of these UP hosts face the problem of difficulty in monetization, and the cooperation with Miaojie can be described as "a perfect match."

In terms of the delivery method, Miaojie's approach is very "simple and crude", that is, inserting dozens of seconds of patch advertising materials into the video, and coordinating with the UP host's oral broadcast, directly outputting the main selling points of the product to the audience. After watching a lot of Miaojie's embedded ads, Kas found that most of the UP hosts have a set of rhetoric, including "it feels like a manual massage", "pressing the neck and kneading the shoulders", and then mentioning the "technological content" of the product - 8D massage head.

To switch from video content to this set of words, you only need to trigger a "silky combo". For example, the UP host is filming a movie frame by frame, and just talked about the village chief falling asleep due to exhaustion, and suddenly changed the subject, "If the village chief sleeps with his neck bent like this, the pressure on the cervical spine will be very great..." Then it smoothly cuts into the advertising time. Such an advertising material usually lasts about 1 and a half minutes.

In the video comment area, Miaojie uses "pinned comments" and blue links to convert, and users can click to receive coupons to purchase related products on Taobao or JD.com.

Image source: B station UP host @特厨遂卞

The human-wave tactic is undoubtedly effective. For products such as massagers, which have similar technical content, when the market is not yet saturated, the louder the voice and the deeper the reach, the more likely it is to bring about a surge in sales. Especially when influencers frequently appear with massagers, consumers will naturally become curious. In the comment section of the Miaojie flagship store, consumers often ask, "Is this product from Bilibili good to use?" According to Titanium Media, as of now, Miaojie's GMV on Bilibili has accounted for 10% of the brand's total GMV, with an average customer price of around 400.

What’s interesting is that, taking advantage of the opportunity of “becoming a sponsor”, Miaojie is also working hard to build good relationships with young people on Bilibili.

At present, the reputation of Miaojie among B station users is divided into two major camps. One camp is grateful to Miaojie for contracting UP hosts in many difficult-to-monetize sections such as knowledge, film and television, and current affairs. After all, dozens of seconds of advertising materials can be inserted anywhere and do not affect the quality of the video. The other camp expresses boredom and will drag the progress bar when the UP host triggers the "silky combo".

Due to the large amount of advertising, the brand called itself "an unknown urger" in the homepage introduction. Users who want to urge a certain UP host to update can tag the brand to do the advertising. After repeatedly advertising a certain UP host, users will naturally interact with the Miaojie official in the comment area, or joke when the UP host receives advertising from another brand, "This may not be another kind of NTR."

3. A replicable “speed pass” strategy

Before Miaojie, the ones who were teased for "acquiring" Bilibili were Mengyajia and Pinduoduo. In addition to Miaojie, there are many brands that "cast a wide net" and cooperate with Bluelink to "quickly pass" Bilibili.

One of the representative brands, "Shenqi Xiaolu", focuses on scientific sleep products. Its popular products include a decompression neck pillow with a customer unit price of 214 yuan and a small ice quilt with a price of 218 yuan. In terms of advertising, Shenqi Xiaolu and Miaojie have a high overlap rate, and they also favor UP hosts in the food, knowledge, and film and television areas. For example, the food store exploration UP host @橙飞一下 has received brand advertising many times; for example, the men's care brand "Hen", third-party data shows that in 2023, the total number of UP hosts invested by Heen exceeded 750, and the number of videos released reached 1,300+. The bloggers who invested were mainly mid-level bloggers, among which fashion UP hosts accounted for the largest proportion.

In fact, it is not difficult to find out from observing the brand placement list that this year B station’s product promotion ecology shows three major trends.

First, many brands have begun to explore the consumption potential of men on Bilibili. Previously, the hair dryer brand Lefen had captured the hearts of straight men with a press conference. Although Lefen's success is difficult to replicate, more and more brands are beginning to turn their attention to men. For example, Heen and Ocean Supreme, which specialize in men's washing and care, Madden Workwear, which focuses on men's wear, and the condom brand Chijiu. This year, Ximuyuan also cooperated with the knowledge zone UP host @小翰可汗 to promote the men's special washing and care set.

Second, blue link has been widely used by brands for promotion. Blue link refers to a blue link with goods inserted and pinned by UP hosts in the comment area of ​​a business order video, usually accompanied by a UP host's recommendation copy. Users can click it to jump to the product purchase page. This marketing tool is often used as a supporting facility for brands to place UP hosts, directly linking products to transaction scenarios after the content is planted.

Since last year, many brands have linked up with UP hosts to connect Bluechain to Taobao or livestreaming, and have achieved good results. According to third-party data, in May this year, the number of products sold on Bluechain at Bilibili reached 224,000, up 22% from April. The main categories of products sold were beauty products, household appliances, and mobile phones and digital products, of which products with a unit price of 5,000 to 10,000 yuan accounted for 14.58%.

Third, with the help of traffic-generating tools, some health brands have also expanded on the platform, such as Notland and Reese, targeting people who want to lose weight. Exploring the model of "fast-tracking" health products on Bilibili, some have cooperated with fitness and sports UP masters, while others have directly cultivated special advertising accounts, and then invested heavily in traffic to increase exposure, frequently appearing in content recommendation positions, and forcing users to pay attention. For example, Move Free, which focuses on bone health, cooperated with @ Dr. Kong's Laboratory to promote a professional repair product. With the help of traffic-generating tools, this grass-seeking video received 22.2 million views.

In addition to brands, there are also many white-label products that are expanding rapidly on Bilibili. Some of them have poor content capabilities and have grown wildly simply by "burning money" to release low-quality advertising materials, which once affected the content ecology of the platform.

Back to Miaojie, the brand's main sales channels currently include JD.com, Taobao and Tmall. On the one hand, it has made a name for itself on platforms such as Bilibili and Weibo, and on the other hand, it has quickly sold products in live broadcast rooms. However, in order to upgrade from a brand recognized by the public to a real brand, in addition to extensive marketing, Miaojie's next step may be to gain more brand power through refined operations.