The most difficult 618 in history, who makes money by selling goods on B station

The cost of acquiring traffic on e-commerce platforms is getting higher and higher, and many merchants are trying to find ways to increase content and lower prices to promote conversion. Some merchants will look for traffic opportunities outside the site, including Bilibili, which is a new content-driven platform that is still growing and profitable.

Traffic has entered the stock era, and the cost of acquiring traffic on closed-loop e-commerce platforms is getting higher and higher. In order to maintain business growth, merchants who want to do business on the platform are trying to promote conversion by increasing content and lowering prices. Some more discerning merchants and agents have opened up another front, and they have begun to look for new traffic from outside the platform.

This is a fact that is happening now, and it is also a trend for the next period of time. Traffic chasers are flowing out of large platforms with more intense competition and flowing to new content platforms that are still growing and still have dividends, including Bilibili.

Bilibili has a differentiated group of people (who can become new customers of the brand); it has differentiated content (different content push logic allows different products and brands to be seen by users. For example, Bilibili has a relatively advantageous knowledge content, the most typical of which is home furnishing content); and it has platform support and smooth links (it is determined to expand open-loop e-commerce).

Based on this, brand merchants and e-commerce platforms need to find new traffic from Bilibili more than before. Various service providers serving brand merchants and platforms have also begun to expand or even shift positions from other platforms to Bilibili.

Among the open-loop service providers of Bilibili we have contacted, Leyan Intelligence previously focused on short video platforms, expanded into Bilibili in the second half of last year, and has achieved 30% performance growth every quarter at Bilibili. Liu Yueyichen was previously a traffic provider for Douyin, and switched to Bilibili in the second half of last year. Service providers who previously worked as MCNs at Bilibili have also started to provide product promotion services at Bilibili, such as Aidoujun.

With the gradual improvement of Bilibili's commercial infrastructure, including product upgrades, traffic integration, policy support, the launch of benchmark cases, and the continuous accumulation and output of methodology, Bilibili will be able to further meet the needs of merchants for new traffic and increased business not only in theory but also in practice.

As we analyzed before, Tuanyuan, a home furnishing service provider transferred from offline services, and @迷登, a home furnishing UP host who has been deeply involved in Bilibili, have achieved good results.

Bilibili has gradually become a new blue ocean of traffic for merchants/service providers.

According to the data from Bilibili, during this year's 618, the number, categories, and branding of merchants who placed traffic on Bilibili have been significantly expanded. The number of customers who placed advertisements on Bilibili increased by 313% year-on-year; the GMV of goods brought by Bilibili increased by 146% year-on-year, and the total order volume increased by 154% year-on-year; among them, apparel and clothing, digital home appliances, and home furnishings are the fastest growing industries, especially apparel and clothing GMV increased by 382% year-on-year.

The amount of money that e-commerce platforms put into Bilibili has increased more than tenfold. "Narrow Broadcast" also learned that the bid that Vipshop paid to Bilibili to attract new users is the same as that of Xiaohongshu.

Bilibili's live streaming business has moved from its early budding stage, when it was even just vaguely believed to have the potential to sell goods, to a new stage where its infrastructure is becoming increasingly mature, its product categories are gradually enriched, and it is even beginning to move towards branding and scale.

Such changes have brought opportunities to e-commerce platforms, brands, and service providers looking for new growth. The changes represented by the influx of service providers will in turn drive more platforms and brand merchants to do business at Bilibili. Bilibili's ecosystem for bringing goods is becoming more and more solid.

Of course, the benefits of B-station's promotion are limited. Some service providers estimate that as B-station's infrastructure matures, competition will intensify as early as the end of the year. So we have to race against time.

1. Why do we need Bilibili?

Traffic is what all platforms and brands crave the most nowadays. After Douyin, Kuaishou, and Hong Kong-based content platforms have successively closed the e-commerce loop, Bilibili, which is in the open loop stage, still has a unique traffic-generating function. As a community that is more content-driven and oriented to young people, Bilibili’s population is also somewhat different from that of major e-commerce platforms.

One of the results is that for brands, the user value brought by open-loop traffic on Bilibili is higher.

Wang Feng, deputy general manager of Leyan Technology, told "Narrow Broadcast" that the number of new customers is an important indicator for brand customers to measure the effectiveness of B station's advertising. The reason is that the new users attracted by the e-commerce platform's on-site advertising already have the motivation to buy and have already conducted searches, while the new users attracted by B station are almost entirely based on the off-site content that stimulates the purchase intention and then conducts the purchase behavior. It is a purer increase.

During the 618 shopping festival, Bilibili released its "new customer rate" indicator, which is the percentage of new customers who were directed to the merchant's store through Bilibili content after the merchant launched the "Spark" plan. The new customer rate for all industries exceeded 50%, with maternal and child care reaching 78%, household daily necessities at 72%, and food and beverage, pets, and home furnishings all exceeding 60%.

Not only can it bring in pure new users, but the cost of acquiring new customers on Bilibili is also more cost-effective for some brands. For some small and medium-sized brands that have not yet accumulated enough brand potential, the cost of acquiring new users from Bilibili is lower than the cost of investing in internal traffic on the involuted e-commerce platform. A supplier revealed to "Narrow Broadcast" that a customer test showed that the cost of acquiring new users on Bilibili is 5-6 times lower than the cost of acquiring new users on a certain e-commerce platform.

In addition to acquiring new users, another core demand of merchants on Bilibili is still to cultivate user minds.

Bilibili is a community platform that focuses on medium-length videos. Users are more patient in content consumption and care more closely about creators. For brands, this means more room for content creation to showcase brand concepts, and once brand content is recognized by users, a closer relationship is formed between the brand and users.

In other words, as long as they find a way to communicate with Bilibili users, the depth of their promotion and the long-tail effect they achieve will be more obvious.

The life cycle of articles on Bilibili is long, and the return cycle of their delivery is also relatively long. The direct conversion of a video article delivery usually lasts for 1-3 months. Some articles with deeper content and longer life cycles can even bring traffic conversion that lasts for more than a year.

2. Commercial infrastructure is gradually taking shape

The lack of a strong commercial atmosphere and the early stages of infrastructure construction were a common controversy surrounding the promotion of goods on Bilibili in the past, and one of the reasons why some merchants were hesitant or only tried to promote goods on Bilibili. However, as Bilibili continues to work hard on commercial products and methods, the improvement of the commercial infrastructure level and its effects have gradually emerged.

First, the matrix of B Station's open-loop cooperation platforms is expanding. From Alibaba and JD.com at the beginning, Pinduoduo and Vipshop were added this year. The addition of new partners is the best recognition of the results of previous cooperation. It is said that platforms such as Dewu are also in negotiation with B Station for open-loop business.

Secondly, in the process of specific cooperation, service providers and merchants also have some more detailed feelings.

Liu Yueyichen was previously a traffic investment agent for Douyin. He joined Bilibili in October last year. In more than half a year, his team grew from 5 people to more than 60 people.

Wang Yi, general manager of Liuyue Yichen, told Narrowcast that there was a period of time last year when B Station was not accurate enough in identifying more refined groups of people, such as people over 18 years old. He knew that big data needed time and data scale to gradually achieve accurate matching, but in the early data convergence process, the problem of overflow of agency delivery costs would be encountered. Fortunately, B Station provided a "compensation" policy to return the invalid delivery costs to the service provider, which means that the platform and the agent jointly borne the early testing costs.

Moreover, since the beginning of this year, Liu Yueyichen "has rarely seen compensation funds coming into the account", which shows that the platform's investment flow has become more accurate.

For example, last year, Bilibili launched a smart delivery tool, which allows merchants and agents to get the desired delivery effect without having to choose the traffic entrance, such as the large card on the homepage, the small card, or the comment area card. Wang Yi knew about smart delivery very early, but at first "it didn't feel so smooth". After December last year, it was obviously "much smoother". Now in their tests, "the efficiency of smart delivery is higher than manual delivery".

These are all concrete manifestations of the gradual improvement of Bilibili's commercial infrastructure.

Bilibili has publicly mentioned that the upgrade of data labels is a major optimization focus of Bilibili's commercial infrastructure before the big promotion. Bilibili has added more than 100 industry-specific population labels, covering more than 60 industry content consumption groups, in order to help brands more accurately select the target population and achieve better in-store conversion effects.

Wang Feng of Leyan Technology also has a clear perception of this. When customers concentrated their investment on Double Eleven last year, there was an obvious rush for volume and a surge in costs. However, after optimizing the algorithm for 618 this year, the company took on more order demands, but there was no obvious increase in investment costs.

More than one agency also mentioned the "Creative Center" function launched by Bilibili, which is similar to TikTok's Juliang Star Map. In addition to showing merchants and agencies the commercial content that has performed well recently on the site, it also supports one-click shutdown of those currently delivered materials with low conversion effects, greatly improving advertisers' control over delivered materials and operational efficiency.

The "one-click start" cold start tool that distributes traffic universally and is friendly to small and medium-sized businesses; the "effect diagnosis" that provides guidance on traffic allocation issues, etc., are also new features of Bilibili that have been mentioned many times by service providers.

In less than a year, the results of Bilibili's open loop are being verified more and more.

Beng Haiqing, CEO of service provider Aidoujun, told "Narrow Broadcast" that this year on June 18, the number of brand merchants who actively requested to participate in the "Xinghuo" and "Jinghuo" plans has increased significantly, and they have actively requested data monitoring through "Xinghuo" and "Jinghuo".

However, it should also be noted that Bilibili's commercial infrastructure has just passed its start-up phase and is still some distance away from maturity.

For example, in the review management of submitted articles, there are no tools such as keyword blocking, which are issues that need to be resolved.

3. Future dividends and opportunities

Bilibili is still in the open-loop bonus period, and some participating service providers, brands, and platforms have seen the results first. But overall, Bilibili is still a platform that is different from mainstream e-commerce platforms in terms of content style, traffic logic, population size and characteristics, and overall community atmosphere.

Some service providers and brands that are used to the operating ideas of other platforms may be confused in the short term. However, once the conceptual barriers are eliminated and a set of growth methods suitable for Bilibili is formed, they will still find their own gains on Bilibili.

Just like what Beng Haiqing of Aidoujun said, "It's not easy to do business at Bilibili, but the suppliers who have been deeply involved in Bilibili have gradually accumulated a certain moat."

The scale of Bilibili is not very large, with daily active users exceeding 100 million. It is not an efficient platform like Douyin and Kuaishou that quickly matches people and goods with algorithm mechanisms for the general public. The content threshold is relatively high, and it cannot directly reuse content from other platforms.

Based on the unique content ecology and community ecology, Bilibili's product ecology must be in line with the community's tone in content and growth, and also meet commercial needs.

Specifically, having the ability to produce distinctive content on Bilibili is a necessary condition for seizing Bilibili's window of opportunity. More and more businesses are realizing that "content is advertising, advertising is content" is the basis for advertising on Bilibili to gain user recognition.

Popular science videos, evaluations and other educational videos are still popular content types with relatively high conversion rates on Bilibili. In the opinion of Aidoujun's Beng Haiqing, brand-endorsed content is a major development point for Bilibili content at this stage, such as the brand's own official account matrix.

A more representative example is Laifen Technology. Its press conference video that became popular on Bilibili was released by its official account. Aidoujun, as the streaming service provider, achieved over 9 million views after the video was released and fermented for about half a year. The founder of Laifen once said in a public interview that the ROI of this video was over 10.

In addition, videos that are close to life scenes and down-to-earth also have commercial potential on Bilibili, such as @罗兰朵女士, @侯翠翠 and other UP hosts. Their video content has a wider selection of goods and a good conversion rate in the general life categories such as home furnishings and small appliances.

Finding the intersection and balance between content and commercialization is the key to achieving conversion effects on Bilibili, and is also the ultimate demand for commercialization of Bilibili.

At present, in terms of volume, the major categories of goods sold on B Station are beauty, health, and digital 3C; clothing, home furnishings, pets, etc., are growing faster. During the 618 shopping festival this year, clothing and apparel were the category with the fastest growth in GMV on B Station, with a year-on-year increase of 382%, followed by digital home appliances at 152%, and home furnishings at 48%.

Overall, Bilibili is still a new traffic platform that can bring incremental business to merchants, and its traffic value has not been fully tapped.

B station is committed to vigorously developing commercialization from a corporate strategy perspective, but the current commercial infrastructure and links are still being improved, which is a favorable period for brands, platforms and service providers to explore its commercial value. The entry of more brands, platforms and service providers also means that B station's commercialization may continue to expand its product category width and transaction scale, entering a new stage of further improvement.