Online customer acquisition and offline monetization: the emergence of business-oriented creators

A group of commercial creators have emerged on social platforms. What are the characteristics of this type of authors and what are their advantages? This article lists some cases for you to discuss. Let's take a look.

In the past year, a group of business-oriented creators have emerged on social platforms. They may not have a large number of fans, but through online traffic and offline monetization, they have demonstrated commercial capabilities that cannot be underestimated.

On Bilibili, a group of photography and painting bloggers are releasing tutorials and selling courses at the same time; on Xiaohongshu, everyone from investors to hair stylists acquire clients through the platform; on Douyin, a group of restaurant franchisees acquire customers through live streaming, short videos and other channels.

Unlike traditional content creators, the threshold for monetization for business-oriented creators is often lower. For business-oriented creators, creating an account is like making their own billboard, which allows customers to find them accurately, thereby expanding their customer base and increasing their own popularity.

As competition in the content industry intensifies, it becomes more difficult for newcomers to enter the market. At this time, the advantages of business creators begin to gradually become apparent.

1. Lowered Monetization Threshold

Simply put, we can divide content creators into two categories: one is early content creators, who attract advertisers through video content and then monetize. The other is business creators. According to Yang Buhuai’s statement, the commercialization focus of this type of creators is not on advertising monetization, but on acquiring customers online and then monetizing in their own offline business.

Compared with the monetization method of advertising cooperation, since the monetization threshold for commercial creators is lower and the business model is more sustainable, related accounts have emerged in large numbers in the past few years.

It is understood that for current real estate agents, self-media such as Xiaohongshu, Douban, and Douyin have become important customer channels. Currently, searching for "agent" on Xiaohongshu has more than 2.98 million notes, and the topic #二手房# has 1.01 billion views.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu's note-taking format and newcomer-friendly keyword recommendation mechanism make real estate agents particularly fond of Xiaohongshu. After using Xiaohongshu for a year, Beijing real estate agent Xiao Zhang found that due to the high proportion of young people, the rental market on Xiaohongshu is very active, and "the frequency of inquiries and transactions is very high."

For real estate agents, different platforms have different characteristics. On the Douyin platform, videos about luxury homes that are more interesting tend to get more traffic. Highly praised graphic content on Xiaohongshu often has limited traffic on short video platforms such as Douyin.

Image source: TikTok

In addition to real estate agents, professions such as stylists, car salesmen, and photographers are also a major source of business creators.

It is understood that new barbershops often advertise on social platforms before opening to attract new customers. In addition, according to Relang data, many hairstylist KOLs such as @山城小栗旬的髮代記, @子宇髮設計, etc. have become popular on the Internet. In addition to regular advertising income, the identity of a hairstylist often makes it difficult to get a haircut offline. After consulting, it can be found that its price positioning and waiting time are also far higher than those of ordinary shops.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Similar accounts are becoming more and more common on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, and social media has gradually become a resource exchange site for businessmen. Under the popular topic #摄影# on Xiaohongshu, you can see a group of photography bloggers. The main content of this type of account is to share photography tips and customer photos. At the same time, they also sell photography courses and photo booking orders. To some extent, social media has reduced the cost of acquiring customers for individual photographers and gained more exposure.

The accounts of these business creators are often more vertical. They start from their own experience, find the people they serve, and find business opportunities from them. Selling multiple houses with a thousand fans, doing endless business with a few hundred fans... The various "myths" circulating in the industry are not groundless. For small-scale business creators, fans attracted by outputting opinions can often have a higher degree of conversion. Simply put, the reach is more precise.

Different from the above, there is another type of business creators who choose to obtain a healthier business model.

The UP host @影视暴风雨, who has over 8 million fans in the film and television section of Bilibili, has won the top 100 UP hosts many times. From his video self-narration in 2023, we learned that the current Film and Television Hurricane is a team of nearly 100 people. In addition to the regularly released videos on Bilibili, the Film and Television Hurricane team also operates in the form of an advertising company. According to industry insiders, Film and Television Hurricane Company is at a relatively high level in the industry in terms of both order quantity and unit price.

But for this type of entrepreneurs, a complex business model means more complex operational issues. In the past, TVC advertising accounted for 50% of Hurricane Film and Television's business, e-commerce accounted for 20%, and channel commercial cooperation accounted for 30%. Later, TV advertising revenue dropped sharply, so channel commercial cooperation increased.

On this basis, @影视暴风雨 also opened the @悸多多StormCrew account in 2023 to produce vertical screen short video content with "lighter" content. The latest video is a variety show hide-and-seek game. While linking up with multiple B station UP hosts, the video playback volume has exceeded 700w.

Image source: Station B

Whether it is increasing channel commercial cooperation or opening a short video account, we can see that after a content team develops, business issues are gradually put on the table. In other words, if content people want to build a team and enrich profit channels, business creators are the only way to go.

2. Business creators cannot escape the Pareto Principle

Being a business creator sounds like it has a lot of advantages, but in practice, many people find it difficult to do so. Clour observed the content of some existing business creators and came to the following conclusions.

First of all, it should be clear that for the early business-oriented creators, traditional content creators and business-oriented creators have two different logics: one is to compete on content, and the other is to compete on expertise. For traditional creators, the competition is about how to make videos with beautiful editing, exciting points, and hot topics. Advertising monetization depends on the traffic brought by the watchability of the content.

For business creators, the early focus is on the ability to output professional knowledge. In terms of breakdown, first, it is about professional ability, that is, the accumulation of offline business experience. Second, it is necessary to express professional ability intuitively. This expression can be in the form of a summary of practical knowledge, but it is not limited to a summary of practical knowledge.

Observe the hairdressing diary of the master hairstylist @山城小栗旬. The highlight of his content lies in the contrast between before and after haircut. Later, more plot content was incorporated on this basis, making the video more watchable and able to reach more audiences.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

In the actual creation process, many offline practitioners with superior skills want to create content, but they lack the ability to express themselves and make videos. At this time, it is crucial to show the fun of the work. For example, @城南电工线路’s videos do not have fancy editing, but the video content conforms to the narrative structure of "discovering problems - solving them - encountering difficulties - solving difficulties", and each episode has a strong story, which also brought an increase in the number of fans.

Whether it is Xiaohongshu or Douyin, the value of social media is not limited to receiving advertisements through the number of fans. The advantage of business-oriented creators is that they have offline businesses behind them, whether they are investors or real estate agents. Maybe you don’t necessarily need 100,000+ fans. As long as your content meets the needs of others, business is likely to happen.

If you are an offline barbershop, the number of customers you can serve is limited. At this time, operating an account with 500 fans may be enough to meet the number of customers you can serve. Of course, this does not mean that the number of fans is not important. The number of fans means popularity to a certain extent. When business creators develop to a certain scale, increasing the customer price can also increase commercialization capabilities.

In general, the monetization threshold for business-oriented creators is relatively low, but this does not mean that everyone who enters the market can obtain customer conversions. The 80/20 rule also exists between industries. Professionalism and expression skills are important issues facing beginners.

3. The double-edged sword of low threshold

Business-oriented creations have already existed, attracting customers through the Internet and then converting them. This logic is similar to that of merchants creating their own accounts, except that the main body has changed from brands to small-scale merchants.

For these small businesses, social media has blurred the boundaries between operators and content creators, and good content can bring customers to creators.

However, for consumers, whether the service and the advertisement are not the same needs to be carefully considered. For example, a few days ago, after Sora was released, although the model was still in the internal testing stage, a group of "AI experts" selling related courses appeared on the short video platform.

According to negative reviews, the courses taught by these "AI experts" are either fake or they are just selling free technical documents from OpenAI's official website, and the quality of the courses is low.

Image source network

When the threshold for monetization becomes lower, on the one hand, creators have more room to play; on the other hand, products of varying quality appear at the same time, and consumers need to keep their eyes open to avoid the gap between "sellers' shows" and "buyers' shows." But from another perspective, doesn't this prove the feasibility of the business path for business-oriented creators?

Reference articles:

• Trend: Business Creators | Yang Buhuai
• Real estate agents flock to Xiaohongshu | Doujiao Spicy

What do you think of business creators? Please leave your comments below~

Author: Guang Ye

Source: WeChat public account: TopKlout (ID: TopKlout)