Expert Marketing, Moving Towards the Era of Small V

Now more and more brands are looking for small bloggers to advertise. It can be seen that brands are gradually moving towards the era of small V in the layout of influencer marketing. So, how to interpret the story of the small V era? What are the difficulties of the small V era? Let's take a look at the author's analysis and interpretation.

"It's not that big Vs can't afford it, but that small Vs are more cost-effective." In today's brand marketing circle, this sentence has become a famous saying.

After the disclosure of various chaos such as big anchors' failure, big bloggers' inflated quotes, and top influencers' inappropriate sales levels, brands in the market environment of reducing costs and increasing efficiency have begun to change their marketing strategies to seek stability, turning their attention to more cost-effective small and medium-sized influencers.

Olive, the person in charge of a beauty brand, told Yiyuguancha that it now takes more than a thousand or as few as dozens of influencers to make a hit product. In addition to the main beauty influencers, it also involves influencers in other general fields such as life and drama. Not only are the influencers required to have a certain social influence and professional knowledge, but they also hope to penetrate a wider circle through influencers. "Our budget is not enough to invest in dozens or even hundreds of top influencers. Mid- and low-level and amateur bloggers would be more suitable. Moreover, amateurs are more likely to create hits on Douyin and Xiaohongshu now, and they are more cost-effective."

The demand for brands to invest in mid- and low-level influencers and amateur bloggers reflects the expansion of the market size.

According to data from Chanmama, the number of mid- and tail-level influencers on Douyin increased significantly in 2022, especially the number of tail-level influencers who sell goods increased by as much as 139.7% year-on-year; the influencers who sell goods showed a "popular" characteristic, and the number of influencers with less than 1 million fans accounted for as high as 99.3%; the number of mid- and tail-level influencers was hundreds of times that of the top influencers.

Data source: Cicada Mom

The larger scale of influencers, higher cost-effectiveness, and more frequent hit rates have allowed mid- and low-end influencers and amateur bloggers to overtake others, and also allowed brands to move towards the small V era in terms of influencer marketing layout.

1. When the small V masters rise

“No talent, no marketing” is almost a consensus among brands this time.

As long as it is related to brand management and business growth, influencer marketing has become a must for brands and even the key to determining success or failure.

Although the marketing role of "expert" has only appeared for a few years, it has become a necessary option for brand marketing through the dissemination and penetration of multiple marketing scenarios such as grass-roots promotion, e-commerce, and advertising.

Experts are different from internet celebrities in a broad sense. In fact, they have unique content productivity in the skills or fields they are good at, and can attract fans to engage in interactive behaviors such as forwarding, liking, and commenting, and ultimately achieve purchase conversion.

At this stage, the brand owner's demand is to use the influencer's high number of fans and high traffic to implant content, increase brand exposure, and expand brand influence. In order to meet this demand, the early action of brand merchants was to find top influencers, and the range of available screening was not wide. In addition, the top influencers may have unfavorable situations such as full schedules and quotations exceeding the budget, so brands have to make Plan B for mid- and low-end influencers.

A notebook brand cooperates with experts

Olive said that when the beauty brands he is in charge of select influencers for cooperation, they will allocate them according to the ratio of 2:3:5, that is, 20% will be top influencers with more than 10 million fans and a high reputation, 30% will be mid-level influencers with more than 1 million fans and recognition in the beauty field, and 50% or even higher will be amateurs with 10,000 to 100,000 fans and who are in the initial stage. "On the surface, it may seem that investing in top influencers will have the best communication effect, but in fact it is also setting a target. Competitive products can directly see that we have invested, or some competitors have invested first, so we will no longer consider repeated investment in the future, which indirectly narrows our selection range."

From top traffic influencers, to more professional vertical influencers, to a large number of growing mid- and tail influencers, this type of combined delivery has become the first choice favored by brands.

In fact, as early as 2021, the prototype of this strategy had already appeared - "5,000 Xiaohongshu reviews, 2,000 Zhihu questions and answers, plus Li Jiaqi and Viya's live broadcast rooms can create a new brand." This sentence was verified again and again at the time, and most of them were new consumer brands that "focused on marketing and less on research and development."

For example, Perfect Diary has taken brand marketing to the extreme and has used Xiaohongshu as a key channel to intensively publish notes. In 2021 alone, Perfect Diary had 2.01 million fans and over 340,000 notes on Xiaohongshu, far exceeding other beauty brands, and was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The outside world also called Perfect Diary "the first stock of Xiaohongshu's new brand." The disadvantages of this approach are also obvious. Once the marketing expenses decline, the revenue will collapse. At present, Perfect Diary has experienced a continuous decline in revenue and the closure of 128 offline stores.

"Everyone is more cautious now. Brands are not as aggressive as in previous years in launching new products in batches and intensively marketing them. Even the volume of new products in the initial launch period is much less than in previous years," Olive concluded. She observed that due to the reduction of brand budgets, some top influencers have a tendency to lower their quotations, or guide brands to place vertical accounts of top influencers, in order to find cooperation space as much as possible under the background of brand cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

2. What are the difficulties in the era of small V?

When "traffic dividends are hard to find" becomes a common dilemma in the Internet industry, small V influencer marketing can help brands save marketing budgets temporarily, but problems continue to arise in the long-term development process, such as inaccurate influencer screening, complex management, and difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of delivery.

What brands pursue is the ultimate marketing effect. Whether it is conversion and transaction or communication and breaking the circle, quantitative values ​​are an important dimension of evaluation.

Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Bilibili and many other platforms have launched their own influencer business cooperation platforms, such as Juleliang Star Map, Dandelion, Magnetic Star, Fireworks, etc.

The main role of these business cooperation platforms is to help brands and influencers establish connections, accelerate influencers' commercial realization, and let brands see the results through visual interactive data such as likes and comments. At the same time, these platforms also provide corresponding support policies for influencers, the most common of which are traffic cash incentives and operational guidance.

Taking the latest data released by Juliangxingtu as an example, in 2023, the number of influencers who can receive orders increased by 137% year-on-year, and the growth rate of the number of business orders received reached 142%. Ai Qing, the person in charge of a clothing brand, told Yiyuguancha that sometimes the platform will take the initiative to establish brand owners to choose mid-level influencers. In addition to the cost-effectiveness factor that the brand prioritizes, it also helps the platform to meet the exposure support requirements for mid-level influencers.

"Insights into the In-site Influencer Ecosystem of Douyin in 2022" also shows that mid-level influencers are in the growth stage. Their audience fans are more active and have greater room for increasing their followers than top influencers. Moreover, their content has greater differences and a higher rate of explosive posts, which enables them to better achieve product and effect synergy.

The report also shows that the top brands in each industry have their own focus in building influencer matrices. For example, luxury goods, beauty and skincare brands are more inclined to cooperate with top influencers, while maternal and child products, home furnishings, and pet products are more inclined to cooperate with small influencers in the middle and lower levels, while apparel, footwear, 3C digital products, and jewelry are more inclined to cooperate with tail influencers.

Weiwei, a skincare expert, said that when she cooperates with brands, in addition to paying attention to whether the content field and brand attributes are compatible, the second thing the brand pays attention to is the fan attributes, such as which cities they come from, age distribution, gender ratio, etc. "Although I am engaged in skincare content, some home furnishing 3C brands are willing to invest in me because they are optimistic about the dissemination of pan-circle content and the purchasing power of fans. From a business perspective, the trust of fans is more important than the content attributes because it represents purchasing power."

But the Internet world is full of uncertain changes. As time goes by, some small V influencers may become top influencers with millions of fans by relying on one or two hit products, while other small V influencers may lose hope in the long-term updating process and eventually become mediocre.

Such changes have also brought troubles to brands in terms of the inability to unify management. The most direct manifestation is that most small V influencers have not established independent content and business teams, and many of them work alone, which leads to difficulties in communication efficiency for brands.

Ai Qing, the person in charge of the above-mentioned clothing brand, continued to say that as the post-00s have emerged in the field of short video live streaming, many of the quotations he and his team have recently received from talents are from college students or high school students. "They have a good sense of the Internet and their quotations are very good, but the problem lies in the uncertainty of their time. There were several times when the release date was approaching, these student talents said that they had to prepare for exams or their mobile phones were confiscated and they could not post for the time being. This sounds unprofessional and unbelievable, but it is true."

This also reveals another drawback of the Little V era. Many Little V bloggers are students or working part-time. Their main axis does not revolve entirely around their accounts, and the effective communication between Little Vs and brands exposes the drawbacks of live streaming.

3. Platforms must tell the story of the Little V era well

In the traditional marketing model, consumers usually need to go through a long path from knowing a product to finally purchasing it. Influencer marketing plays a key connecting role in this process, which not only helps accelerate brand exposure, but also facilitates the final sales conversion.

Little V is like the discussion when the concept of KOC was born. The industry regards it as a substitute for KOL and a cost-effective choice. Most of them are ordinary people. They may be mothers or community aunts. They are often hidden people who are not easily discovered outside the social circle, but they have strong relationships in the social circle. This is their commercial value, and it also meets the needs of brands to establish strong connections with target users.

From another perspective, although KOC does not have the same strong attributes as KOL, it is between KOL and ordinary users and will be the key hub connecting the two.

Now, this model is changing. The influencer marketing represented by Xiao V is no longer just the KOC's seeding function, but uses the platform marketing function to guide users to directly click on the link to browse or buy, without jumping to the platform.

The marketing model tends to integrate planting and harvesting, which not only improves consumers' shopping experience, but also creates a more direct and efficient conversion channel for brands.

In other words, rather than discussing the impact of the small V era on brand marketing, what we are essentially analyzing is the future trend of influencer marketing.

Since the era of top influencers is gone and cannot be retrieved, in addition to embracing the small V market by casting a wide net, brands can also build their own official personalized accounts to stabilize the traffic pool in their own hands. There is no need to limit themselves to the external influencer pool, which may bring brands a broader marketing space.

At the same time, when Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Bilibili all took advantage of the platform's small V marketing combination, brand merchants also carried out multi-platform layout to enrich the transformation scenarios of commercial realization. Under the industry background of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, it is normal for brand merchants to shift from high-speed development to high-quality development, which also means that brands no longer put all their eggs in one basket, but consider diversifying risks.

On the platform side, small V marketing also brings commercial vitality to the platform. Most influencers' business cooperation needs to be reported to the platform, and the platform charges a service fee. In the era of small V, the brand side's wide-ranging layout has also driven the number of platform business orders to a certain extent, which is a win-win situation for all parties.

The marketing stories in the era of Little V will be the essential lessons that these platform owners who have built their business empires mainly on content creators must focus on.

Note: Olive, Weiwei and Ai Qing in this article are all anonymous.

Author: Thick Code

WeChat public account: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.