With video accounts undergoing drastic changes, how many new strategies will be introduced in the future?

This article mainly provides in-depth insights into video accounts and puts forward some practical suggestions for entry based on thinking.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, the revenue of Video Account exceeded 1 billion yuan; in the third quarter of this year, it exceeded 3 billion yuan , and the resulting exposure flow of Video Account also increased several times compared to before.

Where does the revenue of Video Account come from? The answer is advertising revenue. As we all know, almost half of Tencent’s revenue comes from WeChat.

Native advertising and information-leaving advertising on video accounts are the main businesses of the platforms. Although WeChat has over 1 billion daily active users and Douyin has 750 million daily active users, in terms of advertising revenue, Douyin has an annual revenue scale of 300 billion , while WeChat is only between 30 and 40 billion.

Such a large difference in size means that there is still a lot of room for market growth in video accounts . The platforms will inevitably increase their investment in these areas and expand the proportion of public domain advertising revenue. This is why the platforms began to block private domains, that is, the private domain affects the proportion of the main advertising business.

But even though the exposure of the video account is not that large, the advertising cost is high, there are few influencers, few brands, little high-quality content, and the platform rules are layered. The needs of users and merchants are still emerging. In other words, the platform is still in its bonus period , and everyone still pins their hopes on this new traffic entrance.

Previously, Jianshi organized a private video account meeting for members, during which many guests shared their in-depth insights on video accounts and gave practical entry suggestions.

This article is a re-organization of the contents of this private meeting. It should be mentioned in particular that these contents are only and only represent the outside world's speculation based on market development. They are one of the industry's predictions on the development of the industry. They are only used for industry exchanges and do not mean anything else.

1. Past: Concerts went viral, and commercialization of video account traffic saw hope

The emergence of video accounts gives us a feeling of raising troops for a thousand days and using them for just a moment.

Previously, Tencent did not build its own complete product functions and service system, and most brands still had to go through video account service providers. With the new industry structure, new business model, and new organizational team, it is really worrying whether WeChat can catch up as a latecomer.

At the beginning, the platform did not have the advantage of matrix traffic ecology, and it was difficult to achieve explosive growth no matter how it was promoted. However, since the establishment of the matrix ecology, the traffic has achieved exponential growth. In particular, the dozens of online concerts on video accounts last year have greatly activated the public domain traffic of WeChat.

The fundamental reason why the concert business model is successful is that it benefits five parties:

First, users get high-quality content and have a great experience;

Second, the star economic companies that were unable to hold concerts during the epidemic benefited;

Third, brands benefit. For example, there are many car brands that have gained huge exposure and conversion through advertising placement.

Fourth, the platform benefits, user growth and duration as well as marketing value are improved;

Fifth, content creators benefit. The biggest beneficiaries here are the bloggers at Bilibili. They are good at medium-length videos. About every 5 to 10 minutes, they will move the content of the video account to Tencent for processing. The possibility of bloggers receiving orders from big brands increases, which is also the reason why many bloggers flee Bilibili.

But a big tree attracts the wind. Because it was so popular, the client began to unite and limit companies like Tencent and Douyin to only two online live broadcasts per month.

It can be said that the platform is both active and passive.

Being proactive means achieving certain set goals and making drastic adjustments; being passive means being under pressure from the external advertising environment, and if you fail to do so, advertising revenue will drop significantly.

Therefore, concerts are just stimulants and not a long-term solution.

Centralized traffic control is a tough nut to crack, and the platform must do whatever it takes. It would rather bear the misunderstanding of the industry and enterprises than make bold moves to carry out reforms.

This can be clearly perceived from the changes in the retention methods before and after. For example, since the beginning of this year, the platform has severely cracked down on and strictly controlled the "public to private" work. The underlying reason is to achieve centralized traffic control of the platform, thereby realizing the clear pricing of advertising traffic and realizing ideal commercialization.

There are some reasons behind this: on the one hand, it is to align with Douyin and realize centralized traffic management; on the other hand, it is to prevent itself from following the old path of Kuaishou.

We have seen that retention components are becoming more and more compliant, and advertising retention components are more efficient . After testing, we found that the Android addition rate is more than twice that of iOS. Of course, from a cost accounting perspective, the average customer acquisition cost of retention is 10 cents, and the cost of adding it to corporate WeChat is about 1 yuan, but this is still cheaper than investing in traditional advertising.

This is a trend. We will see more "advertising" logos in live broadcast rooms. This is the trend of the future.

2. Now: Internet products have taken three steps, but video accounts have only taken one step

The development of Chinese Internet products often completes the transformation of the platform in a three-step manner, that is, first making tool products, then community products, and finally building its own ecosystem.

Kuaishou , a product of the same generation as WeChat, was initially just a GIF animation tool. Later it started to become a short video community. It was not until the first live broadcast by a big anchor selling goods that it achieved the transition to a platform.

Douyin is similar. It started as A.me, a BGM tool similar to the current Jianying. In December 2010, it started to build a short video community. Until April 2020, it invited Luo Yonghao to start live streaming to sell goods, which also indicated that Douyin has achieved the transformation into a platform.

This three-step process will also occur on WeChat Video Account .

The triple jump transformation process will be very painful. The team will be the first to experience subversion, and the whole process will change from the original Buddhist and slow state to a process of running forward.

And what is the biggest pain? The inability to achieve traffic centralization .

Kuaishou lost the initiative in commercialization because it did not do well in this regard. Of course, it is not easy for any new platform. Video accounts also need a long time to prepare, and secondly, wait for the content to mature.

Video accounts are still in the early stages of commercialization and can only generate traffic in the early stages. There are still no signs of mid-term community business, and the platform does not seem to have found the feeling of a community yet. It does not have a distinct community tone like Kuaishou and Douyin.

This is mainly because there are few native influencers on the video account itself, and most of them are accounts transferred from the platform MCN agency accounts and public accounts. When the platform is operating, there is a lack of hooks and chips to leverage a lot of traffic. Most of them are just profit-seeking and professional PDC agencies, so it is difficult to make long-term plans.

In 2022, the success of the concert model allowed Video Account to taste the sweetness of traffic; in 2023, Video Account also began to lay out the industrial chain. For example, a very inconspicuous seafood industry belt has monthly sales of over 100 million. The Chinese people's demand for health and nourishment is still strong, which is the huge potential behind the industry.

3. Future: Traffic model of points, lines and surfaces, content hot spots are hidden in SouYisou

If we use a traffic model to summarize the WeChat ecosystem, then the "point-line-surface" model is the most appropriate.

Point refers to the initial touchpoint - the mini program, which allows users to create a closed transaction loop first;

Line refers to connecting users through tools or enterprise WeChat retention;

On the surface, it means combining pictures, texts and videos together through official accounts and video accounts to help "points" and "lines" flow at high speed.

And above all, search is the ultimate culmination.

You may not be able to realize that Douyin has 750 million monthly active users, Baidu has 700 million, and Souyisou has 800 million monthly active users . Souyisou is already the number one in the industry, it’s just a question of whether the quality is high enough.

However, most brands have basically started to purchase Souyiso's "brand segmentation " , just like when they did Baidu SEO optimization, they guarantee the rights of advertisers through methods such as locking words and brand protection .

It is reported that 40% of the current advertising business lines of Video Accounts come from car companies. For example, Yiche has achieved over 10 million views on the Video Accounts platform. The core is that they have a large number of accounts and are MCNs themselves. Therefore, when purchasing traffic on the platform, they have bargaining power and stability.

Do you still remember the hot topic of grabbing salt? From a certain perspective, the keywords that appear in the search window will be the focus of future video account content selection, which is also one of the simplest logics for starting a video account.

4. Five suggestions for joining the video account

Ideally, the traffic cycle from the public domain to the private domain and then empowering the public domain seems to form a perfect closed loop. But in fact, it is now difficult for public domain traffic to return to the private domain.

To sum up, the current situation of the video account is still unclear. In troubled times, all long-termism is untenable. Therefore, getting results on the video account is the kingly way at present. Short-termism is the correct layout strategy. It is meaningless to simply increase traffic without the purpose of profit.

Here is a typical example. A certain video account team developed very smoothly in the early stage, but they neglected to change their withdrawal account to a corporate account, which meant that they had to pay 20% personal income tax. This is a typical case of only thinking about the future and ignoring the things that go into their pockets every day.

Based on the current situation, we believe that we can adjust the layout of video accounts from five aspects:

First, create multiple accounts and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. At present, operating a single account is very risky, especially the deduplication ability of the video account is not as strong as we imagined, and it may also lead to misjudgment of violations. Therefore, it is better to use a matrix to enhance the anti-fragility of the enterprise.

Second, the content strategy must be in line with "interest + benefit". On the one hand, for users, interest is mainly reflected in the narrow scope of use of video accounts and the relatively narrow crowd, so the products that can be sold are limited, which is a big challenge; on the other hand, it is the interests of the platform. The core is the duration. Douyin is two hours, while the video account is less than one hour. This is the ability that the platform wants to break through.

The third is frequency . You always envy the show hosts who have tens of thousands of viewers, while you only have a few thousand. This is because the show frequency is high and the broadcast time is long, while you only broadcast it a few times. How can you rely on evaluation and traffic? The broadcast frequency especially affects the account weight.

Fourth, the placement brings about a commercial cycle. The era of relying purely on free services is gone forever. Once the store's DSR score drops, the traffic will soon disappear. The placement of traffic is just the icing on the cake. There are two logics behind it that need to be taken seriously:

First, only when the people, goods and places satisfy the platform and users, can we invest in traffic and achieve results. It is difficult to achieve good conversion by selling game controllers and young people's figures on the video account platform, because these do not match the crowd of the video account;

Secondly, when investing in traffic, one must also consider the product gross profit margin. If the gross profit margin is above 50%, the ROI must reach 2 to break even. If the gross profit margin is less than this, no matter how much traffic the live broadcast room invests, it will be difficult to increase the volume, or it will be impossible to achieve the ideal ROI.

The investment should be considered only after ensuring the stability of personnel, goods and places, and the gross profit margin of the product.

Fifth, the weight of traffic has shifted. Previously, the weight of adding fans was high, but now the weight of adding WeChat for Business is higher. In the past, if you imported a user into the live broadcast room and interacted with him for more than three minutes, you would still get 1:1 traffic, but now the situation is unstable unless you can bring more GMV and WeChat for Business fans.

Author: Tang Luyao

Source: WeChat public account "Jianshi (ID:jianshishijie)"