Live streaming business takes center stage in Meituan, local life competition focuses on live streaming rooms

This article first analyzes the phenomenon of Meituan's live broadcasting footprint further expanding, then explains the progress of Meituan's live broadcasting, and then analyzes whether it can maintain its position as the "C" in live broadcasting, and finally makes suggestions for Meituan. This article is suitable for merchants who want to conduct live broadcasting to analyze whether it is suitable for live broadcasting on Meituan.

Meituan’s live streaming territory has further expanded.

Recently, Meituan reached a cooperation with Chongqing physical supermarket chain "Chongqing Department Store" to carry out group buying in Meituan's official live broadcast room "Official Live Broadcast of Mall Specials". The main products promoted in the live broadcast room were "265 Group 300" supermarket shopping vouchers and "995 Group 1000" pick-up cards. The GMV of a 5-hour live broadcast exceeded 20 million, and the consumer redemption rate exceeded 90%.

In fact, this is not the first cooperation between Meituan and offline supermarkets. As early as June, Shandong Ginza Supermarket launched its first live broadcast on Meituan. In the live broadcast room of "Ginza Group", it put daily necessities such as Blue Moon laundry detergent and Luhua peanut oil on the shelves. This live broadcast drove Shandong Ginza's instant retail transaction volume to triple.

Since Meituan entered the live broadcast field, the live broadcast scenarios have been continuously expanded, from catering, hotel and travel, medicine, to today's supermarkets. Meituan seems to want to redo all kinds of local life businesses in the form of live broadcast. What are the advantages of Meituan's live broadcast? Compared with content platforms, how will Meituan's live broadcast make up for its shortcomings?

1. How is Meituan Live progressing?

At present, the live broadcast section has appeared in a fixed position on the homepage of the Meituan App.

On the Meituan live broadcast aggregation page, the live broadcast rooms are presented in a double column. Several official live broadcast rooms such as Meituan Travel, Meituan Grocery, Meituan Medicine, and Meituan Car Buying and Maintenance are currently broadcasting. Among them, the number of viewers of the Meituan Hotel official live broadcast room has reached more than four million, far exceeding other live broadcast rooms. The number of viewers of Meituan Medicine Buying, Meituan Travel and other live broadcast rooms can also reach millions.

In addition to various official Meituan live broadcast rooms, Meituan's live broadcast page also includes self-broadcasts by merchants of different types, such as flowers, hairdressing, cakes, and medical beauty. Judging from the live broadcast data, the live broadcast effects of many merchants are quite impressive. On the day of Chinese Valentine's Day, many flower shops started broadcasting on Meituan, with tens of thousands of viewers. For the chain hair salon Fujino Hairstyle, the sales volume of a single product in the live broadcast room can reach more than 100,000.

In terms of live broadcasting, Meituan’s official live broadcast room is basically hosted by real people. Merchants’ own live broadcasts are diverse. In addition to using real people to explain, some merchants’ live broadcast rooms also use recorded broadcasts and digital human live broadcasts. Some merchants’ live broadcast rooms are real-time store dynamics.

However, the scale of Meituan Live is still relatively small. On the live broadcast page, you can quickly browse through the live broadcast rooms that are currently being broadcast. If you browse further down, you will see the live broadcast room reservation mode, and at the bottom are replays of many live broadcast rooms.

In fact, Meituan’s initial exploration of the live streaming track can be traced back to 2016. At that time, the live streaming format was back-kitchen live streaming, and the starting point was to bridge the information gap and improve consumer trust, and promoting consumption was not the focus.

2020 was a critical year for Meituan Live, and Meituan built an internal live broadcast team. At that time, Meituan Live was mainly reflected in "travel live broadcast" and "kangaroo live broadcast". The former was aimed at food tourism, with the aim of helping scenic spots and restaurants closed due to the epidemic to find a breakthrough; the latter was mainly aimed at catering practitioners and riders, and the live broadcast courses were taught by lecturers from Meituan University.

At the same time, the "Meituan Mlive Live" applet was launched, which mainly promoted self-broadcasting by merchants, and most of the participating live broadcasts were related stores such as medical beauty and education. However, the development of the live broadcast industry was not mature at that time, and user habits had not been formed. Under the influence of multiple factors, Meituan's live broadcast business did not improve much.

Meituan's investment in live streaming business has not stopped. In April last year, Meituan received feedback from many local small and medium-sized businesses, hoping to increase connections with users through new online channels such as live streaming. To this end, Meituan launched the Live Streaming Assistant App.

2. With the live streaming business taking center stage, can Meituan do a good job in live streaming?

This year, Meituan’s live streaming layout has clearly accelerated.

At the Takeaway Industry Conference on March 27, Wang Puchong, senior vice president of Meituan and president of the Meituan Home Delivery Business Group, said, "This year, we will provide merchants with 'hot product venues' that are more expressive and have large traffic, and that meet both timeliness and stockpiling needs, and provide better marketing tools to further stimulate consumer demand." Live streaming is the new "hot product venue" he mentioned.

On April 18 this year, during the "Shen Coupon Festival", Meituan launched its first "takeout live broadcast". On the day of the live broadcast, Meituan linked the two major catering scenarios of "takeout + in-store", and ultimately achieved a year-on-year growth of nearly 50% in takeout orders, a year-on-year growth of 75% in daily active users, and a weekly growth rate of more than 30% in the GMV of participating catering brands.

After the live streaming business achieved some success, Meituan also made certain adjustments to its internal organizational structure.

According to LatePost, in June this year, Meituan announced the establishment of a live broadcast platform and hired a new person in charge to report to Li Shubin, a member of S-team, Meituan’s highest decision-making body. At the same time, Meituan is also constantly recruiting talents for related positions such as live broadcast content operations. Huxiu reported that live broadcast has been regarded by Meituan as one of its company-level strategies for 2023.

The core of live streaming e-commerce is nothing more than people, goods, and venues. Meituan has natural barriers in both people and venues when it comes to live streaming.

First of all, in terms of "people", most local life merchants are small and medium-sized, and they have no live broadcast experience and camera performance, so it is not realistic for them to invest manpower and cost to broadcast themselves. And constrained by platform traffic and live broadcast ecology, the method of experts live broadcasting to attract store traffic is difficult to work in Meituan.

In order to solve the "people" problem, Meituan has set up a number of official live broadcast rooms, aggregating multiple merchants into the same live broadcast room to reduce the cost of merchants investing in anchors. From the current situation, the merchants that appear in the official live broadcast room are basically brands with multiple offline stores, so they are not suitable for most merchants on Meituan.

In terms of "scene", the richness of Meituan's live broadcast room scenes is far from enough. For example, in order to save costs, many merchants will play videos in a loop in the live broadcast room, or focus the camera on offline stores, which is obviously not attractive enough to users.

Of course, Meituan Live has certain advantages in terms of “goods”. The dining coupons provided by Meituan give users more choices, and they can “stock up” or use them directly.

Meituan also mentioned in its first quarter financial report this year that Meituan Waimai has connected live broadcast vouchers with store shelf sales, so that users can purchase other products when they redeem the vouchers, thereby driving overall sales growth for the merchants. According to Meituan, on average, the redemption of one live broadcast voucher has led to an order transaction amount 1.5 times the value of the voucher.

It is worth mentioning that Meituan's achievements in live streaming are closely related to its large investment in resources. In terms of marketing, it has increased its publicity efforts. Meituan invited Liu Yifei as the spokesperson for Meituan's takeaway lifestyle and vigorously promoted the "Super Popular" live streaming room, which attracted the attention of many users. 36Kr previously reported that a Meituan insider revealed that Meituan has set aside billions of budgets to support live streaming.

3. Surrounded by many enemies, Meituan Live urgently needs to cultivate user minds

As the Internet enters the era of stock competition, it is not surprising that Meituan has increased its investment in live streaming to seek new growth space. A larger industry background is that the high-frequency and rigid demand of local life has made many platforms salivate. In the past two years, the local life field has been full of wars, and platforms such as Douyin, WeChat, Kuaishou, and Pinduoduo have successively entered the market.

For example, WeChat is testing a mini-program express delivery service. The new project is called "Store Express Delivery" and the entrance is set in the mini-program on the WeChat Discover page. Currently, the open categories include food, tea, fresh food and general merchandise, and you can see big-name catering businesses such as Weiduomei, KFC, Heytea, Shanghai Auntie, Meituan Maicai, Baiguoyuan, Guoquan Food, etc.

In April this year, Xiaohongshu also officially announced its entry into the local life market, first in high-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, focusing on promoting quality life products such as coffee and tea that young people love. Currently, coupons for related businesses can be seen under notes such as store visits, coffee, and travel. Xiaohongshu, which focuses on promoting products and lifestyle, has gradually embarked on a differentiated path of local life development.

Among the many new players, Douyin is coming in with great momentum, so Douyin is always compared with Meituan.

Douyin has developed rapidly in the in-store business, which has a relatively low threshold for fulfillment. According to data from LatePost, Douyin's transaction volume before write-offs for in-store life services and hotel and travel business remained at around 40% of Meituan's. Half a year ago, this figure was close to 45%.

Compared with content platforms, Meituan’s shortcomings are obvious, and its user retention ability is far inferior to that of Douyin. Therefore, in addition to focusing on live broadcasting, Meituan is also accelerating the layout of short video business. At present, the short video function in the Meituan APP already supports users to shoot/upload short videos by themselves, and provides simple editing functions, as well as shooting templates for multiple materials such as exquisite food, food records, and travel.

Under the layout of various contents, the usage time of Meituan users has increased. According to QuestMobile data, the average monthly usage time of Meituan takeaway users was 96.9 minutes in May this year, an increase of 19.0% year-on-year. However, compared with Douyin, the gap between the two is far. According to the "China Internet Audiovisual Development Research Report (2023)", the average daily usage time of Douyin users has reached 2.5 hours.

Although Meituan’s live broadcast room has a clear disadvantage in terms of traffic, Meituan has built a certain competitive barrier thanks to its unique push method and years of industry accumulation.

Meituan's live broadcast room is based on LBS positioning, and is basically pushed to users within a few kilometers. It is convenient to verify and the price is reasonable, so the probability of transaction is very high. According to third-party data statistics, the average conversion rate of orders for Meituan's local merchants' live broadcasts exceeds 30-40%, and the verification rate of these orders that are ultimately converted into store sales exceeds 90%, which is far beyond the reach of many competitors.

Meituan has a solid foundation in the local life business. Data shows that as of October 2022, the number of active local life merchants on Douyin reached 250,000, of which the number of merchants with group purchase coupons reached 210,000 and the number of merchants with dynamic sales reached 100,000. During the same period, the number of active local life merchants on Meituan reached 3.78 million and the number of merchants with dynamic sales reached 3.26 million. Douyin is not even a fraction of Meituan, and as a new player, Douyin still has a long way to go.

In general, although the competition in the local life field has reached a stage of fierce competition, Meituan's foundation is still solid thanks to years of accumulation. In the field of live broadcasting, Meituan is currently small in size. While expanding the basic plate of live broadcasting, it may be more important to open up user awareness. After all, Meituan is not a content platform, and the homework of supplementing content is slow to take effect. It is necessary to attract the attention of users and cultivate their minds first in order to better cope with external competition.

Author: Aries WeChat Official Account: TopKlout