As a travel “adventure” brand, where is the next stop for content marketing?

This article analyzes the joint project between Kuaishou Travel IP and the beauty brand Lancome Little Black Bottle. The rich and varied travel micro-variety show "Travel Adventure" implants the efficacy of Little Black Bottle Essence into a variety of travel scenarios, combining emotional resonance with rich content to effectively enhance brand influence and user awareness. If you want to understand the practice and strategy of content marketing on short video platforms, it is recommended for students who want to understand the application of combining content and brand.

Travel is the keyword this year.

After three special years, many people have included "going out to see the world" in their wish list for 2023. At a time when travel has become a popular lifestyle, travel short videos have also opened up the public's horizons and rooted all kinds of beautiful scenery in the minds of users. At the same time, the promotion of influencers in the short video era has become a general trend in brand marketing.

How to effectively combine content and brand through "travel + planting grass" and enable products to reach consumers is worth thinking about by platforms, brands, etc. A travel IP micro variety show that TOP Jun recently paid attention to planted grass during travel, playing a new trick in content marketing.

01 Content Adventure Scene: Drink the " Little Black Bottle Essence " while traveling

Travel Adventures is a national destination marketing IP incubated by Kuaishou Travel since 2021. The program invites expert bloggers from different vertical categories to go deep into travel destinations, explore local cultural and tourism characteristics, and promote tourist destinations.

This micro variety show brings users the magnificent rivers and mountains, flowing water and exotic customs of the motherland, while also driving the development of local scenic spots, accommodation, catering and other aspects. It also uses content to find commonalities with the brand and achieves wide reach of the product through natural implantation.

In the two years since its launch, the Travel Adventures started from Wuzhizhou Island in Hainan Province and traveled through Yunnan, Harbin, Fujian, Thailand and other places. In the Travel Adventures in Guangxi Station, Kuaishou invited six experts to participate in the filming. They did not belong to the same vertical category, but they jointly created an adventure in Guangxi in their respective fields of expertise.

The first stop of the Guangxi adventure is the Black Water River in Chongzuo, where travel expert Fang Qi and short play expert Xiao Wu start their journey to trace its source.

When you come to Chongzuo, Guangxi, you will see karst landforms everywhere, which are sculptures from nature. The beautiful scenery between green mountains and clear waters connects people with nature. Fang Qi once said in her works that it is more appropriate to describe her as a "travel content creator" rather than a "travel expert". Having traveled to many places and seen many landscapes, what does travel mean to her?

When Fang Qi gave the answer "Every trip is a growth and makes my heart richer", the implantation of Lancome's Little Black Bottle Essence popped up on the screen. "Stabilize fragility and travel freely" is the meaning of travel to herself in Fang Qi's eyes, and it is also the skin care effect that the Little Black Bottle Essence provides to travelers .

Sports creators Tiedou and Xiaomei went to Leye, hiked in the mountains, breathed with the trees, integrated into nature, and challenged themselves.

They like challenges, adventures and exploring the unknown, and they are often in complex environments, so they need to face the wind and sun in the best condition. At this time, Lancome's flower word implantation appears, "Stay stable, challenge freely and take risks" is the pursuit of outdoor sports by sports and adventure enthusiasts, and it is also the protection of their skin after experiencing wind and sun .

The mission of the beauty creators Li Yiran and Peng Shiliu is hidden in the night market in Nanning. The street market is an indispensable part of people's daily life and a must-visit place when traveling.

In the Yuanyang Building with staggered stairs, the two received a food challenge task. Li Yiran saw Peng Shiliu eating a lot of spicy food and couldn't help but worry about her skin. But Shiliu has her own little trick to maintain stability: using Lancome's Little Black Bottle Essence a week in advance can eliminate worries and eat delicious food. Tasting local food is an indispensable part of travel. The combination of food and travel IP makes the product's stabilization effect more deeply rooted in consumers' minds .

The Travel Adventures in Guangxi continues the main theme of "treasure hunting". While experiencing the natural scenery and cultural landscapes of Chongzuo, Leye and Nanning, the three groups of experts complete the tasks assigned to them by the "mysterious man", combining tourism with the three themes of adventure, food and challenge to create the concept of "travel +".

If there is anything in common between Kuaishou Travel Adventures and Lancome, it must be the travelers themselves. Only by "stabilizing" your travel mentality and "stabilizing" your skin condition can you "freely" see more scenery in the future.

Brand placement is already common in variety shows, but only by effectively combining brand propositions with variety show scenes can it be thoroughly planted. Travel Adventures does a good job in this regard, allowing the audience to watch and remember, burying the efficacy information of the Little Black Bottle Essence in unexpected places, conveying Lancome's brand concept, and also labeling it as "maintaining stability during travel"; achieving emotional resonance with "stability" and "freedom", strengthening users' brand awareness with "content + scenes", and ultimately achieving brand-effect integration .

02 Specialty Expert Ecosystem: Making Long-Tail Grass Seeding Fun

In addition to the "high-end feeling" of content implantation, the "location inspection" of this project is also quite clever.

As we all know, beauty brands face two key marketing cycles in May and June, one is "520" and the other is "618". The project nodes of Travel Adventures and the brand's commercial demands have formed a high degree of "resonance".

At the beginning of the project, the initial brand mindset was implanted by using travel experiences with the expert’s personal style and content creation that was close to the audience’s psychology.

In the middle and late stages of the project cooperation, Kuaishou teamed up with 30 experts in various fields including travel, beauty, sports, appearance, and drama to form a strong and wide-ranging product evaluation team, which continuously produced differentiated videos to promote products for users, including the Little Black Bottle Essence and Aurora Water.

Data shows that the videos produced by these 30 experts have been played more than 18 million times and the number of interactions has exceeded 800,000. Take beauty, travel, and short drama experts as examples:

During the 618 promotion, Shochu Lizi introduced Lancôme's Little Black Bottle from the professional perspective of a beauty blogger. His work started with unhealthy lifestyles and targeted consumers with sub-healthy lifestyles; based on three aspects: self-use experience, strong effect comparison before and after use, and skin condition before and after makeup; he emphasized the professional ingredient formula of Lancôme's Little Black Bottle Essence, its moisturizing and layer-by-layer repairing skin care effects, and deeply planted the product's effects in the hearts of fans during the 618 promotion.

The video of a blue whale planting grass does not have a detailed description of the efficacy, but through the beautiful and magnificent or fresh and elegant scenery and delicate and gentle words, it gives the product the value of life attitude - for travel enthusiasts, life is constantly switching in the cycle of four seasons. When the dry climate of the Dunhuang desert and the humid air of the Phuket seaside alternate in a short period of time, sensitive skin also needs to be stabilized. In this scenario, Lancome's little black bottle essence comes in handy.

Screenshot of a video of a blue whale planting grass

Qin Ran, a short drama expert, set the brand exposure scene in the workplace, and combined it with the "domineering CEO" plot that most users like, highlighting the product's efficacy in the ups and downs of the workplace. The expert's own "whole-life" ability and the high stickiness of fans were used to achieve in-depth product reach, locking the applicable group of Lancome Little Black Bottle Essence to people in the workplace, and also giving the product a romantic atmosphere.

Screenshot of Qin Ran's video

During the project, the playback volume of Lancome keyword-related content on the Kuaishou platform increased by 65% ​​month-on-month, the interaction volume increased by 32%, and the keyword search volume increased by 17%. From the early stage of the micro-variety travel adventure in the early 520 period to the large number of influencers before the 618 promotion, Kuaishou has become a bridge connecting brands and users and increasing the brand's value by leveraging the content ecology and influencer ecology on the site.

Lancôme's full-link marketing on Kuaishou this time uses fine-grained content to convey the product's selling points and usage scenarios to users, accumulating the brand's crowd assets and content assets on Kuaishou. This is not the first time Lancôme has cooperated with Kuaishou. During last year's World Cup, Kuaishou and Lancôme launched a micro-variety show "Girlfriends Talk" together.

During the World Cup, businesses generally target male football fans, but Kuaishou's "Girlfriends Talk" invited several female celebrities to talk about their views on the World Cup and their troubles in life. Lancôme also used flowery words to implant in the program, using the female perspective and hot topics to reach Kuaishou users, and achieve a multi-point link of marketing nodes + program content + product promotion.

Kuaishou x Lancome "Girlfriends Say"

03 The next stop for travel IP: enabling brands to reach a wide range of markets

Looking back on this project, Kuaishou achieved brand traffic accumulation and in-depth product promotion through the deep integration of the "Travel+" IP and brand connotation and the high-intensity and high-frequency promotion of expert marketing .

Judging from the number of views of Kuaishou Travel Adventures, the Guangxi station’s video has been viewed more than 32.9 million times, and the related topic #旅行奇遇记广西站 has been viewed more than 1.31 billion times. During the promotion period, the number of views of Lancome-related content on the Kuaishou platform also increased significantly. So, why can Kuaishou’s travel IP effectively help brand marketing?

The first is the content advantage of travel IP.

Travel-themed short videos also have a natural appeal to the public. The "treasure hunt" plot format increases the fun and suspense of travel micro-variety shows, and the addition of diverse experts also enriches the user's viewing experience. Travel IP covers multiple elements such as "food, clothing, housing and transportation", and has extremely high scalability. It can be derived from content in different dimensions in various fields and major brands, and "cross-border" with other vertical categories such as food and variety shows to achieve resonance between brands and consumers.

The second is the fit between the program content and the brand.

The matching of data is a prerequisite for brands to choose the Kuaishou platform. The "2022 Kuaishou E-commerce Data Value Report" shows that female users are the core consumer power of Kuaishou e-commerce, accounting for more than 60% of the total; and in the beauty and personal care category, facial skin care accounts for a far leading proportion, as high as 63.0%, which is in line with the Lancome brand with facial skin care products as the main line. In terms of the tonality of the work, the two keywords "stable" and "free" link travel and brands, which not only expands the application scenarios of the products, but also the experience and spiritual healing brought to people by using the products have the same effect as travel.

Finally, it is the rhythm matching of variety show marketing and expert marketing within Kuaishou.

In this cooperation between Kuaishou and Lancome, Kuaishou started the brand "water storage period" on May 20, using the flower wording of "Travel Adventure" to help the brand expand its circle and inject the first wave of traffic into the brand; and in the "conversion period", through large-scale, rhythmic and diversified marketing by influencers, it strengthened users' trust in the brand and finally achieved product and sales integration. The combination of "travel +" and influencer ecology effectively linked influencers, brands, platforms and tourist areas in the two major promotion activities, while showing the beautiful scenery of Guangxi and appealing to the brand concept, it also converted fans into consumers.

It is understood that the Travel Adventure project will be fully upgraded in the second half of 2023 , combining popular domestic and foreign attractions, popular events, and popular activities to bring everyone a different scenery.

The Hangzhou station will take advantage of the upcoming Hangzhou Asian Games to visit the birthplace of the intangible cultural heritage represented by the mascot, and embody the spirit of sports through interesting economic games; the Xinjiang station will focus on "exploration", looking for local culture and legends, and is committed to creating the next internet celebrity self-driving route.

Now, the investment promotion for the Hangzhou and Xinjiang projects has started. The two programs will not only obtain local resources to cooperate with the online and offline linkage, but the brand rights will also be presented in a more "deep and shallow", rich and diverse form in the programs. In addition to the regular program packaging and implantation rights, they will also undertake relevant authorization, upgrade customization and other personalized needs.

In the upcoming two stops, the platform has also made a lot of big moves. In addition to the top influencers of Kuaishou Travel forming a new travel promoter, the linkage of the pan-life matrix attracts users to watch ; it invites influencers of various vertical categories of pan-life, such as travel, food, and agriculture, to participate in the topic co-construction, and create a "pan-life LIFESTYLE" out-of-circle journey. The most important thing is to link up with local KOLs and KOCs to check in on the program, and jointly create a unique self-driving tour route for the travel adventure , attracting more people to travel spontaneously along the route, and forming the content assets of the Kuaishou Travel IP.

04 Conclusion

The combination of travel IP and brand requires finding the most popular entry point and thoroughly understanding the content to achieve widespread dissemination of the brand and high popularity of the product.

Kuaishou Travel Adventures uses the expert ecosystem in a scientific and systematic way. The personal characteristics + beautiful scenery make the audience feel as if they are in the experience and enhance consumer appeal. At the same time, the large-scale investment of expert marketing achieves strong mental planting, allowing experts, brands, platforms, and tourist areas to get the answers they are looking for.

Author: Top Jun

Source: WeChat official account: TopMarketing (ID: TMarketing)