Tour guide Xiao Qi gained millions of followers overnight, travel agency MCN "breaks through" Douyin?

Recently, the discussion about Xinjiang tourism has gradually increased. The discussion about Xinjiang tourism on social platforms originated from "Guide Xiaoqi". How did the guide Xiaoqi gain millions of followers overnight? This article analyzes the secret code of her popularity. Let's take a look.

The heat of Zibo in March spread to Xinjiang in June and July.

In the past two days, Xinjiang tourism has been discussed on social platforms because of "Guide Xiaoqi". During his trip to Xinjiang, travel blogger "Travel Notes of Passerby A" found that the guide Xiaoqi was honest and down-to-earth, and provided good service. Not only did he not take kickbacks for eating and shopping like most tour guides, he also stopped tourists from buying expensive Xinjiang specialties. What's more surprising is that he also provided various value-added services such as helping to take care of children and taking photos, which solved the pain points of tourism one-on-one and created a peak experience.

After the praise video with the theme of "Adhering to the principle of not letting honest people suffer losses" was released, it has been viewed over 100 million times and received over 360,000 likes. Xiao Qi became an internet celebrity with 3.07 million fans overnight. Netizens joked that Xiao Qi would never be able to accept all the millions of customers who came to her for her fame in her lifetime.

The operating company behind him, "Langlang Planet Travel Agency", is very smart. After Xiaoqi became popular, in order to continue his popularity, they not only quickly let him do live streaming to sell goods, but also launched Xiaoqi No. 2 and No. 3 for tourists to choose from. They even analyzed the reasons for Xiaoqi's popularity and told the story behind Xiaoqi, so that he continued to become popular.

The boss behind Langlang Planet is "Yu, a student from Imperial College", a Douyin influencer who transformed into a travel MCN last year. Now, with the help of Xiaoqi's live broadcast, the business is so hot that it has to start controlling the number of groups. It is worth noting that Langlang Planet focuses on high-end tours, and the price of a 12-day Xinjiang 5-person mid-to-high-end group has reached 14,800.

As tourism remains popular, Douzhu found that most of the current travel MCNs and travel experts were previously local food live broadcast group buying experts. Even during the 618 shopping event this year, some top e-commerce anchors stopped selling beauty and fast-moving consumer goods and started selling travel routes.

The reason why it was able to reap the first wave of benefits from going viral is that Langlang Planet has grasped the path of "differentiated competition". Among the travel celebrities who offer low-priced tours and control costs, Langlang Planet has targeted the mid-to-high-end market, strengthened services, and focused on experience, and naturally stood out from the crowd of "overcharged tour guides".

After all, the conscientious expenses of not recommending additional services and not cheating tourists are all included in the all-inclusive service price of more than 10,000 yuan.

1. The reason why tour guide Xiao Qi was praised: short videos prefer “good people who make a comeback”

Is there only one standard for tour guide Xiao Qi? In fact, there are many "good" tour guides like Xiao Qi who work diligently at their posts to serve tourists, get up early and help take bags for photos.

But how to present it in the short video of Douyin and resonate with the netizens should be attributed to the mentor "Travel Notes of Passerby A" behind Xiaoqi.

In the short video posted by "路人甲旅行记", the first sentence describes Xiao Qi as a "silly boy" and an "honest man", with the hidden meaning being "no tricks, trustworthy".

From the professional perspective of tour guide Xiao Qi, on the one hand, he provides "Haidilao-style" companionship, especially highlighting the details of value-added services he provides beyond the scope of a tour guide's job, such as buying ice cream, dried fruits, and fruits along the way, helping bloggers take care of their children, preparing safety seats for their children, and even carefully choosing seats on the side with a view of the Tianshan Mountains when booking air tickets.

On the other hand, there is the smart Xiao Qi who can do everything. He can fly drones and take photos with a SLR camera, which directly meets the current needs of young families for travel photography. When his drone fell, he ignored the risk and walked a long way to find it. He said he had insurance and was not worried about compensation. He was mainly afraid that it would be a pity to lose the videos he took for customers. He continued to gain high favorability and trust from tourists.

There is a famous saying in marketing that fear is the most powerful weakness marketing. If you want to sell something to people, you have to grasp their inner fear.

Nowadays, the image of tour guides has plummeted, with news reports of tourists being cheated in everything from transporting passengers to internet celebrity cities. Many people can only choose to step into the trap of "travel agencies" and tour guides and then swallow their anger to keep quiet. In sharp contrast, Xiaoqi directly saves the cost of selecting tourists. Tourists do not have to spend their energy to guard against the calculations of merchants or deal with the embarrassment of taking the wrong path when traveling. All their mental energy can be used to experience the joy of Xinjiang.

Most importantly, in the two-minute video, the blogger did not fail to give a full and three-dimensional expression of Xiao Qi. He introduced Xiao Qi as a young man from Northeast China born in 1999, who was in a foreign land, thousands of miles away from home, and wanted to bring his parents to Xinjiang when he was free. The simple smile and sincere attitude in the video made netizens feel very close.

"Don't you miss home so far away?" "I wouldn't notice if he didn't do a lot of the detailed work, and his boss wouldn't see it if he did it. Why is he so serious as an employee?" "In an era when young people are proud of slacking off at work, Xiaoqi's seriousness and diligence seem a bit silly." The few casual words written by Passerby A in the video made netizens see in Xiaoqi the epitome of a hardworking, positive and capable young person.

In this era, when people in this society are chasing fame and fortune, desperately using skills and routines, the "honest people" and "good people" who do the opposite are more favored by short videos, because the principles that seem to be easy for these people are not known to be so precious in other places. Therefore, the kindness and compassion deep in the hearts of the public, the desire for such people to be favored by fate, and the expectation that they can "rebound", may be the underlying psychological logic of Xiaoqi's popularity.

2. Food experts and e-commerce anchors have all turned to the tourism industry, why did "Xiao Qi" become the first to become popular?

Xiaoqi's popularity will not stop there. The owner of Douzhu noticed that the travel company behind Xiaoqi responded extremely quickly. After the video of "Passerby A's Travel Notes" praising Xiaoqi became popular, Xiaoqi posted videos and did live broadcasts in response the next day, and her fans are still increasing at a high speed.

Other IPs of Langlang Planet are also gradually emerging, such as "Langlang Planet Xiao Yuan", which has over a thousand fans through filming #Xiao Qi's daily life after the explosion#. The one who gained the fastest fans is the boss behind the scene, "Imperial College Yu Tongxue", who knows how to leverage power. Not only does he let Xiao Qi live broadcast on his personal account, he also posted videos revealing the story behind Xiao Qi and analyzing the reasons for Xiao Qi's explosion in popularity, gaining 200,000 fans in three days.

This fast-paced follow-up and ability to capture trends are also closely related to Yu's own identity as a big V. It was learned that as an influencer of Douyin's commentary on people's livelihood and current affairs, his opportunity to run a travel agency came from Douyin's ability to create "cultural and tourism hits."

Nowadays, short videos are increasingly becoming the mainstream of the cultural tourism market, from Xi'an, which was popular in the 1.0 era, to Luoyang (a landmark that is crowded with people wearing Hanfu, why is it Luoyi Ancient City?) and Zibo (Zibo is popular, let the bullets fly for a while), Douyin's cultural tourism marketing capabilities are unquestionable. Seeing this trend, Yu Tongxue established a travel agency to offer Xinjiang tours last year. Although the tour was shelved after only a few groups due to the epidemic, it was still reopened in April this year and will continue until August.

Of course, Yu is not the only one who has set his sights on this market. Short video celebrities, live streaming influencers and travel practitioners have all targeted this fast-growing market and are trying to get a piece of the pie. Sam, an industry insider, told me that the local tourism life that was boosted by the "micro-vacation" last year is now in the blue ocean, and the Douyin hotel and travel sector is growing rapidly.

In the live broadcast field, a large number of celebrities have joined the field and cooperated with cultural and tourism institutions, hotels, etc. to promote tourism products. Last year, in June alone, the sales of the hotel and tourism sector in local life exceeded 100 million. Among them, Xiaoqi Aiwan, which has only 50,000 fans, sold more than 10 million in a single broadcast, and the Wuhan Maya Beach self-broadcast room created a single broadcast GMV of 8.8 million. After the epidemic, overseas travel routes also began to heat up.

In addition to travel KOLs, a large number of food group-buying experts and top anchors have also turned to the travel track. During this year's 618, Yaowang's e-commerce experts Yang Zi & Huang Shengyi, and Wang Zulan all launched their live broadcast debut on Douyin's local life service, with single-day GMV exceeding 150 million and 11.15 million respectively; in June this year, Douyin's life service launched its first overseas outdoor live broadcast. Celebrity Gao Yuanyuan and travel KOL Paris Xiao Guoguo jointly recommended products such as in-depth tours of France and Italy and high-end overseas trips. The 3-hour live broadcast had more than 10 million online viewers, and the average customer order value exceeded 9,000 yuan.

However, due to the limitation of industry resources, most live-streaming celebrities still participate in the tourism track by recommending routes and tourism supporting products, and only participate in the recommendation in the sales process. In the tourism track that emphasizes service and experience, individual feelings are different. It is difficult for celebrities who are only responsible for attracting traffic and selling goods to guarantee the individual experience of each user, which has also led to the situation where product sales are hot but the reputation is uneven.

On the other hand, major travel agencies and tourism service organizations that control front-end tourism resources are also working hard to build online and short video communication channels and switch to the MCN model. Doujiao learned that many travel agencies now specially train their tour guides on how to create tourism store exploration IPs, how to shoot short videos, how to live broadcast and sell goods, how to explore stores, etc.

However, this also places higher demands on travel agencies. The creation of a tour guide’s personal IP requires time and operational skills. Many of them need to hire some IP creation professionals to solve problems such as the planning, shooting, editing, and operation of short video content, and form a set of professional and standard travel store exploration blogger creation processes. At the same time, travel agencies are also required to negotiate store exploration resources, product selection, advertisers, etc. Such long-term operations are unfamiliar to many travel agencies and require a lot of time and cost. Therefore, many travel agencies try to seek external cooperation when choosing, and directly find travel experts to make recommendations and write stories. "If one of the batches succeeds, the investment can be recovered."

This also leads to the separation of products and communication. Since last year, KOLs and KOCs have collectively made short videos about hotels, travel and store exploration. Due to the low entry threshold for influencers, the proliferation of short videos, the widespread copywriting and planning, the serious homogeneity of the works, and the near saturation, travelers also feel the "unworthy" false communication and the bad experience of being forced to buy outside the low-priced package.

From this point of view, it is not difficult to understand why Xiaoqi became popular overnight and became a new "out-of-circle" benchmark case in Douyin's local life, hotel and tourism section.

Langlang Planet's main travel routes are Xinjiang and Sanya. It is a travel agency that provides travel services. On the basis of ensuring service quality, it caught up with the summer travel boom and produced popular content. Relying on its previous experience in operating celebrities, it quickly seized the trend.

The front end is personally involved in ensuring service quality, and the back end has mature operational experience to follow up on dissemination. The unification of product and sales is the key to Langlang Planet's success, and it also indirectly proves the public's real and urgent demand for high-quality travel experience.

3. “It looks very lively, but the industry is still focusing on low-price tours”

In the final analysis, the reason for Laoshi Xiaoqi's popularity is that he is dedicated to providing services. He has become a clear stream among the many tour guides who messily recommend additional products or overcharge customers.

The ability to provide a pure all-inclusive service is also closely related to Langlang Planet's focus on mid- to high-end travel planning routes. Especially in the Xinjiang tour project, there are differences from the mainstream services currently provided in the market.

"Tourism is indeed very popular now, but most MCNs still follow the low-price logic when making short videos and live broadcasts, so there will be a big difference in quality, and there are many hidden costs." Sam also told the owner that they and travel agencies formed a low-priced product with daily sales of tens of millions, but the write-off rate was very low, especially for long-distance travel, where users take a long time to make decisions, and the role of bringing goods is still to attract customers with low-priced products.

The owner of the website found that in the live broadcast room, a 14-day tour of five European countries has been reduced to 10,999 yuan, while a pure tour group in Xinjiang with 8 days and 7 nights of food, accommodation, transportation and entertainment only costs 2,880 yuan. This is obviously not enough to meet normal commercial profits.

Yu said in a video that the reason travel agencies are not losing money by launching a large number of low-priced tours is that they are still making profits through high-value purchases. Most tour guides do not receive any salary, and all the money they earn is commission from tourists' shopping. When promoting the tour, it is said that there is zero shopping, but in reality it is a shopping tour. For example, buying latex pillows and pearl necklaces in Sanya or jade in Yunnan are priced at several thousand, but finally sold to customers for a few hundred, with the actual cost being only a few dozen. As a result, the market is still in a state of bad money driving out good money.

From a business logic perspective, starting small, exquisite tour groups and increasing the average price per customer seem to be the transformation direction that major travel agencies can think of. They are generally aimed at people with an annual income of more than 1 million yuan and travel expenses of 50,000 to 100,000 yuan. However, in order to reach this base of people and get them to pay, they have to think about how to provide equivalent products, services and value in short videos and live broadcasts.

Langlangxinghuo is the representative who has seized the dividend of this wave of people. The tourism service projects it provides are divided into parent-child tours, mid-range tours and high-end tours. The price of a 12-day Xinjiang 5-person mid-range tour has reached 14,800 yuan, and the price of a high-end tour photography (tourism photography) is 19,800 yuan, both of which are over 10,000 yuan. It is not difficult to imagine why Xiaoqi would provide Haidilao-style service. After all, you get what you pay for. So far, the best-selling product in Langlangxinghuo's window is the 8-day Yili tour for 8,980 yuan, with sales of more than 200.

The popularity of Xiaoqi and its Bole "Travel Notes of Passerby" tourism content may provide ideas for small and medium-sized organizations to do high-end customized tourism on Douyin and take the differentiated boutique track. This not only avoids resource competition with traditional tourism organizations, but also makes it easier to achieve word-of-mouth and provide precise services to the new middle class by starting with service.

After all, when the cultural and tourism boom starts, the arrival of the low-price trend drives an increase in orders, and the public's enthusiasm for participation rises, ensuring services and providing travel experiences that match user expectations will be the next direction that celebrities and institutions need to focus on.

Author: 24

Source: Doujiao TMT (ID: ylwanjia), the smell and temperature of new traffic, new technology, new gameplay, and new economy.