Interviews with 10+ brand managers revealed 5 new 618 strategies

618 is coming, during this period, platforms and brands are competing with each other. In order to welcome this promotion, all brands have formed new strategies for 618! This article talked with more than 10 brand people and came to 5 conclusions, hoping to provide some new thinking for the industry.

It has to be said that this year's 618 is another "King of Lottery" competition.

Platforms compete with each other, and brands compete with each other. After all, this year marks the 20th anniversary of JD.com and Taobao, and both sides probably want to achieve good results at key points and grab the match point. JD.com held a merchant conference in April, and Alibaba held a 618 press conference in May without stopping, launching various support plans to attract merchants to participate.

At present, the competition between the two sides has begun to enter a white-hot stage, and the first wave of pre-sales is coming. In this case, the brand side’s mentality towards this year’s 618 is: with more and more daily promotions, the difficulty coefficient of doing big promotions has begun to increase. The original 618 was a one-day explosion, but now it is a long-term battle. Including the polarization of consumer purchasing mentality, one is to cover the wallet, compared to the pursuit of novel products, more likely to buy "sense of security" products, that is, basic consumer products; the other is to pursue high-end products, not to compare prices, not to stock up, what you want is experience. But even if the difficulty increases, the brand side still said that "618" is a battlefield that must be participated in. In order to better understand the brand's strategy for 618 this year, we talked with more than 10 brand people and came to 5 conclusions, hoping to provide some new thinking for the industry.

1. Sales Pre-positioning

Generally speaking, during the promotion period, the biggest competition between competing products is price. As mentioned above, some consumers have become more cost-conscious. They will go to Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo and other channels to see how much this brand's product costs and how much another brand's product costs, and then buy the brand product with the best price-performance ratio.

In this case, it means that it is actually very difficult for brands to "compete on price", so some brands start to get ahead of themselves and do "sales pre-positioning", that is, to complete the sales targets during major promotions such as 618 and Double 11 in advance.

In other words, while others start fighting on June 18, you start on May 18, and take advantage of the time difference to avoid the time when the price war is the most intense.

On June 18, after achieving the sales target, the brand will sell according to normal daily sales methods. Last year, a beverage brand said that it achieved its sales target in this way. If it takes the same measure this year, its assessment indicator will be changed to "shortening the battle", that is, it took 20 days to achieve the sales target last year, and whether it can be achieved in 15 days on June 18 this year. If there is no advance sales this year, a "differentiation" approach will be adopted, such as selling products in combination packages for competing products, etc., to make some breakthroughs without direct competition.

2. Digital closed loop, marketing closed loop, and global closed loop

In addition to playing with time differences, many brands said that they need to pay more and more attention to "closed loops". The closed loops mentioned here are mainly divided into three categories:

1. Digital closed loop, closing all paths from user demand to purchase and then to repurchase
2. Marketing closed loop, not only selling goods, but also brand promotion
3. Full-area closed loop, omni-channel deployment and harvesting

In fact, the reason why everyone emphasizes closed loops is that the difficulty of business operation has doubled, so that many marketers complain that the number of consumers has decreased. In fact, consumers have not "decreased" but have become very scattered. Brands "cannot see" these consumers. They are scattered on any channel such as traditional e-commerce, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc. So, how to do these three closed loops well?

First, digital closed loop, brands may want to start with these two steps:

First, the first step to a digital closed loop is to understand "who your target users are and where they are" because the choice of channels is not determined by the brand itself, but by consumers. You should go where your audience is. For example, who will buy a video security doorbell product? The answer is female users or users with children. Where are these people? Xiaohongshu is very useful for this. For another example, the target audience of dashcam products is more concentrated on Zhihu and What's Worth Buying.

Second, brands must try their best to understand what the “closed loop of data” is and connect content with transactions.

Many of the channels mentioned above, such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Zhihu, do not have a closed loop for transactions, payments, and logistics. At this time, users need to return to JD.com or Tmall. So, what can brands do? The core is: starting from user needs, doing a good job of seeding, and the path of linking seeding content to e-commerce.

Let's take Xiaohongshu as an example: First, you need to know the positioning of your brand in Xiaohongshu, what keywords your competitors use, and who are your upstream and downstream under the search keywords? Then determine what your keywords and positioning are? What influencers do your competitors use, and what influencers should you use?

In short, your digital capabilities on Xiaohongshu are more prominent than those of your competitors. You know, ducks know first when the river water warms in spring.

After doing this, brands need to pay attention to their search terms and keywords on Xiaohongshu. These contents are the key points of optimization. These keywords should be embedded in the actual e-commerce searches or reflected on the pages. Grafting is a must because only after grafting will the brand know the efficiency of the content output on Xiaohongshu, thereby completing a certain aspect of data connection and monitoring.

Secondly, the closed loop of marketing. For many mature brands, 618 is not only a promotion, but also a large-scale marketing campaign. For example, a mature brand will focus on "brand + product + channel" this year, because the mission of the brand is whether users can think of you. For example, if I want to buy a certain product, which brand will come to mind, and whether the product quality is good enough, whether users can buy it, and whether users will repurchase. Finally, this year's 618 brands should not blindly set channels, goals, and content, and do live broadcasts if live broadcasts are popular. Instead, after thinking about efficient and high-quality channels, "ignite all channels and harvest everywhere." Of course, in this process, brands still make arrangements based on their own situation. For example, the sales of a certain brand's channels account for about 6:3:1, with JD.com accounting for 6, Tmall accounting for 3, and Douyin and Kuaishou accounting for 1. Therefore, on the channel side, this brand will focus more on the support of Alibaba, Douyin, and Kuaishou this year.

3. Category, crowd, segmentation and tiered operations

Category, crowd, segmentation, and stratified operations can be seen as the key implementation in a digital closed loop. When doing a closed loop, the matching of "people, goods, and venues" must be more accurate, but nowadays users are not only scattered but also stratified, that is, they are scattered in various media, and in different media, these users have different levels of awareness of your brand.

At the same time, in this situation, consumers are exposed to an explosion of information. Many marketers say, "Consumers now have a memory similar to that of fish, which is only 7 seconds. They buy when they see something and leave when they buy it." This has led to brands becoming more segmented and refined in terms of categories and populations. As a result, everyone is paying more and more attention to the user stage (similar to 5A of ByteDance and AILP of Alibaba Mom), and "interest groups" are mentioned repeatedly. Of course, each platform has a different name for "interest groups". ByteDance calls this type of consumer the A3 group, which is the user who has been planted by the brand.

Many brands said that during the promotion period, the budget will be more focused on consumers who are "interested in the brand", "have been attracted by it", and "have already purchased it", which are more likely to be converted. In other words, the precise products will be promoted to the precise people in the right scenarios. However, in the actual operation, it is still necessary to adjust according to the brand's own purpose.
In addition to stratified operations among the population, mature brands have begun to segment their operations into different categories.

Generally speaking, compared with emerging brands, mature brands tend to have a very large category system, which is a "super store". However, this will also cause a problem, that is, the store is large and the categories are very complete, but it is also very scattered. In this regard, a mature brand said that super stores are mainly large and comprehensive, targeting the "masses" audience and reaching a wide range. At the same time, focus on categories, set up category stores on channels such as JD.com, Tmall, and Douyin, find out which categories have core advantages, amplify them, focus on users, focus on traffic, and differentiate from industry competitors.

4. Content Marketing

In addition to the keywords of category segmentation, digital closed loop, and sales pre-positioning, "content marketing" is mentioned frequently. Some brands even firmly stated that content marketing will be a hot topic in the future. You must grasp it. At present, many emerging brands still mainly lay out content in the interest fields of "Tik Tok and Xiaohongshu", and then find opportunities to attract people, stimulate their needs, and then transfer to e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and JD.com to complete transactions. Because after years of precipitation, the shopping mentality of consumers is still dominated by these two platforms. After all, for new brands, in addition to sales, they also need channels with media attributes to expose their brands. A tea brand said that its current sales on Tik Tok account for more than 70% of its total revenue.

In fact, not only brands, but also e-commerce platforms are paying more and more attention to content. Especially Taobao, the second section placed in the navigation bar at the bottom of the APP is called "Shopping". In the form of information flow, you can swipe to see short videos recommending various products. Using content-based means, it increases user time and makes Taobao more enjoyable to shop. Shopping and shopping more are the sources of traffic. But then again, the layout of content marketing is not so easy to do. Taking Douyin as an example, some brands said that many times, the cost of investing in Douyin, plus the corresponding marketing expenses, may reduce the ROI for the business in the final settlement, so brands will try to focus on natural traffic first. So how to plan Douyin specifically? Perhaps brands can think about the following 3 points:

First, the content level. The brand is too burdened, and the content is all about product promotion, which cannot resonate with consumers and is too far away from consumers. Of course, this is also related to the brand group PR, which needs to be strictly reviewed and easily arouses expectations, so the actual brand can choose to use personal accounts to promote the product.

Secondly, live streaming. Users are bombarded with "brainwashing" rhetoric every day during live streaming. It is easy to increase the volume at the beginning, but users gradually get tired of it, and the content has a low shelf life. So what kind of live streaming do users think is relatively good?

1. Boss live broadcast. A certain brand said that according to the research based on user psychology, when the boss appears in the live broadcast room, users will think that the price must be low, and the trust is high. The probability of consumers jumping out of the live broadcast room to compare prices is lower, and the transaction rate is relatively higher.
2. Factory live broadcast. Direct from the factory, consumers can see the quality of the brand products, feel assured, and thus develop trust.

Finally, on-site fulfillment. If store growth is driven by content, Douyin local life can be distributed to various brand stores or KA channels through live broadcasts and short video content using GPS, and the crowd can be directed offline through offline coupon redemption to achieve on-site fulfillment. Currently, on-site fulfillment is divided into two categories: 1. GPS to store; 2. Linked, if the store does not cover the consumer, a free trade order will be issued the next day after the purchase.

To expand on this, "In the future, content will influence consumer decisions, and the proportion will become larger and larger," an investor said. As mentioned above, consumers receive too much information. On the one hand, the probability that they will be attracted by content is increasing. Before buying a product, checking out Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Zhihu may be a "must-do" for many consumers to buy a product.

Therefore, brands actually need to have the ability to create content, rather than just refining it from the perspective of KOLs and KOCs. How to combine their products with content and scenarios is a very important task for brands nowadays. For example, "when brands begin to consciously turn content-oriented things such as public account output into a product line and create content around different specific products, the entire company's business ideas and results will be different," said an investor.

5. Focus on daily sales

We just talked about keywords and user changes. Finally, let's talk about the brand's experience of this year's 618. "This year's 618, we feel that the e-commerce environment may not be the same as in previous years. The jump between big promotions and daily sales is not very obvious, especially on March 8 this year. We can clearly feel the focus of channel big promotions, and the jump is relatively flat. Therefore, this year, we need to focus on the more important daily sales, including the early harvest of big promotions. It is very necessary," said a brand.

To some extent, this also represents "market competition has reached its extreme", but after consumers are repeatedly touched by various festivals, in the long run, brands only exerting their strength during the big promotion period is no longer enough to support long-term growth. We need to formulate a more long-term strategy - do a good job of daily promotions and small node promotions, through such daily water accumulation, expand the user population base, continue to deepen the relationship between user groups, and turn the target population into what we call "interest groups", accumulate strength for the big promotion, and then make a final sprint for more efficient conversion. In other words, it is to extend the cycle, accumulate little by little, and change from quantitative change to qualitative change.

VI. Conclusion

Finally, we also see that brands are beginning to think about how to better integrate online promotions with offline marketing. Because from the perspective of brands, whether consumers buy offline or online, they have actually completed the transaction.

However, if you want to integrate online and offline, the key variable factor is price. Whether the "online and offline" prices are consistent, because once consumers find that the prices are different, they are likely to have negative emotions. Of course, in addition to this, in many companies, online and offline are actually managed by different teams, and whether the organizational capabilities can be effectively coordinated is also a difficult task. But it is undeniable that when online business is becoming more and more difficult, everyone begins to think about the "breakthrough" methods of business growth from all aspects. And these methods, in the end, for consumers, are to remove the bubble and let consumers get more value for money; to meet consumer needs and provide a good experience.

Author: Rita

Source: WeChat public account "Morketing (ID: Morketing)"