Single product GMV 3 million +, crowd assets increased 10 times, these brands broke through the circle of Douyin e-commerce supplies

Introduction: This article uses examples of brands such as Bananain and UR that have done a good job in omnichannel marketing to show readers how to operate a brand, penetrate downward, seize core products, and ultimately achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

In the past year, the Knife Skills Research Institute interviewed more than 100 brand operators and found that reducing costs, increasing efficiency and building brand power are the common directions of efforts of almost all brands.

There are two common paths to building brand power: one is to use brand marketing to penetrate from top to bottom, and the other is to reach consumers through advantageous categories and core products, and drive the brand through categories.

Products are the terminal for communication between brands and users. Driving the brand through category strategic campaigns can allow users to perceive the brand through products and consumption experiences at a lower cost, thereby shaping brand power. This can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

As one of the core online channels of brands, Douyin e-commerce has also seen the trend of categories driving brands, and actively cooperated with brands to create a growth model. This year, Douyin e-commerce's full-domain marketing activities in the apparel industry have been fully upgraded, launching a new category activity IP Douin New Trend "Apparel Trend Category Week" and the "China is Good" series of activities.

Dispersed channels, serious product homogeneity, lagging communication with users, and difficulty in improving operating efficiency are common problems in the clothing industry. In this event, clothing brands such as Bananain, CABBEEN (hereinafter referred to as "CABBEEN"), and UR have solved these problems one by one and achieved both product quality and sales through their advantageous categories.

In this article, Knife Skills Research Institute deeply analyzes the three brand cases of Bananain, Carbean, and UR to answer your questions:

1. How can brands find their advantageous categories?
2. How to accumulate crowd assets through advantageous categories and break the circle?
3. How to establish a global marketing layout to leverage more growth?

01 Three key points to find the advantageous categories

Just as when we mention down jackets, we think of Bosideng; when we mention cashmere, we think of Ordos... These brands are able to leave an impression in the hearts of users, proving that whether it is a mature brand or a cutting-edge brand, building a brand by creating advantageous categories is an effective method that has been proven countless times.

Using product category strategy to create the first association of "brand = category" is not only applicable to single-category brands, but also for all-category brands, finding core categories and quickly breaking through the circle with product category strategy is also the key to opening up the market. For example, the all-category brand Carbin, through its advantageous category of T-shirts, launched a single product with sales exceeding 2 million in the "Douyin New Trend·China's Best T-shirts" project, and 5 single products with GMV exceeding one million. The total GMV reached 18.85 million, a month-on-month increase of 193%, and the explosive coefficient was as high as 1.67.

The first and key step to achieve this is to find the core categories and super products that can truly represent the brand.

Carbin's method of locking in advantageous categories is to use the "three-circle model" - the needs and preferences of the brand's core TA, the best carrier of the brand's own DNA and concepts, and the best embodiment of the brand's comprehensive capabilities in design, supply chain, cost control, etc. The overlapping part of these three circles is where the advantageous categories are.

In addition, the process of Carbin determining its advantageous categories also relies on the data support of Douyin e-commerce. Carbin made early arrangements at the beginning of the year and invested a small budget in Douyin e-commerce to test the hot products. It continued to heat up the potential products through methods such as influencer recommendation, in preparation for the hot products.

For items with good performance in the early stage, the Douyin e-commerce platform will provide traffic support during the event, helping brands focus resources on top hits and make corresponding inventory preparations. In addition to Carbine, Bananain and UR also used Douyin e-commerce resources and combined their own advantages to find their main advantage categories - sun protection clothing and dresses - during the Douyin New Trend "Apparel Trend Category Week" event.

Bananain has four major categories: underwear, ready-to-wear, home wear, and children's clothing. After becoming a representative brand in the underwear category, Bananain plans to expand its audience through category strategy and break through the circle. And sun protection clothing is the next advantageous category it is targeting. Bananain's newly launched "Liangpi" series of sun protection clothing continues the product logic of "retanpi" warm clothing, which not only conforms to market trends, but is also a natural extension of the brand's advantageous categories.

Similarly, UR has also combined the industry trend and its own advantages to find the dress category. As one of the popular categories in the clothing market, the demand for dresses has further exploded in the spring and summer seasons. Leading the fashion trends of the season in advance and reaching the core group is the key to building brand awareness through this category.

In the "2023 Spring/Summer Dress Trend Guide" jointly released by Douyin e-commerce women's wear and global fashion trend forecasting agency WGSN, UR is not only the leading brand in the dress category, but also the representative brand of the sporty girl trend style. Based on this advantage, UR actively cooperates with the platform to promote its brand power in the Douyin new trend "Apparel Trend Category Week" event.

02 Establish a seeding matrix to break through the crowd

Finding trending categories is only the first step. Next, brands need to establish matrix topics and promote content through celebrities and influencers in order to accumulate crowd assets and truly break through the circle.

The premise of effective promotion is accurate insight into users. In traditional channels, it is difficult for brands to keep up with changes in user preferences. Developing products and producing brand content based on inertia results in being further away from users. On Douyin e-commerce, brands can clearly see the crowd assets.

In the Douin New Trend·Dress Trend Category Week event, activating crowd assets is the goal of many brands. Among them, UR's approach is worth referring to.

During the event, UR products received more than 10 million views, and more than 180 new products were launched within 10 days of the event. The first launch rate of new products on Douyin e-commerce platform was 98%, and the proportion of new products in the dress category reached 62%, ranking first in the dress track of brand women's clothing self-broadcast merchants. Its retro waist dress product GMV output was 3 million+, and orders were 13,000+.

After the activity period, the penetration rate of UR dress category increased from 30% to 40%, and the age group of 18-30 years old continued to rise, which not only achieved the rejuvenation of the population, but also expanded the two core groups of "sophisticated mothers" and "senior middle class".

After the release of the "2023 Spring/Summer Dress Trend Guide", UR immediately took advantage of the opportunity to launch hot topics and theme blockbusters, and launched the "Guilin Landscape Show" offline, firing the first shot of its category strategy.

Next, a key move for UR to achieve results is to optimize the cooperation model with Douyin influencers. In 2023, UR's focus on Douyin influencers is not limited to the simple marketing dimension, but to tap into the unique influence of influencers among fan groups while ensuring sales. At the same time, through cooperation with influencers, it can gain multi-angle insights into the latest fashion trends and consumer mindsets of the season.

UR's influencer matrix almost spans the entire activity chain, including new product preheating, release, seeding, live broadcast, conversion, etc. Under the hot topic #公主的100穿衣, the matrix effect is fully exerted - using a large amount of high-quality original content about products and trends to attract users and deepen users' association with UR and the dress category.

Behind influencers are the crowd. UR regards influencer cooperation as a lever to leverage crowd assets and use their influence to trigger a chain reaction. For example, a successful cooperation will attract other high-quality influencers to cooperate, thereby reaching more people and expanding Douyin users' brand awareness.

UR's GMV generated by influencers' promotions reached a historical peak. Among them, the average purchase order volume of users in the "Little Bear" collaboration session increased to 2.3 pieces, and the payment GMV of six products exceeded 100,000+.

The data analysis tools and crowd packages provided by Douyin e-commerce as a platform allow brands to clearly see the changes in crowds and accurately measure marketing effects. For example, through the huge cloud map, we can see that the total assets of the UR brand have increased by more than 100%, among which the growth rates of A1, A2, and A3 crowds are all over three digits.

In addition, Bananain and Cabbeen also formulated operational strategies for their respective key groups to achieve breakthroughs.

During the "Douyin New Trend·Spring and Summer New Products" campaign, Bananain's 5A population assets increased by 23.3 million, an increase of 257%, of which A1-A3 population increased significantly. Relying on the platform's operational resources such as exposure, topics, top KOL challenges, and celebrity co-creation of short videos, Bananain has laid out content fields, created a matrix of high-quality topics and influencers, and quickly accumulated user assets. On the other hand, it has coordinated commercial investment and obtained more sustainable traffic to achieve brand population breakthroughs.

Through activities such as the Talent Challenge, Carbin’s related videos have been played over 100 million times, the brand’s 5A population has increased by 444%, the shallow population A2A3 has increased by 3328%, and the contribution of new customers to GMV accounts for 72%. From the data, it can be seen that Carbin has effectively expanded the brand’s awareness among Douyin users and promoted conversions through seeding content.

Before the event started, Carbin used a huge cloud map to analyze user portraits and locked in "sophisticated mothers" as the core group for targeted delivery. Therefore, in terms of content orientation, Carbin intentionally increased the proportion of mothers participating in the event in addition to the core group of 25-35 years old. For example, in the joint series promotional videos with China Rockets, a sticker activity that is attractive to children was set up to reach the group of sophisticated mothers in multiple ways.

03 Reduce costs and increase efficiency, starting with global operations

If finding trending categories and accumulating crowd assets through trending categories is an effective way to build brand awareness, then if brands want to further reduce costs and increase efficiency and achieve higher conversion efficiency, the key lies in deploying Douyin e-commerce omni-channel marketing.

In the context of the gradual increase in traffic costs on all platforms, if brands only focus on live streaming or harvesting traffic from a single node, it is difficult to accumulate real traffic and the cost will remain high. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a global mindset, accumulate people through relatively low-cost exposure and seeding in the early stage, and then promote conversion through multiple channels and various forms to effectively reduce the overall traffic cost.

As for how to establish a global traffic layout, Bananain's approach is worth referring to. During the event, Bananain deployed all categories of products on self-broadcasting and Dabo channels, which led to global business growth. The brand activity period had an explosive coefficient of over 200%, of which new brand customer transactions accounted for 75%, and GMV exceeded 17 million, an increase of 864% year-on-year.

Bananain entered Douyin e-commerce as early as 2021, but the real explosion began in April 2022, when Bananain re-examined the Douyin e-commerce ecosystem and reorganized the operation team. By 2023, as the brand develops in the direction of full categories, Bananain will build 5-6 live broadcast rooms, form an account matrix, coordinate content scenes and shelf scenes, and double the sales scale by establishing Douyin e-commerce omni-domain marketing.

First, Bananain's cooperation with top influencers in the content field has increased the sales share of live broadcasts from 15% to more than 20%. During this event, Bananain's full range of underwear appeared on top live broadcast rooms such as Oriental Selection and Make Friends, effectively increasing brand awareness and continuing to promote it. At the same time, Bananain optimized its own live broadcasts, upgraded the decoration style of the self-broadcast room during the event, and optimized the live broadcasting techniques based on the strong seasonality of sunscreen products.

Secondly, Bananain plans for long-term development through membership operations, taking on traffic and promoting conversion. During the activity period, Bananain added more than 30,000 new members and continued to improve circulation efficiency. In the new member acquisition stage, new member coupons with a total value of more than 500,000 yuan and member lottery purchases with a maximum value of 500 yuan were used to attract new users to join. In the conversion stage, challenge competitions were launched to win coupons and fixed-node lottery activities to inspire users to complete orders during the new product release period. In the retention stage, Bananain improved the membership rights and interests gradient, as well as the "lottery wheel" activity with 8 lottery prizes per period, to attract existing users to continue to pay attention to the brand.

Coincidentally, the comprehensive growth of Carbeen and UR in Douyin e-commerce also started with "full-area operation".

In September 2022, Carbin made a round of strategic adjustments to the Douyin e-commerce channel, shifting resources from a single-point investment in live streaming to a full-area approach including early seeding, reach broadcasting, self-broadcasting, and marketing IP activities, with remarkable results - from January to April this year, Douyin e-commerce sales reached more than three times that of the same period last year.

UR entered the Douyin e-commerce market earlier than the previous two. It started its layout in early 2020. UR initially focused on short video operations, and then gradually expanded to live broadcast rooms and established an account matrix. Each account operates differently for different audience groups.

In 2022, Douyin e-commerce upgraded interest e-commerce to global interest e-commerce, and UR saw the opportunity. On the basis of doing a good job in content scenarios such as short videos and live broadcast rooms, UR tried to add shelf scenarios such as search and Douyin Mall, which greatly improved product exposure and user conversion rate.

04 Analyst Comments

Nowadays, brands are all worried about the high traffic costs. But in the three brands of Bananain, Cabbeen and UR, we see that brands have seized the category trend and have the opportunity to bring huge growth.

In order to help brands solve the problem, Douyin e-commerce plans to create more than 10 key trend categories with a value of 100 billion yuan and more than 10 category captain brands leading the industry based on the platform's crowd resources and data analysis capabilities, including down, cashmere, T-shirts, dresses, camping, fishing, etc. The value of becoming a trend captain brand of Douyin e-commerce apparel category IP activities to merchants lies not only in obtaining exclusive rights and exposure resources, but more importantly in grasping category trends and accumulating crowd assets.

If brands want to maximize the value of trend categories on Douyin e-commerce, they need to find core advantage categories, establish matrix topics, accumulate crowd assets through celebrity content, and break through the circle. At the same time, they need to break the single-point thinking and deploy omni-channel marketing to have the opportunity to create more growth.

To achieve this, in addition to leveraging the brand’s own advantages, the support of platform resources is also indispensable.

In this event, Douyin e-commerce provided support to brands throughout the entire process. Brands can not only co-create trends with the platform in the early stages, but also use Douyin e-commerce's crowd packages and data capabilities to further segment the granularity of the crowd target portraits and provide data insights for brands. In addition, Douyin e-commerce also provides category captain brands with traffic resources and strong exposure across the entire region to accumulate potential for category explosions. After the outbreak period, Douyin e-commerce's support for brands continues. Brands can review and precipitate their strategies through data, and the pain points of brand marketing activities that are difficult to measure are also solved. Brands make layouts and strategies based on data, which is equivalent to an "open-book exam."

Author: Saturn, Siete

WeChat public account: Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)