In 2023, Douyin will use the "sandwich" method to promote the entire link

Grass-seeding marketing can deepen the memory of the brand and stimulate immediate actions and conversions. There are many contents introducing the grass-seeding of Douyin short videos, but there is still a lack of first-hand practical operation by brands. Today, the author shares the Douyin full-link grass-seeding "sandwich" method in this article, hoping to help you.

Grass-seeding marketing is generally considered to be a model between brand promotion and performance marketing. It has the attributes of deepening brand recognition and memory, and also has the function of stimulating immediate actions and conversions. In the previous article (long article) about everything about grass-seeding marketing, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, WeChat, Zhihu, Weibo, we introduced the grass-seeding strategies and practical methods of mainstream platforms.

Among them, Douyin is a platform with a huge user base and high average time stickiness (accounting for half of the country's population. If the elderly and children are removed, the penetration rate of effective consumer groups is extremely high), and its significance is self-evident:

Among them, short video seeding plays a key role in the Douyin business ecosystem:

First of all, short video format has always been the soul of Douyin.

With the iteration of the Douyin ecosystem, Douyin's commercialization has continued to evolve, from influencer recommendations to KOL content investment, to information flow advertising, and to brand live broadcast room investment, but short video content has become the carrier of consumer cognition and has remained unchanged.

Secondly, short video seeding can not only expand the A2-A3 population in the closed-loop ecosystem of Douyin e-commerce, accumulate water for live broadcasting, and expand the volume for self-broadcasting; from the perspective of global marketing, because of its explosiveness and precision in traffic, it can also greatly attract attention and traffic, becoming the "engine" to ignite global e-commerce, private domain and even offline business.

There is a lot of content introducing the short video promotion on Douyin, including framework introduction, influencer selection, traffic investment methods, content polishing, brand cases, etc. However, there is still a lack of first-hand practical operation by the brand side and the systematic practical methods summarized.

Since ancient times, practice leads to true knowledge.

Today's article is based on our team's own practical iterations and has been proven to be effective.

We call this method the "sandwich" method , which runs through the product from launch to promotion (usually one cycle is about three months). In addition to planning and rhythm, it also involves detailed operations, including influencers, investment tool combinations, e-commerce closed loops, etc.

Without further ado (it seems like we’ve said a lot already), let’s get started.

1. Preparation before making the "sandwich"

Students who are involved in product marketing may be familiar with a term - "selling point testing".

To be more precise, the "selling point" is a combination of [demand motivation-supporting functional points] .

Before planting grass, you need to extract the most attractive points that impress consumers or the motivating points based on scene needs, that is, demand motivation. With demand motivation, you also need several selling points that can support [meeting needs]. Then combine the two together to make N groups of different options.

Before formally promoting, these combinations should be tested on a small scale to ensure the success rate - the cost of promoting products on the Douyin platform is actually not low, and it is strongly recommended that you do a test first and then formally promote products.

How to do selling point testing?

The Douyin platform once suggested that we cooperate with Douyin koc or mid-level influencers in batches and use content services (a kind of Douyin video tool for streaming and heating) for testing. However, after actual testing, we found that this method is difficult to operate:

First, the time cycle is relatively long, from selecting influencers to sending products to script planning and video production, and then going through the content promotion and video review process. The whole process has high time and operation costs;

Second, it is difficult to measure objectively. The excitement and expressiveness of expert videos will have a key impact on the effectiveness of the content, and there are too many factors that interfere with selling point testing.

Third, the cost is not low. Not counting the cost of influencers, the content service requires a minimum investment of 50,000 yuan.

Therefore, I recommend two methods:

First, use Qianchuan directly to compare the running volume effects of materials with different selling points - it is fast and convenient, the effect can be seen in real time, the content is highly controllable, and the selling points can be observed more objectively.

Second, use the influencers at the bottom of Xiaohongshu (5k-10k fans) to test . Xiaohongshu adopts a double waterfall flow mode. Users can directly click into the content they are interested in when browsing. Therefore, the brand can use the cover and title to show the different selling points to be tested, and measure the attractiveness of different selling points based on the click-through rate and return search rate. In addition, Xiaohongshu can use pictures and texts (even directly provide pictures to influencers), which is faster and simpler than Douyin's videos.

When we have measured the best performing [motivational need + selling point combination], we have prepared the most important ingredients for making the "sandwich" and can enter the formal stage.

2. "Sandwich" model

What is the "sandwich" model ?

In simple terms, it is a three-layered strategy adopted during the period from product launch to promotion:

1. The first level: the listing period - top influencers rush for popularity and traffic
2. The second layer: heating period - different vertical experts in the middle waist area planted grass
3. The third level: promotion period - early high-quality content investment + fierce closed-loop harvesting

Why do we use this strategy when promoting products on TikTok?

First, from the perspective of the iteration of Douyin’s commercial ecosystem, it is facing a situation of insufficient commercial traffic.

An algorithm engineer at TikTok said in an interview, “TikTok attempts to use algorithms to push each consumer’s content tolerance to the extreme, thereby broadening the scenarios in which users consume on TikTok.”

The short videos promoted by influencers basically belong to Douyin’s content traffic pool (rather than advertisements), and the fan tag system is becoming increasingly mature (the e-commerce tag of each fan is more accurate).

From the perspective of traffic, the platform's support will be strengthened, laying a solid foundation for shelf e-commerce and brand search; from the perspective of precise reach, as e-commerce labels are improved, the ability to promote products will continue to improve. Therefore, the "sandwich method" will focus on the original short videos of influencers , maximize the content power of short videos, and take into account breaking the circle and harvesting.

Second, the price of influencer traffic has increased. Basically, the quoted price of top influencers in 2023 will increase by 10-25%. Therefore, on the basis of cooperation with top influencers (to ensure traffic popularity), we must reduce the overall cost by optimizing the influencer combination. Therefore, in the middle layer of the "sandwich", we use multiple groups of vertical influencers to increase popularity.

Finally, Douyin seeding should be in line with the overall rhythm of product marketing. In addition to paying attention to individual effects, it is also necessary to pay attention to overall time planning. This is also the core of the "sandwich" method - not to seed randomly, but to " do the right thing at the right time ."

Each layer is explained in detail below.

The first level: the momentum of top talents

When a product is just launched on the market, it needs to be covered with a "thick layer of bread", that is, top influencers need to increase its popularity.

The time window for new products is very critical. The popularity and traffic of the initial launch not only affect C-end consumers, but also affect the confidence index of various sales channels, distribution at all levels, dealers and even platform categories.

Therefore, choosing high-quality top influencers with a large fan base, abundant traffic, and strong sales power will easily produce hit products and maximize voice and sales.

There are three key points in this layer of action:

First, how to choose top talents.

You should be familiar with the following indicators:

• CPM and organic playback volume - mainly look at the median playback volume (the median playback volume of the Star Map platform is the organic traffic, which has removed the incremental traffic brought by the investment) and the corresponding CPM cost (to measure whether it is considered as the top)
• Interaction rate - number of interactive behaviors/number of views. Generally, it is good if it can exceed 10%. In addition to looking at the data, it is recommended to click on the comments to see the content (to measure the stickiness of fans and the authenticity of the views)
• Shopping cart click rate - how many people click on the yellow cart or component, representing the fans' willingness to try (measures whether the influencer's fans are pure spectators or willing to try the products they recommend)
• GPM - refers to the transaction amount brought by one thousand impressions, which is the most direct evaluation indicator (measures the influence of influencer content)
• Of course, there are more practical methods:
• Look at the influencer’s first 10 videos and see how many trailers they have (to assess how popular they are with brands)
• Is there a significant drop in the traffic data of the expert trailer short videos compared to their daily videos (do fans reject commercial orders)?
• Ask about the schedule (the tighter the schedule, the better)
• Reinvestment rate of other brands (everyone is not stupid, they will reinvest only if the effect is good)

Second, how to create content.

After selecting the experts, the next step is to co-create content.

Provide the best performance of [demand motivation + supporting functional points] in the early test as the core elements to the experts, and pay attention to the following key points in the brief:

• Product placement should be at about 1/3 or 1/2 of the overall content . If it is too far forward, it is easy to lose natural traffic, and if it is too far back, the chances of the product being seen are even lower.
• First, demonstrate the scene or introduce the pain point, then introduce it verbally. Do not just read the words verbally.
• Leave a hook to inspire action , such as click to get discounts, benefits, etc.

Third, how to invest?

The talent is 1, and the traffic is a string of 0s behind it. High-quality content needs to be boosted by traffic to break through the circle.

Commonly used content investment tools include dou+, content services, content promotion, native information flow, etc. In the early stage of listing, we recommend using dou+ first, because the directional model of content promotion and information flow is more sophisticated, and OCPM can be used for targeting, but the target population portrait is not clear in the early stage; Dou+ is based on the expansion of kol personality and fan portrait, and the top kol has a high weight and a large fan base, which means that the effect of Dou+ traffic distribution is more accurate.

"Content traffic is the best traffic for the grass-planting effect. When the competition for overall traffic is insufficient, Dou+ delivery is better than OCPM delivery." - by "Growth on the Road"

How should I invest in dou+?

First, observe the effect of natural traffic. Feiyang once gave a formula, which our team members have tried many times and found to be very useful:

Traffic ROI formula = GPM/CPM = sales per thousand impressions/cost per thousand impressions

For example, after a KOL releases a video, it gets 500,000 views through natural traffic, which is 500 CPMs, bringing in 40,000 sales, and the CPM is purchased at 40 yuan, then GPM=40,000/500=80, and traffic ROI=2. In actual operation, if ROI reaches 1, it is a good data and you can continue to invest. If it is lower than 0.8, you don’t need to consider investing.

After that, you can choose to invest additional 2-6 hours and observe the effect after the investment. If all indicators are good (traffic, conversion, add to cart, favorites, etc.), you can choose to continue investing and maintain a high order trend until the consumption decays.

The above are the key operations of the first layer of sandwich: selecting top talents + co-creating content + launching dou+

How to measure the effectiveness of this wave?

At the exposure level, the number of views and CPM are evaluated;

In terms of effectiveness, in addition to direct conversions and GPM, it is also necessary to comprehensively evaluate indicators such as traffic, collections, and add-to-cart (after all, when a product is launched, there are no comments or popularity accumulation, so the number of conversions is limited). The brand search index, which is a huge number on the Douyin platform, is also one of the important indicators for planting grass.

Middle layer: Mid-waist master stacking potential

The middle layer of the sandwich corresponds to the time period from product launch to the big promotion period.

The grass-planting during this period mainly plays a role of connecting the past and the future - it inherits the potential energy and popularity of local influencers, and then stores water and heats it up for the big promotion period.

We recommend using mid-level, cost-effective experts to promote products.

First of all, from a cost perspective, the launch promotion period and the big promotion harvest period must be foolproof. Therefore, large budgets are often required at both ends. In the middle period, the tolerance rate is relatively high, and lower-priced vertical influencers (with more precise target groups) or growth-oriented influencers can be selected for cooperation, thereby controlling the overall delivery cost.

Secondly, from a practical perspective, after the initial launch and accumulation of sales data, the crowd portrait is clearer, which can help us find precise experts in vertical categories based on crowd matching.

In addition to the several data dimensions introduced in the first part, when selecting specific vertical influencers, you can pay more attention to the matching degree between fans and potential customers.

For example, if it is a non-essential product with a high customer unit price, you need to find a corresponding group of people with high spending power. When selecting influencers, you should consider the following points:

• The higher the proportion of first- and second-tier cities and people aged 24-30 (middle-class consumer power), the stronger the fans’ purchasing power.
• iPhone share: The higher the share of iPhone users in fans, the higher the "white, rich and beautiful" index is.
• Douyin officially divides fans into Genz, sophisticated moms, new white-collar workers, urban blue-collar workers, small town youth, senior middle class, urban silver-haired, and small town middle-aged and elderly people; among them, sophisticated moms, new white-collar workers, senior middle class, and urban silver-haired people all have relatively high spending power, while sophisticated moms and new white-collar workers have higher conversion efficiency;

We should also be more careful when selecting mid-level talents, because there is often a consensus in the industry about top talents, but the number of mid-level talents is large, and the quality varies, making it more difficult to distinguish, so more dimensions need to be considered.

For example, you can look at the number of views of an expert’s videos within half a year. Since Douyin will provide a lot of traffic support for high-quality content, small hits are common. On the contrary, if the expert’s playback data for each episode is very average, there is a high probability that there is a problem of data falsification.

Of course, a better way to avoid pitfalls is to find influencers who have used competing products - with good volume data and repeated investments. If there are no direct competing products, you can look for brands with similar average order values ​​and similar consumer groups.

The grass-growing content at this stage can have a higher degree of flexibility - on the basis of accurate transmission of key information, it can give influencers more room to play, and even do not need to hang vehicles or components, and use more native and natural content to enhance the attractiveness of the video itself, so as to obtain high completion rates, high interaction rates and natural traffic.

In terms of the rhythm of grass-planting, a pulse method can be adopted: the cycle unit is week or half a month, and the delivery is concentrated for 3-5 days in each cycle. In each pulse period, it is best to choose influencers in the same vertical category and with a relatively high overlap of fans, so as to have the opportunity to reach the same group of people multiple times.

The timing of the pulse can also be coordinated with omni-channel marketing efforts, such as e-commerce promotions, brand promotion, content marketing, etc., to form a marketing synergy.

The third level: maximum heat + closed-loop harvesting

The final layer of the sandwich, before and during the big sale.

After the initial promotion by influencers, the product has gained a certain degree of popularity. In the sprint and promotion period, we should also make "thick bread", that is, invest heavily in resources, but unlike the first-level strategy of investing in top influencers, at this point in time, the brand already has a large number of high-quality content (top + middle and waist), and can give full play to the effectiveness of these contents to strive for greater breakthroughs and more conversions.

The main tasks include:

• Content service native information flow strongly promotes high-quality content
• Increase the harvesting power of self-seeding and UD streaming

Let’s talk about the first step first. For content investment during this period, content service is the preferred service. This product is ordered in the form of media scheduling, supports crowd selection strategies (including cloud crowds), and is presented in the form of native content from experts without advertising.

Compared with dou+, content services are hotly recommended:

• Crowds can be precisely targeted
• Before or during a big promotion, you can reserve traffic in advance to ensure that there is enough traffic during the launch period.

The advantage of choosing the form of content service promotion is that there is high-quality content tested by dou+'s ROI model in the early stage, as well as the accumulation of population portraits and cloud map assets, which makes the success rate of the delivery higher.

Of course, if the budget is sufficient during this period, native or bidding information flow delivery (Cloud Map Crowd or Leica Keyword Behavior Targeting) can also be considered.

In addition to increasing popularity and traffic, this period also requires increased efforts in closed-loop harvesting. This mainly includes:

• Douyin’s internal closed loop: thousands of rivers flowing into the market
• Douyin’s external closed loop: Ali UD

Needless to say, Qianchuan will deliberately reduce ROI during its own broadcasts during the promotion period to grab traffic. Whether it is the crowd assets accumulated in the early stage of planting grass or the secondary processing of expert materials, there are certain reserves, so it can step on the accelerator to accelerate.

To be on the safe side, you can still use the free push test before launching. If the ROI is greater than the break-even point, continue to follow up. If it is less than, you can switch to a targeted test. If it still doesn't work, give up the material. If the material passes the test, use the PC version to launch and increase the volume.

We also use Ali UD quite a lot. UD refers to [UniDesk], which is Ali's external advertising platform. Advertisements are displayed on Douyin and transactions are completed on Tmall. This delivery tool deposits data into Ali Data Bank, which can be finely labeled and can also be delivered more accurately on Taobao.

Specific operation method:

• Reinvest in some high-quality Douyin influencers (+UD components) that we have previously cooperated with. The main purpose is to repeatedly reach the influencer’s fans through the promotion momentum.
• Carry out secondary marketing to the strong interest groups accumulated by UD before (deposited in digital banks).

Summarize

The above is the whole of the "Sandwich" Douyin short video seeding method . The essence of this method is to use the tools and crowd asset flow of Douyin to match the rhythm of product marketing to achieve the best effect.

To summarize:

The top influencers are pulling the heat. In the early stage, selling point testing should be done. Pay attention to details in promotion. Use dou+ to test and invest more.

In the medium term, vertical experts will flexibly promote products with high cost-effectiveness, use pulse-like rhythm, and pay attention to the overlap of the crowd at each node.

The big promotion will increase content investment and closed-loop harvesting, and the investment will give priority to content services and hot promotions. Native information flow can also be considered. For the closed-loop, Qianchuan and UD are recommended to increase their firepower.

Today we will focus on the practical methods of seeding short videos on Douyin, but in the actual implementation, it is necessary to plan from a global perspective:

• Consider the location of the product horizontally
• Vertically look at the characteristics of the product stage

Author: Lan Lan

WeChat public account: Taro and Cat Talk (ID: taro_cat)