Hello everyone, we've been helping brands run live-streaming rooms on Douyin all year. Today's sharing is also a reflection and summary of our DP services over the past year. We've served over 20 brands in total this year, with 5-6 long-term partnerships. First, let me summarize brand self-broadcasting on Douyin in 2021. I've distilled it into 16 characters: High-profile, Policy tilt! Disappointing... Profits questionable? Just a year ago, if you attended any industry conference, you'd get the signal: 2021 is the first year of brand self-broadcasting, and you must do blue V self-broadcasting on Douyin. Moreover, Douyin would provide policy traffic support and so on. So at that time, both agencies and brands clearly felt the potential dividend of this opportunity. We also keenly seized this opportunity, launched our Douyin DP services, and became one of the early authorized brand service providers on Douyin. I remember seeing data shared by Feigua mid-year: within just a few months, the growth rate of blue V self-broadcasting was 3 to 5 times that of influencer live-streaming. That growth rate is astonishing. I think Chinese e-commerce brands have never lacked reaction speed; their desire for traffic and new channels is innate. So whether domestic or international brands, they all started diving into Douyin for self-broadcasting. We've communicated with many brands and peers. I remember a top DP telling me that their agency broadcasting department loses 2 million yuan a month. Another said they lose 1 million a month. After a busy year, are we comparing who loses more? From brand feedback, the bosses told me they're basically losing money so far. You can see many brands have high monthly GMV on Douyin, and growth is impressive. But when you add up the manpower, commissions, and marketing costs, the math shows they're indeed losing money. So the question arises: DP loses money, brands lose money, so where does the money go? Who's actually making money in the end? Moreover, everyone clearly feels that in the last two or three months of the year, influencer live-streaming rooms have quickly seen a surge in traffic. Why? It's simple: brand live-streaming rooms haven't been performing well this year. The platform has invested money and effort, giving support and policies, but brand rooms' conversion efficiency on traffic is indeed much worse than influencer rooms. At year-end, the platform also needs to hit performance targets, so it quickly boosts influencer broadcasting again. In the end, it seems that very few brands have actually sold well, gained buzz, and made profits through self-broadcasting on Douyin this year. That's my summary. I've summarized several reasons why brand self-broadcasting doesn't work well. The first reason is the people problem. To put it bluntly, almost all the operational talent you can recruit in the market are mediocre, whether they ask for 10k, 20k, 30k, or 40k. We interviewed a large number of job seekers in Shanghai this year. Our HR has connected with over 10,000 people on Boss Zhipin. Actually, Shanghai has fewer live-streaming e-commerce talents than Hangzhou, so we kept digging, chatting, and exploring in Shanghai. Because whether it's the development of DP companies or brand self-broadcasting rooms, it ultimately relies on people to achieve and complete. If a live-streaming room isn't done well, it's a people problem. So the scarcity of industry talent is a common situation, and it won't be alleviated within a year. We've found that operators and managers in the job market, no matter how impressive their claimed achievements at a well-known brand or team, when verified by their actual work ability, we feel that we can train someone with a bit of operational foundation to their level in about a month, but at half or even one-third the salary. The reason is simple: the entry barrier for live-streaming e-commerce is relatively low. Basically, if you're smart, willing to work hard, and self-study for a while, you can call yourself an operator. And the money you make selling goods on Douyin yourself is definitely more than working a 9-to-5 job. So excellent operators all work for themselves. The people you can recruit are basically ordinary, and you need to use your industry-leading knowledge and experience to train them into talents suitable for your team. So if the person in charge of the live-streaming room or the brand leader doesn't understand the business and the logic of Douyin e-commerce, this thing can't be done well. The core issue is still the people problem. The second reason is the cognition problem. Many brands come to me and ask, "How much do you charge for agency broadcasting per month?" Actually, when they ask this, they're calculating: how much money do I give you, how much goods can you sell, and in the end, how much profit can you make for me? Many brands don't understand anything themselves, and they first find several DP companies to race horses and do matrix accounts. I can tell you, truly excellent brands don't race horses, because that mindset is wrong. What's the meaning of doing matrix accounts? It's actually to explore differentiated user segments. But many brands lack the overall planning ability, and don't know how to coordinate and plan the product mix and audience differences among matrix accounts. They hope to make the cake bigger, but in the end, they end up competing for traffic within the same cake. In the end, it hurts the brand, hurting the brand's time and money. Because with so many DP companies racing, the brand's energy is definitely stretched, and they won't invest patience and trust in each DP. Do you think this can work well? Many times brands can't think this through clearly. They think, whoever runs out first, we'll cooperate with long-term. But from a DP service provider's perspective, all DPs are thinking about two things: First, win with the winner. If you're a winner, I'll win with you. Winners include brands that already have buzz and recognition, as well as potential category leaders that might explode on Douyin. No one is willing to cultivate the weak into winners. If I have that ability, why would I help you do live-streaming? Second, all agencies willing to accept clients at low prices or pure commission are essentially spending the brand's money to incubate their own teams, just for a cooperation logo. Whether it can succeed depends on luck. So back to this question: if you're a brand with little recognition and you want to find a service agency truly willing to invest in you, please give money, time, trust, and patience. Or, just build an in-house team yourself, attract excellent talent with equity, and many in-house teams do quite well! The third reason is the mindset problem. Everyone thinks Douyin live-streaming is hot, and live-streaming e-commerce is gold. "My neighbor and I are in the same industry; on Tmall, they can't outsell me, but on Douyin, they can sell 5 to 8 million a month." I've heard this too much. Obviously, in the Douyin live-streaming track, there's an opportunity to overtake on curves. But in reality, many brands not only fail to overtake but also crash. From our year of experience, unless you have super strong brand power, super strong anchors, and super strong product mix, it's very unrealistic to simply harvest in the live-streaming room. Many brands think: "I'll directly harvest Douyin users in the live-streaming room through bidding ads. How great is that? It's both brand and performance." Anyone with a bit of common sense knows, how could that be possible? Currently, the average dwell time in Douyin live-streaming rooms is less than a minute, maybe 58 or 59 seconds. So if you want to pull a new user into the live-streaming room and close a deal with your mediocre people, goods, and venue, your ROI will definitely be low. Brands think, "If I can get above 2, I'll start making money," but in reality, they can't even reach 1. In this situation, the mindset keeps collapsing, and in the end, overtaking becomes crashing. After two months, they can't hold on, and they blame the platform. If you really want to build a brand, not just sell goods, then you should follow Douyin's FACT logic: do self-broadcasting, do influencer matrix, do marketing activities, etc. This is indeed effective. It allows you to move some budget outside the live-streaming room, but harvest within the room. The fourth reason is the execution problem. Many brands enter Douyin with a try-it-out mindset, and their execution and reaction speed can't keep up with Douyin's pace. But we've found that Douyin requires you to invest 100% energy, time, and resources; otherwise, you can't do well. Unless you say you don't want this business, once you start, there's no such thing as trying. This is cruel. You need to think clearly. Dabbling and wavering will only cost you more sunk costs. These are the main reasons why brand self-broadcasting has been disappointing this year. In August last year, Douyin announced 600 million DAU. By now, it's probably 700-800 million. The DAU of Douyin live-streaming e-commerce is actually less than 100 million. This means the penetration rate of live-streaming e-commerce is less than 20%, indicating there's still huge room for growth in the future. I think Douyin live-streaming e-commerce is still growing healthily this year, not at full throttle. If Douyin wanted to increase the penetration rate from 20% to 40% or 50%, it could quickly pull users into live-streaming rooms through algorithm loosening. But Douyin hasn't done that. This year, Douyin hopes users will actively develop healthy, benign, and natural consumption habits. So now in Douyin's information feed, the inventory of selling live-streaming rooms is relatively low. You'll find that many short-video influencer accounts, after starting live-streaming, have good traffic because they convert many users who only watched short videos into live-streaming e-commerce users. This is what Douyin wants to see. This is about the anchor conveying trust to fans, pulling people who haven't ordered in live-streaming rooms to place orders. So Douyin will give extra weight and traffic to such live-streaming rooms. This is Douyin rewarding you for helping it complete user education and consumption habit cultivation, and helping it establish and optimize e-commerce crowd tags. So let me summarize the current state of Douyin live-streaming e-commerce. The growth space for live-streaming e-commerce is huge, and the entire pool is expanding. Everyone currently or future involved will reap dividends and opportunities in this process. That's undeniable. Looking at the next 2-3 years, I still think this opportunity is in its early stages. That's the first point. Second, under the mechanism of goods finding people, good products return to the center stage. Last year, even if your product wasn't good enough, you still had a chance to get a lot of traffic. But now, if your goods aren't good, you'll be very limited in the early stages of acquiring traffic. Third, under the new traffic allocation model, sellers are guided to focus on long-term operation. That is, you need to look at long-term ROI and more comprehensively at your user asset on Douyin. Finally, successful models are constantly being validated, and the cycle for starting a new account on Douyin live-streaming has significantly shortened. I've seen many excellent grassroots operators. In the process of starting accounts, they can replicate new accounts with almost 99% success, if not 100%. Not long ago, I went to a very small county and observed the account-starting process of a live-streaming room. This team's success rate was almost 100%. They used pure natural traffic to sell white-label beauty products, and could sell over a million per session. I also learned a lot of experience. I think such excellent talents and such amazing operational methods exist in the grassroots, not in brand live-streaming rooms. The reason is simple: if I can sell a million per session with 30-40% gross margin, why would I help brands sell goods? So I think everyone should think clearly about their positioning and role on this platform today. As a DP, do you want to be a profitable company or a valuable company? Are you making short-term profits in this process, or do you want to earn a long-term stable traffic pool? I think whether you're a seller, a brand, or a service provider, you should think this through. You can't say you're a brand while actually doing short-term selling, thinking about today without tomorrow. If that's the case, don't insist on calling yourself a brand; just go to the platform to harvest traffic and make money. There's no right or wrong choice, but don't be conflicted, tormenting yourself and others. Next, let me share some recent practical tips. Short videos bring more stable and higher ROI traffic than paid traffic placement This is also our recent obvious feeling. In the first half of this year, including before October, we received some brand agency broadcasting consultations, not full-case services. Brands spent their money on other channels, then set high KPI requirements for our agency broadcasting rooms. I want to say, who do you think you are? You don't spend your advertising or brand promotion money here, but you ask me to achieve the final sales performance closure. Any agency that accepts such requirements is irresponsible. In the last quarter of this year, we contacted some brands, aligned our cognition with them, and took on their full-case Douyin services for next year. Full-case means the brand gives me the money for producing short video content, the money for influencer seeding, the money for Douyin brand promotion, and the money for bidding live-streaming traffic. Only then can I guarantee the results of this Douyin e-commerce business. Actually, you can see that in this process, the bidding live-streaming traffic cost is just a small part, but many brands have it reversed. Only when we can fully control all the money and rhythm the brand spends on Douyin can we guarantee the results of their live-streaming room and promise how much return I can bring for how much money spent. This return is not only the live-streaming room performance, but also 5A crowd assets, long-term ROI, user repurchase, etc. You can't spend money elsewhere and expect me to directly bring bidding traffic returns in the live-streaming room. That's impossible. Back to the topic of short video traffic. We have a team in Shanghai that charges about 100,000 yuan per month for short video production costs from live-streaming clients, specifically producing high-quality e-commerce content for brands. They produce about 5-10 pieces a day, which is 150-300 pieces a month. This is equivalent to moving the 100,000 yuan I originally spent on bidding ads in the live-streaming room to outside the room, using it to pay for content production. For this account, 80% of the live-streaming room traffic is free, including natural traffic and short video traffic. The store-wide ROI is far higher than the industry average. In the cold start month, it sold over 2 million, and the brand made money. In just over a month, over 30% of the daily traffic to this live-streaming room comes from short videos. These short videos bring both live-streaming traffic and precise conversions. So I hope every brand pays attention to content production. Although everyone acknowledges that short videos are useful, the threshold and ceiling for short videos are higher than for live-streaming rooms. So many brands can't do this well in their live-streaming rooms, but in my view, this has huge opportunities and dividends. Previously, people often said paid traffic is a lever that can move free traffic. Now, in my view, short videos are also a lever that can move free traffic and higher conversions. The selling ability and cost-effectiveness of low-follower influencers are severely underestimated Not long ago, a fan of my public account contacted me. Their company makes home fitness equipment for children under 14. These equipment aren't expensive; the main function is to let kids jump and bounce at home to grow taller. Their team doesn't know how to do live-streaming, but they know Douyin has opportunities. So they set up a team to manually BD pure commission influencers on Douyin. They relied entirely on employees to browse short videos, send private messages to these influencers one-on-one, and send free samples. In the end, they achieved monthly sales of over 3 million. All these 3 million came from employees linking low-follower influencers on Douyin, free samples, and short video sales. But if these people tried live-streaming, with their cognition and operational ability of Douyin live-streaming rooms, they might not even sell 1 million a month. They didn't link high-quality influencers on Xingtu; they were completely low-follower moms, maybe with only 10,000-20,000 followers. Many of the people they found had never even sold goods before. Script is more important than the anchor; product grouping is more important than the product itself. High CTR = endless natural traffic We've always emphasized how important people, goods, and venue are. If your anchor isn't strong, but your script is strong enough, it can cover the anchor's mediocre ability. Once you train the anchor well, they become an executor in front of the camera. Understand that it's hard to find particularly strong anchors. If they're that capable, they're either poached by big brands or work for themselves. The anchors and operators you recruit, you have to accept they're mediocre talents. That's the reality. In this case, you need to provide this live-streaming room with a super strong script that's been continuously polished. What is product grouping? Maybe the product itself is ordinary, but through strategic regrouping and coordination with the live-streaming room process, you can make the product regain value and premium ability. Then there's good scene = high CTR = endless natural traffic. The live-streaming room I mentioned in that small county selling white-label beauty products achieved 2 million per session without spending money. I saw their CTR in the backend was 39%, close to 40%. With such a high CTR, you'll definitely get traffic. So don't blame Douyin for not giving you traffic. Douyin gives you impressions, but if you don't have the ability to make users click in, that's your problem, not Douyin's. So when you look back at your live-streaming room's impressions, don't complain about no traffic. If users aren't willing to click in from outside the room, how can they be willing to buy in your room? I think in terms of live-streaming room CTR, there's a lot of room for optimization in many rooms. Don't always think about buying traffic; first see if you can increase your room's CTR from 5% to 20%. That's a 4x difference in views, completely different traffic levels. The scale and ceiling of paid traffic are smaller than free traffic You might think to get 10,000 or 20,000 people online in a live-streaming room, you need to spend money. But how much do you need to invest to achieve that effect? Unless you're joking about "full throttle bidding," if you want to protect a bit of ROI and care about costs, you can't do full throttle. Many live-streaming rooms can't rely on burning money to get tens of thousands online. For many influencers or top live-streaming rooms, you'll find their views and online numbers are high. Most of their traffic must come from free traffic, because you can't burn paid traffic to that scale. Actually, in live-streaming rooms, everyone thinks spending money is the easiest way because it's the most mindless. As long as you have money, you can burn traffic. Natural traffic is good, but free things are the most expensive. To get free traffic, you need to spend time polishing all your links, including process, script, product grouping, and anchor ability. Let me give you another rule. 0 to 1, monthly sales of 1 million, rely on natural traffic 1 to 10, monthly sales from 1 million to 10 million, rely on short videos + natural traffic 10 to 100, monthly sales above 10 million, rely on paid traffic + short videos + natural traffic If a brand live-streaming room really wants to achieve, say, 30 million a month, you must add paid traffic. Paid traffic can't reach the level of free traffic, but to break the ceiling of the live-streaming room, you must use paid placement. I have a case to prove this. We operated a hairy crab live-streaming room. Since the season is over, this account's lifecycle ends this month. In October, our GMV was 9.9386 million yuan. This account didn't invest a penny, purely relying on natural traffic. I can't deny that this product is indeed a top-notch item. The image on the right is from Feigua Zhitou, a screenshot of our bound live-streaming room. The traffic placement in the bottom right corner is all zeros. This account started broadcasting on September 20th and has sold over 17 million so far. In just two months, we posted 533 videos on the homepage. Because if you don't invest money, you have to exchange something else with Douyin for traffic. Without paid traffic, we sold like this, further confirming that with a good product and good people, goods, and venue, you can achieve monthly sales of 10 million purely with natural traffic and short video traffic. But to reach 30 million a month, I think you definitely need to spend money. But selling 30 million would make us lose money. So you need to know what you want: selling 10 million comfortably and making money, or selling 30 million and losing money after exhausting yourself. That's Douyin. Burning anchors + excellent script account-starting method can achieve cold start single-session million sales This is a path I've seen in many live-streaming rooms that I think brand live-streaming rooms can replicate. The screenshot on the left shows this account broadcasting for 37 minutes, selling 1.02 million, with 300,000 views. The right shows selling for 2 hours 23 minutes, with 470,000 views, selling 1.87 million. You can see the traffic source is purely natural traffic, not a penny invested. How did they do it? I summarize it into two points: one is having an anchor who can burn themselves. What does burning themselves mean? CTR of 39% is burning themselves. Based on ability gaps, for some people, 20% also counts as burning, but most rooms with 5% CTR clearly aren't burning themselves; the anchor sitting there is burning money. In our company, for a store broadcasting anchor, we require them to broadcast 6 hours a day. If they truly burn themselves, they can only broadcast 2 hours. After these 2 hours, they'll be exhausted because this state consumes a lot of physical and mental energy. You'll also find that whether the anchor sits or stands while broadcasting, the CTR, dwell time, and conversion rate are different. To explain this state more specifically, it's the anchor facing the camera, fully investing in a passionate and excited state, pulling up the user's dwell time. But as for the state, I can't show exactly what it looks like. Many people should have seen Zhu Guagua's live-streaming. Her live-streaming, including her anchors' live-streaming, shows that burning state. Then users outside the live-streaming room see you and want to click in. They feel you're doing something big in the room. The anchor's exaggerated performance and burning state are very infectious. This is what pulls free traffic, but most people can't do it. So traffic is fair: you get what you give. Some people are born for this; it requires a bit of talent. Traffic always follows the 80/20 rule. 80% of traffic goes to 20% of live-streaming rooms. Traffic is Matthew effect: if you have it, Douyin will give you even more, making your traffic overflow; if you don't, it'll take what little you have and give it to others. So you can judge whether burning yourself is worth it. In my view, it's very worth it. I think we don't need to elevate the anchor's state to that talent level. Improving 30% from their current state is achievable. A 30% improvement might mean double or triple your views, which is definitely worth doing. The explosive product cycle with order withholding is still the most effective method for brand live-streaming rooms For many brand live-streaming rooms, even if you have 10 SKUs, we don't recommend selling all 10 in the room. You can choose to promote one explosive product, but it must be high-priced, high-margin, and high-conversion. What should you do during Double 11? Raise prices. What about Double 12? Raise prices. You should group a higher-priced, higher-value product to sell in the live-streaming room. Actually, all the live-streaming rooms we've operated basically follow this product grouping and pricing strategy. Over the past year, I've found it very useful. We previously operated a high-end skincare live-streaming room and a functional food live-streaming room. The first thing we did after taking over was to group a high-priced main explosive product. Later, as you saw, both rooms became category leaders, making us a showcase at the Douyin service provider conference. In October, we took over a personal care and home cleaning brand live-streaming room. Their Tmall unit price was 129 yuan. We grouped a unit price of 489 yuan in the room. Today, we've already sold over 200,000. For such a niche category, selling 300,000 a day in the room is quite satisfying. The core is still to group high-priced products. Traffic costs are so high; if you pull a user into the room, it's not worth it if they don't buy something expensive. Now, the pricing for our product grouping in Douyin live-streaming rooms is basically 3 to 4 times that of Tmall. I think this is the meaning of Douyin interest e-commerce. Use good content, good products, and good service to exchange traffic with Douyin Good service is a basic need, a rigid requirement. If you don't have good service, don't do Douyin live-streaming. If you can't maintain good store credit scores and product reputation scores, you don't meet the basic requirements. Good content includes both good short video content and good live-streaming room content. Both are good content. Ask yourself which you're better at. If you can produce good short video content, you don't necessarily need to broadcast 18 hours a day. There are many accounts that only start broadcasting when their short videos go viral. That's also efficient. You don't need to be so competitive or hire so many people. You can sell several million a month, which is very nice. Some teams aren't good at producing short videos, but they're good at creating the people, goods, and venue in the live-streaming room. That's also fine. They have few works on their homepage, but their people, goods, and venue are good, so they can pull traffic, and paid traffic conversion efficiency is high. So see which one you're better at. If you're good at both short videos and people, goods, and venue, then I think there's no reason you shouldn't make money in this market, no reason you can't achieve monthly income of a million. In the next two years, just run with your eyes closed and make money. Of course, abide by the law and pay taxes. As for good products, I think in front of truly top-notch products, all operational skills become ineffective. A truly good product, when placed in a Douyin live-streaming room, brings its own traffic. You don't need order withholding, promotions, price changes, or any tricks. None needed. You can see that our hairy crab live-streaming room basically has no tricks. That's all for today's sharing. I hope everyone has a clearer understanding of themselves and Douyin. I wish you all explosive sales. Source: Taihuo Liangyi (ID: taihuo-iris) -END-