As consumer demand diversifies and reshapes, the e-commerce industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Data shows that in 2023, China's FMCG retail market saw a slight 0.04% decline in overall omnichannel sales compared to 2022. While the consumer market and e-commerce industry growth have slowed significantly, consumer decision-making processes have become longer and more complex. Before making a purchase, users often gather information across multiple platforms, making e-commerce consumption more fragmented. Brands urgently need to establish a certain connection with consumers. Influencer seeding, because it can influence consumer behavior and help accumulate target audience assets, has gained favor among more brands. Among these, influencer seeding on short-video platforms, due to its strong radiation effect outside the platform, is more conducive for brands to achieve omnichannel operations and establish target audience mindshare on a larger scale. In the new e-commerce phase, seeding influencers with nationwide influence will be the first entry point for brands to explore long-term value. Brands' Seeding Challenges In the current e-commerce environment, there are issues of oversupply and insufficient demand. As the dividends that drove the explosive growth of e-commerce and new consumer brands disappear, brand marketing conversion is becoming increasingly difficult. Data shows that when the traffic ceiling is hit, nearly 70% of CMOs feel it is difficult to improve ROI. At the same time, with the 'decentralization' of the internet in recent years, traffic has dispersed across multiple content platforms, and users have followed. Content platforms are accelerating e-commerce integration, giving users more choices for e-commerce consumption. Both supply and demand sides of e-commerce are becoming more fragmented, leading to more randomness and possibilities in the matching between consumers and brands. Taking the 3C industry as an example, research shows that consumers encounter 34 types of purchase-driving touchpoints during the decision-making process, forming 4,220 real routes to purchase. More routes to final consumption undoubtedly make it harder for brands to track user behavior, and it is unlikely to track users' consumption behavior across the entire chain on a single platform. With more choices, users' consumption attitudes have become more cautious and complex. Before purchasing, they often use search and other behaviors to form consumption decisions on content platforms earlier, leading to the popularity of seeding in major communities. According to iMedia data, 68% of users accept 'seeding', and among those, 70.7% will purchase based on actual circumstances. Consumers are not only seeking simple functional satisfaction when buying goods but also self-realization and expression. Surveys show that nearly 80% of users have a 'smart consumption personality', striving to meet needs and please themselves during the purchase process. This makes content an important medium connecting brands and consumer minds, and influencer seeding is becoming increasingly important for merchants. In a media environment where everyone communicates with everyone, influencers' personalized content can better build trust and emotional connections between brands and users. Through influencer seeding on platforms like Douyin, brands can more deeply reach consumers' inner needs, establish emotional connections, and thereby enhance consumer loyalty and repurchase rates. For example, on the Douyin platform, by covering all scenarios such as 'browsing', 'watching', 'playing', 'shopping', and 'searching', influencers and audiences can continuously interact, bringing stable mindshare influence and helping brands and merchants accumulate target audience assets. This effectively overcomes the challenges of fragmented user behavior and difficulty in capturing attention in the stock era. Sun Hengyuan, General Manager of the Social Business Department at Shanghai Juxing Media, told The Narrowcast that a cosmetics brand, after launching a custom short drama on Douyin, saw its audience asset scale increase by up to 2400%. In this trend, nearly 70% of CMOs explicitly stated they would increase budget allocation for influencer marketing. However, brands still face challenges when conducting influencer seeding. Merchants hope to use omnichannel traffic operations to cover e-commerce transaction behaviors that are difficult to capture on a single platform. Surveys show that more than half of CMOs expect to improve omnichannel business operation capabilities. But the fragmentation of content and e-commerce value makes omnichannel operations more difficult for merchants. Based on consumers' jumping behavior paths, brands have started to place marketing investments on multiple platforms. However, multi-platform investment significantly increases costs and is extremely difficult to coordinate. If any part of the data chain breaks, the overall marketing effect is greatly reduced. Moreover, individual users often consume content across multiple platforms, leading to duplication and waste in multi-line investments. Brands must consider another possibility for omnichannel operations: what kind of platform can achieve twice the result with half the effort when brands conduct seeding? The Fulcrum Role of Douyin Influencers Skincare brand Filorga has focused its new product launches on Douyin in recent years. Brand Director Alfred Wu found that after completing new product launch activities on Ocean Engine Star Map, the product not only saw significant voice growth on Douyin, such as a 50% rapid increase in A3 audience (deep interaction audience), but the seeding effect also spilled over to other e-commerce platforms. The brand saw a twelve-fold increase in search on Tmall, and even some offline distributors encountered users who had been seeded on Douyin. Filorga's experience is not an isolated case. After communicating with some brands, The Narrowcast found that 'omnichannel operations' does not mean full-force efforts; finding the right fulcrum can often help brands achieve growth by leveraging one point to drive the whole. The most important fulcrum for omnichannel operations is finding the right seeding platform and content. Merchants must realize that the seeding value of different platforms varies greatly. Only content platforms with nationwide radiation capabilities can make seeding effects influence external sites. With short-video users exceeding 1 billion, short videos have gradually become the new generation of internet infrastructure. Douyin has also become one of the few super-large platforms with mass media effects and both content and community attributes. Douyin's seeding behavior has a strong diffusion effect and is increasingly equated with nationwide seeding. In the past few years, Douyin has driven many brands and cultural tourism cities to become public hotspots, proving the platform's mass penetration. According to Jigua Data, when cities like Tianshui, Zibo, and Harbin became popular, Douyin's platform voice on topics far exceeded other platforms. This is partly because Douyin has a large user base, making it easy to generate mass seeding influence, and partly because its community-based, personalized content production is better at creating media events, thereby establishing broad and deep user mindshare. It has been verified that after being seeded on Douyin, 20%-40% of conversion behaviors occur on non-Douyin platforms. In this process, the value of Douyin influencers cannot be ignored. Douyin has a large number of influencers covering various content circles, thus meeting the marketing needs of different brands and helping them find core target audiences. Top influencers in various Douyin circles often have distinctive personas and have established deep connections with users. Brands can also build emotional connections with users through influencers' distinctive seeding content, thereby shaping deeper brand mindshare. With the further deepening of Douyin's community nature in recent years, influencers' ability to create memes has strengthened, and seeding sometimes becomes part of internet pop culture, providing excellent opportunities for brand marketing to break through circles. However, many brands still view the commercial cases that go viral on Douyin in isolation, failing to see the overall radiation effect of Douyin influencer seeding. Compared with other platforms, Douyin's seeding is unique in that it can simultaneously form a closed loop and an open loop. Internally, it can drive e-commerce conversion; externally, it can connect to a broader range of e-commerce platforms, promoting sales increases on those platforms. The dual nature of seeding value is Douyin's biggest advantage, but it also causes many brands, when entering Douyin, to rely on operational inertia and path dependence, getting used to exploring marketing closed loops within the platform and often overlooking the open-loop value and fulcrum role of Douyin seeding. As more brands like Filorga realize the radiation effect of Douyin influencer seeding, more brands will devote more energy and resources to open-loop exploration and investment. When Douyin becomes the fulcrum, its seeding behavior generates enormous spillover value, providing merchants with another sample of omnichannel operations: a path possibility that uses Douyin influencers as the fulcrum to leverage the whole domain rather than spreading across all platforms. Eliminating Uncertainty For brands, after establishing a new path, operational uncertainty still exists. The main challenge lies in tracking user behavior and measuring campaign effectiveness. Most merchants have long faced the classic problem: 'I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half.' Omnichannel operations bring greater uncertainty to data tracking, making it harder to measure off-site seeding effects. This unknowability deters many merchants. For merchants, only by effectively measuring effects can they achieve more cost-effective and sustainable marketing investments. In recent years, platforms have been seeking to develop more precise and comprehensive marketing tools. The use of tools allows brands to manage investments more precisely digitally, and technologies for off-site tracking of marketing are becoming more mature, helping brands better measure the effectiveness of their investments. On May 6, Ocean Engine Star Map, in conjunction with Taobao Star Task, launched the full-link seeding product 'Star Cube'. Based on the post-investment report of Ocean Engine Star Map influencers, it added multi-dimensional indicators such as store visit behavior and transaction behavior brought to Taobao and Tmall after influencer seeding, achieving tracking of post-seeding off-site link behavior influenced by influencer content. After connecting internal and external platforms, with the data analysis tools provided by Ocean Engine Star Map, brands can monitor the impact of influencer seeding activities on their overall business across the entire chain. Ocean Engine Star Map has also accumulated a comprehensive and precise seeding strategy that can minimize the threshold for brands' omnichannel operations. On the Ocean Engine Star Map platform, brands can also comprehensively consider factors such as influencer content quality, follower count, and activity level to amplify seeding momentum. At the same time, using the comprehensive application of Star Push, Search, and Direct, combined with e-commerce platform marketing activities, maximizes the voice boost for brands during promotions. Terry, Digital Head of maternal and infant brand Friso, compared Ocean Engine Star Map to a 'searchlight': 'The value of Ocean Engine Star Map to us is that it allows brands to move from early blind selection or selection by feeling to now having guided, strategic, and data-supported selection.' Openness is also further eliminating uncertainty in e-commerce investment. As overall growth slows, platforms are reducing zero-sum games and strengthening interconnection, such as Taobao's e-commerce gradually opening up WeChat Pay functionality. Openness between platforms can further connect multi-platform data, thereby amplifying the value of seeding. The launch of the 'Star Cube' plan is the latest effort to expand the nationwide value of Douyin influencer seeding. Although the premise of traffic ceiling exists, the overall openness of the e-commerce industry and the further improvement of tools mean that brands still have new platform-based opportunities. Seizing this opportunity for deep cultivation in omnichannel operations will help build long-term brand value. The platform dividend for full-link and segmented tracking and operation of users is still being released. Brands need to further seize the seeding opportunities on super-large platforms like Douyin to launch products with nationwide influence. Placing brand development in a holistic perspective, increment and imagination still exist. Recommended Reading