Core Guide: 1. Facing the rising trend of influencer livestream commerce, should brands follow or not? 2. How to correctly view influencer livestream e-commerce? 3. What pitfalls should small and medium-sized enterprises avoid when choosing influencer livestream commerce?

The Double 11 craze has not yet faded, but it has completely propelled video livestream e-commerce into the spotlight.

On the first day of this year's Tmall Double 11 pre-sale, tens of thousands of Taobao anchors went live, and nearly 20,000 brands adopted online livestream selling. Over 90% of brands in categories such as personal care, food, maternal and baby products, household cleaning, and health products participated in video livestream selling, with the number of merchants broadcasting increasing by more than 200% year-on-year. Compared to last year, livestream business brought Alibaba over 100 billion yuan in new GMV.

With livestream e-commerce in full swing, how should small and medium-sized brands respond in a competitive market?

-01- The Surging Video Livestream E-commerce!

For many marketers, the names "Li Jiaqi" and "Viya" are already familiar. These names are often accompanied by a string of numbers: sold X million yuan worth of goods in X minutes, with shipment volumes reaching XXXX. Coupled with the promotion of e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Tmall, and the marketing efforts of various MCN agencies,带货 influencers have also begun to emerge in large numbers.

According to a report by iiMedia Research, "2019 China Online Livestream Industry Research Report (First Half)", the number of online livestream users in China is expected to exceed 500 million in 2019, with over 50% of livestream platform users having watched celebrity/influencer e-commerce livestreams.

The report believes that with the further implementation of livestream e-commerce, market development may continue to accelerate, and e-commerce + livestream may become an important model connecting people, goods, and scenes. This is also an important reason why more and more brands are seeking cooperation with influencer agencies.

For large brands, the sales brought by influencer livestreams may be negligible; the sales from one livestream may not even match a year's sales in a county. But for the vast number of small and medium-sized brands, a single livestream by a top influencer can match their annual sales, while effectively avoiding the high channel costs associated with traditional distributors, and quickly reaching precise consumer groups on a large scale in a very short time.

The other side of the coin is that the sales model heavily reliant on the influencer's personal IP is increasingly being questioned by brands and consumers, with typical examples being the "failures" of Li Xiang and Li Jiaqi's livestreams.

On the evening of October 27, Li Xiang started a new round of product promotion in her livestream room, but embarrassingly, consumers did not buy it. The worst-selling items were a certain brand of milk powder and a mink coat. The milk powder Li Xiang promoted was not cheap; she tried her best to promote it in the livestream, but only sold 77 cans. Notably, the number of people watching the livestream reached a staggering 1.62 million, which makes people begin to doubt the selling power of celebrity livestreams.

Similarly, product quality issues are also an important reason why influencer livestream e-commerce is widely criticized. Previously, Li Jiaqi, the "Lipstick King" with 10 million followers on Taobao, encountered a "failure" when promoting a non-stick pan. During the livestream, Li Jiaqi's assistant demonstrated frying an egg, but it stuck to the pan.

After noticing something was wrong, Li Jiaqi took the spatula from his assistant to try to save the situation, emphasizing, "It won't stick, it won't burn," but the egg remained firmly stuck to the bottom of the pan. Although Li Jiaqi tried to save the situation by saying "it's because no oil was added," many netizens still criticized him for not carefully selecting and testing the product.

It is undeniable that before laws and regulations are fully established, the development of influencer livestream e-commerce still has a long way to go.

-02- How to Correctly View Influencer Livestream E-commerce?

Does this mean that at this stage, brands should not cooperate with influencer livestream agencies? The answer is clearly no.

The essence of influencer livestream commerce is to use the influencer's traffic and fame to make consumers recognize and purchase a certain product. Its advantage lies in the ability to interact with consumers and shorten the distance with them. It can answer questions online and provide customers with styling suggestions. It gives many consumers who have difficulty choosing or don't know what they need a clear direction of demand, prompting them to place orders.

On a deeper level, influencer livestream commerce is essentially livestreaming; the primary need of users is to pass the time, which requires influencers to build sufficient stickiness with users through continuous content output.

For merchants, the role of influencer livestream commerce includes boosting sales volume, clearing inventory, and matching Alibaba's traffic allocation, among other reasons. For traditional e-commerce platforms, merchant livestreams usually convert existing merchant resources and user bases, while influencer livestream commerce provides the possibility of new users and merchants.

"Merchants offer top influencers great promotional deals, and some products may only have thin margins," said a marketing director of a brand. "Merchants cannot simply treat livestream as a sales channel. As more people watch livestreams, it will greatly increase product exposure, helping brands reach consumer groups they couldn't reach before. In the long run, it is more beneficial for brand development."

-03- What Factors Should Small and Medium-sized FMCG Enterprises Consider When Cooperating with Influencers?

For small and medium-sized manufacturers, Li Jiaqi is actually just a legend. Even if you spend a fortune to hire Li Jiaqi, the selling effect may not be as expected. This is related to consumers' mental cognition. Whether it's food and beverages or personal care and daily necessities, small and medium-sized brands should recognize these eight characters when looking for influencers to sell their products.

1. Precision (准)

Influencers are not without categories. If you blindly find influencers to sell goods, you may waste money without results, and it would be better not to find influencers at all. For example, Li Jiaqi is positioned in beauty. Of course, with his current popularity and fame, it might not be impossible for him to sell other categories.

But for small and medium-sized brands, finding influencers must pay attention to precise matching. Beauty brands should find beauty influencers, and clothing, food, and beverage brands should do the same. In short, any non-precise influencer selection is a waste of your advertising budget.

2. Communication (通)

If you don't fully communicate with the influencer in advance, it will be difficult to control the selling effect. Although influencers are popular, their cognition inevitably has some limitations. Especially when small and medium-sized brands work with second- and third-tier influencers, they must pay attention to full communication. Even sending a dedicated person to fly to the influencer's location or inviting the influencer to the company for full communication is not excessive.

3. Trial (试)

The "trial" here means you must let the influencer try your product first. Whether it's beauty or food and other FMCG products, if you don't let the influencer fully try the product, they will definitely run out of words during the livestream. In other words, to let the influencer sell your products well and speak vividly, you must ensure they have fully tried the product beforehand.

4. Stability (稳)

The hidden meaning of "stability" is that influencer selling cannot be achieved overnight. Don't be discouraged if one livestream doesn't perform well, and don't lose confidence in influencer selling. Also, don't bet all your budget on influencers just because one livestream is very popular.

That is to say, finding influencers to sell goods must be stable, with reasonable planning and budget, and carried out together with other channels. Only in this way can you grow your brand and continuously expand market share.

5. Patience (耐)

The "patience" here refers to being patient. Although finding influencers to sell goods is the most fashionable sales method at present, if you don't have the patience to gradually polish it, your selling may not be successful. Finding influencers requires considering costs and benefits. You must be patient in preparing for influencer selling, and not just decide which influencer to use after a simple talk. At the same time, you must be patient, continuously explore and learn from peers' experiences, and make influencer selling effective or even perfect.

6. Diligence (勤)

For anything, if you diligently study and ponder, it will not disappoint your efforts. Diligence is a basic guarantee for small and medium-sized brands to find influencers to sell goods. Here, you should at least watch various influencer selling cases yourself and with relevant employees, and also continuously try cooperating with different influencers. After all, as a small and medium-sized brand, we must be diligent in making up for shortcomings, and the spirit of the early bird catching the worm can reach the peak of influencer selling.

7. Comprehensiveness (全)

The "comprehensiveness" here refers to comprehensively packaging your brand and products, so that influencers have something to say when selling, can fully release their selling potential, and can diversify the livestream of brand and product advantages. Moreover, in the current white-hot competition of selling, comprehensively polishing products and brands is also the only way for small and medium-sized brands to reach the peak of influencer selling.

8. Novelty (新)

It must be new products to create a splendid scene for influencer selling. After all, consumers are always fond of the new and tired of the old, so small and medium-sized brands should continuously invest in R&D and launch differentiated new products. Only in this way can you have more confidence in finding influencers to sell goods, and to some extent reduce influencers' exorbitant demands. Moreover, winning with novelty makes it impossible for competitors to match.

An example is a brand selling beef sauce called "Xiao Xiao Ge" (Little Brother). Through livestream selling, it managed to sell at a high price of over 40 yuan, compared to Laoganma's less than 10 yuan, which can be said to be a sky-high price. The reason is the differentiated product leading to impulsive buying by the herd. Among these, "novelty" is the winning strategy for this small brand's livestream selling.

Overall, brands should not only focus on sales and conversion when finding influencers for livestream selling. More importantly, through livestream selling, they should pave the way for brand building and new product awareness.

Therefore, FMCG enterprises should see the essence of influencer selling. They should not only choose the right influencers but also "train" them, while continuously polishing and developing new products. Only in this way can your livestream selling gain word-of-mouth effects in the atmosphere created by influencers, and take the lead in occupying consumers' minds.

Comments by Wang Jun, New Retail Industry Expert:

As the hottest form of traffic monetization, video e-commerce, especially livestream e-commerce, is the new sales channel that traditional brand distributors should pay most attention to.

Moreover, a batch of merchants who paid attention early and took active action have already received dividends: launching new products and clearing inventory.

Facing the rapidly growing livestream e-commerce, how to see the essence, master the gameplay, and avoid risks? I have a few suggestions.

1. Refer to big data to choose suitable influencers for cooperation, not just the legendary top ones. Cooperating with top influencers is not easy to make money; what you gain more is influence and shipment volume. The vast number of mid-tier, or even amateur, selling influencers is the blue ocean.

2. Don't abandon the opportunity to build your own account matrix and master private domain traffic just because the investment in WeChat official accounts didn't yield results. This time, the accounts have more IP value, bringing goods and consumers closer.

3. Don't think it's too late; the construction of basic platforms is being perfected at high speed and ultra-high speed. Video selling still has a long way to go before reaching saturation in the overall retail market.

4. IP, fans, fission communication, etc., the theories of new marketing perfectly match this marketing + sales model and have been verified. This is not a short-term fire. It's not about chasing trends, but embracing change and evolution.

Finally, don't simply understand livestream selling as just the internet version of "TV shopping" from the past.

It is filled with the character "人" (people). It has warmth, emotion, and trust. This sales model is more human.

If you are interested in short video livestream selling, feel free to add the author's WeChat to join the New Distribution short video livestream theme community. When adding friends, please note: short video.

Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.