Content might be the last key to driving overall regional growth.

Where there are people, there will be business. If people change, business will naturally change.

"Business is becoming increasingly difficult." Since last year, this kind of voice is no longer the complaint of individual merchants, but has spread to become a social consensus. Traffic has become more costly, consumer willingness to consume has declined, and consumer demand has become more demanding... Behind various attributions, it seems to be reflecting a problem that the methods and experiences of doing business in the past seem to be starting to fail.

From the perspective of consumers, the changes that are taking place are even more obvious. An industry analysis article proposes that consumers have entered the "zero consumer" era. Current consumers are often omni-channel shoppers who are both frugal and extravagant, and do not blindly follow brands. Brands, channels, users... The business assets belonging to enterprises are returning to zero. The only way to stop this is to "better" meet the needs of consumers. This is precisely Douyin's strength - a field where content and business are integrated.

The "content" value of Douyin, which once served as the entrance to brand business, seems to have been underestimated. 

All-round Growth, Beyond E-commerce Business in Douyin

Content has always been the core driving force for Douyin to commercialize.

When the concept of interest-based e-commerce is gradually established and Douyin begins to complete its own "business" infrastructure, the commercial possibilities it brings naturally give rise to the natural growth of the all-round concept on the platform. This is the collective judgment of the business community and the convergence led by the platform's potential energy.

This is not surprising. After all, in the context of the stock era, whether actively or passively, enterprises will try their best to integrate "all-round" resources to achieve collaborative growth.

In terms of the business environment, since 2020, the cold current in the consumer field has been surging. Especially around 2022, consumer entrepreneurs generally accepted a reality - the traffic dividend and the capital dividend will not be available in the short term. And the popular private domain concept at that time could not solve the "zeroing" phenomenon of consumers.

A former head of a VC institution focused on the consumer track told 36Kr, "The rise of a single channel can only prove the potential of a category. Comprehensive growth in multiple channels is the realization of potential results."

The difficulty in realizing potential lies in the effective activation of user needs in different channels. In other words, the traditional channel-oriented thinking has no longer worked, after all, consumers are faced with too many choices. And Douyin's content ecosystem was once one of the solutions to this problem. Content stimulates interest, and interest activates demand, which is the essence of Douyin's commercialization. The content distributed based on interest, after repeatedly reaching consumers, affects not only the conversion within the Douyin ecosystem, but also the decision-making mindset of the entire channel, thereby naturally achieving the so-called "all-round growth".

However, due to the inertia of business thinking and tactics, brands/merchants betting on Douyin often still maintain the "channel" thinking, which makes the value of Douyin as a content platform simply condensed into an accessory identity such as a "marketing channel" and a "placement channel", and is gradually ignored.

From this point of view, the value of content as the basic disk of Douyin needs to be reorganized. 

Returning to Content, How to Release the All-round Value?

What is content? Videos shot during ad placement, scripts planned during live broadcasts. In the perspective of most merchants, content may be equivalent to materials. But if one realizes that the background color of Douyin is content, one should understand that everything that happens in Douyin is part of the content.

"We often tell brands that they must now grasp the initiative in information, operation, and time. The key to operation lies in exerting the value of content." Wang Yijun, President of the Song Business Division of Accenture Greater China, believes that exerting the value of content is the acquisition of a commercial initiative. "As a content platform, Douyin needs to attach more importance to the value of content. Content directly reaches various businesses and participates in almost the entire process of consumer decision-making, which is a new opportunity for the all-round growth of the brand."

The bearing of life, the choice of interest, the decision of consumption, the transmission of information... Re-understanding the content value of Douyin may better help us understand why all-round growth occurs.

1. Between Popular Hotspots and Hot-selling Businesses, There Is Only One Content Pipeline Missing

It cannot be denied that there are hundreds of millions of contents being generated on Douyin every day, and hundreds of millions of user attentions are also gathering. A reality is that everything is content: hotspots that attract public attention are content, short videos of influencers are content, live-streaming rooms are content, and product detail pages are content. What brands lack is a content pipeline between consumers and businesses.

And Haidilao has found it. Haidilao may be one of the most discussed catering brands at present. In different social media including Douyin, there will be popular contents or brand topics that are discussed every once in a while. What makes it even more observed by its peers is that the generation of each popular content often brings a considerable amount of all-round business growth.

"The secret may be that more than a thousand stores are all engaged in creating content, and each store is the origin of creating hotspots." Wang Miao, the Minister of the Brand Department of Haidilao, revealed that Haidilao's stores across the country and more than 140,000 employees are naturally the starting point for content generation and the contact point for user interaction. And the explosive power brought by high-quality content can often bring all-round business growth.

Last year's "Subject Three" incident may be a typical example. The impromptu performance of store employees celebrating the birthday of customers became popular on Douyin. After judging that it was a replicable content form, on the one hand, an internal evaluation was initiated to encourage employees to participate and continue to undertake hotspots. On the other hand, combined with the new product "Pure Beef Tallow Pot Bottom", a content challenge to find Haidilao experts was planned. In just a 10-day planning period, while accumulating 2.6 billion views, it also ushered in the peak business within Douyin.

"Through the POI anchor point of Douyin, stores and content can be well associated. From the membership data, during the spread of the Subject Three incident, the new customer acquisition data increased significantly. And the popularity is not only fermenting within one circle, but also sweeping the entire network." From the perspective of the overall business, the value of Douyin as a content platform has been verified: the output of brand content amplifies hotspots, the spread of hot content brings the hot sale of group buying coupons, and group buying coupons represent the source of offline customer flow, ultimately forming an effective cycle of business and content, driving the overall growth of online and offline businesses.

2. Things Gather by "Crowd", People Are Divided by "Interest"

There are also brands that have recognized the "zeroing" phenomenon of consumers. "Nowadays, consumers no longer advocate big brands or rely on channels, and the certainty of marketing has become a challenge." Ren Peng, General Manager of the Leader Brand in the Chinese region of Haier Zhijia, even believes that the current consumer journey is no longer a track-like interlocking, but a wilderness-like aimlessness.

Especially for durable consumer goods such as home appliances with a long decision-making cycle, the demand activation and transaction conversion that a single product marketing action can bring are becoming increasingly weak. "Many consumers may stockpile the products they planted in September until Double Eleven to consume." Ren Peng believes that the focus of the brand should be shifted from the closed-loop transaction of a single platform to the growth in the entire channel range.

And this is the key for Leader to focus on Douyin. On the one hand, what it values is the scale of the Douyin crowd. In addition to the full potential of 600 million DAU, the segmented users gathered by interest distribution are themselves the advantages of Douyin's content ecosystem. Internal data of Douyin shows that after home appliance industry users are planted by Douyin, 70% of the business occurs outside Douyin. In its view, through the content innovation form of direct dialogue between brand executives and users through live broadcasts, the target consumers can be effectively linked and the brand mentality can be planted.

On the other hand, the integration of the Douyin content field and the business field provides more possibilities. Leader's innovation in products can quickly stimulate the potential needs of consumers through content reach. For example, for the camping scene, a bag coffee machine that can extract 60 cups of coffee without plugging in; for example, a cloud washing machine that is suitable for rental and small-sized apartments, with both appearance and compactness. The innovative functions and selling points of the products are transformed from boring text into actual "content", quickly establishing the product mentality.

After the mentality of the brand and product is established, the initiative of the business returns to the brand again. The same planting content can directly lead to business on Douyin - jumping to the live-streaming room to become the entrance for online transactions, hanging the POI anchor point to guide to the store for conversion, and even "can spill over to drive conversions on other platforms", bringing about true all-round growth.

3. "Real" Consumers Need to Be Re-understood

The decrease in consumption frequency and the weakening of consumption willingness. The current situation of consumers mentioned earlier is the current pain point of brands and also the blind area of users that has been ignored. A very classic business theory is that consumers do not know what they want until you put the product in front of them.

Before this, the approach of most brands to solve the problem of frequency and willingness is to target some target groups with显性需求 or verified by the industry for "precise strikes". It is effective, but the marginal benefit is gradually decreasing in the stock era. Compared with the user groups that have already been converted, brands may should pay more attention to the objects that have not been converted.

And the key to activating these "strangers" is content. Yin Che, Chief Investment Officer of GroupM China, revealed a case. Last year, GroupM adjusted the content marketing strategy of a certain high-end beauty brand it served for Douyin. First, it is the re-selection of the reached crowd. It cooperated with Jumei Engine to re-analyze the characteristics of the crowd and expand the reached crowd to more than twice that of the regular category crowd. Second, it is the emphasis on the input of the marketing form. GroupM found that when content planting occurs on Douyin, conversion consumption will occur in the entire channel. After comparison, "We found that the all-round value of content marketing is the highest," so GroupM maintained more than 50% of the budget in content marketing investment, focusing on opening screen exposure and cooperation with influencers.

Yin Che believes that this returns to the logic of interest content - it brings a wider coverage of the crowd. Compared with direct effect advertising, it can break through the traditional limitations of categories and brands, spill over to the so-called "non-core users", and achieve "all-round growth" from the perspective of the crowd.

It is not difficult to find that the joint force between the content field and the business field will produce a chemical reaction where 1 + 1 is far greater than 2. An undeniable business logic is that the business field is a rational "business", and the business operation is always one input and one return, and the difference is only in how much return the input can lever. But the content field is an emotional "human heart", and the demand stimulated by content and interest often has a greater imagination space.

Perhaps some people still remember the tourism boom in Harbin at the beginning of the year. This can almost be said to be a standard content victory. Splashing water to turn into ice, the most beautiful aurora, affordable morning markets, the popular phrase "Everything is fine if you call me big brother"... The "daily" life in the north is displayed to tourists across the country through concrete content, becoming an "unusual" travel experience. The human-centered content perspective has instead become an anchor point for people to check in.

After the early "exploration" by the influencer group became popular, it was the interaction of the official cultural and tourism department of Heilongjiang to solicit contributions. After it became popular on Douyin, the popularity then spread to the content carnival of the cultural and tourism departments of 26 provinces and cities across the country on Douyin. Continuously delivering the mentality of the Harbin tourism experience to the public's cognition, and the video content is also accompanied by a POI positioning, which not only provides coordinates for consumers, but also becomes the entrance to undertake the online popularity.

The results are also obvious. On the basis of no large-scale investment, promotion, and marketing, the total exposure of Heilongjiang tourism on the entire network exceeded 2.7 billion, attracting 150,000 tourists to spontaneously produce UGC content. More intuitive data is that the search volume of Harbin within Douyin directly tripled to more than 53.35 million times, which is also the direct source of the threefold increase in the total number of tourists and the doubling of local business orders.

Every interest planting, every content marketing, and the attention and volume it can attract are the reserves of business momentum. Brands that lack this step and only "do conversions" will find it even more difficult to revitalize the business in the entire channel. 

Business and Content, the Balance Art of Growth

Consumers are changing, and business naturally needs to change. And content is precisely the window that can best see consumers' preference behaviors. Forwarding, sharing, and collecting not only activate interest, but also potential consumer demand. From a longer-term perspective, every precise planting of interest content is likely to reap rewards in the near or distant future.

However, enterprises at different development stages have different expectations and growth needs for long-term and short-term returns. This requires them to agilely adjust their strategic directions, rather than blindly following the path dependence of past experiences, only focusing on e-commerce gameplay, or blindly pursuing content volume and only planting but not harvesting.

Between business and content, there is no absolute primary and secondary, only a proportionate fit. But it must be admitted that how to judge the value of content is always a difficult problem. Douyin obviously does not want its "background color" to be forgotten. In 2023, Jumei Cloud Map launched the "All-round Measurement" product, which can provide the ability of scientific attribution and all-round measurement. Essentially, it also hopes that merchants can see the power of content.

According to the data, in specific industries such as catering, home appliances, clothing, and tourism, 40 - 80% of all GMV contributed by Douyin occurs outside Douyin. And this is only the traceable advertising touchpoint, not the limit of the all-round value of Douyin.

This means that Douyin provides not only the stock of the business field, but also the increment of the content field. Even cases like the tourism in Harbin have shown us a huge imagination of growth driven by pure content power.

Planting on Douyin, converting all-round. This new paradigm of growth is not just an answer, but a specific problem-solving process that can be structured and analyzed. And it can be confirmed that brands that re-see the content value of Douyin may be able to understand the all-round value of Douyin one step ahead and find the crucial winning move in this endgame.

After all, growth is in the future, but the landing must be in the present.