Monthly consumption of over 2 million! Alibaba and Pinduoduo are both investing in the placement of short video materials for information flow in overseas markets!

Alibaba and Pinduoduo invest in short videos for overseas markets with monthly consumption of over 2 million

Half of 2023 has passed in the blink of an eye. Looking at the overseas marketing market in the first half of the year, it did not see the expected strong recovery. According to Guo Ge’s understanding, the advertising revenue of most overseas brands has generally declined, and the growth rate of the overseas marketing market has continued to slow down.

There is an obvious perception this year: for the overseas market, the era of relying on “quantity over quality” based on traffic and investment is gone. The strategy of expanding market share is a double-edged sword. While overseas brands can reach more consumers, consumers are also experiencing a sense of disorder brought by information explosion and fragmentation. Scientifically combining various marketing methods and standing out from a large amount of information to capture consumers’ hearts and minds have become one of the important issues facing current overseas brands.

On the other hand, brands are increasingly facing the challenge of the exponential increase in content quantity and the rapid shrinking of user stay time when deploying various consumer touchpoints such as text and graphics, short videos, information flow, and live streaming.

Based on these issues, Chi Jing spent half a year and reached a deep cooperation with a certain xpress and a certain mu in China to jointly explore and develop a feasible method. With the outstanding achievement of xpress in achieving an ROI of 3, it also verified the feasibility of this set of marketing combination strategies. Today, Guo Ge will share it with everyone, hoping to bring new inspiration to more overseas brand merchants.

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The new combination marketing formula is: “social media operation + influencer marketing + information flow advertising”. Looking at the entire chain of brand marketing, the above three aspects cover the key steps of brand marketing: first, by building a social media account matrix, seize long-tail traffic and precipitate private domain users; second, through influencer marketing, deeply promote products and explode brands and individual products; finally, through the “short, fast, accurate, and intensive” information flow, repeatedly reach the target customers and harvest traffic to promote conversion.

In other words, the above three aspects also conform to the core strategy of brand marketing: brand power + communication power + conversion power

Source: Whale MCN

Pain Points and Solutions for Brand Marketing Overseas

Forge the “Undead Ecology” of China’s Major Home Appliance Brands Overseas

Pain Point 1 for Overseas Brand Merchants:

Where does the advertising fee go? Shared “traffic” is difficult to become “retention”, high investment but low conversion.

Advantages of the 3-Power Strategy:

Brand Power—— Build a social media account matrix to establish a private traffic pool, which is conducive to accurate delivery of brand tone and concept, focuses on brand mind building, and enables “traffic” to accurately precipitate into “retention”.

Influence Power—— Skillfully leverage high-quality KOL to increase product voice, accurately express product performance through the real experience of red people, dispel consumer concerns, and promote grass planting and ordering.

Conversion Power—— Use high-density selling point collection videos in information flow advertising to strengthen product recognition and quickly harvest grass planting users; accurately deliver based on users’ multiple tags to improve target audience arrival rate and advertising effectiveness.

Source: Whale MCN

Pain Point 2 for Overseas Brand Merchants:

What should be done if the traditional advertising model is increasingly rejected and disliked by users and the effect is not good?

Advantages of the 3-Power Strategy:

Brand Power—— Establishing a brand social media matrix is the first step of a long march and an important cornerstone for the brand’s everlasting youthfulness. Every advertisement, every public relations activity, and even every promotional material release is all about dialogue with consumers and adds points to strengthen the core value of the brand. Shaping a brand is not complicated, the key is whether it can persist for years.

Influence: With the surge of the internet, waves are impacting every corner. The popularization of social media and the increase in KOL (Key Opinion Leader) influence weakens the traditional functions of communication, media, sales, and channels, and disrupts many traditional marketing models. Precise dissemination through internet celebrities makes accurate outreach to a large audience possible, with lower dissemination costs and faster dissemination efficiency.

Conversion: Utilizing information flow advertising, ads naturally integrate into video browsing, intelligently pushing based on user needs, with native display forms that do not disrupt the user’s reading and usage experience. Product information gains more attention from potential users, and brand image is not damaged by inappropriate advertising methods.

Source: Whale MCN

Marketing Pain Points of Advertisers 3:

Advertiser Pain Point: Increasing exposure costs with low efficiency?

3 Forces Strategy Advantages:

Brand Power – In this age of information overload, excessive dissemination, and fast pace, even good wine is afraid of deep alleys. Be good at seizing the “microphone” given by the times to speak out. Remember: the form of media is always changing, but the essence of the brand remains unchanged. The essence of dissemination remains unchanged – targeting the audience, disseminating brand information, generating sales, and cultivating brand loyalty.

Influence – “Trust Chain + Recommendation Chain” is the most efficient commercial value realization path in this era. Utilizing KOLs for deep seeding to narrow the trust gap with target customers. Utilizing KOCs to channel fans, fully leveraging the power of word-of-mouth recommendations from fans, achieving a significant increase in brand strength.

Conversion Power – Nowadays, brands have a clear perception that users are becoming more fragmented and segmented. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find target consumer groups and to reach them deeply. Information flow advertising based on big data technology matches user preferences with brands for delivery. At the same time, it analyzes delivery data in real-time and adjusts delivery strategies to optimize marketing funnels, improve advertising delivery efficiency, and reduce delivery costs.

Image source: Whale Eating MCN

In fact, Whale’s public account has already accumulated a lot of dry goods content about building social media accounts and overseas influencer marketing. However, many merchants and friends are not particularly familiar with overseas information flow short video advertising. Today, Brother Today will discuss this with you. After reading it carefully, I believe it will give you new inspiration.

What is information flow advertising?

Information flow advertising: that is, bidding ads. Its advertising display format will be displayed in the TikTok video information flow. Overseas brands can promote 5-60 second short videos, which are spread and displayed in TikTok’s recommended stream in native advertising style, seamlessly integrated into TikTok’s recommended stream, and help advertisers achieve marketing and promotion goals on Douyin.

Brand merchants can target the delivery based on the portrait of the target audience, and can set keywords to narrow down the characteristics of potential users. Usually, the advertising language in the video is used to display the brand and product, and finally guide the traffic to their own website.

As a new form, information flow advertising has an obvious advantage that replaces the shortcomings of traditional search advertising (“people looking for information”) and adopts the active recommendation mode, that is, “information looking for people”, using information flow to stimulate demand.

TikTok information flow material’s giant consumption machine

Here, I would like to share a set of data with you. According to the data from market research company eMarketer, it is estimated that the global information flow short video advertising market will reach 46.858 billion US dollars by 2023, an increase of 69.7% from 2019. Among them, the market size in North America will reach 14.11 billion US dollars, and the market size in Europe will reach 9.06 billion US dollars. This shows that the market size of information flow advertising in overseas markets is still growing and has huge potential.

Spring river water warm, ducks feel it first. We have found that cross-border e-commerce brands are one of the earliest categories to explore information flow. After trial and exploration, they have developed a more harmonious cooperation with information flow, and their importance in the information flow advertising market has become more prominent. Overall, cross-border e-commerce brands pursue a stronger flow effect in their advertising placement. With diverse advertising subjects and high demand for advertising materials, they perfectly combine with the characteristics of native advertising and rich advertising inventory of information flow.

It is worth noting that, along with the successful exploration of cross-border e-commerce brands, other categories such as fast-moving consumer goods, 3C technology, and cosmetics are gradually beginning to try short video information flow advertising placement. Currently, Chijing is collaborating with a well-known domestic cosmetics brand, and they have also strengthened their layout of information flow advertising short videos in overseas markets this year.

Image source: Chijing MCN

It is not difficult to think that the outbreak of short video information flow advertising materials is due to three reasons:

Overseas short video traffic is still rapidly expanding, especially with TikTok as an example, the long-term viewing of over 1 billion daily active users produces more advertising inventory, and inventory expansion requires more video materials to fill;

The rapid consumption of fragmented content forces the content production end to accelerate. After all, repeatedly exposing the same ad will only lead to aesthetic fatigue for users;

Overseas brands and service providers are trapped in a “prisoner’s dilemma”. New materials often achieve better propagation effects. When a certain overseas brand launches new materials in bulk, its competitors will also be forced to compete.

The production of information flow short video advertising relies on a large number of materials. However, as a result, the production time and lifecycle of materials have been greatly shortened. If you are familiar with short video information flow advertising, you can easily understand the logic: the running quantity of materials represents conversion growth, so brand owners and service providers naturally have the impulse to accelerate and increase their advertising placement. However, good materials supply ability becomes the lifeline of conversion growth under such circumstances.

To some extent, the social media information flow advertising system is like a giant machine that speeds up the consumption of advertising works. According to Guoge’s understanding, if a brand wants to produce at least 100 short video information flow advertisements per day during the peak promotion period, they will need about 10-30 high-quality materials.

Ecology of the Information Flow Advertising Short Video Material Market

Materials are generally obtained through three methods: self-shooting, self-owned materials, or purchasing copyrighted materials.

Self-shooting refers to the brand’s own customized shooting. This was the basic method used for early short video information flow advertisements, but it increases the manpower and financial costs for the brand. On the one hand, the brand needs to contact foreign personnel for shooting, which increases communication costs. At the same time, it cannot guarantee whether the foreign personnel it finds have commercial performance.

On the other hand, the equipment, scenes, and batch editing in the later stage are also difficult points. Real foreign scenes are more realistic and immersive, but the construction of scenes means that overseas brands need to find suitable venues and organizers abroad. After the shooting is completed, the video material needs to be edited quickly and efficiently in order to promote subsequent volume. As mentioned earlier, if a brand wants to produce at least 100 short video information flow advertisements per day, it will need a video team of about 20 people or more.

All of these are very real problems, especially considering that the material production is not guaranteed to generate a lot of exposure. Therefore, if the effect is not good, the self-shooting cost in the early stage is likely to become a sunk cost.

Based on this, reusing self-owned materials and purchased copyrighted materials for mixed editing has become a common means of cost control.

The self-owned materials come from clips in product promotional videos, which are used repeatedly. The most representative ones are the highlights and exciting moments from live broadcasts. These video clips are edited to generate new materials. This “killing two birds with one stone” approach has become a regular operation for many overseas brands. Although this approach saves the cumbersome work of producing self-shooting materials, managing, screening, and editing a large volume of materials still requires strong support.

Another way is to purchase copyright materials from outside sources. Fruit Brother and a person in charge of overseas promotion for a well-known cross-border e-commerce platform discussed how the management of materials was very crude and primitive in the earlier stages. After purchasing a large amount of commercially available video materials, they were stored in hard drives or cloud storage. When they needed to use the materials, they relied on memory and manual screening. This model is not a problem when the amount of materials is relatively small, but when the scale of material production and use increases exponentially, it is easy to crash.

In addition, there is another difficult point. The main material suppliers provide high-quality 4K landscape materials, which are suitable for vertical video platforms such as TikTok. However, there are relatively few materials available that are suitable for short vertical videos. Moreover, the materials provided by the copyright suppliers generally do not match the characteristics of short video scenes, which require localization and integration with the products and brands.

Overseas Localization by Whale

Short video material proxy service for information flow advertising

Based on the pain points of overseas merchants mentioned above, as well as Whale’s wealth of practical experience and circle resources in the overseas social media market, Whale has officially opened up the market for information flow advertising short video material proxy services.

In Fruit Brother’s opinion, a successful information flow advertisement still mainly depends on the video content. It should be disguised as an attractive “ordinary video” that allows users to unconsciously watch an advertisement and still have a high point of memory for the product.

Short video marketing has become mainstream, and in order to stimulate users’ desire to purchase and attention through a video, brand merchants must consider both the product selling points and video content, but they must also take into account the core of localization. Below is a screenshot of the preparatory research for a well-known brand that Whale is currently working with. Localization is a point that any content marketing company that goes overseas must consider, and I won’t go into too much detail. Interested friends are welcome to chat.

Source: Whale Eating MCN

Overall, compared to brand advertisers, platform advertisers have a greater choice of advertising subjects and information, including overall e-commerce platform operations, brand product displays, new product launches, and individual discounts, which can all be used as the main content for promotion. Although there are various choices of content, all of the above information has its own attractive points for users, and each category of information can contribute to the overall effect, achieving multi-dimensional information linkage and attracting users’ attention to the platform-activities-products, thereby improving the overall advertising effect.

According to Guo Ge’s observation, more and more brand advertisers are actively laying out information flow advertising, such as the well-known overseas men’s grooming brand MANSCAPED, game Dice Push, and travel industry retailer lastminute, etc. Fragmented, immersive short video information flow advertising will inevitably become a must-win for many industries and companies, with native content, precise tag targeting, repeated reaching of target customers, high interactive dissemination rate, and an overall market size that is growing. It can be foreseen that more and more brands will lay out information flow advertising in the future. It is recommended that all offshore brand merchants lay out their advertising as soon as possible.

Finally, unlike microfilms and live broadcasts, short video production does not have specific forms of expression and team configuration requirements like microfilms, and has characteristics such as simple production process, low production threshold, and strong participation, and is more valuable for dissemination than live broadcasts. However, its ultra-short production cycle and fun content pose certain challenges to the copywriting and planning skills of the short video production team.

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