What is Douyin
Douyin is a short video sharing social media app, outside of China known as TikTok.
Douyin was launched by ByteDance in 2016 and has become the most popular short video social media platform since then. Due to its big success in its home market, ByteDance decided to launch it with an independent server infra structure and different name (TikTok) outside China in 2017.
Douyin allows users to create 15 seconds videos and lip sync along to music. The main audience are youngsters between 14 and 22 years old, two third being female. They are spending around 1.5 hours on the app - daily. What makes Douyin very popular is the opportunity to chose from a huge library of music which can be added as background and lip sync the own face to the singing. Additional filters and editing tools offer almost endless options to customise the videos captured.
Douyin for Professional & Commercial Use
With it's young urban user base, Douyin offers a great platform to reach a heavily consume oriented audience. But due to its characteristic, you can't just shorten your promotional videos to 15 seconds, upload them on Douyin and hope they'll go viral. Douyin is an entertainment app with a highly competitive character: the race for the most likes and shares is ubiquitous. This has to be considered when designing a campaign for this leading video app.
Ways of Advertising on Douyin
Douyin offers four main types of advertising options:
Hashtag Challenges
Hastag challenges has become a very popular way of creating brand engagement on Douyin. Users are asked to create a video around a certain topic and publish it under a hashtag. This might be to imitate a "blueprint" video by using similar choreography, same background music or sequence, a footage how the product is used or an item is displayed. The users with the highest number of likes and shares can be offered rewards. Douyin uses like to pick up this kind of challenges as it provides the chance to get a sweep stake and, maybe even more important, a few seconds of fame.
Hastag challenges can be kicked off directly from your brand account, but to reach a large audience quick, the cooperation with influencers (called KOL, Key Opinion Leaders in China) can help to overcome the shortage of organic reach.
User-Generated Content
Reflecting a typical behaviour of social media grown ups, douyin users like to get involved. Being rewarded by a brand is not the sole motivation. It's much more about the fun involved, the desire to create and the chance for a bit of fame. However, not every product bears the same potential to attract users to create fun content. Online banking services are significantly less likely to appear in videos created by Douyin users as for example action sports gear or tech gadgets.
Influencer (KOL) Marketing
Celebrities are playing an important role in Chinas nowadays society and aocial media creates its own stars. Cooperating with KOLs has become a major tactic to grow audience on line. On Douyin especially, but also on other social media platforms, choosing the KOL with the largest follower base is not necessarily the best option. Due to the suggestion algorithm of Douyin (read more below), choosing a few more but lesser known KOLs might provide better results.
Brands usually gift their products to the KOL but leave it up to them how to promote it. The influencers know best which type of content their fans like to see. Even if their videos might look amateurish from a marketing professional's point of view, if the content is what their followers like, it will take off ground. In the fast moving world of social media, authenticity is much more important than technical perfection and brand guidelines.
In-App Adds
Like many other feed based platforms, Douyin offers the oportunity to place ads directly in the users stream of content. This kind of advertising can create traffic to external location like your online shop or web site but also help a hasthag challenge to take off ground by reaching a critical mass to go viral.
Marketing Strategy on Douyin
A Key Player: The AI Driven Feed Algorithm
The success of videos on Douyin can be of certain randomness. Launching a campaign through a KOL with a large follower base does not necessarily guarantee a high visibility in users feeds. Douyin has developed a havily AI-based algorithm to populate the users feeds. As a result, small accounts can suddenly gain a huge reach while famous one might get insignificant visibility in the users streams. Some of the recently successful videos were published from accounts that had just seen a hand full of likes and shares for their previous videos.
Based on this, there are a few things to consider when advertising on Douyin:
Quantity over Qulity
This might be the oposite of what is recommended for any marketing effort. But due to it's characteristics, publkishing a larger number of simple but funny video with lower quality (aka brand guideline compliance) videos will create much higher reach than just posting the same neatly perfectionised branding clip over and over again.
More but Small to Medium Size KOLs
Dont go for the one big fish, rather swim with a flock of smaller ones. Small to medium size influencers are much less expensive than the social media super stars but on Douyin their chance of hitting the jackpot is almost as high. This said, the flock strategy is likely to bring higher ROI.
Carefully Choose Your KOLs
Choose KOLs that can promote your product with authenticity. A 19 year old student might not be your choice for advertising anti aging cosmetics nor would the digimom for a party cruise. Make sure to select KOLs who generate consistent engagement among their followers and are able to transport your message with authenticity.
Gift Your Product to KOLs
Especially small, upcoming KOLs might be happy to get your product for free and will talk about the product and your brand in exchange. But keep in mind that it is required to hire and pay KOLs via the Douyin platformfor that they can publish purchasing links for your product in their video.