Deep Sound Original · The author | Li Jinglin
The home furnishing industry has never faced so much change and pressure as it does now.
The overall weakness of real estate as a pre-cyclical industry has dragged down the home furnishing industry behind it to a certain extent. Coupled with the rise in raw material costs, after entering 2021, the home furnishing industry is suffering from the supply side to the sales side is suffering from a lot of challenges - increasing revenue and not increasing profits, which has become the main theme of the home furnishing industry in the third quarter of this year.
When the business pressure meets a special period, accelerating the online transformation of the home furnishing industry, Internet home improvement is gradually taking center stage. Traditional brands continue to "touch the net", at the same time, such as Yilai, Yimian, Copper Master and other cutting-edge Internet home improvement brands have also grown rapidly with the help of new platforms.
The home furnishing industry, which was originally heavy offline, is making great strides towards digitalization. However, digitalization is not just about brands coming online, but also requires the integration and transformation of various aspects of production, sales, marketing and other aspects that were originally scattered.
Just from the perspective of marketing links facing users, online information is fragmented, channels are complex and diverse, if not integrated, the old gameplay will be difficult to adapt, and the problem will even be magnified. From the consumer side, the demand for home improvement integration and intelligence is also rising, and the problem of how to match the supply and demand sides needs to be solved urgently.
The era of real estate driving growth is over, and when it comes to online, the home furnishing industry is bound to enter the era of "people-oriented" from "house-oriented". How should the home furnishing industry grasp the core of "people", complete the transformation from tradition to new retail, and how will it open up new growth ideas?
The home furnishing industry has changed, and the difficulties are more
From the source to the terminal, including raw material supply, product manufacturing, sales and other links, the home furnishing industry chain has many types of products and low entry thresholds, showing the characteristics of large industries and small enterprises. The home improvement industry is more complex, involving design, procurement, engineering, installation, woodwork, soft decoration, service and other links, integrating manufacturing and service industries.
The main participants are mixed, and there are many communication links, resulting in the situation that the home improvement industry is prone to information asymmetry. With low price transparency and lack of standards and supervision of service quality, the user-side experience is naturally difficult to guarantee.
In the marketing process, products, channels, users and decision-making elements are scattered, resulting in marketing efficiency has not been high. Coupled with the disappearance of the traffic dividend today, marketing costs have also begun to climb. According to the data released by the Beijing News, the cost of customer acquisition in various channels online in the home furnishing industry is more than 1,000 yuan, which is not high.
He Xinghua, vice president of Red Star Macalline, once concluded: The home furnishing industry is characterized by high dispersion, high correlation and high complexity, which has led to four major "useless" - silly advertising is useless, silly sales are useless, it is useless to fight price wars, and users are useless when they have bought.
Under the new trend of digitalization, the original problems in the home furnishing industry have not yet been solved, and new problems have begun to appear.
From the C-side point of view, the younger consumer group has brought about the pain points of intergenerational changes. Nowadays, the post-90s and post-95s have gradually become the main consumer groups in the home furnishing industry. According to the data of Huge Engine and Zhimeng Consulting Agency, 63.7% of consumers in the home furnishing field are under the age of 35, and the average decoration budget of people under 35 years old has reached 254,000.
Compared with the older generation, young people are more willing to spend money, but at the same time, they also have more personalized needs for home decoration aesthetics. With the popularization of the whole house customization concept, more "non-standard" customer needs have emerged. The reality is that due to the low degree of standardization in the industry, the design scheme and construction standards are difficult to benchmark, and in order to ensure the quality of the finished product, the industry urgently needs to bridge the information differences and concept differences in each link.
On the B side, the Internet is like a "mirror", magnifying the problems in the original industrial chain.
Similar to real estate, automobile and other industries, home furnishing as a long-link industry, customer retention and conversion is not easy. On the Internet, information fragmentation and rapid decay, in the information flow environment, whether it is product introduction or advertising content is fleeting, users may lose at any time with the distraction of attention. Companies need to apply tools or technologies to help them efficiently and one-stop for conversion from retention to final ordering.
At the same time, because it now spans both ends of the line and the line, there are more uncertainties in the long link, which invisibly increases the communication cost and collaboration difficulty of each link. Multi-link and multi-thread collaboration is a problem that home furnishing enterprises must solve.
In addition, the popularity of online has also caused the shift of marketing positions, and brands must also begin to change their marketing ideas. In the past, the "one-hammer trading" type of delivery method for mass media can no longer meet the needs of the current circle of consumers, and enterprises need to formulate different strategies for diversified delivery channels to produce a richer marketing product portfolio.
From a broader perspective, the "people-oriented" turn of home furnishing enterprises is essentially a reconstruction of the relationship between enterprises and consumers, not only the marketing link, the thinking of enterprises in each link process must change, and the organizational structure must keep up. And it's not easy for companies to really lay out to match all these changes.
With content, as the entry point for transformation
The industry should be "people-oriented", standing in the perspective of "people", that is, consumers, the best weapon to attract and impress them must be - content. Some "forerunners" have given inspiration on how to implement the action.
In order to cater to the preferences of young consumers, Chivas, a functional sofa brand under Man Wah Holdings Limited, not only works products, but also began to lay out short videos and live broadcast tracks from last year. The brand has established a professional content team to achieve brand promotion through scene content output, and also cooperates with multi-circle layer masters to further popularize the product concept. Zhan Junfei, deputy general manager of Man Wah Holdings Greater China, concluded that the brand is laying out the vibrato interest e-commerce, through self-broadcast infrastructure, creating product efficiency marketing events, talent matrix, and supporting dealers in digital transformation.
"Live streaming is the most efficient way for traditional dealers to digitally market." Zhan Junfei introduced that since March this year, the douyin live broadcast room, the monthly sales reached 150,000, in September Chivas sales soared to 45 million, so far the cumulative total of more than 100 million yuan.
Image source: Chivas official website
The online space gives the brand more room to play, and the gameplay has begun to become diverse. Founded in 2011, the lighting company Moon Shadow Home is, to some extent, the first "crab-eating" enterprise - the brand laid out the first star co-production national task in the home furnishing industry, and also created the first case of star map advertising cooperation in the industry.
In August this year, Moon Shadow Home invited Yang Yang to become the brand spokesperson and released a co-production campaign called "Light for You" on Douyin. Through the help of multi-field content and the extensive participation of UGC, the exposure of the final topic reached 290 million, the number of topic participation reached 88,000, and the use of co-production stickers exceeded 50,000. At the same time, in the advertising cooperation with StarMap, the number of content clicks produced by The Preferred Talents is 3 times that of ordinary materials, and its content exposure efficiency has increased by 88% in August this year, and the overall ROI of Moon Shadow Home has increased by 21%.
A co-production campaign launched by Yang Yang, the co-brand spokesperson of Moon Shadow Home
From the successful cases, it is not difficult to summarize the methodology of using content to stimulate user interest and bring real growth.
First of all, enterprises must have the awareness of active transformation.
Building a brand account position and continuously outputting differentiated high-quality content is the foundation, which can help enterprises to "camp and camp" online first, in preparation for expanding products and brand voice later. Further, the two major content forms of short video and live broadcast will help brands reach more consumers, and gradually open up the channels of marketing, retention of capital, customer acquisition to sales, and use content to promote the growth of revenue.
Secondly, taking advantage of the content ecology of the platform will be the best option for accelerating the overall brand.
Celebrities, KOLs, and UGC users constitute a complete creator system of the platform from top to bottom, they face users directly, can directly gain insight into user needs, and can also produce stronger emotional links with users. Diversified cooperation with creators and matrix use of its content, brands can concentrate on amplifying the volume of brand voice, but also can achieve a more three-dimensional display of the brand.
At the same time, the platform itself also has a lot of interactive gameplay and IP projects that integrate many resources of the platform. Deep experience and participation in interactive play within the platform, brands may also form a multi-level marketing link, reach more consumers, and concentrate on amplifying the voice of the brand.
Of course, the premise of brand leverage is that the content ecology of the platform should be sufficiently perfect.
At this stage, home vertical content has gradually become a scale in the various content platforms of the Byte system. According to the data released by the huge engine, the household enterprise account increased by 191% year-on-year, the fan enterprise account increased by 168% year-on-year, and the home-related contribution volume increased by 221% year-on-year. The content of household categories, whether in terms of quantity, quality or richness, has made a qualitative leap.
At the same time, the platform continues to provide more products and scenarios to help the home furnishing industry. For example, Wang Juan, head of the home field of Watermelon Video, said: "Watermelon Video assists creators in commercialization and monetization through a complete commercial link, creates a chinese video collection competition, a live streaming PK competition, an innovative content column IP, etc., and launches the 'China Video Partner Program' to enable creators to achieve watermelon, vibrato, and today's headlines to generate income at the three ends." ”
ByteDance's incubated small helper vertical platform in 2018 is also helping practitioners in the home improvement industry to more accurately reach user groups with clear needs. Cao Jia, head of the designer operation of Zhuxiaobang, said: "Zhuxiaobang activates the design value with the power of the platform, helps the designer to expose multiple dimensions through precision marketing, assists the online operation with smart tools, and pays attention to the personal growth and IP shaping of the designer, fully releasing the value of the designer. ”
From a global perspective, from marketing to operation
In fact, marketing has never been the ultimate goal of a business, but management is.
What enterprises should do is to consider how to do online business from the "global perspective" - people-oriented, starting from the whole link, and carrying out full-effect operation. At this time, we need to pay attention not only to marketing with content, but also to efficiently operate and link users from the four levels of traffic, content, data and efficiency. Expand the opportunity crowd through traffic management, precipitate data assets with content management, create a brand matrix with the idea of position management, and realize the deep cultivation of vertical ecology.
After having an idea, it must be landed with actions. For the home furnishing industry, the scattered and complex industrial chain is hindering its advanced development, and enterprises should achieve full operation if they want to achieve the purpose of cost reduction and efficiency increase of the overall whole process.
The first link in full-effect operation is the operation of traffic.
In the past, under the traditional thinking, traffic was only put into the "funnel" of conversion after acquisition, more like disposable consumables. This is possible during the traffic bonus period, as brands only need to deliver at scale and frequency to increase conversions. But now that we have entered the era of stock competition, there is not much new addition, and the traffic has become more expensive, and the cost of brand acquisition has risen.
Therefore, it is necessary for brands to look at traffic with "business thinking". While obtaining business domain traffic through advertising, private domains are then built for retention to form a "compound interest" for traffic conversion. At the same time, after the two are opened, they can also supply each other and form a positive cycle, thereby achieving brand cost reduction, efficiency increase and expansion.
Shang layer decoration is a successful case of practice. The brand first invested in the drainage, and retained capital with the landing page. At the same time, the enterprise account is used as the private domain to operate, and multiple business components are used to conduct secondary marketing for advertising traffic. In the past month, the free powder of Shang layer decoration has increased by more than 8,000, and the cost of lead conversion has dropped by 33%.
In the process and after the traffic operation, in fact, there is no lack of content. The above has mentioned that many brands use content as a cut to transform, take the initiative to build content positions, create their own content, and take advantage of the platform content ecology. This whole process is not a one-way repetitive content output input, but in fact, it is also under "business thinking". The best effect of content management is to link marketing and sales more closely as an intermediate link.
It is not difficult to see that what is closely related to content management is to do position management.
Doing the position is equivalent to the brand building a store that has been perfected in all aspects of decoration, equipment, and services online. The content fills the brand account matrix, which can build a brand image online, and also become an asset precipitation to continue to attract traffic and undertake fan operation services. In addition to the content, the establishment of the management system is for the follow-up long-term and stable business. At the same time, the position can help brands continue to precipitate user assets and data assets, and can also achieve feedback on business.
Previously, the brand Chivas participated in a project launched by The Huge Engine to help the brand build an operational position, "Ten Thousand Lights". The "1+N+X" operation matrix of the project, of which "1" is the official enterprise Douyin account, which is used for the overall output of the corporate image to undertake fan operation services; "N" refers to multiple self-operated people to set up accounts, forming user stickiness through continuous output content; "X" refers to the dealer number, with the help of "short straight and double open" to do grass with goods, to promote sales conversion. During the project cycle, Chivas dealers broadcast more than 100 live broadcasts, the average stay time in the live broadcast room exceeded the large market by 105%, and the average attention rate in the live broadcast room was 232%.
From draining customers to building a position to do business, it seems that the whole link of brand operation is covered from the overall perspective.
But in fact, it is easy to overlook the "vertical management". Pan-content platforms often cover a large number of users with different needs, and the "people-oriented" turn of home furnishing companies is actually necessary to use a more vertical platform and a more vertical IP to reach more accurately and dig deeper.
For example, many of byte's content platforms provide a field for brands to do content marketing, build content and operate positions, and the vertical platform Zhu Xiaobang will help home furnishing brands to reach consumers with actual needs more directly. On this platform, brands can further segment user needs, thereby providing services and products that are more well matched. Of course, the data of the vertical platform is also more targeted, and it can also be fed back to multiple ends to improve the effect.
In August this year, the paint brand Nippon launched the "Living Space Exploration Program" marketing campaign in conjunction with the small gang. With the help of the designer resources, active KOLs and user resources of the home improvement vertical category, and the linkage of the head designer Aoyama Zhouping, the resources of Douyin and today's headlines have been opened up, and the brand volume of Nippon Art Paint has been successfully enhanced. According to the data released by the huge engine, the project finally obtained a total exposure of more than 20 million with the help of the small gang, and the reading exposure of the grass articles exceeded 4 million.
Nippon linkage well-known designer Shuhei Aoyama
In full-effect operation, whether it is traffic retention, increased exposure or more accurate reach, the final link of the link still has to go to the completion of the transaction. Home furnishing is a typical industry that needs both clues to retain capital and need to promote actual transactions, and now "short straight and double open" has gradually become a trend, which can take into account these two needs and achieve "full chain transactions".
By leveraging short video content and the platform's many product tools, enterprises can achieve lead growth faster and more efficiently. Using live broadcasting, design services and customized main materials can allow enterprises to complete the rapid retention of capital through online reservations and other methods; for the closed-loop live broadcast of finished furniture and household goods, the connection with consumer terminals is directly opened to complete the entire transaction closed loop.
From the shaping of the perspective of the idea to the landing of the closed-loop execution, the business process is subdivided, and the effective investment and efficient layout are the necessary actions for cultivating internal strength and making up for the ability, and it is also the premise and beginning of the real realization of digital transformation.
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, followed by now. Although the home furnishing industry is now superimposed on the old and new problems of traditional business and digitalization, the pain points are very prominent, but this also means that the industry change is accelerating. In this era, the industry can find a breakthrough with the help of more platforms, provide services around all the needs of users, and do a good job in comprehensive operation online. Only in this home industry can it achieve transformation.