Image credits @unsplash
Wen 丨 zinc scale, author 丨 Li Wenjie, editor 丨 Xuanqi
New consumer brands seem to have begun to change the direction of marketing.
On the occasion of retiring the old and welcoming the new, from the pen end of the major media and the phenomenon of major social media, it can be seen that the marketing path of the new consumer brand routine is about to come to the "end", and the explosive formula "20,000 little red books + 8,000 vibrato + 3,000 B stations + 150 Zhihu Q&A + live streaming goods = a new brand" has also begun to fail.
According to Tiger Sniff, such a change actually revealed a signal early. As early as August 2021, the sales of a number of cutting-edge brands in snacks, fast food, beauty and other categories showed a downward trend; in October, the amount of financing in this field was only 3.7 billion yuan, only a quarter of the peak period.
A corresponding change is that new consumer brands that are gradually withdrawing from traffic pools such as Xiaohongshu have become active in podcasts. The latter, which originally started late in China, was once seen as a niche platform. However, with the gradual development of domestic podcast platforms, more and more new consumer brands have set their sights on this pool of traffic that is secretly accumulating...
Is the "first year of commercialization" for podcasts coming?
Chinese podcasts, the pace of "breaking the circle" and "commercialization" suddenly accelerated.
In 2019, Chinese podcasts suddenly began to heat up after a long period of lows. On the one hand, Apple's podcast China podcasts "Suddenly Left and Right", "Naturalist", "Unemployed Homeless" and "Surplus Value" these podcasts slowly developed into heads and began to have fixed fans. On the other hand, audio platforms such as Himalayas and Lychee FM have regained podcasts, and in 2020, the podcast client small universe is online, "born for podcasts". Between April and November of the same year, Chinese podcasts exploded by about 6,000.
As both podcast content and platforms grew rapidly, this emerging medium form was targeted by new consumer brands.
Sara, a 26-year-old media practitioner, began listening to podcasts in 2019 and gradually had a fixed podcast program, she found that in the past two years, more and more podcasts have begun to take on business cooperation and advertising, and the brands placed by these test water podcasts are mostly new consumer brands, "from the three and a half meals that we are more familiar with, to the sleeping environment brand Lying Island, the perfume brand Juliet and the cider brand Berry Sweetheart, you can hear their ads in more than one podcast." ”
According to incomplete statistics of zinc scale, the brands that appear in podcasts with high frequency in 2021 include coffee brands Yongpu and Santo; underwear brands milk candy pie, inside and outside; catering brands ramen, Berry Sweetheart; sleeping environment brand Lying Island; pet brand Jiusheng; mother and baby brand Nest Matuan, etc., in addition to car brands Lexus, reading APP palm reading, WeChat public account new world phase and so on. On the whole, it is still dominated by new consumer brands.
The form of delivery is mainly two types: one is to insert oral advertisements, promote by introducing brand information, issuing coupons, etc.; the other is to sponsor the broadcast of programs to increase the exposure of brand names.
The main advertising form of the current podcast
The former is a more common form, while the latter is relatively rare. Among them, Neihe and Lexus exclusively sponsored 3 episodes of the podcast "Random Fluctuations" from March 2021, while Nestlé's mother and baby brand Nest Mom Group exclusively sponsored the podcast "Harmonic Star Chat" for 12 issues.
"In fact, with the increase in the delivery of new consumer brands, most podcasts are also trying different ways of advertising implantation, unlike the original simplest title or direct insertion of a segment of oral broadcasting in the middle, and now many anchors will also make the form of advertising more interesting and rich or more natural." Chang Ran is a novice anchor, she and her friends' podcasts have been online for nearly half a year, and she has not considered business cooperation for the time being, but she has long observed the form of head podcasts receiving business.
For example, Chang Ran said, "For example, the podcast show "Sage Time", which focuses on the lives and emotions of ordinary people, recently set the background of the recording podcast to drink and chat when implanting Suntory low-grade wine, and naturally appeared to touch the wine glass and reveal the brand. Or the comedy podcast show "Harmonic Star Chat", they will show the advertisement in the form of a more interesting form such as a retro taxi driver radio station or a small theater during the opening broadcast. The cultural reading podcast "Improvisational Silence" will carry out business cooperation by sharing books sponsored by reading APPS and launching a lottery book delivery activity. ”
It is undeniable that the collision of podcasts and new consumer brands has brought both to a new intersection, the former seems to have ushered in the "first year of commercialization", and the latter has begun to break the marketing path of routine.
From casting a wide net to precise positioning, new consumption for play
From the perspective of new consumer brands, it is not difficult to understand the choice of podcasts as the new marketing position. After all, the long-lasting "traffic play" is really a bit unmoving.
Looking back at the popular path of a large number of new consumer brands, including Yuanqi Forest and Perfect Diary, it is nothing more than spending money on marketing and buying traffic. First of all, do a good job of brand packaging, and then appear in the small red book and live broadcast room with high frequency, stepping on the consumption habit of "planting grass" to create a blockbuster.
But this path lacks core barriers, and every new consumer brand seems to be able to imitate it. As a result, on the one hand, the homogeneous delivery model leads to aesthetic fatigue of consumers sooner or later, and perceives that "new consumer brands are IQ taxes", on the other hand, the tide is rising, the cost of traffic is going up, and the conversion rate is getting lower and lower.
According to Tiger Sniff, as early as the spring of 2021, a dollar fund found after studying a food brand that the investment of this "well-known brand" in traffic was not enough, and the delivery conversion rate was quite dismal only around 1:0.8, that is to say, it cost 10,000 yuan to put it, and it could only generate 8,000 yuan of sales.
As for the repurchase rate, it is even more difficult. Therefore, under the launch of the "wide cast net", the ceiling came faster than expected, and new consumer brands had to start to change their thinking.
Choosing a podcast is actually choosing a more accurate delivery method.
Overall, the audience portraits of podcasts and new consumer brands are highly overlapping.
According to the data of iiMedia Research, domestic audio platform users, post-90s, that is, users aged 30 and below, account for 52%. University degree accounts for 59%, which is relatively high level of education. The "2020 Chinese Podcast Listeners and Consumption Survey" released by PodFest China also pointed out that the main force of podcast users in Chinese comes from first-tier and new first-tier cities, and nearly 90% of users have bachelor's degrees or above.
And what is the main consumer portrait of the new consumer brand? According to the analysis of Ai Media, this group is mainly urban unmarried white-collar workers with higher education qualifications and income levels in the middle and high-level levels, mainly in first- and second-tier cities.
From a more microscopic point of view, because the positioning and areas involved in different podcast programs are also different, their corresponding audiences are more segmented and accurate, which is conducive to new consumer brands to find podcasts with higher audience fit for delivery, and can also cover users with different needs when running different podcast programs.
An intuitive example is that the new generation of lingerie brands has previously chosen to exclusively sponsor the broadcast of "Random Fluctuations StochasticVolatility", one of the key reasons is that this podcast is hosted by three female media people, the program content covers neoliberalism, biological citizenship and feminism, etc., and its main audience, that is, the new generation of independent middle-class women, is the target group that the inside and outside hope to reach.
Another podcast, Sage Time, which has been released inside and outside, is more emotionally oriented, including the friendship and confusion of the younger generation. Obviously, the internal and external choices of Sage Time are aimed at another user group, that is, young women who pursue comfort and self.
Then, when the same brand is placed on podcasts with different positioning and tonality, it can often produce a "1+1>2" effect.
In addition to the matching degree of the audience, compared with other social platforms or media, such as the knife method research institute, podcasts have "four high advantages", that is, "high quality content, high resonance emotion, high user value and high cost performance".
The first three points will lead to a high degree of stickiness and trust in the audience. As the "Small Universe Podcast App" previously posted on Weibo, "The audience of podcasts is many, but like the fat in the snowflake cow, it is finely and broken into the muscle." ”
Therefore, the audience's acceptance of podcasts in commercialization and advertising is also relatively high. In PodFest China's latest survey, 87.8% of Chinese podcast listeners did not oppose podcast commercialization, and 88.5% of podcast listeners had paid for content.
PodFest Chnia 2020 Chinese Podcast Listeners and Consumers
"I've always loved a podcast, Unemployed Homeless, but they didn't get their first ad until 2020, when they said it was a milestone for them, but I'm very happy for them as a loyal listener." Qiao Yaxuan, who has subscribed to multiple podcasts, told Zinc Scale that she is often active in the comment areas of major podcasts, in fact, from the comment area, it can be seen that most listeners have a high tolerance for advertising podcasts, "because everyone knows that high-quality content is worth monetizing, and in fact, compared to a 1-hour program, interspersed with an advertisement of less than five minutes is actually not offensive." ”
As for the cost-effectiveness, the data can show this more intuitively.
In the "Minority" survey of the effect of the Nest Mother Group's named podcast "Harmonic Star Chat", it was written that "the broadcast data of the program was better than the previous average, with a total of 9.07 million broadcasts of the 12 programs, and the price of a single broadcast was less than two cents, far lower than other media." The person in charge of the Nest Mama Group said that it exceeded expectations: "Our activity has two purposes, one is brand promotion, and the other is to recruit 10,000 users. Brand promotion, the data is better than the previous programs, users are also in the group to express good; recruit users, but also basically meet the standard. ”
The vice president of Xinshixiang mentioned in the podcast "Relish", the average price of WeChat reading is 1.5 yuan / time, the average price of b station views is 0.6 -1 yuan / time, and the average price of podcast listening is only 0.05 - 0.1 yuan / time.
The low-cost and high-precision user base is the key for new consumer brands to get out of the bottleneck.
"In addition, in fact, an important tone of new consumer brands is to dare to try new, so compared to traditional brands, their steps are faster and they dare not fall behind in this wave of new delivery channels." Chang Ran analyzed.
How long can the "love period" between podcasts and new consumption last?
Judging from the phenomenon and data, podcasts and new consumption seem to have entered a "hot love period". Podcasts hope to gradually form a monetization path through the launch of new consumer brands, and new consumer brands hope to rely on podcasts to exchange low costs for high returns. The two are also able to achieve a "win-win" at present.
But how long can this "hot love period" last?
From the perspective of the global situation, when the domestic podcast industry is still growing, overseas podcasting is already a thriving scene. According to the advertising agency IAB (The Interactive Advertising Bureau), advertising revenue from U.S. podcasts has reached $842 million in 2020, up 19% year-over-year. This type of advertising revenue is expected to exceed $1 billion this year.
But domestic podcast programs are still difficult to achieve such revenue. According to the article of the new list, "After making tens of millions in the podcast market, what is the next step for JustPod?" The founder of JustPod, a leading domestic podcast and digital audio company, also said that only a small number of program anchors can make money in the podcast market.
From the above point of view, the reason why new consumer brands will choose podcasts is because of their current cost performance and because of the high acceptance of advertising by the audience. But both of these points may change with the increase in brand side and the increase in the frequency of advertising.
In fact, the attitude of a part of the audience has changed. "The main reason is that there are not many head podcasts now, the choice of new consumer brands in the launch is very limited, and listeners may hear ads of the same brand in multiple podcasts in the short term, which on the one hand can increase the awareness of the brand, but on the other hand, it will also make the listeners feel bored." Sara said that if more and more brands are pouring in, but the head podcasts do not increase or do not grow fast enough, it can easily lead to repeated reach.
Image source: Small Universe
The Knife Law Institute also pointed out this, "At present, in the case of a small overall audience and more than 10 long-term listeners, the audience of each podcast is partially overlapping, and brands need to make a more detailed portrait of users when they are delivered, otherwise it may be counterproductive because of repeated touch."
At the same time, when more and more brands notice the high cost performance of podcasts, it is also possible to raise the price of podcasts and vicious competition.
In addition, in Changran's view, "because the current head podcast for the sake of ensuring the quality of content, often retain a large initiative in content when accepting delivery, but once the scale and amount of bets placed by the brand side are larger, the bargaining power between the podcast and the brand and the control of the content may also change." This will also have an impact on the development ecology of podcasts. ”
Therefore, for podcasts and new consumer brands, it is more important to consider how to go on in a longer and healthier way when the "hot love period" of co-production has passed.