In recent years, the Spring Festival has been a must for major brands and platforms.
This is the most special festival belonging to the Chinese people, covering the important consumption scenarios of hundreds of millions of people, and is a wonderful opportunity for enterprises to sprint their performance and seize their minds; at the same time, because of the rich traditional cultural connotation of the Spring Festival, it also makes it the best position for enterprises to communicate emotionally with users.
Some people throw thousands of dollars here, from grabbing the title of the Spring Festival Gala, competing for the countdown king, to participating in various party activities, all of which highlight the desire of a growing company for the national label.
To a certain extent, once upon a time, especially during the expansion period of the Internet, behind the competition for the Spring Festival activities, it was the competitive thinking of Internet companies to fight for the ground and rush to growth.
The smoke of this great war has almost disappeared in the Spring Festival of 2022, replaced by more activities with temperature and joy. For example, Kuaishou continued to divide 2.2 billion red envelopes this year, but the theme became pet powder and welfare, and users felt the atmosphere of the Spring Festival through a variety of ways to play. Grabbing red envelopes on platforms such as Kuaishou has become a New Year custom for many users.
From "grabbing the ground" to "sending care", behind the changing red envelope activities, what are enterprises thinking?
The Spring Festival of iron, the winner of the flowing water
Spring Festival marketing campaigns emerge in an endless stream, and there will be different winners every year. In the field of the Internet, WeChat, Taobao and Kuaishou have all left a lot of ink on the Spring Festival War. Especially in creating pioneering interactive activities, enterprises represented by Kuaishou have been handing over new answers.
On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2014, a team of people and horses quietly worked overtime in the WeChat headquarters in Guangzhou. When the annual Spring Festival Chinese New Year's Eve night, the WeChat red envelope that came out of nowhere became famous. Later, according to statistics, the total number of people who participated in the WeChat red envelope activity that night reached 4.82 million times, from the Chinese New Year's Eve to the eighth day of the first year, the total number of activated users of WeChat Pay exceeded 8 million.
The results of the WeChat red envelope in this year's Spring Festival were even defined as the "sneak attack on Pearl Harbor".
But the trajectory of the industry that belongs to the mobile payment track is irreversible. By the Spring Festival of 2015, the total amount of WeChat red envelopes received and sent has exceeded 1 billion, an increase of more than 60 times year-on-year. More data said that this year's Spring Festival drove the number of WeChat tied card users to exceed 80 million. Later, at the end of 2016, Zhang Xiaolong announced that the official withdrawal from the red envelope war was completed with a sentence that "the mission of weChat Spring Festival red envelopes has been completed". But there is no doubt that when the Chinese New Year's Eve in 2017, WeChat received and sent 14.2 billion red envelopes, which still consolidated WeChat's historical position in the red envelope war.
In 2018, the spotlight of the Spring Festival came to Taobao. In the same year, Taobao announced an exclusive interactive cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, and in the process of broadcasting the Spring Festival Gala this year, Taobao set up four interactive links to distribute a total of more than 600 million Spring Festival Gala red envelopes and privileged goods.
The effect is remarkable. A key statistic is that at that time, for the sake of safety, the technical department of Taobao Spring Festival Gala expanded the server by 3 times based on the capacity of Double 11 in 2017. As a result, on the day of Chinese New Year's Eve Night, as the Spring Festival Gala activities reached a climax, there was still a brief accident in the event. Later, according to Taobao technicians, this was because the outbreak brought by the Spring Festival Gala reached 15 times that of Double Eleven.
It really confirms the words that Luo Zhenyu said in his New Year's Eve speech, "We don't know anything about the power of the Spring Festival Gala."
In 2020, enterprises that have undergone the "big test" of the Spring Festival Gala have become Kuaishou, and their official announcement has become the exclusive interactive partner of the 2020 Spring Festival Gala. This not only means that the user volume of Kuaishou at that time can already accept the test of the Spring Festival Gala, but also means that it can bring bigger and more surprises. At that time, the question left for Kuaishou was, how to bring people more innovative interactive activities?
This year, at the same time, Kuaishou distributed a total of 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes on the day of the Spring Festival Gala, setting a record for the largest amount of interactive red envelopes in the Spring Festival Gala at that time.
At the same time, Kuaishou is also the first non-BAT Internet winning enterprise to appear after WeChat, Taobao and Baidu. As the first short video community to participate in the interaction of the Spring Festival Gala, Kuaishou has also brought more freshness to people's Spring Festival consumption experience, pioneering to bring people a different Spring Festival Gala viewing mode. Let people watch and play at the same time, combining community content with the interaction of the Spring Festival Gala.
What is more critical in this activity is that it also helped Kuaishou sprint 300 million DAU in the context of that time, consolidating its position in the industry.
Looking back at history, it is not difficult to find that in the past few years, the amount of the Spring Festival red envelope war has risen and the way of participation has become more and more diverse. When people regard the Spring Festival dividing up red envelopes as a new era of New Year customs. Companies are also starting to think, how can they create more valuable event content? What kind of marketing campaigns do people need?
The evolution of Kuaishou Spring Festival marketing is undoubtedly a case worth referencing.
Behind the evolution of Kuaishou Spring Festival marketing
For several consecutive years, although the Kuaishou Spring Festival marketing campaign finally presented the impression of "spending a lot of money" to consumers, the logic behind it was completely different.
In the year of the title Spring Festival Gala, Kuaishou was still in a period of rapid development. At that time, in the field of hot short video and live broadcasting, Kuaishou was still engaged in a fierce competition with competitors. For Kuaishou at that time, it had to consolidate its first-mover advantage and stabilize its platform characteristics, while at the same time, in terms of the number of users, the length of use, and the coverage, Kuaishou was also constantly exerting its strength. The Spring Festival Gala event wrote a new footnote for the evolution of Kuaishou this year.
At that time, it was also the end of the Kuaishou K3 campaign, and inside Kuaishou, the countdown to the Spring Festival Gala activities could be seen everywhere, and the employees unanimously entered the "wartime" state. Later, in interviews with the media, many employees recalled this experience and said that for the Spring Festival Gala project, more and more conference rooms have become temporary workstations, and the working hours are advanced, and the employees are like chicken blood.
The Spring Festival Gala Campaign finally drew a relatively satisfactory end to Kuaishou. After the Spring Festival Gala event, the Kuaishou DAU exceeded 300 million as scheduled, and the senior management of Kuaishou was also satisfied with the "process" of achieving this result. Since then, Kuaishou has also rapidly moved towards the north and south of the river, its popularity has been rapidly improved, and creators and ordinary users have also continued to grow.
2021 is a new turning point for Kuaishou, and at the beginning of this year, Kuaishou officially landed on the capital market. From the submission of the IPO prospectus on November 5, 2020, to the official completion of the listing action on February 5, 2021, behind the lightning listing reflects the determination of Kuaishou to seek stronger organizational capabilities.
At that time, the Kuaishou community also completed a single and double parallel revision, and the use of the two major traffics in the private domain and the public domain became more and more mature. When the platform ecology tends to be perfect, around the infrastructure construction, Kuaishou created this year's Spring Festival red envelope activities.
In the 2.1 billion Spring Festival red envelope activities, the strong momentum of Kuaishou Express Edition and Kuaishou E-commerce have all come out of the limelight, first Kuaishou Express Edition topped the Free App Store list, and then, the cumulative number of viewers of Kuaishou E-commerce's "Super New Year Gift" activity exceeded 130 million. The cumulative number of interactions between the live broadcast rooms of Kuaishou Xiaodian exceeded 560 million, and the total GMV of the live broadcast room exceeded 260 million yuan.
At the same time, Kuaishou also invited national memory Jay Chou and his friends to do a very popular live broadcast event in Kuaishou, and the total number of online viewers exceeded 100 million.
At the end of 2021, Kuaishou proposed the concept of "digital city ecology". In this ecology that has been nurtured for many years, how to achieve the common "Spring Festival Carnival" of users, creators and merchant brands is the main goal of Kuaishou. The Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger in 2022 is based on this.
Rise to the occasion with Engagement + Content
In the past three years, Kuaishou's presence during the Spring Festival event has been very strong.
In 2020, Kuaishou won the naming right of the Spring Festival Gala and wrote the slogan of "dividing up 2.1 billion" on the APP icon, which triggered many Internet companies to follow up. This year, this number has risen to 2.2 billion, and it is richer in gameplay and mode, and the perception of users and creators is stronger.
It is understood that during the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger, Kuaishou created the main venue of the Spring Festival and the Chinese New Year's Eve venue respectively, following the classic mode of passing.
During this period, users open the Kuaishou App and click on the "Spring Festival" in the upper right corner, you can enter the main venue, and the game includes five levels: "New Year's Flavor Inheritance", "Splendid Mountains and Rivers", "City of Double Olympics", "Star Sea", and "Ten Thousand Lights", with traditional New Year flavor, there are also Winter Olympic innovation themes, and there is a sense of collision between traditional culture and youth culture.
From the perspective of consumers' physical feelings, this year's interactive mode also fully reflects the design sense of Kuaishou, such as "jumping, red envelope to", "guarding the old money" and "set good luck China Fu" and other branch activities, which can let people really play in Kuaishou in the set card mode and small game mode.
In addition, there are some small activities with surprises. For example, from January 19 to February 5, Kuaishou launched an "Easter egg" game - "Fortuna Arrived". During this period, as long as you open the Kuaishou or Kuaishou Express App to reverse the mobile phone, you have the opportunity to trigger the special effect of "Blessing Chapter" or "Red Packet Article", harvest Kuaishou New Year greetings, and get up to 6666 yuan in cash red envelopes.
At 23:00 on the evening of January 30, Kuaishou officially opened the Chinese New Year's Eve event venue 1 hour in advance, and launched interesting games such as "number lottery", "shake to win cash", "200 million red envelopes to the end", with an average of 100,000 minutes per 60 seconds throughout the day. Among them, Chinese New Year's Eve from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m., Kuaishou also opened the "Super 6 Minutes" at each hour, and divided tens of millions of red envelopes in 6 minutes.
In addition to the official activities, Kuaishou also joined hands with celebrities and vertical creators to launch pet fan activities and create a "New Year Koi" activity section. By sending out a variety of unique gifts, creators and brands can not only pull in the distance with fans, but also allow many people to deepen their understanding of the warmth and inclusiveness of the Kuaishou platform on the occasion of the Spring Festival.
It is not difficult to see from the above activities that in the Spring Festival marketing, Kuaishou still pays attention to the user's sense of experience, and also makes the word "interaction" vividly displayed.
Kuaishou is also actively exploring innovative combinations of interaction and content. For example, the aforementioned New Year Koi activities are not only for ordinary users, but also for many creators, which is equivalent to creating an operational activity with an increasing mindset, which better leverages the enthusiasm of creators and ultimately achieves a win-win situation for the platform, users and creators.
In addition, the Kuaishou platform has also formed a large number of PGC-oriented high-quality content matrix. It is worth mentioning that in the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger in 2022, Kuaishou once again reached a cooperation with CCTV, and at 0:30 on February 1, the data showed that more than 170 million people watched the "Central Video" live broadcast of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Tiger. Kuaishou provides a more convenient and smooth Spring Festival Gala viewing experience for Chinese people around the world through live broadcast, on-demand and short video. In addition, Kuaishou has also reached cooperation with 11 provincial and municipal satellite TV Spring Festival Gala to provide users with a visual feast of the Spring Festival Gala in the form of "short video + live broadcast".
This means that through a large number of formal copyrights related to the Spring Festival Gala, the relevant spokespersons for the Spring Festival Gala, the artists and related staff stationed in Kuaishou, and a large number of in-site second creations, Kuaishou further consolidates the community's supply of content and attracts and retains more users. In the mode of interaction + content, it intends to realize the positive cycle of market activities feeding back the content ecology.
In fact, Kuaishou also reached a cooperation with the Winter Olympics this year, winning the official copyright of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. From the Spring Festival Gala to the Winter Olympics, people can have a complete Spring Festival consumption experience in Kuaishou. It can be predicted that the Spring Festival marketing campaign can bring significant effects to the growth of Kuaishou DAU and the new user pull, and the Winter Olympics, as a national sports event, can help Kuaishou increase its weight in content consumption and UGC production, thereby enhancing user activity and retention.
From big interaction to big content, Kuaishou has played a complete set of combination punches.
Warmer Spring Festival activities are more popular
According to statistics, this year's "Shang kuaishou 2.2 billion" red envelope activity interaction total of 11.46 billion times, the most received red envelope users received a total of 1261 times, as of the day of Chinese New Year's Eve, the "jump a jump" activity accumulated more than 40.4 billion jumps, according to a jump of 2 meters, can circle the earth 2016 times. Kuaishou proved the popularity of its Spring Festival activities among users with solid data.
Creating the above types of activities is fundamentally in line with Kuaishou's inclusive and warm community tone. The Kuaishou community has always been inclusive, so that everyone can participate in the activities, and at the same time, the solid trust relationship established between creators and fans has always allowed the Kuaishou community to maintain characteristics that are different from other platforms. The Kuaishou digital market ecology is also generated on the basis of such a platform and continues to grow.
People like to watch a variety of videos on the Kuaishou platform, which will also derive related service needs, extending from content consumption to deeper service consumption. Kuaishou builds a business system to support creators and businesses, create a healthy business ecological environment, and achieve an open and win-win ecological effect, so as to better serve Kuaishou users.
As a result, even commercial activities can always stimulate the huge enthusiasm of Kuaishou users, which is reflected in this year's Kuaishou Spring Festival marketing activities. Among the many partners this year, Guanfang-Hawthorn Tree, as the exclusive general title provider, also realized the full-chain integrated closed-loop marketing of super exposure, super interaction and super transformation with the help of the creative gameplay of Kuaishou Spring Festival.
For Kuaishou, to create an activity, in essence, is not a cold red envelope output, not to build on commercial interests, its most obvious is to help the development of the community ecology, understand the needs of users, meet the needs, so that users can enjoy themselves in a rich way of playing. It also allows more brands and creators to continue to interact with users during the Spring Festival, consolidate the trust foundation and tap the value of private domains, creating a Spring Festival marketing that benefits consumers, creators and partners.
To a certain extent, Kuaishou is really migrating the new year flavor to the Kuaishou platform to create a new Way of New Year for young people that belongs to the current digital age. Society is changing, annual activities are also improving, Kuaishou has also been exploring products and services that meet the needs of the current era, and under the big test of the Spring Festival marketing activities, Kuaishou has handed over a satisfactory answer sheet.