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Tencent Venture | ID：qqchuangye
"Shop-exploring bloggers are blooming everywhere, and many merchants are looking at the traffic or fame behind "them"? ”
The source of this article is "Understanding Notes" (ID: dongdong_note), which is reprinted by Tencent Venture with permission.
Author/Panverni
Editor/Qin Yan
Shop bloggers are blooming everywhere, and many merchants are looking at the traffic or fame behind "them"?
"There's something wrong with this shot!"
"XXX, you are not in the right state when you eat it, this is the small yellow croaker of the East China Sea, and you eat it like a grilled autumn knife on the street."
"Deviated from the scripting preset, so we couldn't account to the shopkeeper."
At 10 p.m., in the office of a creative space in Shanghai's Minhang District, the atmosphere gradually took on the smell of gunpowder.
The four young men sat scattered behind their desks, facing the "leader" in the middle of the office without saying a word, and harsh reprimands rang from his mouth from time to time. Even through the glass partition door, you can feel the "cold" of the air.
Scenes like this are not uncommon in this circle, and for 70% of MCN institutions or shop bloggers, the competition in the industry has become more and more cruel - "when the shop is industrialized and modeled, the blogger's creed has changed from showing the truth to everything is valuable."
But what to do? Everyone needs to survive, and the shooting, copywriting, post-production behind the store, even finances also need expenses. A veteran UP master said.
The field of exploring stores (video content production), which is not a new thing, entered an explosive period two years ago with the popularity of live broadcast and short video content.
A variety of shops big V, UP main has risen, from small subdivided life categories, large to food, clothing, housing and business, almost the entire industry coverage. Some of the small editors who used to explore the store have become outbound hosts, some have been resold as KOLs, and some have successfully "run away" to open the road to entrepreneurship. 、
In their development path, the outside world has found that "Tandian" has long been active in daily life as an industry, "changing soup does not change medicine, updating the equipment, gameplay and price, and what remains unchanged is the unspoken rules of the industry", a blogger said.
1
Exploring the Outlet: The Change of Content Under the Performance
Exploring stores has existed as a vertical content for a long time. At the end of 2015, the public account at that time was not long after the rise, and the headline number was not well known to the public, but the trend was set. In this process, the first to spew out is the emergence of a variety of local "life numbers" across the country, for these early entrants, the creation of content creation is one of their important means of monetization.
Xu Jing (pseudonym) joined an entrepreneurial advertising agency in Shanghai after graduating from university in 2015. The business is not big, there are not many people, 3 editors, a part-time financial HR, and the boss. The topic of food is not complicated for her, "Where there is good food, I will collect it, and if there is a business opportunity, I will give it to the boss." After confirming it, I will take my camera to the store to collect and write, and a graphic manuscript will be completed. ”
A program called "Popular Food" often becomes Xu Jing's reference template. "What they do is the kind of recorded video content of traditional TV stations, that is, they go to the stores in Shanghai one by one, take the host to try it, and the effect after filming is good." Throughout 2015, I followed their show to nearly 100 stores, several of which were commercially matched. ”
From 2015 to 2017, Xu Jing's team focused on serving local offline merchants and stores in Shanghai, from home improvement and food to candy and digital, all producing content in the form of graphics and texts - "At this stage, as long as it is a store with high consumer attention, we will quickly get traffic through some gimmicky content to create topics." ”
At that time, mass consumption relied on the promotion and guidance of the self-media platform, and after the "strong combination" between merchants and creators, the growth effect of public numbers and store customer sources was remarkable.
"In order to attract customers to merchants, we usually put group purchase links at the bottom of the article, and even send cash coupons in private messages. Taking an article with nearly 50,000 readers as an example, it will usually add nearly a thousand group purchase orders for the owner that month, and remove 3% of the group purchase (platform) deduction point, which is a very considerable number," Xu Jing told understand the notes.
However, the tide of traffic came too quickly, and the positions of the tuwenists began to be eaten away. After 2018, the era of short videos has arrived, which has caused the reading volume of graphic life numbers to plummet. The change behind this is that the all-round innovation of traditional graphics and texts from content to form, and some small actions and gameplay that were unfavorable in the past have quietly changed.
Xu Jing's company will migrate the main battlefield to channels such as Douyin, B station, and Taobao live broadcast, and the main content is still to explore the store, but the content form is a video of different lengths.
The biggest feature of the short video era is that the boundaries of content are gradually blurred, and the extension is gradually stretching. Video empowers everything – old factories, town shops, abandoned mine pits, and packaging can all become projects that capital aspires to; many traditional urban cuisines, museums, restaurants, towns, and even rural life are popular because of short video empowerment. The carrier is not often new, the key is how to innovate the content and presentation form.
Xu Jing and colleagues began a comprehensive adjustment from the second half of 2018. "The style on the business bill is becoming more and more biased towards video, the time is getting shorter and shorter, and there are gimmicks, interesting plots, and commercial transformations... Originally, the graphic content was one per person a day, and now it is 3 people a day to produce a video. ”
With Xu Jing as the host, the team began to extend the logic of the local life number and constantly updated the short video. At the same time, the company also began to recruit some "editors" who "can be photogenic and can say beautiful words", and at the same time, they began to cooperate with many external shop bloggers, "eat what they can do, and don't need to say what they can't do, and then find some outsourcing (insider shop bloggers) to do it." According to Xu Jing, "the company's costs have not increased much, but the commercial orders have obviously increased." ”
If Xu Jing has followed the times step by step on the road of transformation, That Yu (pseudonym) is a typical representative of crossing the river by feeling the stones.
In 2020, the horn of resumption of work after the epidemic sounded, and "local life" became a market that major platforms were scrambling to target, and "visiting stores" happened to be an important part of local life.
According to iResearch data, the size of the local life service market will increase from 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020 to 35.3 trillion yuan in 2025, and the online penetration rate of local life services will also increase from 24.3% in 2020 to 30.8% in 2025. Analysys Qianfan's data also shows that as of the first half of 2021, the transaction scale of the local life-to-store business market has increased fivefold from the same period in 2015 to 528.76 billion, and has maintained a year-on-year growth rate of more than 20% in the past few years.
Zhang Yu resolutely "went to the sea" from the office building and decided to do a short video entrepreneurship that he had always been optimistic about: "After returning to work, it is really different to see anything. After quitting my job, I became a shop blogger, simply shooting, and then sending all the video platforms that can be released. I remember posting only 2 videos in the first week, a coffee shop, an old Shanghai oil pier breakfast stall. ”
Zhang Yu has been able to get to the present with the confidence brought by the first two store visit videos, but he still said very frankly, "The reason why people can insist on continuing to be a shop blogger may be different for many UP owners." But I think the most important thing is to increase fans and monetize, without these two most basic elements, 99.9% of people can't stick to it. ”
Zhang Yu recalled the joy of getting 300 yuan for the first time to visit the store, and then silently opened the mobile phone document - the schedule for the next few weeks.
After the content pool has a certain accumulation, platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou have significantly accelerated their speed in 2021 and began to help bloggers and merchants tap the monetization value of the store business. This is also the change that has occurred since 2020, after offline consumption has continued to warm up and consumers have re-entered offline physical stores.
Zhang Yu said frankly, "In the past two weeks, I have to explore 5 stores, and the prices are good. ”
2
The gray area under "everything has a price"
"She (a blogger of a certain exploration shop) is now quoting 600,000 yuan for a short video of 60 seconds? When I first transferred her to a visa, the whole package sold for less than 2 million! "Insiders from a well-known video platform told me to understand the notes that they had already laid out the packaging of the bloggers and began to create some personal short video KOLs in 2018." You see, up to now, these head bloggers are really earning millions a month, and some other UPs that have changed careers also have monthly income of hundreds of thousands. ”
For more than a year, thanks to the unique influence among fan groups and the traffic tilt of video platforms, the profession of shop bloggers has blossomed everywhere. And all kinds of merchants rush to invite "them", but also look forward to the infinite imagination space behind "them", in a word - traffic and popularity.
But behind the prosperity of the tandian culture has also brought about several "chain effects". According to an industry insider, the monetization method of visiting the store has not changed much, "advertising revenue accounts for a large part of their income sources." In addition to the winner-take-all market law (the two-eight principle), the other 80% of the broadcasters are also very difficult, and all kinds of chaos are also emerging. ”
In order to survive, many bloggers do everything they can, as long as the store gives money, whether the food is good or not, the ingredients are not passed, it has become the least "key" problem in the video of the store.
As soon as the dishes are on the table, they will quickly swing the camera, push and pull, and add a large panorama, and the shooting of a food exploration shop will be over.
"I went to shoot some somewhat famous Internet celebrity shops, the quotation is mostly 3000-5000 yuan, the merchants will generally tell me in advance how much conversion rate or pageviews are required, and no one wants to suffer losses." Zhang Yu said, "If I don't complete this KPI, then... You can only pay for it yourself. ”
In today's growing shop industry, reality (content) has become a scarce thing. As long as the traffic is large enough, merchants are willing to try, in the face of hundreds of shop explorers, they are also like opening a blind box. According to the person in charge of mcN agencies, the big V of the current head short video platform can visit 60-70 stores on average a month. And based on the local life of the food exploration content, almost every video has a soft wide behind.
With soft publicity content, the business experience of brushing this gray area has become the only way to explore the shop blogger. Xu Jing told the note-reading, aside from the head of the shop blogger, most of the shop KPIs need to be completed with the help of brushing orders, and 10% of the profits that are not much are left for single merchants.
In addition, there are other new open source throttling methods, which are also new ways of playing that many store owners are not very clear about. Some shop-exploring bloggers have long used a low-cost method - cloud exploration. It is a single person to go to the business to shoot a large number of materials, and upload them to the cloud, the rest of the bloggers only need to select materials from them for secondary creation, which is what people in the industry often say in the group "group to visit the store".
In addition to soft text cooperation, some shop bloggers began to use shop video to attract traffic, and then tried to monetize with goods, which is also the survival of some shop bloggers who "can't get soft publicity cooperation". For example, place a link to a group purchase merchant at the bottom of the video, and extract a certain commission according to the transaction volume of the order, which can reach up to 20%.
But these bloggers often fall into the vortex of "punching the face", "when there is no money to say that a certain store is not good, give money to change the mouth, the result was turned out of the original video by netizens, hey ..." Xu Jing recently encountered such a dilemma, the most critical thing is that many times the difference between the traffic brushed out and the actual volume of goods is like cloud mud.
3
Don't visit the store, give training to people who want to explore the store
The prosperity of offline commerce has become the basis for exploring the content of the store, but there are too many people entering the game, making it inevitable that there will be more monks and less porridge. In the face of fierce industry competition, some bloggers simply no longer pay attention to physical stores, but pay attention to newcomers who want to be bloggers.
So the circle of tandem shops has spawned a content creation training program. The new "rookie" Yi Ling just walked out of the campus for more than half a year, and paid attention to the relevant training information: "Teach you how to be a qualified shop blogger, how to make a differentiated shop search account ...",
"But after I signed up, I just fooled around with you." For example, what equipment to use, what kind of store to find, these are briefly talked about, and then let us go out to find the store ourselves, say that we want to practice, and finally use the account of someone else (UP master) to upload the homework video. Isn't that just practicing with us! After Yi Ling spent 699 yuan to sign up for an online course, she found that the road of master and apprentice was not feasible, "What I want is not only technology, thinking, but also some corresponding resources, but none of them." ”
An MCN institution in Shanghai recently opened a training program for bloggers who explore shops - the content is based on the history of Haipai, eight major cuisines and other American food appreciation. When consulting the registration, the admissions manager told the understanding notes that they hope to create a group of high-quality shop bloggers, rather than simply doing the store visit video, "the operation, the selection of stores, including the rules and attributes of the platform are not the same, the newcomers have to learn a lot, we will also sincerely teach." ”
However, after more and more people have finished learning, the market boom of exploring the content promotion of the store is gone. When Xu Jing learned that many institutions had opened training courses for shop bloggers, she couldn't help but ask.
"In fact, many shop bloggers can't receive business matching, and their income is not good." Sometimes I find a merchant and work for half a day in exchange for free food and drink or a certain amount of package coupons. Xu Jing sighed.
In the eyes of some industry insiders, the local attributes of shop bloggers also bring a limitation. The first is that the regional restrictions are very strong; secondly, the offline stores are mostly small and medium-sized businesses, the general budget is low, even if there is a budget, most of them are invested in KOC, and rarely cooperate with KOLs.
"In fact, whether it is a video store or a graphic store, I think it is necessary to return to content dominance in the end, so that this circle can have a benign development prospect." Perhaps, this is also one of the reasons why Xu Jing has always stuck to the industry.
4
At last
The traffic and commercial value brought by the content creation form of Tandian have been verified, but this does not mean that everyone can dig gold from it. Head shop bloggers can quickly dig for gold, but what about other blogger groups in the lower part of the pyramid? If you think about it, the end result seems to be a hunt for consumers...
When the shop is superimposed with traffic, it will make the "shop" model produce a jaw-dropping energy, to paraphrase a popular phrase: "We will eventually change the direction of the tide". But another question that industry insiders should be thinking about is: As the traffic increases, will it be gold or something else?
END
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