As the pioneer of domestic beauty to the sea, ZEESEA Ziser launched the "brand to the sea" strategy in 2020, and set the first stop of going to sea as the Japanese market with more fierce competition in the beauty market, and then in just over a year, Japan's omni-channel sales reached nearly 10 billion yen, becoming the top 1 domestic beauty in the sales volume of Amazon in Japan.
ZeeseA's marketing director said in an interview with the media that there are two main reasons for entering the Japanese market first: First, the skin color, experience and favorite items of Japanese users are similar to those in the Chinese market; Second, Japanese users have higher preferences and loyalties to makeup.
Successful market positioning allowed ZEESEA to win the first battle in Japan, and then in 2021, it entered the US market, with an average monthly sales of more than 2 million yuan in only 4 months.
In the face of the highly developed Japanese and American beauty markets, ZEESEA has successfully gone to sea with its unique brand tone, which is inseparable from its efforts in product creation, channel layout, brand marketing and other aspects.
Image source ZEESEA Zi color official website
Focus on polishing products and research and development to improve user experience
In order to promote the successful overseas of the brand, ZEESEA's positioning of the product is to directly benchmark the international first-line beauty brand and take the international brand route. And in order to ensure product quality, more than 100 people have established a research and development team, of which 30% of the beauty engineers have more than 20 years of beauty development experience, 70% of the makeup artists have international brand experience; And with a number of internationally renowned raw material suppliers to establish in-depth strategic cooperation, to create a strong endorsement of high-quality products.
In the process of product development and design, ZEESEA will also invite users to participate, provide opinions from the perspective of consumers, and ensure that each product can meet the real needs of users from quality to packaging.
In addition, in the face of different national markets and different skin color consumer groups, ZEESEA has also set up a separate product team to deeply understand the needs of consumer groups and effectively solve the pain points of consumers.
User-centric, and constantly innovate and reform product development guidelines, so that ZEESEA's products after being introduced to the market, quickly won the affirmation and purchase of consumers. Taking the Japanese market as an example, its liquid eyeshadow, color mascara and other products were once sold out and out of stock, and also set off a hot topic discussion of "Chinese makeup" on the social media platform.
The source of the image is ZEESEA Color's official public account
Online and offline dual channel layout, in-depth access to overseas users
Different from the general overseas brands giving priority to the layout of online channels, ZEESEA Zise directly lays out online + offline dual channels when the brand goes to sea, and more comprehensively reaches overseas users.
Online, in addition to entering a number of cross-border e-commerce platforms, ZEESEA has also created a brand independent station and carried out an all-round layout of online channels. With the help of the natural traffic advantages of each cross-border e-commerce platform, the brand information remains highly exposed, while relying on independent stations to precipitate brand value and enhance brand influence.
It is worth mentioning that the ZEESEA color brand independently stands in the design optimization, and there are many detailed considerations, which can help improve the conversion rate in the station. Such as supporting multi-language and multi-currency to meet the differentiated needs of consumers; The first-level menu name in the navigation bar is set to a brand co-brand, and the co-brand IP is used to quickly increase brand awareness.
When going to Japan, ZEESEA learned that Japanese users have offline consumption habits, so it comprehensively laid out offline channels, and became the first domestic makeup brand to enter Japan's largest chain of drugstore Kiyoshi Matsumoto.
According to the data, by the end of 21 years, ZEESEA zi color covered nearly 2,000 Matsumoto Kiyoshi stores, as well as more than 2,000 Japanese collection stores, supermarkets and other sales points, rapidly increasing market share.
Image source ZEESEA Zi color official website
Content marketing + co-brand IP to maximize brand value
ZeeseA's marketing director mentioned in the interview: Although foreign social media is developed, the combination of social media and e-commerce is very low, and many foreign social media are more just pictures and texts, and the pictures are not as meticulous and vivid as domestic ones. So the team took the domestic way of content marketing to overseas, leveraged the market with content, and quickly achieved success.
ZEESEA will also combine different market characteristics to localize advertising content. Taking product posters placed in Japan as an example, according to the reading habits of Japanese consumers, a lot of text introduction content has been added to the posters.
In the social media operation, according to the Japanese social media users have a certain dependence on Internet celebrities, ZEESEA has cooperated with stars/KOLs in related fields to deepen brand word-of-mouth marketing.
At the same time, it will also create hot topics and deeply interact with young consumers. For example, when promoting colorful mascara products, an exclusive "tear makeup" topic was created, which triggered a heated discussion among consumers.
Another highlight of ZEESEA's overseas brand marketing is the joint big IP, which has cooperated with the National Gallery of Britain, the British Museum, Picasso and other world-class cultural and artistic big IP to launch Egyptian 16 color eyeshadow, Egyptian Queen Powder, Van Gogh lipstick, Alice 9 color eyeshadow and other fashion makeup items, giving the brand cultural gene and using cultural connotation to enhance the brand premium.
Image source ZEESEA Zi color official website
In the overseas beauty market with many well-known brands, ZEESEA has successfully established a personalized and artistic brand image with the marketing game of joint IP, and greatly enhanced the brand's awareness and topic in overseas markets.
From the perspective of the traffic composition of ZEESEA's brand independent site, direct access (41.48%) and brand search (45.83%) are the main sources of website traffic, indicating that ZEESEA's brand marketing strategy is extremely successful.
At present, more Chinese brands are embarking on the journey to the sea, throughout the successful brand experience, most of them are based on the segmentation needs of target users in overseas markets, develop products that meet the needs, and then use creative marketing methods to promote products to the media platform where target users gather.
For Chinese brands, adhering to long-term doctrine, carefully polishing products, and doing a good job in localization operation and brand services will be the knack for winning overseas markets.