Author | Babe
Edit| Mia
Beauty brands have been looking for breakthroughs in recent years, and in 2024, a new marketing method, short show marketing, seems to provide a new path for beauty brands.
According to the 2023 financial report released by Han Shu's parent company, Shangmei Co., Ltd., Han Shu contributed 73.7% of Shangmei's total annual revenue with a year-on-year growth rate of 143.8%, becoming the main engine of the group's performance growth.
According to public data, in Q1 2024, the total GMV of Han Shu's Tmall and Douyin platforms will reach 2.1 billion yuan+, and the Douyin platform alone will bring 2.007 billion GMV to Han Shu. Proya's Tmall and Douyin platforms have a GMV of 2 billion yuan+. What is it that has opened up Han Shu's second line of appointment and supervision in Douyin? Han Shu's success is actually closely related to its marketing methods. According to incomplete statistics, in 2023, the number of Han Shu and Proya will rank first and second respectively.
In addition to Han Shu and Proya, beauty brands Gu Yu and Marubeni have all set their sights on platform short drama marketing. Gu Yu launched a customized short drama "The New Year" starring Xu Mengjie and Li Chuan, which won a high level of discussion; Marubeni teamed up with Kuaishou, Gumai Jiahe, Liudu Media, etc. to produce the love short drama "Close to the Gemini Stars" last year, which received more than 120 million views on Kuaishou Station, and SK-II became the title sponsor of @Jiang Seventeen's short dramas "You Shine More Than Starlight" and "Legal "Fan" Beauty".
Han Shu brand has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to title the smash hit variety show "If You Are Honest, Do Not Disturb", and now the spearhead of marketing is aimed at the platform short drama, which has become a "new blue ocean" of marketing, and the brand marketing model has entered the 2.0 era, but for beauty brands, in the current market, if they want to continue to make efforts for product promotion through short drama marketing and realize rapid realization of traffic, they still need to continue to innovate.
Skit marketing with flying beauty?
With the rapid rise of video websites, online video advertising has also achieved a blowout development, forming a variety of types such as placement advertising, product placement advertising and advertising customized dramas. However, in the current market environment, there are still some imperfections in the traditional advertising methods in terms of effect evaluation, content production, and delivery models.
Traditional product placement uses film and television dramas as the carrier, and the advertisements are covertly implanted in the film and television, and it may be difficult for the audience who lacks observation to find the hidden advertising information inside, and it is difficult to evaluate the effect.
Custom dramas are more intuitive, but it is difficult to break the circle. In terms of content, in the past, the competitors of online advertising custom dramas were traditional film and television dramas, and the current production level of online advertising custom dramas is far less than that of traditional film and television dramas.
Short dramas with low thresholds, wide audiences, and fast pace have a considerable fit with advertising custom dramas.
"Who is the audience? I am 95" "I am also a post-90s generation, this drama is too decompressing", in the comment area of the short drama "You Will Be Popular" customized by Douyin expert Jiang 17 for Han Shu, I often see similar comments.
In 2023, Han Shu will invest in Jiang Seventeen's "Dress Up with Growth", "Heartbeat More Than a Moment", "A Beam of Sunshine, A Beam of Love", "All Love and You", and "You Will Be Popular" 5 short dramas, which are softly implanted in Han Shu's "Red Waist" series in combination with the plot.
Each skit is made up of 16 separate short stories, but all revolve around the growth of women. The advantage of this plot setting is that it does not affect the independence of the story of a single video, and it can use the development of emotional lines to attract the audience to keep watching. It is worth mentioning that according to the Douyin algorithm and rules, as long as a user has watched one of Jiang Seventeen's short dramas, they will be classified by the platform into the A3 crowd with the label of Han Shu. In Douyin's traffic distribution mechanism, the A3 grass group refers to this user group that has multiple clicks, searches, and additional purchases on brand content, and it is also a group with high recognition and consumption willingness to the brand.
Among the people reached by marketing, short drama marketing emphasizes that the influencer and the brand have a high degree of fit. According to Yien's data, Han Shu's crowd and Jiang Seventeen's fan crowd drama are highly compatible, mainly to 25-34 years old.
In terms of marketing play, Han Shu used a combination of "customized short dramas + brand self-broadcast + talent live broadcast", and harvested more than 100 million broadcasts through short dramas. Then, through brand self-broadcasting and talent broadcasting, it mainly undertakes the traffic and attention brought by short dramas. It is reported that Han Shu has associated more than 20 brand self-broadcast accounts with just one brand. In the first quarter of this year, the "Hanshu Official Flagship Store" topped the brand's self-broadcast sales list with a monthly GMV of more than 100 million.
From the perspective of marketing effect, the cumulative number of views of Han Shu's five short dramas has exceeded 5 billion. Feigua data shows that from March to May 2023 on the Douyin platform, the sales trend of the Han Shu brand showed explosive growth, and the monthly sales exceeded 100 million yuan. The timing of this sales reversal coincides with the popularity of Douyin short dramas.
In addition, Douyin customized this series of short dramas not only played a role in the promotion of the work, but also promoted the brand conversion, users in the process of early watching, through the topic and copywriting comment area, you can go directly to Han Shu's official flagship store and live broadcast room to purchase, greatly reducing the search path of beauty brands.
The same is short drama marketing, launched by Gu Yu, Xu Mengjie and Li Chuan starred in the customized short drama "New Year", which is currently in the hottest list of Douyin short dramas, Gu Yu's New Year's whitening package is used as a gift from the heroine's little sister to her family in the play, which is in line with the plot scene at the time, and can naturally display the product, highlighting the effect of Gu Yu's "repair" and "whitening" In Proya's sponsorship of the short drama "Full-time Househusband Training Plan", the heroine, as an independent woman returning to the workplace, gave her a set of Proya ruby gift boxes from her new company superiors in the play, as a thank you gift to the heroine for helping herself before, "He can help you be more confident in the workplace, and you will be in a better state to look at prejudice in the future", this line not only strengthens the heroine's "independent woman" The label also subtly conveys the brand's mind of providing women with a sense of security.
The advantage of short drama marketing lies in creativity and direct conversion, first using good content to keep the audience, by providing emotional value, first making the traffic funnel bigger, and then undertaking traffic through self-broadcast and reach. However, compared with some popular long dramas, the plot content of short dramas is seriously homogeneous, the audience is aesthetically fatigued, and the life cycle is limited, so there may be problems such as low relative purchasing power of the audience, long tail effect and weak emotional stickiness.
The supply of short dramas has increased by 20 times, how to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the era of short drama marketing 2.0?
Stimulated by the successful cases of Han Shu and Proya in the traditional beauty field, brands such as Gu Yu, Marubeni, and Nature Hall have followed suit. Nowadays, not only domestic beauty brands, but also international first-line brands such as SK2 and Estee Lauder have also begun to try brand customized short dramas.
Nowadays, the beauty vertical track is starting to get particularly crowded. Lu Yixiong, the founder of Shangmei Group, said on Moments that when many beauty brands across the country learned from Han Shu and squeezed into the short drama track, the supply of short dramas increased by 20 times, the price doubled, and the effect dropped by 40 times. It is worth exploring how to truly reduce costs and increase efficiency in marketing in the era of short drama marketing 2.0? Here, we sort out the marketing methods of short dramas and the platforms for broadcasting short dramas, so as to provide more references for brands and relevant production teams.
For brands, brand-customized short dramas are certainly impressive, but the cost is relatively high, and single-episode delivery provides new ideas for many brands. It is reported that the third episode of the short drama "If you don't fire, you will do it to the end!" implanted a single episode of Boben water milk, and the plot of the heroine receiving the Po Ben water milk sent by the leader achieved brand exposure and effect explanation.
Second, the time when the short drama is launched should match the big promotion node. The preparation cycle of short dramas is short, generally about 30 to 45 days, which can fit social hotspots in a timely manner, and schedule the dramas in 38 festivals, 618 and double 11 and other e-commerce festivals, and in 2023, Proya's customized short drama - "Full-time Househusband Training Plan" was launched on the eve of Double 11, and at the end of Double 11, the number of views of the show reached 240 million. It has to be said that with the help of festival promotions, the broadcast of content on the eve of the e-commerce festival can undoubtedly shorten the conversion link from content to consumption to the greatest extent.
Third, pay attention to the new forces of short dramas. In addition to Douyin and Kuaishou, which have begun to take shape in the commercialization of short dramas, you can pay more attention to new platform channels, and at the 2024 Taobao Content E-commerce Festival, Dao Fang, general manager of Taobao Content E-commerce, made it clear that brand customization is the core mode of Taobao to do short dramas. It is worth mentioning that unlike Douyin and Kuaishou, which are placed by brands, Taobao's brand customization projects are shared equally by the platform and the brand, and Taobao will also give traffic support to the brand's live broadcast room.
Nowadays, fragmented short dramas have become the latest electronic mustard for young people, which has also allowed many brands to enjoy the dividends of traffic and monetization. Beauty brands such as Han Shu and Proya have explored new models of short drama marketing on short video platforms. However, under the current model, how to balance content and product commercial revenue in the highly competitive track of beauty brands is a question that entrants and latecomers need to consider. In the future, while trying multiple platforms, we are constantly discovering new ways to play, which may be the best way to maximize the marketing of short dramas.