Weifang, a city with a "double-sided character".
It has always been full of "poetry and distance". In April, people from all over the world gather here and take advantage of the spring breeze to release paper kites. The hinterland of Qilu culture and "Mo Yan's hometown" are its words.
It's also always down-to-earth. Shouguang and Zhucheng are frequent visitors to the "Top 100 Counties of China's Economy", and Shouguang is a well-known hometown of vegetables at home and abroad. More than 1,500 years ago, Jia Sixian, an agronomist born in Shouguang, created the agricultural masterpiece "Qi Min Yaoshu". Shouguang people's vegetable planting genes have probably been there "since ancient times".
The so-called "relying on the mountains to eat the mountains, relying on the water to eat the water", Shouguang people who rely on the land also look for business opportunities from the land. In 2023, Shouguang vegetables will be sold to more than 300 large and medium-sized cities and exported to 25 countries and regions. Taking the express train of e-commerce, there have been 630,000 kilograms of "croissant honey" melons sold in 6 hours, 100,000 kilograms of thornless cucumbers sold in a day, and 380,000 kilograms of "Beibei pumpkins" sold in a single month......
Behind Shouguang's abundant fruit and vegetable output, it is obviously inseparable from its history of deep cultivation and precipitation in agriculture of superb agricultural technology and a variety of agricultural materials such as fertilizers and other agricultural material industry chains. And these elements usher in new opportunities in the era of live broadcast e-commerce.
Who will meet the spiritual needs of the "rooftop gardener".
Liu Zhenfei, a native of Shouguang, is a typical example. He set his entrepreneurial sights on fertilizer production and sales, which is actually the hidden advantage of growing up in this "hometown of Chinese vegetables" to him - the fertilizer production technology here is mature, the product quality is good, Liu Zhenfei has the impression that when he was a child, almost all the people around him can be regarded as farming experts.
In the first few years of his business, Liu Zhenfei has been engaged in offline production and sales, and sometimes helps other brands OEM. But he soon found that the involution of the line was too serious. Perhaps because everyone is an expert, there are so many local fertilizer shops that you can see one on the street a few steps away, and the quality of the fertilizer is not bad. But the total demand is only so much, "you will find that everyone is engaged in all kinds of promotional activities, there are 'buy fertilizer and get air conditioner', there are also 'buy fertilizer and get washing machine', you can imagine how fierce the competition is." ”
In order to break through the involution, Liu Zhenfei decided to move his business online.
In 2019, Liu Zhenfei opened a store account of Qingcong Gardener on Douyin e-commerce, focusing on live broadcast and short video delivery. Also in this year, Douyin has 821 million monthly active users, with an average monthly usage time of 22.3 hours, and the number of new likes on videos has skyrocketed, and it is becoming a super user traffic pool.
There is more traffic and more audiences, but do urban users on the Internet need chemical fertilizer? Liu Zhenfei said with a smile, "Although they don't farm land, every household grows flowers." "Users from Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai are the main consumer groups of Qingcong Gardener's online store.
This is actually related to the mismatch between "people" and "goods" in traditional offline channels. Flower growers are located in cities, and the sales points of agricultural products such as flower fertilizer are generally concentrated in remote farmers' markets and urban-rural areas. Even if many flower farmers have a demand, it is difficult to find "goods".
Online sales connect the supply side and the demand side through a small mobile phone screen. As long as people watch short videos at home and place orders with their fingers, the flower fertilizer can be delivered to the doorstep, so why not.
Since 2020, the sudden increase in free time has made it a rare leisure method for many people, and "rooftop gardening masters" are often seen on social media. The sales of agricultural products related to horticulture have become their breakthrough on the e-commerce platform.
On the first day of construction on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year in 2021, more than 5,000 orders of vitality hormone items in Qingcong Gardener's Douyin store suddenly exploded, which was astronomical compared to the average daily order volume of 100-150 in other sales channels at that time. Even today, the daily order volume of Qingcong Gardeners has reached an average of 10,000 orders, with a peak of 2-30,000 orders, recalling the scene at that time, Liu Zhenfei's tone still can't hide his excitement, "At that time, we were so excited that our hands were trembling. ”
The essence of the explosion is the video popularization of agricultural technology
Of course, "bursting orders" is not the norm for live broadcasts of agricultural materials.
Jia Rongji, the boss of Beikeshi, who entered Douyin e-commerce in 2021, did not go well in the first few months. He found that although everyone in the city raised flowers, many people did not form the awareness that "raising flowers requires fertilization". However, as a live broadcast and short video platform, Douyin's advantage lies in its ability to break the "people looking for goods" model on traditional e-commerce platforms, where only users can contact related categories of goods after active search. Merchants can not only sell goods on the platform, but also help establish the awareness of "fertilizer can be used for raising flowers" through short video creation, and then explore potential customer needs.
To this end, Jia Rongji set out to create his own content and shooting team, set up his own shooting site, and explained planting knowledge such as "how to prevent yellowing and spot on leaves" and "how to prevent insects" in the context of the planting scene that is as restored as possible. He also regularly conducts agricultural knowledge training for team members, and tests are conducted every week, which makes great efforts to produce professional content.
On the other hand, he has also extensively sought to cooperate with Douyin influencers to expand the influence of his brand. He admits that because the strength of our team alone is limited, content creation can also fall into a fixed mindset. But different influencers will have all kinds of whimsical ideas, which can often produce unexpected effects.
Jia Rongji also said that once users have formed the corresponding cognition, the potential market behind it is unlimited. Because of the subdivision, there are many things that can be excavated in the cultivation of flowers. For example, different varieties of flowers, the same kind of flowers in different growth stages, need different products, in the process of raising flowers encountered a variety of small problems, such as how to remove insects, how to prevent the leaves from turning yellow, etc., all correspond to different subdivision products.
How much potential can a market segment have?
Liu Zhenfei said for example, in 2023, the expert they cooperated with UP master "Huafang Girl Chengcheng" has a video explaining the care of Junzi Orchid, which caused a traffic explosion, and the Qingcong gardener single product she used in the video "grows fast", which generated more than 2,000 sales in an instant. That day, in order to handle the delivery of these 2,000 orders, Liu Zhenfei and his team members worked for a whole day, and everyone was so tired that they couldn't stand up straight. Liu Zhenfei's partners, who have more than ten years of experience in e-commerce, sighed, "I haven't felt this way for several years." ”
After their research, they found that the "breaking point" of this video was only because the expert mentioned in the video that "the leaves of the orchid can become shiny" met the core needs of nurturing the users of the orchid, thus triggering the platform's push mechanism in a short period of time.
What's more, this demand is not a one-time, short-term one, and Liu's team has since tried the same method many times to create videos to promote the product, and almost every time it has received a good response.
Challenges and opportunities for traditional industries under the new model
After starting to bring goods on Douyin, the fertilizer sales that originally only served the growers in the surrounding ten miles and eight villages entered thousands of households in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Stress also comes with it.
The first is the issue of transportation. Although fertilizer transportation is not as good as some fresh food, fruits and vegetables, it has strict requirements for freshness and quality. However, the outbreak of its demand coincided with the epidemic, and the express delivery was suspended, and there were orders but "could not be shipped", which also made Jia Rongji sad for a while.
According to his recollection, although the express delivery did not stop at that time, they had to find a car from the local area and find temporary workers to complete the transportation from the factory to the distribution center. During that time, not only were there fewer workers and vehicles willing to work, but the cost was up to 5-6 times that of usual.
Jia Rongji felt pressured by the sudden rise in cost pressures and risks, but when asked, "Did you think about temporarily stopping your online business at that time?" Jia Rongji replied categorically, "How could that be?" In his opinion, this was not a problem that our family was facing at that time, and when we encountered a problem, we found a way to solve it, and it was good to pass.
"When you encounter a problem, solve the problem", this kind of thinking seems to be the character background of the merchants in the land of Weifang. In Liu Zhenfei's eyes, the biggest difficulty may be nothing more than "sometimes in order to solve a link error, I am busy until two o'clock in the middle of the night". Jia Rongji said, "It's better than a problem that erupts later." ”
In addition to individual merchants, there are also platforms that pay attention to these issues. A long time ago, the agricultural material industry chain has entered the platform sight of Douyin e-commerce. Agricultural materials industry chain in the past almost all sales flow around the offline, when the industry chain wants to go online, in fact, need to face the challenge, in addition to the exploration and learning of the online operation model, but also in this process to find the logic suitable for the online circulation of agricultural products. In the practical attempt, Douyin Xiaoer took the initiative to connect with many local agricultural merchants in Weifang, in addition to guiding them to learn the basic operating rules and traffic logic, but also deeply involved in the direction of their video content positioning and the construction of live broadcast rooms.
In this process, the platform also saw the industrial characteristics of agricultural materials on Douyin e-commerce. Taking the online channels rolled out by Qingcong Gardeners as an example, the sales volume of the Douyin platform accounts for about 70%. But an interesting phenomenon is that his official Douyin account only has more than 2,000 followers, the frequency of live broadcasts in the store is not high, and the number of online users is often only in double digits. This seems to be not quite the same as the public's impression of the big anchor live broadcast room that is in full swing and often has 100,000+ people watching online simultaneously.
Liu Zhenfei explained that the consumption of agricultural products such as flower fertilizer is more demand-oriented, and users in need enter the purchase interface through the accurate recommendation of the live broadcast room or short video, and leave after buying, with high conversion efficiency.
What Liu Zhenfei really cares about is the number of repeat customers in the store and how to do a good job of service. In Liu Zhenfei's view, large traffic and many fans are not the key to operating a store on Douyin. He firmly believes that only by doing a good job in product quality control, always walking in the forefront of innovation, and doing a good job in customer service can they always be full of passion and never forget their original intention to serve more flower lovers and flower keepers.
Even Bekoshi, who has 100,000+ fans in the store, when the boss Jia Rongji was asked "how to increase the number of fans", his first reaction was a little surprised: "In fact, we didn't specifically study how to increase fans." Although the store will open a live broadcast every day, he has a very indifferent view of the data such as the duration of the live broadcast and the sales volume of a single live broadcast, "Generally, we will flexibly adjust the live broadcast duration according to the traffic of the day, and compared with the data, we pay more attention to the input-output ratio." ”
Based on the deep cultivation of the agricultural material industry chain, there are currently a large number of Weifang agricultural material business clusters on Douyin, and there are more small and medium-sized businesses engaged in agricultural assets in Shouguang, Zhucheng and other agricultural belts. They share knowledge through live broadcasts and short videos, and at the same time let consumers use better products, no longer relying only on local agricultural material stores, to achieve the wide dissemination of advanced agricultural technology and the acceleration of the reach of genuine agricultural materials.
End
Talking about the future planning, Liu Zhenfei said that in addition to further digging into customer needs, he also hopes to build a set of "Internet +" system, build his own "cloud warehouse", and optimize the logistics system. In the new year, he set himself a "small goal": to double the sales of the store.
Jia Rongji predicts that in the future, with more and more similar merchants entering Douyin e-commerce, the competition may become greater and greater, and how to stand out in this increasingly fierce competition will be a problem that needs to be studied for him. In terms of products, he also hopes to develop more diversified and refined products to meet the different needs of users, "At present, in the process of communicating with users, they will also ask a lot of questions that we did not expect." Solving these problems is also the direction of our development. Jia Rongji said.
According to the data, by the end of 2023, Douyin e-commerce has covered 684 characteristic industrial belts across the country, with a year-on-year increase of more than 194% in industrial belt merchants, more than 1.09 million live broadcasts with goods, and an increase of more than 66% in product sales, of which the sales of shelf scenes have increased by 103%. Since the beginning of 2024, the overall sales of Shandong agricultural materials and horticulture in Douyin e-commerce have increased by 132.91% month-on-month, and the sales volume has increased by 186.8% month-on-month. Among them, the sales of Weifang agricultural materials and horticulture exceeded 149.6% month-on-month.
In fact, in Douyin, in addition to the "big anchors" who often occupy topics and headlines, under the global interest e-commerce model, more ordinary people like Liu Zhenfei and Jia Rongji are moving forward on a more accurate track. Behind them are new opportunities for the regional economy of industrial belts like Weifang.