Douyin for Business: Digital Marketing Trends to Scale Your Business
In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, short-video sharing apps like Douyin provide a proven digital marketing platform in China for brands to expand their reach and grow their business.
What sets Douyin apart from other platforms is its ability to captivate audiences with a unique blend of creativity, humor, and viral appeal packaged into short-form videos, livestreams, and interactive content. However, its influence extends far beyond entertainment, making it an invaluable marketing channel for brands looking to build their online presence in China.
In this blog post, we will explain why a Douyin Business Account is crucial for brands aiming to grow their business in China. Additionally, we will reveal five key China digital marketing trends that play to Douyin’s strengths and which will help you to expand your reach and brand visibility.
Why Douyin for Business is crucial for growth in China
With massive reach, engaging content formats, viral potential, and data-driven insights, Douyin for Business provides a variety of benefits for brands to build awareness, foster engagement, and drive conversions.
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Massive reach: With over 600 million daily active users worldwide, Douyin for Business provides unparalleled access to diverse demographics across China. This enables brands to reach a vast audience or identify and target highly specific audience demographics.
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Engaging content formats: The app’s emphasis on short, engaging videos and live shopping shows allows brands to showcase their products or services in innovative and entertaining ways. From educational content to influencer collaborations and user-generated content (UGC), brands can leverage various content formats to share their story and introduce products or services to target customers.
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Viral potential and discoverability: As the leading short video app in China, Douyin provides an effective mix of marketing, advertising, and talent resources for brands to create viral campaigns. Trending challenges and hashtags can further amplify brand visibility, making it easier to stand out in your industry.
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Data-driven insights: Douyin provides powerful analytics tools, allowing brands to track performance metrics, understand audience behavior, and optimize their marketing strategies in real-time.
For businesses looking to establish a long-term presence on Douyin, upgrading to a Douyin Business Account is highly recommended. This verified business account, denoted by a blue logo, offers several benefits, including access to advanced advertising features, enhanced visibility, and credibility among users.
To verify your account as a business account and obtain the coveted blue logo, you will need to provide documentation to Ocean Engine confirming your business identity and legitimacy.
The top 5 digital marketing trends in China
Let’s turn our attention to exploring China’s top five digital marketing trends and how you can take advantage of these trends using Douyin for Business.
1) Amplify your social media campaigns with influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has emerged as a cornerstone of successful social media strategies, leveraging the large following and clout of influential social media accounts to drive consumer behavior.
On Douyin, influencers span various niches, from beauty and fashion to travel and lifestyle, each with a loyal follower base. Influencers on Douyin also have a strong knowledge of the platform, allowing them to build a substantial following based on their unique content style, personality, and niche interests.
By partnering with relevant KOLs, brands can instantly amplify their reach, enhance brand visibility, and foster genuine connections with target audiences. These collaborations often manifest in creatively crafted content, including product reviews, tutorials, unboxing videos, or branded challenges, tailored to resonate with the influencer’s audience.
A standout example is the South Korean food manufacturer, Samyang Foods, which worked with 14 lifestyle and dance influencers to kickstart their 3D Branded Hashtag Challenge in 2023. The company collaborated with the chosen influencers to create custom dance videos featuring their instant noodle product line in a fun and energetic way. These videos served as demonstration materials, inspiring more Douyin users to participate and create their own content.
The campaign soon generated 270 million hashtag views and was recognized with an Excellence Award for Overseas Marketing at the prestigious Tiger Roar Awards.
To find and cooperate with influencers on Douyin and other apps in China, brands can use dedicated service platforms such as Ocean Creator Marketplace (Xingtu), provided by Ocean Engine. The platform offers a comprehensive partner service, including access to over 1,500 MCNs (Multi-Channel Networks), 2 million influencers, 1.9 million brands and clients, and over 1,000 agencies and service providers.
2) Create Hashtag Challenges to unleash UGC
Hashtag Challenges and user-generated content (UGC) campaigns have emerged as effective marketing solutions in China for brands aiming to engage with individual users and mobilize an active audience.
User-generated content is highly influential as it resonates with users on a personal level, fostering trust and credibility. Hashtag Challenges, for example, provide a powerful medium for brands to generate buzz and foster user participation. Brands can create unique challenges around specific themes or prompts, encouraging users to create and share their own videos using carefully crafted hashtags. These challenges often leverage creativity, humor, and trending topics to resonate with Douyin’s diverse user base.
Brands can also incentivize user participation through contests, rewards, or by showcasing selected UGC on their official channels. As part of their Hashtag Challenge (#ExplodeWithSamyangNoodles), Samyang enticed creators with cash rewards to post and share videos using a custom 3D Branded Effect, which superimposed the brand’s dancing “Hochi” (a little chicken) in sync with the creator’s dance moves.
With the right incentives, these types of Hashtag Challenges can increase brand visibility and engagement exponentially. This includes the potential to go viral, reaching millions of users as participants create and share their creative takes on the challenge. This not only amplifies brand awareness but also encourages user interaction and community building around the brand. In the case of Samyang, their Hashtag Challenge resulted in over 38,000 video submissions from creators.
3) Host an interactive livestream on Douyin
In today’s digitally-driven society, consumers crave authentic, real-time connections with the brands they love. Livestreaming enables brands to establish these crucial connections on a broad scale, dismantling barriers and nurturing a community centered around their products and services.
In the first half of 2023, sales from Douyin brand livestreams experienced a remarkable 80% year-over-year growth, prompting numerous brands to increase their investments in this marketing channel over other content formats.
This rapid growth underscores the pivotal role of livestreaming. By blending entertainment with shopping convenience, livestreaming not only captures consumer attention but also encourages immediate interaction and purchasing decisions. Brands leverage this dynamic platform to showcase products, services, or experiences in real-time, answer audience questions, and build trust through authentic demonstrations and testimonials.
4) Take advantage of cultural holidays in China to run a promotion
As cultural holidays approach in China, excitement and anticipation sweep the country, delivering a surge in online and offline activities. These holidays hold immense cultural significance and are eagerly awaited throughout the year, sparking increased consumer spending on shopping, travel, and family gatherings.
Examples of cultural holidays in China include traditional holidays such as Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival, which coincide with a public holiday. Additionally, the adoption of international holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day has further enriched the holiday calendar. Year-end festivities, including Christmas and New Year, are also an opportunity for brands to take advantage of annual peaks in traffic.
For brands, cultural holidays represent a unique opportunity to align their offerings with the seasonal spirit and meet the heightened demand for products and services. From pre-holiday anticipation to peak celebrations, brands can deploy content marketing strategies on Douyin to capture attention, foster engagement, and drive conversions effectively.
Luxury brands like Gucci, PRADA, and FENDI, for example, have successfully tapped into these cultural festivities by launching targeted advertising campaigns, collaborating with celebrities and creators from platforms like the Ocean Creator Marketplace, and unveiling new product releases.
By embracing the cultural richness of these holidays, brands can not only enhance brand visibility but also forge deeper connections with consumers in China, establishing a lasting impact that extends beyond the festive season.
5) Invest in paid advertising on Douyin with Ocean Engine
Paid advertising can significantly enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, especially as organic traffic has a limited lifespan of around 72 hours. To prolong the impact of native content and maximize visibility, it’s therefore important to supplement organic traffic with paid traffic through online advertising.
As the official Douyin advertising network and the leading digital marketing platform in China, Ocean Engine provides a variety of paid advertising solutions to achieve your marketing objectives. From targeted advertising to brand safety and transparency, Ocean Engine offers tailored solutions to boost your social media campaigns.
Here’s how Ocean Engine can empower your brand:
- Targeted advertising: Paid advertising on Douyin offers targeted and measurable campaigns to help your business reach specific audience segments. From native display ads to sponsored influencer content, Ocean Engine allows you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors with precision.
- Creative ad formats: From native In-Feed Ads integrated into users’ content feeds to immersive Branded Effects and Hashtag Challenges, Ocean Engine offers a variety of creative ad formats that capture attention and foster user engagement. These formats enable you to showcase your products or convey your brand message in compelling and innovative ways, resonating with Douyin’s highly engaged audience.
- Influencer collaboration: Ocean Engine facilitates partnerships with Douyin influencers who have established credibility and influence within their respective niches. Collaborating with KOLs enables you to amplify your reach, leverage the influencers’ authentic voice, and connect with followers authentically, driving brand advocacy and trust.
- Performance analytics: Integral to Ocean Engine is its robust analytics and reporting tools, providing you with actionable insights into campaign performance metrics such as impressions, clicks, engagement rates, and conversions. These insights enable continuous optimization and refinement of advertising strategies to achieve campaign goals effectively.
- Brand safety and transparency: Maintaining brand safety and ensuring transparency are paramount on Douyin. Ocean Engine implements stringent measures to safeguard brand reputation, including content moderation, ad review processes, and compliance with industry standards and regulations, fostering a trustworthy advertising environment.
Crafting your marketing strategy for Douyin
Douyin presents a wealth of opportunities for businesses looking to enhance their digital marketing strategies in China. By harnessing the platform’s unique features—from influencer collaborations to viral Hashtag Challenges—businesses can build brand awareness, drive engagement, and ultimately, achieve sustainable growth in a highly competitive market.
For direct assistance, including setting up a Douyin Business Account or Hashtag Challenge, please feel free to reach out to us via the Contact Us form on our website.
For further insights and tips on China marketing solutions, see our comprehensive blog catalog.
