Mastering Douyin: The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing in China
In today’s digital age, attention is everything when it comes to brand marketing. China is no exception and mastering video marketing on platforms like Douyin is vital for driving attention to your next social media campaign in China.
Join us as we explore strategies to boost your video marketing strategy and accelerate your follower growth, as Duolingo did with a combination of creator endorsements and paid advertising.
What is Douyin?
With over 600 million daily active users, Douyin has transformed digital engagement with its blend of creativity, entertainment, and e-commerce integration.
What sets Douyin apart is its ability to seamlessly integrate short and mid-length videos, livestreaming, and e-commerce functionalities into a single, cohesive experience. This not only empowers users to share moments and knowledge but also transforms them into influencers who can market and sell directly to their audiences.
For brands, Douyin provides a platform to collaborate with influential creators, build their brand presence, seed purchase intent, and build a community on one of China’s largest mobile apps.
Opening a store on Douyin
In addition to traditional business activities like branding and community building, Douyin offers enormous opportunities for brands to sell directly to consumers through the Douyin Lite Shop.
Douyin Lite Shop allows brands to establish storefronts directly within the Douyin app, creating a streamlined shopping experience for users to explore, evaluate, and purchase products without ever leaving the platform.
Douyin Lite Shop comes with a comprehensive suite of seller tools and analytics, empowering businesses to not only showcase their products but also monitor sales performance and refine marketing strategies in real-time.
This integration of e-commerce into social media transforms browsing into a dynamic retail experience, where users can engage with product listings, watch informative videos, and read detailed descriptions—all while enjoying the captivating content that Douyin is known for.
Cross-border e-commerce
Alongside traditional e-commerce, overseas brands can sell directly into China through Douyin’s cross-border arm, Douyin EC Global. Launched in 2021, Douyin EC Global offers end-to-end solutions tailored for cross-border sellers, including advanced marketing tools, powerful e-commerce capabilities, and efficient logistics support. This includes access to bonded storage facilities and streamlined direct mail services.
By leveraging these resources, sellers can optimize their inventory management and expedite the delivery process, typically ensuring cross-border products reach consumers within 2 to 5 days.
Securing influencer endorsements and why Douyin is the new “seen on TV”
Douyin is one of the premier platforms for brands to collaborate with creators and influencers across a diverse array of formats including short videos, live shopping broadcasts, Branded Missions, and product seeding campaigns.
While influencer marketing is prevalent across multiple social platforms, Douyin stands out as the most trusted platform among online shoppers. Creators on Douyin, in particular, are known for maintaining a close, trusted relationship with their audience, lending credibility and trustworthiness to the brands they endorse. This has led to a significant increase in brands allocating their marketing budget towards influencer endorsements on Douyin, with the phrase “as seen on Douyin” becoming the modern equivalent of “as seen on TV” in China.
To find and cooperate with creators on Douyin, brands can leverage dedicated service platforms such as Ocean Creator Marketplace (Xingtu), provided by Ocean Engine.
Ocean Creator Marketplace serves as a comprehensive partner service, offering invaluable support and guidance to both brands and influencers throughout their marketing journey. This includes 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.
How to create engaging content on Douyin
Livestreaming events are popular for raising brand awareness, boosting sales, and igniting viral marketing campaigns. They serve as interactive shows where brands can directly engage with their audience in real-time, fostering genuine connections and driving immediate action.
While anyone can go live on Douyin, achieving sales demands high-quality content. For brands, this means effectively conveying product benefits, showcasing common or unique applications, offering time-sensitive promotions, encouraging follower engagement, launching Hashtag Challenges, and providing product comparisons.
To effectively define your product’s selling points, it’s crucial to grasp market sentiment. Douyin offers sophisticated video content analysis tools that transcend traditional methods like A/B testing. Through real-time monitoring of brand and product-related conversations, brands can glean actionable insights into consumer perceptions and preferences during and after a live show.
A cosmetics brand, for example, identified recurring user complaints about their foundation, such as issues with acne coverage and cakey appearance. By collaborating with Douyin creators to produce instructional videos on proper application techniques, tailored to address these concerns, the brand was able to respond swiftly to live user feedback.
This led to an immediate surge in purchase intent and enhanced brand favorability, as validated by user surveys. This proactive approach underscores Douyin’s role not just as a content platform, but as a place for brands to listen and adapt to their audience’s evolving needs.
Why you need paid traffic after 72 hours
While it’s possible to go viral with organic traffic only, leveraging paid traffic can significantly boost overall reach, including the ability to target different market segments.
Paid advertising, for example, can significantly enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by leveraging the positive correlation between organic traffic and key metrics such as video views, completion rates, and ad engagement rates. Put simply, the more organic traffic, the better the ad performance.
Additionally, organic traffic typically has a limited lifespan of around 72 hours. Therefore, to prolong the impact of native content and maximize visibility, it is important to supplement organic traffic with paid traffic through advertising. By using paid traffic, you can amplify the impact of native content, extend its visibility, and ensure that high-quality content continues to generate engagement and user actions beyond the initial organic traffic period.
Thirdly, paid advertising provides an opportunity to target specific demographics, interests, or locations to improve the precision of your video marketing campaigns.
Why you should advertise on Douyin using Ocean Engine
As China’s leading platform for online marketing and advertising, Ocean Engine provides a powerful platform for Douyin video marketing and brand building. Ocean Engine complements popular mobile apps, including Douyin, by providing robust advertising and mobile app marketing solutions that amplify reach across a myriad of digital touchpoints, from search and in-feed ads to tailored content placements.
With 1.9 billion monthly active user accounts across this network, Ocean Engine is able to analyze user interests and behavior in real-time on a massive scale, helping brands find the right audience and reach them at the right time and place.
This enables brands and advertisers to target focused online communities using granular and AI user targeting and then gain access to data-driven insights about user behavior in their chosen market. By leveraging demographic insights, user interests, and online behaviors, businesses can precisely tailor their campaigns to attract potential customers at every stage of the purchasing journey.
Other key features include fast and easy ad delivery, multiple creative formats, and comprehensive ad optimization tools for maximum efficiency and in-depth insights.
How to set up your Ocean Engine & Douyin Business Account
Using Ocean Engine, brands can quickly deliver ads and marketing campaigns on Douyin, Toutiao, CSJ (Chuanshanjia), Xigua, and other popular mobile apps in China.
To start advertising on Douyin or other mobile apps, you will first need to create an Ocean Engine Ads Account. Below is a quick step-by-step guide.
- Go to oceanengine.io: Navigate to the ad account creation page by clicking on the “Create ad account” button located in the footer at the bottom of the home page.
- Create an ad account: Fill in the online form and attach your business license. Note that you don’t need to have a Chinese business license to apply. You will, though, need to provide an original business license (photograph or color scan); photocopies of the business license should be stamped with a colored official company seal. For countries and regions where there is no official seal, the signatures of the legal person/senior management will be needed. If the official seal does not completely match the name of the business entity, please also provide the signature of the Legal Person/senior management.
- Wait for account approval: Once you’ve submitted your information, your application will undergo a review process. This process typically takes 2-3 business days, after which you’ll receive notification of approval from the sales team.
- Set up payment: After your Ocean Engine Ads Account is approved, you will need to set up a payment method. Ocean Engine supports various payment options, including bank transfer to top-up.
- Start advertising: Once your account is set up and your payment method is configured, you can start creating your first ad campaign!
For businesses looking to establish a strong presence on Douyin, upgrading to a Douyin Business Account is essential. 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.
Analyzing performance
As with other programmatic advertising platforms, running ads on Ocean Engine is rarely a set-and-forget job. To improve ad performance and create higher converting content in the future, it’s important to evaluate ad performance based on audience conversion. To fulfill this need, Ocean Engine offers special tools to finetune ad campaigns using key data and in-depth insights.
From audience analysis reports (i.e. devices, behavioral interests, and regions of users) to landing page heat maps and ad tracking options using third-party tracking links, there are various ad data reports to choose from.
In addition, advertisers can obtain additional insights for scenario-based data analysis (i.e. video, livestream, and landing page analysis reports), business account reports (i.e. changes in user activity over a defined period of time and recent business account performance) to help finetune their ad strategy.
How Duolingo used Douyin and Ocean Engine to gain 10,000 new followers
Leveraging Douyin’s expansive reach and Ocean Engine’s innovative marketing tools, Duolingo has unlocked remarkable success in engaging its target audience of online language learners in China.
To grow its brand in China, Duolingo launched a focused campaign to boost its follower count on Douyin, with the goal of amplifying reach and generating more leads for its mobile learning app. To achieve this goal, Duolingo worked closely with Ocean Engine to design a video marketing strategy comprising three key elements: creator endorsements, traffic amplification, and search optimization.
Initially, Duolingo identified and partnered with relevant Douyin creators through the Ocean Engine Creator Marketplace (Xingtu). These creators were tasked with creating high-quality content to spark interest and encourage their followers to use the Duolingo mobile app for language learning.
Each video featured a call-to-action button directing users to Duolingo’s official Douyin account and a landing page hosting a lead-generation form. This strategy not only aimed to increase followers of the brand’s Douyin account but to also boost conversion rates.
Next, using the Ocean Engine advertising platform, Duolingo launched Douyin Native Ads to promote creator videos to a highly targeted audience, driving increased traffic.
As a strategic addition, Duolingo integrated “blue words” into the comments section of creator videos. These highlighted keywords prompted users to perform searches after viewing the content, thereby facilitating re-engagement through strategically placed search ads. This helped to optimize visibility and attract more leads.
By combining the benefits of KOL marketing, traffic amplification, and search optimization, Duolingo was able to successfully engage users across the entire user journey, from the upper marketing funnel (awareness and consideration) to the lower funnel (conversion).
During this period, Duolingo gained over 10,000 new followers on Douyin, while reducing its lead gen costs by 3,000% from December 2022 to March 2023.
Learn more about video marketing in China
Whether you’re seeking to launch a new product, amplify brand awareness, or drive direct sales, Douyin and Ocean Engine offers a gateway for global brands like Duolingo to succeed in China’s dynamic digital landscape.
To learn more about Douyin and video marketing in China, you may like to read our detailed guide to influencer marketing in China and how to advertise in China using Ocean Engine.
For direct assistance, including specific video marketing, KOL marketing, mobile app marketing, and other advice for running a successful social media campaign in China, please feel free to reach out to us via the Contact Us form on our website.
