Understanding Douyin Marketing & Audience Insights

This article helps you understand Douyin marketing and tells you how you can get intelligent and accurate Douyin marketing insights for your brand with the help of Repustate’s AI-powered sentiment analysis and text analytics solution. International luxury brands have long awaited to enter the Chinese market with ease of outreach, and today with the rising purchasing power of Chinese consumers, they have found the perfect launchpad. From Gucci to Prada to Pizza Hut, international brands are creating business accounts on Douyin for brand promotion and to reach out to the country’s fast-rising affluent class. So let’s get down to know all about Douyin and how brands can leverage it.

What is Douyin?

Douyin is a short video app launched in China specifically for Chinese residents by tech company ByteDance in 2016. Douyin was later, in the same year, launched as TikTok, internationally. Douyin was an instant success and currently has over 600 million daily active users. Most of its user base is educated and come from comparatively affluent backgrounds.

US-based premium brand Michael Kors was the first to use Douyin marketing as a platform for its hugely successful campaign called “The Walk”. This was followed by other premium brands like Montblanc, Burberry, and Dior. As we read further, we will see how Douyin marketing insights can help brands like these as well as other brands wanting to make an entry into China through Douyin.

Why Do Brands Need Douyin Marketing?

It may seem unusual that brands like Dior, Prada, Tiffany & Co, etc. that don’t seem to fit the casual TikTok/Douyin category are lining up to create accounts on the app. But there is a very important reason why these brands, hesitant in the beginning, have opened their marketing and advertising accounts on Douyin for bettering consumer experience needs. So why do these brands and others like them need Douyin marketing?

Below we throw light on some of the key reasons.

1. Douyin helps brands go viral

Because of its highly entertaining video content that is completely user-generated, Douyin has successfully driven up traffic and thus helped luxury brands go viral. Aware of how pivotal it can be in building brand awareness and engagement, Douyin has even announced a list of certified digital agencies that it will work with to streamline the process of commercial advertising with brands.

2. Douyin’s foray into e-commerce

In January of 2021, Douyin introduced Douyin Pay even as it banned links to third-party e-commerce sites in order to compete with other Chinese giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay. It also stopped brands from promoting products from a third-party website. In 2019, Douyin marketing also ensured, thanks to new e-commerce policies, that brands had to use Douyin’s own digital marketing matching service in order to identify key opinion leaders (KOLs).

3. Younger, richer, educated consumers

According to a survey done in 2017 by OC&C Strategy Consultants, there has been a huge change in demographics of luxury consumers in China. The majority of these consumers are between the ages of 24 to 45, which means both millennials and Gen Z have huge purchasing power compared to previous generations. Douyin marketing insights show that users are also mostly from educated backgrounds and hence are curious as well as well-informed. This dynamic shift in spending power and social growth has lead to many luxury brands like Chloe, Gucci, etc. to change and adapt their brand strategy accordingly.

4. Rising millionaires in China

According to the 2019 global wealth report by Credit Suisse, China ranked only second to the US in the number of millionaires, on a worldwide ranking chart. The number of Chinese millionaires added up to 5.3 million individuals. As the Chinese population grows to become a giant in monetary spend, it is but natural for companies as diverse as Michael Kors and Pizza Hut to acknowledge Douyin as the next best thing for increasing market share.

5. Douyin users welcome brand advertising

Chinese consumers are open to knowing about new brands and very positive towards Douyin advertisements. Over 40% of users mention that they have no issue with product placements in commercial content or even in user-generated tutorial videos. Douyin itself allows many kinds of marketing campaigns such as ad banners, hashtag challenges, as well as video filters. Given the openness of active users towards Douyin marketing, brands are keen on leveraging the app for brand promotion and product sales.

How Can Repustate Help You In Douyin Marketing?

Repustate’s intelligent sentiment analysis and text analytics tool lets you study and scrutinize Douyin marketing campaigns run by brands to give you audience and market trend insights. 1With the help of video content analysis that enables you to discover meaningful information from the voice of the customer (VoC) data gathered from Douyin marketing videos and comments, Repustate empowers you to leverage the app both for branding as well as staying ahead of the competition.

Below are details about some of the key ways in which Repustate’s all-in-one social media sentiment analysis solution can help you.

1. Sentiment mining from trends

Gathering sentiment from trends and combining them with your Douyin marketing insights is very important because it will tell you what specifically about your video content is making it trend. This analysis of trends opens up a holistic way of understanding and preparing for new patterns emerging in the market based on what consumers are leaning towards.

2. Analyze brand mentions

With Repustate’s sentiment analysis platform you can analyze not only comments but also brands that are mentioned in the video itself. This means that you can track the different brands and products mentioned in a tutorial or entertainment video and can find out what insights emotion mining gives- whether the mentions are in positive light or negative, and how they are mentioned in relation to you.

3. Measure brand value

Brand value needs to be measured not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Repustate allows you to have a qualitative measure of your Douyin marketing campaigns by giving you insights that go beyond the number of likes, shares, or number of comments on a commercial content. The platform extracts insights from the comments and videos through keywords identification and segmentation of entities and topics it extracts through video content analysis and text analytics, thus finding the true sentiment score of different aspects of your brand.

4. Monitor specific hashtags

When hundreds of videos trend under a specific hashtag, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them have positive sentiment attached to them or that all of them have similar content. A sentiment analysis of hashtags can give you crucial insights even about the users who shared the same hashtag challenge. You can create buyer personas for your Douyin marketing strategy in order to create more targeted advertising for accounts with similar likes and dislikes.

5. True Chinese language insights

Repustate allows you the most accurate Chinese language Douyin marketing insights because it operates using native speech taggers for each of the 20+ languages it supports, including Mandarin. Repustate does not use any translations and has robust named entity recognition capabilities making it one of the fastest and most efficient sentiment analysis platforms in the market.

6. Identify key opinion leaders (KOLs)

Through video AI and sentiment analysis, you can easily identify KOLs on Douyin through whom you can expand your brand awareness operations. You can find out more about the authenticity of influencers through emotion monitoring and separate authentic and trustworthy KOLs to boost your endeavours.

7. Better metrics for ad success

You can predict sales and see the upward or downward trend of your product movement, which in turn will tell you a lot about the success of your ads. Based on Douyin marketing insights, you can easily know what demographic watched your ads more than others, but more importantly, why it is that the particular ad clicked with them. And this is only possible through social listening of the comments.

8. Study product feedback

Comment analysis and video & audio analysis can give you impeccable data about what customers like and dislike about your product and whether they would give you a good net promoter score (NPS). You can use this valuable VoC feedback to adjust your product strategy and decide whether you should diversify, change, improve, relocate, or repackage your product. And whether it will be worth the effort or not.

9. Ensure cultural sensitivities

It is not easy to operate in another country, in another language, and in another cultural environment altogether. It is important to ensure that your Douyin marketing insights include cultural sensitivities and keep you abreast of anything that can put your brand in a negative light. This is an important part of any company’s customer experience strategy because knowing, understanding, and respecting your customers is the most important thing in building trust and loyalty with them for a long and fruitful relationship.

10. Know audience demographics better

Getting to know your audience better is the most important aspect, and the first step in building a good marketing and branding strategy. Through an analysis of your followers, their account information that is public, their purchase habits, likes and dislikes, you can know so much that can make your brand better.

Douyin marketing is not just about entertaining videos, but also, as mentioned above, a place where brands can invest in advertisements and product placements unlike TikTok. In this aspect, TikTok insights can be nascent since the platform is still green for product advertisement in the traditional sense. Therefore, through trend analysis, when you know your audience better, you can make more relevant and targeted content that will give you more results.

11. Competitor analysis

You can know as much about your competitor brand as about yourself. Competitor knowledge through video, audio, and text analysis can help you with Douyin marketing such that you will know why a competitor is more popular than you, why a certain aspect of his brand is more popular, what areas you can improve upon, what demographics you can choose for outreach, and more.

12. Identify logos and brand mentions in videos

Through video content analysis you can quickly identify logos and brands that are mentioned in videos, either user-generated or in commercials. By identifying these logos and brand mentions, you can get rich Douyin marketing insights that can help you be alert for negative brand mentions, and more responsive for positive or neutral ones. You can get information of what is common amongst users who like other brands along with yours and this will help you know what programs you can invest in including influencer programs, discounts, loyalty programs, etc.

Discover more: Douyin advertisement analysis

There are a myriad of ways that Repustate’s all-in-one sentiment analysis solution, with its innate ability to analyze Mandarin without translations, can help you in gaining rich Douyin marketing insights.Leverage an AI-powered tool that will help you increase your return on investment and help you make data-backed business decisions.