Bilibili : a great opportunity for fashion and beauty brands

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What is bilibili ?

Bilibili overview

Bilibili ( 哔哩哔哩) is a Chinese video sharing website that is themed around live streaming, video hosting, and mobile gaming. Most of its users are under 25, who post, view, and comment on videos in real-time.

Bilibili was founded in 2009 and was focused on anime-related content and video game culture.

With the fast growing number of visitors, Bilibili decided to expand its functions. In fact, now Bilibili offers videos of various fields, including music, dancing, science and technology, entertainment, movie, drama, fashion, daily life and even advertisement films. Bilibili also includes advertising, mobile gaming, and e-commerce and live streaming service where audiences can interact with streamers.

Bilibili is growing fast and now tap a wide range of fields such as fashion, lifestyle, beauty, music, and technology. According to Bilibili’s 2019 financial report, the site saw revenue growth of 64 percent year-on-year to $960 million (6.78 billion RMB). More importantly, the company presented a more balanced revenue composition that was less dependent on ACG and with a higher income from Livestream and e-commerce.

Bilibili strategy

Due to the fact that Chinese consumers are sensitive to sponsored content, Bilibili has found a way to overcome this issue. In addition to normal “like” and “add to favorite” features, Bilibili monetizes user engagement through virtual tokens that are called “casting coins.”

These can be spent supporting preferred video creators, and users are more willing to support contributing brands and uploaders as long as they are open about the process.

Bilibili’s user-generated content feels both authentic and highly-engaged. That means they can offer a more organic reach and positive conversion rates for brands.

While video platforms such as Douyin, Xigua Video, and Kuaishou are competing for the market, Bilibili has a unique position among the younger generations thanks to its authentic attention to youth culture.

As a matter of fact, from Weibo and WeChat to Tiktok, beauty and fashion companies are now turning their attention to Bilibili. Brands can have a creative opportunity to connect and gain popularity among China’s young generation at a rapid rate using this platform.

Bilibili as an unusual video sharing platform

Bilibili is an unusual platform, and before launching on it, companies must understand the differences between this video sharing platform and its market competitors.

As a Gen Z focused, online community, the visuals, and terminology of Bilibili’s content are shaped by its users and the platform collectively. Brands need to understand Bilibili’s users and learn to speak a Gen-Z language since this group is the key to unlocking China’s market.

Traditional marketing methods do not work in Bilibili and it’s not familiar or good for brands that are familiar with the traditional marketing model.

Users’ preferences, which are very directly reflected in Bilibili, are perhaps the most direct challenge faced by some traditional brands in the development process.

Bilibili, not only is changing the way of content expression, also is changing the user’s favorite content. For example, funny official accounts and sponsored content are efficient ways to connect brands with Bilibili’s users.

To maximize a campaign’s performance, brands should tailor strategies to this specific platforms.

Fashion and beauty brands successful marketing strategies on Bilibili

Given the appetite for consuming and sharing video content in China, many brands like Perfect Diary, Shiseido, Lancôme, Louis Vuitton, Fendi own official channels on Bilibili platform.

Beauty brands

  • Shiseido rolled out an online launch event in April with a visually appealing Livestream that featured its brand ambassadors. The event had 1.34 million engagements and nearly 200,000 bullet chats, a more efficient and organic reach compared to typical offline launch events.
  • “Aurora Essence” campaign exemplifies how site-specific sponsored videos can increase a product’s awareness among young consumers and drive organic reach.

Fashion brands

  • Louis Vuitton teamed up with the site to promote its collaboration with one of the world’s most popular video games League of Legends, which resonated considerably with young Chinese users.
  • Fendi launched a banner advertisement last month to introduce its “Peekaboo Bar” campaign, which allows consumers to customize the brand’s well-known Peekaboo handbag. To reach the Gen-Z community, the campaign featured a comic-influenced illustration that was created by Bilibili’s in-house design team. The ad was well-received and sparked many consumer comments on the novel idea.

Beauty and fashion players are again leading the way among brands that are leveraging influencer marketing on the Bilibili platform.

How to market your brand on Bilibili?

Here are 3 ways for marketing your brand on Bilibili:

1. Create an official account and feed your audience

Ask us for more information about this, we can help you register.

2. Cooperate with KOLs

In the beauty and fashion market, cooperation with KOLs would be a wise choice for brands.

Marketers can make great inroads in hitting a focused target audience through specialized KOL on the Bilibili app.

In fact, Chinese consumers, especially those who consume products in the fashion and beauty sectors, rely heavily on KOLs for choosing the product to buy.

However, the choice of the right KOL in a platform like Bilibili is not so easy because he should fit the brand image and at the same time to be interesting for the Chinese millennia audience.

GMA can help you by choosing the right KOLs for each campaign ensuring that they fit the brand image and managing the communication with the KOLs regarding campaign brief and content requirements. GMA can work with you to create a KOL marketing campaign using Bilibili to access Chinese Gen-Z.

3. Leverage Live-streaming

Only a real-time interaction would help to capture customer insights. Bilibili’s main differentiation point is the loyal and active community.

Livestreaming might be the perfect choice when it comes to showcasing the personalization and authenticity of your beauty products.

KOLs run special live streaming events and often they’ll sell out of event items making this marketing technique particularly powerful to drive both awareness and sales.

Advantages of using live streaming:

  • Fast increase of product popularity
  • Increase brand awareness and sales
  • Increasingly popular way for consumers to buy products due to discounts

BILIBILI is also an e-commerce platform

The uploaders in the Bilibili platform can use the mini-program to sell goods.

Bilibili has been collaborating with other big players in the E-commerce business to boost its development in this area. To tap Gen-Z users with an appetite for anime subculture, Taobao and Bilibili, cooperate to launch initiatives to better connect users, merchandise, and content creators on both platforms.

As part of the partnership, the Alibaba-owned online marketplace will introduce content creators from Bilibili to Taobao.

They will join the more than 1.6 million writers and influencers currently on the site, who produce promotional content, such as blog posts and live streams about everything from apparel to furniture.

In order to promote your brand and if you have any questions related to digital marketing on Bilibili, contact GMA now!

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