Known as Tik Tok outside of China, Douyin was launched by parent company Bytedance in 2016. Like its global counterpart, Douyin was created as a short video social media platform.
Douyin is second only to WeChat, China’s ubiquitous super-app, in terms of popularity as a social media platform. According to a 2023 survey by Statista, 72.3% of surveyed participants use Douyin, ranking behind WeChat’s 81.6%, but beating major competitors like QQ, Baidu Tieba, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Kuaishou.
Douyin has a much more advanced set of ecommerce functions than Tik Tok. While Tik Tok has implemented integrations with Amazon and Shopify, these are restricted by region, limiting its potential as a social ecommerce platform.
Douyin integrates ecommerce platforms like Taobao and Jingdong, while also running its own in-app ecommerce platform.
Launched before Tik Tok’s foray into the livestream sales, or live shopping, trend, Douyin Live’s livestream sales integration is a fully developed feature. It features tight integration with Douyin’s native ecommerce functions, including in-stream one-click buying buttons.
4 Steps for Creating a Successful Douyin Marketing Strategy
Step 1: Define your campaign objective
Depending on your campaign objective, you might want to use different placements (feed, search) and formats (In-Feed Ad with CTA, Native Ads…) that lead to various measurement models (CPM, CPC, CPA…).
If you are looking for eCommerce conversion, Douyin In-Feed Ads, Native Ads, and Search Ads will be your best choice. You can also combine In-Feed Ads and Search Ads to cover the entire user journey.
If your main objective is massive awareness, Douyin TopView and Brand Takeover will guarantee maximum exposure to impact your target audience. It’s a common practice for big brands to leverage branding ads for official launches, new collection releases, brand ambassador announcements, and others.
If you are unsure where you should start for your brand, please refer to the below chart with different phases and find our recommendation.
Step 2: Define audience mapping and target strategy
You might already have an idea of your ideal customer that fits your brand image and positioning well. For a quick start, you can collect the interest & behavior & keywords that you are using probably for Facebook/Instagram Ads and find its equivalent in Douyin. You can also refer to all the segmentation capacities that we explained earlier.
However, China is such a vast country with a massive audience size, so you might need some local experts to “translate” your target audience into China’s context. If you need any help defining your audience mapping and targeting strategy, don’t hesitate to reach us for a tailored solution.
Step 3: Customize your creatives for Douyin
Make it short and eye-catching
Douyin users are impatient. Video Ads rhythm should be quick, short, and concise; otherwise, Douyin users will easily swipe up if the content does not catch their attention in the first two or three seconds.
Below is an example of C-beauty brand Perfect Diary. It starts with a question: “still wondering how to do your makeup for Chinese New Year?” Then quickly show seven types of makeup with fast-paced electronic music. The whole video is only 5 seconds but strong enough to make a user click “like” and probably go to the business account to know more.
Make it Chinese-user friendly
Localize your content for Chinese users. Adapt your creatives by adding a subtitle (if the audio is in English) or voiceover in Chinese, or create some video content optimized for Douyin. If the content contains a conversation or a plot, adding subtitles is common even if the conversation is in Chinese.
Adapt to Douyin style
Just like traditional video creatives that work for Instagram Feed might not work well for Tiktok or Reels, the best practice is to spend some time on Douyin to get a sense of the platform “style” and know what users are expecting.
We can help you adapt your assets or produce video ads that Douyin users expect. Please feel free to contact us for more information.
Step 4: Understand Key Success Factor of Douyin Advertising Strategy
Like all the programmatic ads, the critical success factor for Douyin Ads is data and accurate targeting. However, programmatic advertising in China has one significant difference from its western “equivalent”: Most Chinese consumers will not go to official websites for shopping; instead, they rely on marketplaces such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com.
As a result, individual brands do not have easy access to their audience behavior or performance, which can use for advertising. On Facebook, it’s pretty easy to target your valuable audiences, such as website visitors, add-to-cart users, or shoppers for different campaign objectives. In China, however, it’s simply not easy because most of the traffic will not go to your website. Therefore, you will probably need to rely on Tmall data for retargeting ads.
Therefore, you can rely on Ads for pure awareness or branding purposes without any problem. But for conversion-oriented campaigns, we’d recommend it to brands and advertisers with more than 400k RMB monthly GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) or provide retargeting data for better performance results.
For brands in an early stage in China, we suggest you consider Douyin Ads after several months of organic operation and feel confident about the market. It’s better to start by testing your market fit with influencer seeding/gifting and then begin advertising on social media to scale your brand.
