As the dynamic zero-COVID policy gradually became the norm, China’s beauty market is gradually bouncing back. According to China Customs’ latest data, the overall import of cosmetics and beauty products started to increase in July 2022 to 11.97 billion RMB ($1.7 billion US ), up 5.18% year-over-year (YoY). Despite significant retail sales shrink in March and April this year, major global powerhouse L’Oréal managed to achieve double-digit growth of revenue in June, thanks to significant growth of new channel sales. In July the company ranked fourth for top brand sales on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has attracted 600 million active users.
The revival of beauty retail sales significantly outpaced sales in other industries. According to Euromonitor forecasts, the penetration rate of e-commerce sales channels in the beauty industry is expected to increase to 40% in 2022, and continue to expand. Douyin had become an appealing channel for beauty brands. According to data from Sinolink Securities, Douyin’s beauty GMV in Q1 2022 was 9.6 billion RMB ($1.4 billion US), up 164% YoY, with the highest growth rate among e-commerce platforms.
Chinese domestic brands contribute a significant portion of beauty product sales in Douyin, as Feigua Analytics estimates that Chinese domestic beauty brands contribute around over half of the top 20 brands’ gross merchandise value (GMV). In this article, we will analyze what C- beauty brands are doing on Douyin to stay ahead of the competition, and what international brands can learn from them.
1. HBN – Create a professional image and deepen consumers’ awareness of the brand with ingredients
HBN, founded in 2019, is the newest efficacious skincare brand. As the “Morning C and Evening A” skincare concept became popular, HBN successfully penetrated the consumer market and created a deep brand impression with its retinol ingredient.
HBN has been on Douyin for one year, focusing on ingredient skincare. In the past six months, the brand’s sales have reached 219 million RMB ($32 million US), and the monthly sales in Douyin have basically remained at 35 million RMB ($5 million US) so far this year.
According to the statistics, the sales of HBN’s brand self-livestreaming in the past six months were 72.285 million RMB ($10.5 million US), accounting for 32.93% of total sales. Meanwhile, sales of influencer livestreaming were 146 million RMB ($21 million US) ), accounting for 66.69% of total sales.
In the past six months, HBN has cooperated with 1,099 Influencers in livestreaming, with a total of 18,000 sessions. Sales mainly based on livestreaming accounted for 99.75%.
In its livestreaming strategy, HBN chose to cooperate with a large number of influencers on Douyin through short video content. They illustrated the efficacy of retinol to increase consumers’ understanding of the ingredient in order to improve brand awareness. The high-quality content and massive video exposure also precipitated some potential consumers who are aware of the brand, and led to sales for HBN’s follow-up livestreaming, completing the full-link closed loop of Douyin’s marketing.
From the perspective of the proportion of consumers, the fans of HBN’s livestreaming room are mainly females aged 18-40, accounting for 94% of the total population. The traffic of the HBN livestreaming room is mainly composed of paid traffic and organic traffic. The paid traffic accounts for 75% of the sales and the organic traffic accounts for about 25% of the sales.
In addition, HBN’s topical challenge co-created with users on Douyin has reached 1.24 billion views and gained huge exposure. In the past 90 days, there have been more than 5,000 short videos mentioning HBN, and the total interaction volume has exceeded 5 million.