If you want to grow your business, it’s time to include video marketing into your overall marketing strategy. Brands should not overlook the usefulness of branded online video for their audience. Similar to how YouTube experiences huge popularity in the West, China’s video platforms such as Youku and iQiyi are successful with the local Chinese audience. But one live streaming platform that is often overlooked that is changing the perception of video-sharing platforms is Bilibili.
What is Bilibili?
Bilibili is China’s biggest anime streaming site that started out with the sharing of anime pictures and videos. It has grown to be one of the most popular video sharing platforms for China’s Millennials and Generation Z with over 100 million monthly active users, where users can view, submit, and add commentary to videos.
Since its launch, Bilibili has expanded into a variety of categories including mobile gaming, e-commerce, and advertising. Bilibili’s successes is rooted in its ability to create a high user sickness in this niche market. Its newly launched premium membership feature enables user access to special shows and deals.
Bilibili’s content structure
What separates Bilibili from other video sharing platforms like iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video is that Bililbili has a unique marketing position that focuses on ACG (anime, comic, and games) content. Among the different types of content that the platform offers, anime is the most popular genre. According to Bililbili’s 2019 Q1 presentation, entertainment, lifestyle, gaming, anime, and technology are the top ranked categories on the platform. Most of the users are students or young graduates, the platform focus is set on the Gen-Z population.
Is Bilibili growing?
According to the WalktheChat analysis, Bilibili has seen a promising growth rate in revenue since 2018, from 0.8 to 1.4 billion RMB, which is a 58% growth increase. Furthermore, monthly active users have increased at a steadily pace of 31% YOY. Bilibili’s strongest growth metric can be seen through its number of paying users and revenue sharing structure. The number of paying users on the platform had a 132% YOY increase. Bilibili also encourages user generated contents, which makes it one of the highest playing platforms for content creators in China.
Currently, Bilibili is not yet profitable, but the platform makes its money mostly from published games. Mobile games make up most of the revenue, followed by live broadcasting, advertising, e-commerce and then others. E-commerce seems to be picking up a lot of traction on the platform. It’s likely to see it take up more of the revenue space in coming years.
E-commerce & livestreaming
Bilibili recently released e-commerce mini programs for brands to sell goods. The platform has made many attempts in the past to add e-commerce to the range of features that it has to offer, but now has way more of an incentive considering the changing shopping lifestyle of Gen-Z. It has been collaborating with other e-commerce players such as Taobao to promote high-quality uploaders with a loyal following base to expand the market.
Bilibili also offers a wide range of content to satisfy users’ demand in the gaming, entertainment, and e-sport market. Live broadcasting has increased significantly in demand in these years. Bilibili users show a high willingness to pay for a sense of happiness and appreciation.
Why should brands market on Bilibili?
If you want to increase your long-term success in China, it is important to penetrate Gen-Z consumers who have an expanding purchasing power and are expected to be the leading consumer group in China’s entertainment industry. Advertisement and KOL marketing are some of the most lucrative ways to promote your brand when it comes to video-sharing platforms.
Bilibili, which is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms in China, uses mini programs, livestreaming, and e-commerce to benefit brands looking to market to younger consumers. Here are some of the benefits of using Bilibili for marketing campaigns.
- The social experience. Danmu is one of Bilibili’s most known features, which are basically bullet comments for user interaction of the platform. This comment system creates a rememberable social watching experience that brings users closer together. This give Bilibili an edge over other platforms because it is already a niche market that promotes community sharing and user-generated content. With the right KOL, your marketing campaign has the opportunity to be more successful on Bilibili verus if you were to market on another video-sharing platform due to these dynamics.
- Young user demographic. More than 80% of Bilibili users are Gen-Z users who are between 1990-2009. The average age of newly registered users is around 19-20 years old and these users live in second tier cities. The overall average age of the platform’s current users is 21 years old. This age group is a great opportunity for brands that have products are services that benefit young users.
- Bilibili e-commerce mini programs. Brands can now sell goods and services through mini programs. In addition to scanning, users can enter mini programs via active links on users’ posts. Bilibili has been working with Taobao to launch features that better connect users to goods and content creators on both platforms.
There are many short-video platforms to take advantage of when marketing to China, but Bilibili is a platform with a unique user base and has a lot of growth potential. The most important thing for you to do as a brand is to define your target audience, your objectives, and make a personable marketing campaign that connects with the young users that use Bilibili. And based on Bilibili’s growth, it’s safe to say that this video-sharing platform will continue to be one of the preferred methods of ACG content consumption in China for the foreseeable future.
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