Maximizing B2B Growth with Targeted Douyin Advertising Strategies

With the rising popularity of short video platforms, Douyin has evolved from a mere site of entertainment and lifestyle sharing into a crucial tool for B2B enterprises looking to expand their market presence and increase visibility. Unlike consumer goods, the customer needs and conversion pathways in the B2B sector are significantly more complex, demanding highly precise advertising strategies. This article aims to guide B2B businesses through the potential of Douyin, helping them to craft and execute effective advertising campaigns that drive business growth.

This screenshot showcases the interface of Douyin's advertising platform, the "Ocean Engine" workspace.
This screenshot showcases the interface of Douyin’s advertising platform, the “Ocean Engine” workspace.

Advantages of the Douyin Platform

  1. Vast User Base
    Douyin boasts hundreds of millions of active users spanning various age groups, regions, and professional backgrounds. This vast user base provides B2B companies with a rich reservoir of potential customers, enabling them to quickly expand their brand’s influence and reach their target audience.
  2. Precision Targeted Advertising
    Douyin’s advertising platform offers a wide range of targeting options. Companies can fine-tune their ad placements based on specific characteristics of their target customer group, such as geographic location, gender, age, and other demographics. This precision ensures that ads are shown to users most likely to be interested in the company’s products or services, thereby enhancing ad effectiveness and conversion rates.
This screenshot demonstrates the extensive targeting options available on the Douyin advertising platform, enabling precise ad targeting.
This screenshot demonstrates the extensive targeting options available on the Douyin advertising platform, enabling precise ad targeting.
  1. Engaging Content Formats
    Douyin primarily utilizes short videos, a format that is lively and visually engaging, quickly capturing user attention. B2B companies can leverage this by creating innovative and valuable short video ads that showcase their products’ features, solutions, and successful case studies, thus enhancing users’ understanding of the company’s offerings and advantages.
  2. Strong Social Interactivity
    Douyin operates as a social platform, allowing users to interact with ads through likes, comments, and shares. This not only increases ad visibility but also facilitates direct communication between businesses and users. Such interactions help companies understand user needs and feedback, allowing for further optimization of products and services.

Strategies for Douyin Ad Placement

  1. Clarify Promotional Objectives
    Before launching ads on Douyin, B2B enterprises must define their promotional goals, whether they aim to gather user leads, increase account followers, or other objectives. Clear goals enable the creation of more precise and effective advertising strategies. Specific promotional objectives are illustrated in the following diagram:
Strategies for Douyin Ad Placement
Specific Douyin Promotional Objectives

Annotations:

  • App Promotion: Users download your app.
  • Sales Leads: Gathering user information for follow-up.
  • E-commerce: Selling products online.
  • Native Interaction: Gaining followers and attention on Douyin.

It is recommended for B2B companies to focus on generating sales leads as their promotional goal, acquiring essential contact details like phone numbers to facilitate follow-up and ultimately close deals.

  1. Creating High-Quality Content
    The success of Douyin advertising largely depends on the quality of the content. B2B companies should produce professional, innovative, and appealing short video ads that highlight their core competencies and value propositions. Additionally, the content should be concise and clear, easy to understand, and capable of conveying key messages quickly.
  2. Choosing the Type of Advertisement
    Douyin offers two types of advertising options, detailed in the following diagram:
Douyin Advertsing Options
Douyin Advertsing Options

Annotations:

  • General Placement Ads: These ads are distributed across all traffic positions, including but not limited to feed ads and search ads, targeting users who might be interested in your products or services.
  • Search Ads: These ads are shown to users who have actively expressed interest in your products or services. The system selects the appropriate search traffic scenarios based on your advertising goals.

B2B companies can choose the type of advertising that best fits their needs and flexibly mix different types to optimize their strategy.

  1. Choosing Advertising Objectives
Choosing Douyin Advertsing Objectives
Choosing Douyin Advertsing Objectives

Annotations:

  • Custom Dual Bidding: The system estimates the eCPM based on your set bids for deep conversion and target conversion, deploying ads at the lowest possible eCPM. You can flexibly set two prices to optimize conversion effects, which generally results in slower consumption.
  • Automatic Optimization: The system optimizes for deeper conversions while ensuring shallow conversions. If you have a sufficient budget, it is recommended to choose automatic optimization.
  • Deep Optimization Objective: If you require high-quality leads, it is advised to select the deep optimization objective. However, this requires marking the “lead tags” and “lead stages” fields in the Flying Fish system, as shown in the diagram below:
Marking Lead Tags and Lead Stages
Marking Lead Tags and Lead Stages
  1. Choosing Ad Placement Locations

When selecting where to place your ads, it is crucial to consider the quality of leads you aim to generate. It is recommended to prioritize media platforms like Douyin and Toutiao for higher quality placements, as some platforms, like Pangolin, may yield leads that are difficult to contact due to lower quality.

choosing ad placement locations
Choosing Ad Placement Locations

Annotations: If quality of leads is a concern, it is advisable to prioritize media choices such as Toutiao and Douyin for ad placements. Specifically, Pangolin is noted for poor quality leads that are often uncontactable.

  1. Choosing Advertising Materials
Choosing Advertising Materials
Choosing Advertising Materials

Annotations: For selecting advertising materials, it is recommended to choose video as the format since videos generally achieve higher conversion rates compared to images.

  1. Setting a Reasonable Budget and Timing for Ad Placement B2B companies need to set a reasonable advertising budget based on their financial situation and marketing goals. It is also important to choose the right times for ad placements, such as during industry expos, new product launches, and other significant events to maximize ad effectiveness. It is generally not recommended to place ads from midnight to 5 AM, nor during national holidays like the National Day, as shown in the diagram below:
Ads Timing and Budget Planning
Ads Timing and Budget Planning
  1. Monitoring and Optimizing Ad Performance After deploying ads on Douyin, B2B companies must closely monitor key performance metrics such as expenditure, number of conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. Based on the analysis of these data, timely adjustments should be made to the advertising strategies, content, and targeting settings to enhance the effectiveness and return on investment of the ads.

8.1 Utilizing Douyin’s Audience Analysis Tools Douyin’s advertising backend offers extensive user profile analysis tools. B2B companies can use these tools to filter their target audience based on demographic information such as age, gender, and geographical location, ensuring they reach the most relevant user groups.

Douyin's Audience Analysis Tool - This section displays conversion data segmented by age and gender.
Douyin’s Audience Analysis Tool – This section displays conversion data segmented by age and gender.
Douyin's Audience Analysis Tool - This section shows conversion data by province.
Douyin’s Audience Analysis Tool – This section shows conversion data by province.

8.2 Optimizing Creatives through the Material Center

Creativity is crucial to the success of Douyin ads. To identify the most effective ad formats, B2B companies can experiment with various creative elements, such as video styles, ad copy, and background music. Testing different creatives and analyzing the performance of each can provide valuable insights. Data from the Material Center not only helps in optimizing ad creatives but also in refining the content structure, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of the advertising campaigns.

Douyin's Creative Material Report - This section displays the conversion performance of various creative materials, allowing for the identification of the most effective creatives to scale up deployment.
Douyin’s Creative Material Report – This section displays the conversion performance of various creative materials, allowing for the identification of the most effective creatives to scale up deployment.
  1. Douyin “Orange”: Landing Page Tool
    Creating an effective landing page is a critical step in ad creation. For advertisers without a suitable landing page, Douyin offers “Orange,” a tool designed to accelerate the creation of landing pages for ads.

Quick Landing Page Creation:
Templates: The system includes a variety of templates suited for different scenarios such as e-commerce, brand promotion, and product display. Users can easily customize these templates by replacing content as needed to suit their specific requirements.

Douyin's "Orange" Landing Page Tool Templates - This section displays a variety of page templates tailored for different industries, available for selection and use.
Douyin’s “Orange” Landing Page Tool Templates – This section displays a variety of page templates tailored for different industries, available for selection and use.

Drag-and-Drop Editing:
The “Orange” tool supports multiple templates, allowing users to quickly create landing pages through simple drag-and-drop actions, without the need for professional programming skills.

Douyin's "Orange" Landing Page Tool Drag-and-Drop Editor - This section displays the layout of the "Orange" landing page, showcasing how users can easily manipulate and customize the page structure.
Douyin’s “Orange” Landing Page Tool Drag-and-Drop Editor – This section displays the layout of the “Orange” landing page, showcasing how users can easily manipulate and customize the page structure.

Douyin Advertising Boosts B2B Business Growth

For B2B companies, Douyin advertising is more than just a showcase for products; it is a powerful tool that helps businesses precisely reach their target customers and enhance sales conversions. Through well-crafted ad creatives, accurate audience targeting, effective data analysis, and seamless integration with CRM systems, companies can deploy efficient advertising on Douyin, injecting new vitality into business growth.

This article was written by Xiaofang