Meituan live broadcast new moves
Since Douyin vigorously entered the local life business last year, Meituan's live streaming business has been advancing faster and faster.
Meituan's live broadcast progress has accelerated again. According to ** reports, Meituan is expanding the city in a large area, and in 21 cities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Jinan, it is recruiting trial broadcast service providers for the official account of the live broadcast city of the explosive group.
Source: Screenshot from Meituan.
According to the recruitment documents, the service providers that meet the standards of the trial broadcast need to start the broadcast regularly every month in the designated Meituan Bangtuantuan city account, and Meituan will pay the service provider in the early stage of the broadcast to ensure the latter's income. The trial date is from December to 31, and the specific trial time lasts from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
From the perspective of recruitment requirements, service providers need to be equipped with dual cameras and set the live broadcast background to the real sceneService providers need to have at least 1 category project experience, of which catering experience is preferred.
The specific operation mode of the group is as follows: Meituan provides discount goods and sales;The service provider is responsible for the construction of the live broadcast scene, the allocation of the anchor, and the live broadcast skills. The service provider will charge Meituan a commission based on the actual amount of write-off.
At present, Meituan's live broadcast mode is divided into self-broadcast and official broadcast, and merchants need to apply for their own accounts and live broadcast in stores. Self-broadcasting is relatively autonomous and can be rotated throughout the day.
However, self-broadcasting does not have traffic support, needs to be operated by special personnel, and the conversion rate is low. Generally speaking, chain brands are more suitable for self-broadcasting, have a certain number of fans, are well-known, and are easier to start in the early stage of live broadcasting.
This also means that if merchants want to increase conversion rates, they have to spend money on streams. According to data from Guoxin**, Meituan's small and medium-sized businesses account for between 90% and 95%, and it is difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to roll out self-broadcasting.
The official broadcast is the official broadcast that provides drainage** to participate in the official broadcast, and the explosive group belongs to the official broadcast. The advantage of the official broadcast is mainly that the platform gives more traffic, the homepage accounts for 40%, and the conversion rate is higher.
At present, Meituan faces two difficulties in the field of live broadcasting. First of all, compared with content-based live streaming platforms, Meituan has a short board in terms of user stay time, and users generally leave when they place an order. Second, Meituan is relatively weak in terms of infrastructure and content in the field of live broadcasting, and needs to increase investment to improve.
According to a report, in July, when the first-level entrance of Meituan Live was just launched, the GMV of Meituan Live in a single month was about 5-600 million, with a month-on-month growth rate of 20%, and in August, it quickly reached 10-1.2 billion, and there were live broadcast rooms that exceeded 100 million one after another. By October, the monthly GMV exceeded 2 billion yuan.
The live broadcast IP of Meituan Takeaway is "God Rush", and the live broadcast IP of the in-store wine and tourism review business is "Explosive Tuantuan". The former belongs to the category of home delivery, and the latter belongs to the field of store arrival.
This also means that Meituan's live broadcast ecology is maturing, and it is a matter of course for the explosive group to expand the city in a large area with the IP of the store. Meituan recruited service providers to prepare for the large-scale rollout of the explosive group, and charged head-on with Douyin's in-store business.
How Meituan defends
Since the merger of Meituan and Dianping Volkswagen in 2015, its first-class model has been integrated with the Dianping model, and the in-store business model has been formally formed, and Meituan has become a leader in the industry.
It is known that Meituan's business is divided into two parts: core local business and new business. The core local commercial business segment includes food and beverage delivery, in-store wine and tourism, Meituan flash sales and other businesses, while new businesses include Meituan Preferred, Meituan Grocery and others.
Takeaway and flash sales in the core business are both "home-to-home" businesses;In-store business is when consumers place an order with Meituan and then go to the store to make purchases, such as hotels, travel, etc. In the third quarter, the comprehensive revenue of home delivery business and store delivery business reached 57.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 245%。
But as Douyin continues to penetrate into the local life field, Meituan's hegemony is threatened. In October 22, the GMV of Douyin life services has exceeded 10 billion;Since 2023, Douyin Life Service has upgraded hotel tourism to a first-level department, parallel to the in-store business (including in-store catering and in-store integration).
According to a research report by Bank of Communications International, the GMV of Meituan's in-store business in 2022 will be about 236 billion yuan. In September '22, Douyin's GMV was 8 billion, an increase of 25%. In April this year, it was reported that some of the core indicators of Douyin's in-store business have reached one-third of Meituan's, and it is still on the rise.
As of April 2023, Douyin life services have landed in more than 370 cities, with more than 2 million cooperative stores. This year, Douyin has set a target of 150 billion yuan in GMV for local life, doubling the target. Today, when Internet traffic has peaked, such a high growth rate has also made Meituan fight with a 12-point spirit.
In 2023, Meituan will also make live streaming one of its annual corporate and strategic strategies, and will increase its investment in traffic acquisition. Meituan completed a new round of organizational adjustments in April this year. Compared with the past, in this adjustment, Meituan's in-store attention has been significantly improved, and most of the positions of "internal living water" have been transferred to in-store and home-to-store business, and the in-store business is obviously tilted.
Meituan also released relevant recruitment positions, including client-side senior test development engineer (client), server-side senior test development engineer (server-side), short-term content cooperation, short-term content recommendation algorithm engineer, content business analysis, etc.
Judging from the third quarter report given by Meituan, in-store, hotel and tourism maintained growth, with the transaction value exceeding 90% year-on-year, and the commission income of the core sector increased by 30%.5%, advertising and marketing revenue increased by 316%, both of which are greater than the growth rate of orders, which means that it may be more revenue contributed by the in-store segment.
Source: Meituan's financial report.
The core model of Douyin's in-store business is "content planting + conversion and monetization", that is, merchants can promote users to place orders and consume in stores through store visits** and live broadcast content, so as to improve the conversion rate of merchants.
Based on Douyin's huge user base and accurate algorithm, it has formed a "store looking for people" model, which greatly reduces the cost of customer acquisition in the initial stage of Douyin. However, compared with Meituan, this model also pays more content costs to store explorers and third parties.
Meituan's moat to the store lies in the fact that it has built the mentality and scale advantage of people looking for stores early. But in the face of such a strong offensive from Douyin, Meituan must continue to find new breakthroughs and defend the moat it has built for a long time.
Whether it is in-store or home-based business, Meituan has increased its live broadcast, and its core business has also found a new target.
Local life is the winner
On the road of local life, Douyin has surpassed Ele.me to become a strong competitor to Meituan.
Douyin is based on the huge user traffic and the long-term accumulation of store visits, and the development of local life is the icing on the cake.
According to the data, in the first three quarters of 2023, 580,000 Douyin talents will obtain stable income through store visits, and store visits will bring 72.9 billion yuan of economic benefits to physical merchants.
Source: Douyin Life Service***
However, Rome was not built in a day, and Douyin is still beyond the reach of intra-city distribution, service delivery, and order fulfillment. Therefore, Douyin also tries to cooperate with third-party errands and delivery agencies to try to open up the closed loop of its intra-city services. But to truly penetrate the core of Meituan's local life, Douyin still needs to make a lot of efforts.
In addition, Meituan's magic weapon to achieve positive profitability is the huge number of merchants and millions of riders, who have maintained the throne of the "first brother" of local life for many years.
According to the calculations of Zhongtai**, only 50%-60% of Douyin's push**GMV is converted into actual write-offs, while Meituan's active search** write-off rate is more than 70%.
At present, Meituan is short in terms of traffic, usage time, and content supply. Meituan also needs to continuously improve its live content ecosystem to attract high-quality live streamers and brand merchants to participate in order to provide rich live content.
In addition, Meituan still needs to find a live broadcast model that can compete with Douyin to ensure that the live broadcast business can bring in considerable revenue.
Since the beginning of this year, in order to cope with the competition of Douyin, Meituan has had to increase market investment in order to seize the market share of local life. In the third quarter, Meituan's core local operating profit decreased by RMB1 billion, and its operating margin also decreased by 43 percentage points.
There are two main reasons: first, the subsidy rate has increased;Second, the increase in subsidies for seasonal riders has led to a decrease in the unit economic efficiency of its food delivery and Meituan flash sale businesses.
This can also be seen that Meituan is burning money to seize the market, and it depends on how Meituan wins this protracted battle of local life.
Author |Li Ying.