"Welcome to the summer in Guizhou! Hello everyone, I'm Crazy Yan, a crazy little player ......" opened the Douyin short video, and it was this familiar opening sentence in my ears, a girl with a smile like a flower on the mobile phone screen, was using her bright and hearty voice, as well as relaxed and cheerful words, to introduce her newly discovered treasure tourist destination.
Li Yan, a 27-year-old girl from Guizhou, loves life by nature and likes to travel. In the 4 years since she chose to become a Douyin store explorer, she has traveled all over the country, passing on what she has seen as a "professional player" through more than 300 short videos, and the sharing has led to a number of niche attractions. The video she posted on Douyin of the Guizhou Sheepskin Cave Waterfall has received 150 million views.
Douyin explores the store with a "fire" sheepskin cave waterfall
"Nowadays, the short videos and live broadcast content of cultural tourism exploration stores have been regarded as super levers to promote the development of rural cultural tourism. For example, there are many people who know and 'plant' at the Guizhou Yangpi Cave Waterfall precisely because they watched my video of cultural tourism visiting the store. Li Yan said that from the earliest Ding Zhen single-handedly drove the tourism of the entire Litang County, to Zibo barbecue, Harbin fever, to Tianshui Malatang, Guizhou "village super", the continued popularity of these places is inseparable from the efforts of "store explorers".
Immersive content scenarios such as short videos and live broadcasts can often capture the pain points of consumers' needs. As the Institute of Industrial Economics and Technical Economics of the China Academy of Macroeconomics recently released a research report "Research on Optimizing Experience, Expanding Scenes, and Promoting Consumption on Life Service Platforms - Taking Douyin's Store Exploration Model as an Example" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), the store exploration economy, as an emerging consumption model, is changing traditional consumption habits, marketing strategies, job markets and cultural communication with its unique charm and influence.
It is not only a store visitor, but also a discoverer of a better life
Li Yan, who has always longed for freedom, has been exploring a career path that can combine hobbies and make a living after graduation, at first she chose to be a part-time etiquette model, and later started a self-media company.
"It's very interesting to interweave travel and life, so I'm always looking for ways to combine my hobby with my career." Li Yan told reporters that since she was a child, she has been a girl who likes to dream and travel, and she is a person with a strong desire to share, so she will edit every travel shooting into a video and share it on Douyin. Over time, she will also receive many private messages from friends who follow her, hoping to share more detailed and niche travel tips for Guizhou.
As a native of Guiyang, Guizhou, in Li Yan's eyes, the green mountains and beautiful waters, ethnic customs, and natural scenery of her hometown are beautiful, romantic and mysterious. If she can travel all the way and "play with everyone" all the way, it is her most desirable lifestyle.
Li Yan was photographed in Libo Xiaoqikong
So, with a mobile phone and a bracket, this girl who called herself a crazy little player named herself Mad Yan, and from 2020 onwards, she officially became a Douyin store explorer. "Not only a store explorer, but also a discoverer of a better life." Li Yan said that Douyin Life Service's identity positioning for store explorers is too consistent with her.
In Li Yan's view, with the popularity of short videos and live broadcast platforms such as Douyin, and the development of life service business on Douyin, fans who did not know how to "play" niche attractions in the past can now buy tickets for scenic spots and book the most suitable hotels for travel in real time after being "planted" by short videos. This makes Li Yan also a part of the store visiting economy, that is, through the on-the-spot consumption experience of store visiting experts, it can not only provide consumers with consumption suggestions, but also attract new customers for merchants, which is a multi-party benefit.
"The display of short videos and live broadcasts is very vivid and real, and I can see whether this place is fun or not in three dimensions, which minimizes the degree of information asymmetry, and I also want to be worthy of the trust given to me by the people who follow me, and show the most real and interesting attraction guide as much as possible." After taking store explorers as a profession and accumulating her own audience, Li Yan was moved.
Immersive marketing scenarios such as short videos and live broadcasts can often grasp the pain points of consumers' needs, arouse consumers' desire to consume service products, and help consumers make more accurate consumption decisions.
The act of visiting a store itself is a process of disseminating and displaying the image of the city. The analysis of the report pointed out that while introducing products and services, the live broadcast of the talent is also promoting the city's good scenery, history and culture, and urban customs, which invisibly conveys the city's heritage to consumers, highlights the charm of the city, and promotes the city's brand building and the dissemination of urban culture such as food and folk customs, and has become an important channel to show the city's style. At present, more and more leading cadres of local government departments, especially cultural and tourism departments, take the initiative to embrace the Internet in order to promote the city where they are located, turn into anchors through life service platforms, visit business districts and shops to the majority of netizens, promote local intangible cultural heritage delicacies and time-honored brands, and vigorously promote local culture and city image.
The prosperity and growth of the Tandian economy has made the "unpopular" scenery "hot".
According to the data of Douyin life service, the "content planting" of life service experts has greatly stimulated the interest and demand of users, and people will take the initiative to search and discover more beautiful lives. On Douyin, the monthly search volume of life service-related content increased by 180% year-on-year, and 78% of the search transaction contributions came from the search behavior generated after being "planted with content" by influencers.
The beauty of Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village was filmed and disseminated as a Douyin video
What impressed Li Yan the most was that she once set fire to the economy through a short video.
"Guizhou is the province with the most waterfalls in China, so in the early days of being an expert, I was always digging for all kinds of niche waterfalls." Li Yan recalled that the first "popular" video was released in May 2020 and was filmed of a wild waterfall in Xifeng County, Guizhou Province. It is a waterfall with its own "fairy energy", a clear spring under the waterfall, clear, blue, pure, and even more "falling" at a glance.
After the video was released, the number of views quickly reached millions, and the number of likes also exceeded 100,000+. For a while, the wild waterfall that no one cared about became very lively, "Even the villagers who sell water at the foot of the mountain can sell mineral water for hundreds of yuan a day." Li Yan later learned that her video not only brought fire to this "unpopular" attraction, but also brought economic income to local villagers and boosted the development of surrounding restaurants and homestays.
Sheepskin Cave Waterfall is the most famous "wild waterfall" in Guizhou, known as the most similar waterfall in Iceland in China. However, two years ago, the waterfall was still an unpopular attraction.
"Although Sheepskin Cave Waterfall is not as famous as Huangguoshu Waterfall, its wild beauty is enough to shock people." From 2021 to 2022, Li Yan went to the sheepskin cave many times to shoot, and produced and released a number of short videos, among them, a detailed guide, including 2 arrival routes and dressing guides, which has been played by hundreds of thousands of people after its release. In order to let fans feel the grandeur of the sheepskin cave waterfall more intuitively, she posted a short video of more than ten seconds, but she didn't expect it to explode all of a sudden, with more than 500,000 likes overnight, and 1 million likes within 24 hours, and her fans have also increased a lot.
After Li Yan, other celebrities went to the sheepskin cave one after another, and the waterfall has completely become a popular Internet celebrity attraction on Douyin.
As pointed out in the report, in the traditional offline consumption scenario, a large number of non-chain small shops and old stores are distributed in the streets and alleys, far away from the core business districts and neighborhoods. On the Douyin life service platform, store explorers with their keen insight explore these vast long-tail markets (a market composed of products that are not in high demand or do not sell well), and they shuttle through the streets and alleys of the city in search of unknown restaurants, old shops and niche tourist attractions. Through the form of short videos and live broadcasts, it provides consumers with credible and effective feedback on the consumption experience, so that the service information of small restaurants, old stores and niche tourist attractions can be quickly disseminated on the platform, reducing the search cost of consumers for high-quality merchants in the long-tail market, and enriching and expanding the experience of consumers.
Song Ziqian, director and researcher of the Policy Institute of the China Tourism Academy, pointed out at the seminar that the rise of the talent shop visit model is closely related to the changes in consumer demand. In the past, visitors to Beijing mainly came to see the six World Heritage sites, but now many people choose to follow the influencer route for a city walk or visit the influencer check-in spots in the hutongs. Zibo, Tianshui and some other counties, although they have not been popular tourist destinations for a long time, have spread quickly on the Internet because of the "warm" and "hospitable" image conveyed by the relevant store visit videos, and these places have quickly become popular.
It is understood that with the integration of short videos and live group buying into people's daily consumption habits, store explorers have become a new career choice for more and more young people. According to data from the Douyin platform alone, in 2023, more than 580,000 people will rely on store visits to obtain stable income, and Daren store visits will help physical merchants increase their income by 94.6 billion yuan.
Reporter of Guizhou Daily Tianyan News
Wang Di Hu Rui
Edited by He Tao
Second instance Yang Tao
Third trial Tian Minjia