China’s health & fitness industry has boomed in the last decade, growing at an average rate of 8.6% YoY since 2014.
Popular sport-product app Shihuo caters to this trend, providing a content sharing platform for a community of sport-obsessed and athleisure-wearing consumers.
Hot Pot’s Campaigns Team created a Shihuo platform 101 for brands looking to capture this audience, shining the spotlight on a few brands getting their approach right.
What is ShiHuo?
Loosely translating to ‘Spot the Best Products,’ ShiHuo established itself as a male-centric, sports product platform.
Six years after launch, ShiHuo has 4.8 million Daily Average Users (72% male) and is the third most popular app in the sports category on China’s Apple store. Content is focused primarily on those searching for genuine sportswear products, an often difficult task in a market littered with convincing counterfeits.
The app offers 3 main attractions for users that sit across the conversion funnel.
Pre-Purchase - Sports & Product Focused Content
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The main use of the app is to discover and discuss niche sportswear content, with a focus on identifying genuine products.
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Through owned profiles, brands can disseminate product information, launches, offers and interactive campaigns.
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KOLs provide the biggest source of content, building communities around their valued opinions, including product reviews, unboxing and competition-led campaigns.
Purchase
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While ecommerce isn’t directly available on the platform yet, the app is set up to facilitate conversion on external sites with reduced friction
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Links are embedded within both brand and KOL content, driving users to authentic and verified ecommerce sites.
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Users are thereby protected against counterfeit purchases, in turn driving relatively high conversion rates
Post-Purchase - UCG reviews
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App engagement is also very high, largely driven by product reviews
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Users provide another layer of product authenticity through reviews of the products, delivery, unboxing and customer service to advocate or critique recently purchase experiences.
How can brands leverage the platform?
Brands have an opportunity to curate a community of vocal brand advocates amongst users who are actively searching to make purchases. Aside from pushing out owned content, there are two main advertising opportunities for brands.
In-app Media Buy
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ShiHuo offers a range of different media buy placements that can drive users to their Brand Profile, or direct to their website or ecommerce site.
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These include ads on the user's launch screen, within the newsfeed and trending content.
KOL Collaboration
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A great opportunity for brands is to collaborate with KOLs and access their evangelized networks.
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Creating innovative content with KOLs is key to cutting through the noise, leveraging interactive campaigns and giveaways to unlock engagement.
Case Study - Roseonly
What we loved about Roseonly’s ShiHuo collaboration is the innovative approach to connecting with their target audience. As an online high-end flower shop, Roseonly was not necessarily a natural collaborator for digital campaigns on ShiHuo. However they noticed that a large portion of the platform’s consumers were males purchasing for their partners.
Launching on ShiHuo allowed Roseonly to tap into a male-dominated community. They tied in to May 20 (I Love You Day) celebrations to challenge couples to share the most stylish matching outfits. To enter, couples needed to take a photo of their outfits, share and tag the brand on ShiHuo. Leveraging an existing network of KOCs (key opinion consumers) and their partners, this thread skyrocketed on the app. The result: nearly 1,000 total entries, 120,000 million impressions and a total of 150,000 votes.
Case Study - Nike
Nike often faces counterfeit challenges in China, so the brand saw ShiHuo as an inevitable match to help their fans guarantee authenticity. We are impressed with the creativity of the campaigns, tapping into the Chinese passion for basketball. Ahead of the FIBA championships, Nike built an interactive H5 that integrated with ShiHuo. Users were asked to vote for the winning teams before matches, with the chance to win a pair of trainers. Continuous discussion of the upcoming matches drove engagement for Nike’s account, with the trainers also taking centre stage.
Over 575,000 users interacted with the account, amassing 1,301 user generated posts and more than 100 million impressions over the entire campaign. Of course the real win for Nike is the half million interactions from consumers that then had access to purchase the trainers, with the campaign directing them through to their authorised ecommerce site.
While many brands are drawn to the huge user numbers of core platforms in China such as WeChat, Weibo and Tmall, Hot Pot regularly advocated backing these up with a more niche approach. Reaching a smaller - yet still significant - community of highly targeted users through platforms like Shihuo pays dividends in terms of engagement and conversion rates as well as ATV.
Looking to expand your brand within a male-targeted community or looking to learn more about niche platforms in China and how they could work for your brand?
Contact Hot Pot China to discuss how our team of China specialists can help realise greater value in your brand, digital and eCommerce initiatives.