Interface journalist | She Xiaochen
Interface news editor |
In the wave of content industry moving from graphic era to short video, May Beauty belongs to one of the content organizations with earlier transformation.
This company, which specializes in the field of beauty and fashion, was formerly known as Guangzhou Qingzhi Fashion Culture and engaged in fashion WeChat official account business. In 2018, short videos and live broadcasts rose one after another, and the founder of May Beauty also felt the decline of WeChat official account’s increment in May.
According to the data released by China Network Audiovisual Program Service Association, in 2018, the market size of the video content industry reached 187.13 billion yuan, of which the short video market soared by 744.7% from 5.53 billion yuan in 2017 to 46.71 billion yuan.
Let the beauty fashion editor transform and shoot videos, which became the starting point of the beauty transformation incubation blogger in May. When the beauty MCN business was launched in 2018, the company implemented "internal transfer". The editor-in-chief and editor of Fashion WeChat official account were the first to transform into beauty makeup directors, and some beauty editors made short videos.
Tianyancha information shows that in 2019, in May, beauty cosmetics won the tens of millions of Pre-A rounds of financing from Xintu Capital; In 2021, in May, beauty cosmetics completed tens of millions of A rounds of financing, and the investor was Woyong Fund.
Different from the strategy of many organizations competing for "expansion", May Beauty has always focused on beauty categories. In a recent interview with Interface News, the co-founders of May Beauty told Interface News that one of the reasons is related to the founders’ thinking. They think this is where the company is good at, and the content team of May Beauty is also more professional in beauty. From the perspective of commercial realization, the beauty track is relatively stable.
In the content market, beauty brands are indeed the "big investors" of various platforms. Taking Tik Tok as an example, the massive arithmetic statistics of ByteDance’s platform show that in 2022, the year-on-year growth rate of search and live broadcast in Tik Tok’s beauty industry both exceeded 50%, and the average monthly broadcast volume of short videos exceeded 100 billion.
This also gives similar companies such as May Beauty a relatively stable opportunity, but the competition is more intense.
Gao Gao summed up the "volume" of the beauty track in the past year from three dimensions: First, there are more and more high-quality beauty bloggers and professional peers, and they are all expanding their platforms. Second, the platform has entered the stock market, and various accounts have begun to grab traffic. Third, it stems from the improvement of brand demand. "In the past few years, many brands may mainly focus on communication effects. Now they hope to have both communication effects and good ROI, and the requirements are more diverse." Say it high.
In this context, May Beauty began to lay out matrix accounts to meet the different needs of different customers. In May, 2019, beauty cosmetics rose rapidly on the content platform, but by the second half of the year, the team obviously felt that the traffic was getting thinner and thinner, which prompted the company to start thinking about its own advantages and differences. Making a professional matrix is the path explored by May Beauty.
When incubating bloggers, the screening criteria for beauty in May are that bloggers have professional knowledge. For example, the blogger "Li Xuechang" who was incubated in May became a professional "classified" blogger after graduating from college. For the brand, the advantage of professional bloggers is that they can create content with the brand. At the same time, both bloggers and fans can give feedback and suggestions to the brand’s new products. In 2020, May Beauty established a brand protection "mixed story", and many bloggers participated deeply in the process of product development and listing.
With the expansion of the company, there are more than 60 self-incubation beauty bloggers in May Beauty, and the matrix accounts formed include fashion grass planting, professional composition party, professional makeup education number, skin care number, student party and fragrance number, which are distributed in Tik Tok, Xiaohongshu and Aauto Quicker.
Incubating multiple accounts on different platforms means that the company should update its business with the fastest speed to adapt to the changes in the huge market. Gao Gao told the interface news that in May this year, beauty cosmetics will increase investment in live broadcast, and will sign contracts and incubate more professional bloggers.
