The Spring Festival in China is approaching, and the festive atmosphere is becoming stronger. Businesses are also entering a new round of the “golden moment.”
“Lucky makeup for the Year of the Snake,” (2025 is the Snake year in China’s zodiac signs) “New Year limited edition makeup gift box,” “Skincare gift sets for the Chinese New Year,” “New Year-themed lipstick”… Topics around the “Chinese New Year” are skyrocketing on major platforms like Douyin, and the strong festive atmosphere is driving a stronger desire to consume, translating into the first wave of growth in 2025.
Because of this, every Spring Festival, major businesses will strategically position themselves early, combining the festive atmosphere and hot topics to create explosive product matrices, in order to win the first wave of traffic in the new year. Douyin, as a dual ecosystem platform combining content and e-commerce, with the dual advantages of content atmosphere and consumption atmosphere, naturally becomes the “main battleground” for businesses to compete for business growth during the Spring Festival.
Now, with less than a month until the Spring Festival, how can businesses accurately grasp the hotspots and seize the opportunities of the Spring Festival? What kind of strategies can best stimulate business growth? CHAILEEDO has noticed that Juliangyinqin recently released a comprehensive set of strategies exclusive to the beauty and digital industries, providing a reference for businesses preparing for battle to help them achieve a significant increase in business at the beginning of the new year.
Insight into Trends, Kickstart the New Year
Every Chinese New Year, besides the Spring Festival couplets and red lanterns hanging in the streets, the places with the strongest “festive vibes” are inevitably the major content platforms. Currently, topics such as #ChineseNewYear #NewYearGiftBox #NewYearMakeup… have collectively garnered over a billion views on the Douyin platform, with business opportunities for the new year hidden within.
In the beauty and digital industries, topics like “Exclusive New Year Makeup Looks” and “Skincare gift boxes that touch mothers’ hearts during the New Year” always become hotly discussed focal points during the New Year period. Consumer demand sparked by trending content has always been a key point for business growth. New Year gifts, family gatherings, and other exclusive New Year scenarios not only ignite the festive atmosphere but also give rise to a more widespread consumption craze. Emotion-driven consumer desires become particularly prominent during this time.
Because of this, unlike the traditional e-commerce platforms’ common practice of “creating festivals,” Douyin, with its massive amount of native content, has inherent advantages in integrating consumer and emotional needs.
On one hand, the abundance of original video content and constantly emerging hot topics provide businesses immersed in them with a rich source of information, helping them swiftly and accurately discern users’ actual needs and the hidden business opportunities within, achieving a proactive approach to meeting consumer demands.
Data shows that in 2024, Douyin’s Spring Festival content had a 10-fold increase in views before the festival, with over 670 million interactive users during the Spring Festival and a five-fold increase in New Year interactions. During the 2024 Spring Festival shopping season, short video views in the beauty and digital industries exceeded 10 billion, with a 617% growth in viewers.
On the other hand, behind frequent searches, browsing, and interactive behaviors lies a surge in shopping desires. Douyin’s massive user base naturally provides businesses with a pool of traffic. As topic popularity grows and user engagement escalates, hidden consumer demands are more easily stimulated.
Looking at the 2024 shopping season data, the daily average GMV on Douyin Mall increased by 98% year-on-year, daily average paying users increased by 132%, and the daily average number of goods sold increased by 113%. The beauty and digital industry saw nearly a 103% year-on-year growth rate, with themed goods related to the New Year increasing supply by over 4.9 times, and user clicks on New Year-related goods increasing by 431%.
For beauty and digital brand businesses, New Year-related content and corresponding consumer scenarios can indeed be opportunities for commercial growth. The more precise and specific the scenario marketing layout, the more effective the resonance with content topics, thus stimulating more consumer demand and driving online growth.
In this regard, businesses on Douyin need to excel in content creation and scenario-based marketing to quickly capture users’ attention during the New Year. So, on a practical operational level, what exactly should businesses do?
“Content + Products + Marketing”: Launching a Combined Attack
For beauty and digital businesses, the Spring Festival shopping season is not just a critical moment for business growth but also one of the most important nodes for attracting new customers throughout the year. The festive atmosphere and emotions lower decision-making thresholds, with new customers eagerly entering the scene. Official data from Juliangyinqin in 2024 also shows that during the shopping season, a higher proportion of new customers were attracted.
So, how can businesses stimulate consumer emotions and achieve dual growth in attracting new customers and sales during the Spring Festival shopping season? CHAILEEDO has dissected the strategic warfare for the beauty and digital industries released by Juliangyinqin and discovered that the organic integration of the beauty and digital industries with specific New Year scenarios is crucial.
In essence, current marketing in the Douyin beauty and digital industries focuses more on finding users through content, grasping the four key points of more diverse content, distinctive products, innovative marketing, and enhancing new potential to achieve a “combined attack” of the full process of “identifying hotspots – leveraging content – product continuity,” in order to realize a closed-loop growth driven by content.
Firstly, creating diverse content that aligns with user interests.
Under the New Year atmosphere, high-quality and precise content can help businesses ignite discussions and drive product exposure on platforms. Therefore, businesses can create a combination of content types such as gift-giving, practicality, and texture by aligning with platform user interests from different perspectives to spark shopping desires during the New Year shopping season. Crafting content that is unique and precise can captivate consumers.
In terms of practical content, products can be placed in various New Year consumption and practical scenarios such as visiting relatives and friends, gatherings, and holiday travel, matching them with different functional products to meet user needs.
Additionally, combining the atmosphere that matches the product’s tone with New Year scenarios to create more immersive texture-based content not only showcases brand identity but also builds a unique brand impression.
Secondly, creating distinctive and differentiated product combinations is key to improving conversion rates during the Spring Festival shopping season.
For example, enhancing the sense of ceremony for users and combining it with “New Year atmosphere” content marketing to create special packaging or limited gift boxes featuring elements of the Year of the Snake in products like essences, lotions, lipsticks, eyeshadows, etc., which better integrate the products into the festive atmosphere.
Additionally, creating more freshness by combining different types of gift boxes or major products with more practical free gifts or celebrity-endorsed items can create a sense of urgency in users to avoid missing out.
Moreover, practical product combinations are crucial, combining practical products like lotions, essences, and creams into explosive product combinations that resonate with users, further amplifying market impact through celebrity endorsements and short video matrices for increased visibility.
Thirdly, seizing opportunities by leveraging trending content to capture traffic and break through marketing barriers.
For brands, expanding visibility is crucial to avoid drowning in a sea of homogeneous marketing efforts. Leveraging trending content becomes key. For example, through social trends, short drama marketing, IP collaborations, etc., expanding user sharing scenarios, accumulating target audiences, and exploring new opportunities at the beginning of the year.
Once the target consumer base is established, businesses can focus on capturing traffic to boost business growth. Emphasizing content-driven live streaming rooms can focus on product usage scenarios, stimulating both brand visibility and demand growth. Additionally, through massive star-driven short video collaborations, content-driven short videos focusing on gifts, new products, and limited-edition products can further drive market momentum.
Of course, marketing is not limited to online efforts alone; leveraging local lifestyle services, limited-time pop-ups, cross-industry collaborations, and Douyin-exclusive IP partnerships can help businesses break through marketing barriers through integrated online and offline efforts.
Fourthly, utilizing the dual support of “Comprehensive Promotion + Instant Creative AIGC” to enhance overall efficiency.
On one hand, businesses can utilize comprehensive promotion and live-streaming comprehensive promotion to achieve a “seed and harvest” model of “content and product shelves,” improving operational efficiency, increasing effective consumption rates, and thereby capturing incremental growth.
On the other hand, businesses can leverage Instant Creative AIGC to enhance material competitiveness, using AI to generate massive script materials in bulk, identifying popular materials, and rapidly creating viral content to improve marketing efficiency.
In doing so, businesses can not only conduct precise marketing based on key practical scenarios but also optimize product combinations based on consumer demand, employing a multi-pronged approach to lead the first wave in the New Year.
2025 Beauty Industry Surge: Still on Douyin
At present, the topics related to the “Spring Festival shopping season” on Douyin are showing signs of a surge. Emotion-driven consumption is becoming increasingly frequent. It is evident that seizing the content and traffic dividends on Douyin can lead to capturing the first wave of incremental opportunities in 2025.
It is worth mentioning that CHAILEEDO has also noted that in addition to providing detailed strategies for businesses, Juliangyinqin has offered incentive policies for brand advertising, massive star collaborations, and other products to achieve a collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between the platform and businesses.
It can be said that Juliangyinqin has already crafted a comprehensive “surge strategy” for the Spring Festival shopping season for businesses, covering product combinations, content innovation, efficiency improvement, marketing, and platform incentives, making the ground for brand growth even more fertile. In the view of CHAILEEDO, this is undoubtedly an attempt by Juliangyinqin and businesses to collaboratively drive business growth upwards.
It is noteworthy that in the year-end visits conducted by “CHAILEEDO on the Frontline,” almost all interviewed brands believe that there is currently no alternative platform that can replace Douyin and help companies find higher-quality increments in the near future. Douyin is leveraging its dual advantages in content and product shelves to become the most efficient channel for brands to seek increments online and expand their customer base.
In fact, beauty brands are increasingly viewing Douyin as a crucial growth platform. This is not only due to its vast user base and highly active social atmosphere but also because Douyin provides a complete closed loop from content innovation to product sales and user retention. Within this loop, brands can fully utilize Douyin’s content ecosystem to deeply embed product features and brand images in the minds of users through creative short videos, live streams, and various forms of content.
Therefore, for beauty brands, excelling in Douyin remains a crucial lesson for brands for the foreseeable future. Douyin will continue to be the most suitable business arena for brands to cultivate the market and seek growth.
It is foreseeable that the new high ground for the first wave of beauty business growth in 2025 will still be on Douyin.
