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Find here the Daxue Talks episode 27. Olivier Vérot explains in detail how to work with affiliate marketing on Douyin to redirect traffic from this app to other platforms. Let’s discover the power of Chinese social media marketing on Douyin!

Full transcript below:

Oliver Verot: I’m Oliver Verot, the founder of Gentleman Marketing Agency (GMA). We are a digital marketing agency focused on performance and based in Shanghai.

Interviewer: What is the new system known as affiliate marketing for Douyin?

Oliver Verot: Douyin has a lot of influencers and they have a project to develop the biggest affiliate platform for e-commerce. So how it works? It gives opportunity to each of influencers, macro and micro influencers to speak about something and put a link. When the brand is selling something or if a company is selling a product, they will basically give the money automatically to the influencers. So they have an access to a large number of KOLs and they start to promote it and even give the opportunity to each people published video on Douyin to start to monetize and make money. I think it would be a big game changer in the e-commerce in China because I believe that if you have all these influencers that basically are paid for the effort, it will be totally changed. Today how it works with the influencers, you need to pay them and they’ll speak about it, but it’s kind of hard for company to track where the sales come from and what it is. So it’s very complicated for influencers to work based on affiliation and commissions because they are not sure that they would get the money with the traffic that they get. But Douyin programs this and makes it happen, they already launched this with some Taobao stores and external links, it’s possible it works. And they are planning to open Douyin stores and link directly existing influencers with an automatic system. So I believe that it’s really the future and interesting for brands because brands can develop on Douyin and after people can jointly speak about the products whatever they want and make money automatically. For all these influencers that we stopped to negotiate with brand directly and other third parties kind of things, they can directly see if they like the product and speak about it and make money on that.

Interviewer: Technically speaking, how does Douyin integrate the connection with Taobao, TMall, JD or WeChat?

Oliver Verot: How technically it work today, every time you are interested about something in the video, you can click on the link and you have an external page, you click it and after it’s linked automatically. So it’s connected automatically with Taobao because they have an agreement on Taobao and Tmall, but it doesn’t work with every store, the store need to have at least 4 stars and certain experience, so it works like this. If it is with a Douyin store, it would be more joint and won’t have this middle page, so we would be directly linked to the influencers or the page where people can directly buy it. So today they are making the first step and after or later they will make it more direct by deleting one step, Taobao store or Tmall store or any links that are in the middle.

Interviewer: Does it mean that Douyin is not sending traffic to JD and WeChat shop?

Oliver Verot: For JD, I never see that, I don’t think they have an agreement. They are selling traffic not to WeChat, but to Youzheng store which is a WeChat store but on an external link. Why are they selling to that? Because on Youzheng store, you can basically set up a program and link this to API together, but I don’t think Douyin and WeChat’s API are connected together.

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.