Livestreaming: China’s New Digital Frontier
With COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on travel regulations and consumer risk perceptions, tourism and lifestyle brands have had to turn to ever more imaginative strategies to keep China’s ever-more-prosperous travellers engaged. In case you couldn’t tell from Douyin or TikTok’s strong entrance into the global attention economy where Snapchat and Facebook used to battle for dominance, livestreaming is the highly immersive and improved future of digital content consumption. In China, livestreaming mania is far better established and more widespread than outside of East Asia, with content consumption behaviour being significantly different from the West. Chinese viewers prefer high-paced, super condensed and highly interactive media experiences, peppered with a variety of cultural cues and nuances that Western content creators need to understand to engage with successfully.
Western travel and lifestyle brands have, however, begun engaging China’s livestream-loving industry and consumers, developing a knowledge base of what works. Some established Western destinations have started reaping the low-hanging fruit that first movers on new Chinese digital trends tend to earn. The Palace of Versailles, the British Museum, Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, as well as Serbia, Germany and Finland’s tourism boards were some of the first movers to leverage these platforms several months ago. For these destinations, livestreaming has become a whole new immersive portal through which these destinations have engaged select segments of Chinese travellers with virtual tours before they’ve even booked tickets or thought about the prospects of navigating COVID regulations. The safety, availability and desirability of the respective destinations is reinforced via livestreaming, which is especially valuable in a region such as Europe, where travel is seen as increasingly viable.
The developing world, however, has had to also carve out a niche in a travel world order that may well change in favour of African or Latin American destinations. Beijing-based marketing and digital media consultancy firm Create Consulting has been developing several cases in promoting developing-world destinations that offer immense competitive advantage relative to established mass-tourism outbound destinations. Starting off with a series of industry-focused livestreaming events for African destination Camp Jabulani in September 2020, they developed a Chinese livestreaming playbook that speaks directly to China’s top tourism industry decision makers. Using these learnings together with their expertise and comprehensive network of China sales decision-makers, they’ve begun a second series of livestreaming events for Peru’s national exports and tourism promotion agency, PromPerú.
Working off the core finding that direct B2B marketing delivers the best return in the media-saturated Chinese consumer market, Create Consulting leveraged its deep network of industry relationships to promote Peru’s destinations directly to decision-makers. Tallying up hundreds of actual Chinese tour operator participants so far, the livestreaming events promoted the cosmopolitan attractions of Peru’s capital city, Lima, as well as the myriad adventures of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. The events featured Peru brand promotion expert Liu Dong Rui as main speaker, telling viewers the in-depth stories behind each destination while holding branded merchandise giveaways for participants. As viewers asked questions about travel times and visa policies, vibrant discussion kept going around Lima’s museums, cuisine and shopping attractions, as well as the river cruise and Amazon leisure camp experiences available to visitors. With the first two livestreaming events featuring Lima and the Peruvian Amazon were held on October 14th and 21st, respectively, two more livestream events are scheduled for the ancient Inca capital of Cusco and the white volcanic stone city of Arequipa.
Liu Dong Rui will be taking viewers on an immersive journey into Cusco’s Inca-built streets on October 28th, before venturing further into Peru’s mountainous wonderland to the mysterious Arequipa on November 4th. To witness our livestream events in action, simply scan the below QR codes and see how it works!
For our October 28th 2020 event featuring Cusco at 15:00 Beijing time, please scan the below QR code:
For our November 4th 2020 event on Arequipa (also at 15:00 Beijing time), please scan the below QR code:
We look forward to seeing you there!
