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Author | panfeni editor | Qin Yan

Probe store bloggers are blooming everywhere. Do many businesses like the traffic behind “them” or fame?

“There’s something wrong with this lens!”

“XXX, you’re not in the right state when you eat. This is a small yellow croaker in the East China Sea. You eat it like a roasted autumn knife on the street.”

“Deviated from the script preset, so we can’t tell the shopkeeper”

At 10 pm, in the office of a maker space in Minhang District, Shanghai, the atmosphere gradually smelled of gunpowder.

Four young people sat scattered behind the table and said nothing to the “leader” in the middle of the office. Severe reprimands sounded from time to time. Even through the glass partition door, you can feel the “cold” of the air.

Such scenes are not uncommon in this circle. For 70% of MCN institutions or search bloggers, The competition in the industry has become more and more cruel - “after the industrialization and patterning of the probe store, the blogger’s creed has changed from showing the truth to that everything has a price. But what should we do? Everyone needs to survive. The shooting, copywriting and later stage behind the probe store also need to be paid, even for finance.” A senior leader said.

The field of search shop (video content production), which is not a new thing, entered an explosive period with the popularity of live broadcast and short video content two years ago.

The big V and up owners of various exploration stores have risen one after another, ranging from subdivided life categories to doing business in clothing, food, housing and transportation, covering almost the whole industry. Some of the former editors of the text search shop have become outbound hosts, some have been reselled as KOL, and some have successfully “run away” to start a business. In their development path, the outside world has found that “exploring the store” has long been regarded as an industry active in daily life, “changing the soup without changing the medicine, updating the equipment, playing methods and prices, and unchanged the hidden rules of the industry” - said a blogger.

Exploring the outlet of the store: the change of content under performance

As a kind of vertical content, search shop has existed for a long time. At the end of 2015, the official account was not long known, but the trend was fixed. In this process, the first thing to emerge is the emergence of a variety of local “life numbers” all over the country. For these early entrants, exploring store content creation is one of their important means of realization.

Xu Jing (pseudonym) joined an entrepreneurial advertising company in Shanghai after graduating from university in 2015. The enterprise is small and there are not many people. There are three editors, a part-time financial HR and a boss. The topic of delicious food is not complicated for her. “I’ll collect what’s delicious and give it to the boss if there is a business opportunity. After confirmation, I’ll take my camera to the store to collect and write, and a picture and text draft will be completed.”

A column called “popular food” often becomes Xu Jing’s reference template. “What they do is the kind of video content recorded and broadcast by traditional TV stations, that is, they go to stores one by one in Shanghai and take the host to try. The effect after shooting is good. Throughout 2015, I followed their program to nearly 100 stores, and several of them also made commercial distribution.”

From 2015 to 2017, Xu Jing’s team focused on serving local offline businesses and stores in Shanghai. From home decoration, food to candy and digital, content was produced in the form of graphics and text - “at this stage, as long as it is a store with high consumer attention, we can quickly get traffic through some gimmicky content to create topics.”

At that time, the mass consumption depended on the promotion and guidance of the we media platform. After the “strong alliance” between merchants and creators, the growth effect of public accounts and store customers was significant.

“In order to attract customers to businesses, we usually put a group purchase link at the bottom of the article, and even send cash coupons by private letter. Take an article with a reading of nearly 50000 as an example, we usually add nearly 1000 group purchase orders for the shopkeeper in the current month, excluding the 3% group purchase (platform) deduction, which is a very considerable number,” Xu Jing told understand notes.

However, the ebb tide of traffic came too fast, and the positions of graphic and graphic agents began to be eroded. After 2018, with the advent of the era dominated by short videos, the reading volume of graphic life numbers began to plummet. The change behind this is the all-round innovation of traditional graphics and text from content to form. Some small actions and playing methods that have been unfavourable in the past are quietly changing.

Tiktok’s company moved its main battlefield from WeChat official account to the channel of voice, B station, Taobao live broadcast, etc. the main content of Xu Jing’s company is to explore stores, but the content is different from video to video.

The biggest feature of the short video era is that the boundary of the content is gradually blurred and the extension is gradually expanding. Video empowers everything - old factories, small shops in cities and towns, abandoned mines can become capital projects after packaging; Many traditional urban cuisines, museums, restaurants, small towns and even rural life are popular due to the empowerment of short videos. The carrier is not always new. The key is how to innovate the content and presentation form.

Xu Jing and her colleagues have made comprehensive adjustments since the second half of 2018. “The brief on the commercial list is more and more biased towards video, and the time is shorter and shorter. It has to have gimmicks, interesting plot and commercial transformation… It used to be a picture and text content one person a day, but now it is three people a day to produce a video.”

With Xu Jing as the host, the team began to postpone the logic of the local life number and constantly update short videos. At the same time, the company also began to recruit some “Editors” who “can be photographed and speak beautiful words”. At the same time, they began to cooperate with many external search store bloggers, “eat what they can do, and needless to say what they can’t do. Just turn to some outsourcing (search store bloggers in the circle) to do it.” According to Xu Jing, “the cost of the company has not increased too much, but there are obviously more business orders.”

If Xu Jing followed the times step by step and embarked on the road of transformation, Zhang Yu (pseudonym) is a typical representative of crossing the river by touching the stone.

In 2020, the horn of returning to work after the epidemic sounded, “local life” has become the market that major platforms are scrambling to target, and “exploring stores” happens to be an important link in local life.

According to iResearch consulting data, the local living service market will grow from 19.5 trillion yuan in 2020 to 2025