Social media marketing has become an important means of tapping into the growth curve.
YesWelder’s Social Media Marketing
YesWelder, launched in 2018, is a DTC (Direct To Consumer) brand that focuses on welding products such as welding machines and welding caps. After transforming from the earliest OEM to the Amazon B2C model, YesWelder has begun to focus on brand building in the past two years, trying to create a brand with high consumer recognition and loyalty through social media and content marketing in a direct-to-consumer form. Surprisingly, as an industrial product brand, YesWelder is unique in social media and content marketing, and has gained a large number of loyal fans. Currently, YesWelder has accumulated 47,000 fans on the Instagram social application. Many users will also actively interact with the brand, share their stories with YesWelder on social media, spontaneously become brand ambassadors, and even put unconventional stickers on welding machines to show their understanding of the product, interpret their personality, express their trust and love for the brand, and let more people know YesWelder.
YesWelder means Ye’s Welding in Chinese. The five founders have more than ten years of OEM experience in welding. They have long provided product processing services for foreign welding machine brands and are also good at operating overseas e-commerce platforms such as eBay.
YesWelder began brand building in 2019. Initially, it used Google ads to increase brand awareness, and its monthly traffic maintained a growth of 30% to 50%. However, when the new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic broke out in 2020, Google misjudged the keyword of YesWelder’s welding helmet products as “Mask”, so its Google Merchant Center account was blocked. At that time, Google was the largest source of traffic for YesWelder. The founding team thought that this would have a great impact on the brand’s sales. However, after two or three weeks of stagnation in sales, sales rebounded and grew again. YesWelder saw from the Shopify backend that social media such as Facebook and Instagram brought it a considerable sales conversion; in addition, the content of the YesWelder blog, which had just been launched, was also very popular; YesWelder’s email marketing also received a high click-through rate because it focused more on content rather than promotion.
Welders have a strong sense of professional honor and personality. If the brand reaches this group of people, they will have a high degree of loyalty to the brand and spread the word of mouth. At present, the welding machine audience is concentrated in a group of men aged 40 to 60 with strong stickiness. YesWelder hopes to attract young men and a small number of women through social media. YesWelder began to pay attention to the operation and content output of social media such as Facebook homepage, Instagram, and Pinterest, exploring the characteristics of the audience groups on different platforms and spreading brand content.
Instagram is the social media platform with the longest operation time for YesWelder. Instagram’s user base is wide and younger, and female users account for a high proportion. In the early days, YesWelder usually posted some very “hardcore” photos that matched the tone of welding machine products. Since then, YesWelder has posted many short videos of users using YesWelder products on Instagram. These short videos have a high number of views, ranging from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of times – bringing a lot of natural traffic and conversion to the brand’s official website, and to a certain extent, it has also improved the effectiveness of YesWelder’s Facebook advertising.
On Pinterest, YesWelder shares more pictures and videos of skill applications – practical issues such as how to replace batteries and how to set up a welding machine. Currently, YesWelder has also begun to try to create original content on TikTok, constantly trying new platforms to gain new audiences, and creating social media content that matches the corresponding platforms based on the user characteristics and platform attributes of different platforms.
The diversity of platforms, the content tone and distribution rules of different platforms are also different, making the production and distribution of original content a time-consuming and labor-intensive project – YesWelder began to try to give products to KOC (Key Opinion Consumer) influencers on different platforms, and share them with more communities through the content production capabilities of bloggers. YesWelder also gradually established social relationships with this group of influencers and infiltrated their fan base.
Taking YouTube as an example, YesWelder often gives some products to YouTubers for trial, and does not restrict or constrain their creative content. YouTubers can shoot videos or photos in the way they are good at or like, as shown in Figure 1-2. Welders are a very vertically segmented group of people. The videos created by bloggers for YesWelder focus on how to use welding products or technical teaching videos, which provide users with valuable learning content and make the video viewing volume very considerable. Many people overseas use YouTube as a video platform for skill learning. People who specifically search for welding videos on YouTube are usually potential customers with great purchasing intentions. This is the main reason why YouTube has become the second largest source of traffic for YesWelder.
In addition to the results brought by KOC to YesWelder, YesWelder also found that some users spontaneously wrote welding product evaluation and comparison articles on their personal blogs, which brought a lot of traffic to the brand. When searching for the keyword “Best welder” on Google, such evaluation articles will appear, which also greatly helps YesWelder’s sales.
Now, more and more KOCs are actively seeking cooperation with YesWelder. These KOCs believe that YesWelder’s fan base can also bring them traffic, content and exposure.
WhyWeWeld is YesWelder’s blog and a content column under the brand’s official website. Initially, YesWelder wanted to build a separate blog site with stories about different welders. Considering that YesWelder still needs to accumulate more natural traffic, this column is now integrated into the brand’s official website.
The Why WeWeld blog has been continuously updated for 7 issues. The welder protagonists in these stories love their work and are proud of it – there are entrepreneurs who open welding workshops, DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts who use welding machines as tools, and people who make a living as welders; even in the “male-dominated” white welder industry, the Why We Weld column also reported the stories of three female welders, showing the unique strength and charm of female welders. People in this group have rich and colorful stories in this industry, and everyone has a unique story on the road of welding. Founder Zhu Chengfeng wants to pass on the “interesting soul” in this industry through character interviews.
Some of the protagonists in these stories come from YesWelder fans. Some of them are just welding enthusiasts, some are welding beginners, and some are senior welders who have been working in the industry for decades. YesWelder presents the stories of this group in multiple dimensions, showing the diversity of the welder group, and presents it in an approachable way.
In these contents, YesWelder hardly presents any product advertisements, and does not use the sales conversion brought by the blog content as the evaluation of the effectiveness of these contents. Zhu Chengfeng believes that “brands pay more attention to the user’s perception of these contents (such as data such as article reading volume, number of interactions and article stay time) and the brand awareness of YesWelder established through these contents.”
YesWelder’s brand operation has explored the following experience in social media and content marketing.
① “Adapt to local conditions” to create content-adopt different content strategies on different platforms, display YesWelder’s content through multiple channels, and try to diversify the content forms on different platforms as much as possible, such as short videos, blogs, pictures, etc.; and make timely adjustments based on the platform’s data feedback and results.
② Create content that interests target consumers, rather than just marketing products. Use tutorials, welder character stories and other content to make YesWelder’s audience interested, rather than using content as a marketing tool.
③ Keep a learning attitude. While doing well on the existing platforms, actively try other platforms, such as TikTok and Twitter. Be brave to try and keep innovating.