Lives-streaming marketing helps vitalize rural areas

Live-streaming marketing is helping to vitalize China’s rural areas by boosting consumption and facilitating the digital transformation of enterprises and industrial development.

One example of this is in Yanggu county, Liaocheng city, east China’s Shandong Province. Shandong Fengxiang Co., Ltd., a leading chicken breeding and processing company in the county, has boosted sales of its products via live-streaming e-commerce.

A farmer in ethnic Qiang costume sells local products via livestream in Beichuan County, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Nov. 14, 2020.  (Xinhua/Jiang Hongjing)

This year, the company saw its sales of featured products exceed 15 million yuan (about $2.36 million) during an online sales promotion campaign on China’s popular short video app Douyin, known as Tik Tok globally.

“Live-streaming e-commerce helps local chicken and other agricultural and sideline products reach more customers,” said Xiao Dongsheng, general manager of the company.

Inspired by the company, many local farmers have gone to work in the chicken breeding and processing industry. By the end of 2020, Liaocheng had 160 million poultry on hand, including 99.96 million chickens. Today, the city has formed a complete industrial chain for the chicken industry, including feed processing, chicken hatching, breeding and selling.

Similarly, Shaanxi Co-op E-commerce Group, an agriculture-related e-commerce company in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, has also promoted agricultural products through live-streaming sessions.

The group held eight live-streaming sessions to advertise over 200 products from 35 exhibitors at the 28th China Yangling Agricultural Hi-tech Fair in the province’s Yangling, which kicked off on Oct. 22. The live-streaming shows generated an online sales volume of 36,000 yuan and an offline sales volume of 2.2 million yuan.

According to data from the All China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, e-commerce sales in the country’s supply and marketing cooperative systems increased by 40.2 percent year on year in the first three quarters in 2021. China’s network of supply and marketing cooperatives serves as a key platform for the distribution of agricultural products in the country’s rural areas.