The competition for high-ticket businesses returns to trust itself.

Written by丨Jiang Siyuan

The wedding photography company Yunduan Bian once had a dilemma: private messages rang from morning to night, but it was very difficult to identify those truly ready for a shoot.

Among those who came to inquire, some merely asked for prices after scrolling through videos, some had not yet decided whether to shoot, and others had not even thought about their destination. Customer service replied to each message individually, investing a lot of time, and customers with clear plans were often drowned out.

Later, Yunduan Bian integrated several questions into the intelligent reception process on Douyin's private messaging: Which city are you planning to shoot in? When do you expect to shoot? What is your budget?

When users enter the private message, these questions are automatically posed by the system. Users who can provide specific answers are marked by AI as highly interested and prioritized for follow-up communication; those who cannot answer are continued to be managed by intelligent reception for basic exchanges.

With just a few questions, a large number of generic inquiries were filtered out, and Yunduan Bian's cost-per-lead fell by nearly 20%.

Actively narrowing the customer acquisition entrance was against common sense in the past. For a long time, this business followed a sufficiently simple path: content attracts people, private messages leave contact information, and the rest is left to customer service and sales to follow up one by one. Naturally, the more leads the better, the cheaper the better; as for what the other party actually wanted, how much budget they had, when they would spend, these were problems to be solved after obtaining the numbers.

However, wedding photography, home decoration, and dentistry have a common characteristic: high unit price, long decision-making cycle, and service must be completed offline. Taking a set of wedding photos, a whole house renovation, or a dental implant cannot be completed like purchasing an item in just a few minutes, and leaving a phone number is still far from closing a deal.

Therefore, for high-ticket businesses, coming to Douyin is not only about adding a customer acquisition channel; they need to rebuild a business chain from being seen, being understood, to being trusted and chosen.

Heavy asset companies need more "accuracy" in online customer acquisition

Xin He Ju is a custom hard and soft decoration company with over twenty factories across the country, serving about 10,000 homeowners a year, and Douyin contributes to 60-70% of its online customer acquisition.

Full decoration is a heavy business offline. Xin He Ju builds factories and real scene showrooms in different cities, with a single factory investment of about 30 million yuan, covering production lines, showroom facilities, and staffing. If the front end cannot bring stable and manageable demand, the waste is not only the advertising budget but also the time and capacity of the entire backend organization. However, the online consultation needs for home decoration are highly fragmented; many people only want to renovate kitchens or living rooms, making it difficult to match the whole-house decoration business model.

In the past, this was not a problem. A lead could cost as little as several yuan, and the screening work could be left to the backend. However, in recent years, with the home decoration industry downturn and narrowing profits, this cost has become particularly significant. From when a customer initiates a private message inquiry to the final delivery of the decoration project, multiple links must pass through customer service reception, market manager follow-up, designer proposal, and construction team implementation; if any link finds budget or demand mismatched, the previously invested communication cost could become zero.

The key to reducing such losses is not to make the backend screening faster but to make the judgment occur earlier.

Xin He Ju used to ask about the city, house area, budget, and start time, but these questions typically occurred after the customer left their phone number, confirmed one by one by customer service and sales. Now, when users enter private messaging from short videos or live broadcasts, AI will first complete this round of basic inquiries and then determine whether to switch to manual follow-up based on their answers.

Founder Chen Chusheng refers to this process as a "micro-intent interview," believing that the sustainable development of the company relies on controlling the cost of each data point. Merchants must define what kind of customer has intent before spending money to increase volume and then inquire to understand specific needs, thus more accurately capture the customer's true requirements and provide a firmer foundation for follow-up investments.

The criteria for "who is worth following up" is not new. In the past, it was written in customer service scripts, sales experience, and company SOPs, to be executed manually after users left contact information; now it is configured as a system-executable rule, moved forward before human involvement, with AI taking over the most time-consuming work, using standardized processes for the first round of screening. Xin He Ju revealed that after using Douyin’s private message intent lead product, relevant human efficiency has improved by about 60-70%.

Transforming experience into configurable rules has another direct benefit: it can be efficiently reused. Chen Chusheng has described Xin He Ju's path to scaling: a content and delivery model first operates successfully in one city and one account, forming a complete process from content, delivery goals to private messaging reception, and then migrates to new accounts. For a company covering multiple cities and operating multiple brands simultaneously, this determines the speed of expansion.

As the quality of leads, visit rates, and contract rates gradually forms a relatively stable relationship, Xin He Ju began to arrange advertising in reverse. Chen Chusheng stated that Xin He Ju can now estimate how many orders a factory needs to complete in a given month and calculate the necessary volume of advertising on Douyin based on that. This way, online customer acquisition is no longer a marketing budget determined by random decisions but a variable in the factory’s capacity and operational plan.

In Chen Chusheng's view, rather than reaching out to a user who is still unfamiliar with the brand and whose needs are unclear at a low cost, he prefers to invest more to connect with a user who genuinely understands Xin He Ju and is willing to trust it. Therefore, the standard for measuring this investment has shifted from the cost of a single lead to whether a relationship can ultimately be established that would be fulfilled by offline services.

Chen Chusheng’s interest in AI goes beyond customer acquisition. He is already laying out AI content and AI manhua (comics), believing that businesses and platforms are co-builders of the era, moving forward in the same ecological system where no one can slow down.

For heavy asset companies like Xin He Ju, the significance of precise customer acquisition lies in establishing online trust as the starting point for stable offline operations.

For chain brands, content management needs to be "deeper"

If Xin He Ju seeks to solve how to identify potential customers earlier and more accurately, then Maiya Oral faces a different question that is harder to standardize: as a private medical institution, how to effectively prove its professional capabilities online.

Founded in Shenzhen in 2015, Maiya Oral now has 15 stores in Shenzhen, Huizhou, and Xiamen. In 2023, the centralized procurement of dental implants was fully implemented, bringing a common turning point for the entire private oral industry: on one hand, centralized procurement lowered the consumption threshold for patients, rapidly expanding the market; on the other hand, the profit structure reliant on material price differences was significantly compressed, drawing many institutions into a homogenized price war.

With the disappearance of profitability from materials, institutions must find reasons for patients to choose them beyond price—where doctors' capabilities, service experiences, and brand trust are precisely the competitiveness that is hardest to validate online. The more intense the price war, the stronger the urgency to prove professional ability, and the greater the difficulty.

This process of reestablishment takes longer than expected. From leaving contact information to walking into the clinic, there may be a hesitation period of up to a year. "Many of our peers cannot wait until that day." According to the brand director of Maiya Oral, what is truly worth doing online in this industry is not immediate conversion, but through solid content, allowing patients to get to know you, understand you, and trust you before they come to the store.

Following this line of thought, Maiya has built a three-tier account system on Douyin: a brand account focusing on medical quality, treatment technology, and doctor teams to establish professional recognition; a store account targeting local customers, finely breaking down specific projects and prices; and a worker account featuring frontline employees, specializing in vertical science popularization aimed at different groups by department.

A typical information reach path may look like this: patients first establish initial recognition of the institution on the brand account, then hear a nurse explain the entire dental implant process on the worker account, and finally see specific promotions for the nearby store on the store account. The three layers of content interlock, jointly stitching together a complete and specific brand impression.

However, the challenge is to make this matrix operate efficiently. The primary scheduling of frontline medical staff is already saturated, making video shooting difficult to implement. Maiya’s brand center responds by initiating a worker account contest internally—employees join the worker account, posting content while tagging their store addresses, and anyone whose single video receives over a thousand views in the same city will receive corresponding incentives.

The process of issuing incentives also serves as an exploration of the internal content genes of the organization. The team selects employees from the contest entries with strong expression ability and on-camera presence, providing them with content direction guidance and specialized training. During the event, the exposure of Douyin group purchases for regional stores increased by 20%.

While building the content matrix, Maiya also cooperates with information flow and search advertising to gain inquiries, and attempts to guide patients to scan codes to complete transactions in offline stores. As this online-offline integrated business model gradually unfolds, the spillover effect of content and advertising begins to manifest.

By 2026, Maiya will significantly increase its new offline stores, with nearly 80% of the new marketing budget allocated to Douyin. As a participating merchant in Douyin's lead business "Dou Jin Plan," Maiya gained platform support in traffic and operations during this stage.

The logic of advertising here is not simply a function of the number of stores. The content radiated by one store can reach patients over a distance of 20 to 30 kilometers, while the final conversion may happen at another store closer to the patient. This means that the denser the stores, the more conversion exits there are for a single advertising campaign. For chain brands, the scale effect of content does not lie in how many people see the content itself, but whether it can continuously amplify the conversion probability of each reach as the offline network density increases. This is precisely the core of the mutual empowerment between online content and offline networks—deeper content coverage leads to higher marginal returns for opening offline stores.

When content capability becomes the underlying operating system for chain brand expansion, the barriers to offline replication are no longer site selection and funding but the clear, trustworthy, and warm brand recognition in the patients' minds. The deeper the content management, the lower the marginal cost of brand expansion—this is precisely the deepest value of content management.

High-ticket businesses transition from one-time customer acquisition to sustainable operation

While Xin He Ju and Maiya have different approaches, both are transforming one-time customer acquisition investments into sustainable online assets. The former accumulates an understanding of target customers and a set of processes that can be reused across different accounts; the latter accumulates brand content, worker accounts, and store reputation.

These accumulations do not only remain on the merchant side. When the results of effective inquiries, in-store visits, and transactions feedback online, the criteria for the platform to assess the value of a lead also change: in the past, the system mainly knew who viewed the content, clicked the ad, and left their number; now it can further understand who among these users later showed explicit needs, who actually walked into the store, and who ultimately completed the transaction.

Similar logic applies to more high-ticket, complex decision-making industries. Education and training is another example. Nowadays, more and more users do not just search for keywords like "graduate school entrance exam," but input questions directly into the search box, such as "which graduate school training organization is reliable" or "is there a graduate school training camp." The more specific the search questions, the closer the intention is to a transaction.

New Oriental has thus divided its advertising into two steps: the first step uses search AI smart investment to do "precision", automatically generating advertising plans and using matching content to carry active inquiries, thereby accurately bringing in "those who already have needs"; the second step uses feedback and deep transfer functionality to do "amplify," allowing the model to learn the characteristics of high-quality leads brought by searches, and then find more similar users for secondary reach in the information flow. Search is responsible for "finding the right people," and information flow is responsible for "finding more of the right people." The combination of the two, using high-intent signals from search to calibrate the scaled reach of information flow, forms a positive cycle. As a result, overall volume has increased by 75%, and lead effectiveness has increased by 22%.

From home decoration to dental care and education training, the high-ticket industry's operations have thus formed a complete closed loop: content and search bring potential customers, private messaging and human follow-up meet demands, stores complete visits and transactions, and subsequent results feedback online, affecting the next round of content and advertising.

Closing a high-ticket business deal hinges on winning the trust of users. Renovation companies showcase display rooms and construction cases, while doctors build reputations through professional experiences and patient reviews—all to convince customers that merchants can fulfill service promises. Now, the path to building trust has been further moved forward, allowing consumers to form an initial judgment of merchants through content, searches, reviews, and private messaging before stepping into a showroom or clinic.

This also means that merchants must maintain consistency between online and offline. The services displayed in the content, promises made in private messages, and products presented on store pages need to match the actual experience upon arrival. For high-ticket merchants, trust is not created by a viral piece of content; it accumulates through multiple touchpoints and is ultimately validated in offline delivery.

On September 10, Douyin Life Services held a product launch themed "AI Lead Marketing, More Efficient and More Effective." This meeting revealed a possibility: as the platform's product capabilities continue to improve, businesses rooted offline are worth being re-done online, from being seen, being understood, to being trusted, and being chosen, with each step taken more solidly.

High-ticket businesses are entering a deeper cultivation era. For merchants willing to operate seriously and invest in the long term, growth is beginning to have a traceable path, and certainty is returning to trust itself.

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