For high-ticket businesses, competition now revolves around trust itself. Yun Duan Bi An, a bridal travel photography company, once struggled with a common dilemma: their direct messages buzzed from morning until night, yet identifying genuine potential customers proved exceedingly difficult. Among those reaching out, some were merely price-checking after watching a video, others had not yet decided whether to book, and many had no destination in mind. Customer service reps spent enormous time replying to each inquiry one by one, while customers with concrete plans were easily lost in the shuffle.

Eventually, Yun Duan Bi An configured several questions into Douyin's intelligent direct message reception flow: which city do you plan to shoot in? When do you expect to schedule? What is your budget? Once users entered the DM, the system posed these questions first. Users offering specific answers were automatically flagged as high-intent leads and prioritized for follow-up communication, while those unable to answer continued receiving basic support from the intelligent system. By asking just a few questions, the company filtered out a large volume of vague inquiries, cutting effective lead costs by nearly 20%.

Proactively narrowing the customer acquisition funnel would have defied conventional logic in the past. For years, this business followed a simple path: content attracts people, DMs collect contact details, and the rest fell to customer service and sales teams chasing each lead. The more leads and the cheaper they were, the better, with questions about what the customer wanted, their budget, or purchase timing left for after the phone number was obtained. Yet businesses like bridal photography, home renovation, and dentistry share a common trait: high-ticket prices, long decision cycles, and mandatory offline service delivery. Booking a wedding shoot, a whole-home makeover, or a dental implant cannot be completed in minutes like buying a product; capturing a phone number is merely the first step toward closing a sale that spans multiple stages.

For high-value merchants, coming to Douyin is not just about adding another acquisition channel. They need to rebuild a full operational chain here, one that moves from being seen and understood to being trusted and chosen.

For asset-heavy companies, online acquisition needs to be more precise

Xin He Ju, a custom furnishing company covering both hard and soft decoration, operates over twenty factories nationwide, serving roughly ten thousand homeowners annually, with Douyin contributing sixty to seventy percent of its online leads. Whole-home renovation is a heavily asset-intensive offline business. Xin He Ju builds factories and showrooms across different cities, with each factory representing an investment of around thirty million yuan, covering production lines, showroom facilities, and staffing. If the front-end cannot deliver stable, executable demand, the waste extends beyond ad budgets to the entire backend organization's time and capacity. However, online renovation inquiries are highly fragmented; many users only want to remodel a kitchen or revamp a living room, which hardly matches a whole-home model.

Years ago, this was not an issue. A lead cost as low as a few yuan meant screening tasks could be deferred to the backend. But as the home renovation industry has faced downturns and shrinking margins in recent years, this math has become conspicuously unfavorable. From the moment a customer initiates a DM consultation to the final delivery of a whole-home project, the journey involves customer service reception, market manager follow-up, designer proposals, and construction team execution. If budget or requirement mismatches surface at any stage, all prior communication costs are zeroed out. To reduce this friction, the key is not faster backend screening but earlier decision-making.

Xin He Ju used to ask about city, home size, budget, and start dates as well, though typically only after the customer left a phone number, confirmed manually by customer service and sales. Now, when users enter DMs via short videos or livestreams, AI completes this baseline questionnaire first and decides whether to transfer to human follow-up based on the answers. Founder Chen Chusheng describes this process as a "miniature intent interview," arguing that a company's sustainable growth relies on keeping per-lead costs controllable. Merchants must define what an interested customer looks like before spending on scale, then learn their specific needs through questioning, enabling more accurate capture of real customer intent and more grounded subsequent investment.

The standard of "who is worth following up" is not new. It previously lived in customer service scripts, sales experience, and company SOPs, executed manually after a user left their contact information. Now, it is configured as system-executable rules, moved ahead of human involvement. AI takes over the most time-consuming work here, conducting the first screening through standardized processes. Xin He Ju disclosed that after adopting Douyin's DM intent lead product, relevant personnel efficiency improved by approximately 60 to 70 percent.

Turning experience into configurable rules offers another direct benefit: efficient reusability. Chen Chusheng described Xin He Ju's scaling path: a content and ad delivery model is first refined in one city and one account, building a complete pipeline from content and campaign targeting to DM reception, then migrated to new accounts. For a company spanning multiple cities and operating several brands simultaneously, this determines the pace of expansion. As lead quality, site visit rates, and contract closing rates gradually form a stable relationship, Xin He Ju has begun inverting its campaign planning. Chen Chusheng says the company can now calculate how many orders a factory needs to fulfill in a given month, then derive the appropriate advertising scale required on Douyin. Online acquisition is thus no longer a marketing budget decided by gut feeling; it becomes a variable within factory capacity and operational planning.

In Chen Chusheng's view, rather than reaching a user who is unfamiliar with the brand and unclear about their needs at low cost, he prefers to invest more in connecting with someone who genuinely understands Xin He Ju and is willing to trust it. The metric for this investment has therefore shifted from the price of a lead to whether both sides can establish a relationship ultimately fulfilled through offline service. Chen's interest in AI extends beyond acquisition. He is already exploring AI-generated content and AI animation series, believing that merchants and platforms are co-builders of the era, advancing within the same ecosystem, and neither can afford to lag. For asset-heavy companies like Xin He Ju, precision acquisition means letting online-established trust become the starting point for stable offline operations.

For chain brands, content operations require greater depth

If Xin He Ju's challenge is identifying interested customers earlier and more accurately, Mai Ya Dental faces a different, harder-to-standardize problem: how a private medical institution effectively proves its professional competence online. Founded in Shenzhen in 2015, Mai Ya Dental now operates 15 clinics across Shenzhen, Huizhou, and Xiamen. In 2023, the nationwide centralized procurement policy for dental implants became a shared turning point for the entire private dental industry: on one hand, it lowered the threshold for patients, sharply expanding the market; on the other hand, profit structures heavily dependent on material price differences were severely compressed, dragging many institutions into homogenous price wars. As the profit moat built on materials disappeared, institutions had to find new reasons for patients to choose them, and physician expertise, service experience, and brand trust are precisely the competitive strengths hardest to verify intuitively online. The more intense the price war, the more urgent and difficult proving professional competence becomes.

This re-establishment process takes far longer than expected. From leaving contact information to actually walking into a clinic, there can be a hesitation period of up to a year. "Many peers never make it to that day," says Mai Ya's brand director. In this industry, what truly matters online is not immediate conversion but building content of substance that lets patients get to know, understand, and trust the institution before visiting. Following this approach, Mai Ya has built a three-tier account system on Douyin: brand accounts focusing on medical quality, treatment technology, and physician teams to establish professional credibility; store accounts targeting local customers with detailed breakdowns of specific procedures and pricing; and practitioner accounts featuring frontline staff, delivering vertical educational content segmented by department for different audiences. A typical information journey might unfold like this: a patient first builds initial awareness of the institution through the brand account, hears a nurse explain the complete dental implant process on a practitioner account, and finally sees location-specific promotions on the store account for a nearby clinic. These three layers interlock, collectively forming a complete and concrete brand impression.

The challenge, however, lies in making this matrix operate efficiently. Frontline medical staff already have saturated schedules, making video creation difficult to promote. Mai Ya's brand center responded by launching an internal practitioner account competition: employees join by posting content tagged with their clinic's location, and any single video achieving over a thousand local plays earns corresponding incentives. The incentive process itself also serves as active exploration for organizational content DNA. The team selects employees with strong presentation skills and on-camera presence from submissions, providing them with content direction guidance and dedicated coaching. During the campaign period alone, regional store Douyin group-buy exposure increased by 20%. Alongside building the content matrix, Mai Ya also combines feed ads and search campaigns to drive inquiries, while guiding in-store patients to scan QR codes for transactions. As this integrated online-offline operating model expands, spillover effects from content and advertising begin to emerge. In 2026, Mai Ya significantly increased new offline store openings, directing nearly 80% of its incremental marketing budget to Douyin. As a participating merchant in Douyin's lead generation initiative, the "Doujin Plan," Mai Ya received coordinated platform support in traffic and operations during this phase.

The logic here is not a simple function of store count. Content radiating from one clinic might reach patients across twenty to thirty kilometers, yet the final conversion may land at another clinic closer to the patient. This means the denser the store network, the more conversion outlets each ad impression generates. For chain brands, the scale effect of content is not about how many people see it, but whether it can continuously amplify the conversion probability of every touchpoint as the offline network density increases. This is precisely the core of mutual empowerment between online content and offline networks: the deeper the content deployment, the higher the marginal benefit of opening new stores. When content capability becomes the underlying operating system for chain expansion, the barrier to offline replication is no longer location selection or capital, but the clear, credible, and human brand perception in patients' minds. The deeper the content operations, the lower the marginal cost of brand expansion, and this is the deepest value content operations deliver.

High-ticket businesses: from one-time acquisition to sustained operation

Xin He Ju and Mai Ya take different approaches, yet both convert one-time acquisition investments into sustainable online assets. The former accumulates an understanding of target customers and a reusable reception process across accounts; the latter builds brand content, practitioner accounts, and clinic reputation. These accumulations do not remain solely on the merchant side. When results from valid consultations, store visits, and transactions flow back online, the platform's criteria for valuing a lead also evolve: previously, the system mainly knew who watched content, clicked ads, or left phone numbers; now it can further determine who among these showed clear demand, who actually visited a store, and who ultimately completed a transaction.

Similar logic applies to other high-value, complex-decision industries. Education and training is another example. Increasingly, users no longer search only keywords like "postgraduate entrance exam," but type whole questions into the search box, such as "which exam prep institution is reliable" or "are there intensive boot camps nearby." The more specific the query, the closer the intent is to conversion. New Oriental has split its campaigns into two steps: first, using AI-powered search bidding for precision, where the system automatically generates campaign plans and uses content matched to different needs to engage proactive inquiries, funneling in those who already have demand; second, using deep conversion retargeting for amplification, allowing the model to learn characteristics of high-quality search leads and find similar users in feed streams for secondary touchpoints. Search handles "finding the right people," while feed handles "finding more of the right people." Combined, the high-intent signals from search calibrate the scalable reach of feed, creating a positive feedback loop. As a result, overall campaign volume increased by 75%, and lead effectiveness improved by 22%.

From home renovation to dentistry to education, high-ticket industries now form a complete operational loop: content and search bring in potential customers, DMs and human agents handle demand, stores complete visits and transactions, and results flow back online to influence the next round of content and advertising. Closing a high-value transaction ultimately depends on winning the customer's trust. Renovation companies display model rooms and construction cases; doctors build reputations through professional experience and patient testimonials; all demonstrate that merchants can fulfill their service promises. Now, the trust-building journey has moved further forward: consumers can form their first judgment of a merchant through content, search, reviews, and DMs before ever stepping into a showroom or clinic. This also means merchants must maintain consistency between online and offline. The services showcased in content, promises made in DMs, and products presented on store pages must align with the actual experience after arrival. For high-ticket merchants, trust is not manufactured by a single viral piece of content; it accumulates through multiple touchpoints and is ultimately verified in offline delivery.

On September 10, Douyin's Life Services division held a product launch themed "AI Lead Marketing: More Efficient, More Effective." The event revealed a possibility: as the platform's product capabilities continue to mature, offline-rooted businesses are worth rebuilding online, from being seen and understood to being trusted and chosen, with every step taken more solidly. High-ticket businesses are entering an era of deep cultivation. For merchants willing to operate earnestly and invest over the long term, growth is becoming traceable, and certainty is returning to trust itself.