2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference: Can inbound marketing resurrect Taiwan’s e-commerce industry?

The author of this article is Qin Zhenjia, co-founder of the content hacking website.

Faced with Facebook’s strong attack, the end result is a near-monopoly on online advertising. However, due to the tight situation of high advertising costs, where should Taiwan’s e-commerce companies go? There is no other way out. In fact, it is to actively look for other alternatives to spread risks and reduce costs.

In the forum “Future E-commerce Growth Strategies from Inbound Marketing” at the 2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference, the organizer invited industry experts such as Qiu Yuting, Li Zhenwei, Jian Shijie and Xu Youjian to discuss the use of a wider range of inbound marketing (inbound marketing), combining pull (content) and push (advertising, public relations), to become a new driving force for e-commerce growth. Lin Siwu, the founder of awoo SEO, was the first to mention that the current trend of e-commerce is evolving from short and fast advertisements to content shopping guides that require a longer period of time.

Insight into consumer needs, content hacking has a niche

From the perspective of content hacker, this means that in order to cope with the increase in Facebook advertising costs, e-commerce companies must take advantage of [owned content management] media)](https://www.contenthacker.today/2017/11/2018-contentmarketing-trends-summary.html), combined with the existing digital advertising (paid media) and public relations mechanism (earned media), a multi-pronged approach; only in this way can consumers’ interest and trust be increased, and they can be successfully guided to the landing page (landing page), and then gradually guided to the shopping process.

All starting points are whether content hackers can insight into consumer needs and find out the relationship with product features? Then, corresponding content is generated based on the channels preferred by consumers.

Is it the right answer for e-commerce growth to change to customer-based marketing? And there is no fixed process to follow?

Qiu Yuting, general manager of Paganiniplus (https://www.paganiniplus.com/), described inbound marketing as allowing target audiences to land and inbound to the e-commerce merchant’s sales webpage. However, inbound marketing does not rely only on pull force as most people imagine, but on pull force as the main body, and it must also be driven by push force.

In the past, the main reason why e-commerce companies did not use inbound marketing was that “it is very tiring to do”. The reason is that there are too many channels for the target audience to enter, resulting in no fixed process. To invest in inbound marketing, e-commerce merchants must first define the main axis to make the main core statements consistent; then analyze the starting point of the target audience’s needs, in order to achieve the purpose of hooking the target audience with touch points.

E-commerce merchants must give priority to the needs of the target audience, that is, issues of humanity and importance, and guide them through pull and push channels. At the same time, they must adjust the proportion of different channels based on the target audience’s response; and design different landing pages for different audiences to attract the target audience to stay.

• Pull channels: SEO, word-of-mouth marketing, blog marketing, public relations/press releases, forum posts, online videos, bookmarking websites.
• Push channels: advertising banners, keyword advertising, social media operations, email marketing, Q&A website operations, TV advertising, radio advertising, search engine marketing.

Picture source: Qiu Yuting

The “inbound marketing” suggested by Qiu Yuting, the process is as follows:

• Step 1 Brand voice: Use public relations to release information and build brand image.
• Step 2 Demand Generation: Find the connection between consumer needs and product features.
• Step 3: Capture prospective customers: Use Facebook Pixel, LINE, and official website to collect target lists.
• Step 4 Prospective customer training: Provide focused content based on consumer habits.
• Step 5: Purchase stage: The target audience will conduct a second search (some as many as 10 times), looking for online reviews and unboxing articles, and the industry must prepare corresponding content in advance.
• Step 6 Customer generation: The target object places an order to purchase and becomes a real user.
• Step 7 Product Delivery: Deliver products/services as early as possible.
• Step 8 After-sales customer service: Create user generation content (UGC) with good customer service, and create user recommendations and referral reward mechanisms. User-generated content can generate 50% more traffic than industry-generated content.

Jian Shijie, founder of Yoda, added that e-commerce merchants do not necessarily need to use all inbound marketing channels, but it is recommended to use a few of them to establish a complete process from beginning to end, so that all personnel in the company are familiar with the overall operation and results, so that there is room for adjustment and improvement.

Overall, although inbound marketing is not a new idea, it has powerful effects and is worthy of relevant industry players’ time to invest in research.

★ Content Hacking Activity Preview:

• January 2018 Content Hacking Lecture (CHL3)─Create your content marketing strategy
• February 2018 Content Hacking Lecture (CHL4)─Creating calls to action for your content

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Further reading

• 2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference: Green Vine Vitality, using warm content marketing to create atypical rapid growth
• 2018 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference: “Pinecone Shopping” has suddenly emerged, and the key to success lies in the introduction of artificial intelligence
• Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference 2018: Guo Jiaqi reviews his entrepreneurial journey and drives e-commerce growth through data and advertising

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