2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference: How can e-commerce players regain content dominance from Facebook?

In response to the e-commerce marketing trend in Southeast Asia, [Innity Media] (http://www.innity.com/tw/) global brand director [Wang Zhongqian] (https://www.facebook.com/isis.wang.18) shared the concept of “data sharing” with the guests at the 2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference. She encouraged e-commerce players in different fields to maintain an open mind and cooperate based on intersection points. In addition to exchanging lists, they can also gradually expand the scope of marketing.

Based on Innity’s experience in operating the Southeast Asian market, e-commerce players must first rely on data analysis in order to target the correct audience and correctly place digital ads across platforms (vehicles). According to data, Facebook and Google accounted for 92% of digital advertising expenses in Asia in 2017, indicating that they are bigger and can accumulate more consumer-related data. Therefore, the greater the amount of advertising, the more accurate the effect will be.

E-commerce players establish their own content center platforms to regain control

In order to help e-commerce companies collect potential user information in detail and no longer rely entirely on Facebook and Google, Wang Zhongqian suggested that e-commerce companies should establish a content center (Content Hub) to direct traffic back to their own content platforms in order to collect user information. For example, Pepsi and the Taiwan Tourism Bureau operate Content Hub in Malaysia, which has the effect of doubling Internet traffic.

Content Hub is defined as “gathering content from different media so that users who visit the website can see all brand information, product information, social media, news reports, netizen opinions and other related content in one place.”

Wang Zhongqian explained the functions and features of Content Hub with 6C:

• Central: Concentrate content that was originally scattered everywhere and integrate fragmented information.

• Control: Take back control of content, get back traffic from Facebook and Google, and track consumer trajectory.

• Conversion: Interact with the community and get more data through games, such as psychological tests, post points and badge points, etc.

• Curation: Content reorganization and management.

• Context: Content obtained through user or cross-industry cooperation (user generated content, UGC).

• Content Amplification: content extension application.

The benefits of establishing a Content Hub for e-commerce businesses include:

• Increase website traffic.

• Increase dwell time.

• Increase brand awareness.

• Add social sharing.

• Increase the number of registrations.

• Shorten the consumer decision-making process.

• Collect more and broader data.

Through Content Hub, e-commerce merchants can collect the following types of user information:

• Event: User login, purchase history data.

• Declared Demographic: User’s basic information such as age, gender, etc.

• Device and Location: Platform information such as browsers and operating systems commonly used by users.

• Contextual: Commonly used keywords, URLs and other information.

• Intent: The history of user search for products and watch lists.

• Ad Interactions: User clicks and interaction records on the website.

Example of Content Hub:

• White House of the United States: Obama White House Website Social Hub (Editor’s note: This page seems to be a backup during the Obama administration, and there is currently no content hub on the White House website).

• IBM: IBM Voices (Editor’s note: IBM’s Content Hub has been renamed and is currently the Social Media Aggregator. The webpage lists a list of social media operated by different units of IBM. After clicking on the project, a list of Twitter, blogs, videos, photos and other content operated by the project will be listed).

• P&G: P&G official website (Editor’s note: In the News section at the bottom of the official website, you can select All Recent, and all blogs, press releases and social media post titles will be listed).

*Pepsi: Pepsi Pulse.

*Malaysia promotion website of Taiwan Ministry of Transport and Tourism Bureau: Taiwan Tourism.

At the annual meeting event, an audience member asked, “If negative messages from users appear on Content Hub, it will affect other Internet users. How should we deal with it?”

Wang Zhongqian emphasized that Content Hub is a platform where e-commerce businesses can control the appearance of messages by themselves, so businesses can choose to allow the correct messages to appear and clarify them as soon as possible to achieve management effects.

Second-party data can be used to exchange cross-industry data to obtain a large amount of high-quality consumer information.

After collecting potential user lists and habits through Content Hub, Wang Zhongqian suggested that e-commerce companies can further utilize the concept of data sharing and obtain second-party data (lists) through cross-industry cooperation.

Usually first-party data refers to lists collected by e-commerce merchants themselves. Since user information is obtained on their own platforms, it is a list of small quantity and high quality. Third-party data generally refers to lists purchased from outside, which has the disadvantage of being large in quantity but not precise in quality. Wang Zhongqian believes that if e-commerce companies adopt a cross-industry cooperation model, exchange lists of points of intersection with cooperation partners, and combine them with the lists they have collected before, they can generate a large amount of high-quality information for in-depth analysis and promotion.

Content hacker advice: It’s not enough to just use Content Hub to gather content, you have to reorganize the content for the target audience

For e-commerce merchants, if Content Hub can centralize and control information originally scattered on different social platforms, it can also increase traffic multiples, which sounds like a good way to achieve multiple goals with one stone. But from the perspective of content hackers, if you simply gather all scattered content together, it is not easy to directly produce the effect of attracting customers.

Internet users are all interested in information that is “interesting and relevant to them.” Therefore, e-commerce merchants must first formulate a content strategy, unify the content based on the core concept, and then distribute the content to different channels. At the same time, you can use the method of operating self-media to re-aggregate and classify content for different groups.

Overall, if e-commerce operators can reorganize the re-aggregated content and establish self-media that is meaningful to specific groups (such as young working women, high school boys, residents living in Zuoying District, Kaohsiung, etc.), they can give full play to the advantages of existing content. It has even been able to expand further, using aggregated content to trigger word-of-mouth among the same groups, becoming the driving force for content hackers and growth hackers to drive product sales growth.

★ 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: To promote user growth, why not first decouple brand and content
• Master the secret skills: 2016-2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference Essence Lazy Pack
• 2017 Taiwan Growth Hacker Annual Conference: Make good use of content and growth thinking to make email marketing even more powerful

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