Strengthen your social penetration—learn from Content Hacker

This article is written by Qin Zhenjia and was originally published in the January 2018 issue of “English Island” magazine. Thanks to English Island for authorizing the reprint. Thank you hereby.

For ordinary consumers like you and me, we are bombarded with advertising copy and videos every day. From TV commercials, mobile videos, to printed promotional catalogs or leaflets, it is so tiring that apart from occasionally paying attention to whether there are special offers, it is probably difficult to be attracted to learn more about product information.

Marketers are also troubled. They hold briefings and seminars, buy or accumulate lists over and over again, and the effect of attracting customers becomes worse and worse. It makes people want to shout, where is the end?

Marketing methods evolve from “Push” to “Pull”

Traditional marketing methods, such as advertisements, press releases, promotional activities, etc., all represent push marketing in which companies push product features or images to consumers. If you want potential customers to come to your door automatically, in addition to push, you must also generate a pull force like the centripetal force of fans of Apple products. The person responsible for promoting pull marketing is Content Hacker).

The task of content hackers is not to directly sell products or services and reduce the level of the product, but to deeply explore the relationship between the product and the target audience through observation and recognition from an external perspective. In this way, consumers can understand that the features of these products or services are specially designed for them.

Finding an angle that relates to your target audience is just the beginning of content hacking. The next important task is to formulate a content communication strategy, use content methods that are acceptable to the target audience, and continuously and stably produce content that attracts the target audience and improves or helps them.

Use “homely talk” as a weapon to break the advertising wall

Taking girls’ intimate products as an example, Taiwan’s sanitary napkin market has long been dominated by several large manufacturers, such as Reliable, Sophie and Haozizai. Brand recognition of consumer products is very important. If you want to open up exports, you usually have to pay huge advertising costs and intensively bombard the target audience to leave an impression in their minds.

Taiwan’s local latecomer [Icon Biotechnology] (https://www.icon99.com.tw/) did not use head-on advertising to emphasize the characteristics of sanitary napkins and challenge this seemingly unbreakable wall. Aikang’s female operation team has adopted a content marketing communication method of cordial greetings, using the content strategy of “I am your friend” instead of “I know better than you” or “I am cute for you”, and operates the market step by step through Facebook fan groups.

Aikang has more than 100,000 Facebook fans (as of January 10, it has accumulated to 101,126 fans), which is more than the market leading brand [Hao Zuizai](https://www.facebook.com/Whisper.Tai wan/) (97,000), Sophy (83,000) and Reliable (65,000) all came in large numbers, which is the result of the efforts of the management team.

In the posts of iKang’s fan club, in addition to the inevitable promotional activities, most of them are homely and warm messages, such as the CEO has changed computer screens for employees, and the boss wants to greet consumers when he returns home. In addition, homemade funny videos or pictures are also used to introduce the features of sanitary napkin products to the female public, such as the exaggerated comparison of piglets passing through sanitary napkins and being sucked into pork jerky, to shorten the distance between them and the female target audience.

★ If you want to strengthen your content power and become a content hacker, please refer to the [“Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands”] (https://goo.gl/XEK2Dv) online course.

★This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of “English Island” magazine. Thank you to English Island for authorizing the reprint. We hereby express our gratitude.

---

Further reading

• 6 steps to teach you how to master content marketing
• Thinking from the reader’s perspective─How to write valuable articles?
• Content marketing evolves again: Content hackers who create new thinking

---