Taobao quietly builds a "full range" of content

The revision of Taobao Hot Search has brought a lot of exposure to the homepage. It can be noticed that many reports related to social hot spots can be found in Taobao Hot Search. In addition to the new content field of Taobao Hot Search, Taobao Live and Shopping have also started a transformation. Taobao is trying to create a closed loop of content consumption within the APP. What changes has Taobao made? Let's take a look.

"Taobao merchants are all very confused. No one had bought The Art of War for 10 years, but after Crazy Storm became popular, all the stocks were sold out."

On the night of the finale of "Kuang Biao", 6 of the top 10 trending searches on Weibo were related to "Kuang Biao", and 5 of the top 50 on the Douyin hot list were related to "Kuang Biao".

Behind the craze of watching TV series, there is an invisible player, Taobao, which can easily take over the hot spots of the entire network with its products. "The Art of War", "Sister-in-law" lipstick, "Kuang Bi" novel of the same name, etc. have created one Taobao hot search after another.

In the product review area, the owner of the app was pleasantly surprised to find that many users bought products from Taobao’s hot searches, which directly shortened the link of converting the public’s emotional points into consumption intentions.

The redesign of Taobao Hot Search has brought more exposure to the Taobao homepage. I noticed that screenshots of Taobao Hot Search are becoming more and more common in media reports related to social hot spots, and have even become a new source of news. Shen Fangjun, the head of public relations for Taobao Hot Search and Taobao Live, told me that the PV of Taobao Hot Search has increased significantly in recent times.

It is worth noting that it is definitely not a simple matter for Taobao to be a hot search. The deep layout behind it is that "Taobao hot search" is gradually upgrading to another content planting ground for consumers, becoming a major tool for Taobao's content transformation.

Nowadays, all e-commerce platforms have entered a period of in-depth cultivation of "contentization". In addition to the function of e-commerce shopping, Taobao itself also has certain content attributes, especially the encroachment of short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou on the e-commerce landscape. They have the inherent traffic advantage of generating content, and their GMV growth rate is obvious. Therefore, "content" has become a breakthrough for Taobao to tap into the incremental market.

In addition to the new content field of Taobao Hot Search, Taobao Live and Shopping have also started the transformation from "old-fashioned department store" to "shopping mall", allowing users to not only "buy, buy, buy", but also "go shopping". At the same time, Taobao has made a systematic construction in the creation of content marketing IP and content live broadcast ecology, trying to create a closed loop of content consumption within the APP.

1. Changes in content products: The strong rise of “Taobao hot searches”

Today, Taobao has three content products: Taobao Hot Search, Taobao Live, and Shopping.

Among them, hot searches are the most obvious and belong to the distribution logic. They have the fastest response speed and the fastest acceptance speed to hot spots.

Before "Kuang Bi", the popular cartoon "Chinese Legends", the movie "The Wandering Earth 2" and "Man Jiang Hong" and other film and television works have set off a peripheral craze. Less than 10 days after the broadcast of "Chinese Legends", the goose goose goose nesting dolls and wild boar memo clips on Taobao were sold out and removed from the shelves.

After the release of The Wandering Earth 2, Saifan Science Fiction Space, one of the IP operators, launched three peripheral products on Taobao crowdfunding: the multifunctional all-terrain transport robot dog "Benben", the digital life card USB flash drive + card reader, and the artificial intelligence MOSS. The original crowdfunding target was 100,000 yuan, but the crowdfunding exceeded 50 million yuan in 6 days, breaking the record of Chinese entertainment crowdfunding, causing Saifan Science Fiction to temporarily "close down". The most expensive robot dog "Benben" was priced at 488 yuan, and the transaction amount reached 150 million yuan in 17 days.

There are also movies that first brought out calligraphy and paintings instead of official peripherals. Within a week of the release of the movie "Man Jiang Hong", the search volume for "Man Jiang Hong" calligraphy and paintings increased 12 times, and the sales of "Man Jiang Hong" calligraphy and paintings in many Taobao live broadcast rooms soared.

The scope of Taobao's hot searches has expanded to various social hot spots and festival nodes. Li Ronghao's song made Wumeizi sauce popular. In the following week, Wumeizi sauce's hot search index on Taobao rose by 843%. Many Taobao merchants bundle Wumeizi sauce with Li Ronghao for marketing, with fancy copywriting such as "Ronghao's sweetness", "Wumezi sauce Li Ronghao recommends", "Concentrated Wumeizi sauce, smile sweetly after eating", etc., similar to consumers' love for buying the same items as the Spring Festival Gala on Taobao. After combining hot searches with social emotions, the purchasing mentality formed from hot spots brings new traffic to merchants. On February 2 of the lunar calendar, the dragon raises its head, and consumers in northern regions also buy dragon beard noodles on Taobao's hot searches.

In addition to directing traffic to stores, Taobao hot searches can also link to Taobao live broadcasts. In early January, Tianfu Cola was caught up in bankruptcy rumors, and its chairman Jiang Lin started a live broadcast on Taobao, which prompted Tianfu Cola to be on Taobao hot searches. Many netizens with sentimental feelings directly rushed into the live broadcast room and flagship store to carry out a wild shopping spree.

Previously, Taobao's hot search function was more mixed with the operation and marketing of a large number of its own market activities, such as the 618 strategy and the Double 11 promotion, which made consumers feel alienated. Now, the revision of hot search is based on the product dimension, and the product algorithm is completely used to achieve the spontaneous management of the entire life cycle from listing to delisting. This change makes the hot search content closer to social sentiment and more objective.

Shen Fangjun also mentioned that Taobao's hot searches are different from those on other platforms. Taobao's hot searches are not news topic searches, but real searches by users on Taobao based on social hot spots. Consumer hot spots are more likely to appear on Taobao.

At the same time, the “Guess what you want to search” above the hot search section incorporates the user’s own browsing behavior on Taobao to create a “one-size-fits-all” experience.

With the support of Taobao hot searches, Taobao Live has now also begun to be closely linked with hot topics.

During the popularity of "Kuang Biao", the actors who played the killers Lao Mo and Huang Yao promoted the novel of the same name on Taobao, becoming the strongest live streamers on Taobao. At that time, because publications were unpopular products, the Qingdao Publishing Group only prepared 20,000 pallets for Taobao live streaming, and Huang Yao and Lao Mo basically sold out within an hour of the show. This means that even without being a live streamer, the traffic brought by hot stars is, to some extent, greater than that of professional live streamers.

On the other hand, Taobao Live is also combining the ritual sense of special nodes, consumption and social emotions. For example, in the Year of the Rabbit, IP trendy toys, clothing and even spicy rabbit head and other delicacies with "rabbit" elements were very popular in the live broadcast room.

In addition, Taobao also has a more mature content planting system - "Guangguang".

During the exploration period of "content e-commerce", Taobao had content sections such as buyer shows, Weitao, Taobao headlines, and internet celebrity live broadcasts. In April 2021, they officially gathered on Taobao for "shopping", and the scattered UGC content and segmented consumer circle content were displayed and distributed more concentratedly.

Compared with Taobao Live, which uses transactions as its indicator, the key indicators of Guanguang are traffic, duration, number of KOLs, and PV, UV and other factors.

Unlike other grass-growing platforms such as Xiaohongshu, which "use content to induce transactions", Guanguang aims to aggregate and distribute decentralized content such as high-quality transaction evaluation content and consumer propositions on the platform, so as to give content vitality to trading tools.

However, Guanguang is still in the transition period. It is an important source of private traffic for Taobao merchants and has not yet become a large public traffic portal.

According to Wandian.com, this year, Taobao's product-related business departments adjusted their organizational structure, and one of the important changes was "Guangguang", which was merged with the homepage recommendation business and managed by one person. In the future, more content originally in the "Guangguang" channel will appear in the homepage information flow.

2. Ugly things competition, sand sculpture storytelling… Taobao’s “marketing IP” is becoming more and more content-oriented

Recently, the Weibo topic #Taobao announces the ugly things of 2023# generated 140 million readings, successfully allowing Taobao to achieve traffic landing.

The "Ugly Things Contest" is one of the most popular content marketing IPs of Taobao. It has been held for the third year. From the ugly human face clay case to the slightly uglier princess down jacket, the ugly products in various shapes and sizes have been promoted by netizens because of their overly exaggerated designs, sparking a heated discussion on social networks.

Behind the marketing IP of "Ugly Things Contest", the focus is on Taobao's efforts to connect young people, and the inspiration comes from Douban's "Ugly Things Protection Association Group" created in December 2019. So far, more than 240,000 people who like ugly things have shared and communicated in the group, making "Ugly Things" continue to ferment into a hot topic on the entire network.

This means that, compared with beauty pageants, ugly pageants can become a social currency for young people to express their individuality. It can also transform young people from viewers into participants and communicators, and derive more imaginative content. Some young people will even refer to the list of ugly things as a list of gifts to choose from.

To a certain extent, holding an awards ceremony at the end not only adds drama to the spread of the topic, but the "controversy" of the winning works also extends new traffic value and creates new topics for the competition.

The organizers of the competition told the owner that their initial evaluation and selection criteria were appearance, copyright, etc., but now they are paying more and more attention to the design concept, novelty, popularity, and whether consumers can easily buy them? Can they trigger a new trend? In order to catch up with the trend of young people, this year's original designers of "brain flower hats" even took the initiative to sign up for the competition.

For brand merchants, they are not afraid of products being ugly, but they are afraid of being mediocre and having no characteristics. Behind the "ugliness" lies a broader commercial value.

In the past year, the number of people who actively searched for "ugly things" on Taobao has increased by 900%. Take the muscular lucky cat, which was shortlisted for the 2020 "Taobao Ugly Things", as an example. After the IP image became popular, the designer cooperated with the trendy toy brand TOPTOY to launch a series of products such as the blind box of the powerful lucky cat, with sales of more than 10,000 per box.

There are many marketing IPs similar to the "Ugly Things Contest" on Taobao. In 2021, Taobao spent 1 million yuan to collect sand sculpture stories from the entire network, launched the "Taobao Sand Sculpture Story Club", set the 23rd of each month as Sand Sculpture Day, launched a grand award for netizens' sand sculpture behaviors, and later launched the Taobao Sand Sculpture Concert in the Sand Sculpture Series.

Taobao Sand Sculpture Concert

Even in the marketing of big promotion IPs, Taobao has begun to weaken e-commerce promotion information and look for content, fun and emotions that users care about. For example, during this year's New Year's Goods Festival, the promotional short film "I'm Back" was released. It was based on the special social sentiment of the first Spring Festival after the epidemic, focusing on "people waiting" rather than "people returning home" to create a restart ceremony for a better life.

This series of marketing IPs reflects that e-commerce platforms have begun to understand social phenomena and the behavioral habits of young consumer groups, and then empower them through content value, communicate with their own audiences, and establish effective conversions.

3. Live streaming content: Expanding the scenarios of purchasing content while shopping in supermarkets

In the past quarter, the most outstanding achievement of Taobao’s “content strategy” was the rapid development of Taobao Live in terms of content.

On the evening of February 27, the popular Douyin content phenomenon "Big Mouth Girl" launched her first live broadcast on Taobao across platforms. As the main anchor of T97 Coffee, Big Mouth Girl was once regarded by the founder of the coffee brand as the "Li Jiaqi" in the local life field.

In fact, starting from Double 11 last year, Taobao Live has successively snatched a number of top MCN agencies such as Jiao Ge Pengyou, Yaowang Technology, Wuyou Media, and Dongfang Zhenxuan from platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou. This is regarded by Alibaba as one of the few beautiful counterattacks against its competitors last year. Moreover, Taobao Live is one of the fastest growing businesses of the entire Taobao system in 2022.

If content-based live streaming is the "purpose" of Douyin and Kuaishou, which is to keep users in the live streaming room and make transactions through content, then the content-based live streaming that Taobao needs is the "means". Taobao Live has no shortage of users who place orders, nor does it lack super salesperson-type anchors, but as users' trading habits change and the logic of grouping goods changes, the anchor's shopping guide method also needs to change.

For example, if the anchor can cleverly add content when talking about the product, it may be possible to effectively promote orders in the live broadcast scene. The essence of this is to ensure professional product selection and marketing, and use content-based expression based on the personality to bring a sense of trust and professionalism to users.

Last September, when Taobao Live 2.0's "New Content Era" strategy was officially released, Cheng Daofang, general manager of Taobao Live Business Group, said: "In the past, many people's impression of e-commerce live broadcasts was 'hawking'. We have clearly defined Taobao's new value proposition of content, which is 'professional and interesting people will lead you to buy'."

Take Da Zui Mei as an example. Her unique content advantage on Douyin is her rap-style marketing and lively and funny live broadcast style, but her disadvantage is that her marketing is obviously greater than her conversion. On Taobao, in addition to simple rap interaction, she needs to strongly demonstrate her professionalism to attract accurate traffic and promote conversion.

It is reported that Taobao platform defines "Big Mouth Girl" as an expert in the coffee circle, and the coffee track is one of the main new vertical tracks promoted by Taobao Live this year.

This means that talking about content is just an emotional need of users, while talking about products is a shopping need of users. No matter what the live broadcast style of the anchor is, it must ultimately serve the purpose of selling goods. The content cannot deviate from the product, and irrelevant content cannot bring accurate traffic. This is also why after Taobao Live entered the 2.0 era, although the traffic distribution mechanism was changed, it only added the "content" indicator, rather than completely replacing the original "transaction" indicator.

In order to achieve "contentization", Taobao Live also provided corresponding support. On the one hand, Taobao Live held the first "China New Anchor" competition to discover professional and interesting new anchors, and invited Xiao Xiaofeng, Chen Jie and other top anchors who have already tried their hand at the industry to serve as star makers to "generate blood" for new anchors. At the same time, in order to allow new anchors to quickly gain a foothold, Taobao Live provided tens of millions of cash subsidies, hundreds of millions of traffic support, as well as the supply of high-quality goods and heavy publicity resources. Actors Wang Jiameng, Little P Teacher Perry and Yu Xixi-Miao Ye are all outstanding in this competition.

On the other hand, Taobao Live launched the "Super Newcomer" plan in March last year to attract differentiated and distinctive top content creators from outside the site, including Douyin blogger Ichiri Xiaoshazi, who has millions of fans, and celebrity Cai Guoqing, providing them with traffic, marketing resources, product selection, publicity and promotion and other support.

According to official sources, after Big Mouth Girl, it is expected that at least 50 heavyweight internet celebrities will come to Taobao Live.

As we enter the new content era, the internal competition in e-commerce will only become more and more intense. Contentization is an inevitable result, and the core point lies in how to transform "transaction" into "consumption". Transaction is an event, and consumption is a state. For Taobao at present, browsing does not necessarily mean buying, but it is more important than buying. Only when users browse can the platform occupy users' time, tap into users' needs, and then convert them into incremental performance.

Author: 24

Source: Doujiao TMT (ID: ylwanjia), the smell and temperature of new traffic, new technology, new gameplay, and new economy.