E-commerce platforms do content, and content platforms do e-commerce, which has been a hot topic in business in the past two years.
Yicai Business School's "All-Platform Content Power Evaluation Report" focuses on dismantling platforms represented by Taobao Tmall, Pinduoduo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Channels as typical cases from food, FMCG, home improvement, pets, tide play, flowers and green plants, etc., and analyzes the driving method of "content power".
If you need to get the full report, please pay attention to the official account "Yicai Business" and contact the background to get it.
Text/Wu Lingwei
Online merchants are generally facing the dilemma of rising traffic costs. Content has become a "business shortcut" for small and medium-sized businesses. They achieve exposure and conversion through live broadcasts, short videos, or low-cost drainage by leveraging the natural content advantages of differentiated products.
This article will introduce two small and beautiful merchants, one is the flower merchant "Zhou Jinsong Bowl Lotus" with Taobao as the main position, and the other is the home building materials merchant "ABC-STONE" with Xiaohongshu as the main position. They all cut into relatively vertical niche categories, and started from different platforms and different paths to achieve steady growth through scarce professional content and high aesthetic premium products.
Taobao store "Zhou Jinsong Bowl Lotus" is a 12-year-old garden plant store with more than 250,000 fans, and the best-selling "Newbie Recommended Opening Package" has accumulated sales of more than 10,000.
ABC-STONE, located in the Foshan Tile Industrial Belt, used to mainly sell stone and mosaic tiles overseas. After 2020, the international market shrank, and most foundries in Europe and the United States were plagued by the decline in orders. ABC has also begun experimenting with moving from exports to domestic sales. At present, ABC accidentally excavated an explosive product and realized a commercial closed loop on Xiaohongshu, gradually laying out Tmall stores.
Zhou Jinsong bowl lotus:
Professional content, created a "Taobao God Store"
Common problems in the industry: Merchants generally face the dilemma of rising traffic costs, especially niche pendant products.
Publish professional content off-site to drive free traffic to Taobao stores; Old customers repurchase and bring new ones, which constitute the core consumer group of the store; Relying on popular science live slices + buyer shows, it continues to bring content precipitation to stores.
Many brands need to pay for "drainage", but most of the flower friends take the initiative to find Zhou Jinsong's Taobao store.
In the niche category of bowl lotus, Zhou Jinsong is a big person. After "entering the pit" more than ten years ago, he began to sell bowl lotus on Taobao in 2011. Zhou Jinsong has a professional background in horticulture and excellent knowledge, and in the past ten years since opening the store, he has successively cultivated hundreds of new varieties, including the rather valuable miniature bowl lotus. His name often appears in vertical flower forums, sticker bars, and douban. The flower raising skills mentioned by Zhou Jinsong are regarded by flower friends.
Zhou Jinsong said that he has never bought traffic on Taobao in the past few years. In recent years, because of the recruitment of a team and the need to expand sales, a small amount of payment has begun, and the through train fee during peak hours is only more than 300, and the maximum time does not exceed 500 yuan. His store has 100,000 orders a year, more than 30% of whom are regular customers, and more than 30% of whom are new customers who are recommended by regular customers.
Due to the strong seasonality of bowl lotus, Zhou Jinsong only does business for half a year, from March 1 to August 31. From March to August, he streamed live for three hours a day. After September, it is broadcast for one hour every two or three days. Although the live broadcast is not long, and the main purpose is not to sell goods, but to answer the question of raising flowers, Zhou Jinsong's peak broadcast can attract 200,000 viewers.
A few years ago, Zhou Jinsong would post a short video on Douyin Kuaishou with a Taobao link. But after Douyin Kuaishou built its own e-commerce closed-loop and broken chain, he directly traded through short videos on the content platform.
Douyin's large traffic has significantly driven sales, and the proportion of sales contributed has gradually expanded. But Douyin also brings "troubles", on the one hand, due to the small size of the team, the lack of delivery manpower after the explosion, on the other hand, due to the limited production of Douyin this year, it is sometimes difficult to catch up with Douyin's 15-day pre-sale period (90 days on Taobao).
At present, Zhou Jinsong's main position is still Taobao, accounting for 60% of sales. His Taobao store, a content-based store, is also the largest gathering place for domestic bowl lotus lovers: there are live broadcasts of popular science lotus cultivation techniques, live broadcast explanations of slices, and buyers' flower planting results. Every time a new variety is bred, Zhou Jinsong will collect a name for them - because the consumers who come from the content are also creating content.
Content-based merchants like Zhou Jinsong have created scarce content through their expertise, created a Taobao God store, and brought a steady stream of off-site traffic to Taobao.
ABC-STONE：
Foreign trade merchants achieve payment testing + sales in Xiaohongshu
Common problems in the industry: foreign trade merchants turn to domestic sales, consumer groups change - toB to toC, overseas markets to the Chinese market, how to choose the right sales channel? How to break through the difficulties of product selection and content strategy according to consumer groups?
In terms of product selection, it mainly promotes high-aesthetic premium products that conform to the tonality of the platform; In terms of content, from the perspective of factory production to the perspective of consumption scenarios.
Domestic traditional building materials wholesalers mainly sell goods through real estate or commercial real estate engineering projects, but most of these channels are saturated, and the investment is heavy and the capital risk is high. After ABC-STONE decided to switch from export to domestic sales, founder Zhu Weilong tried to promote it through Xiaohongshu, but at first fell into two misunderstandings:
First, product selection strategy. Originally, he wanted to clear the inventory of stone and mosaic in Xiaohongshu, but because the mosaic did not conform to the current trend of domestic decoration style, it was troublesome to decorate. In addition, there is no differentiated competitive advantage for such goods, and many upstream suppliers have begun to sell goods through Xiaohongshu or Douyin because they cannot receive orders, and the price is more competitive than ABC.
Second, content strategy. This content is based on the production perspective, focusing on the production equipment and technology of stone. But Zhu Weilong found that Xiaohongshu users were not interested in the production process on the factory side, and only wanted to see the final effect, and it was the actual scene.
In 2021, ABC's collaboration with a designer was a turning point. The designer made a doorknob out of natural stone, and when Zhu Weilong posted the renderings to Xiaohongshu, the post quickly exploded, and many people left messages asking for quotations and asking for the same style.
This allowed ABC to also change its product strategy: from mass-style stone to finished door handles with a sense of design. At the same time, in addition to showing details, he also began to pay attention to design scenes and real cases, almost all of which came from real shooting.
Although the price of a doorknob is as high as 800 yuan, it has scarcity and aesthetic value due to design, and it is quickly supported by Xiaohongshu's traffic. ABC officially opened its store in Xiaohongshu Mall in August this year, and by mid-September, sales from Xiaohongshu and Taobao reached 100,000 yuan (Taobao did not do any promotion, and the customer source was completely from Xiaohongshu traffic spillover). Just one item of the doorknob has sold tens of thousands of sales through Xiaohongshu. Most of the current customers are clothing stores, coffee shops and homestay owners.
Traditional foreign trade requires wholesalers to pay for goods in advance, and cost pressure is high. The closed-loop of planting grass and transaction realized in Xiaohongshu has brought several benefits to a traditional foreign trade brand such as ABC:
1. Low cost or even zero cost to reach users;
2. Xiaohongshu has three delivery methods: second delivery, delivery within 24 hours, and self-set delivery time. Set the delivery time by yourself to leave time for stone customization, collect cash, do not need to pledge the payment in advance, and the cost pressure is low;
3. Adjust the product direction through content feedback to test what kind of product is popular in the market.