Text/Chen Feng
Edit/Midnight
In 2023, in the Chinese market, on average, each person will open 27.5 apps, open them 2559.6 times, and stay for nearly 170 hours per month. In other words, the average person spends nearly 6 hours a day on the Internet.
Mainstream products such as short videos, social networking, e-commerce, and communities have attracted more users' attention and have long become a part of people's lives.
When these products win more users and duration, they also create a new value depression for themselves and their brands - more and more brands are doing marketing and growth on the platform, especially in recent years, with the deepening of the combination of content and e-commerce, how to run a good business on these mainstream social media applications has become a topic that no brand can avoid.
However, in the context of intensifying involution, the uncertainty and challenges faced by brand growth around social media marketing are increasing:
How to continue to strengthen the user's mind and achieve growth and transformation? Should we choose brand marketing or effect marketing? How to improve the ability of digital and intelligent management, and how to seize the opportunity when the AI era comes?
The thinking and layout of digital storytelling, the leader of digital intelligence in social media marketing, is worth paying attention to.
On April 12, DataTelling Stories released its new strategy for 2024, "Social to Sales", at the "Social to Sales Insights Make Business Happen" intelligent marketing forum, with the core concept of driving business growth around data.
Behind it, DataStorytelling wants to provide customers with more accurate AI+Social data insights at multiple levels such as users, pallets, and operations, and use this as the starting point to provide business insights with real action value.
Wired Insight observed that the thinking and layout of digital storytelling about the growth of brand business is actually a step deeper.
At the forum, Dr. Xu Yabo, founder and CEO of Digital Storytelling, said: "The current social media is not only a life field that carries different lifestyles, but also an emotional field that witnesses the changes in consumer emotions, and it is also a brand vanity fair. When the Internet celebrity formula fails and brand power returns, "content + social" has become a new bridge connecting brands and consumers, influencing consumers with content and building user relationships and assets have become two major issues in the social native era. ”
Based on this paradigm change in social media marketing, DataStorytelling not only wants to provide customers with the ability to provide data insights, but also pays more attention to results; when most brands have not yet used AI capabilities, DataStorytelling has been vigorously deploying and empowering AI into products; DataStorytelling also wants to extend its services overseas to adapt to the growing needs of customers going overseas in the era of China's social e-commerce voyage.
The point is, how does the number storytelling do this?
1. Understanding consumers is the starting point of all business
It is difficult to measure and verify the effect and improve the marketing ROI, which are the two common pain points of brand growth for a long time.
Specifically, in the marketing environment where social media marketing is becoming more and more important, these two major pain points can be divided into the following points.
On the one hand, industry competition is becoming more intense, involution between brands continues to intensify, and the overall customer acquisition cost continues to rise.
On the other hand, user touchpoints are richer and more diverse, but people's consumption habits and consumption behaviors have become more elusive.
At the same time, as global marketing becomes a consensus, more and more brands will focus on multiple platforms, through a variety of content forms, and a variety of marketing methods to reach users, but the accuracy of marketing is becoming more and more difficult.
Improving digital intelligence capabilities is a game-breaking method, but firstly, many brands, especially small and medium-sized brands, are not aware enough, and secondly, many tools on the market also have limitations in terms of capabilities, that is, they pay more attention to the data and the tools themselves, but they do not go further and cannot be responsible for the results, which leads to the fact that there may be many tools on the market that are easy to use, but they still cannot help brands solve actual growth problems.
Based on the above points, it is not difficult to find that there are two key elements that brands really need helpers:
The first is to help brands better understand consumers, which is the starting point of all business, and the second is to make insights not only stay at insights, but also provide further action value.
The core reason is that Social has become the original battlefield of brand potential energy, and the boundaries between content, social networking and consumption are gradually blurring, and brands need to think about how to truly occupy consumers' minds and improve the repurchase rate if they want to achieve long-term sustainable growth in the stock competition.
Correspondingly, whether the platform can provide data insights with wide enough coverage, rich enough dimensions, granularity enough and high accuracy - the new strategy "Social to Sales" released by Digital Storytelling this time essentially wants to deepen these capabilities.
Under this strategy, Digital Storytelling hopes to take AI+Social data insights as the starting point, not only to provide customers with data insight tools and solutions, but also to go one step further and provide customers with "business insights with action value" and be responsible for the results.
On the whole, at present, DataStorytelling has built a full value chain solution from data collection, governance, analysis, modeling to business applications, and has developed more than 50 intelligent applications based on different micro-scenarios with the business model of "SaaS + PaaS + API", covering seven business scenarios of product innovation, brand marketing, content marketing, channel sales, interest e-commerce user operation, risk warning, and investment advisory.
Based on this layout, DataStorytelling has formed a business model of "infrastructure + App matrix + partner ecosystem". Xu Yabo previously revealed that Datastorytelling has built a 100-billion-level basic data platform, mainly based on global social media and e-commerce data, covering a wide range of people, goods, fields, and intermediaries, with an average daily aggregation of more than 100 million pieces of data, and the data can be traced back to more than 8 years.
Focusing on "business insights with action value", Xu Yabo's explanation is, "Simply put, it is to make data insights deeper and generate action value, for example, after customers read the data report today, they will know how to deploy specific actions next." ”
He took the popular interest e-commerce as an example to introduce how the digital storytelling product "Navigation Plus" has insight into the track and accelerated the nuggets. Xu Yabo said at the scene that this product hopes to solve three problems: where is the blue ocean of today's business, what products should the brand do in this blue ocean track, and how to undertake traffic?
To put it simply, through category data overview, sub-category query, sales trend analysis, traffic trend analysis and other category market insights, digital storytelling can largely provide reference for customers to choose a good track.
Then, the digital story combines Social insight and e-commerce insight, using Social to see the demand, looking at the user's use effect, using e-commerce to measure sales, and measuring the effect of channel sales.
Further, the allocation of social media marketing budget can also be achieved through the "Digital Radar· SocialMix" has become even more efficient.
Xu Yabo gave a case at the scene. A beauty brand, based on the story of "Radar· SocialMix" readjusted the platform allocation and influencer ratio of social media budgets, and finally optimized the ROI by 19% and increased sales by 260 million.
2. How to arm yourself with AI to accelerate the "common growth" with the brand?
For digital storytelling, providing "actionable insights" is only the first step. The next step is to deliver results to clients based on that insight, not just data and tools.
In the second half of last year, DataStorytelling launched the "DataStorytelling Engine" to explore the transformation of the existing service model of simply selling software and products, and trying to truly stand with customers and "symbiosis" with customers through the "RBX (based on income distribution) automatic settlement system".
"We want to help companies that can't afford to spend a big budget to do digital growth, to package all the digital tools we've accumulated over the past decade to our customers, and to help them do their operations." ”
Under this model, the relationship between DataStorytelling and customers is no longer just a simple "Party A and Party B", but has entered the process of in-depth cooperation, and Datastorytelling has become the role of investors to a certain extent.
In the process, digital storytelling has been explored more broadly and deeply—it has more and more things to do, and it has become more and more involved in building customers' digital capabilities.
AI is an underlying capability support that drives the big strides of digital storytelling.
In June last year, DataStorytelling officially released "SocialGPT" - the first business model focusing on the social field in China, built based on the massive social data of users, focusing on vertical business scenarios, hoping to solve practical business problems.
At the same time, based on the experience of serving 1000+ customers in 10+ industries for many years, and 1000+ business instruction datasets, it can comprehensively cover various scenarios of business analysis, inject open business knowledge graph into the model, and can be combined with mass consumer data for integrated training.
In this way, "SocialGPT" is actually more vertical and more valuable for commercial applications, and can empower more specific business scenarios, such as industry information optimization and recommendation, industry analysis and insight, user behavior analysis, product innovation, interest e-commerce attribution, etc., which can really be seen and felt to promote business.
At present, under the "SocialGPT" business model system, DataStorytelling has launched eight business scenario-based AI applications based on SocialGPT, focusing on scenarios such as "AI✖️ analysis", "AI✖️ content", "AI✖️ operation" and "AI✖️ service", and has realized an iterative development model driven by business efficiency.
When Digital Storytelling combines this AI capability into a specific business, it corresponds to the third step of its product service system and path - accelerating the process of providing customers with actionable value insights and providing customers with results, and improving efficiency.
Let's take a look at a few AI empowerment cases.
Based on the monitoring data of 4000+ marketing activities in 9 major industries, this product quickly extracts the voice, interaction, and keywords mentioned by consumers in an AI way, which can quickly help people who do social media marketing to find and analyze popular activities and refer to the effect of gameplay.
AI is also being used in various product planning to help drive product innovation. The Digital Storytelling product innovation solution can use AI capabilities to provide early consumer insights, generate "product concept cards", quickly generate product benefit points, slogans and product packaging designs, and simulate the perspective of consumers to evaluate and intelligently score concepts, accelerating the innovation and planning process.
In the third case, DataStorytelling took the lead in piloting the product "N Power of Datatalk" in the automotive industry, first based on the ability to analyze KOLs and KOCs on the whole network, select influencer accounts with higher ROI for brands to disseminate, and then accelerate video production through AI to quickly generate content. After the communication, the intending customers are discovered, and the specific car sales policy can be integrated with the KOL, and the referral can be automatically made, helping the brand to close the loop business system and effectively increase sales.
Finally, DataStorytelling co-created the "AI Nutritionist" with a partner, which was previously a customer of Datastory, but later joined the DataStorytelling ecosystem and became a partner in the "RBX" model of Datastorytelling.
"They used to serve the weight loss crowd and mainly made meal replacement products, but then we felt that it was no longer enough to only provide functional weight loss foods today, and what users really needed was weight loss services. To create an 'AI dietitian', our goal is to integrate different disciplines such as nutrition, psychology, and kinesiology into this product to serve users 24/7✖️. Xu Yabo told Wired Insight.
He said that to a certain extent, "AI nutritionist" is the next model that today's consumer goods should explore, that is, how to combine AI services, higher-end services, and consumer goods themselves.
In summary, from insight to content creation and innovation, to a large amount of operational work in the process of "symbiosis" with merchants, to the improvement of consumer experience, AI can essentially empower almost all aspects of social media marketing.
With the empowerment of AI, Digital Storytelling is actually acting as an investor and companion, and working with partners to accelerate the exploration of product innovation and model innovation, which is undoubtedly a win-win cooperation for both parties.
At the forum, Xu Yabo revealed that from the end of last year to the present, seven companies have adopted the "RBX" cooperation model with DataStorytelling.
3. Who will dig the big cake with the brand?
Cross-border e-commerce is a track that currently contains the most growth space and opportunities.
On the one hand, this is due to the penetration rate of online shopping, which is not yet highly penetrated in overseas markets. HSBC pointed out that the penetration rate of online shopping in overseas markets is growing, and the global e-commerce penetration rate is expected to grow from 21% in 2022 to 23% in 2025, but this is still far lower than the 37% penetration rate in the Chinese market in the same period.
On the other hand, Chinese companies have certain natural advantages when going overseas, such as a huge domestic supply chain network, and richer content business play.
To some extent, this is why, Temu became the most downloaded app in more than 20 countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany last year, Alibaba's Lazada was rated as the second largest e-commerce platform in ASEAN, SHEIN has accumulated more than 200 million shoppers around the world, and Tiktok has accumulated 1.1 billion global users, and the development potential of social e-commerce is huge.
The broad growth space of cross-border e-commerce is undoubtedly a huge business opportunity for thousands of brands that want to do business overseas.
Of course, brands seeking growth in a broader overseas market is not a simple process of "copying and pasting" domestic experience and capabilities, and in order to grab more cakes in overseas markets, they first need to deal with the core challenge of "localization".
To put it simply, in the era of strong content, companies that are good at growing in China need to rethink more specific questions, such as what is the overseas market environment, how to choose the track, how to play overseas social media, what are the user's content and product consumption preferences, how to quickly build an international content system, and so on.
Under this wave of going overseas, Digital Storytelling has also accelerated its layout in overseas markets, hoping to help more overseas enterprises gain insight and harvest growth.
Unlike in China, which prioritizes the establishment of a benchmarking effect by serving large customers, in overseas markets, DataStorytelling chooses to focus on the digital and intelligent marketing and growth empowerment of small and medium-sized enterprises first. Sun Shujuan, vice president of Digital Storytelling, said that she hopes to "use the most standard digital products to help decision-making with the most accurate and minimize the entry threshold for overseas markets." ”
At the forum, DataStory, which officially released its first product for global social e-commerce companies, "DataStory", is a data analysis tool that realizes hour-level full e-commerce data updates through self-developed big data models and AI algorithms, which can meet the personalized data analysis needs of industry practitioners in all categories, multiple scenarios and the whole life cycle, and help brands quickly gain insight into new opportunities in the overseas blue ocean market.
"Every overseas company first faces three problems, the first I want to understand the market, the second I want to choose the right goods, and the third I want to use high-quality materials to help me drain the traffic and make the business really land. Sun Shujuan said.
For example, in Sun Shujuan's on-site demonstration, she found that false eyelashes are a blue ocean market in North America through her insight into the North American market in March, because according to the insight results, the increase of false eyelashes in the United States is large, the user acceptance is high, and the market competition is relatively dispersed, and the space for new products and creative categories to enter the market is large enough.
"Glodastory" also launched the world's first intelligent product selection tool with full coverage of Tiktok and Douyin, which can help brands find potential products more efficiently and accurately.
At the same time, this tool also has a strong creative volume ability, which can improve advertising effectiveness and conversion rate through intelligent analysis and optimization of ad creatives, and help brands gain more exposure in overseas markets.
On the whole, it is not difficult to find that the service ability of "Global Glodastory", which integrates overseas market insight, intelligent product selection, and high-quality material running volume, is essentially the same idea and layout path as it has been emphasizing in the domestic market to provide customers with "insights with action value".
When this kind of product capability and service system falls on every customer and every partner, it is an effective help to help them enhance their brand power and reap sustainable growth.
Finally, going back to the origin of digital storytelling, Xu Yabo never positioned the company as a marketing company or a traditional IT company – but as a company that adds value to data.
"The essence of data is to help enterprises make decisions, and our main job is to dig deep into data assets to make them add value. He said so earlier.
From this, it is not difficult to find that from continuously deepening the ability to provide customers with "business insights with action value", to striding to explore the innovative cooperation model of "symbiosis" with customers, to continuously consolidating the AI foundation and accelerating the whole link of social media marketing empowered by AI, and then to accelerating the ability to go overseas, the underlying idea of digital storytelling has never changed on the track of social media marketing.
That is, to help customers truly drive business growth around data, which is also its most important brand proposition since its inception.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Connected Insight" (ID: lxinsight), author: Chen Feng, 36 Krypton is authorized to publish.