After Alibaba Started “Making Content,” What Changed for Merchants Big and Small? | Double 11 Insights, Part 2

A string of questions now faces sellers: What are the new rules of the game? How does staffing keep up? How do you fight for Alibaba's scarce, high-quality resources?

“Making content” is probably the biggest strategic shift yet at Alibaba, a company that has to “embrace change” every so often. After more than a decade in business, it is also the first time Alibaba has rethought how it should “do e-commerce.”

When people relied more on PCs, search and home-page placement were the main ways to pull users in. What Alibaba built was essentially an online copy of an offline shopping venue. That is no longer the case.

Now that the phone is the most important thing people carry, the Taobao gesture consumers know best is the swipe, not the click. Alibaba, home to the largest population of shopaholics anywhere, felt the change earlier than anyone.

Add more sophisticated consumers and fiercer competition, and the fight for hard traffic — traffic bought directly — has become very hard to win. What matters most now is holding on to users, keeping them around longer. That is Taobao's new position: to offer “the joy of discovery” and turn Taobao into a tool people actually use to kill time.

Content is beyond doubt the most effective way to do that. Which is to say, the thing that gets a consumer to buy, or merely to pay attention, is changing.

Alibaba began driving this shift — or going along with it — at the start of the year. It means the rules of the game are changing, and these are the new rules for this year's Double 11. Plenty of merchants already felt it keenly at Alibaba's pre-event mobilization conference.

How did one of the most powerful companies in China turn itself into a content-led shopping guide? How will this new set of rules affect merchants big and small, and how will consumers answer? This series takes four articles to find out.

If Alibaba's new e-commerce story needs a turning point worth marking down, it may well be this year's Double 11. This second installment looks at what it has done to merchants.

Cui Shirong has run a women's clothing shop on Taobao for eight years. A month ago he attended Alibaba's Double 11 seller mobilization conference as the owner of a double-crown shop.

“This year Taobao's focus has been almost entirely on thematic things like Weitao, Trend Journal and iFashion. Taobao wants you to make your own content and pull in traffic from outside the platform.” He and his peers all felt it.

Trend Journal and iFashion — like the Must-Buy List, Taobao Headlines and Good Stuff on the Mobile Taobao home page — are content portals Taobao launched after 2015. Put simply, Alibaba uses words and pictures to tell you what is worth buying. Two years before those portals came Weitao, a social platform sellers use mainly to post updates and talk with buyers.

Xu Zhangxuan does not dare ignore any of them. “Alibaba has absolute say in China, in business as a whole even, so no merchant has any bargaining room in front of it. All a seller can do is fall in with what the platform wants.” Xu Zhangxuan is chief operating officer of Shisi Hangshi (“Sonnet”), a gift-food brand.

“My strong impression of this year's Double 11 is that there will be far more on the content side. Alibaba is putting special weight on content-driven marketing,” Xiao Haikun, vice president of Huimei Group, Inman's parent company, told QDaily. “It's the hottest thing this year. Tmall is running a lot of events around it, and we merchants have prepared a lot too — there will be a livestream every day from November 1 to 11, and from October 21 the platform is holding an official Trend Gala, with plenty of build-up every day and a lot of quality influencers picked out.”

The so-called “influencers,” as we explained in the first article in this series, are content partners plugged into Alibaba's system: KOLs, media outlets, independent media accounts. Once connected, they take orders from sellers, write copy or livestream for them, and earn a commission. Their work also fills sections like Taobao Headlines and Taobao Live. Sometimes sellers and “influencers” skip Alibaba's platform altogether and strike deals privately.

Hupu is one member of Alibaba's vast influencer system. According to Dong Xiaoqi, who runs Shihuo, Hupu's e-commerce venture, Alibaba held a Double 11 influencer mobilization conference a few months ago, attended by more than 500 influencers, to push them to take on more orders.

“We have always said we want users to be able to kill time here, to be filled with the joy of discovery. But to get that joy of discovery, the core is that the platform keeps creating new products, new things to consume, new information, new content,” Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang once said. At bottom, making content today is also about selling more goods. For Alibaba, more and better consumer content may turn into better-looking financial numbers.

Sellers fell in with Alibaba's thinking quickly.

“Our investment in content is fairly large. In the past more of it went off the platform, but this year the whole trend is that on-platform content is surfacing, and its traffic portals are huge,” Xu Jian, director of Inman's promotion department, told QDaily. “A traditional Taobao-born brand like ours reacts fast and sensitively to changes coming from Alibaba. We watch shifts in platform rules closely.”

Shi Lin, marketing director of the e-commerce division at BESTORE, thinks the turn of marketing toward content cannot be reversed. “I think sooner or later, spending on content marketing has to exceed spending on hard traffic — meaning traffic you buy directly.”

“Early on there was a traffic dividend, and as a platform Alibaba also leaned toward big brands, wanting a cleaner environment. In that period, the way we built consumer awareness was by working on product quality and improving our supply chain,” Shi Lin told QDaily by phone. “But that is no longer so special — everyone has started paying attention to quality and supply chains. Consumption will upgrade, competition will upgrade, and consumption will end up finely segmented.”

One result of that segmentation is that people's demand for information has also grown finer. Next to crude categories like “snacks” or “household goods,” an article with words and pictures, a styling livestream, or an online event a shop runs itself will usually draw more attention — and keep consumers around longer, spending more.

What puzzled Cui Shirong is that once shop marketing went “content-driven,” a new problem appeared: not enough people.

“Two people already couldn't carry the workload, and what two people could produce no longer reached the new bar. We needed someone with stronger writing chops,” Cui Shirong said. His shop, Xujiu (“Catching Up”), hired another copywriter this October, bringing it to three, who handle product detail pages, Weitao and Weibo. For an original-design women's-wear brand of about 60 people, three copywriting jobs is no small share. They also work on livestream projects and manage the links to “influencer” resources.

Xujiu is not alone in this. Talking with peers, Cui Shirong has noticed that “mid-to-upper-tier sellers all have staffing problems right now,” especially those who used to put almost no effort into content. As for Xujiu, its two founders came out of advertising agencies, which left them less at sea when it came to making content.

Money is a problem too. Luckily, for some small and mid-sized merchants the cost of content marketing is easier to control than traditional marketing, one reason smaller merchants have more appetite for it.

“Slugging it out on Zhitongche (“Direct Train,” a keyword-search traffic tool) or Zuanzhan (“Diamond Booth,” a targeted traffic-bidding tool) costs too much for small and mid-sized merchants like us,” said Xu Zhangxuan of Shisi Hangshi. Content marketing, he thinks, bends more easily than the old Zhitongche approach. “For a lot of the promotion we do, we would rather not pay cash — we want to trade goods or resources for it.”

Xu Zhangxuan would not tell us how much traffic content marketing has brought the brand, but he said, “The whole influencer system is already the center of our marketing. It now counts for more than Zhitongche and Zuanzhan.” Shisi Hangshi is also trying to hand copy written by its own staff to good influencers, which holds costs down further while keeping the quality up.

Xujiu plans to spend more on content marketing as well. By Cui Shirong's account to QDaily, the share of the shop's traffic coming through influencers and Taobao affiliates has already passed that of any other single channel, which is why he is willing to put in more effort — including hiring more people — to make content. He has also found that the old Zhitongche (a marketing tool priced around chosen keywords) mostly pushes single items, while a styling article or a livestream teaching how to put an outfit together can show off more looks, “raising the odds, directly or indirectly, that a buyer takes the whole set.”

Bigger brands like Inman and BESTORE see it somewhat differently. Zhitongche and Zuanzhan still take the largest share of their marketing budgets. Inman's Xiao Haikun thinks their content spending cannot possibly pass Zhitongche and Zuanzhan for now, “unless one day the offline business passes the online business.”

How eager a brand is to “make content” has much to do with the size of its business. Large merchants like Inman and BESTORE, which grew up on the traffic dividend, are used to old ways of buying traffic such as Zhitongche and Zuanzhan. Making content is a wholly new experiment for them: it is the trend, but its efficiency cannot yet be measured. On another level, large brands have mature data and channels for stirring up repeat customers, so their appetite for new marketing methods is not necessarily as strong as a small brand's.

That does not mean they take “making content” lightly. Xiao Haikun knows full well that “Alibaba is the traffic center of the world's internet,” and that ignoring the rules of Alibaba's shift would be fatal.

So inside Inman a content team of about ten has already been built, running content on Tmall (livestreams included, along with what goes out through influencers), Weitao, Weibo and WeChat. Inman now works with more than 400 Taobao influencers over the long term, 40 of them closely.

This May, Inman also held a Taobao-affiliate conference in Guangzhou, bringing in 500 Taobao influencers and opinion leaders, sharing the brand's marketing strategy with them and pledging 100 million yuan in prize money to content creators — influencers, internet celebrities, new-media accounts, app operators.

A month ago BESTORE set up a new department within its existing marketing planning division, given over to content marketing on every platform: Weitao, influencer liaison, livestreaming, and content made outside Alibaba's system, on WeChat and Weibo.

Shi Lin has noticed that the way BESTORE deals with Alibaba is changing too.

“The Alibaba account managers we used to deal with were mostly about sales targets. This year we have kept in touch with Alibaba's marketing and PR departments, and quite often. A lot of livestream ideas are made jointly with Alibaba — the consumer interactions during a livestream, say, or the moment to drop a shower of red envelopes,” she told QDaily.

What some small and mid-sized merchants understand but can do nothing about is that whether it is influencers or slots in the content portals, Alibaba gives its best resources to top-tier merchants.

“Take the Must-Buy List. Most of those spots probably still go to top merchants, the ones the industry knows,” Xu Zhangxuan said. “As a small or mid-sized seller, you have to fight for every bit of contact with the platform, constantly.”

Alibaba's reasons for preferring large sellers are plain: they have a bigger user base, so working with them activates as much of the existing pool as possible. The other reason is that large sellers can mobilize more, which means they respond to new things more thoroughly and completely — Alibaba wants the big merchants to set an example.

But ignoring what small and mid-sized sellers can do with content is dangerous, and Alibaba knows it.

“This year Taobao is propping up mid-tier sellers, hoping to build up the artsy women's-wear category” — the style category Xujiu's brand sits in — “so it can stand against Western-style fashion,” said Xu Yumin, Xujiu's other co-founder. “Alibaba knows its consumer base has got younger, so it wants shops with character and a voice to rise.”

To get more “content” onto the platform, Alibaba opened influencer registration to sellers. Put simply, a seller who becomes an influencer cannot make money from producing content the way an ordinary influencer does, but can team up with other seller-influencers, cross-promoting each other's products for repeated exposure. Both Xujiu and Shisi Hangshi are trying to run their own influencer accounts, working with brands outside their own category whose audience matches their tone.

What worries Cui Shirong and Xu Yumin is that their traffic has not picked up at all this year. “One thing is that new traffic is scarce — this year favors mid-tier buyers, so our traffic may be lower. The other is traffic from repeat customers: compared with 2008, who knows how many more artsy women's-wear sellers there are now. Over the past three years the growth in our style category has been outrageous.”

In a way this has only sharpened their appetite for making good content; it is where they are placing their hopes. “There's a bit of a snowball effect to it. Once Good Stuff recommends you, your traffic just grows and grows,” Cui Shirong said.

As it happens, Xujiu, BESTORE and Inman have all poured effort into livestreaming. The main reason is still Alibaba's push — on Mobile Tmall and Mobile Taobao alike, livestreaming has been given a conspicuous place. On Mobile Taobao, all 18 content portals across the first three screens are open to livestreams.

“Everyone's doing it, and Taobao promotes it, so we started too,” Cui Shirong said. They plan to buy a professional camera for livestreaming. “We had never touched this before, but you just have to force yourself.”

Inman has put two people on livestreaming full time. For the brand's eighth-anniversary celebration this August, they brought in eight former Olympic champions to livestream. “Stay close to the big trends, follow what's hot on the internet and with netizens,” Xiao Haikun said.

Alibaba, in truth, does not much mind whether the marketing takes the form of a livestream, text or something else, so long as it keeps consumers around longer and gets them to spend more. It is only that livestreaming is seen as the form with more potential. Alibaba and merchants alike are using case studies to prove how well livestreams convert.

In a sense, what Alibaba is doing now is what Mogujie and Meilishuo did before it, and what Xiaohongshu and Smzdm have done since — content-led shopping guides. The difference is that, next to a traditional shopping guide, Alibaba was born with the shopping itself built in, which brought sellers running at the first word; the two together then drew in a crowd of creators hoping to turn “content” into money. So you could also say that Alibaba's turn to content has affected more than sellers. It has affected the content suppliers all along the content-marketing chain.

For platforms that are part media and part e-commerce — Hupu, or the fitness-content startup Renyuxian VS Majiaxian (“Mermaid Lines vs. Ab Lines”) — moving onto Alibaba means not only turning “content” into money but also gaining a new traffic portal and a sales channel. From Alibaba's side, it has drawn in another batch of sellers.

This year's Double 11 is nearly here, and Alibaba reportedly expects 130 billion yuan in transactions. In the words of Wang Yin, founder of Renyuxian VS Majiaxian, what matters most about Double 11 is not only the push on sales but the chance to see every new marketing trick of the past year. And, he added, “this stretch of time ahead may decide how users feel about Taobao for a long while.”

So in ten days, let's see together what number that “feeling” turns into.

But as a consumer, do you feel the build-up for this year's Double 11 is less noisy — above all that the head-on advertising duel between JD.com and Tmall is missing? We will explain what is going on in the next article.

Cover image from:

Oboi-1920x1080.ru, ContentBacon.com