Hong Kong Means Business - Delivering market intelligence to millions of businesses anytime and anywhere.
Characterised by free trade and low taxation, the city of Hong Kong has long been regarded as one of the world’s most significant trade market economies in the world. Established in 1966 for millions of Hong Kong-based manufacturers, traders and services providers, Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) is a statutory body with more than 40 offices around the world. It is the international marketing arm for the city of Hong Kong - “Asia’s World City”.
With over 50 years of market intelligence on how to do business in Hong Kong, China and Asia in general, HKTDC came to us with a challenge - How could we leverage digital to share the best and latest industry insights on how to do business in Asia with millions of SME (small & medium enterprises) from around the world?
Design for the needs of the end-users first and foremost.
HKTDC has a wealth of market research and event information that it shares with a wide range of clients. Our challenge was creating an integrated digital experience that would not only speak to new audiences who wanted to do business in Asia, but an experience that would address the needs of the many target audiences who were already doing business in Asia as well.
After extensive field research and interviews, the idea of the “Hong Kong Means Business” portal was born. It would act as an integrated engagement platform for a variety of business audiences to consume, share, and engage market intelligence across multiple devices and platforms. It would be a tool our target audiences would want to use; it would provide customized, personalized and relevant content catered to these audiences’ interests and behaviors.
Understanding the needs of target audiences was key to developing the concept. But to come up with features that would make the most impact, our UX, UI design and development team needed to learn about their existing behaviors.
Out of the research and discovery, one thing was clear: Our target audiences consumed content only if it was personalized to them. They are only interested in content relevant to their individual interests and needs, accessible across all of their devices. If we wanted end-users to consume more content from HKTDC, we needed to innovate the way content was being delivered.
Changed behavior as the measure of innovation.
We worked closely with HKTDC’s marketing and IT team on an overall content audit to determine the content taxonomy and overall strategy. Because of the breadth of content available, we not only had to develop a sound content strategy but a scalable technical infrastructure to ensure seamless management and distribution of the content across all the delivery platforms (email, mobile, and desktop) A light-weight custom CMS (content management system) was built on top of their existing enterprise infrastructure to ensure nimbleness and flexibility of real-time content updates, without jeopardizing existing operations.
In addition to the backend infrastructure, we designed a responsive interface to allow maximum flexibility and scalability to address the needs of their current, and future, target audiences. In addition to the “Hong Kong Means Business” news portal, we built an intelligent, learning platform to track and learn from end-user behaviors so the team at HKTDC could deliver relevant, personalized content in almost real-time to user’s email inboxes, as well as online portal experiences to their mobile, tablet and laptop/desktop devices.
The “Hong Kong Means Business” portal was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from both the HKTDC internal team and their end-users. With over one million subscribers and counting, HKTDC has already seen dramatic increases in reading time, consumption rate and overall engagement. The portal has led to a change in how end-users consume content. And that content is more relevant than ever.
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Product research
Product strategy
UX/UI design
Mobile & web development
Content Management System (CMS) design & development
