If you often use Douyin, you will always see some marketers saying that to use Xiaohongshu is to lay out 3,000 notes and then find top live broadcasts by Li Jiaqi and Luo Yonghao to reap the benefits. This statement is absolutely wrong, because the important reason for brand success is doing the right thing at the right time. Any promotion without considering the stages is just being a hooligan. If I ask you to build up your following as a KOC on Xiaohongshu and create a Perfect Diary, it’s obviously nonsense.
When doing marketing, you need to do the right things at different stages. At different stages, we need to look at the status quo of the entire category, consider user awareness, competitor conditions, and our own strength, and do the right thing, which is to produce content that complies with the rules of communication and brings about healthy business growth under the objective environment of the category. How to implement Xiaohongshu’s content strategy in different product categories? Let us first understand the knowledge about categories. In his book "Category Positioning Upgrade", category expert Tang Shisan divides categories into five stages: pre-category launch, category launch period, category growth period, category maturity period and category transformation period. The competitive environment and consumer demand of each category are different. When it comes to each stage, the content strategy focus is also different. Today we will focus on analyzing the content strategies at different stages. Figure 1: Category Development Stages (Category Positioning Upgrade)
Before the launch of a category: Expand the category and make the pie bigger
There are two situations in the early stage of category launch: the first is that the category has not yet formed awareness among users. At this stage, the category is small and consumers have little information about the category, such as health products NMN and cultured diamonds in the diamond industry; the other situation is that the category has existed for a long time, the market has the category, and users do not pay attention to the brand. This category stage is in the stage of "there is a category but no brand, such as chopsticks, chargers, hot dry noodles and other categories. In the early stages of category launch, especially in the first case, it is full of assumptions that have not been commercially verified. At this moment, lean entrepreneurship and positioning are needed to verify whether the category exists and whether it can be expanded. 1. From the perspective of lean entrepreneurship, there are two key points: (1) Verify two key assumptions: First, the value assumption: who are the customers and how willing are they to pay? ; The second is the growth hypothesis, how to add new customers or sales, and what the cost is; (2) Two major principles for reducing verification costs: Principle 1: Cognitive results are more important than commercial results, depending on customer awareness. Principle 2: What methods can be used to reduce operating costs? 2. Positioning theory perspective: There are three key points: (1) Overcoming the initial cognitive challenges of a new category requires naming the category; (2) Overcome the cognitive challenges of new brands, focus on original channels, and conduct testing with original populations; (3) Lower the entry threshold for potential customers by offering trial packages to attract more users and allow them to try this product category first. Specifically in the content stage of Xiaohongshu, users do not know much about the category and doubt whether it is useful. For example, the electric towel racks that have been popular in the past two years are in the early stage of category launch. When searching for electric towel racks on Xiaohongshu, the drop-down recommendations revolve around concerns about the category and whether it is a waste of money. Figure 2: Xiaohongshu user searches for electric towel racks Therefore, when writing Xiaohongshu content in the early stage of the category, the focus of communication is not on the brand, but on the category, conveying the value of the category to users and what benefits it can bring to users. After clarifying the value and benefits of the product category, think about who the target audience is and which type of influencer should be chosen to promote the product. Let’s take the promotion case of Fino Thick Coconut Milk as an example. Thick Coconut Milk is made from a blend of raw coconut water and raw coconut meat, produced through a cold-pressing process and frozen at low temperatures to maximize the natural flavor of coconut. The popularity of thick coconut milk stems from Luckin's raw coconut latte. The thick coconut milk in this YYDS drink of Luckin comes from Fino. Thick coconut milk is not used alone, but is more like vodka and needs to be mixed before use. How to use this product targeting B-end users to let more C-end customers know about the thick coconut milk category. When promoting its products, Fino did not focus on the selling point of thick coconut milk raw materials, but took the approach of hanging out with wealthy people, linking itself to Luckin Coffee's raw coconut latte products, appealing to the freedom of making raw coconut latte at home, telling users how to use thick coconut milk and how to mix it, stimulating their enthusiasm for hands-on experimentation. In addition, in the notes, it embedded price freedom, an average price of 6 yuan, and multiple reasons to buy, inspiring users to try this category. Figure 3: Raw Coconut Latte Freedom, Binding Luckin Coffee Raw Coconut Latte In addition, in terms of product specification design, SKUs are increased based on feedback from Xiaohongshu users to lower the threshold for users to try out the product category. Previously, a user commented on the official account that "students really need 200ml." Based on user needs, Fino designed a 200ml packaging design for tasting interaction. After the note was released, a large number of users participated in private messages, and nearly 3,000 users participated in the new product experience event, completing the first wave of brand promotion. Figure 4: Fino Thick Coconut Milk Official Interaction Notes Specifically in the creation of Daren Notes, the selling point of Fino products is not sold, but the category scenario is sold, that is, by mixing it with coffee in various ways, it becomes the homemade Luckin Raw Coconut Latte YYDS, and various production menus are provided to lower the threshold for mixing and stimulate more user participation. Therefore, in the early stage of category launch, we should appeal to the value of the category and make the category pie bigger, so as to allow more competing products to participate and revitalize the market.
Category start-up period: seize the dividend and strengthen the brand
During the category startup phase, the category name begins to be recognized, identified and spread by the group. Everyone knows the effectiveness of the category, a large number of users begin to accept the category, the category growth rate is basically 100%, capital begins to contact the top brands in the category, and some brands begin to receive financing one after another. At this moment, brands in this category should quickly seize the dividends and strengthen their brands. Specifically, in the marketing stage of Xiaohongshu, the core is to establish the product and complete the brand from 0 to 1. The official summary of Xiaohongshu is that a good product and a good set of content will make users recognize that the brand is a cutting-edge force in the category. Accomplishing this requires support from brands, users, and bloggers. Figure 5: Xiaohongshu's commercialization concept BKC 1. Brand: Understand yourself and find communication points with users At this stage, brands need to polish their product selling points and implant them into the minds of users. In the early stage, you can write notes from the perspectives of scenes, selling points, and crowds, and then use the official tools French fries and information flow to test the audience's acceptance of the selling points, continuously launch and optimize, find out the core selling points of the brand on Xiaohongshu, form a brief around the selling points, let bloggers promote the selling points, and guide users to try them out. 2. Users: Help companies spread word of mouth By leveraging the platform product "Good Product Experience Officer", we can see users' acceptance of brand products and their comments on the products. At the same time, we can also embed promotional cards in products that have been sold, allowing users to spread word-of-mouth based on their own usage experience. 3. Bloggers: Continuously refine and optimize the best selling points The bloggers of Xiaohongshu have real and rich personalities and powerful grass-growing abilities. They understand user needs better and cooperate with KOLs through the Xiaohongshu Dandelion platform to find experts to cooperate with to spread brand selling points. Ultimately, they form a set of standard briefs, identify qualified experts, and then quickly cover them. Before the launch of a category, pay attention to the value of the category. Whether it is an expert or a professional account, publish content to let users understand the value of the category. But during the launch period, you must let users understand the brand and the benefits that the brand can bring to users. This can gradually form a situation where users think of you first when they have such needs, such as Kongke pasta, Santonban coffee, and Xiaoxiandun freshly stewed bird's nest. At this stage, only when the brand is planted can it be a success.
Category growth stage: occupying a position and segmenting differences
During the category growth stage, when the category growth rate reaches more than 40% and the leading brand grows almost at double the speed, consumers have an effective and extensive understanding of category information and begin to search for price comparison product information through various media. During this stage, Xiaohongshu's content strategy is to seize category dividends, create high-quality notes, and use official promotion tools to seize the brand's differentiated position in the category. The old brands will find ways to occupy the category, and the remaining brands should seize the differentiated position in the subdivision. Example: Grilled sausage brand Rougandang Background: Grilled sausages have always been a low-profile category among consumers. In recent years, grilled sausages have become popular in convenience stores, and the attention paid to grilled sausages is also growing. The category is also in a growth stage, but there are very few brands that can be truly counted. Rougandang was founded in 2020. It aims at the consumption upgrade in the traditional meat products field. Starting from the appeal point of starch-free pure meat sausage, it occupies the position of high-quality sausage during the growth period of a category. In the group sharing, Rou Gan Dang, the founder, shared that in addition to Taobao advertising resources, he firmly chose Xiaohongshu as the core planting platform because it allows customers to accept high-priced products and has channel dividends in the short term. The major brands were evaluated on trial and error, test efficiency, GMV ceiling, simplicity of operation, and sustainability. Obviously, Xiaohongshu is more suitable for early planting. Figure 6: The founder shared pictures in Qunxiang. In terms of the delivery method, since the transaction chain of Xiaohongshu is Xiaohongshu content < Xiaohongshu exposure < reading volume < interaction volume < Tmall visitor volume < Tmall transaction volume, this horizontal assembly line is a cause-and-effect cycle that can form a closed loop. The vertical influences include competitor influence, blogger account factors, blogger content factors, and the brand’s own factors, etc. Therefore, we control the key nod pictures, content & illustrations, visit guidance plan, and Tmall decoration, continuously optimize the overall delivery efficiency, and then increase clicks and store conversions. Figure 7: The founder shared pictures on Qunxiang The first is click-through rate. Click-through rate is the first funnel, and the numerator and denominator are exposure and reading volume. After the expert publishes the notes, open a professional account, transfer the expert's notes to the corporate account, and test it through French fries or information flow. If the click rate exceeds 5%, and the overall UV cost of entering the store is measured and is positively correlated and acceptable, then this type of note can be released in large quantities. The second is the collection cost, which is the cost of a user’s collection based on the expert’s notes and information flow. The third is the UV cost. Go and see how much UV Xiaohongshu can bring you every day, and use this to calculate your UV cost. During the growth period of a category, it is recommended to penetrate one channel. On the one hand, this will allow you to understand the basic gameplay of this platform, and on the other hand, it will allow you to better calculate the effectiveness of the delivery. For delivery on Xiaohongshu, the core focus is on the search results of brand words or brand words + category words, and real-time data statistics. The fourth is conversion rate. Conversion rate is Tmall's business. UV is divided by the number of paying users, and then your conversion rate is looked at. The core assessment of conversion rate is the homepage image, main text, product strength, and visual expression of the details page. Layers of funnels are used to further optimize the delivery. During the growth period of the grilled sausage category, Rougandang promoted its starch-free sausages and invited vertical experts to try them. It also used official French fries and information flow tools to create a number of popular articles. In this way, when users searched for "grilled sausages, convenience store grilled sausages, Rougandang grilled sausages", there were a large number of notes about Rougandang grilled sausages in the top 50, and Rougandang seized a differentiated position in specific segments.
Category maturity: occupy the category and lock in the market
During this stage, the market structure has stabilized, the brand ranking has been established, and the combined market share of the top two brands is greater than 40%. The category will enter a relatively long period of stability, and the overall scale will steadily decline. In the early stages of the category, the differentiated value brought by product raw materials, technology, and craftsmanship is no longer sufficient to demonstrate in the competition. At this time, the core is to rely on the pull of the brand to drive sales growth, relying on the combined pull of content, operations, and brand. During this stage, brands of different sizes have different actions on Xiaohongshu. The big brands are more likely to cooperate with official organizations to hold events and promote various new products. For example, last year Nayuki and Xiaohongshu jointly held an event, a roasted sweet potato event, and they also promoted it through official brand events. The second and third brands have gained a stable position through market segmentation. For example, Cha Baidao and Baifencha have launched new products through information flow. New brands need to regain the opportunity to enter the market through innovation and carry out marketing according to the current stage of the brand. To give an example of a new brand breaking into a mature category, Xiaohongshu’s business dynamics released an article about IS shower gel. Background introduction: IS is a beauty and personal care brand under Guangzhou Mika Information Technology Co., Ltd. As consumers' demand for beauty has been upgraded, the "appearance economy" has fully penetrated the beauty and personal care categories, and IS was born. How to place ads on Xiaohongshu depends on the development of the product category. As a category in the household cleaning industry, shower gel has entered a mature stage and has always been dominated by traditional big brands such as Lux, Johnson & Johnson, etc. With the pursuit of appearance by Generation Z consumers, Xiaohongshu is the first choice for seeding ads. Specifically, seeding ads on Xiaohongshu is mainly done through the following three steps. 1. Fine-tune product selection to create personalized hits for Generation Z In the early stage of launching the product, we chose the milk-cap shower gel to launch the "New Product Experience Officer" activity on Xiaohongshu, which attracted nearly a thousand users to sign up and received more than 1,500 likes and interactions, verifying the potential of the single shower gel to be a hit product. Figure 8: IS product upgrade and iteration During the new product experience period, we utilized the user word-of-mouth feedback mechanism to fully collect user opinions, which helped the brand to carry out three product upgrades from the early stage milk-capped shower gel, the mid-stage milk-capped pearl shower gel to the later stage pump-out pearl shower gel. At the same time, based on the continuous feedback from trial users on the characteristics of the pearl shower gel, such as "white peach", "tea fragrance" and "sweet and soft", and their recognition of the concept of "pearl milk cap", and whether IS emphasizes the "pearl" mentality in subsequent marketing and creates the "pearl Bobo" appearance, the probability of the note going viral will be greatly increased. 2. Refined content and real-life scenarios support effect expansion "IS Is It" targets young users and combines the powerful potential of Xiaohongshu's data insights. It takes "product evaluation" as the main content and "summer, whitening, lasting fragrance, and moisturizing" as the main selling points to achieve refined content production. The notes revolve around "truth, beauty, and diversity" and choose "1 selling point + one scene entry". Three brand notes are created for each selling point. The CPC test of the explosive rate of multiple notes has been used, and 30 notes have received more than 1,000 likes, 11 notes have received more than 5,000 likes, and one of the notes has received a super high interaction, with more than 300,000 likes and comments. Figure 9: IS's collection of popular articles 3. Refined delivery: KOL pyramid delivery Rely on Xiaohongshu to see if the IS is stable at a delivery frequency of 30 articles. Lock in the KOL of the "Handheld Good Things Sharing" type of pictures and texts, and follow the Xiaohongshu delivery pyramid model. The top influencers use high influence to create broad awareness, the mid-level influencers pray deeply to stimulate purchasing desire, and the tail influencers create an atmosphere of national recommendation. At the same time, a reasonable proportion is made in search and information flow, and potential notes are continuously delivered to form explosive articles, expand the extension of competitive words, and gain within the site. Summary: Through refined operations and delivery, we can not only achieve sales within the site, but also achieve sustained growth in sales outside the site. In the mature stage of a category, the core of the leader will maintain its position, and the second and third will lock in the core position. As a new product, the core must reshape the appearance and needs of the original category and bring new functional value and emotional value to users, so that it can stand out in the mature category.
Category transformation period: new product innovation, changing track
During the period of category transformation, people's demand and understanding of categories are further upgraded, and the transformation will occur in two directions: natural fission of categories leads to category segmentation, or technological changes or concept changes lead to category curves. Category segmentation: The original categories will be segmented and optimized to derive sub-categories. For example, after years of development, the facial mask category has evolved from Yiyezi to the current medical beauty masks and smear-type masks. These are all born in the facial mask category. Taking the market of smeared facial masks as an example, the growth of traditional facial mask categories has shown its ceiling since 2019. At that time, brands on the market included Chando facial masks and Les Enfants Miserables facial masks, and their facial masks had reached the cost ceiling. The entire facial mask category was under sluggish growth. Against this background, the smeared facial mask category emerged, and subsequent categories were recognized by more users. A large number of smeared facial mask brands also appeared, and the industry entered a period of growth and maturity. Category curve, category curve will subvert the existing category supply and demand relationship. It is a new solution that will directly affect the original category brand ranking. For example, at that time, Apple mobile phones were a turning point in the category of the mobile phone industry, smart watches were also a turning point in the category of the watch industry, and Haotemai was also a turning point in the category of the snack industry. During the period of category transformation, whether it is a segmented category or a category turning point, the brand's content strategy on Xiaohongshu is to appeal to the entire category, to tell the core value and benefits of the category, to make more people accept the new category, and to gain a larger market. In terms of Xiaohongshu’s content strategy, today we talked about different categories and how to make targeted marketing plans on Xiaohongshu. We will continue to delve deeper into Xiaohongshu’s detailed stage-based marketing strategy later. That’s all for today.
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