Xiaohongshu Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper

With over 100 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu has strong grass-planting attributes and high spending power. In social media marketing where the cost of acquiring traffic is becoming increasingly expensive, the decision-making value of Xiaohongshu is becoming increasingly prominent.

In order to help brand users fully understand the content marketing logic and industry trends of Xiaohongshu, Qiangua Data has joined hands with the data insight consulting agency - Jiesu Consulting to launch the "Xiaohongshu Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper" to provide more comprehensive ideas and suggestions for brands to launch on Xiaohongshu.

01 Attracting new users and promoting activation - refining the essence, Xiaohongshu content marketing model

The essence of traffic is users. In the process of attracting traffic, user portrait is one of the most important factors in the selection of brand delivery channels, especially for start-up brands that are in the initial stage and have limited budgets. They should abandon the traditional concept of casting a wide net and use refined operational thinking to efficiently drive user conversion and activity.

In the "Little Red Book Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper" jointly released by Qiangua Data and Jiesu Consulting, the five commonly used elements in the actual operation of the Little Red Book delivery model are summarized: accumulation, nurturing, attraction, breaking, and exposure.

From building momentum, cultivating grass to detonating, breaking the circle and posting orders, these are all precise ways that brands reach out to Xiaohongshu influencers and user psychology at different stages.

First, KOCs are used to spread keywords and establish a cognitive foundation for new brand products. Then, mid-level influencers are used to conduct vertical reviews and professional strategies to strengthen the brand product reputation. Then, top influencers and well-known KOLs are introduced to spark topics, and then ordinary people follow suit and post their orders to form a complete communication chain.

The marketing strategies at different time points should also be differentiated. Taking Perfect Diary as an example, the daily content strategy is mainly based on single-product grass-roots promotion, with the purpose of maintaining the brand product volume. The grass-roots influencers are 70% mid-level influencers + 30% KOC.

Concentrate firepower and invest heavily during marketing nodes, using a full matrix of 10% top influencers + 60% mid-level influencers + 30% KOC to drive a significant increase in the platform's voice and quickly promote brand conversion.

02 Xiaohongshu content marketing logic, consumer behavior path - CAS model

Different from the AISAS integrated marketing model of traditional platforms, Xiaohongshu integrates Attention into Interest, Search, Action, and Share through Consideration, and combines them into a CAS model. This is a major feature of Xiaohongshu’s consumer behavior path.

Figure｜"Xiaohongshu Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper"

At the same time, users who actively search will use the search function of Xiaohongshu frequently. Especially when a brand focuses on increasing marketing investment or has major events such as new product launches, the search volume for the brand in Xiaohongshu will increase significantly.

"Everyone is using Xiaohongshu as a search engine," this is the voice of many Xiaohongshu users.

Xiaohongshu traffic logic

Xiaohongshu’s traffic logic has two core points: content tag matching and social relationship chain recommendation.

Content tags: After the content is published, the platform will label it with a series of tags and recommend it to people who may be interested. The keywords, geographic location and other information extracted from the notes are the key keywords of the tags. For example, if the user usually likes to read beauty notes, the platform will recommend more beauty notes to the user.

Social relationship chain recommendation: After pushing notes to some users, the platform will score the notes based on the amount of interaction and decide whether to continue recommending them to other users. This scoring system is called CES (community engagement score) on Xiaohongshu.

In the decentralized content ecosystem, Xiaohongshu's traffic distribution advantage is undoubtedly fertile soil for the rise of emerging brands.

Advantage 1: Equal distribution. No matter how many fans an expert has, as long as the content of the note is high-quality, it can be recommended and distributed by the platform and become a hit.

Advantage 2: High cost-effectiveness. Xiaohongshu’s traffic cost is still very low. The note exposure and interaction generated by high-quality content can bring high cost-effective conversion results to brands.

Advantage three: Long-tail effect. With the recommendation of platform traffic, high-quality notes can still obtain a steady stream of long-tail traffic even after being published for a long time, and can also be displayed at the top of the rankings in Xiaohongshu search results.

03 Highly matching the platform, people, goods and places, Xiaohongshu’s content marketing ecosystem

As the focus of "people, goods and places" shifts from "place" to "people", the corresponding marketing methods of brands are also changing accordingly.

In the process of capturing the minds of Xiaohongshu users, brand competition has become increasingly fierce, and digging deep into user needs and conquering niche areas has become an industry trend. Only by understanding the content marketing ecology of the Xiaohongshu platform and making targeted efforts on "people", "goods" and "places" can the cost-effectiveness of marketing be improved.

Figure｜Qiangua Data

People: Xiaohongshu’s main audience

Xiaohongshu's brand marketing needs to build a "people-goods-place" that is highly compatible with the platform. The first step is to be people-centered, pay attention to consumer tags, stratify users through big data, provide them with targeted recommendations and personalized services, and achieve new development.

Currently, Xiaohongshu has 158 million monthly active users, 64.3% of whom are female, and the core age group is between 24 and 35 years old.

The four core topics of Xiaohongshu users are: makeup, skin care, dressing, and food tutorials. Among consumer labels, popular men and women account for the highest proportion, accounting for 14.71% of all users; followed by students and those who love to buy cosmetics and skin care.

Goods - 7 types of goods suitable for Xiaohongshu

Unlike Weibo, Yitu and Douyin, effective advertising on Xiaohongshu is not divided by brand stage or product average order value. In this regard, the "Little Red Book Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper" summarizes 7 brands and products that are suitable for Xiaohongshu:

1. Brands that are not in a rush to convert;

2. Good-looking or novel products;

3. Products that match the Xiaohongshu user profile (female, young, high-spending);

4. Products with a customer unit price higher than RMB 30;

5. Own brand;

6. Have a well-established e-commerce operation team;

7. Want to become a brand with established brand reputation.

By aggregating the TOP 1000 products on Xiaohongshu from January to October 2021, it was found that skin care and cosmetics products were the most popular on Xiaohongshu, accounting for 50.56% and 16.99% respectively. On the Xiaohongshu platform, where women are concentrated, skin care and makeup brand owners have become the main force in note placement.

Emerging brands and mature brands have different marketing strategies on Xiaohongshu. Emerging brands have found a breakthrough for brand growth by creating brand differentiation, segmentation and regionalization, while mature brands have used Xiaohongshu to establish a new brand image that is younger, more valuable and more technological.

Whether it is a new brand, an old category, or an old brand, a new category, during the marketing process on the Xiaohongshu platform, it is necessary to conform to the development tone of the platform and choose suitable products in order to build a deeper connection with users.

Field - Positioning the "notes" and "experts" circles

The market is the link between people and goods. The market is established to better serve people and meet their needs. In addition to the Xiaohongshu Mall, the influence of the platform's content ecology on user consumption decisions has long extended to various online and offline scenarios.

Xiaohongshu’s circle of influencers constitutes a brand marketing strategy.

Celebrities and top KOLs (with more than 500,000 fans) can effectively enhance brand awareness and influence, and increase brand endorsement and exposure due to their wide influence, distinctive personal image and greater social influence.

As mid-level KOLs (50,000-500,000 followers), they have diverse personalities and are more approachable than celebrities. Therefore, they are more likely to form real word-of-mouth trends and are suitable for driving hot topics and hyping up products.

The more common influencers are junior KOLs (5k-50,000 fans) and amateurs (with fans within 5k). They are the largest in size and are the foundation of Xiaohongshu's community. They are also the cornerstone of brand traffic and reputation. They include a large number of potential consumers and are often used to share recommendations, buyer shows, etc.

In addition, the "Little Red Book Content Marketing Data Insight White Paper" divides KOL marketing into three types: focused, diffuse, and functional.

Focus type is to build a vertical KOL matrix, focus on key groups, and concentrate firepower to promote sales conversion. It is suitable for products with specific consumer groups.

The diffusion type is to build a pyramid-shaped KOL matrix to promote the diffusion of marketing information in stages, which is suitable for mass consumer products;

The functional type is to explore the different functional benefits of KOLs and support all aspects of integrated marketing communications.

When selecting Xiaohongshu influencers, brands should consider the influencer’s marketing effect from both the data dimension and the content dimension, and choose Xiaohongshu influencers with stable data, high-quality content and suitable for brand product launch, so as to avoid failure in the launch.

Depending on the needs of the brand at different stages, you can choose a marketing strategy that starts with quantity and then precision, or a refined marketing strategy.

The strategy of spreading the word first and then accurately targeting is suitable for brands that are launching on Xiaohongshu for the first time. Through multi-keyword and KOC spreading tests, suitable directions for brand promotion can be found and the brand’s focus can be found.

Refined delivery is suitable for brands that have a certain voice on Xiaohongshu. They choose high-level influencers to accurately reach brand users, shape brand product memory points, and thus improve conversions.

04 Conclusion

As content marketing gradually becomes the core of social media marketing, high-quality content is an important guarantee for the value of marketing activities, and is also a key factor that cannot be underestimated in leveraging sales growth and promoting brand conversion.

Xiaohongshu’s brand promotion should be refined and refined, and refined marketing should be carried out through the five major promotion model elements of accumulation, nurturing, attraction, disruption and exposure to efficiently drive user conversion and activity.

Understanding the content marketing logic of Xiaohongshu is a prerequisite for brand launch. Through Xiaohongshu’s consumer behavior path - CAS model, and platform traffic logic, it provides ideas and directions for brand content layout.

As the logic of various industries shifts to being centered on "people", the dilemma of traditional marketing funnels will gradually be broken. Through data insights into the content marketing ecosystem of Xiaohongshu, we can explore the blue ocean of tracks that can be developed under the premise of highly matching the platform's people, goods and places.