New marketing method for increasing followers on Xiaohongshu

If you often browse Xiaohongshu, do you have this feeling? It seems that many fields of Xiaohongshu have been explored by others. Even the reading field is subdivided into picture books, psychology, history, parent-child and other categories. It is very difficult to be a blogger or a brand.

The reason for this situation is that when a category appears, it is mainly extended through vertical segmentation in the early stage. For example, milk is differentiated into pure milk, fresh milk, fermented milk, reconstituted milk, yogurt and other categories. Vertical marketing is a way of infinite segmentation. Through this differentiation method, the brand can quickly open up the market, but the market is infinitely segmented, and there are fewer and fewer consumers, which leads to the dilemma of having no consumers to find.

Figure 1: Philip Kotler, Horizontal Marketing

Horizontal marketing is a horizontal creative thinking method relative to vertical marketing. By developing new uses for existing products, reorganizing products by creating new scenarios and locking in new targets, we can find a wider range of people, such as vehicles that are not pulled by horses - cars, a combination of toys + snacks - Kinder Surprise Eggs, and meals that can be eaten without open flames - self-heating pots. Horizontal marketing is a creative process that is more suitable for the divergence of creative content. It is a creative thinking and it is a necessary supplement to vertical marketing. In other words, horizontal marketing is not a replacement for vertical marketing, but when the market reaches a deadlock, we can use horizontal marketing to see if there are any new usage methods and scenarios.

1. Horizontal Marketing

Horizontal marketing is divided into 3 steps.

1. Choose a focal point

A focus can be something we want to focus on, a problem to solve, a goal to achieve. For example, what a book blogger should do, what a blogger who doesn’t show his face should do, and how to send roses on Valentine’s Day.

2. Perform lateral displacement to produce stimulation

Horizontal substitution is an interruption of the logical thinking sequence, creating a new blank market. In other words, this type of substitution is not common in the market. There are six main methods of substitution: substitution, inversion, combination, exaggeration, removal and permutation.

For example, taking "giving roses to your lover on Valentine's Day" as an example, here are the specific 6 methods on how to use them.

1. Alternative: Give lemons on Valentine's Day
2. Inverted: Send roses every day of the year except Valentine's Day
3. Combination: Roses and pencils for Valentine's Day
4. Exaggeration: Send a bunch of roses on Valentine's Day or send only one rose on Valentine's Day
5. Remove: No roses for Valentine's Day
6. Change of order: On Valentine's Day, the loved one sends roses to the admirer

3. Establish a connection

The core of establishing a connection is to make horizontal substitutions and rationalize the logic of the content. For example, if you want to send lemons on Valentine's Day, you need to think about how to achieve it and in what context to send the lemons so that the whole process goes smoothly.

Why do we talk about horizontal marketing when doing Xiaohongshu? Traditionally, when we do Xiaohongshu, we have infinite segmentation. For example, when doing beauty products, we divide them into lipsticks, facial masks, lotions, perfumes and other types. Although we can get seed customers in the early stage, in the later stage, the target population of the account becomes narrower and narrower because the segmentation is too narrow. On the other hand, using horizontal marketing can create a larger market. The accounts that have recently become popular on the platform all have traces of horizontal marketing.

1) Cooking Elvis

There are 1.17 million fans, with an increase of 780,000 fans in the past year. It is not just a pet category, nor is it a cooking category. Instead, it uses cats to cook. The kitten holding a kitchen knife creates a sense of conflict, generates a new category, gives users a new visual experience, and attracts more new people.

Figure 2: Cooking Elvis’s Xiaohongshu homepage

The three-step breakdown of horizontal marketing is that the operator first focuses on cooking, thinking that cooking is usually done by people, and using the inversion method, what kind of experience would it be if a pet cooked instead of a person? Choose a kitten that the user likes to cook, and then use the third step to establish a connection. How the kitten cooks, highlight the close-up of the cat's paw, complete the whole process, and finally the scene of the kitten enjoying the meal, and the whole video is connected in series.

Figure 3: Video account homepage

2) Xiaoxi and Xiaoshu

A blogger of couple comics, with 811,000 fans and 398.8W likes and comments. If he simply becomes a comics blogger, he will be trapped in the red ocean of teaching people comics. However, he can use comics to show new combinations of couple life and create a novel user experience.

Figure 4: Data on the most popular articles about Xiaoxi and Ashu

The three-step breakdown of horizontal marketing is to focus on comics first, combine comics with details of couple's life, and present the whole process. There will be all kinds of interesting little things in couple's life, and these things become the creative materials, which will brighten the users' eyes and break through the original comic crowd.

The above article talks about how bloggers use horizontal marketing to gain new markets. In fact, brands can also use horizontal marketing to achieve new breakthroughs. Take Panpan Food as an example. Traditional corporate accounts are all about advertising and talking about the various selling points of the products.

Panpan uses the flipping method. If the corporate account does not talk about products, but makes friends with users and extracts the core key processes, such as the recent explosive article, the official account will directly upload the chat records with users. Panpan, who does not play by logic, has won a lot of praise from users, which is exactly the same as the operation of Haier, the joke teller at the time.

Figure 5: Panpan’s professional hit articles

2. Conclusion

When doing horizontal marketing on Xiaohongshu, first think about the category. If the category is just starting, you can use vertical marketing to segment the market and occupy the largest category market.

On the contrary, there are already many bloggers and brands in the entire market. At this time, you can use horizontal marketing to think about how to create a new blank market through flipping, substitution, combination, and exaggeration, and then extract effective processes and construct the entire thinking logic to create this account and brand.

There is still a long way to go as to how Xiaohongshu can use horizontal marketing to innovate, such as how to use it specifically, how to connect, and how to shoot after use. There are still many new points to think about, which are also our thinking points for marketing. I hope this sharing will touch your thinking.