The brand marketing code of Xiaohongshu!

I have been dissecting Xiaohongshu accounts recently and have seen many interesting accounts that have achieved both account follower growth and brand promotion. During the disassembly process, I discovered an interesting current situation. In the beauty category, there are million-level bloggers such as Cheng Shian, Luo Wangyu, and Aiya, while bloggers in reading and financial management rarely have more than 300,000 followers on Xiaohongshu.

What is the reason behind this? Is it because the platform does not provide enough traffic support? No star effect? These are all related to a certain extent, but none of them are entirely correct. When we dig deeper, we find that the secret to the rise of these bloggers lies in – category.

What is a category?

The simplest and crudest expression is the consumer's classification of information, which is the first level unit of consumer memory and understanding. When we enter a room, we will classify the items in the room into categories such as beds, curtains, and cups. Consumers think in terms of categories and express themselves with brands. After seeing a water cup, they will wonder whether it is a Thermos, Lock&Lock or Hexu cup.

By giving this example, everyone can understand that brands are parasitic on categories, and the ceiling of a brand is determined by its category. Why do many beauty bloggers on Xiaohongshu have over a million fans? The core reason is that the platform started with beauty and fashion, with a large source of people and a high degree of brand commercialization. Why don't there be top bloggers (with millions of fans) in the book category? Because in the Xiaohongshu category, this market is small and users are just starting to recommend books on Xiaohongshu. This also confirms a saying that not only people, but even categories are unequal from birth.

Knowing that big categories give birth to big bloggers and small categories have small bloggers, if we want to be bloggers or brands, how should we choose the category that suits us? Let’s take personal bloggers as an example to see how to quickly succeed in this category.

Current status of Xiaohongshu blogger categories

Xiaohongshu bloggers mainly cover 15 major categories, including beauty and skin care, fashion, jewelry and accessories, food and beverages, home furnishings, maternal and child early education, fitness and fat loss, cute pets, travel and accommodation, education/career growth, psychological emotions, business and finance, art and design, technology and digital, photography and other categories. Food, beauty and fashion are also the topics that users pay the most attention to. Choosing this track will make it easier to gain attention from users.

Figure 1: Current status of Xiaohongshu categories

There are also sub-sectors under different categories, such as the 15 popular tracks on Xiaohongshu in the figure below, which produce different content forms and different monetization methods.

Figure 2: Pick out Xie Wudi’s track selection

Taking the beauty and skin care category as an example, it is divided into skin care, makeup, body care, manicure and medical beauty and plastic surgery. Assuming that as a blogger, you choose the first-level category of skin care, the competition will be fierce. For new bloggers, it is recommended to choose the secondary categories under skin care, such as facial skin care, eye skin care, lips, sun protection, beauty instruments, and skin care tools as the core direction first.

In terms of content format, the skin care field includes beauty guides, product recommendations, product reviews, etc. We still need to think about which format to choose, because third-level categories like product recommendations and reviews have already been made by many people, so the competition we face will naturally be greater if we enter the field.

Example: I can’t eat enough steamed buns

34,000 followers, focusing on lipstick reviews in the beauty field. In terms of evaluation method, upper and lower lips are evaluated, which has a stronger sense of conflict. Choose lipstick sharing from the skin care category and open its good product sharing. It does not make a blunt lipstick recommendation, but directly applies lip color and keeps coloring in this way. This can be regarded as a chance of survival in the super competitive lipstick market.

The above mainly analyzes personal bloggers. For brands, how to choose blue ocean categories and how to look at the entire category situation. Assuming that we are making anti-aging masks, we can do it through the following methods.

Current status of Xiaohongshu brand categories

The first step is to read the monthly industry report released by Xiaohongshu

Through the research report, it was found that skin care is the largest category. Facial masks, as the largest section of skin care on Xiaohongshu, have a broad consumer base on Xiaohongshu, high user awareness of the category, and a broad market base.

Figure 4: Xiaohongshu Cosmetics & Skincare Industry Report

The second step is to look at the industry competition

Through the keyword planning tool in the background of Xiaohongshu advertising, we pulled the keywords of facial masks and found that the keywords are mainly concentrated in brand words and product words, and there are many brand-related words. The degree of branding of facial masks is high. On the one hand, it shows that the competition is quite fierce. The competition of facial masks has shifted from brands to brand series. On the other hand, it shows that new brands are entering the market. Either your technology is strong enough or your brand power is super strong.

Figure 5: Keywords of Xiaohongshu film data

The third step is to look at consumer demand

Searching for mask keywords in the search box, we found that the notes focus on whitening, hydrating, refining, acne-prone skin, anti-aging and other demands. Whitening and hydrating are almost standard features in the mask industry. Users' demand for functionality is gradually increasing, and firming and anti-aging have also become users' concerns. As an anti-aging mask, we need to upgrade these basic functions.

Figure 6: Consumer demand for facial masks

Through Endata, we can take a look at the data of anti-aging masks on the platform. There are more than 70,000 notes on the site, mainly focusing on age, application or patch type, brand, price and other scenarios. At this moment, we need to refine the selling points according to the age of consumers and usage methods, and find corresponding experts. Through the three steps of industry-competition-demand, we can roughly understand the situation of the facial mask category.

For new brands to break through, they can not only find positioning methods through subdividing categories, but also create new categories, such as Santonban creating the boutique instant coffee category and Zihaiguo creating the self-heating fast food category. For whether a new category can successfully break through, the following two factors need to be considered: First, whether the new category can have obvious substitutability for the old category market.

New product categories should have obvious advantages over old product categories in some aspects, and this advantage is what a considerable number of consumers in the old product categories are concerned about. Soy milk will not completely replace milk, but for consumers who are concerned about fat and cholesterol, soy milk has obvious advantages over milk.

The second is whether the market of the rival product category is large enough, which also determines the future growth space of the new product category to a certain extent. The reason why Tesla is valued so highly is because it is targeting the market for gasoline vehicles, which is a huge market.

Summary: This is our continued research into bloggers and brand categories. Only by exploring the categories more deeply can we discover the development status of the entire category. The success of bloggers on Xiaohongshu is that they first choose a small category track that suits them and is highly competitive, and then continue to dig deep to form their own advantages, and finally make themselves a brand in the category. For brands, they need to discover the current situation of their own categories, find strong brands in the categories, gain a firm foothold in the categories, and seize the differentiated market.