Xiaohongshu Operation Guide

Let’s take a look at how to achieve conversion rate and the operating guide of Xiaohongshu!

1. How to achieve super conversion rate

How to achieve super conversion rates in different industries? The answer is: master the core methodology and have strong execution capabilities. Only when the process control is refined to every step can the results be replicated.

With this concept in mind, let’s first talk about the big topic of “100 billion growth”. To achieve the goal of 100 billion growth, we need to do the following: four-level growth, leverage, transaction breakdown, traffic combination, super conversion, data-driven and key talents. Due to the limited time for this sharing, we will mainly learn about three parts.

The first is four-level growth, which is the four-level virtuous growth engine from startups to trillion-dollar companies. In all major industries, regardless of whether a company relies on the dividends of the times to rise, it is likely that the company's growth will go through four major stages.

The first stage is in the early stages of entrepreneurship, when you need to ensure that the MVP (minimum viable product) is running smoothly, that is, to ensure that the product does meet a certain market demand rather than a false demand. The best way to verify the MVP is to have 500 strangers from different channels willing to buy the product.

This stage belongs to the cold start stage. In the cold start stage, it is necessary to fight small to gain big, because start-ups are generally weak and cannot compete with giants for standard traffic. They can only go for non-standard traffic. The former refers to traffic that can be bought with money, such as Douyin ads, Taobao ads, live broadcast car ads, etc. The latter includes fans obtained through soft articles on official accounts and Xiaohongshu.

The second stage is large-scale delivery. The premise for large-scale delivery to be effective is to find Class A users, that is, to place advertisements on platforms where users need the product or service.

When the traffic from advertising reaches the ceiling, it enters the third stage: referral and fission marketing growth. Three points need to be noted at this stage: only content that is valuable to users will be forwarded (i.e. sharing rate); how to increase the click-through rate of those being shared; and how to increase the completion rate.

After attracting new customers in the first three stages, the fourth stage is to open up new business lines and repeat the first three steps to upgrade. In fact, only by improving the conversion rate first can the company withstand subsequent expansion in scale.

The second is transaction breakdown, which is to break down the customer journey to uncover growth pockets. The simplest way is to break down the process from consumer learning to purchasing, from channels, displays, viewing to establishing relationships. The entire process fits a funnel model. The more levels there are, the more serious the loss. In this process, we need to simulate every step of the user's operation, find the key factors affecting each step and optimize it.

The devil is not only in the details, but also in a lot of money. We need to disassemble the transaction process and tap into the gold mine of profits.

The third is super conversion, which is the six conversion elements that make customers place orders. Let’s first think in reverse about the three stages of a customer placing an order: stimulating interest, building trust, and placing an order immediately.

Then why do customers buy at store A instead of store B? The selection factors may be due to brand, high sales, recommendations from friends, good reviews, promotions, attraction to the page introduction, etc. If the company also has these factors when it comes to its own landing page, the conversion rate will naturally increase.

In other words, we should give customers what they believe in and not try to challenge their cognition. For start-ups, educating users requires huge costs.

With these basic understandings, let us introduce the six elements of conversion in detail, namely reciprocity, commitment and fulfillment, credentials, best-selling and positive reviews, pain point stimulation, and scarcity.

Due to time constraints, we will only focus on the element of "commitment and fulfillment" this time. A promise is a guarantee of a certain function of a product. The question is how to make people believe in this promise? Generally speaking, as a brand, we make a commitment on a certain function of the product in the previous text, and then we need to make guarantee measures for the experimental commitment that are generally accepted by common sense in the later text, and attach success cases.

Promises and fulfillment only generate mild trust, but this is not enough. We must continue to promote moderate trust and high trust, which requires continued efforts on the six elements of trust and best-selling reviews. For detailed usage, cases, and extensions of the six conversion factors that get customers to place orders, please refer to Chapter 2 of the book "Super Conversion Rate: How to Get Customers to Place Orders Quickly".

In addition, it is worth noting that good works are revised. When writing plans and doing designs, we must remember: "There is no glory that can be achieved in one step, and success can only be achieved through accumulation over time."

2. How can brands deploy Xiaohongshu to achieve new growth?

In the process of achieving super conversion rate, there is an important concept, that is, we should think about problems from the user's perspective, solve problems for them, and bring them benefits. Next, let’s use this concept to understand the platform logic of Xiaohongshu and how to conduct content marketing around user needs on Xiaohongshu.

Nowadays, consumers will search for relevant content on various platforms and make purchasing guides before purchasing. Xiaohongshu is such a shopping guide platform, or it can be called a content seeding platform.

So, why is it necessary to do content marketing for new traffic? In fact, across the industry, the average payment conversion rate of e-commerce is between 2% and 4%, because buyers naturally do not trust sellers. No matter what kind of marketing the brand does on the page, it will be considered as "selling goods." However, the content promotion and evaluation on content platforms are different. Consumers often think that they are on the same front as the reviewers.

The lack of content leads to poor conversion rates. If the conversion rate is poor, people will not dare to invest. If they do not invest, they will not be able to scale up, thus forming a vicious circle. The rule of winning by scale is suitable for most industries, but scale is inversely proportional to user experience. Large scale leads to insufficient service personnel. The easiest way to achieve a so-called optimal solution is to master content marketing and grab platform traffic.

Well-known brands such as Perfect Diary, Gaotu Classroom, Keep, Yuanqi Forest, and Zhong Xuegao have all risen through the content marketing ecosystem.

Now that we understand the importance of content marketing, let’s take a look at how to use Xiaohongshu to perform content marketing.

First of all, we need to understand the platform rules of Xiaohongshu. In terms of the label system, after users register a Xiaohongshu account, they need to label themselves first, then label the content of their notes. Finally, the platform will readjust user labels through various behaviors such as likes, favorites, reposts, and comments, making the labels more and more complete.

In terms of traffic composition, Xiaohongshu's largest traffic comes from search traffic, followed by referral traffic, then fan traffic, and finally regional traffic.

In terms of the platform's risk control system, it is divided into three parts. The first is risk control for illegal content, that is, there must be no content related to pornography, gambling, drugs, or anything that goes against public order and good morals; the second is risk control for illegal operations, that is, users must not be guided to add WeChat and direct traffic outside the terminal; the third is risk control against group control, that is, the behavior of operating a large number of mobile phones in the computer room through computers. Once discovered, a batch of accounts will be blocked.

In short, according to the platform rules, Xiaohongshu is essentially a public domain traffic attribute, and the fans belong to the platform. If the content is not good, even with millions of fans, there may only be dozens of likes. As long as the content is good and SEO is used, even with 0 fans, there may be millions of reads. Therefore, brands should not just rely on spending money to invest in top and mid-level bloggers, but should understand how to play Xiaohongshu. The era when force can defeat skill is gone forever.

Secondly, let’s talk about the five major steps for companies to deploy Xiaohongshu. The first step is to refine the external language. In fact, consumers don’t care about what is good about your product, that is, the so-called selling point, but they care about whether they can become better after owning it. Therefore, we need to combine the selling points with the scenarios and convert them into external language.

The second step is to analyze Xiaohongshu’s benchmark competitors. If you want to achieve great things with little money, you must analyze the practices of your competitors, because competitors have helped us test which content direction is more likely to gain explosive volume on Xiaohongshu.

The third step is to build a model for bloggers and develop a delivery strategy. When modeling bloggers, you need to choose bloggers with higher matching degree, better health and best cost-effectiveness. Generally speaking, top bloggers account for 5%-10%, mid-level bloggers account for 20%-40%, and bottom bloggers account for 50%-75%. This ratio can be adjusted continuously according to demand. There is no absolute optimal solution, only a relative optimal solution.

The fourth step is to develop content and conversion strategies. Precisely because the largest traffic of Xiaohongshu comes from search traffic, we must know how to use keywords cleverly. We divide keywords into eight categories for your reference: core words, symptom words, similar words, scenario words, deep needs, and competitor words.

The fifth step is data monitoring and analysis optimization. The initial modeling is only a rough model, which needs to be continuously optimized through subsequent data to reach a relatively optimal solution.

Finally, let’s analyze three typical cases of Xiaohongshu.

First, let’s take the example of “Panda Doesn’t Walk Cake” to explain how Xiaohongshu can create popular articles. In fact, the cake with the highest offline sales of Panda Buzou was not equally popular on Xiaohongshu, but a chocolate-flavored cake was extremely popular. Since Xiaohongshu's main users are women, who are accustomed to having afternoon tea, chocolate-flavored food will naturally be popular here. Therefore, the test-type seeding articles on Xiaohongshu need to combine the characteristics of the platform to highlight the product selling points and features.

In addition, emotional topics are also very popular on Xiaohongshu. In each story, the Panda Never Leave Cake has become a tool for expressing emotions and creating a festive atmosphere.

Secondly, I will use Zulijian as an example to explain how to play brand on Xiaohongshu. Although Zulijian specializes in shoes for the elderly, it once used young people's language to communicate with them on Xiaohongshu, sparking a trend of young people wearing shoes for the elderly.

Finally, taking the Songneng computer stand as an example, the secret of Xiaohongshu’s sales is revealed. Songneng has transformed from to B to C through the grass-planting evaluation notes on Xiaohongshu. Its conversion path is: the product brand appears in the article, appears multiple times so that users can see it, the purchase path is laid out in the comment area and is pinned to the top for guidance, and the user opens Taobao and enters the brand, forming a complete transaction closed loop.