Dismantling Xiaohongshu's official IDEA marketing methodology

Since Xiaohongshu announced the IDEA methodology at the Golden Investment Awards in October last year, IDEA has appeared more and more frequently in official documents. The methodology is a summary of cases that can quickly enable brands to adapt to the Xiaohongshu ecosystem.

What exactly is the IDEA methodology, and how does it help businesses with marketing? What aspects should we pay attention to when using it? Interpret the IDEA methodology based on official documents and personal experience.

1. What is IDEA methodology

IDEA is mainly divided into four parts: Insight, Define, EXpend, and Advocate. They are closely linked and form a progressive relationship. Even after the last step is completed, you can transition to the data insight part. The following focuses on explaining each part.

Figure 1: Xiaohongshu IDEA methodology

1. Insight: Identify product pain points

The essence of marketing is insight into needs. Insight is insight, because users leave a large amount of behavioral data in the community. This insight is to use the official tools of Xiaohongshu to help customers diagnose real marketing problems. The core is to locate product pain points and find marketing opportunities.

Figure 2: Data Insights: Multi-dimensional Diagnosis of Real Product Problems

In product pain point diagnosis, we mainly start from four aspects: industry, category, brand and product. The specific angles are crowd insights (user portrait + crowd reach), content insights (hot topics + note publishing trends + high-frequency mentioned words in notes), search trends (search related connections, search trends and search penetration) and sentiment insights (positive and negative review word clouds and note comment detection).

In terms of tools, you can use Xiaohongshu's monthly business report, keyword planning tools and topic tools, drop-down word boxes, creative notes and other tools, or explore users' current comments on brands or industries.

For example: IS discovered through industry insights that beauty notes continue to grow, but users' minds are mainly occupied by big brands. Through insights from data tools, it is found that users have five major demands for shower gel: fragrance, whitening, moisturizing, non-slip, and mildness. Based on user needs and combined with the characteristics of its own products, IS determines that fragrance is the focus, and the creation of expert notes revolves around fragrance.

Figure 3: Is IS advertising on Xiaohongshu?

2. Define the product: determine the marketing strategy

The core of this stage is to determine the marketing strategy. In the past, the marketing strategy was based on brand characteristics, and then choose products with good performance on other platforms. The content was whatever was popular, and there was no way to carry out systematic delivery. Many influencers’ delivery was a one-time deal. Now, it is more systematic to define products through data tools and string together marketing strategies through product selection, selling points, content and bloggers.

Figure 4: Xiaohongshu defines products: confirming marketing strategies based on problems

Product selection: Select potential hot-selling products that are popular in the market and are loved by users. Please note that the hot products on different platforms are different. For example, Yun Gengwu’s Taobao hot products are priced at 50 yuan, while Xiaohongshu’s are priced at 149 yuan. Douyin may be different. Different platforms choose different products for delivery.

Selling point: Solve customer problems from the perspective of product function and emotion. Pay attention to the brand name. If the brand name is long, it is recommended to spread it by a nickname. Also pay attention to user feedback and continuously optimize product selling points.

Content: After the selling point is determined, you should also refine 2-3 small selling points, find different scenarios, implant the selling points into the scenarios, and solve user pain points. In terms of content creation, breakthroughs should be made from the title, first image, pictures, texts and videos. For information on how to create, you can read the previous article on creating explosive articles.

Figure 5: Xiaohongshu brand content products

Blogger: Bloggers choose vertical experts or some non-vertical scenario experts with high matching degree, and cooperate in a matrix to promote products through the cooperation of various types of experts.

3. Expand to seize the track: Break through the track mentality

The core of seizing the track is not only to increase sales, but also to improve the brand in the minds of users. Xiaohongshu marketing requires a balance between planting grass and mowing grass. Influencers and information flows are used to plant grass, and then the grass is harvested through search, live broadcast rooms, and spillovers. In actual operations, it is necessary to balance the two steps of depositing money and withdrawing money, and to plan sales and brand at the same time.

Figure 6: Feiyang is growing in terms of seeding and influencers

At this stage, the official explanation is that Xiaohongshu's information flow and search tools will gradually break through the layers of product words, categories, scenarios and crowds, and ultimately allow the brand to occupy the mind. In my opinion, advertising products can be operated simultaneously with influencer delivery. At this stage, three major assets, namely crowd, word-of-mouth and content, will be formed. These three assets will also feed back into data delivery in the later stage.

Figure 7: Xiaohongshu seizes the track and gradually penetrates different tracks

Still taking IS as an example, in order to seize the track, it uses information flow to directly invest in partner notes, selects potential high-quality notes through a horse racing mechanism, exposes them to the public layer by layer through the notes, and uses search ads to intercept users' search terms, such as scene words, category words and core words.

Figure 8: Expand is a traffic tool based on core users

4. Advocate: Gather brand awareness

If the core of the first three stages is to get users to buy, the core of this stage is to interact more with users, generate secondary sharing, and the brand also accumulates content. Products at this stage often use brand advertising tools such as flame topics, splash screen ads, commercial topics, etc. to gather brand content, gather product awareness, and have more interactions with users.

Figure 9: Advocate supports the brand and gathers brand awareness

2. How to use IDEA methodology?

Stage theory is a key theory in corporate marketing, and brand marketing strategies will be different in different stages. When a company is first established, it is natural to acquire the first wave of users; during the growth stage, it is natural to acquire customers quickly; when the product category is small, it is necessary to break through the crowd; and mature brands need to awaken and retain customers.

In the use of IDEA, the official divides the company's marketing on Xiaohongshu into seed customer acquisition, seizing the user's mind, breaking the crowd circle and awakening dormant users, and proceeds according to the brand development stage.

Figure 10: Different types of Xiaohongshu IDEA methods

1. Seed user acquisition

For new brands using Xiaohongshu, the first problems they face are how to acquire seed users, what kind of content will gain user favor, and how to reduce the cost of trial and error. During this stage of exploration, the core focus is to find the selling points of the product through insight.

Specifically, you can use keyword planning tools, content drop-down words, and recent user posts to diagnose the core selling points of the product. Then, through Define, you can define the product and content to clarify the selling points and core audience. At the same time, in Expand, you can use traffic tools such as French fries and information flow to increase exposure and verify whether the business model is established.

Figure 11: Seed customer acquisition method

2. Seize the user’s mind

This type is more suitable for launching new products and wanting to become the number one in the category, such as underwear brand UBras, pasta Kongke, coffee Santonban and other cutting-edge brands. In the early stages, such brands focused more on vertical users and achieved phased success, but the crowd was never opened up.

When using the IDEA methodology, the core focus is to match more selling points, recruit large-scale experts, and expand more planting scenarios. In the Expand stage, in the early stage, we focus on core selling points and scenarios, reach customers at multiple points, consolidate user awareness through information flow and search, and seize more SOV share. If the budget is sufficient, you can use official topic tools, opening screens, surprise boxes and other tools to maintain the popularity of the campaign and upgrade user awareness.

Figure 12: IDEA method diagram for seizing the user’s mind

3. Crowd breaks the circle

The core issue of brand positioning is that the original population of the product has grown and has encountered a bottleneck, and it is necessary to reach new populations. The core of this stage is to create content through influencers based on the characteristics of the target audience in the past and the content trends, and to cross-category/industry scenarios and audiences.

In the Expand stage, extended selling points can be used to target users and create momentum to break the circle. At the same time, with the help of creative products such as surprise boxes, business topics, and a variety of creative products, we can move from product aggregation to brand awareness.

Figure 13: IDEA method diagram for breaking the crowd circle

Case study: ViVO S9 co-creates the nightlife trend of Generation Z:

Earlier in the same year, we realized that VIVO's growth was sluggish and that it needed a larger audience. So, through co-creation with influencers and customized cooperation, we found "night" life scenes, gained insight into the combination of nightlife and crowds, and cooperated with influencers around the scenes to reach different audiences. At the same time, through the EXpand&Advocate scenes, we used global traffic to boost topics within the site and achieve cross-circle communication.

Figure 14: Gaining marketing inspiration through insights and exploring new “night” scenarios

Figure 15: Seizing the market share and user brand, triggering discussion on the site

4. Wake up dormant customers

Suitable for big brands. Some of their customers have become dormant. Through insights, we can discover the problems of solidification of past product/brand image, output innovative content based on the content preferences of dormant customers, and use information flow and search to target touchpoints. In addition, brand advocacy advertising products such as splash screens and commercial topics can help gather brand awareness from single products. For example, Pizza Hut’s advertising on Xiaohongshu is intended to stimulate existing customers and achieve multi-dimensional linkage and renewal.

Figure 16: Waking up the sleeping client IDEA

As the official marketing theory, IDEA methodology uses four methods to provide insights into products, define products, seize tracks and develop user brands for customers at different stages.

Different customer stages have different focuses. Seed customers focus on business model testing, capturing user minds focuses on mind and sales, and breaking the circle of the crowd focuses on exposure, allowing more users to see the brand, awakening dormant customers, and allowing old customers to see the brand again.