Xiaohongshu advertising strategy notes

How to make a delivery strategy?

This problem has always troubled the client's fathers.

There are always parties who think that Party A is the boss and does not need to ask for orders everywhere, nor does they need to be urged to submit manuscripts or revise them. Party B does not understand why Party A always chases them to ask about the effectiveness cases of other brands' advertising, and requires them to guarantee sales and ROI.

Unfortunately, Party A, who is “looking far ahead”, also has worries.

Recently, Mr. Ju has received many questions from his friends on the client side, such as how to formulate a product launch strategy?

1. Choose the right delivery platform

• Find the right market positioning for your product
• Identify target consumer groups
• Analyze consumer portraits

The above basic operations will not be described in detail.

Everything is based on completing the above basic operations. Let’s put it into context.

Suppose a beauty product brand wants to launch a new product. The target market of the new product is young women aged 25-40 in first- and second-tier cities.

The company currently has a limited budget, but wants to quickly implant new products into the target user group. How do you find the right platform?

• Douyin has over 600 million users
• Kuaishou has more than 400 million users
• “Trendsetter” Xiaohongshu
• "Magic Complete Book" Zhihu
• “Traditional engine” Baidu search
• "Information Flow Master" Today's Headlines
• The WeChat ecosystem that is “all-knowing, all-powerful, and capable”

There are many platforms claiming to have hundreds of millions or even millions of users. How do you find the right platform? This is the first step in developing a delivery strategy.

I once heard the owner of a piano store complain to me that the new media operations person she hired was asked to spend money on advertising and building a website as soon as she started working. Instead of doing any research, I chose Baidu search engine. The final result was: I spent 20,000 yuan and got 2 parents to come to the store for consultation.

Back to the topic. The new product is in the beauty category, and the main target users are young women in first-tier cities.

After preliminary screening of channels, we identified two traffic platforms: WeChat and Xiaohongshu. (For an extreme example, assume that you can only choose one of the two options and there is no combination strategy promotion)

At this time, look at your budget. If you use WeChat channels for promotion, you can use the following two delivery methods:

• Scheduled purchase: CPM – impression volume based on the recommended price;
• Bidding purchase: CPM – the effect price is adjusted in real time.

Advertisements can be placed in first-tier/new first-tier cities. Due to fierce bidding, the CPM range will be 60-200 yuan/per thousand impressions. The price range for beauty products should be 90-200 yuan/per thousand impressions.

Judging from the normal opening rate of WeChat Moments ads at 1-2%, the opening cost for users is 9-20 yuan per person. Can your budget handle it? Is ROI easy to explain?

WeChat Moments ads pass first (this case is quite extreme, Moments ads also have DSP ads, and offline merchants will also run similar ads to acquire customers).

Excluding WeChat, we analyze the user portrait of Xiaohongshu, as shown in the figure:

Organize the core information:

• 90% of Xiaohongshu users are female, and the majority of them are between 25 and 40 years old, accounting for 75.91%
• The popularity of content topics on Xiaohongshu is led by skin care, makeup, and beauty topics. The beauty section is an important content section for experience exchange on Xiaohongshu.

Conclusion: Xiaohongshu users highly overlap with the product’s target users.

2. How to publish Xiaohongshu

After achieving user matching, we analyzed the delivery method and price. The delivery method of Xiaohongshu is roughly as follows:

1. Experts’ delivery (notes, reviews, videos, unboxing)

• Celebrity endorsement sharing
• 5% TOP Product Evaluation Analysis
• 10% of mid-level influencers (more than 100,000 followers) posted their orders
• 15% mid-level talent (50,000-100,000 fans) experience evaluation
• 20% of the lower middle-level influencers (20,000-50,000 followers) recommend products
• 50% amateurs (1,000-20,000 fans) expose brands and bury keywords (keywords and search terms)

2. Keyword ranking optimization

Optimize your ranking according to the corresponding keywords.

3. Keyword brand drop-down words

Judging from these three types of delivery methods, Xiaohongshu's delivery is mainly based on the popularity of user content, thereby affecting the brand exposure within the site and the topic keywords of search engines.

The above three types of delivery methods can be combined into a general delivery strategy.

① Adequate budget for delivery

By adopting the celebrity + KOL strategy and giving priority to the search engine keywords on the site, you can bring in a lot of traffic.

② Smaller budget

Adopt the method of amateur promotion, mainly focusing on amateur distribution + distribution keywords, and using the inverted pyramid method of distribution, starting with 50% amateur distribution and 20% mid-level and lower-level expert recommendations, to bring up brand topics, create small hits, and then consider higher-level content distribution.

Conclusion: Xiaohongshu advertising focuses on user-generated content and captures user minds through KOC/KOL’s content-generated experiences. For brands, this type of advertising is different from discount promotions, has less negative impact on brand connotation, and is more likely to create a positive impression of the brand.

Through the above analysis, as a beauty brand. Finally, we decided to choose Xiaohongshu for the placement (due to space constraints, the topic cannot be expanded too much, and the article only provides a detailed analysis of a single channel).

3. Formulate a marketing strategy that is both effective and effective

Before formulating a marketing strategy, you need to determine what your goal is?

• If it is product sales, you need to consider the ROI of the investment;
• If it is brand exposure, you need to consider the exposure volume;

Different core goals will lead to different strategies. The previous chapter mentioned: The decision to choose Xiaohongshu for advertising is that it is cheaper, the advertising is not hardcore, and users are more likely to accept it.

After selecting the delivery channel, you need to consider the delivery strategy. First, let’s analyze the advertising data of competing brands (the data can be viewed using Qiangua Professional Edition, but I didn’t purchase it, so the following is the published data of beauty brands).

Looking at Estee Lauder's advertising data on Xiaohongshu, 195 notes were posted in May alone, and the number of Estee Lauder's advertising experts was as high as 187.

In May, Estee Lauder mainly used influencers in the categories of cosmetics (34.69%), fashion (32.65%), skin care (15.31%), and destinations/travel (7.14%). It is estimated that the amount of money invested in Xiaohongshu in May was as high as 3.65 million.

Obviously, Estee Lauder's overall launch plan is as follows:

Phase 1: The overall content starts with the vertical categories of makeup and skin care;

Phase 2: Phase 1 produced results, opening up the second-tier female topic (outfit) distribution;

The third stage: expand the circle, including travel and even fitness, to ensure that the audience is diversifiable and interactive.

The above-mentioned delivery method is: water wave + keyword combination effect delivery model. The core is to control the frequency and rhythm of delivery.

Assume that keywords and seeding content are stones, and the traffic pool is a pond. When a stone is thrown down and the ripples are huge, then throw a second stone down immediately! The overlap of ripples from various circles brought about a peak in topics, and the hit products followed!

There are many ways to cooperate with KOL/KOC:

• Pit fee cooperation;
• Pit fee + commission cooperation;
• Pure commission;
• Resource replacement;
• Settlement based on click/view/purchase volume (small).

When formulating a placement strategy, you can follow the above approach and communicate with the KOL/KOLs based on your budget and preferences.

Of course, generally the KOL/KOC you communicate with are in the MCN company. You can try to communicate with several companies, and you can try to start with a 30% discount on the publication price.

After producing high-quality content, choosing the right delivery platform, and formulating a delivery strategy, we are now ready except for the following: content - a combination of people, objects, scenarios, and products (the most important thing).

There are four key points to making high-quality popular notes:

① Theme direction

Popular notes need to identify the same goal and stand on the same front. All marketing hits and nodes need to have clear direction strategies, and then cooperate with Internet celebrities to break through the topic.

② Creative Points

Practical notes are not standard documents. They require high levels of generalization and practicality. You must make adequate product copywriting planning and content preparation!

③ Multi-platform interaction

Similar to the second part, delivery is not a one-time act and requires joint efforts from multiple channels and multiple circles.

Quickly test channels (7-10 days), observe efficient channels according to time cutoffs, and increase resources.

④ Vertical KOL selection

KOLs use their fan loyalty, personal temperament, writing style and photos to create personal labels around product content centered around the individual.

The brand department should attach the same importance to selecting KOLs as selecting product spokespersons. Xin Youzhi and Luo Yonghao have set precedents~!

The following are the top 10 content examples of Estee Lauder in May:

Judging from the titles of the notes with the TOP10 likes and TOP10 comments, content such as grass-roots promotion, unboxing, holiday gifts, confessions, and repairs have become the core points of the TOP10 article content and titles.

From the TOP10 hot words, we can draw the result that the frequency of occurrence of words such as (people/things) beauty, effect, and recommendation is high, which shows that users have a high acceptance of content such as products can make people beautiful, real product effects, beautiful product packaging, and recommendation by big Vs.

4. Optimize basic effects

With traffic and content, we should add the following two actions:

1. Keyword ranking top
2. On-site SEO optimization

Xiaohongshu itself has search engine functions, and high keyword rankings = natural search traffic (long tail), which is the same as Baidu SEO optimization and SEM bidding.

Planting grass is an act that cannot be done alone. It requires more users to pay attention to the topic in the content community to generate more spread.

It is also very important to do a good job in public opinion work on the content!

1. It’s easy to find: under the search keyword, it ranks in the first or second interface (top 6).
2. After searching the keywords, I found that everyone said "the product is good!"

5. Conclusion

This article introduces channel comparison and selection, KOL delivery strategies (inclusion, seeding, topics), information flow analysis and optimization, etc.

A feasible plan for a real delivery strategy will certainly not be delivered through just a single channel.

The purpose of this topic of Orange Record is just to provide a solution to the problem for our friends at Party A. The market is changing, and the effects of copied marketing strategies may be mixed.

In terms of advertising strategy, Ju believes that we can think more about and research the following issues:

• How competing products and leading products are promoted in various mainstream channels;
• How to evaluate the effects of promotion in various mainstream channels;
• How to balance the relationship between promotion rhythm and sales;
• How to control the selection and number of content KOLs in the mid- to late-stage;
• After the launch, how to empower the launch effect.

Author: Mr. Orange's work notes

Source: Mr. Ju's work notes