The five major operational logics behind Xiaohongshu’s hit products!

When it comes to Xiaohongshu, many people still have the impression that it is a content-seeking community dominated by "her interests" and a platform for reviewing and sharing beauty, personal care and other products. But in fact, today's Xiaohongshu has moved towards a broader Ta-interest content ecosystem.

In addition to beauty and personal care, food, sports, home, travel, pets... Xiaohongshu's content is covering all aspects of life. Xiaohongshu, with over 55 million DAU (daily active users), is guiding contemporary young people, mainly Generation Z, to update their lifestyles and consumption patterns.

The commercial value of Xiaohongshu has been further explored, and brands have also turned their attention here for marketing promotion, reputation building, and attracting users.

But how can different brands, based on their own situations, truly create trends on Xiaohongshu, rely on KOLs’ content recommendations, gain widespread recognition from target consumers, influence consumer minds and decisions, and build word-of-mouth and increase conversions?

This issue is based on the marketing methodology "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" released by Weibo. It provides you with in-depth analysis from five aspects: product strategy, keyword layout, creation of popular articles, KOL selection, and delivery rhythm.

01. What kind of products are more likely to become popular on Xiaohongshu?

1. From the perspective of product features

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

Seeking recommendations, reading reviews, and gaining new knowledge... Xiaohongshu users usually have a strong purpose when browsing content. Therefore, products with strong demand tend to attract more attention from users in the corresponding circles.

The platform users’ pursuit of fashion and emphasis on aesthetics determine that when they are prompted to buy something, they pay more attention to the appearance of the product. Good-looking products always have a greater chance of being favored and recommended by users.

Compared with the promotion of high-priced products, Xiaohongshu users are more interested in cost-effective products priced under 100 yuan. "Affordable", "low-priced alternative", and "good things for a hundred yuan" are all high-frequency words that appear in popular content, with a cumulative number of notes exceeding 3.22 million.

Among the factors that attract consumers to Xiaohongshu, "authentic and credible content" accounts for as much as 70%. Brand products with high DSR scores on Tmall and JD.com have higher reputation and credibility. Therefore, it is easier for them to establish a high level of trust with users on Xiaohongshu and achieve explosive growth.

2. From the perspective of product categories

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

In the second half of 2020, beauty and skin care products accounted for half of the top 1000 popular products on Xiaohongshu, accounting for as high as 67%, ranking first with an absolute advantage.

Following closely behind, ranked second are exquisite cosmetics products, accounting for 21%.

Ranked third are food and beverage products. However, the 5% share is still far behind that of beauty and skin care and exquisite cosmetics products.

This means that brand products such as beauty and skin care, exquisite cosmetics, etc. are more likely to become popular on Xiaohongshu due to the natural advantages of their product characteristics and Xiaohongshu's huge female user base.

02. How to make users remember your brand keywords?

Statistics show that 90% of Xiaohongshu users search for Xiaohongshu before purchasing products. 60% of the traffic that brands receive on Xiaohongshu comes from the search page.

Reasonable layout of keywords and their further evolution into "hot search terms" is a key link for brands to dominate the search page with natural traffic.

If the same keyword appears in the title or content of 300-500 notes, it will become a "hot search term", such as 618 list, big-brand substitutes, niacinamide, etc.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

Therefore, when laying out keywords for KOL content, brands should not only expand from multiple levels such as brand, product, competitor, hot spots, etc., and use big data and manual analysis to determine the user's perception of related words, but also follow the following 6 key word layout principles, which will further increase the probability of content being actively searched:

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

1. Focus on the future: select and arrange keywords in the period of rising popularity to capture the highest value segmented traffic in the future, such as summer whitening and sun protection.

2. Use both soft and hard tactics: separate the delivery, with one part being soft articles to gain traffic and the other part being to optimize brand searches, and then report and deliver the results.

3. 70%-30% principle: 70% long-tail words, such as "skin" and other long-term traffic words, combined with 30% instant words, such as "618" must-haves.

4. Refinement: There is fierce competition for words such as essence and facial mask. Brands can adopt the small + big principle, such as affordable essence and hydrating facial mask.

5. Real-time optimization: Based on the data results of the delivery, the keywords are optimized in real time and iterated continuously to ensure the continuous growth of keyword popularity.

6. Differences between new and old: Different brands have different maturity levels and strategies. New brands focus on strengthening category and scene words; mature brands focus on brand and product words.

03. 6 secrets to creating popular articles on Xiaohongshu

What kind of content has the chance to become a hit on Xiaohongshu? Based on the relevant transaction data of Xiaohongshu on the Weibo platform, among the existing content types of Xiaohongshu, the four types of content, namely evaluation, list, practical information, and celebrity recommendations, have relatively greater advantages in becoming explosive articles.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

What core secrets must you master to truly create a hit article? The cooperation between brands and KOLs is a win-win brand collaboration. Brands should fully respect the creative style and content tonality of influencers, and influencers should also put in enough effort in the content they deliver:

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

1. Find more points of integration: Combine the hot spots of the platform with the selling points of the product, focusing on the user's pain points;

2. Pay attention to the first picture: use before-and-after comparisons, attach key texts, choose high-definition and exquisite covers, avoid excessive photo editing and stealing, and use more real-life scenes;

3. Set up contradictions: raise opinions or concerns about a certain issue, set up "insignificant" points of contention for the product, set up controversial comments in the comment section and pin them to the top.

4. There are some things to pay attention to when writing headlines: the title should hit the pain points and resonate with the audience. It should use more quantifiers to be more intuitive. It should use more functional demand words to find segmented scenarios and dig deep into the advantages of product ingredients.

5. Combination of video and text: Video is the trend of the platform and can get traffic support from the platform. The combination of video and text can meet different reading scenarios and increase the inclusion rate of major platforms, but the video style should avoid the TikTok style.

6. The text should be easy to understand: Use plain language to explain practical and professional viewpoints, use more emoticons, symbols and summary sentences, share sincerely, and avoid plagiarism and exaggeration.

Taking the promotion of sunscreen products as an example, KOLs can use celebrities to highlight the user's need for sunscreen that combines "whitening" with "natural beauty"; the cover uses a real and natural comparison of local skin color to highlight the sunscreen effect; the title focuses on the needs of segmented scenarios, such as "Top Ten", "Affordable", "Student Party", etc.; notes can be in the form of a combination of video + text, and clearly express personal attitudes towards the product; the copywriting symbols are used properly, the entry point is unique and creative, and the recommendation attitude is sincere enough.

However, as grass-roots marketing becomes increasingly common, consumers are increasingly able to clearly distinguish between advertising and non-advertising content. Therefore, KOLs should be careful not to make false recommendations/subjective perfunctory comments, avoid content that is seriously inconsistent with the personality, malicious marketing, or a large amount of negative feedback from users.

04. How to find the right KOX that matches your brand?

Before launching any communication campaign, brands must be clear about their purpose. Is it to increase brand exposure and awareness, or to promote sales conversion? Due to different purposes and different delivery stages, brands’ choices of KOX (Xiaohongshu influencers) are completely different.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

On Xiaohongshu, mid- and long-tail accounts have the advantages of high explosiveness, high interaction, and high reinvestment value.

Data shows that in 2020, Xiaohongshu’s mid-level KOLs and KOCs contributed over 75% of high interactions and over 75% of popular notes. In addition, the reinvestment rate of the three major beauty brands, Estee Lauder, La Mer and Lancome, in mid-level KOLs exceeds 76.7%.

Head, waist or tail? Should I choose just one or a combination of all three? To choose the right KOL, brands need to conduct multi-dimensional screening from aspects such as basic data, matching degree, content quality, cost-effectiveness and business capabilities:

1. Basic data: such as fan interaction effect, number of note likes; recent fan increase, whether there is fan loss; fan stickiness, activity level and proportion of high-quality fans.
2. Matching degree: such as the matching degree between KOL personality and brand tone, the matching degree between KOL fans and target consumers, the matching degree between fans’ interests and preferences and brand tone, and whether the KOL account label is consistent with the classification of the grass-planting notes.

3. Content quality: such as the content hit rate reflecting the KOL’s creative ability and investment value, the content authenticity highlighting the KOL’s content creation level, the content update rate reflecting the frequency of KOL content updates, and the public opinion health representing the fans’ trust in the KOL.

4. Cost-effectiveness: such as the KOL’s own cooperation quotation, the KOL’s actual interaction cost, number of likes, interaction, reading volume, etc.

5. Business capabilities: such as which industries/brands the KOL has worked with before, how they were evaluated, the KOL’s ability to convert product recommendations, and whether there are genuine inquiries about the product in the comment section of the note.

Only by ensuring that all aspects of the KOL's conditions are consistent with the brand's communication needs and budget can the subsequent content cooperation and promotion between the two parties achieve a win-win situation, or even achieve the effect of 1+1>2.

05. Two delivery rhythm strategies to meet the needs of brands at different development stages

Becoming the next "Perfect Diary" is the goal of many brands when entering Xiaohongshu and formulating their marketing strategies.

However, the communication needs and marketing objectives of emerging brands and mature brands are often different. Therefore, brands at different stages of development have different delivery rhythm strategies on Xiaohongshu.

1. New and cutting-edge brands

The key for emerging brands to break through is speed, relying on concentrated sales to quickly create word-of-mouth effects and product awareness on Xiaohongshu. Starting from Xiaohongshu, it laid the foundation for social media hits and then radiated to social platforms in other scenarios.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

In the accumulation stage, KOC is used as the main target of cooperation, and the "SEO" function is quickly expanded. Multiple keywords are repeatedly used in a brainwashing manner to lay the cognitive foundation for new brands and new products.

In the grass-growing stage, mid-level KOLs are the main targets of cooperation, and vertical reviews, strategy-based and professional grass-growing notes are used to strengthen brand reputation.

In the detonation phase, we introduce top KOL resources to form a pyramid-shaped KOL deployment structure of "head + waist + tail", use beautiful pictures of appearance as a stage offensive to enhance the quality of brand products.

During the breaking circle stage, we will continue to focus on mid-level KOLs as the main targets of cooperation, and use creative content to achieve cross-dimensional communication.

During the order-sharing stage, we will continue to use KOC as the main partner for our campaigns, and provide a large number of order-sharing and real feedback to create campaign details, enhance the sense of hierarchy, and further strengthen the target group’s sense of trust.

2. Mature brands

The investment of mature brands can be divided into two categories: one is daily stable investment to maintain the voice of brand products; the other is concentrated large-scale investment at nodes to increase the popularity of node marketing and quickly improve conversion.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

During the daily stable investment stage, a strategy of combining mid-level KOL and KOC is adopted to invest in influencers, with single-variety ads as the main content form to maintain the brand's popularity on Xiaohongshu.

During the stage of concentrated large-scale investment, in order to quickly increase popularity, brands need to adopt a full-matrix "head + waist + tail" expert delivery strategy, with official topics and welfare distribution as the main content forms, to attract target groups to participate in activities and purchase products.

Taking Estee Lauder as an example, the brand’s average daily advertising spending is mainly on mid-level KOLs, which account for 44.17% of advertising costs and drive 59.05% of interactions.

Image source: Weibo's "How to Create Popularity on Xiaohongshu" Marketing Methodology

Estee Lauder publishes an average of 30 notes per day, and its daily delivery feature is very obvious. However, relatively speaking, the trend of interaction volume is also very good, and its ROI is much higher than other brands.

Image source: Screenshot from Xiaohongshu

During the Double 11 period in 2020, the average daily number of notes posted by Estee Lauder surged to 643, a significant increase compared to the average daily delivery volume, nearly three times the same period in 2019. At the same time, the total number of comments on the notes increased fivefold, and the feedback on the grass-planting effect was very positive.

06. Conclusion

Perfect Diary’s success is not an isolated case.

In the past two years, emerging brands such as Perfect Diary, Hua Xizi, and Zhong Xuegao have seized the era dividend of Xiaohongshu and quickly grown into popular online products; mature brands such as Estee Lauder and Li Ning have also achieved brand renewal on Xiaohongshu and are loved by more young people.

With product strategy as the underlying foundation, content strategy promoted by influencers as the core, keyword layout as the entry point, influencer selection as the sword, and delivery rhythm as the top-level design, Weiboyi helps brands to make strategic layout of marketing delivery on Xiaohongshu, concentrate firepower to create detonating points, and stand out.

Author: Micro Broadcast Easy

Source: Weibo