Analysis of Xiaohongshu's brand marketing promotion mechanism

In the new consumption era, when brands are faced with the choice of various marketing and promotion platforms on the Internet, further understanding the application of the promotion mechanism of the platform is the most basic step, which can play a decisive role in the strategic positioning of brand marketing and promotion.

So what is the operation and promotion mechanism of Xiaohongshu? If we leave aside the underlying algorithmic traffic distribution mechanism of the Xiaohongshu platform, then the remaining sentence can be summarized, that is, based on platform community content sharing and high-precision user traffic aggregation, Xiaohongshu's unique B2K2C promotion model has been formed.

Translated into human terms, the Xiaohongshu platform mainly revolves around a large number of bloggers as a link between brand companies and consumers, sharing and disseminating through the bloggers' fields, helping brands to reach target consumer groups faster and influence consumer decisions.

At the same time, the actual usage and experience feedback shared by platform consumers will also affect the decision-making and marketing strategies of brand products on the platform, forming a two-way interactive marketing mechanism of communication and feedback.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu's brand marketing operation relationship chain is mainly composed of platform community, users, and brands. Among these three, influencers play a very important role in the communication link.

During the entire marketing process, it can help brands enhance their credibility and shorten the distance between them and brand users. It can also assist brands in refining their product selling points or exploring their advantages, thereby achieving content co-creation and better delivering product value to users to achieve the ultimate goal of integrating product and effect.

The following article analyzes the five dimensions of Xiaohongshu community platform positioning, consumer decision-making to transaction end, user-assisted factors, community marketing concepts and community marketing products. Further understand the promotion and operation mechanism of Xiaohongshu , and help brands to initially have a basic reference direction for marketing on the Xiaohongshu community platform.

01 Community Platform Positioning

During the Spring Festival of 2022, Xiaohongshu officially announced Gu Ailing and Liu Haoran as its new spokespersons, and officially positioned the Xiaohongshu platform as "your life guide". Therefore, Xiaohongshu ushered in version 3.0, and launched a new slogan "The life experiences of 200 million people are all on Xiaohongshu" and a new Xiaohongshu brand TVC. The two spokespersons in the video are as follows:

“How to match camera lens” (Liu Haoran)
"How to choose a decoration style" (Liu Haoran)
“How to choose a birthday restaurant” (Liu Haoran)
"How to have fun on a self-driving trip" (Liu Haoran)
"How to choose ski equipment" (Gu Ailing)
"How to write a resume for an interview" (Gu Ailing)
"How to make a nutritious breakfast" (Gu Ailing)
"What to do when you are bored during holidays" (Gu Ailing)

This spokesperson TVC presents the diversified content ecology of the Xiaohongshu community platform centered around "life experience", conveying to people that daily life problems encountered in different scenarios in life can be solved here, and it aggregates the information value of young people's "life guide" and "consumption guide".

First of all, the influence of the two is unquestionable, especially during this year's Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing's powerful performance and phenomenal popularity. More importantly, the images of the two just fit in with the new image of Xiaohongshu brand, which I will not elaborate on here.

It can be seen that Xiaohongshu is positioned as a community platform that understands users better, understands young people's lifestyles better and provides consumption guides. It is also an important source of life trends for young people.

The content of the Xiaohongshu community all comes from sharing by bloggers and users, and its "sincere sharing" is also a core concept of the community convention, thus satisfying the users' experience of a high-quality content ecosystem.

For brands, Xiaohongshu is a content ecosystem community that can influence users' consumption decisions by sharing shopping guides.

On the other hand, as the current mobile Internet traffic dividend has reached its peak, and in the environment of diversified and decentralized communication media, consumer groups are also constantly changing, traditional marketing methods that continue to be driven solely by traffic are somewhat weak.

As for one of the most popular sales models in the current Internet brand market - content marketing, combined with the natural attributes and positioning of the Xiaohongshu community, it is just the right choice for brands to become the new soil for content marketing. I think it will work.

02 From consumer decision to transaction

Brands/bloggers use their own account strategies to create relevant note content, complete distribution and delivery within the site for reach and push, and then present more accurate content to users in the corresponding tag groups based on the platform's underlying algorithm logic. The entire chain completes a series of user browsing needs and the evolution process of being planted.

For the user groups that have been successfully seeded with products, there are two different search action paths, namely, searching within the Xiaohongshu community or searching outside the community . Most of the main keywords in the searches are related brand words or category product words.

One thing to remind you here is that for brands, the search terms given to the user groups that have been planted must remain unique, because this can ensure that those who only aim to drive traffic to e-commerce platform stores can successfully reach off-site (Little Red Book) traffic, otherwise they will just be making wedding dresses for others.

For example, if the brand word appears in many other distribution stores after a search on other e-commerce platforms, or the so-called new track category product word, the search results show that other peers are also using it, then it is equivalent to directing traffic to the entire industry track.

The application of setting the uniqueness of search terms, for example, when Estee Lauder launched a new facial cream category, it named its new product "Collagen Cream", which can be well distinguished from other competing products in the same category, forming an exclusive search term on the entire network, and it is very good to ensure user memory points and efficient traffic reach. Therefore, this is a small suggestion for brand merchants when launching new products or attracting traffic on Xiaohongshu.

Users who search on Xiaohongshu will be directly connected to the brand professional account or Xiaohongshu store in the domain to make payments and purchases, completing a transaction model for the closed-loop marketing on Xiaohongshu.

Then another point is the monetization of off-site searches by users who have been successfully seeded with products, which mainly tends to be the purchase path of e-commerce platforms. According to my personal practical experience, those who will conduct external searches for related words after being seeded with products through Xiaohongshu will mainly tend to open the orange software Taobao. One point that comes to my mind here is that the main consumers of Taobao platform are also mostly women, which is more in line with the behavioral logic of some users.

03 Factors that help users to promote

According to the official news from the 2022 Xiaohongshu Business Ecosystem Conference, Xiaohongshu's monthly active users have reached 200 million. Among them, 72% were born after 1990, more than 50% were from first- and second-tier cities, and the proportion of male users also rose to 30%. Xiaohongshu is slowly getting rid of the exclusive label of "planting grass for women" in the outside world's perception.

The users of the community platform are mainly composed of five different identity types, namely celebrity artists, expert bloggers, ordinary users, brand enterprise accounts and Xiaohongshu's matrix official account (ps: such as Captain Shu who manages the order of the platform community, Geek Brother Shu who is a 3C digital enthusiast, etc.).

In addition to the traditional functions of issuing coupons and holding sweepstakes, brand enterprise accounts can also directly host entrance jumps to stores within the Xiaohongshu domain, including the function of undertaking a series of commercial promotion cooperation with brands on Xiaohongshu. Of course, it is also a presentation of account asset accumulation and operational strategies for communication between brands and community user groups within the Xiaohongshu domain.

For example, Yuanqi Forest’s Xiaohongshu account sometimes updates Yuanqi Forest’s special emoticon packages, such as “angry to the point of deformation”, “be generous”, etc. Or Haidilao’s Xiaohongshu account teaches users how to make their own special drinks at Haidilao, etc.

Regarding platform users, according to the official Nielsen survey data, more than half of the users expressed their approval of the brand product related marketing information on Xiaohongshu, and more than 80% of the users said that they had been successfully recommended on Xiaohongshu. It can be seen that this is also closely related to consumers' trust in the recognized "grass planting" label of the Xiaohongshu platform.

According to the public data from Crawley's 2020 research survey on the grass-roots power of various platforms, among the characteristics of Xiaohongshu that consumers like the most, the highest proportion is the authenticity of the content, reaching 69.8%. The ranking is: accurate content recommendations 64.3%, high content interest 59.4%, the presence of favorite celebrity accounts 45.9%, and the presence of favorite celebrities 31.2%.

It is precisely because of this that, relying on the consumer user group's recognition of the "planting grass" label of Xiaohongshu, the overlap of the two groups of people, impulsive planters and rational planters, has evolved within the platform community.

For example, customers who tend to be impulsive will be driven to buy by new products, fashion trends, promotional events, or things that stimulate their inner interest. Older customers who tend to be rational will be more driven by practical needs or purchasing behavior driven by the need to solve pain points in life.

It has a consumption concept of being keen on pursuing a rich quality of life, daring to try new things and making most groups pay for them. It is also a consumption concept that demonstrates the stable working status and strong consumption capacity of a large number of users on the platform. Public data shows that the average monthly personal consumption expenditure can reach 4.1K (excluding mortgage and car loans).

In summary, the platform's natural user consumption concepts and other attributes have greatly satisfied the basic conditions for brands to maintain efficient "conversion" in the grass-planting stage of Xiaohongshu.

04 Community Marketing Concept

The brand marketing concept proposed by Xiaohongshu platform is the "IDEA" model, which aims to better help brands communicate with consumers and further influence their consumption decisions. At the same time, it also adheres to the business vision of allowing branded products to grow healthily on the platform and achieve sustainable growth. Here I have listed the following parts for explanation.

The four core contents of the "IDEA" model are:

Insight
Define the product
Expand
Advocate

1) Insight into needs (I)

Brands can use community platform data to find the latest trends and user needs, and conduct in-depth analysis to explore the diversity in content planning. It also has important reference significance for content marketing, such as insights into users' value orientation and consumer demand problems in lifestyles such as functionality, emotional satisfaction or social value.

For example, most of the makeup base products in the beauty market focus on oil control, modification and other functions, but on Xiaohongshu, there are already a large number of notes teaching "how to make the base makeup fit better".

From the product perspective, the user's pain point of difficulty in getting foundation to adhere to the skin is presented. Therefore, the beauty brand Bobbi Brown's orange cream for pre-makeup appeared in front of consumers as the "king of adherence and savior of powder adhesion", defining the development based on differentiated product selling points.

2) Define the product (D)

Refers to the discovery of insights based on on-site data, helping corporate brands define product concepts and balance the differences in cognitive transmission between consumers and brands.

To make it easier for everyone to understand, let’s take a brand that everyone is familiar with as an example, the OFO shared bike. During its operation, the company discovered that people on the Internet were accustomed to calling it the Little Yellow Car, rather than calling it “Mobike” directly like competing bike brands. Therefore, in order to meet everyone’s habits and preferences, the company officially announced the new name “Little Yellow Car”.

The same is true for defining product concept applications on Xiaohongshu, which can be based on a usage scenario based on insights from relevant data on the site. For example, the product naming and selling point exploration of Estee Lauder’s new product “Collagen Cream” at that time.

3) Seize the track (E)

It aims to mine competitive blue ocean segments based on on-site data, and assist brands in their main categories by ranking the brands in priority positions among users on the site, thereby providing a reference for insights into users’ awareness of the brand. It also plays a guiding role in the brand’s current marketing strategy planning and promotion channels, etc.

For example, after determining the product marketing positioning, when deciding on the on-site marketing tools, you may want to consider whether you need to use information flow to promote products in multiple dimensions, and use reviews, ingredient analysis, etc. to carry out search content. Influence the user's mind to conduct brand education, seize the niche track with a small budget, or increase the exposure and presentation intensity of content notes through search keywords.

4) Brand advocacy (A)

Based on the sharing of product or service experience by users in the Xiaohongshu community during actual use, they will return to the site to share and express their enthusiasm, which is also the "love to share" feedback behavior in the platform's user attributes. The positive or negative content means whether it can become an important factor in the brand's support or loyalty or repeat purchase directly from satisfaction, and plays an important role in the accumulation of word-of-mouth assets.

Therefore, we can also find that when conducting brand marketing on the Xiaohongshu site, the two dimensions of product and content are far greater than the marketing strategy. Therefore, in the Xiaohongshu community, content is a valuable asset of the brand. It can increase the brand value, reduce customer acquisition costs and improve conversion effects.

05 Community Marketing Products

We know that different platforms correspond to different user characteristics. In order to meet the commercial needs of creators or brands, corresponding marketing resource services will naturally emerge. When we correctly understand the application of relevant marketing tools of the platform, it can indeed play a role in acquiring more customers and achieving quick results in its marketing process.

Therefore, here is a brief introduction to the introduction and application mechanism of several common official marketing tools on the Xiaohongshu platform:

1) Dandelion Platform

Xiaohongshu Dandelion is a high-quality commercial service platform for creators officially launched by Xiaohongshu. It integrates the three major business modules of "brand cooperation", "e-commerce sales" and "new product trials", providing brands with marketing services with grass-planting characteristics.

In simple terms, if you want to find cooperation with Xiaohongshu bloggers, you can directly log in to this platform. However, the only threshold to using this tool is that as a brand account, you need to pass the authentication before logging in, and the authentication fee is 600 yuan/year.

2) Performance Advertising

Performance advertising is mainly composed of two components: information flow advertising and search advertising , which are combined into an advertising tool. The specific promotion model you choose depends on your own delivery strategy. You can choose to promote one or both at the same time.

Among them, information flow ads are exposed to potential users in the form of note content. Users can browse notes to gain a deeper understanding of product information, enhance decision-making intentions, and help brands accurately target potential customers. The ad position mainly appears on the app discovery page.

Search ads can be positioned and intercepted through keywords, and can use different search strategies such as brand words, category words, and scene words to more accurately reach target users. The ad position mainly appears on the app search results page.

3) French fries

It is mainly an auxiliary tool for the platform to help creators increase the exposure of their notes and allow more users to see the notes. By paying a certain amount of money to purchase the corresponding estimated exposure of the note, the platform can quickly shorten a certain period of time to verify the popularity of the note or verify the quality of the note for optimization and adjustment purposes, so that potential explosive notes can explode more quickly.

French fry ads are only displayed on the "Discover" page, and the order of display positions is random. There is no fixed position like information flow ads, and there will be no words such as "advertisement" or "sponsored".

4) Small red screen

The Little Red Screen was officially launched some time ago this year. Simply put, it is the simultaneous triggering and presentation of the app opening page and performance advertising information flow in brand advertising. That is to enlarge the information flow advertisement to the opening screen, so as to attract the user's attention as soon as they open the Xiaohongshu APP.

The application of this tool is suitable for scenarios such as node promotions or official announcements of brand spokespersons when brands urgently need traffic and strong exposure during marketing.

5) Platform’s own IP themes

It is a marketing theme activity provided by the platform, which operates jointly with investment brands and plays the role of a translator between commercial content and life experience.

For brands, the main focus is on solving user communication and long-term growth problems; for consumers, it is about solving life problems. The overall logic is to be guided by limited-time investment promotion activities in the content marketing ecosystem built by the three parties of "KOL, users, and brands."

The above five points are some sharing and analysis of Xiaohongshu’s “B2K2C” promotion mechanism model. I hope it can help everyone’s reference.