Xiaohongshu platform marketing strategy!

As more and more brands begin to use Xiaohongshu as a channel to communicate with core consumer groups, Xiaohongshu has also begun to focus on user needs and build its own marketing IP value from the user's perspective.

Only by entering life can you enter the crowd

Searching for "gift" on Xiaohongshu shows more than 4.92 million search results.

"Guide to gifting your girlfriend/boyfriend", "Recommended gift collection for Little People's Day", "Creative gifts that will never be the same as others"... nearly five million notes and short videos provide a rich and detailed "gift guide" for countless users who have difficulty making choices.

In Xiaohongshu, a life experience sharing space built by 200 million users, not only can users find guides about life experience, but brands can also discover new marketing scenarios and opportunities. During the "Double Holidays" marketing event that just passed, Xiaohongshu cleverly combined users' "gift-giving" demands with the brand's gift box products to create a marketing plan that co-created brand products and user life experiences.

At present, content communities represented by Xiaohongshu are being relied upon by more and more brands. Every community platform has a user group that matches the tone of this community and has also acquired unique ecological attributes. If a brand can better integrate into the community ecosystem, it will open up a channel for communicating with the core consumer group.

At the same time, major platforms have also been deeply engaged in commercialization in recent years. SocialBeta has observed that as their scale expands and their experience accumulates, the commercialization of different platforms has gradually differentiated into different characteristics, and marketing IP has become a carrier that concentrates on reflecting the value of the platform's commercialization characteristics. Three-dimensional resource integration capabilities, reusable operational strategies, comprehensive results that take into account both product quality and effectiveness... These advantages have also made marketing IP gradually become an important choice for brand marketing.

By combing through the differentiated platform marketing IPs in recent years, SocialBeta found that Xiaohongshu has gone beyond the brand perspective and instead built the value of its marketing IP from a user perspective, focusing on "insight into life needs, co-creating life experiences, and anticipating life trends." This is also closely related to Xiaohongshu's community ecology that has always focused on users and content.

During the "Double Holiday" marketing period, Xiaohongshu cooperated with 12 brands and jointly achieved over 1.1 billion exposures, helping brand accounts increase their followers by 220% and total interactions reaching 10.6 million+, demonstrating a marketing IP effect with Xiaohongshu's distinctive characteristics. So, SocialBeta invited Sheng Xiang, head of Xiaohongshu’s brand marketing strategy center, to have a chat. In this conversation, we see more clearly the experience that Xiaohongshu provides to brands: only by entering into life can you get closer to people.

Insight into life needs

As the Year of the Tiger approaches, the Leopard Demon from the 1986 version of “Journey to the West” has become quite popular again. It seemed that overnight, Xiaohongshu users changed their profile pictures to this leopard, and various derivative emoticon packages emerged one after another.

With the beautiful expectation of "If you own a golden leopard, you will be prosperous this year", this homophonic pun accurately hits the public sentiment at the turn of the year. The popularity of the golden leopard quickly spread from Xiaohongshu to the entire Internet, becoming a new Internet social trend. The sudden popularity of "Golden Leopard" is not an isolated case. Previously, "Morning C, Late A" and "Camping" first became trends on Xiaohongshu and then evolved into hot topics on the entire network. In a community atmosphere that encourages users to share sincerely, Xiaohongshu can better understand the real needs of users.

During the "Double Holiday" marketing period, Xiaohongshu launched the "Surprise Double Holiday Carnival Season" in collaboration with 12 brands from five major industries, namely, FMCG, digital, beauty , beverages, and jewelry, including Luk Fook Jewelry, OPPO , Clinique , Guyu, RIO Tipsy, Narciso Rodriguez Fragrances, Walmart, Armani Beauty , Lancome , Shu Uemura China, Augustinus Bader , and Lenovo YOGA . It not only invited celebrities and top KOLs to create momentum and increase exposure resources on and off the site, but also launched the " Surprise Wishing Tree " event: users can choose 3 brand gift boxes as their wishes and get New Year gifts for free through a lottery mechanism. During the event, if users complete tasks such as browsing related notes and following brand accounts, they can also increase the chances of their wishes coming true.

This event can be said to have brought together the characteristic commercial creative interactive elements of the Xiaohongshu platform. In addition to the gift wishing tree, there are also surprise blind boxes, task crystal balls and holiday gift recommendations, which brought significant data effects to the brand. The "Wishing Tree" brought a total of more than 600,000 followers to brand accounts, and the overall average increase in followers for the brands exceeded 220%. Among them, Lenovo, Walmart, and Narciso had a cumulative increase in followers of more than 500%. A total of more than 200,000 users actively participated in making wishes.

The "Surprise Box" has effectively boosted product sales and private domain traffic. During the event, the collection rate of the surprise box reached 95%, among which the retention rate of the surprise boxes of Narciso and Luk Fook Jewellery was close to 100%.

"We have observed that Xiaohongshu is different from other platforms in that it places more emphasis on the output of high-quality content rather than simply high exposure." As one of the partners in the Double Holiday project, Liu Ting, head of communications for the RIO Micro-Drunken Project, found that users of the Xiaohongshu platform would spontaneously output high-quality content around RIO Micro-Drunken products, such as new product reviews, photography notes specifically for the products, and cocktail teaching notes around the products.

High-quality user content is then transformed into new brand assets, driving the brand and products to more people. "We entered China in 2019. As a niche brand with relatively high single product value, our cooperation with Xiaohongshu has enabled us to generate significant data growth feedback on multiple social media platforms, which directly drove subsequent brand communication." Isabelle Zhuang, general manager of Augustinus Bader China, a German skincare brand, gave such an evaluation of the cooperation on Double Eleven.

During the event, the search volume for Augustinus Bader on Xiaohongshu increased by more than 2,400%, and Lenovo, which mainly focuses on 3C electronic products, saw its cumulative fan growth rate exceed 500%... Under the premise of meeting user needs, both niche brands whose brand awareness has not yet been fully popularized, and brands whose product categories previously had limited attention among users on the site, have experienced explosive growth.

The effect achieved by the "Surprise Double Holiday Carnival Season" - seizing the market for new products and giving old models a new lease of life - actually echoes Xiaohongshu's commercial vision of "helping every good product grow." "Helping brands polish their products is actually the most fundamental way to help brands develop, and it is also a way to help users pursue a better life," Shengxiang explained.

From the past to the present, we have seen countless brands become popular due to marketing, and then quickly fade into obscurity. Focusing less on products and more on channels is not a sustainable business mindset. If brands want to achieve long-term development, they must focus on real user needs.

Co-create life experience

An interesting phenomenon is that today’s consumers will actively seek out more effective information content, such as reading reviews before shopping, seeking links to similar products on social media, and so on. But when a brand is involved in false marketing, or has problems with buying trending searches or faking positive reviews, information about the brand becomes useless and consumers will quickly abandon it.

In SocialBeta's view, what the public dislikes is not advertising, but a large amount of invalid information. From this perspective, turning commercial content into life experience and making advertisements "useful" are the keys to a brand's future marketing.

Today, Xiaohongshu has sown the seed of the public’s mindset of seeking life experience, which also makes it more persuasive when working with brands to co-create content.

"The users of Xiaohongshu are younger, more fashionable, and have higher spending power. These user characteristics also bring about special community attributes." Tammie, head of Lancome Color Fragrance, one of the partner brands of the Double Holiday project, believes that the particularity of the Xiaohongshu community comes from the unique attributes of users. Users are more willing to actively express their needs and ideas to brands, which also provides guidance for brands to explore diverse solutions to life experience on Xiaohongshu.

As mentioned above, the original intention of the Double Holiday project came from Xiaohongshu's insight into users' demand for "gift giving" and brand gift box marketing. It allows brand products and user needs to be more fully integrated, which is also one of the core features of Xiaohongshu's commercial marketing IP.

The surprise Double 11 event fully captured the real and long-standing needs of users. On the one hand, Xiaohongshu found through data insights that "gift" is a high-frequency keyword searched by users during the Double Holidays period. A large number of Xiaohongshu users want to know how to choose and buy gifts, and this demand is regardless of gender or age. On the other hand, the Double Holidays and New Year's Eve are also the peak point for brands to launch gift box sets such as New Year gift boxes and Christmas gift boxes. This makes Double 11 an effective combination of user needs and brand marketing appeals, helping brands convey the "life experience" of holiday gift giving to users.

Compared with many other Xiaohongshu marketing IPs, "life experience" has always been the main content line it constructs for communication between brands and consumers. In "Please Take Care of the Yorozuya", QQ Star not only conveys the nutritional functions of its children's milk, but also calls on mothers to share their experiences in scientific parenting; in "A Thousand Imaginations of Life", Fotile invites KOLs to share methods of balancing career and life to express the brand's advocacy of supporting life... Xiaohongshu plays the role of a translator between commercial content and life experience, providing reference for everyone's life.

Let’s go back to the "Xiaohongshu 2022 Content Marketing Map" at the beginning of the article. Under the general theme of "Full Life Scenarios", Xiaohongshu also developed specific content segmentation. “The ‘Good Life Series’ connects the lifestyles and life scenes that Xiaohongshu users love the most with brands, such as starry sky camping, alpine skiing, niche music festivals, frisbee…” Shengxiang explained, “In these trending scenes, users will need a phone with a good night view function to record the beauty and touch of the moment, and they also need an SUV that can hold their equipment and travel happily with friends. Such an IP can make the brand a part of helping users to pursue a better life.”

Another marketing IP, the "Smart Life Series", is just like its name, more of a practical life guide. "For example, the 'Guide to Preparing for a Wedding' helps users become the most beautiful bride, and 'Come on, Workers' provides an effective career advancement guide for students who are about to enter the workplace. In these IPs, the brand's good products will become solutions to users' life pain points and real needs."

The vastness of life itself determines that the content scenarios provided by Xiaohongshu are extremely rich, and brands can naturally explore and derive more possibilities from them.

Celebrities are also being connected to Xiaohongshu’s content system, appearing as ordinary users rather than official business persons. On Xiaohongshu, celebrities are not facing fans, but individuals who are looking forward to sharing and finding life experiences just like them. Yin Zheng is "live streaming" the entire weight loss process on Xiaohongshu. The same diet recipe has been popular since last year. Ouyang Nana and Bai Jingting share their OOTD, and Zhang Junning summarizes sports tips... The life experiences of celebrities are also real, effective and worth referring to for ordinary users.

Sheng Xiang revealed that in the "Star Dream Come True Plan", Xiaohongshu will help celebrities to link back to brand business cooperation based on their real personal preferences. The link that exists in lifestyle will be more vivid and closer than a simple endorsement relationship.

Looking ahead to lifestyle trends

A key to marketing is "prediction" - predicting upcoming trends and discovering consumers' future lifestyles.

In 2021, many Xiaohongshu users fell in love with skiing, and skiing-related guides, dressing guides, equipment recommendations, etc. became a hot topic on the Xiaohongshu platform. As early as the beginning of the year, Xiaohongshu accurately predicted the arrival of the "ice and snow craze" in its "2021 Lifestyle Trend Keywords".

In addition to skiing, keywords such as camping, sugar-free, and fitness at home mentioned in "2021 Lifestyle Trend Keywords" have also become popular lifestyles among contemporary young groups.

At the beginning of this year, Xiaohongshu once again released the "Top Ten Life Trends in 2022", among which "conscious shopping" corresponds to a rational consumption concept, "environmental protection" echoes the issue of sustainable development, and "Ice and snow are in fashion" hits the Beijing Winter Olympics... Many trends are entering the public life at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The ability to accurately grasp trends is of course inseparable from Xiaohongshu users. Many brand managers who participated in the Double 11 events mentioned the user attributes of Xiaohongshu. In particular, in addition to characteristics such as youth, fashion, and trends, "lifestyle" is what Xiaohongshu users pay special attention to.

Tammie, head of Lancome's fragrance department, said, "There are many new lifestyles and scenarios that will first grow on Xiaohongshu, such as camping, skiing, and frisbee. These new consumption scenarios will bring many marketing opportunities, which is equivalent to creating a brand new marketing scenario." In fact, this is also one of the reasons why brands favor Xiaohongshu. Users' curiosity about emerging things and content output can stimulate the creativity of platforms and brands, thereby continuously bringing new marketing opportunities.

As of November 2021, Xiaohongshu’s monthly active users have reached 200 million. With such a huge user base, the content on Xiaohongshu will become more and more diverse, which also indicates that new marketing forms will emerge. For Xiaohongshu, it uses diversified marketing IP content to identify hot trends in a timely manner and help brands occupy a position in advance. In other words, as long as a brand participates in Xiaohongshu's marketing IP, it is equivalent to standing at the forefront of the most cutting-edge lifestyle trends.

Symbiosis and growth

Whether now or in the future, marketing must return to the real life of users, rather than blindly chasing the central traffic pool or releasing as much brand exposure as possible.

In the new consumer era, brand marketing rules have changed. Only by communicating with users sincerely in the right context and understanding what they are thinking can we help the brand grow.

Xiaohongshu is one of the platforms that provides brands with the above-mentioned dialogue context. Since last year, Xiaohongshu has launched multiple content categories such as food, fashion, humanities, and travel. This is not only to strengthen the platform's own mental awareness of a diverse lifestyle community, but also to build a sustainable content engine for brands.

It is foreseeable that the relationship between brands and community platforms will become increasingly close. As real-life content continues to emerge on the platform, there will be more new opportunities for communication between brands and consumers.

Author: BlockBan

Source: BlockBan