5 Steps to Develop Your Brand on Xiaohongshu

Among the projects I have served over the years, 33 industries are open to the public except those stipulated in the confidentiality agreements. The largest marketing consulting project was a 400-page word version of a marketing implementation plan for them. The advertising fee exceeded 3.8 billion yuan, and the highest ROI was 1:102.

Friends often ask, how do you know if a project can be done? I have summarized two main points: first, we must master the most core methodology; second, we must not distort our actions during the execution process.

There is no impenetrable wall in the world. The methods you understand are probably also mastered by others. The main difference lies in execution. Execute each action vigorously, and your results will be controllable and have replicable granularity.

Only when the process control is refined to every step can the results be replicated on a large scale.

What information do you refer to when shopping nowadays? Some people go directly to Tmall, JD.com or offline stores to shop, some are recommended by friends, or are inspired by Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Zhihu, etc. In short, there is actually more and more information for reference.

For brands, domestic e-commerce is definitely inseparable from JD.com, Tmall, Taobao, Pinduoduo, Douyin, etc. But your conversion rate is not high, averaging between 2-5%, which means that out of 100 people who enter your store, 95 of them leave without buying anything.

The core reason is that there is no relatively rich content, and the conversion rate of hard advertising is relatively poor. Without large-scale investment, the revenue scale cannot be achieved.

Because if consumer goods do not include services, they are basically industrial products that can be easily mass-produced and need to rely on scale to win. As sales volume increases, marginal costs such as R&D costs, production costs, logistics costs, employee salaries, and office rent will decrease. However, without investment, the scale cannot be achieved and a positive cycle cannot be formed.

Therefore, mastering content marketing is to continuously obtain high-quality traffic from the platform at low cost. With content, consumers will have a deeper understanding of the product’s functions and gradually build trust.

In essence, live streaming is also a form of content. Generally, the details page will have an additional main video, but the live broadcast is much richer than what the details page shows, and it can be interacted with in real time, so a large amount of content will be generated in the live broadcast.

But what is the problem now? The traffic has become extremely dispersed and promotion has become increasingly complicated.

There are many different channels nowadays. For new startups, it would be very tiring to lay out all the channels due to limited manpower. Therefore, in the early stage when there are few people, it is necessary to invest limited resources in platforms where competition is not sufficient, so as to gain a competitive advantage.

Today I will mainly share with you: How consumer brands can layout the Xiaohongshu content ecosystem and achieve new growth

Xiaohongshu is a typical content platform and a must-have for content marketing. An organization in Hangzhou has achieved revenue of 1 billion by giving people free photos in exchange for helping them post content on Xiaohongshu.

Let’s talk briefly about the platform rules. Let’s first talk about Xiaohongshu’s label system. We call it “Xiaohongshu with Thousands of Faces for Thousands of People”. What does it mean?

The first step is to label users. When we register for Xiaohongshu, it will give us some tags to choose from, such as games, funny, music, animation, cute pets, photography, etc.

Second, label the content. When you post a note or a video, you need to tag the content. For example, the content may be targeted at users with sensitive skin, or it may be recommending a piece of clothing, a tourist attraction, etc.

Finally, labels are continuously adjusted for users and content based on their various behaviors while browsing notes, such as likes, comments, number of views, browsing time, favorites, forwarding, completion rate, etc.

Because the labels you choose at the beginning may be inaccurate, the system actually adjusts and combines your new labels through your behavior, and finally becomes more and more accurate.

It recommends content that you like. The more accurate it is, the more addictive it will be. Your brain will constantly produce short-term pleasure, and you will keep scrolling. This is why people are easily addicted to content platforms.

To obtain high-quality traffic on a platform, you must clearly know the traffic composition of the platform. The largest traffic of Xiaohongshu is search traffic. Because for consumers, most people go to Xiaohongshu to "shop around", that is, most people just want to read other people's reviews and usage experiences.

Many amateurs on Xiaohongshu have only dozens to one or two hundred fans, but the number of readings and likes of their notes will exceed ten thousand. This is because as long as the content is good and they understand ranking optimization, they can rank high on Xiaohongshu and bring more exposure. This exposure + good content will also bring likes, comments, collections, etc., resulting in the phenomenon of the strong getting stronger. Then the system will recommend it again and give it weight, allowing it to enter a larger traffic pool.

The second largest traffic is referral traffic, the third largest traffic is fan traffic, and the fourth largest traffic is regional traffic.

Finally, Xiaohongshu’s risk control system is divided into three categories:

The first category is called risk control for illegal content, which is a requirement for all content platforms in China: no pornographic, gambling, or drug-related content; no content from other platforms or political content, etc.

The second category is called risk control for illegal operations. For example, if you violate the rules in an article by inducing others to add you on WeChat, or starting a war of words, this is a type of illegal operation. There are many more, which I will not elaborate on here.

The third category is risk control to prevent group control. For example, in a marketing company, there are hundreds of mobile phones on a shelf in the office, and machines or computers are used to operate the phones to perform tasks simultaneously. This is called group control.

Xiaohongshu has a "Woodpecker Algorithm" that will investigate these matters very strictly, and will demote or even "pluck out" the relevant persons. Demotion is a small matter. The most important thing is to remove the device numbers, that is, directly record all the device numbers, and this device can no longer be registered on Xiaohongshu.

Many brands have been doing large amounts of low-quality content marketing on Xiaohongshu and have recently been directly punished by Xiaohongshu officials. When searching for brand names on Xiaohongshu, there is no content. When doing content marketing on Xiaohongshu, everyone must always remember that Xiaohongshu is a content platform. Only good content can bring in users. Never touch the bottom line of the platform.

In summary, according to the platform rules, Xiaohongshu is essentially a public domain traffic attribute, and the fans all belong to the platform.

If a KOL with 1 million followers has poor content, it is likely that he will only get a few dozen likes. On the contrary, even if an account has 0 followers or is an amateur account, as long as the content is good and it knows how to optimize the rankings, it may even have millions of reads, hundreds of thousands of likes and comments.

For brands, don’t just expect to spend money on top or mid-level bloggers. You must understand their way of playing. The era when force can defeat skill is gone forever.

We must adapt to the platform's rules and use them to do what is best for consumers and business.

So what are the five steps that brands need to go through to do content marketing on Xiaohongshu?

The first step is to refine the product's selling points. To refine the selling points of a product, you need to stand from the user's perspective, not the brand's perspective.

This year we are doing a marketing consulting project for Zulijian senior citizen shoes to improve e-commerce payment conversion rates, and then we are doing a content marketing project for Zulijian senior citizen shoes. How do we refine the selling points of the product?

As the elderly age, their bones change and their feet become wider, so it is easy for their shoes to not fit their feet. The corresponding selling point should be a wider toe box.

But when writing the product selling points, you must first write the corresponding scenarios. You need to explain why your product solves the problem in this scenario. You need to speak from the user's perspective: this shoe size was enough for you when you were young, so why can't you wear it now that you are older? Many people don't know this when they buy shoes for their parents, so you need to add this in your content marketing.

On the other hand, the elderly will feel tired when walking after putting on shoes, so they like to wear old-fashioned cloth shoes because they are more elastic and will not make their feet tired. So what is its corresponding selling point? It has an elastic midsole and the sole has been optimized or improved, so the feet of the elderly do not feel tired or heavy when wearing it.

Therefore, it is very important to know who your users are. Then, combine the advantages of the product itself, help users solve problems, and create content from the user's perspective, and it will naturally be popular.

The second step is to analyze Xiaohongshu’s benchmark competitors.

For example, when researching Zulijian, you need to see if any of Zulijian's competitors are being promoted on Xiaohongshu. If so, you need to analyze why its data in various dimensions is good or bad, find out where you can achieve big things with little money, what kind of content is more likely to become a hit, and finally summarize several directions for the product to become a hit, and mass-produce good content.

Data must be updated in a timely manner. It is useless to use old data to make current decisions.

The third step is to build blogger model and formulate delivery strategy.

First, choose a blogger with a high match. For example, it would not be appropriate to find a blogger who specializes in technology brands to promote Zulijian senior citizen shoes. For example, we often type in front of computers in the office, which can easily cause lumbar muscle strain or cervical discomfort, so we have computer desks that can be raised and lowered. For this kind of brand, it will be more effective to find some workplace bloggers to promote content.

Second, choose bloggers with better health. Some bloggers used to take all kinds of advertisements in order to make money, and they may have also made some illegal operations, which resulted in their health being not good enough. Such bloggers should not be selected.

Third, choose the blogger with the best value for money. KOLs or large bloggers with millions of followers are expensive, so you should choose bloggers with high cost-effectiveness.

Some bloggers are relatively healthy and well-matched. They may be KOCs or even amateurs, but you can send your content to them, or give them a brief and send them products. After the blogger uses the product, he or she can write a note and review it, and then send it out through their account. You can also optimize the search ranking of the note to get more exposure and content implantation, so that the cost-effectiveness is relatively high.

Fourth, develop content and conversion strategies. After deciding on the bloggers, what content do you distribute to them? Take the hair removal device as an example:

First of all, the core words are XX hair removal device, hair removal, hair removal device recommendation, hair removal device evaluation, etc. These are what users will search for.

The second category is symptom words, such as lip hair, leg hair, armpit hair, upper arm hair, etc.

The third is category words, such as razors, wax, depilatory creams, depilatory sprays, etc. These are all used for hair removal.

The fourth type is scene words, such as dressing, dating, skin care, makeup and hair removal devices, which are all related. These are called scene words.

Some users also have a deeper need to make their lives look more refined and make themselves more confident.

In addition, there are words related to competitive products such as ULike, Mukin, Kitty Annie, etc.

A brand needs to know what its product category is and what problems the product can solve for users. Therefore, a large number of keywords can be expanded through core words, symptom words, words in the same category, as well as scenarios, deep needs, competitor words, etc.

If you want to increase the precise traffic to your Tmall store, you need to do a lot of grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, and to do a lot of grass-planting you need to use keywords to pile up and expand the content.

The fifth step is data monitoring and analysis and optimization.

After creating good content and choosing good bloggers, you need to launch the campaign. After that, you need to monitor the data again, analyze and optimize, and finally find a hit model that suits your product. To mass-produce high-quality content that users and platforms like, thereby obtaining high-quality traffic at low cost and bringing new growth.

Finally, I will share three cases with you:

The first one is about how to create popular articles on Xiaohongshu.

We did a marketing consulting project for Panda Buzou Cake to improve user experience and increase conversion rates, and later provided content marketing services to Panda Buzou Cake. As a new cake brand, Panda Buzou Cake uses Spanish cream and seasonal fresh fruits in its cakes. Although the ingredients are very good, users are not five-star chefs and cannot tell the difference in taste.

So in addition to working hard on the product itself, it also made innovations in more obvious areas that users can easily perceive.

For example, the deliveryman will wear a panda costume and perform a dance for you. There are also small fireworks that can be safely set off indoors. Its birthday hat is not the traditional paper one, but a luminous one, which gives a completely different atmosphere. Therefore, its biggest innovation that can be perceived by consumers is service innovation.

The first thing to do when planting grass-roots content is to highlight the characteristics of the product, and the second is to bring up the Panda Buzou brand. When choosing pictures to promote products, users look at reviews, not hard advertisements, so the pictures must be authentic and not overly beautified.

In terms of content, the innovation of Panda Don’t Walk Cake that can be perceived by users is mainly in service, so the content mainly highlights the service, and can highlight the theme of giving surprises to relatives/friends through the brand.

The second case tells everyone to pay attention to the title and content.

For example, the title of one of the articles about Zulijian is "Still couldn't resist the temptation of Zulijian".

Another interesting post is: "You call other girls beautiful when they wear AJs, but you call me NT when I wear Zulijian. You know nothing. My Zulijians don't sprain my ankle when I stop suddenly, and they don't break when I change direction. Even Curry says they are good."

This statement is in a more roaring tone, proving that Zulijian has good quality, because Zulijian's commitment to users is: if the glue comes apart within one year, free return and exchange, which also proves that Zulijian's product quality is very good.

How to write an article title that fits the style of Xiaohongshu? For example, this title: "At the age of 23, I finally paid for a pair of ice berry pink ankle boots." Do you think this title is interesting? Paying in full means people are afraid that they don’t have enough money. It is also a way of expression that people born in the 1990s and 2000s are accustomed to.

Therefore, if you write content in a language that young people can understand, or in a way that makes them feel that you are the same kind of person, the efficiency of promoting your products will be much higher.

The third case is about the secret of selling products on Xiaohongshu.

Let’s look at another brand called Songneng. This brand used to be engaged in toB business, that is, it originated from an OEM factory. Its main products are computer stands and mobile phone stands. It has created a lot of grass-planting content on Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Bilibili.

How do they promote products on the Xiaohongshu platform?

First of all, the keywords of the article are defined as computer stand, laptop stand and Songneng stand. You must first occupy the brand words, then occupy the category words, and then put the brand words and category words together. After occupying them, lay out about 1,000 notes.

In the early stages of starting a business, you must do performance advertising. Performance advertising means that marketing is for the purpose of planting seeds and bringing in goods. Therefore, content marketing without conversion is just hooliganism.

After the content is created and published, comments must be controlled because according to the platform's risk control system, we cannot ask users to go to a certain platform to purchase, or ask users to follow a certain public account in the body of the note. This is a violation of regulations and the system will demote you.

However, your soft advertisements should appear every 1-2 screens in the comment area, so that you can achieve true content-planting and product marketing.

After a month of promotion, Songneng e-commerce’s backend can see that the search volume for brand words shows a clear upward trend.

The way we leverage content marketing is to use KOC to achieve the effect of KOL, and use KOL to achieve the effect of celebrities. This is a very important point in content marketing.

The real value of content marketing is to obtain high-quality traffic at a long-term and low cost through content marketing.

Q1: Perfect Diary and Zhong Xue Gao were successful when Xiaohongshu had a low traffic situation. Today is different from the past. When everyone comes to Xiaohongshu to create content, does it also mean that Xiaohongshu has become more inward-looking?

A: First, although everyone has begun to wake up and know to go to Xiaohongshu to promote products, you must believe that the competition there is definitely not as fierce as that on Tmall, JD.com, and Taobao, so it still has a competitive advantage relatively speaking and is worth doing.

Second, not everyone knows the traffic rules of Xiaohongshu’s platform. Its largest traffic comes from search traffic, so you need to understand SEO and know that good content can be put into amateur accounts to achieve good results. So you can definitely do it in this regard. At least it has nothing to do with the category. We have also helped clients sell products with a unit price of up to one million on Xiaohongshu.

Q2: What should we pay attention to when launching women’s clothing category? Because the items are updated quickly.

A: Women’s clothing items are updated quickly and the cycle is relatively short, so they need to be fast. After you launch a new product and find that it has the potential to become a hit, you need to immediately launch it on a large scale, because the long-tail effect of Xiaohongshu is not particularly obvious in this category, but it can accumulate brand potential.

In the body of the note or in the comment area, you need to guide users to follow and bookmark this store. The next time you release a new product, users will be notified, which is beneficial to you.

It should also be noted that the people doing the buyer show in the content should be ordinary people, not models. For ordinary people, it is important to look good in your clothes, so brands need to find some KOLs or KOCs or even amateurs who are suitable for highlighting the characteristics of the products, and the buyer show pictures cannot be overly beautified.

Q3: If you are making children's health food, such as seaweed biscuits, but the ingredients are unique, what should you do?

A: You have a unique formula of raw materials. What user value does this formula bring? Is it because it tastes better, is it healthier, or has some other value?

Many of the partners and brands we meet in the marketing consulting process will emphasize how strong their supply chain is, how good their product quality is, and how many patents they have obtained in R&D. However, this is brand language or seller language, not buyer language. It is an internal perspective rather than an external perspective, and external intelligence naturally looks at problems from an external perspective.

It is very important to clearly explain the value you create for users using your unique formula and ingredients. Users don’t care who you are or how powerful you are. They only care about what value you bring to them and whether they will be better off after owning the product.

Q4: How can a new creative coffee brand be promoted on Xiaohongshu?

A: You still need to follow the five steps mentioned above to create content for Xiaohongshu.

For example, if you are a new brand of coffee, you need to show that your coffee is unique. Is it the packaging, ingredients, taste, or the way it is drunk? To stand out, it is difficult to survive without characteristics.

For example, Luckin Coffee invited teachers to give training on the application of color aesthetics in coffee, focusing on its application in coffee seasonings and coffee colors. Back to the product itself, they will compete internally. For every five products produced, only one product can be launched. Through internal competition, they will eliminate the products with weak competitiveness. The products launched are likely to be very popular, such as this year's hot-selling raw coconut latte.

Q5: Medical device products are subject to many restrictions by the platform. How can you avoid being restricted by the platform when promoting products?

A: Let’s take an example of daily health food. One of the functions of probiotics is to treat constipation, diarrhea, and regulate the stomach and intestines. This cannot be mentioned on the platform, so it uses a word called "pushing feces feeling" and another word called "toilet firecrackers". When you see this word, do you immediately know what the effect is?

There are many ways to avoid the platform's review and flow control. It depends on whether you will spend the time and energy to think and use your brain to do it. You can also ask for external intelligence to help if you have any problems.

Finally, I would like to leave you with a message: Life is like a super conversion rate. It is a process of continuous optimization. It depends on the frequency and extent of your optimization.

Author: Inspur New Consumption

Source: Inspur New Consumption