Xiaohongshu platform’s distribution strategy and case analysis

According to relevant data, China's cosmetics market continues to grow: In 2018, the total amount of cosmetics in the country reached a peak in recent years, reaching 261.9 billion yuan, and will continue to rise; it is expected to reach a new peak in 2019, and the scale of China's cosmetics market will further expand in the future.

Among them, international beauty brands are more popular on Xiaohongshu, and international beauty brands are better than local beauty brands in terms of marketing strength and marketing strategy. The discussion is generally hot, and MAC is the most popular beauty brand. Local brands need to strengthen their marketing efforts or change their marketing strategies. Perfect Diary has become the hottest local beauty brand.

Beauty industry development trends and marketing overview

According to relevant data, local skin care brands have a place in the international market. In the fiercely competitive skin care market, local brands lead Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, and occupy the highest share of about 29.7%. This shows that excellent local skin care companies have stabilized their positions after experiencing the siege period of international giants, and have gradually cultivated their own segmented customer groups and unique competitiveness.

As an e-commerce community platform vertically centered on women's content, Xiaohongshu is a further development and advancement of the e-commerce industry. It is also a new product platform for brands, with different focuses on conversion and product promotion. Therefore, it is a new challenge for the market and marketers, especially in terms of mastering the platform's mechanism and gameplay, and more in-depth research is needed in terms of traffic generation, conversion, and delivery.

The development of Xiaohongshu platform: the profile and portrait analysis of Xiaohongshu users’ activity

Xiaohongshu has a place among social networking sites.

In 2019, the total number of active devices of Xiaohongshu reached 419.36 million, surpassing the "social networking sites" of Zhihu and Douban, which started out as UGC communities in the early days. The number is even more than 7 times that of Douban, and it has successfully taken a piece of the pie in the community website market.

In 2019, the number of active devices of Xiaohongshu users showed an overall upward trend. The number of active devices of users showed an upward trend from January to July, reaching a maximum of 53.99 million in July; however, due to the impact of the platform's suspected violations, the number of active online users decreased in August.

The users of Xiaohongshu are mainly from first-tier cities, aged 25-35, and female. The users are mainly from first-tier cities, accounting for about 44.6%. Most of these users have high education and high income, and strong comprehensive consumption capacity. They are the dominant consumer group in the future. It is worth noting that users in underdeveloped areas have become the main group of the Internet, and the market space has great potential. The middle and high-end consumer group accounts for the largest proportion in Xiaohongshu, mainly composed of people aged 25-35, accounting for about 62.3%. This group is characterized by very strong consumption and purchasing power, and is the main force of consumption in the future. The female group accounts for 86%, and the content is precisely positioned vertically in the beauty category.

The above part is an analysis of the industry’s views and the development of the Xiaohongshu platform and its user groups.

This article mainly analyzes the brand’s marketing strategies and cases on Xiaohongshu from two aspects.

1. Xiaohongshu’s strategy for creating hot products

1. User analysis

The Xiaohongshu platform has nearly 200 million users, 90% of whom are high-spending women in first- and second-tier cities. With consumption upgrading, changes in consumption concepts can be seen from the psychological changes of users towards products.

2. Analysis of Xiaohongshu User Portrait

The categories with the most accurate user portraits and most suitable for recommendation include: cosmetics, skin care, mother and baby, clothing, offline medical beauty, etc.

3. Keywords for marketing on Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu influencers are divided into pure amateurs, amateurs with thousands of fans, expert KOLs (bottom, middle, top), artists and celebrities, and top keyword rankings (i.e. Xiaohongshu in-site SEO). Brand promotion must have keywords as tags, because only in this way can it be retrieved by the platform, and searching is also very convenient.

4. Some points to note if a brand wants to become a hit

(1) Massive exposure and efficient traffic. How to obtain these exposure and traffic? The most direct source is KOL + celebrities, using their influence to spread and radiate to fans.

(2) After a brand has achieved a certain amount of exposure and traffic, it needs to establish a good reputation. How to build word-of-mouth is to make a group quickly identify with it based on a core point of trust.

(3) Content dissemination planning

It is necessary to combine with the platform's major nodes and hot topics to integrate with the brand in order to obtain the platform's traffic support. And when a brand does not have many seed users, it can only intervene in word-of-mouth building, which is the keyword we mentioned before: amateurs.

With exposure, traffic, and word of mouth, the next step is to realize sales conversion through sales channels; we collectively call this brand promotion construction. As long as a brand does a good job in brand promotion, any sales channel can carry traffic and achieve conversion.

(4) Vertical influencer combination and delivery strategy

This is a common marketing strategy, which mainly depends on the brand's budget. If the brand has sufficient budget, you can use the celebrity + KOL strategy. If the budget is small, you can start with ordinary people and then work your way up to the top of the pyramid.

5. Notes on hot-selling notes

Now is an era where content is king, and the most important thing here is the combination of people, objects and scenes. Promotion must also take into account the applicability of the product and the right time. Why?

For example:

People think about it, who would buy sunscreen in winter? This is the right time.

Who uses sunscreen indoors? This is the right scene.

Only in the hot summer, outdoors is a suitable scene for sun protection and you will meet the right buyers.

So now we have traffic and content, what do we need to do next?

That is to increase the keyword ranking to the top and optimize the on-site SEO; Xiaohongshu itself is a large search engine, so a high ranking can obtain a large part of the natural search traffic, and it is the king of long-tail traffic, which is continuous and continuous. This is the same as Baidu SEO bidding. Planting grass is an act that takes two to tango. It requires more and more user attention in the entire community, and here we need KOL to recommend it.

6. The topic is important

The brand’s own topics and social hot topics are combined with the brand. From the perspective of communication, only topics can be spread effectively. With topics, coupled with recommendations from internet celebrities, fan interactions, and soft implantation of brand products, conversion purchases can be achieved.

7. Marketing Link

This is a standard service process, and all product launches must complete this process.

The above are some content skills and some details that matter, so you must grasp these details when placing ads so that a brand can achieve good results when promoted on Xiaohongshu.

8. Products and brands empower products

(1) The product quality is good, but it is not well-known, so the only way to form brand influence is to drive the product. In this case, the product must be cost-effective, novel, and creative, preferably a fast-moving consumer product, so that it is easy for fans to know it and establish brand memory. A major feature of this type of promotion is that the core of marketing is to focus on product functions, efficacy, and usage scenarios.

(2) Brand-enabled products: This is easy to understand. For example, when Chanel launches a new perfume, people buy its perfume products after knowing the brand. This type of product promotion tends to focus on building brand potential, celebrity endorsements, etc., and mainly relies on the marketing power of the parent brand to bring new products to market. This kind of product basically belongs to the big brand level.

2. Analysis of Xiaohongshu advertising cases for the beauty industry

Main brands analyzed: Marie Dalgar, Korea's unnyclub, Perfect Diary, Huaxizi

Basically, everyone who has promoted these brands on Xiaohongshu knows about them. We analyze the cases by combining methodology and practical experience.

1. How to advertise on Xiaohongshu in the beauty industry? From the following aspects

(1) First of all, professional operators

Being a professional operator is not about how much salary you pay, but about emphasizing the professional qualities of the staff. Brands like Perfect Diary and Mary Kay attach great importance to the candidate's experience in advertising and operating on Xiaohongshu.

Because Xiaohongshu has many rules for publishing. If an inexperienced person is allowed to operate Xiaohongshu, the articles published by the brand are likely to be blocked by Xiaohongshu in minutes. In addition, high-quality operators can select high-quality bloggers at a low price, saving the brand a lot of promotion costs.

(2) Focus on creating best-selling products

Remember, even if you have a lot of production lines, you can't push most of the products out evenly. Just focus on promoting one or three products, taking Perfect Diary and Mary Kay as examples.

A. Perfect Diary’s promotional categories include 8 product categories: lipstick, lip gloss, blush, eye shadow, liquid foundation, highlighter, cushion, perfume, and makeup remover. Among them, eye shadow, makeup remover, and lipstick have the largest number of notes and are the top three products in the same category on Xiaohongshu, with a high rate of best-selling products.

B. Mary Kay has 15 product categories. Except for lipstick, which has a relatively high number of notes, the number of notes for other products is relatively evenly distributed. The promotion power is dispersed, making it difficult to produce hit products.

So how does the beauty industry choose to promote popular products? For many beauty brands, lipstick is chosen as the main product because lipstick has the brightest color and the notes made with it are the most eye-catching. However, when choosing a hot-selling product, we should not blindly follow the trend. We must first analyze whether we have a competitive advantage.

Everyone knows that Perfect Diary is already the "big brother" in the lipstick industry, just like Li Jiaqi is the number one lipstick brand. It is difficult for the brand to shake its position as the number one brand with long-term and large-scale investment. Moreover, the color, smoothness, and non-stickiness of the lipstick are no longer very special advantages in front of countless competitors. Therefore, Hua Xizi, which specializes in carved lipsticks and has extremely high appearance, can break through the siege.

C. The Korean brand unnyclub avoided the advantages of products such as Mary Kay and Perfect Diary, and chose the popular unny eyeliner. The characteristics of their eyeliner are that it is waterproof, non-smudged and the effect is very natural.

Super makeup brands like Perfect Diary also chose twelve-color animal eyeshadows as their main product this year. The strategy of concentrating all efforts on promoting popular products is obviously effective. For example, the sales of "Explorer Twelve-Color Animal Eyeshadow" promoted by Perfect Diary in March this year has never fallen out of the top 10 of Perfect Diary's official store since it went online. Creating a hit product is like owning a cash cow, which will bring high sales over a long period of time and also drive sales of other products.

Another misunderstanding to watch out for is:

Many people feel that they have invested heavily in Xiaohongshu, and there are many notes on it when searching, but they gradually stopped investing. However, the fact is, in addition to concentrated investment before major promotions, it is best for brands to continue investing every month. For example, if you invested 300,000 in the first month, 50,000 in the second month, and 50,000 in the third month, you can maintain the popularity of the brand and make the brand explode one day after a long period of investment.

(3) Proportion of the number and level of bloggers

In fact, some brands do not need to seek endorsements from big-name celebrities from the beginning. Instead, they widely deploy niche KOLs. The top influencers and celebrities are there to create momentum and attract user attention, the mid-level influencers are there to plant grass, and as for the amateurs, although they cannot play a big role, their momentum is huge and can also affect ordinary users. In this case, many amateurs will follow suit and write just because the product is a hit.

However, it is important to note that the head, waist, and amateur combinations are reasonably matched. For example, on the Xiaohongshu eyeliner sales ranking list, South Korea's UNNY eyeliner ranks second with 3,648 notes, while Mary Kay eyeliner ranks 11th with 3,936 notes.

Then why is there such a huge difference in sales volume between the two eyeliners even though the number of notes and product prices are similar?

After analysis, it was found that the main reason was the ratio of KOLs. There are more than 30 top bloggers of Korea's UNNY Eyeliner with more than 100,000 fans, while there are only a few top bloggers of Mary Kay. The rest are basically amateurs with less than 10,000 fans. The ratio of bloggers at different levels is very important. We cannot just invest in small bloggers, but we must reasonably allocate the top, middle and amateur bloggers. The best ratio of beauty bloggers is 5:50:100 for top, middle and amateur bloggers.

（4）Develop corresponding content strategy

In the beauty industry, there are basically more picture and text notes than video notes. This can also be seen from the number of Xiaohongshu influencers. Among the vertical category influencers, beauty influencers are the number one. And for Xiaohongshu bloggers, pictures and texts are the most convenient way. Videos have higher requirements for content production and higher costs.

This can be seen from the notes that have been placed in large quantities by brands such as Mary Kay, Perfect Diary, Hua Xizi, and Unnyclub.

Taking lipstick as an example, the content presentation is mainly based on color testing, and the requirements for the influencer's appearance and color testing photos are quite high. Even if they are amateurs, there is no ambiguity. It is possible to modify a picture and make the influencer give up cooperation. From the published notes, it can be seen that these big-name beauty brands have very high quality requirements not only for the top bloggers, but also for amateurs with only a few hundred fans.

For beauty product notes, pictures and titles are the most important because consumers care most about whether the product looks good when applied. Collect notes with high interactions and find color swatch notes. The first picture with a person + product is the most popular among consumers. The display of characters and products is usually in a four-square grid, which amplifies the product effect.

In terms of picture distribution, the upper picture is usually the product, the middle picture is the effect on the face, and the lower picture is the color test. It is convenient for users to directly understand the product and its usage effects. Using puzzles not only attracts clicks, but also reduces the risk of being judged as an advertisement due to displaying only one single product.

In addition to color swatch notes, beauty tutorials and review notes also have high interaction, and these two types of notes are the most likely to become popular. The first picture of beauty tutorials mostly features people, showing the effect of makeup and attracting users to click. As for the review notes, the first picture is a puzzle of multiple products. Regarding the copy of the notes, although the pictures are important, the copy cannot be ignored. In the color test notes, the title copy is mostly in the form of effect description or expression of emotion.

The above is a case analysis of Xiaohongshu’s hit creation and the beauty industry. For Xiaohongshu’s placement, brands should decide based on their actual situation, select influencers, get content points, combine hot spots, and be familiar with the platform mechanism. This is the most important point for brand placement and achieving brand-effect integration.

Author: Meilingdao

Source: Meiling Knife (ID:meilingd25)

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