The reverse logic of Xiaohongshu’s advertising under the “high pressure crackdown”

Xiaohongshu has undergone a lot of changes during this period.

for example

Crack down on traffic diversion outside the site, launch special governance on transaction diversion, and block countless accounts

The closed loop of community e-commerce has opened up new barriers to entry for potato shops, and the number of new potato shops has reached a new high.

Suing the notification platform, claiming tens of millions in compensation, and comprehensively upgrading the management of false marketing

To combat false marketing, a large number of brands have been banned and directly declared “no such product”

In fact, these changes are all reasonable. The changes at the rule level are all for better governance of the community ecology. What remains unchanged is the user value behind the Xiaohongshu platform.

More and more brands that are good at "techniques" are leaving the Xiaohongshu stage, while brands that focus on high-quality content continue to share the prosperity of the community

It is not difficult to find that the brands that were cleared out all used a large number of false marketing notes to promote

Take Nivea as an example. According to the data collected by Qiangua Data one month before Nivea was banned, the number of Nivea brand-related notes reached 1,234, while the number of Nivea commercial releases (notes published after influencers have reported brand cooperation) was only 9. this

This means that an average of 40 relevant posts are published on Xiaohongshu every day, and most of them are mixed with fake marketing content from brands.

When the number of reported notes and the number of false marketing notes are seriously unbalanced, the community has reason to believe that you are affecting the community ecosystem content, and then catch a few typical ones to make an example of you.

Most brands have misunderstandings about Xiaohongshu. The first thing many brands do when entering Xiaohongshu is to increase sales. Some brands even become amateurs.

People usually think that the node that links Xiaohongshu users is Xiaohongshu influencers, but in fact, it is the content that links users, and influencers are just carriers of different content types. Although the number of influencers’ existing fans can determine the basic distribution number (about 200 for 1,000 fans and about 500 for 10,000 fans), the upper limit of content distribution is determined only by the content itself.

Content = unlimited growth of traffic entrance. Each content is the smallest marketing unit. It is more important to improve the quality of content than to increase the quantity. The cost-effectiveness of quality must be greater than that of quantity.

Some people may say that it is cheap to publish hundreds or thousands of articles with just tens of thousands of dollars, which seems to be very cost-effective. However, there is a very high risk of "damaging" brand words and keywords.

A while ago, a friend who sells cotton towels asked me for help to analyze why the natural traffic and inclusion of Xiaohongshu have been poor. So I grabbed some key data and generated a visual table, as shown below.

This brand only started to advertise on Xiaohongshu in March. Before that, the brand had no presence on Xiaohongshu. It can be seen from the visualization table that the number of related notes was always 0 before March, so the brand chose to directly expand the market and made 200 test articles in the first month. The traffic was OK at the beginning, but the organic traffic continued to decline and the inclusion rate also hit a new low. The overall inclusion rate in the first month was lowered to 42%. Although the brand continued to expand the market in the next month, the number of expansions was controlled due to the continuous decline in the inclusion rate.

I believe that many small and medium-sized brands have also encountered this situation. The best way to avoid it is to slow down the pace of delivery. For the community, a brand may not have any influence at first, but suddenly at a certain stage, the number of related notes increases sharply. This behavior will be judged by the community as malicious marketing behavior and a "politically incorrect" violation of the community convention. When such content exceeds a certain warning line, it may cause brand words and related keywords to be restricted or even blocked. In this case, no matter how many notes are posted, no recommended traffic will be obtained, resulting in a significant reduction in the effect of the posting.

Therefore, before placing ads on Xiaohongshu , please first collect information about whether your brand currently has a "natural voice" on Xiaohongshu. If you already have a certain amount of "natural voice" foundation, you can choose to cooperate with a small number of high-quality KOCs to keep the voice growing naturally;

If there is no "natural voice" on the site, it is recommended to start with mid-level KOLs, and then gradually increase the number of KOCs. It should be a gradual process. Try not to make the trend of the number of related notes and likes too high in the first month. It is usually not recommended to directly increase the volume in the first month.

The delivery model I usually use is as shown in the figure below. I start with mid-level KOLs, and report them if possible to drive the growth of natural traffic. After the first wave of natural traffic is exhausted, I use KOCs to supplement it to maintain the growth curve. After the traffic is stable, I use Xiaohongshu brand official V, e-commerce or private domain channels to stimulate self-propagation, and finally use top KOLs to break through the traffic bottleneck.

So in fact, it is not getting harder to do business on Xiaohongshu, but the threshold has been raised. Brands that don’t understand marketing, content, and rhythm are being cleared out. Are you among them?

Author: Zhao Zichen Vic

Source: Zhao Zichen Vic