In 2025, brands will have to change their thinking when promoting products on Xiaohongshu!

As platform competition intensifies and user needs diversify, brands need to make corresponding adjustments to their marketing strategies on Xiaohongshu. This article will analyze in depth the four common misunderstandings that brands make when promoting products on Xiaohongshu, and the two major trends of Xiaohongshu in 2025 to help you stand out in Xiaohongshu marketing in 2025.

In the next 25 years, more brands will invest in Xiaohongshu to achieve growth. What is important for the bosses is not only the execution actions, but also the understanding of the platform.

Especially for brand owners, don’t think that creating content and achieving growth is just about hiring people and posting articles. I have met many bosses who, because of poor results from their campaigns, focused their energy on optimizing execution details. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of e-commerce growth.

Today, we summarize the common problems we encounter during our service process and share with you four common misunderstandings and two trends in the current situation of Xiaohongshu:

01 Myth

90% of small and medium-sized brands face four cognitive traps that waste their budget when promoting products on Xiaohongshu.

Myth 1: Planting grass = looking for KOL/KOC to place ads

Many bosses came up to me and asked me, "Your advertising is effective. What kind of influencers do you look for? How do you find them? How many do you invest in each month?" Based on their own failed experiences, some even think that Xiaohongshu is not effective.

In content marketing, content is just a form of delivery, whether it is live broadcast, pictures and texts, or short videos.

The product's positioning, pricing, advantages and disadvantages, target groups, scenarios, and pain points are the core factors that determine the launch strategy and must be handled by the boss. Don't expect employees to do everything the boss should do.

Advice to bosses:

The skills of execution can actually be learned after a period of hard work. What is important is to make sure that a series of things are done right in terms of direction, strategy, and product promotion, rather than just finding and screening influencers, and reviewing content. No matter how well these are done, if the pricing is wrong, high customer orders may be difficult to sell, or low customer orders may not make money, both of which affect growth.

Myth 2: Keyword stacking = product promotion?

We work with a maternal and infant brand. They previously placed a large number of notes on "apple-faced baby cream for sensitive skin", but the traffic was not good. What users need is a "solution" rather than a homogenized "product manual".

When "apple face" is over-commercialized, the platform will be more inclined to recommend real content such as "Experiences in caring for newborn apple face" and "Moms of sensitive babies tell their own stories on how to avoid pitfalls".

Advice to bosses:

Keywords are the medicine, scenes and emotions are the prescription.

Popular content must include pain point scenarios (such as “a baby with eczema crying at 3 a.m.”) + emotional resonance (such as “the bitter experience of a mother of two children”) + light product placement (such as “experts recommend XX ingredient”).

Myth 3: Popular articles = popular sales? Traffic ≠ sales

A new cat food brand has won many hits thanks to its cute pet content, but its sales are dismal. The more it invests, the more it wastes.

Underlying logic: Xiaohongshu’s content must be deeply integrated with Tmall users’ “purchase decision chain”.

The data of the popular article did not impress users through the product and stimulate their desire to buy. Such content will have no effect no matter how popular it is.

Advice to bosses:

The content team must simultaneously look at the Business Advisor data and look at the grass-planting content from the perspective of product conversion. They cannot just look at the popular articles, otherwise they will be lonely.

Misconception 4: Expert matrix = increasing volume and traffic?

Counter-common sense conclusion: 1 amateur KOL with 1,000 followers is greater than 10 general KOLs with 10,000 followers!

A certain high-order foreign skin care brand once cooperated with 40 waist-level influencers. As a result, the crowd labels in the Tmall store were confusing, and the content of the notes was no different from that of affordable products. It attracted young white-collar workers aged 24-30, but the actual purchasing group was women aged 30-40.

Advice to bosses:

You must cooperate with experts with a content-oriented approach. If you only cooperate based on the data, you will end up with traffic but the target audience will not be accurate.

02 Trends

In 2025, the Xiaohongshu ecosystem will become more and more competitive, and the blind effect, selling point + crowd seeding conversion effect will only get worse and worse. To see the blue ocean opportunity in the red ocean, at least it is not so competitive.

Trend 1: Search traffic enters the "precision" era

Scenario opportunities: More and more traditional big words (such as "sunscreen") will be monopolized by leading brands, but scenario words such as "sunscreen for commuting" and "sunscreen for military training" are blue ocean opportunities for small and medium-sized brands.

Advice to bosses:

Establish a "three-level keyword library":

• Level 1 words: Category words (defensive layout, such as "shampoo")
• Level 2 words: scenario pain point words (main attack position, such as "oily hair becomes greasy the next day after using shampoo")
• Level 3 words: long-tail demand words (surprise attack, such as "oil-control shampoo that can be used during breastfeeding").

Trend 2: Content trust chain changes from "planting grass" to "planting hearts"

The essence of content marketing is to “reduce user decision-making costs” rather than “increase brand exposure.” Users no longer believe in “hot items on the Internet,” but will pay for “verifiable chains of evidence.”

Advice to bosses:

Building the “Iron Triangle Trust System”:

1. Objective evidence (test report/experimental video),
2. Subjective experience (X-day check-in record),
3. Third-party witness (expert interpretation/cross-border evaluation)

In 2025, I wish you all great success!