4 ways to customize your budget for Xiaohongshu marketing! Help you prepare for Xiaohongshu marketing in 2025!

On Xiaohongshu, a platform full of opportunities and challenges, how to reasonably formulate a budget to achieve the best marketing effect is a difficult problem faced by many brands. This article will share four practical budget customization methods to help brands face competition in Xiaohongshu marketing in 2025 and achieve precise delivery and efficient growth.

There were quite a few brands like this when I was doing advertising. When I asked them about their advertising budget, they had no idea at all or were a little confused. They didn't know how to set a budget or what amount was reasonable.

In fact, the budget situation has a huge impact on the effectiveness of the campaign!

Although there is a saying in the marketing world that you get what you pay for, content marketing and e-commerce marketing are different.

No matter how good your foundation is on an e-commerce platform, the more money you spend, the better the results will be. But it is not the same for content marketing. It needs to consider your foundation on the platform and maintain a normal and steady growth. If you expect to become a big fat man in one bite, you will only kill your own brand.

If there is too much, we cannot provide it and the market cannot absorb it. If there is too little, it will not be effective and will be wasted.

But this is not a quantitative amount with clear standards. When it comes to different brands and categories, the basic lines and standards are different. There is no way to give you a specific number and tell you that investing XX million is enough.

I have always been teaching people how to fish, so today I will share with you how we can finalize the advertising budget based on our own situation and give you some ideas.

1. What kind of budget is reasonable?

We often say that we should formulate a reasonable budget, so what kind of budget is reasonable?

I think it meets at least two criteria - it can be implemented and it can be predicted.

1. Able to land

A budget that cannot be implemented is a waste of time.

Even if a small start-up brand sets a marketing budget of 30 million, it will not be able to spend it. And a growing brand only has a marketing budget of 30,000 per month, which is obviously not enough and the brand cannot develop.

The prerequisite for implementation is that the budget needs to meet the needs of our development stage and help us maximize unit utility within our marketing capabilities.

At the same time, it must also conform to the industry average. Even at the same stage of development, the marketing expenses required for the maternal and infant industry and the beauty industry to achieve the same effect are different.

2. Can be estimated

While formulating the budget, we also need to estimate the results after the launch.

If we don’t know what a budget can bring to the brand and what it can do, then this budget is obviously unreasonable and unfounded.

It’s like some investment agencies, when asked, they say 50,000 or 100,000, without considering your current situation, what you want, and they can’t say for sure what we can get after the investment. That is obviously not acceptable.

2. Four ways to make a budget

Based on these two criteria, I will give you four methods for making a budget. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, and you can all refer to them.

What is more important than setting costs is to spend our money effectively and valuable!

1. According to your own budget/situation

The simplest way is to look at the budget we can take out! Use as much as you can, and proceed steadily. Don't stare at the marketing expenses and results of the top brands that are tens of millions per month. Do your own cooking first.

Whether it’s three or five hundred thousand per month, or thirty or fifty thousand is fine, as long as every penny is spent wisely, it will bring us growth and feedback.

Maximize the effectiveness of units instead of piling up in large quantities!

However, it is not recommended to invest less than 30,000 yuan per month in Xiaohongshu, otherwise it will not make any splash and will be wasted.

At this time, you need to pay attention to the details of strategy formulation and implementation, especially for brands with limited budgets who want to make a small investment for a big gain or start from 0-1.

2. Feedback based on past delivery results

If we have daily advertising, or have done advertising before, it is most appropriate to formulate a budget based on the feedback from our past advertising!

When referring here, it is necessary to consider four points: time node, investment volume, investment results, and operation capabilities.

1) Time Node

As big sales approach, bloggers’ quotations will be higher than usual, while there will be more room for negotiation during February to May each year.

This will affect the number of bloggers we can ultimately work with within the budget we set.

For example:

The investment we refer to is from October to December, with a monthly investment of 100,000 yuan and 80 bloggers.

In the January-March period, if we want to maintain the same amount and level of bloggers, the cost can be controlled at around 80,000 yuan, because the same blogger will have a lower quote.

*The amounts and quantities are only used as assumptions and do not represent actual conditions.

2) Volume of investment

If our previous advertising budget was less than 30,000, the feedback would not be of much reference value to us due to the limited number of samples.

At this time, we can formulate a budget based on the average price of single bloggers at each level and the number of bloggers we want to advertise this time.

For example:

Last time, we invested in 50 bloggers with less than 10,000 followers and 20 bloggers with 10,000-100,000 followers, spending a total of 80,000 yuan.

In the next campaign, based on the volume and interaction effects, we need to target 80 bloggers with less than 10,000 followers + 35 bloggers with 10,000-100,000 followers. Assuming the bloggers' quotation levels remain unchanged, our budget will become 120,000.

If the time node affects the blogger's quotation, then on this basis, combine it with the first point to comprehensively determine the budget!

*The amounts and quantities are only used as assumptions and do not represent actual conditions.

3) Delivery results

Assuming that we have previously had three stages of delivery, we need to list the costs and results of the three deliveries A/B/C. The results include the number of bloggers, hierarchical distribution, volume of popular articles, total interactions, and cost per interaction.

The store visits and conversion rates are more dependent on content optimization capabilities and are not strongly related to budget setting, so they are not used as a reference here.

From previous campaigns, we selected the situations with the best feedback, especially the best volume of popular articles and the best cost per interaction, and used the budget of this campaign to formulate the budget for our new campaign.

What is referenced here are more different types of bloggers, and the impact of bloggers at different levels on the delivery effect, as well as the impact on the budget.

For example, for the same mini electric stew pot, I can target both maternal and child bloggers and lifestyle vlog bloggers, and the interactions, store visits and quotations that these two can bring are different!

4) Trading ability

The reason why I said to formulate the budget based on the best situation of explosive content volume and unit interaction cost is because the results of our investment depend to a large extent on our management ability, that is, whether we can maximize the unit utility.

The marketing expenses incurred by a mature content management team and a newly formed or inexperienced delivery team to achieve the same delivery results are also very different.

For example, in our last campaign, we handed it over to a high-quality content-based MCN organization, which cost us RMB 100,000. But this time, we want to form a brand team to do it ourselves.

But if we want to achieve the same effect as the last time, if we are a newly formed team and everyone is relatively new, the cost may be 1-2 times higher than last time, reaching 200,000-300,000 yuan.

The larger the investment volume, the greater the budget gap that can be created.

Therefore, improving the team's operational capabilities, or finding an agency with content optimization capabilities to deliver content on our behalf, is also an important consideration when controlling and formulating our budget.

In terms of cost setting, if it is a growing brand, it is recommended to increase it by 1-1.5 times every quarter. Of course, it would be best if it can be increased month by month.

If it is a newly launched brand, you can maintain a stable investment in the early stage. For example, our previous investment was 50,000 yuan per month, so we should maintain an investment of around 50,000 yuan per month, and increase the budget during major marketing stages such as new products or big promotions, and increase the investment to 80,000-100,000 yuan.

3. Reverse according to the interim results

If we have never placed an ad before and do not want to find an agency to do it for us, and cannot refer to the past or learn from the experience of the agency about the standards of other brands in the same field, we can also work backwards based on the results we want.

For example.

In this campaign, we want to achieve a 40% content share under the keyword [electric stew pot]. According to the current content retention data of the market, it will take about 100 popular articles to achieve this.

Assuming that in the estimation of our management capabilities, our explosive article rate is 2%, then to achieve 100 explosive articles, at least 5,000 notes will be needed.

Based on this number, combined with the distribution of influencers in our delivery strategy and the average price of each influencer, we will calculate the costs.

Assume that in our strategy, the hierarchical distribution and estimated cost per blogger for this campaign are top 5% (50,000) + mid-level 30% (8,000) + KOC 35% (1,000) + amateur 30% (400).

Our budget for this campaign is:

*Note: All data are hypothetical and do not represent the actual situation. It mainly depends on your thinking!

With this method of calculation, we can also know more clearly what kind of coverage scale or feedback we can get after the launch.

This formulation method is more suitable for brands with clear advertising goals. The team has relatively rich experience in Xiaohongshu advertising and has overall control capabilities, so that costs can be effectively controlled under the established goals.

4. Refer to the cost of competing products

This is actually the method I least recommend. It’s not that this method is unreasonable, but it is very easy to generalize and lead to large deviations.

The first is benchmarking against competitors. This is the factor that most affects our advertising budget under this dimension. However, finding reasonable benchmarking against competitors is something that many brands cannot do.

Of course, we may not get very precise advertising costs from our competitors, but we can make a rough estimate based on their voice and exposure on the platform, the number of cooperating bloggers, etc., whether it is two million, five hundred thousand, etc.

Generally, the difference will not be too big, so that someone spends 200,000 yuan but we estimate it to be 800,000 yuan.

We then formulate a budget based on our own content management capabilities.

Of course, the budgets derived from these methods are given to brands as a reference, rather than being formulated without dimension. However, this does not mean that the effect of the advertising will be poor if the budget amount is not reached or exceeded.

Persistence is always better than fishing for three days and drying the net for two days. As long as we persevere, even a drop of water can wear away a stone.