Talk about advertising content: Only people can impress people

The combination of advertising and content is a revolution in the marketing industry. In this article, we will explore how to use storytelling and emotional resonance to make advertising no longer a cold information transmission, but a warm communication. From Xiaohongshu's "Crowd Event" to Haier washing machine's "My Balcony Habitat", each case is a vivid interpretation of advertising content. Let us take a deeper look at how to inject human warmth into advertising.

As you all know, I am a person who holds high the banner of content.

Since my first article in 2015, “What I Learned from My New Media Experience at MK in New York,” I have been emphasizing the importance of content marketing.

Now it is 2024, and content promotion has become one of the basic operations of marketing, which is quite gratifying. However, many brands will have a question: product promotion cannot solve all problems. Branding is still very important, but the old way of playing seems to be ineffective. What should we do?

Solution: I mentioned in "What is the difference between advertising and content?" that big advertising is not ineffective and will always exist, but in the future, advertising should be content-based.

But how to do it? Xiaohongshu has handed in its paper.

Many people may not have noticed that Xiaohongshu has spent a lot of energy in the past two years to develop an IP project that is closely integrated with the crowd, which is internally called a "crowd event", including the Slow People's Day, the Outsider's Day, the Snowman Day, etc.

This "X-People Festival" series started from the unique crowd and trend of Xiaohongshu, and achieved good results. For example, the mid-year Slow People Festival created 6.7 billion exposures and cooperated with 20+ brands, setting a record for the largest investment promotion scale in the history of Xiaohongshu. Brands such as Mengniu, Feihe, Haier, and Zhiji have already joined the cooperation.

The picture comes from Xiaohongshu blogger @野生珍妮@国产无线电X

This aroused my curiosity. How did Xiaohongshu do it? How does a content platform make "big advertisements"? This is worth observing and is also suitable for discussing "advertising contentization".

Therefore, I contacted the project planner Baoni, participated in the bloggers and brands, and even went to the site of the Outer Festival. This article will share how I understand "crowd events" and also give brands some references on how to make good use of Xiaohongshu IP.

1. Crowd events are led by the “crowd”

I have been telling everyone that the new marketing is no longer about birds of a feather flock together, but about people being divided into groups.

This time on Xiaohongshu's Outsider Day, this sentence was truly fully embodied.

The Outsider Festival is a festival for outdoor people. The third session went directly to the Tengger Desert. There were both hard-core activities such as desert cycling and hiking, as well as the favorites of "light-hearted people" such as sand therapy and Ba Duan Jin.

The most important thing is that I found that everyone really had fun together, sharing barbecue, playing music together, and cheering for each other when challenging the slackline. I believe that anyone who has managed an event knows how difficult this is.

The two Xiaohongshu outdoor bloggers I contacted told me that they met their best friends during the Outdoor Festival. For them, this annual festival of Xiaohongshu is like a gathering of friends to invite friends.

The picture comes from Xiaohongshu blogger @Marilyn Mengting @Zhou Ruiqiu Rachel

I think this is why Xiaohongshu calls the IP project a crowd event - to achieve greater exposure, it is also necessary to be people-oriented and use the crowd to take the lead. How is it done specifically? I think the underlying logic can be summarized into three points.

First, talk to specific people. How specific is a "specific person"? After talking to Baoni, I found that the group of people can be large or small, the key is to "empathize".

Let me give you two examples. The first is the Outerman's Day mentioned just now. Before it broke out of the circle, the outdoor scene was a typical niche group. And this circle was on Xiaohongshu. From camping to frisbee, many new outdoor trends originated from here.

This time, 100 groups of bloggers were invited to the Outsider Festival. What Xiaohongshu is doing is to first gather a small group of top outdoor people to form empathy in a smaller range, and then use this to drive more people. This "from small to large" anti-funnel logic has always been one of the characteristics of Xiaohongshu.

But the crowd can also be large from the beginning. The birth of the Slow Man Festival is very interesting. Baoni told me that there was no word "slow man" at the beginning. The question they focused on was, what is the external expression of an emotion from the inside out on Xiaohongshu?

There are many answers: the 20-minute park effect, tree hugging, rock and roll, partying... At first glance, these behaviors seem complicated and cannot be thrown into a big bag like the outdoors, but the mentality behind them is actually very consistent: people hope to find some moments of their own in this muddy world.

This is a truly touching insight, which shows the true taste of people's lives. It is precisely because of this insight that people want to "return to life at double the speed" and believe that "slowness brings good things".

Therefore, no matter the size of the crowd, what remains unchanged is "empathy". Only by making users feel that "it is related to me" can accurate resonance be achieved.

Second, find a wide range of people.

With specific people in place, the conversation has a direction, but how to get more people to hear it is the next question.

How do you get ads to the people you want? Using algorithms and building a content delivery mechanism is key. In this era of people being divided into groups, no one is watching the same old stuff anymore. Big ads also need to be about small content.

Let’s look at a specific case. When Feihe teamed up with Slow Man Festival to promote the idea of ​​a rare milk source, they planned three marketing events targeting different information points:

0.1% rare black soil, corresponding to the "Slow Zhenwu" auction. Through the fun auction of rare crops from black soil, users are educated about the value of black soil. It takes 10,000 years to generate 1 cm, and the organic matter content reaches 15%;

Noble cows enjoy a life of nobility. With Li Guangjie as the representative of the traceability, we invite all Internet users to come to Qiqihar to be a free and unrestrained person and explore the life of the "noble cows" in Feihe Ranch.

High-quality grass and water, in response to today's social mood of fast, anxiety, and fatigue, planned the 47 degrees north latitude lying down conference. While lying down and relaxing, feel the 17-hour golden grass and natural oxygen bar of Feihe Golden Milk Source to heal fatigue.

The three events have different focuses, but all of them focus on slow life and Feihe’s ingenuity. This is actually a translation process, from the selling point that the brand wants to convey to the content that users care about, and KOL is the core translator and diffusion point.

Feihe invited KOLs to share their slow-life experience of exploring the rare milk source in Qiqihar. The number of interactions exceeded 1,000, the explosive post rate was 100%, and the note exposure volume reached 23.26 million. It also promoted the accumulation of UGC content, and the final topic views exceeded 150 million.

It is one of the compulsory courses for brands today to bury the brand’s hidden message in the content, rely on KOL and KOC, and use content to find people.

Finally, go beyond the category and stimulate unknown human needs.

I have said that the more you limit yourself to a certain category, the more you will be trapped in the stock. The more you start to look at the crowd, the more potential you will have. Don’t just look at what products consumers buy, but look at what kind of desirable life they are pursuing behind the purchase.

When I was at the Foreigner Festival, I felt like a living Little Red Book, a manifestation of the life people yearn for. What brands need to do is to integrate well. This is why the categories that Little Red Book IP can carry are very diverse, even beyond the imagination of brands.

For example, when Baoni mentioned the Slow People's Day, some brands were worried that being associated with "slowness" would be inconsistent with their image, such as emphasizing "fast" mobile phones and cars on their products. But in actual implementation, it was found that finding the right connection point with the crowd can have a very good effect.

I think, ultimately it’s a matter of perspective. When it comes to marketing today, it’s more important to find out what the buying points of the crowd are than the selling points of products and brands.

Having explained the underlying logic of the IP contentization of Xiaohongshu, what characteristics will this project eventually present? I think there are three points.

First, it is scarce.

This includes the tone of Xiaohongshu, which is itself a brand with potential. It also includes the fact that the "people" on Xiaohongshu are rare. Finding trends from UGC, amplifying trends through KOLs, and then involving more UGC users in it, this crowd cycle is difficult to replicate.

Secondly, it is forward-looking. Outdoor is a typical example, where trends are born and evolved, and by participating in it, brands may be able to enter the market and gain insights in advance, and take advantage of the trend to become part of it.

Finally, it is widespread. And this widespread exposure is achieved by attracting more users to participate and generating more content, so it is not invalid noise, but ripples in people's hearts to cause more resonance.

In general, Xiaohongshu IP is like creating a wave in people's long-lasting life and then embedding the brand into it.

2. How to use Xiaohongshu IP? To shape the tone and attract the crowd

We understand the Xiaohongshu IP, but for brands, what is its use and how can it be used?

I think there are two marketing tasks that are particularly suitable, one is shaping the tone, and the other is reaching the crowd. Next, I will use two real-life examples to explain.

The first is the cooperation between Haier washing machines and Slow People's Day. The core product of this time is Haier Yunxi washing and drying set, which has the advantages of fast washing plus efficient cleaning of washing machines and fast drying and thorough drying of dual-engine heat pump dryers. Therefore, both parties focused on the home scene and proposed the main theme of "My Balcony Habitat".

In terms of products, the emphasis is on "direct-drive cleaning technology for washing machines, and free washing and drying with dryers", so there is no need to rush or worry about a pile of housework to be done, and a relaxing balcony can be created. In terms of concept, the slow-paced lifestyle is continued, and "a well-crafted landscape balcony is a spiritual reserve at home" is proposed. In addition, sincere "housekeepers" who are not willing to make do, love to make trouble, and are very sincere are recruited to share their balcony life. In the end, the topic page has received nearly 50 million views.

Many brands are confused about how to measure the success of marketing objectives such as shaping tone, and what they should look at?

In fact, there are official homework to copy. Xiaohongshu launched the AURA indicator for marketing IP this year, covering four parts: brand image awareness, content accumulation, word-of-mouth stimulation and population penetration.

To put it bluntly, it is about how many people there are, what kind of cognition they have about you, what kind of evaluation they have made, and how much content they have produced. Among these, people and content are the most critical.

Let’s look at the crowd. This kind of demand often comes from mass consumer brands, who want to get close to people in a specific circle.

There were many relevant cases at this year’s Foreigner Festival. For example, Zhiji Auto brought a new model, the LS6, which is positioned as a super-city smart SUV, with the slogan “Think open-mindedly and go outside”, which echoed the theme of this year’s Foreigner Festival, “Spiritual Sanctuary”.

Another example is Huawei, which has cooperated with the Outdoor Festival for the second time. This time, its core product is the HUAWEI WATCH GT 5. Combined with the new function of the new watch that can record emotions in real time, it has built an "Emotion Feeding Station" to monitor emotions and exchange group points. It is naturally integrated into the on-site group competition and plays with outdoor people.

"Playing together" is very important. Lemon, an outdoor blogger who cooperated with Huawei this time, told me that she would experience desert hiking and cycling, and review watches by the way. In her opinion, first there is story, then experience, and then sharing. This order is very important, so that natural and real content can be born.

The scene of Xiaohongshu IP is such a scene, which can make the brand and products no longer be strange "others", but belong to the real life of the crowd, not floating in the air, but down to earth.

3. Only people can impress others

One thing I have always admired about Xiaohongshu is its focus on people. During this exchange, I also felt a lot of details about people.

For example, when talking about the Slow People's Day, Baoni said that she often took a taxi to the company in the morning and took another taxi downstairs after work. Sometimes she didn't know what the weather was like outside, but only knew that the temperature in the work area was 24 degrees. When it was her day off, she saw that the weather was very good and the wind was very nice, and she couldn't even think of words to describe it.

This kind of personal experience is also the spirit that Xiaohongshu's Slow People's Day wants to convey: to regain sensitivity to life.

In fact, whether it is advertising or content, the marketing mission of the brand is the same - to find the deep JTBD hidden under the surface needs. So the key is to see people, understand people, and care about people.

For brands, the increasing maturity of the series of marketing IPs such as crowd events means that Xiaohongshu can provide more help in branding, and the methodology of crowd operation has also been upgraded.

In fact, if you have been paying attention, you will find that in addition to the aforementioned AURA indicators, Xiaohongshu also released a brand strength measurement system this year, which also talks about branding from the perspective of the crowd.

There is no doubt that brand is still the core factor that influences consumer decisions. On Xiaohongshu, brands with stronger brand power have an 18% higher seeding rate and a 13% higher sharing rate than brands with average brand power.

However, just as advertising needs to be content-based, branding also needs new interpretations under new marketing.

I once said in the first half of this year that using products to promote brands is Xiaohongshu's exploration of Chinese branding. This big crowd event has given me a new solution. Now on Xiaohongshu, you can not only promote products, but also brands.

I am very happy to see that this solution is self-consistent, without losing the characteristics and advantages of Xiaohongshu, and the idea of ​​people matters runs through it. I also always believe that only people can move people.

Editor | Doris
This article is written by the author [Xiao Mei] of Operation Party, WeChat public account: [刀姐doris], original/authorized to be published on Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.