After digging into 400+ marketing cases on Xiaohongshu, we found the key words for successful promotion

In today's brand marketing strategy, "grass planting" has become a key word, representing a marketing method that influences consumers' purchasing decisions through social media. With the intensification of market competition and the gradual numbness of users to advertising content, brands are facing the challenge of achieving efficient ROI. As an important platform for grass-roots marketing, Xiaohongshu provides a wealth of cases and strategies to help brands stand out in the fierce market competition.

"More and more brands are setting up dedicated grass-planting departments with independent budgets," a brand service provider told Doujiao recently.

With the popularity of grass-growing, market competition has become increasingly fierce, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve high ROI through grass-growing.

On the one hand, users are becoming increasingly desensitized to pure advertising content: According to Kantar data, consumers' acceptance of advertising fell by 5% in the second quarter of this year, and the media as a whole showed the characteristics of "high penetration and low impact". On the other hand, as the industry involution, many brands choose to adopt "price wars" and further expand the target population, which not only damages brand power, but also increases advertising costs.

How can enterprises improve their predicament and achieve healthier growth? How can they increase product sales, build brand awareness, and retain users?

The answer is still in the base camp of grass-roots shopping - Xiaohongshu.

According to Kantar data, users in the second quarter were more impressed by the innovation and fun of Xiaohongshu ads, which was much higher than the average of mainstream social media. Recently, Xiaohongshu held its first "Grass Seeding Awards" in Xitang, selecting a number of cases that achieved business conversion and long-term brand growth through "grass seeding" for industry reference.

Winners of the first Xiaohongshu Seed Awards As the industry's first marketing award focused on seeding, the Xiaohongshu Seed Awards combines the key practical paths of brand seeding and sets up 9 major tracks: crowd seeding innovation, new variety seed marketing, innovative search marketing, seeding closed-loop conversion, efficient private domain operation, efficient lead marketing, seeding full-domain conversion, cutting-edge growth brands, and long-term brand growth. They respectively represent the core value of Xiaohongshu seeding in terms of brand crowd insights, promoting business conversion, and accumulating long-term assets.

As an in-depth observer of Xiaohongshu’s first grass-planting award, we also found the key from the growth stories of more than 400 cases.

Little Swan launched a new hit product, "Little Black Plum Washing and Drying Set", which saw a 300% increase in GMV within 30 days after the project, and an average monthly GMV increase of 40 million yuan;

Songzan Group has cultivated a new group of people: members aged 26-30 increased by 58%, the global attributed GMV exceeded 50 million, and 33% of orders came from new customers;

Swisse has achieved sustained growth in all business lines: revenue in the Chinese market increased by 37.4% in 2023, and the brand's closed-loop transaction volume on Xiaohongshu increased by 141% year-on-year...

After digging deep into a number of successful cases, we found that the key word for seeding needs to return to the initial link - "people". Only by having a clear insight into the core audience of the brand, accurately grasping the consumer sentiment, and completing the long-term accumulation and global precipitation of the crowd, can we achieve truly high-quality and healthy seeding.

01 Identify “precise groups” and efficiently reach them to solve growth problems

Either the market share is lost to competitors, or the target customer group is not penetrated enough and the conversion rate is low, or the existing consumer group is solidified and the business growth rate is slow...

A closer look at the periodic challenges faced by a number of brands reveals that many problems arise with the crowd.

Since 2003, Afu has been making great strides in the segmented track with the slogan "Afu, is essential oil". However, with the fierce pursuit of up-and-coming companies and the lack of products, core users have been lost. Afu urgently needs to regain the user's mind through grass-roots promotion; Yunjing's high-potential population is expanding slowly. Its core users are men before, and its conversion efficiency among female users is low. It hopes to speed up with grass-roots promotion; Little Swan wants to expand the new population. The new generation of main product Xiaowumei washing and drying set wants to break through the vertical circle of home furnishings and create new business through grass-roots promotion...

A closer look at the different demands of a number of brands shows that they can all achieve breakthroughs with the help of refined promotional campaigns. This is also the new trend in the industry: say goodbye to the past widespread reach, and do a good job of user segmentation from the origin to achieve effective coverage.

Take Afu as an example. During the promotion process, Afu teamed up with Xiaohongshu to analyze the product structure and user needs of the essence oil track, and found that the anti-aging line with high customer unit price in the essence oil track is still a blue ocean. At the same time, based on the insight into users who need to use oil to nourish their skin, it locked in the 11-seed essential oil for people with dry skin and sensitive skin as the main product.

During the promotion process, Afu made use of Xiaohongshu's reverse funnel model to set clear penetration targets for different groups of people. It first penetrated the core group of essence oils and anti-aging groups, then penetrated the high-potential group of people who stayed up late and meditated, and finally broke through to the group of people who see the world, romantic events, and other groups among Xiaohongshu's 20 major lifestyle groups. Ultimately, it achieved the growth of group assets, thereby promoting a leap in brand voice and sales.

It can be seen that the insight into precise groups of people cannot be "taken for granted". It is also necessary to combine the brand development stage, product advantages and user needs to ultimately find the blue ocean track in the red ocean.

It is worth noting that in the search for high-potential groups, the "similar group recommendation" function of the Lingxi platform can use big data to help brands achieve "efficient reach". That is, based on the understanding of the group, it can judge the similarity between differentiated interest tags and brand circle users, and reach people with high potential for exploration.

A typical example is the Xiao Wumei washing and drying set, which found that people who pay attention to washing machines and home decoration have a strong interest in topics such as health and fashion. Similarly, the fresh food brand Hejie Fresh also found that users have a high degree of overlap with pregnant women and trendy people. These new crowd labels help brands better target peripheral populations and achieve breakthrough growth. Taking the Xiao Wumei washing and drying set as an example, in the end, the product penetration rate among the health-conscious people and the fashion-conscious people on Xiaohongshu soared by 192% and 226% respectively.

Obviously, using platform tools to pre-stratify the population and combine different user needs to create accurate and efficient reach ideas are the key for brands to improve their efficiency and solve growth problems.

02 Cultivate "emotional value" and share sincerely to attract popular attention

After identifying the right target group, how can we reach them efficiently?

Compared with low price tags and sales urging, amplifying the "emotional value" may be a more suitable solution for the current generation of young Chinese people.

In June this year, the "2024 Young People's Consumption Trend Survey" initiated by Beijing News Beike Finance showed that contemporary young people pursue decompression and self-healing, and nearly 30% of the respondents would consume for emotional value healing.

A trendy lifestyle that can be enjoyed at any time, a healing remedy to relieve anxiety, a feminist concern... these additional emotions can make users remember and favor the brand, recognize its deep spiritual core, and drive conversion.

When it comes to the grass-planting stage, whether it is pictures, texts, short videos or live broadcast content, the core functional selling points of the product need to be translated into "buying points" that match the emotional needs of users.

Xueersi has thus achieved great success. When promoting the new Xueersi learning machine, Xueersi did not continue to use the popular "chicken baby helper" product positioning on the market, but went the other way and played the healing keyword of "school starts without costing mothers". Through cooperation with the Xiaohongshu IP "Mom Energy Club", Xueersi invited elite lawyers, star athletes, dancers and other mothers to engage in dialogue, conveying to users that "being a good mother is also the heroine of your own life". This brand care that rejects educational involution and emotional inward consumption, gives consumers enough emotional value, and has also received widespread praise, with the final ROI>12, far exceeding brand expectations.

Similarly, Yunjing, which does not simply emphasize technological terms but instead tells women how to solve the problems of long hair and cat hair while also being good-looking; and Afu, which seizes the trend of emotional skin care and amplifies women's self-pleasing emotions through immersive oil-nourishing videos, are both representatives of successfully converting selling points into buying points.

After finding the right keywords, the outreach method should also be consistent with the "emotional value", emphasizing the appeal of sincere sharing, combining it with real user usage scenarios, and delivering it to the target audience more naturally.

A typical example is the hotel and travel brand Songzan Group. In order to reach the younger crowd, the brand completed an in-depth promotion of self-created scenes. By working with Xiaohongshu to create the "Outsider Festival", Songzan invited more than 100 outdoor bloggers to the mountains. The richer promotion materials and more natural brand exposure in the mountain scenes ultimately helped Songzan to effectively expand its reach to the younger, high-quality outdoor crowd.

03 Cultivate “global growth” and increase people’s assets through long-term operations

Completing reach and conversion is not the end of the grass-roots promotion. For mature brands, further accumulation of crowd assets will lead to long-termism.

More and more brands have realized that the value of Xiaohongshu goes far beyond the conversion of a single project. Relying on its unique community atmosphere, Xiaohongshu has created a venue for brands to have in-depth and lasting communication with users. It has strong spillover effects and contributes to overall business growth.

During the big promotion period, Kongke created dual-mode conversions both on and off Xiaohongshu, which significantly improved the global ROI and explored a new formula for brand promotion with closed loop on the site and global precipitation.

Obviously, only by flexibly combining the product marketing cycle, promotion nodes and brand goals, and making full use of the platform's combination of delivery methods, can the conversion of product users to brand audiences be completed.

In recent years, the commercialization of Xiaohongshu has accelerated significantly. More and more brands have seized the opportunity and no longer focus on single-point or single-project promotion. Instead, they have carried out long-term crowd management on Xiaohongshu, trying their best to complete the conversion, sedimentation and spillover of interested users, ultimately leading to a business explosion across the entire region.

With the insight into Xiaohongshu users' "food anxiety" and demand for fast food, the emerging fresh food brand Hejie Fresh has produced different types of high-quality content to attract users through the manager + professional matrix, and gathered crowd assets through private domain operations, achieving a sharp increase in Xiaohongshu users from 3 million to 30 million. In just 3 months, the GMV on the site exceeded 10 million, and the repurchase rate of old customers increased by 331% month-on-month;

With in-depth insights and demand analysis of the health-conscious population on the site, Xiaohongshu helped Swisse divide high-potential groups into seven categories, including sophisticated white-collar workers, hardworking students, and fitness experts. It also completed differentiated penetration of the product matrix based on the needs of different groups, and through the "note chain + store broadcast" method, became the top 2 brand in closed-loop transactions of health products on Xiaohongshu, with a year-on-year increase of 141% in closed-loop transactions.

With the help of the creation of KOS personal profile accounts, Anta attracted users with different interests through high-quality notes and differentiated product recommendations on the account, converted them into private fans of the brand, and launched differentiated operations. Ultimately, it achieved a smooth "planting grass-consulting-discussing-purchasing" closed loop within the group. The GMV of KOS seeded products exceeded one million, and the number of new recommended notes increased 22 times.

In addition, there is Afu, whose monthly GMV on the site is nearly 10 million, and its GMV increased by 894% month-on-month; the Xiaowumei washing and drying set, whose site population assets increased by 249.12%...

Undoubtedly, the development of buyer e-commerce, the optimization of brand self-broadcasting and the improvement of private domain service tools have all prompted brands to improve their efficiency in accumulating crowd assets on the Xiaohongshu site.

Overall, seeding is still an important way for brands to achieve efficient growth. Xiaohongshu's unique community atmosphere, mature data model and constantly improving business links make it the best soil for returning to "people", returning to high-quality content, returning to long-term growth, and achieving refined seeding among people.

In the future, as its commercialization becomes more mature, the closed-loop value within Xiaohongshu will also deserve more attention from brands.

Author | Guo Jian