Xiaohongshu’s strategy to break the brand circle

On Xiaohongshu, a platform full of creativity and resonance, how can brands break through the circle has become a challenge for many small and medium-sized brands? This article will explore in depth how to achieve the brand's goal of breaking through the circle through trend insights, leveraged marketing and momentum-building strategies, and provide brands with some practical Xiaohongshu operation skills. Whether you are an influencer or a brand owner on Xiaohongshu, this article will provide you with valuable insights and guidance.

Breaking the circle is a necessary condition for Xiaohongshu to penetrate the anti-funnel crowd. If you can't break the circle, you can penetrate each circle one by one.

But the term "breaking the circle" seems to sound particularly good. Many small and medium-sized brands will naturally think that our brand is new and the budget is small, so it is difficult to break the circle.

But in fact, breaking the circle is not exclusive to big budgets and big brands. As long as you find the right method, you can still achieve the effect of breaking the circle. Today, I will share with you some ways and methods of breaking the circle within our team! Remember to forward it to your colleagues to learn!

1. Understand the trend

Platform trends affect hot spots within the site. If a brand wants to break out of its circle, it must understand trends and create hot spots.

We all know that users on Xiaohongshu prefer high-quality, creative, and resonant content. If brands want to create hot content on the site that can break through the circle, they need to focus on analyzing Xiaohongshu's user trends, category trends, etc. to carry out product innovation and track layout, find products and content that users are interested in, and use creative and emotional content to accurately promote users and improve the efficiency of new products.

Yes, in essence, if you want to stand out, you still have to do a good job of segmenting the crowd and marketing in a targeted manner.

The question is, how can brands achieve these effects?

1. Learn to gain multi-dimensional insights to make planning more in line with user needs

Before launching a brand, the most important thing is to learn to gain insight. To find an effective target group rather than just finding interested users, brands can not only gain insight into users from three dimensions: category, competitor, and own product, but also conduct in-depth exploration in three aspects: needs, behavior, and emotion.

Demand - Understand the most basic needs of consumers for products, such as the characteristics, efficacy, value, and experience they pursue, because demand often involves consumers' lifestyles, consumption habits, and even preferences

Behavior - By studying consumers' purchasing behavior and consumption habits, such as Red Star purchase data, on-site evaluation and other feedback data, we can dig out the pain points behind users' consumption behavior and see what factors affect consumers' decisions? Is it our KOL investment? Or are some of our small yellow car link notes attracting user conversions? How can our investment accelerate decision-making?

Emotions - To understand consumers' emotional needs or the emotional factors that drive consumption, we can search for keywords for category products on the site search page, analyze the reasons in the popular article notes that can trigger consumers' emotional connection and emotional resonance with products and brands, understand the emotional and sentimental value trends on the site and use them in our delivery notes. For example, many brands use the keyword "domestic products" in their delivery, because the patriotic sentiment behind it can accurately touch the consumer's consumption itch point at once.

Only by doing a good job of early insight can we grasp the needs of the core group and make the planning of the delivery closer to the users, so as to achieve precise seeding.

2. Reach new groups and explore new opportunities

What should brands do if they want to reach new user groups? We have previously talked about "how to use the anti-crowd model to create content". In addition to directly segmenting the crowd, we can also work hard on the product. We can segment the product's services and scenarios based on the characteristics of the product itself, and provide them with personalized product service experience. Secondly, we can also polish the product, packaging, and seeding points based on the differentiated characteristics of the existing crowd.

If marketing wants to reach new groups and tap into new opportunities, it must "build product awareness based on usage scenarios and group needs"

2. Understand the trend

After understanding the trends on the site, brands also need to know how to use the emotional trends and hot topics on the site to make placements. Layout content and placements based on traffic trends, user search habits, etc. Three new ways to leverage trends to attract them to pay

1. Strong conversion content

Some brands are too focused on the amount of interaction or discussion on the site notes. Often, there are not many users discussing the brand's products, but a lot of onlookers are attracted. This is because the brands have overlooked an important point, which is that whether it is to attract new users or retain existing target users, high-profile topics and interactions are all for the purpose of achieving the brand's ultimate goal of "planting grass and selling products."

It is also very simple for brands to create strong conversion content. As long as it conforms to the trends on the site, the notes they publish will not only have strong conversion effects, but also good exposure. You can master this marketing formula: note aesthetics + emotional connection + lifestyle

In our tweets two days ago, we shared with you about Xiaohongshu's recommendation algorithm. You can know that the Xiaohongshu system will perform algorithm matching based on search terms. After the notes are published, they will be labeled with a series of tags by the system. The core of its content algorithm is to examine the fan interaction behavior brought about by the notes, so notes with high interactivity will be determined by the system and continue to be pushed to other users.

The Xiaohongshu website itself has very high requirements for the aesthetics of notes. When we analyze the high-quality, highly converted popular notes, we find that they generally have the following five content skills (high-quality content, attractive cover, comprehensive labels, accurate keywords, and sufficient comments and likes)

By utilizing these five content techniques, first attracting users to click and read on the push page through attractive covers and pain-point titles, and setting precise keywords in the text, topics, and comment areas of the notes, it will help the notes to be included and recommended by the system.

Use the emotional content topics on the site to attract users to interact and output a lifestyle that is consistent with the brand's product concept. As long as the content is high-quality and has accurate keyword matching layout, it can continuously generate user seeding and attract social fission.

2. Strong demand scenarios

Xiaohongshu users will release different real needs in different scenarios. And these real needs will help brands achieve accurate promotion and promote users' consumption decisions due to the background of the scenarios.

How to find strong demand scenarios for products? Strong demand scenarios generally refer to scenarios where users have a strong demand for a product or service at certain times or in certain situations. They generally have the following characteristics: "high frequency, high value, strong emotional drive, and clear solution-oriented scenarios."

We can embed products through the hot scenes with strong demand organized by Xiaohongshu, or we can take advantage of some hot scenes spontaneously created by users on the site.

For example, the "Outsider Festival" on Xiaohongshu is a typical strong demand scenario. It stimulates users' demand for outdoor activities and related equipment through the display of outdoor sports and lifestyles, thus providing marketing opportunities for brands. Brands can participate in such activities and start some lucky draws, publicity and promotion interactions to show how their products meet users' needs in specific scenarios.

To put it simply, it means that the target users have a high frequency of use in their daily lives, such as daily eating and transportation. Or it may be some usage scenarios that are closely related to the user's psychology. For example, some beauty-loving women with hunchback problems would like to have a good figure when meeting with their long-distance partners. Then "dating + good figure" is a strong demand scenario for such users.

Therefore, brands can create relevant content based on the needs of users in this specific scenario, such as sharing posture correction techniques, dating strategies, etc.

In addition to leveraging existing hot scenes on the site, brands can also combine their products with new offline consumption scenarios and create new usage needs.

For example, Suntory has used the popular convenience store ice cup game on Xiaohongshu and co-created content such as a cocktail guide collection to generate many creative and novel game methods. It has successfully expanded the consumer group of oolong tea to the "drinking idiot group"

3. Strong public opinion

In addition to content and scenarios, don’t forget that Xiaohongshu is also a “search” community. Users will search for brand products before making decisions. Therefore, if brand content wants to break through the circle, it is very important to create a strong voice.

If a brand wants to increase its voice on the site, it also needs to subdivide whether there are already strong brands in the site categories, and classify them according to the voice situation on the site:

• Recommended flow: *If there is no flow, then increase the volume of investment to increase brand awareness, waist bottom + amateur
• Search flow delivery: *If you already have a strong brand, you can explore the advantages and differences of your product and make a review collection to take advantage of the popularity of big brands

Brands that have new products or need to improve their brand awareness should create more recommendation content. Brands with larger budgets can use influential people to make recommendations. If the brand itself is relatively mature or already has a certain reputation on the site, we can also do more search flow delivery, and use a large number of mid-level and low-level influencers to create content from different angles to help users resolve their doubts about the product and promote conversion rates.

3. Know how to create momentum (emotion + topic + creativity)

Everyone can also observe that on the current Xiaohongshu site, brands’ advertising placements are becoming more and more “soft”. ​​It’s not because users are more averse to hard advertising, but because brands have discovered that at certain times, the conversion effect brought by soft advertising is better than that of hard advertising.

This is because today’s users are pursuing a deeper spiritual resonance, and because there are more and more emotion-driven decision-making behaviors, if brands want to create their own marketing offensive, they need to stimulate consumers’ emotions to influence their purchasing behavior.

“Emotion + topic + creativity = powerful emotional marketing”, how to create momentum?

Brands can try a dual-domain marketing strategy, that is, (community public domain traffic + brand account private domain traffic)

In the public domain, brands can use the notes of experts and amateurs to gain a position on the search results page.

In the private domain, the notes released by brands are mainly in the form of grass-planting guidance, private message marketing, etc., mainly to promote fan conversion. They can also use high-matching keywords in the content of brand notes to connect public and private domain traffic. The above is about Xiaohongshu's brand breaking circle strategy.