Xiaohongshu’s strategy to break the brand circle

How can brands break through the circle on Xiaohongshu? How to do marketing well and achieve the maximum effect of advertising? This article describes the content of Xiaohongshu's brand breaking through the circle, which is very helpful for brand marketing on Xiaohongshu. It is recommended for Xiaohongshu operators to read.

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 the hot spots on the site. If brands want to break out of the circle, they must understand the trend and create hot spots. We all know that users on Xiaohongshu prefer high-quality, creative, and resonant content. If you want to create hot content on the site that can break out of the circle, brands 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 plant grass for users and improve the efficiency of new products; yes, in essence, if you want to break out of the circle, 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 insights. To find an effective target group rather than just finding interested users, brands can not only gain insights into users from three dimensions: category, competitor, and own product, but we can also conduct in-depth research in three aspects: needs, behavior, and emotions.

1. Demands - Understand consumers' most basic needs for products, such as the characteristics, functions, value, and experience they pursue, because demands often involve consumers' lifestyles, consumption habits, and even preferences.
2. 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 KOLs? Or are some of our small yellow car link notes attracting users’ conversions? How can our advertising accelerate decision-making?
3. Emotions ——Understand the emotional needs of consumers or the emotional factors that drive consumption. We can search for keywords of category products on the search page of the website, 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 emotional value trends in the website 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.

Only by making good early insights can we grasp the needs of the core group and make the delivery planning closer to the users, so as to achieve precise promotion.

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 of people and explore new opportunities, it must "build product awareness based on usage scenarios and group needs."

2. Understand the trend

After understanding the trends within the site, brands also need to know how to leverage the sentiment trends and hot topics within the site to place ads. Content and placement layouts are 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 of notes on the site. Often, there are not many users discussing the brand's products, but many people are attracted to watch the show. This is because the brand has overlooked a key point, that is, whether it is to attract new users or retain existing target users, high-profile topics and interactions are to promote the ultimate goal of the brand, "planting grass and selling goods." 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 released will not only have a strong conversion effect, but also good exposure. Master this marketing formula: note aesthetics + emotional connection + lifestyle.

In our tweets two days ago, we shared with you about the recommendation algorithm of Xiaohongshu. You can know that the Xiaohongshu system will match the algorithm according to the search terms. After the notes are published, they will be marked with a series of tags by the system. The core of its content algorithm is to examine the fan interaction behavior brought by the notes, so the notes with high interactivity will be judged by the system and continue to be pushed to other users. Xiaohongshu itself has very high requirements for the aesthetics of the notes. We disassemble and analyze those high-quality, highly converted popular notes. They generally have the following five content skills (high-quality content, attractive cover, comprehensive tags, accurate keywords, and enough comments and likes).

By using these five content techniques, you can attract users to click and read on the push page through attractive covers and pain-point titles, and set precise keywords in the text, topics, and comment areas of the notes, which will help the notes to be included and recommended by the system. You can 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 a precise keyword matching layout, you 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 do we find scenarios with strong demand for products? Strong demand scenarios generally refer to scenarios where users have a strong demand for a certain 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 implant products through the strong demand hotspots organized by Xiaohongshu, or we can take advantage of some hotspots 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 and promotions to show how their products meet users' needs in specific scenarios.

To put it simply, it means that it appears frequently in the daily life of the target users, such as daily eating and transportation. Or it can be some usage scenarios that are closely related to the user's psychology. For example, some beauty-loving women with hunchback problems want to have a good posture when meeting long-distance lovers, so "dating + good posture" is a strong demand scenario for this type of 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 scenes to create new usage needs. For example, Suntory used the popular convenience store ice cup gameplay on Xiaohongshu and co-created content such as a collection of cocktail guides to generate many creative and novel gameplays. It 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 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 in the current Xiaohongshu site, the brand's advertising placement is becoming more and more "soft", not because users are more resistant to hard advertising, but because brands have found that in some cases, the conversion effect brought by soft advertising is better than that of hard advertising. This is because users nowadays are pursuing a deeper spiritual resonance, and because there are more and more emotion-driven decision-making behaviors, so 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, a two-pronged approach of community public domain traffic + brand account private domain traffic.

In the public domain, brands can use the notes of experts and amateurs to secure 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 connect public and private domain traffic with high-matching keywords in the content of brand account notes.

The above is about Xiaohongshu’s strategy to break the brand circle.

Author: Vic

Source: WeChat official account: "Vic's Marketing Thinking (ID: Viccps0227)"