To seize the opportunity of Xiaohongshu, you must seize the opportunity of store broadcasting

This article will delve into the rise of store broadcasting in Xiaohongshu's e-commerce and how it helps merchants achieve dual growth in brand and sales.

Doing store live broadcasts has become a new way to seize the e-commerce dividends of Xiaohongshu.

Four years ago, when live streaming sales was in its infancy, management scholar Mu Sheng put forward a point of view: companies should establish a three-layer "live streaming pyramid" with bosses selling products, KOLs selling products, and daily store broadcasts.

KOL live streaming is now also known as expert live streaming and Dabo; merchants’ self-live streaming is now also known as store live streaming. The protagonist of Dabo is the expert, and the position of store live streaming is the merchant. The two form the DNA double helix of live streaming e-commerce.

In the past few years, the rise of super anchors has connected the public’s mental anchor point of live streaming e-commerce with super anchors, while the presence of store broadcasts has been relatively low.

In the past two years, the situation has changed significantly: on Double 11 last year, store live streaming exploded on multiple platforms. Due to its rapid growth momentum, 2023 is also known as the first year of the store live streaming explosion.

Today, the trend of store broadcasting is still blowing. During this year's 618, store broadcasting has become an important focus for many platforms, including Xiaohongshu.

01

Nowadays, when talking about Xiaohongshu, some people will immediately think of "planting grass" and then think of "buyers".

"Buyer" is a symbol that is very characteristic of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce. Similar to the form of expert live broadcast, it is also called buyer live broadcast on Xiaohongshu.

Buyers’ live broadcasts can link up considerable consumer energy, help merchants create hot products, and increase the merchants’ visibility.

From the perspective of stable business operations, merchants also need to accumulate more brand value and drive sustainable weeding. They should use their own live broadcast rooms to connect front-end brand communication and product sales with back-end member acquisition, customer maintenance, and customer service communication, accumulate highly loyal fans and high-precision traffic, and bring them to the private domain to achieve efficient conversion.

Xiaohongshu is obviously aware of this. At the Link e-commerce partner week in August last year, Xiaohongshu announced the three steps of e-commerce operation: create an account and post notes; find buyers and do live broadcasts; do store broadcasts and stabilize operations.

I have noticed that many emerging brands that have grown out of Xiaohongshu have followed this development path: planting seeds with content to lay the foundation; investing in buyers for live broadcasts to expand their voice; and finally trying out store broadcasts to solidify the brand.

Because the importance of store live streaming has become increasingly prominent, since last year, Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou and others have introduced support policies for store live streaming. The era of store live streaming predicted by Mu Sheng in 2020 has finally arrived.

02

In addition to buyer live streaming, we also need to develop merchant store live streaming, because store live streaming is an indispensable part of the live streaming e-commerce layout.

Buyers’ live broadcasts are like boutique supermarkets, usually selling many products in a single broadcast in the form of “mixed broadcasts and single links”. Many buyers can help new brands complete the cold start from 0 to 1 with their personal credit endorsement and help many merchants promote hot products.

Store broadcasting is like a specialty store. It can become a window for merchants to introduce corporate brand culture, display product details, and answer user questions. It can also become an incision for merchants to adjust product selection and sales strategies based on user instant feedback.

In a context where graphic and text introductions, window displays, customer service interactions and other forms can no longer meet users' consumption decision-making needs, and they want to know more about brands in addition to product notes and buyer live broadcasts, store broadcasts are the best interactive venue for brands to connect directly with users.

Xiaohongshu's "content-e-commerce" field covers live broadcast, notes, search, shopping malls, etc. Under the "store-account integration", in the smooth combination with the community, store broadcast can be based on the store, interconnecting the private domain asset precipitation with the traffic resources attracted by the notes, search, shopping malls and other scenes, carrying the effect of product-effect integration and repeat purchase conversion, and better helping merchants to develop in the long run.

I have seen a sharing before, which talks about the "growth story" of the domestic brand East Beast: East Beast is an "online brand". Before the brand was officially launched, the three warm-up notes it released on Xiaohongshu received efficient exposure, helping it to achieve the step "from 0 to 0.5" - the plant and herbal skin care concept it promotes has won the pursuit of many Xiaohongshu users and accumulated a group of seed users.

In May 2023, Gigi Leung made her first live broadcast on Xiaohongshu to sell goods, and among the recommended products was The Beast of the East, which promoted the continued popularity of The Beast of the East.

In the second half of last year, East Beast started its store live broadcast on Xiaohongshu, and has maintained the rhythm of at least three days a week since then. During the Double 11 period, East Beast’s store live broadcast helped it strengthen its image as a "newcomer in the new ingredient beauty and skin care track."

He Yi, founder of East Beast, said that the audience of the store broadcast room is more precise, which allows the brand to have in-depth communication with fans and potential target audiences at close range. East Beast also tries to combine store broadcast with offline activities to tell the brand culture more deeply to the precise customer groups of Xiaohongshu.

The integration of product effectiveness and sales in store live broadcasting is an important reason why the Beasts of the East choose to make store live broadcasting a normal practice.

03

From the beginning, live streaming e-commerce has coexisted with Dabo and Dianbo, but usually "Dabo rises first, and Dianbo rises later." In this process, Dabo will play the role of "the first popularity drives the later popularity" invisibly.

Because those top influencers (Internet celebrities, stars, KOLs, etc.) often bring their own traffic, they can attract attention resources and establish a live broadcast mindset for the platform. With the live broadcast mindset, the platform can naturally fill the gap of store broadcasts. Top influencers can also import traffic through the IP effect and raise the level of the platform's traffic pool. The platform can then adjust and allocate public domain traffic to store broadcasts that were previously positioned as private domain marketing tools.

Judging from the laws of industry development, using Dabo to drive store broadcasts and making store broadcasts gradually become the "cloud standard" for merchants is almost a necessary path for every live streaming e-commerce platform to mature.

This is very obvious with Douyin's e-commerce: from 2019 to 2020, in its exploration of live streaming, Douyin initially focused on store broadcasting, but users did not have a live streaming mindset. Later, Luo Yonghao, Jia Nailiang and other celebrities entered the live streaming scene, helping Douyin to raise the mindset for live streaming, and Douyin's store broadcasting began to flourish.

According to the data, the proportion of Douyin store broadcasts in the platform's total live e-commerce transaction volume has increased from 30% in 2020 to 55% in 2023.

The same is true for Taobao Live and Kuaishou Live: initially, users were brought over by Dabo, which led to the improvement of live broadcast infrastructure and paved the way for the explosion of store broadcasts.

With Dong Jie breaking out of the circle in early 2023, Xiaohongshu e-commerce buyers have been accelerating their expansion over the past year. At the Link e-commerce partner week in August, it was proposed that the buyer era has arrived, making Xiaohongshu buyers widely recognized. Buyer live broadcasts have also attracted the live broadcast mentality for Xiaohongshu live broadcasts, laying the foundation for the development of store broadcasts on Xiaohongshu.

In this way, the live broadcasts and product notes of merchants and buyers can form a more complete "content + e-commerce" ecosystem, providing merchants with diversified business tools and helping them achieve a combination of short-term business explosions and long-term stable growth.

04

When Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce business was focusing on spreading news through store broadcasts, I saw some people discussing whether Xiaohongshu was also a buyer.

This is simply a binary opposition between store broadcasting and buyers, and the view that "paying attention to store broadcasting = no longer paying attention to buyers". However, judging from Xiaohongshu's actions, Xiaohongshu is obviously trying to develop buyers and store broadcasting in parallel.

This is not difficult to understand: buyer live streaming and merchant store live streaming are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.

For Xiaohongshu e-commerce, live broadcasts of merchants and buyers are both in a period of bonus, and both are showing a trend of rapid growth. There is no need to neglect one side. By focusing on both, we can "seek synergy from complementarity", shorten and optimize the path of "planting grass-pulling grass-repurchase-planting grass again", and make Xiaohongshu's "born from content, grow in transactions" closed-loop ecology more perfect.

In a prosperous supermarket ecosystem, supermarkets and specialty stores are indispensable. Buyers and merchants live broadcast in parallel, which can provide merchants with a combination of strategies to meet the multiple needs of increasing sales and consolidating private domains.

05

For merchants, it is widely said that the most important e-commerce opportunities to seize in 2024 are Xiaohongshu e-commerce and video store. And to seize the Xiaohongshu opportunity, you have to seize the store broadcast opportunity.

Nowadays, traffic on major platforms is becoming more and more expensive, and merchants need to tap into new sources of traffic. Xiaohongshu's UGC characteristics and decentralized distribution features can allow merchants who are good at operations to obtain a lot of natural, high-quality traffic. Considering that the number of merchants currently settled in is far from saturation and involution, the traffic dividend period of store broadcasts is still very long.

During this year’s 618, Xiaohongshu’s store live broadcast support policy is aimed at both short-term explosion and long-term development.

The "New Customer Attraction Subsidy Increase" program improves merchants' efficiency in attracting new customers through large subsidies for new customer vouchers and support for multi-field exposure; the "Brand Day" program allows brands to enjoy exclusive rights such as exclusive buyer matchmaking, high-quality note output, and increased exposure resources in all fields; plus the "Store Broadcast 3+3 Practical Methodology" released for the first time. These two major marketing methods and multiple operational guidance are all aimed at improving merchants' long-term capabilities.

The reality is there: doing store live broadcasts has become a new outlet to seize the e-commerce dividends of Xiaohongshu.

LINHUANYING, a new Chinese style independent designer brand, has become a representative of seizing this dividend: its owner Lin Huanying originally had a dream of creating an "original new Chinese style personal brand", but due to factors such as the starting capital threshold for creating a brand and the mainstream aesthetic preferences of the market, she had to put it on hold. In 2022, she took the step of creating her own brand.

LINHUANYING started from Xiaohongshu, and by matching the lifestyle aesthetics of Xiaohongshu, and using the combination strategy of "buyer + store broadcast + notes", it has successfully gained many fans of new Chinese clothing. Lin Huanying thus achieved "both" - earning a considerable income and realizing the dream of becoming an independent designer brand.

Nowadays, store broadcasting has become a daily operation of LINHUANYING. Lin Huanying believes that the advantage of store broadcasting is that it can provide feedback on product promotion, material preparation, and production status, and better serve the operation of the entire chain. "Brands doing store broadcasting themselves can enable them to better grasp the production rhythm. So in the early stage, they can find suitable buyers to try to bring goods, and then rely on their own store broadcasting."

The experience of LINHUANYING may illustrate one point: if a business wants to gain both traffic and retention, both sales and brand IP, it should take advantage of and follow the trend.

Using buyer live broadcasts to leverage a sudden explosion in the public domain, and using store live broadcasts to bring about a long-term conversion in the private domain, is to seize the opportunity and follow the trend.

As the saying goes, "If you have a carriage and horses, you can travel a thousand miles; if you have a boat and an oar, you can cross the river." For many businesses, there are now "carriages and horses" and "boats and oars" available - one is called Dabo and the other is called Dianbo.

Author: She Zongming

WeChat public account: Digital Force Field (ID: shuzilichang), resist entropy increase and salvage fun.