The Xiaohongshu Marketing Methodology You Haven't Heard of

The author of this article is explaining the marketing methods of Xiaohongshu. If you are interested in the operation of Xiaohongshu, please continue reading~

Finally, we come to Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu is very popular this year. I believe you have heard a lot of content about "how to do marketing on Xiaohongshu", "how to plant grass", and "how to do e-commerce on Xiaohongshu" on major social media platforms.

We also looked at a lot of materials and courses on the market. For the first-line operators of brands, the intuitive feeling is:

It's more or less like "treating the symptoms but not the root cause".

Because most of the content is an introduction to Xiaohongshu's various advertising forms and delivery methods, models of various types of expert combinations, traffic models and delivery techniques, etc.

However, there are few full-link, practical methods: including how to set marketing goals, how to monitor the implementation of goals, how to allocate budgets, how to cooperate between platforms, when to invest in Xiaohongshu, and when to consider other platforms.

This leads to many problems: it seems that there are a lot of details listed, but it is difficult for traders to really have control and decision-making power:

1. Unable to establish goals

What is being assessed? Is it the viral rate, CPC, CPM, CPE, or SOV, return search rate, upstream and downstream keywords, and search conversion spillover costs?

We have said before that any type of marketing should have a single and unique North Star indicator, and Xiaohongshu's indicator is like a sky full of stars. Bosses and business operators, brand teams and agency MCNs often have their own goals and considerations, and it is difficult for them to agree with each other:

“You said the viral rate is high, so why are there no business results?”

2. The current dilemma of KFS is difficult to solve

KFS is the most common model for seeding products on Xiaohongshu:

KFS (Xiaohongshu's core marketing method, kol (expert) - feeds (information flow) - search (search))

This year, although Xiaohongshu’s promotion of product promotion has become very popular and has surpassed Douyin in popularity, on the other hand, many brands are also complaining that their efficiency has begun to decline and it is difficult to see the results.

From the perspective of Kol, the initial traffic of the report notes is low and the traffic of influencers is unstable;

On the information flow discovery page, brand content is highly homogenized and business notes have poor traffic;

The search page is a popular product promoted by Xiaohongshu this year, but it has also led to more fierce competition for traffic. The CPC prices of many keywords have increased several times, and small and medium-sized brands dare not even pursue it.

The fundamental reason is: compared with several major content platforms, Xiaohongshu's daily active users are still too low, and its traffic is squeezed by both business and community, and there is almost not enough to share.

The reasons at the traffic structure level also include:

• Under the principle of equal rights for traffic, the competition between community traffic and commercial traffic becomes more intense;
• Commercial traffic tends to go to closed-loop e-commerce, followed by information flow. The starting point reading volume of expert reports is getting lower and lower (the platform hopes to put more budget on traffic investment)
• For merchants, there is an increasing amount of homogeneous content and serious internal competition in key categories.
• From the user's perspective, although Xiaohongshu is still the most friendly community, with the rapid growth of advertising content, it is inevitable that users will become immune to advertising, be wary of advertising, and become fatigued in making decisions.

To solve these problems, we should not just treat the symptoms.

Requires top-down solution logic - from goals to strategies to execution

We also need an outside-in strategy system - not just focusing on Xiaohongshu marketing, but looking beyond Xiaohongshu and looking at the role and mission of Xiaohongshu from the perspective of the overall business:

For example, many students asked, how can brands break through the circle on Xiaohongshu? But let's go a step further and ask, why must we be on Xiaohongshu? Is it the lowest cost or the most efficient? Are there any other options?

This is also the problem with many current courses and content (such as content produced by agents, institutions and even Xiaohongshu’s official website), which are limited to Xiaohongshu itself. Marketing is not only about Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu is not the goal, business is.

Jump out of Xiaohongshu and create Xiaohongshu again

Yu started researching and launching Xiaohongshu in 2018 (it was still mainly cross-border at that time), and has made many attempts on Xiaohongshu:

There is a popular single product, the girlfriend phone, which has an average monthly sales of over 10 million, and has exceeded 100 million in 2 months;

There are learning machines that are focused on building momentum, and within half a year, they have achieved the highest market share;

There are also customer-oriented products that require slow and careful work, such as whole-house intelligence;

There is also the growth of apps with extremely low budgets. The result we got is: the number of new users doubled within 1 month (this year, when Internet traffic has almost no bonus)

As a vertical blogger on Xiaohongshu (the creator's perspective is an effective supplement to brands, whether in terms of content, traffic, or commercial advertising cooperation), I basically achieved 20,000 followers by relying solely on content. In December last year, I started to try closed-loop e-commerce for courses. Currently, the overall ROI is around 5.

At the end of last year, we started to sort out Xiaohongshu’s full-link marketing methods. While doing it, we also practiced it and constantly had new inputs and new methods to verify. After about 4 months, the overall content was finally released (see the end). In this article, I will share with you some of the key parts (KFS). I will talk about e-commerce specifically later if there is an opportunity.

1. How to set promotion goals for Xiaohongshu

The goals of Xiaohongshu are nothing more than three levels: exposure, seeding, and conversion.

Exposure means creating brand awareness among the target population, leaving an impression and memory; seeding means stimulating further action among high-potential populations, and conversion means direct transaction.

Before setting goals for Xiaohongshu, we must first clarify the goals of the entire business: In different product stages and different competitive environments, what is the core promotion goal?

For example, the Xiaodu Smart Screen in 2022 has already gained nationwide popularity (the "Xiaodu Xiaodu" meme has become a hit on the Internet), and the problem to be solved is: how to get people who "know but are not interested" to take action, so the promotion goal is to plant grass. In the early stage of new product launch, most products or services face the dual tasks of exposure + planting grass.

Determine your business promotion goals and then decide whether to achieve them on Xiaohongshu, or:

Evaluate whether Xiaohongshu is the most cost-effective platform to complete the promotion task.

1. Exposure target

Whether to expose on Xiaohongshu depends on whether "exposing the target audience on Xiaohongshu" is the most cost-effective.

Generally speaking, if you take "young women" as the core target group or the combination of "women + high-priced products", Xiaohongshu can be used as an exposure platform.

However, even if the target population overlaps a lot, it is still necessary to see whether exposure on Xiaohongshu is the most cost-effective, that is, to calculate the exposure cost of the target population. For example, when promoting the girlfriend machine, we found that the exposure cost for women aged 25-35 with high spending power in second- and third-tier cities was much lower on Douyin than on Xiaohongshu.

If you choose Xiaohongshu as the exposure platform, how do you set exposure assessment indicators?

There are two core indicators:

First, SOV: refers to the proportion and ranking of the brand's notes in the top xx positions on the search page of the Hongshu app when searching for a certain category of keywords - usually for those who use Xiaohongshu as a key exposure channel.

Second, conduct a backward survey on purchasing users, asking them "On which platform did you first see the product or service and leave an impression?" Then divide the exposure cost on Xiaohongshu by the "number of users who first saw the product on Xiaohongshu" to get the exposure cost for a single target user - usually for users who use Xiaohongshu as one of the exposure channels.

If you are the boss, operator or person in charge, it is enough to keep a close eye on these two indicators.

Other indicators, such as CPC and explosive article rate, are process indicators of the team during execution.

2. Grass-planting goal

As Xiaohongshu’s popularity grows, it has gradually become a reference platform for influencing shopping and making purchase decisions for the entire population.

How to measure the effectiveness of grass planting?

For new categories, look at the product search index on Xiaohongshu;

For mature categories, look at the ranking of your own brand words in the upstream and downstream search terms of the Xiaohongshu category - usually the upstream words represent mind share, and the downstream words represent the grass-planting effect.

Similarly, indicators such as CPC, CPE, and return search rate are just process indicators.

3. Conversion Goals

The conversion goal mainly depends on the ROI of Xiaohongshu’s closed-loop e-commerce transactions and the ROI of customer lead transactions.

Note that the Xiaohongshu goals here, whether exposure, seeding or conversion, are all closely linked to the final business results through our own testing. Therefore, they are suitable as performance indicators for evaluating internal operation teams and suppliers and assessing the effectiveness of brand seeding.

2. On the traffic side, how does KFS break the impasse?

At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that KFS’s current dilemma is that there is not enough traffic to share.

A more accurate answer is:

There are not enough high-quality people to share the content.

This is also why the "explosive article logic" is becoming ineffective: there are explosive articles, but no explosive volume.

On the one hand, the cost of creating a hit article has increased. As long as commercial information is added, the initial traffic will be limited, and the cost of traffic investment will rise, resulting in the high cost of a hit article.

On the other hand, there are many softer and more covert explosive articles that can indeed attract natural traffic, but the brand and product implantation content can easily be lost in other more eye-catching information. Even if the comment section is used for small dramas and strong interventions, the effect is limited.

How to solve it, and give you three ideas:

1. Find the traffic depression of Xiaohongshu

We divide Xiaohongshu's goals into three levels: exposure, seeding, and conversion. Note that even if your goal is seeding, you can still ask for traffic from both ends. Because the seeding traffic is so heavily divided, if you want cost-effective, high-quality traffic, you need to go up to the exposure level and down to the conversion level to ask for traffic. The specific steps are as follows:

(1) Request traffic from the “exposure layer”

The "exposure layer" mentioned here is not the hard advertising or IP activities on the Xiaohongshu platform (if you are very rich, you are welcome to buy it). Instead, it is to significantly reduce the CPC of the delivery method, so that the product seeding content can gain the attention of the general public (here it is more targeted at relatively broad users, without overly vertical brands).

How to do it specifically?

Brand-made hot articles + koc distribution

Many people here will ask, why not just ask koc to create it?

The reason is that the creative ability of koc itself is lower than that of kol, and this content must have the ability to obtain natural traffic and undertake brand content. After our continuous experiments (stepping on the pit), we found that koc is indeed not feasible (except for products such as milk tea and coffee that are easy to implant)

If you want to attract traffic and promote your own popular articles, here are some topics for you to choose:

• Reality + Emotion: Chat screenshots, life events
• Viewpoints + Practical Information: Challenge common sense and output practical information
• Emotion + experience: emotional introduction, personal experience
• Rough + Questioning: Simple questions and comments
• Hotspot + scene: hotspot substitution, scene integration

For example, this article on Maimai mainly uses a conversation with a "violent" internal referral officer to let everyone know that there are many people here who are willing to help you with internal referrals, and the natural traffic will be very good once it is published.

Video Streaming

Last year, video streaming was a real low point, and the cost has also risen this year, but overall it still has certain advantages over information flow.

(2) Request traffic from “conversion”

We know that in Xiaohongshu's spotlight platform, there are different delivery targets: grass-roots promotion, commercial sales, and customer information.

Of course, in addition to the Juguang platform, you can also directly invest in traffic through the store’s e-commerce (Qianfan Ark).

This year, the platform tends to give high-quality traffic to the e-commerce side, whether it is Juguang's business consumption, customer resources or Qianfan. Therefore, there is a "strange but very effective method", which is:

The goal of opening a Xiaohongshu store + trailer placement + choosing e-commerce placement (rather than seeding)

But the actual purpose is to plant grass, so it is not to evaluate ROI and transaction, but to use it as a means to obtain accurate and high-quality traffic and improve the efficiency of planting grass.

In addition, through the click-through rate of trailer notes products, we can also more directly measure the popularity of content.

To invest traffic in this way, you can use expert notes or official matrix accounts.

Experiments over the past month have proven that this delivery method not only obtains more accurate traffic, but also has a lower CPC cost than seeding ads!

2. Refined operation of KFS

The second method is called refined operation of KFS. We know that when a platform has more inward traffic, it means that it wants to make money, and the degree of refinement is higher:

For Xiaohongshu, overseas investment has long become history, and the KFS model needs to be further divided. We divide product services into four quadrants based on the different category stages and brand stages:

The first quadrant is called new brands and new categories: For products in this range, you can typically use the reverse funnel model to get results, but note that when laying out the information flow page, you need to solve the problem of "how to get attention": the product is new, the category is also new, and it is difficult to start getting volume through search. The key is to improve the competitiveness of the discovery page.

The second quadrant is called new brands and mature markets. As a new brand entering a mature market, the "reverse funnel" is not very useful at this time. There are strong differentiation and weak differentiation to correspond to the group strategy. The focus of strong differentiation is to grab search traffic + occupy the high point of content; while weak differentiation is to break through a big breakthrough + positional warfare and repeated reach.

The third quadrant is for mature brands and new markets, which means that the existing market has encountered growth bottlenecks and needs to attract new groups and new volume. At this time, it is necessary to start from small pain points (category, demand gaps), find market segments where demand exceeds supply, and cleverly use the combination of "familiarity" + "freshness" to find content models with high seeding power, and at the same time do a good job of defense (search).

The fourth quadrant is called mature brands and mature markets. When the market is saturated and the competition is in a red ocean, the method is: disperse in normal times, focus on big promotions, control it with a strong operational rhythm, attract general traffic to make a big plate when releasing, and vigorously gain category traffic when collecting.

More specific methods will be presented to you one by one in our course (see the end)

3. How to create the ultimate and combined content?

There is a very true saying about content marketing:

"The way for all organizations to obtain stable traffic in content media is to find a template or method that can be replicated in batches."

The same is true for Xiaohongshu.

Creating content on Xiaohongshu is a bit like playing cards (yeah, that, I’m addicted to throwing eggs recently):

1. Have blockbuster content

Xiaohongshu's blockbuster business notes refer to popular articles with good natural traffic and strong seeding power. After years of experimentation, the following three directions have the highest chance of producing blockbuster content:

(1) Counterintuitive stuff

Use a counterintuitive point of view to attract clicks, and simultaneously screen out high-potential people who are interested in the content; in addition to providing valuable content in the notes, it is also necessary to showcase the personality and reflect the professionalism and authority of the personality in this field (highlight personal experience, expertise, etc.) to increase persuasiveness, and then recommend corresponding products and services to users.

The front-end traffic and back-end sales effects of the two notes are very good

Note that counterintuitive opinions not only stimulate clicks, but also easily lead to discussions and even controversy in the comment area. In the traffic distribution mechanism of the Xiaohongshu platform, the weight of comments is getting bigger and bigger:

CES = 1 point for likes + 1 point for favorites + 4 points for reposts + 4 points for comments + 8 points for followers

It feels like the weight of comments and attention is still increasing.

Here’s another tip for you. At the end of this type of content, you can say “We’ll talk about this in the next article.” This way, interested fans can easily be guided from notes to followings, and the weight of “following” is currently the highest-scoring item.

Another use of counterintuitive content is to get traffic under segmented long-word search results (for example, "How should sunscreen be applied?", "What should I do when asked about gaps in an interview?").

(2) A good emotional story

Stories that focus on emotions are the most effective way for Xiaohongshu to gain resonance and traffic. However, the difficulty is:

How to combine the product and the story together in a natural way and achieve the effect of planting seeds?

There is a method I recommend to you:

Xiaohongshu is a platform mainly for women. For women, the meaning and value of "making others happy" is greater, whether it is a close friend, boyfriend, family, elders, etc. Therefore, providing "product services" to make people around you feel emotionally satisfied is a tried and tested creative template.

When Xiaodu Smart Screen is promoting products on Xiaohongshu, it basically adopts the method of "storytelling". The story template is:

"Because I bought the Xiaodu smart screen, my grandparents' lonely lives are now filled with laughter."

Under this theme, the rate of popular articles and the rate of repeated searches are surprisingly high.

(3) The US is a hard currency

Beauty is eternal productivity.

On Xiaohongshu, beauty is the pass to all clicks, recommendations and conversions.

Does beauty necessarily mean high popularity? Here is a point, that is, "the protagonist of beauty is the product"

For example, in the note below, the model covered her face when the whole set was displayed: because the atmosphere of this set is more important than the appearance.

In this regard, we also took detours when we were making the girlfriend phone. For example, there were beautiful pictures made by home bloggers, but the comments were all asking about carpets and furniture, and few people paid attention to the product itself.

In addition, if the focus of creation is to express beauty, the less text the better. In particular, avoid long paragraphs, try to divide them into paragraphs, the structural sense of the text is also part of the beauty.

2. Build a refined content portfolio

Just like playing poker, there are rules for when to play pairs and when to play single cards.

Xiaohongshu's content takes over various types of content from the discovery and search pages, matching diversified directional logics such as crowd packages and search behaviors. In terms of content design, it should also follow the "card group logic" and adapt content with different attributes, forms and different focuses respectively.

Due to limited space, we only operate the content of "new market, new category" products and services in layers on the "Discover" page of the information flow:

1. Users who "have to watch" are people who have obvious needs for similar categories, and we create targeted content around their needs.
2. "Already like to watch" users: that is, find the content that the target users like to follow, and implant products or content. Note that this type of blogger has strong fan stickiness and personality attributes. If the cooperation effect is good, long-term cooperation is recommended. Blueglass has cooperated with a large number of sports and health bloggers, and the cooperation is long-term. If you are interested, you can find it and have a look.
3. Users who "may like to watch": content that users are likely to like: find the current popular types of content on the platform: such as emotions, fun, curiosity, resonance, plot, etc., to create content.

Of course, the other three quadrants, "new market, mature brand", "mature market, mature brand", and "new brand, mature market", are also different from the above. The methods of deployment will be explained one by one in the course.

Finally, let me tell you something interesting. Although the commercial contents of Xiaohongshu are very competitive, once they cross platforms, they have the effect of dimensionality reduction: for example, some Douyin e-commerce companies have begun to learn to use Xiaohongshu's note style to make detail pages, and found that the purchase conversion rate is much higher.

That’s all for today. More strategies and detailed methods will be included in the course.

IV. Conclusion

1. If you want to get results on Xiaohongshu, you should not look at Xiaohongshu marketing from the perspective of Xiaohongshu, but instead look beyond Xiaohongshu and look at the role and tasks of Xiaohongshu from the perspective of the overall business.
2. Before setting goals for Xiaohongshu, we must first clarify the goals of the entire business: what are the core promotion goals in different product stages and different competitive environments.
3. Xiaohongshu promotion goals include exposure, seeding, and conversion. Think clearly about your goals first.
4. The exposure indicator is SOV and a backward survey of purchasing users, asking "On which platform did you first see the product or service?" Then divide the exposure cost on Xiaohongshu by "the number of users who saw the product information on Xiaohongshu for the first time" to get the exposure cost of a single target user.
5. The core indicators of seeding are search index (new categories) and upstream and downstream brand word rankings (mature categories).
6. The conversion goal is closed-loop e-commerce transaction ROI and customer capital transaction ROI
7. To solve the problem of KFS, the first solution is to find the traffic depression: find traffic from "exposure": brand-made popular articles + koc delivery, video streaming; find traffic from "conversion": use the transaction as the target trailer to promote (selling dog meat under the guise of sheep)
8. KFS is operated in a refined manner and divided into four quadrants according to category and brand maturity, with different specific methods for each quadrant.
9. Create killer content, including king-bomb content and deck-building content. King-bomb content includes counter-common sense viewpoints, emotional stories, and beauty is hard currency (product beauty).

One more feeling: This year, the weight of Douyin's "price power" continues to rise, Video Account rises quietly, and Xiaohongshu is in the limelight. Traffic has begun to enter a new round of reshuffle. For traders, understanding the different goals of each platform and using the characteristics of different platforms to flexibly set goals and allocate resources is the key to controlling traffic and healthy growth.

Therefore, don't just focus on one method, one position, or one idea: on Xiaohongshu, in addition to KFS, there are commercial sales and customer information; in addition to Xiaohongshu, there are also Douyin, video accounts, e-commerce, private domains, etc.; in addition to promotion, think back to the "4Ps": it is not necessarily just about traffic involution, you can also find new methods from products, prices, and channels.

Our mission is not to capture a position, but to win a protracted war.

come on!

Author: Lanlan WeChat public account: Taro and Cat Talk