After 10 years, Xiaohongshu finally broke the last wall of grass-growing

Xiaohongshu’s channels for brand promotion are constantly being optimized. Let’s take a look at the specific situation of Xiaohongshu’s brand promotion.

After this year's summit, many marketers came to ask me how to seize the dividends of global content and how to upgrade PMF (Product Market Fit) to PCMF (Product Content Market Fit) at the operational level.

I am very happy to find that everyone is starting to choose the crowd strategy route to find new opportunities for business growth, but there are still many unresolved issues on how to break the circle.

The first is to verify the effect. Today, everyone is doing things with GMV and ROI indicators on their backs. It is difficult to make up your mind to do it without certain results. Secondly, because PCMF involves multiple links, the problems encountered at the how level are almost one after another - what products to choose, what groups to target, how to formulate content strategies, and the SOP is actually not very solid.

As the first frontier in brand promotion and practice of the reverse funnel model, I know that Xiaohongshu has been upgrading its commercial products around the "promotion" in the past two years. It has also reviewed the entire chain of product promotion with brands of all sizes over and over again to explore how to make promotion more certain.

So this time, before Xiaohongshu held the WILL Business Conference, I specifically found Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng, Xiaohongshu Technical Vice President Fengdi, and Xiaohongshu Marketing Laboratory Director Shengxiang to discuss what the key to breaking the circle of people is, and systematically talked about Xiaohongshu's scientific grass-planting techniques to dispel everyone's last concerns about investing in Xiaohongshu.

01

The anti-funneling circle cannot be broken. The crux lies in the lack of back-link data.

The projects I have been involved in in the past six months have one thing in common, which is that they all end up falling into the crowd reverse funnel model.

I think the essence of the anti-funnel is a process of breaking the circle. The key point of this proposition is how to effectively break the circle? Many people are actually stuck at one point - the top circle is built, but they can't get down.

Some time ago, I talked about this issue with Jiaoxia's CMO Guo Xiao. He believes that there are two main ways to break through the circle. One is to make the core group powerful enough and have strong potential energy, so that its influence will naturally spill over to the next circle. Jiaoxia uses another method. In the past, its products were mainly aimed at outdoor sun protection scenes. Guo Xiao said that humans actually yearn for the outdoors, and sun protection is just one of the scenes, so Jiaoxia chose to go a step further and expand the scene to light outdoor to influence the next circle of people.

In my opinion, the first type is actually breaking through the circle with potential. If the value you provide is clear enough and the brand potential is strong enough, breaking through the circle is a natural thing. The most classic example is Moutai, which links its products with success, fame, and social status, which can satisfy a person's need for respect.

The second method, which is the scene-based method used by Jiaoxia, is what I think is kinetic energy-based. The key is to find scenes that people in the next circle also like, and then promote the brand and product to that scene.

After listening to the Swan Home case that Zhiheng shared with me, I found that no matter which method is used, by connecting the data of the back-end link, we can find ideas and clues to solve the problem and break the circle, making the path of product promotion and crowd breaking the circle verifiable and repeatable.

Tian'e Home is a platform that provides domestic life services, such as nannies, confinement nannies, and cleaning services. They wanted to find a better way to advertise on Xiaohongshu. After sending back historical transaction data, Xiaohongshu and Tian'e Home found several valuable insights.

First, the overlap between Tianedaojia’s customers and Xiaohongshu’s users is very high, up to 76%. Second, users who have been deeply attracted to Xiaohongshu and have undergone spillover conversions account for one-third of all transaction users. In addition, the products ordered by Xiaohongshu users are high-order products for the three sister-in-law category, such as childcare nannies, confinement nannies, and babysitters.

Based on these data, Xiaohongshu helped Tianedaojia find a very typical consumer decision path. Zhiheng gave another example of a typical path, in which he learned about the notes related to "monthly nanny" in detail over a period of more than 30 days, and the search and browsing depth even exceeded 400 notes.

Moreover, the search path is very representative, from "where to find a good confinement nanny", "how to make demands to a confinement nanny", "how to take a confinement nanny for a physical examination", to "how is the Swan Home platform", from general needs to specific products, this user read 20 notes on Swan Home before placing an order. I can understand her very well. When making some heavy consumption decisions or involving unfamiliar and professional fields, I will also do my homework more thoroughly on Xiaohongshu.

With data integration, Xiaohongshu helped Tian'e Home to understand the needs and decision-making paths of the core groups and formulate targeted strategies. First, the product, promoting the confinement nanny, childcare nanny and babysitter business on Xiaohongshu; second, find a more precise group of people, that is, people with high-priced and low-frequency needs; then, use content to link the group and the product, and in the search scenario, make a connection between search terms and note content. The final result is very good. Tian'e Home has almost doubled its monthly lead volume with the same delivery cost, and the global conversion ROI is higher than 20.

Zhiheng told me that she has seen many cases of clients, and sometimes the advertising is ineffective, maybe because the product is not selected correctly, and the brand has not found what circle or scene to target in the reverse funnel model; or there are some negative comments, but the brand does not understand the reasons behind it, nor does it deal with it. In fact, these problems can be solved by returning first-party data or third-party data.

In order to make product promotion more measurable and optimizable, Xiaohongshu's business team also announced a new upgrade of commercial products at this conference, and will launch a "1+3" open matrix. "1" refers to a data alliance for promotion, and "3" refers to three product solutions, including the upgraded Lingxi, promotion all-domain promotion and search direct promotion.

The data alliance can compare Xiaohongshu data, customer data, and third-party platform data. The main purpose is to connect and integrate global data, use data to help brands improve global business certainty, and make the entire chain of Xiaohongshu seeding and global conversion smoother.

In the past, when promoting products on Xiaohongshu, there was no back-end data for verification and analysis, and it was difficult to set goals because we had no idea what the results would be. Now Xiaohongshu can shake hands with the customer's first-party data, as well as the platform's third-party data. With the upgraded Lingxi, the front-end and back-end links can be compared, so that customers can see the data more clearly and know how to optimize marketing.

02

Only by understanding real people can we match products with people.

Under the crowd strategy flywheel, every link is inseparable from content. Brands need to provide better product experience, find more vertical groups, and form a stronger consensus with them, so as to achieve higher LTV and NPS, and on this basis generate more profits, which can be fed back to the products and form a healthier ecosystem.

What connects products and people? I think it is content, and only content can create a consensus on products and brands. So as the content budget accounts for an increasing proportion, it becomes urgent to establish a set of SOPs.

Zhiheng told me that if you want to create good content, the key to solving the problem is to understand people. She gave me an example of a maternal and infant brand, the client is Songda Shuangshenlu. It wants to compete with talcum powder for the market, but the talcum powder brand did a better job of market education earlier, and the user mind is very strong, so when this product was first launched, it could only sell a few hundred thousand a year.

Xiaohongshu is a platform for ordinary people to help ordinary people. Ordinary people will encounter various problems and have various needs in real life. "New mothers" are a typical group of people. I used to be one of them. I know that mothers have to solve 10,000 problems every day. Eating, drinking, defecating and urinating are just the most basic scenarios. Xiaohongshu is my encyclopedia. I will search for answers on Xiaohongshu if I need anything.

Zhiheng told me that Xiaohongshu, based on its insights into the maternal and infant population, helped Songda Shuangshenlu find the group of people that best matched the product's selling point, and that was mothers of chubby babies. When it's hot, chubby babies are prone to "drenching their necks", and sweat accumulates in the folds of their necks, which can cause rashes over time.

In the past, parents would apply talcum powder to solve this problem, but this product has a problem that it is easy to "fly powder". Talcum lotion is very convenient and very suitable for mothers of chubby babies. Xiaohongshu uses the needs of this segmented group and links the product and the group with content. After reaching a consensus that "talcum lotion does not fly powder", it helps the brand expand the group, and the market is naturally opened up. This is also a successful practice of the crowd reverse funnel model. Zhiheng said that this year, this product sold more than 23 million during the 618 shopping festival alone, becoming the number one in the category on the e-commerce platform.

After finding the "people" as the starting point, Xiaohongshu has upgraded its products in every link. The first step is to understand "real people". Xiaohongshu takes "people matters" as the principle and forms Xiaohongshu's characteristic crowd. Recently, it has also cooperated with Ruixue, a consulting company that specializes in anthropological and sociological insights, to interpret the crowd and describe 20 Xiaohongshu's characteristic lifestyle crowds.

I asked how to understand the characteristics of Xiaohongshu. Shengxiang told me that the so-called characteristics of Xiaohongshu are to superimpose crowd labels and "demands" and use demands to help brands match crowds and products. This is rooted in the community gene of Xiaohongshu "ordinary people helping ordinary people". Half of the content posted by Xiaohongshu users is related to products, and the segmented demands revealed in these contents can help products find people.

She said that Ecovacs T20 is a typical example. The core selling point of this product is that it can wash rags with hot water, making the home environment healthier. Among the featured groups on Xiaohongshu, there is a large category called "home life group", which can be further divided into "nomadic youth", "nesting youth", "all-round life home" and "quality and beauty middle class". The reason for this division is that although these four groups of people attach great importance to home and life, their usage scenarios, requirements for home stores, consumption expenditures are very different, and their definitions and emotions of home are also different.

Focusing on the core selling point of washing rags with hot water, Xiaohongshu helped Ecovacs find out which groups of people would have higher requirements for floor cleaning, and finally identified sub-groups such as mothers, mysophobes, and pet owners. Combining the pain points behind different groups of people, for example, pet-raising families are more concerned about hair in corners, while mothers are more worried about stubborn stains in the kitchen's heavy oil area, further research was conducted on what differentiated advantages Ecovacs T20 has compared to other products that can solve this demand, and finally found the content direction.

Fengdi said that the upgraded Lingxi, in addition to being able to measure the value of global seeding, has also added insights into "people". In the past, it could only identify Ecovacs products, but now it can identify the content interaction and word-of-mouth of the "home life crowd" towards Ecovacs T20.

In the "1+3", in addition to Lingxi, there are "Global Seeding" and "Search Direct" to help brands improve the efficiency of expanding their audience. An important capability of "Global Seeding" is to help brands achieve "people find people". For example, if Ecovacs launches a new product in the future, it can find more people who may place orders on Xiaohongshu based on the crowd package that has bought Ecovacs products, and perform a reverse funnel penetration of the crowd.

After graduating from the new mother, I have become accustomed to searching on Xiaohongshu for any problems I encounter in life. Fengdi said that users like me are not a minority, and 42% of new users use the search function on the first day of coming to Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu is becoming a search platform for life decisions.

The main goal of "Search Direct" is to bring the needs of search users closer to the brand, making the conversion of seeding smoother. After the brand has been launched, when the relevant users make consumption decisions, there will be 3 conversion paths:

One is to directly click on the link in the note to complete the purchase in the Xiaohongshu store, which is the shortest and fastest conversion path;

One is to jump to the store outside the site to form a purchase conversion;

In some industries, the decision-making chain is relatively long, and the main goal on the platform is to leave sales leads. Similar lead industries can directly obtain information left by users and improve work efficiency.

The WILL Business Conference also revealed Xiaohongshu's attitude, which is to choose openness and access. In a real sense, brands can obtain data from the front and back links to see the business in the entire domain, and have a scientific method to improve the efficiency of seeding.

This year, when I met every brand founder and CMO, I would say, "You really should open a Xiaohongshu!" After chatting with everyone, I feel that my recommendation is more confident. In the past, people often told me that doing Xiaohongshu to promote products is like opening a blind box. Sometimes the investment is very small but the effect is very good, and the new product can sell well; sometimes a lot of money is spent but there is no splash. Today, I can answer him that promoting products is no longer just metaphysics. "Taste Xiaohongshu and sell it all over the world" is very scientific.

I also found that the Xiaohongshu commercialization team has a very clear idea in serving brands. First, they continuously study the special groups of Xiaohongshu, help brands understand the real and specific needs of ordinary people like you and me in different life scenarios, and then diagnose the brands to see how to match the needs with the products.

Next, we will use commercial products to help brands test the waters with bidding. If there is an effect, we will increase the investment to reach more people. If the effect is not as expected, we will stop and review to find the problem, which greatly improves the efficiency of budget use. We have also made upgrades in some important links related to consumer decision-making and conversion, such as search, to make conversion smoother.

Finally, by comparing the brand's own data with the data from the third-party platform, the most important and critical link of verifying the grass-planting effect is completed. At the same time, it can also feed back into product research and development and insights into the crowd to find new business opportunities.

The grass-planting business ecosystem that has grown out of the community is becoming more and more mature. Brands should be concerned about how to make good use of Xiaohongshu's business model, follow Xiaohongshu to understand real ordinary people, and plant grass for their products together.

Author: Daojie Doris WeChat public account: Daojie Doris