What did this brand with annual sales of over 100 million do right on Xiaohongshu?

As a young and vibrant social e-commerce platform, Xiaohongshu has been exploring how to help brands grow. Over the years, some big brands with annual sales of over 1 billion have achieved impressive results on Xiaohongshu. This article will explore the secrets of their success.

"What should I do? I've invested so much in Xiaohongshu notes, but the sales are still not good?"

"I have been in Xiaohongshu for half a year, but I still can't capture the right audience, and I am still focusing on it."

Recently, this voice often rings in our ears, so what do we understand?

Xiaohongshu started from marking a better life, to promoting grass-planting culture, and now to its efforts to improve its own business ecology, and finally to form a closed-loop grass-planting business.

In this process, many dark horse brands break through the circle every year, bringing curve growth to the brand's sales. Today, there are still many emerging brands and traditional brands embracing Xiaohongshu.

As Xiaohongshu's business ecosystem gradually improves, how new brands can capture the Xiaohongshu crowd and seize the platform dividends is a concern for every brand, company and merchant.

This article will analyze brands with annual sales of over 100 million, and find out what the key is to achieving small goals. It will also break down the code for running a brand on Xiaohongshu for your reference.

1. Opportunities of categories and times: 10 years ahead

1. Should we stick to the original or select products in line with the trend?

In recent years, from the real cases I have seen and observed around me, there are mainly two types of brands and merchants that have exploded on Xiaohongshu.

One is to stick to self-operated products and grow by taking advantage of opportunities.

For example, the topics that became popular on Xiaohongshu last year: camping, brewing tea around the fire, etc., brought popularity to some businesses that specialize in outdoor tents, snacks, tea sets, and tea stoves.

Before topics like camping and brewing tea around the fire became popular, they had persisted for 5-7 years, with annual sales of only a few million. But last year they achieved sales of 50 to 60 million. Some had sales of 8 million last year and exceeded 40 million this year, and some had sales of 30 million last year and directly exceeded 100 million this year, ushering in a blowout growth in sales.

Image source: Xiaohongshu-Brewing tea around the stove

Another form that is growing rapidly is: leveraging the Xiaohongshu platform to select products accordingly.

What does it mean?

For example, some brand operators, with their keen business sense, can discover what sells well in the market and what styles sell well. They then use half a month or a month to quickly copy the products and then quickly launch them into the market, thereby amplifying the commercial value and achieving rapid growth and rapid monetization.

But what lies behind this is years of operating experience and the accumulation of various resources, so the coordination of the supply chain is also extremely important.

The result is: what others may take 5-7 years to achieve, he may be able to accomplish in 3 months.

Both of these two forms of product category creation have opportunities on Xiaohongshu. The main purpose of discussing the distinction between the two forms of product category creation is to let everyone understand that you have to make a choice based on your actual situation.

If you stay rooted in one field and make sure the general direction is right, you can get results by taking a few years and seizing an opportunity. You don't have to worry about starving to death because you have accumulated experience.

While chasing the trend may make money quickly, the problem is that you don't have a firm direction and precipitation. So the specific product selection can be determined according to your actual situation, but the reason why chasing the trend can make money quickly is that

It lies in their product packaging and design system on the Xiaohongshu platform.

What exactly is the “Xiaohongshu Feedback Product Design System” ?

2. Only by customizing products and content for different groups of people can you break through the circle

The main reason for customizing products is that each platform has different attributes. A video that is popular on Bilibili may not be popular on Xiaohongshu.

A live streaming room that is popular on Douyin may not be popular on Xiaohongshu;

Products that are popular on Weibo may not necessarily be popular on Xiaohongshu;

Platform differentiation is a point on which the industry has reached a consensus, and the core difference in platform differentiation is the difference in the population.

Therefore, when designing and packaging your own products on the Xiaohongshu platform, you must first polish the product according to the differentiated characteristics of the Xiaohongshu crowd. Only in this way can the product have a greater chance of becoming a hit.

For example: When my students were working on Xiaohongshu, they customized the packaging based on the attributes of the Xiaohongshu audience, changed the template and content. The products with the new packaging design are completely different from the previous traditional e-commerce versions.

This makes the products more in line with the preferences of the Xiaohongshu users, thus bringing about a good sales growth.

Image source: Xiaohongshu-Cat Food Brand

Secondly, different groups of people have different demands for products, so targeted packaging should be used to highlight the selling points of the product based on the needs of the group to attract precise user groups.

In other words: products made from the same raw materials may have different prices, packaging, and brand positioning, and will impress different groups of people.

For example, Dyson's products are very useful and are priced at several thousand yuan. This is aimed at a certain group of people. This group of people think that using Dyson's products represents a kind of lifestyle, so many people will buy them. But there are also some people who think the price is too high, and they need to find a substitute, such as Lefen, which has similar functions but is more affordable.

Image source: Tmall Dyson VS Lifen

Therefore, we need to conduct research and differentiate based on the population, so that there will be a chance for your products to reach your target users.

Xiaohongshu’s ability to bring together these high-quality business people is a rare opportunity.

So in my opinion: Xiaohongshu platform is a battleground for brands and merchants.

Only by choosing the right category for yourself and seizing the opportunities of the times can you usher in explosive growth.

Now that we have clarified these two points, how can we achieve a large-scale growth on the Xiaohongshu platform? Understanding the following growth formula will be very helpful to you.

According to the preferences of the crowd, we customized the packaging they liked and gave the content with emotional value. Only after thinking about these things did we start to plan Xiaohongshu.

Price also determines the target group. If there are already brands with high average order value on the market, there will still be many people who are sensitive to price, so you can start targeting the middle and low-end groups .

This era is changing very quickly, and the focus still needs to be on the track and industry in which you have accumulated experience. You can devote 20%-30% of manpower, financial resources and time to trying new things and new tracks.

70% is still in the original business that we are good at, so it won’t collapse, from the perspective of risk control. Looking back, if we want to develop Xiaohongshu, the product must be polished, communicated with and researched, and a product that suits the Xiaohongshu crowd must be made, so that we have a chance to break the circle and achieve small goals.

Is it enough to do the above two?

Not enough! We need to think deeply about the longer term.

There is also compound interest and cycles!

2. Xiaohongshu Entrepreneurship: Track × Multiple × Compound Interest × Cycle

1. Xiaohongshu Marketing Track

Will hard work definitely lead to results?

How big a thing can be depends on how high the ceiling of this thing is. It is not enough for entrepreneurs and companies to rely solely on hard work, they must also learn to choose. If the ceiling is too low, then it will be difficult to make this thing big.

So how do you choose?

Choosing a track means choosing the ceiling.

Although there is serious internal competition in the big market now, there are hidden opportunities in some subcategories.

Last time we had a closed-door meeting with the CEOs of Content Villa to discuss the experience of achieving 100 million yuan in sales. Among the 10 people, 3 had annual sales of over 100 million, and the rest were emerging brands with tens of millions in sales.

Here, I would like to share the cases of members of our Content Villa CEO Circle. For some niche sectors, such as tweezers for bag repair, the total market is only 100 million yuan a year. If you can achieve 20 to 30 million yuan, you are already in the top 3 in the industry.

But it is precisely this niche track that hides great opportunities.

Because big capital doesn't value it, traditional businesses don't understand it, but the players in the track do understand it, and opportunities arise.

For a track like this, if we do three to five projects a year, then the scale will be 100 million. If you choose the right track, how can you get a bigger share of the pie in this track?

Then we need to magnify our potential energy and look at the multiples.

So what is a multiple? Let’s continue reading.

2. Xiaohongshu Marketing Multiples

Companies in Zhengzhou, Henan, and Shandong are taking a different approach to Xiaohongshu than those in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The reason is that they have built a Xiaohongshu team and have a mature process that can be quickly replicated, reducing labor costs as much as possible.

By building one more team, content capabilities will double, and sales will also double.

When making a product, we also use a replicable model.

For example, the same skin care product has been successfully marketed on Xiaohongshu and has achieved good results. With the same raw materials, the company only needs to change the packaging and copy 5 brands to create another brand. This strategy can also double sales.

Image source: Xiaohongshu-Skin Care Products

At the same time, the company will let 10 different Xiaohongshu teams be responsible for this category, and the teams will generate content and output notes. According to the sales results, we will see if there is growth. If there is growth, it means that the team's content capabilities are good, and then this team can continue to be retained.

In addition to the team, there is also the multiple of content; a company that can only publish 100 notes a month will have a completely different fate from a company that can publish 1,000 notes. In other words, a company that only has 50,000 readers a month will have a different fate from a company that has 5 million readers . If you can't mass-produce high-quality content, then you have to increase the multiple of paid reading.

50,000 views VS 5 million views, multiplied by 12 months, this is how the gap between competitors on the same track is widened. In addition to the multiplier, another secret of growth is exponential growth.

This is often called compound interest.

So what role does “compound interest” play in business growth?

3. Xiaohongshu Marketing Compound Interest

Why do many people, despite working very hard, still fail to make a breakthrough and get good results? It is because what they do does not have compound interest. I only figured out the deep understanding of compound interest two years ago.

If there is no compound interest, something will eventually stop growing.

It is just like, entertainment anchors rely on their youth to make a living, but once their prime time has passed and they are old, the bonus is gone and they can no longer bring in revenue, so they will become someone who was once very popular but now no one cares about them.

However, when selling products and building brands, if the company has a good reputation, then even if you stop advertising, users will recommend it to people around them, leading to repeat purchases and fission. The second purchase can be zero-cost , and there is no need to pay traffic costs.

This kind of thing is something that continues to grow with compound interest.

Including the articles I have written, I have now written more than 150 articles, nearly 1 million words. When I can write 1,000 articles, I may have accumulated 5 million to 7 million words. My analytical ability, expression ability, accumulated cases and materials will all increase. Then, when I write about an industry again, the article will be more penetrating.

There are many brand CEOs around me who used to worry about traffic every year, so they all figured out that brand building is the long-term solution. Many people think that building a brand requires a lot of money, but generally speaking, a brand can be built with a small amount of money because a brand is the result of selling goods, not a threshold at the beginning .

How do you understand this?

So when you do something, you must do something that will generate compound interest.

But on this basis, there is another core issue, which is the cycle.

So how critical is crossing the life “cycle” to the longevity of a company?

4. Xiaohongshu’s Growth Cycle

Everything has its cycles, some are long and some are short.

If something has a short cycle, the dividend period is only one year. After this year, there will be no more opportunities. If you can seize this year and become a capitalist, that's great. But the more realistic situation is that most people find it difficult to accumulate capital several times, and becoming a capitalist is even rarer. Therefore, if you haven't reacted within this year, the opportunity will be gone.

Even with compound interest, it is short-lived. You will find that some popularity will pass in three or two months, and some content cannot be continuously produced after a while, all because the cycle is too short. No matter how hard you work, you can't get the results you want.

This is also why everyone says that we should be friends with time and be long-termists.

Track × multiple × compound interest × cycle . After understanding this formula, let’s take a look at whether to choose conservative and steady development or active and adventurous progress. You will have a scale in your heart.

We have a boss for our offline classes, and they can make about 300 million yuan a year.

The logic he shared was: once he found that this thing was working, he would quickly use a paid model, 5 million or tens of millions, to quickly expand it and become the top in the industry, or even directly No. 1.

This logic of making it difficult for competitors to surpass them has both advantages and disadvantages. However, in a relatively stable situation, its efficiency or the speed of making money is very fast.

If you have mastered the formula for Xiaohongshu's massive growth, then the key to achieving it from 0 to 1 lies in creating good content on Xiaohongshu.

By learning from the successful experiences of others and making your content more exciting, attractive and real, your communication power will be greater.

But can you sell more goods just by choosing the track and the product?

It is the same as if you have an account, but the content and volume cannot keep up, selling goods and product promotion are all empty talk. All companies cannot avoid creating content when doing marketing.

However, we are back to the original question: How to continuously produce high-quality content?

3. Content Efficiency: Xiaohongshu Content Factory System

Whether you create content in batches yourself, create a Xiaohongshu matrix account, or choose to cooperate with Xiaohongshu bloggers and let bloggers create content (here you can read an article I wrote in 2021 "5 million to buy a set of Xiaohongshu brand building methodology").

In essence, they all have a set of deterministic scientific content logic and a set of deterministic effective content cores that can produce clear results, rather than simply the so-called explosive article rate data.

So today, let’s talk about Xiaohongshu Content Factory from the perspective of acquiring customers through the Xiaohongshu matrix and mass producing content.

So what is a content factory?

1. Xiaohongshu category selection system

We divide the numerous products on Xiaohongshu into four quadrants.

Four-quadrant category chart

New product categories: We may have never seen them before, and the difficulty of research and development and innovation is relatively high.

What can we do about this kind of product?

That is, when a competitor develops a new product, within 3-6 months, when the competitor has not yet scaled up, we will take the lead and quickly scale it up to seize the market.

Hot-selling products: The second thing is to choose products that are easier to sell on the market. Follow the product selection logic. It doesn’t matter whether the average order value is high or low. The key is to have high profits.

Only with profits can a business be sustained. If your profits are low, it is difficult to support this project, because you have to pay for advertising and labor in the later stage. If you don't make money, then it's a waste of time.

Therefore, one of the keys to the success of the Xiaohongshu platform is to select good products, or in other words, you have to design and package good products.

2. Xiaohongshu Crowd Research System

The important point of the crowd system is to study the relationship between your product and the target audience. Only by having a sufficient understanding of the target audience can you produce content that attracts them and achieve accurate seeding and conversion.

How to study the crowd? The most important point is to have insight into the target crowd. I have written a special article on several directions of insight, "Spending 2 million to buy a set of Xiaohongshu consumer research methodology". If you are interested, you can click on the blue text to read it.

The point that needs to be emphasized again is: How do content masters create content that everyone cares about? The core reason is that content masters immerse themselves in this target audience, so the content they create is what everyone is interested in.

Bebebus's Butterfly Car Case

Here, we divide it into two parts:

The first part is called: Products and content customized for the crowd can break the circle;

The second part is: sugar-coated bullets, go for this crowd;

A cater-to-the-sounding shell with the things you want to implant in it will result in relatively better data.

Therefore, if you want to make a breakthrough in the content on a platform, the people who create the content must be immersed in the target audience for a long time and have a deep insight into the lives of the target audience.

Otherwise, you will just disassemble the popular content on the platform, and there is no need for so-called original ability. Of course, I suggest you choose originality, which will have longer-term value.

3. Xiaohongshu scene building system

I previously visited the company of a member of the Content Villa Club, a Xiaohongshu MCN agency in Shandong. Some of their blogger accounts were mainly for college students, so they set up four girls’ dormitories to truly recreate the feeling of a college girls’ dormitory.

Home Furnishing Industry Case

Another student from Content Villa Academy makes furniture, and the scenes they shoot are real home environments, which are very consistent with the users' real scenarios.

For example:

Some people don’t do well on Xiaohongshu because the scenes they create are fake. Although some of them hire professional commercial photography teams to take pictures with high resolution and high-end, these pictures look fake and not realistic enough.

Sales of a certain clothing brand exceeded 3 million in 3 months

Nowadays, we can see that there are many videos of factory assembly lines being pushed continuously. The left and right perspectives of the same scene are pushed alternately, resulting in one more person or one less person on the assembly line, which users can notice. This is to show users the real scene of the factory workshop.

Users will have a very good experience and it is easy for them to develop a sense of trust.

4. Xiaohongshu content production system

The content system has a set of standard processes regarding scenes, topics, titles, covers, copy structure, etc.

Taking filming as an example, our team has been producing videos recently. We can produce 300 videos every day, and through editing and processing, 300 videos can be turned into 600 videos.

During the shooting process, the position of the tripod bracket is marked, and it can be placed in the same position next time you shoot. This is standardized.

Let’s talk about topic selection and how to achieve standardization. In any category, I will spend one day studying 100 popular articles to find their patterns, including some types of articles with low fans and high popularity. I will also study them, and then regenerate popular articles according to the summarized rules and standards. Looking back at the data, the text data will not be bad.

An enterprise that selects products in line with the trend must have its own product selection criteria. It should not only select products with high customer orders and high profits, but also understand the product's phased mission and long-term value within the enterprise.

Crowd research, scenario building and content production must also be standardized and streamlined to form a systematic operation in order to improve the efficiency and risk resistance of the enterprise.

Judging from the trend, whether we choose a category that goes with the flow or a long-term compound interest business, the two need to be combined. Standing at two higher dimensions, looking at the current situation will be clear at a glance.

To become a brand with annual sales of over 100 million, what things do they need to do right?

1. The key is "selection" : choose a category that is trending, or a category that has been cultivated for more than 5 years, wait for the wind to come, and choose the method that suits you. The so-called product determines the market, which is the key to a brand standing out from many similar companies.
2. The key word is "determination" : the fate gap of enterprises is opened in this way: track x multiple x compound interest x cycle. A good track grows rapidly through multiple superposition and compound interest effect, and constantly differentiates, choosing differences and brands that can resist traffic cycles and cross cycles. The four factors are intertwined and determine the company's long-term success in commercial competition.
3. The key is "matching" : using Xiaohongshu for product, crowd research, scene building and content production, the philosophy is gradually formed and enabled. I hope that all brand owners and business leaders can understand the importance of "content factory" to achieve better results on Xiaohongshu.

Author: Zhuang Jun, WeChat public account: Zhuang Jun