Xiaohongshu is going to hold another business conference. Can the conversion problem that brands are most concerned about be solved?

Xiaohongshu will hold the WILL Business Conference on December 22, and this is the second time this year that Xiaohongshu has held a business conference. So what might the platform propose at this conference? The author of this article makes a prediction about the solutions that Xiaohongshu might propose, let's take a look.

Xiaohongshu will hold the WILL Business Conference on December 22, which is already the second one this year. The fact that the annual business conference is held twice in one year shows how much importance Xiaohongshu attaches to it.

What important signals will Xiaohongshu release this time?

Yibang Power learned that the theme of this business conference is "Everything can be promoted", which may mean that the industry adaptability of enterprises conducting marketing and promotion on Xiaohongshu is expanding.

At present, the marketing behavior of "planting grass" has become a standard action for more and more companies. However, the increasingly diversified and segmented demands of the current consumer market, coupled with the fragmentation of consumer channels, have posed new challenges to the successful promotion of companies.

At the same time, more and more companies are realizing that talking about seeding without talking about conversion is just empty talk. The conversion effect of seeding on Xiaohongshu has always been the core pain point for brand merchants. The lack of conversion data after seeding makes it impossible to accurately measure the effectiveness of seeding, and the effect of seeding is also full of uncertainty.

To this end, Xiaohongshu urgently needs to provide brands with more deterministic methodologies and supporting data and product capabilities to help brands achieve seeding and full-area conversion on Xiaohongshu.

1. Brands lack awareness of the methodology of seeding products

Since the beginning of this year, Xiaohongshu has launched intensive business exploration around the e-commerce closed loop and offline local life. As a result, the number of businesses and service providers has increased, and the scope of the industry has also been continuously broadened.

A Xiaohongshu service provider revealed to Yibang Power that the scope of industries served by its company has become increasingly broad this year, and has gradually moved from online to offline. For example, the demand for brand promotion in industries such as home furnishings, automobiles, and education and training has become particularly strong.

More and more companies in various industries have seen the potential of Xiaohongshu.

In the view of some industry insiders, Xiaohongshu has not yet provided a relatively systematic and comprehensive methodology for promoting products and a mature supporting product system based on the new industry and new promotion environment. This is one of the core pain points for brands to promote products on Xiaohongshu.

Merchants entering Xiaohongshu often still have the marketing logic of traditional e-commerce and content platforms that focuses on traffic, or their understanding of the concept of "seeding grass" is still in its early stages, and they try to quickly occupy the minds of consumers by spreading grass-seeking content over a large area. However, the essence of this marketing behavior is still the business logic of using money to exchange for conversion. Today, when user perceptions have changed, burning money cannot bring short-term growth to the brand.

This is not the marketing concept advocated by Xiaohongshu. Previously, CMO Zhiheng pointed out that the essence of Xiaohongshu's grass-growing lies in "people", that is, users, rather than traffic .

Data released by Xiaohongshu shows that 90% of the community content comes from ordinary users in daily exposure. In such a content environment, the value of "people" is further magnified, and users are not only consumers of content, but also producers. If brands want to reach more users through grass-growing content and form economies of scale, they must start from the users themselves, taking satisfying user needs and usage scenarios as the core of grass-growing content, thereby stimulating users' positive and active sharing.

However, most brands are still not familiar with the correct way to promote products and the particularity of the platform. "Most brands still have a biased understanding of promoting products on Xiaohongshu, especially new brands and small and medium-sized businesses, who always focus on 'traffic'." The above-mentioned service provider pointed out that the platform has basically formed unique promotion paths for different industries on the site and has accumulated successful cases in different industries, but lacks a summary of the overall methodology. The experience is in the hands of a few brands, and successful cases cannot be replicated. This has become one of the pain points that Xiaohongshu urgently needs to solve in its commercialization.

2. Challenges between Demand Insight and Link Measurement

Mastering the correct method of promoting branding is a prerequisite for brand operations on Xiaohongshu, but the scientific nature and effectiveness of promoting branding is inseparable from the conversion of the post-promoting links.

Some merchants pointed out that the conversion effect of seeding on Xiaohongshu is relatively difficult to measure and even more difficult to predict. In the view of Yibang Power, this problem comes from the excessively long conversion link on the one hand, and the lack of relevant data on the link after the platform seeding on the other.

Users who have recommended products on Xiaohongshu and then place orders on other platforms pose a challenge for brands to verify the effectiveness of Xiaohongshu's recommendation. In response to this, Xiaohongshu officially completed the e-commerce closed loop within the site this year, closely linking recommendation with conversion, and effectively shortening the brand's recommendation-conversion link on the platform. In fact, some brands have already achieved "integration of recommendation and harvest" by relying on Xiaohongshu's e-commerce closed loop, achieved rapid growth this year, and used the platform as the brand's main business position.

This move by Xiaohongshu has undoubtedly provided strong support for the development of brands on the site. Data released by the platform show that as of November 12, the number of merchants participating in Xiaohongshu's e-commerce Double 11 was 4.1 times that of last year, and the number of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce orders was 3.8 times that of the same period last year. In various trading venues such as buyer live broadcasts, store live broadcasts, and product notes, a number of brands and stores have seen an increase of more than 10 times.

However, for most brands with a multi-platform layout, the current conversion channels and data are fragmented, and the problem of separation between grass-roots promotion and conversion still exists.

Since the industry entered the stock market, brand growth has lost the panacea of ​​traffic, and the business needs to return to its original essence, which is to pursue repeat purchases through refined operations on users in exchange for long-term sustainable growth.

Data is the core that supports all of this. Some mature brands have begun to use digitalization to explore D2C business models, build their own user databases, and connect data information at each end of the links such as seeding, communication, and conversion with the brand CRM system to better assist operations, or even lead operations.

Under this trend, it is particularly important for Xiaohongshu to fill the missing back-link.

3. Xiaohongshu solution prediction

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, if Xiaohongshu wants to consolidate its advantages in promoting products and help merchants in more industries expand their business by promoting products on the platform, it needs to provide more deterministic methodologies and supporting tools.

In this regard, combined with the above-mentioned merchant pain points, we can make the following two predictions about the core content of Xiaohongshu’s conference:

1. Launch a methodology that is suitable for more industries and provides guidance for brands

Previously, at each WILL Business Conference, Xiaohongshu would launch corresponding marketing and promotional methodologies. At the business conference at the beginning of this year, a new concept was announced: "True Interest". This is also a new thinking and exploration of Xiaohongshu on promotional marketing.

At the same time, as the industry changes with each passing day, more and more new industries are being promoted on Xiaohongshu. The platform urgently needs to use a more universal and systematic methodology to strengthen the platform's promotion logic and provide direction for merchants.

2. Get access to the back-end conversion data of the trading platform, and you can rely on the data to promote your products

Only by making up for this missing data capability can we truly achieve scientific promotion of brands on the platform and scale promotion, further increasing the certainty of brand placement and business. Only when this is met, the methodology mentioned above will become meaningful.

In addition, after connecting the data of the trading platform, the search value of Xiaohongshu may be further amplified. Xiaohongshu COO Conan once pointed out that "Xiaohongshu has become the search portal for ordinary people's lives."

Users' search behavior is often based on clear needs. On this basis, if Xiaohongshu can connect users' search behavior on the platform with their transaction behavior on the backend, it will be able to truly realize full-link user behavior data insights, which will be more valuable in guiding brand promotion and operation.

Professional strategic positioning, valuable data, and clear conversion are also the key to stable operation of brands on the platform. Born and raised in "planting grass", can Xiaohongshu further expand the value and differentiation of the platform, and whether it will make up for the key content that was previously missing, this WILL conference will give a definite answer.

Author: Li Mengqi Editor: Shi Lei

Source: WeChat public account "Ebrun Power (ID: iebrun)"