Please stop the ineffective promotion of products on Xiaohongshu

Planting grass on Xiaohongshu is a common way for many brands to attract traffic, but some brands spend a lot of money on planting grass on Xiaohongshu but fail to achieve good results. Based on my own experience, I would like to share with you some common misunderstandings in planting grass on Xiaohongshu, as well as several effective ways to plant grass, hoping to help you.

Xiaohongshu is a way of attracting traffic that brands cannot avoid. People have very polarized attitudes towards Xiaohongshu. Some use Xiaohongshu to continuously attract traffic to their stores, while others spend money but get no results.

In fact, the simpler things are, the more difficult they are.

Cooking, following recipes, but not everyone can be a cooking master.

Singing is something that can be done easily, but not everyone can become a singer.

The same is true for Xiaohongshu. It only takes a few dozen words and pictures to publish. Although it seems simple, many brands cannot get results on Xiaohongshu, and the notes for promoting products become inefficient and ineffective. In the end, the brands did not make any money, and the influencers all bought new houses and cars.

Today, based on my own experience in serving brands in integrating content marketing with product and effect, I would like to share with you some common misunderstandings in promoting content on Xiaohongshu, as well as several effective ways to promote content.

1. Misunderstandings and Common Errors

1. Poor product positioning and homogeneous content

This is a problem faced by many brands.

The relevant groups, product selling points, and scenarios of the product are not well prepared. The notes are just introducing the product, which leads to the homogenization of Xiaohongshu notes, and everyone talks about the same thing. This kind of content has a very poor conversion rate.

After all, consumers tend to compare and choose when buying things. If the selling points and buying points of the products presented in the content are all similar, the effect will definitely be poor.

When I was training Hengan Group, I studied the diaper market. The brands in this market are generally strong, which is reflected in their investment. They are also more generous, and homogeneous content is common, which has become a competition to see who has more stores.

The final beneficiary is the expert. He or she can take a similar set of copy and make it slightly different to suit another brand, and then easily collect money from different brands.

When water absorption and thinness have become industry standards, it is necessary to find reasons to buy the product from the product, more segmented users (boys, girls, active babies, etc.), and daily life scenarios (home, outdoor sports, crawling, etc.). Even if the product is really not differentiated, you can also explore more segmented scenarios that have not been found by competitors and quickly occupy them.

Otherwise, the content released will be like that of diapers, homogeneous and without any unique features of the product.

2. Directly list the product’s selling points or even more selling points

When promoting products, if the content is just listing the product’s selling points, highlighting the product’s functions, effects, ingredients, etc., it will give consumers the feeling of a text-based detail page, and there will be many professional terms that consumers don’t understand. The more detailed the content, the worse the effect.

Moreover, many of the selling points presented by the influencers are the selling points that all products in this category should have. Such content does not have the effect of planting grass at all. It is like you are a toothpaste seller, and you tell everyone that your toothpaste can quickly whiten teeth and remove tartar. If toothpaste does not have such basic functions, it is just paint!

Today's consumers are very smart and spend a long time on the Internet. They can easily judge which are advertisements and which are promotional articles. What they hope to see through Xiaohongshu are users' sharing. This kind of content that goes straight to the point and is eager to force selling points into consumers is most likely to be rejected by consumers.

The type that lists multiple selling points is even more blatant than the first type, and the only difference is that they have the word "advertisement" in the title. The brand owners are afraid that one selling point cannot stand out, so they list several selling points of the product in sequence. The root of this problem is that the brand owners themselves have not found the core selling point, and they are lazy in strategy. The content they produce will definitely not leave an impression on consumers.

3. Take photos with influencers and products

I think this is the most popular type of grass, no doubt about it.

Friends from the brand are also users of Xiaohongshu. When you see photos like this on a daily basis, don’t you feel uncomfortable from the bottom of your heart?

From the perspective of a normal sharer, who would share a product and take a photo with the product?

Xiaohongshu users will swipe past this kind of content immediately.

Although the note data of many grass-planting influencers are not bad, a lot of data are optimized. For many brands with sufficient budgets, the basic volume is not small. They cannot see the immediate improvement of grass-planting on Xiaohongshu without looking at it, so they only look at data such as likes, collections and comments on Xiaohongshu. However, it is not difficult to optimize data, especially for influencers who want to make continuous profits.

4. No user pain points

Why do consumers buy a product?

Because there is a demand and the product can solve user problems.

What is important about words is that they create resonance.

However, a lot of content lacks user pain points or scenarios. At most, it talks about a problem that the user has, and that a bestie or friend introduced a product to them, and then they found it good, so they can’t wait to start promoting it.

Consumers have no sense of resonance at all, so the effect of planting grass is not ideal.

For this kind of content, the introduction of the product is too abrupt, and Xiaohongshu users have become immune to it.

5. Fans-only theory, over-reliance on top influencers

Some brands believe that mid-level influencers have good data and greater influence. Instead of launching 10 small influencers, it is better to launch 1 mid-level influencer. I have seen several brands with a budget of hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but the average price of the influencers they launched is more than 10,000, and several of them are soft-implanted, and the data looks good.

From the perspective of execution, finding dozens of top-level influencers is definitely faster and more efficient than finding one or two hundred small and medium-sized influencers, but from the perspective of results, this approach is not advisable.

Some people think that Xiaohongshu is just like a public account, thinking that more fans will bring certain results. But in fact, even if there are many fans, Xiaohongshu often fails.

2 data:

1) An expert with a price of 10,000 yuan and 50,000 views;

2) One is 500 yuan quotation and 5,000 readings;

Which data performs better?

Some brands may think that 50,000 is the price, but in fact, the prices of the two influencers are different and there is no comparison at all. In terms of CPM, the 500 yuan offer is more valuable.

There are a huge number of notes on Xiaohongshu every day. The same consumer will be reached by various brands. Without quantitative change, there will be no qualitative change.

For a total of 500,000 exposures, is it better to expose 500,000 people once or to expose 100,000 people five times?

Obviously, the latter.

Therefore, in terms of delivery, we must ensure that there are notes reaching users every day, with a minimum of 100 articles per month.

6. Planting grass intermittently, follow the rhythm of big promotions

When asked about whether they have any advertising campaigns, many brands replied that they have one campaign before every big promotion, and then no campaigns at other times, or very few campaigns.

Anyone who drives knows that fuel consumption on the highway is lower than on city roads. That's because on city roads, it takes a lot of effort to get up to speed, return to zero at a red light, and then start again. To return to zero and start again, more gasoline is needed to boost.

Content seeding has the same effect;

1) The exposure and promotion of products to consumers should be continuous. A large number of consumers will not complete the purchase through one promotion. If it is intermittent and cannot reach consumers multiple times, the attention of other competing products will definitely be taken away. Even when consumers compare, they cannot see more content about the brand. For details, please refer to my previous article "New Consumption | Marketing Misunderstanding Series 03: Promotion is both offensive and defensive"

2) On the delivery side, if it is continuous promotion, the user conversion rate formed by multiple touches will inevitably be higher than the conversion rate of staged promotion. For the brand, the utilization rate of funds will be higher

3) Every day, new consumers have purchasing needs for your products. If you don’t attract new customers, they will be handed over to competitors, which is a pity.

4) Most importantly, big sales are a way of stockpiling goods. Many old customers value the discounts during big sales. If you only use big sales as a way to attract new customers, the effect will not be as good as normal sales. Who doesn’t want to buy some products that they feel good about during big sales?

7. Single-minded content

Planting grass is like fighting a war.

Fighting a war requires strategy, coordination, and rhythm. It certainly doesn't mean gathering all your troops and rushing towards the opponent in a swarm. That would only mean giving away your lives.

Therefore, content also has a strategy, and a single content direction can easily encounter a bottleneck in delivery.

Many brands have a misunderstanding that adhering to a fixed content direction is creating a unified product mindset. In fact, a unified product mindset means a unified product selling point, not solidified content.

1) Content is public. Without product support, pure content innovation can be easily imitated by competitors. Once content homogeneity occurs, the conversion rate of content will decrease. Therefore, brands should actively create new content directions so that the ROI of content can be high.

2) Content is time-sensitive. People like to see changing content, especially senior users of social platforms. They don’t even want to click on repetitive content. Social hot spots, industry hot spots, seasons, etc. can all be combined with product content.

3) Different consumers have different expectations for products. Take cat food as an example. The functions are similar: no loose stools, glass stomach killer, no black chin. In addition, some consumers care about cost performance, some care about a single meat source, some care about the strength of the OEM factory, some care about fresh meat, some care about protein content, and some care about the portability of small packages when traveling. Therefore, it is definitely not a set of content for all consumers, but to find more frequent users among consumers and convert them through content.

4) During big sales, the platform limits traffic, tests and releases traffic notes, the ratio of collection and list notes, etc., all involve the rhythm of the content.

8. Hope to plant grass and see the effect quickly

After all, money has been spent and everyone hopes to see results quickly. Wouldn’t it be great if it were possible to see the results the moment the show starts, like experts do?

The effect of off-site promotion is not just sales volume, but also includes searches for brand words, searches for product words, number of visitors, number of people adding items to cart, etc. These are all indicators to measure whether off-site promotion is effective.

Because the grass-planting is a subtle mind-influencing logic, even if consumers are interested in a product, they will not place an order immediately, but will select and compare. If it is a non-urgent item, many consumers will add it to the cart and place an order when the platform is promoting it. For many people, the temptation is quite large, with a 200-30 yuan discount and a 300-50 yuan discount.

Live streaming is a price + impulse logic, with the main focus on price reduction and consumption impulse in a short period of time. Once you miss the live streaming, the price in the official flagship store will indeed be more expensive.

Unless you invest enough budget in the short term, it is difficult to see results in the short term, especially for brands that don’t have much budget. It will take at least 1-2 months to see GMV results, and that’s based on good delivery capabilities. If the basic sales volume is not low, it will be even more difficult to see significant growth.

9. Invest in traffic as soon as you launch

The advantage of traffic investment is the stable ROI. Although it is not high and it is a loss-making business, many brands are satisfied with it.

People like to invest in traffic because brands feel that compared to the uncertainty of influencer investment, investment in traffic at least has a certain ROI. Although it loses money, it feels less than investing in influencers.

But in fact, not only does the ROI of traffic investment be low, it is also very expensive, ranging from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, which are easily spent. Brands know that they are not making money, but they dare not stop because there will be no traffic if they stop.

The impact of a product on consumers’ minds should be continuous. It should not only actively reach consumers through algorithms, but also find a lot of positive notes about the product when consumers become interested in it.

However, many brands that started to invest in traffic at the beginning ignored the consumer decision-making process, thinking that consumers would buy after reading the seeding notes. They did not lay the foundation for the number of basic notes, and the final investment efficiency was low.

2. The correct posture for planting grass

Having said so many questions, what is the correct posture for that kind of grass?

1. Product positioning and target audience

Many brands think that content promotion is just about finding influencers to promote their products. If the results are not good, it is the influencer’s fault.

Make plans before you act, and you will gain success when you know when to stop.

Positioning + crowd + scene are actually the most important, these are the basics.

Positioning: What is the product positioning, what selling points are focused on, what is the difference between it and competing products, and what kind of product impact do you hope to have on consumers;

There are too many selling points and it is difficult to find the core selling point, mainly because the product positioning is not correct.

Crowd: Especially for new brands that are 0-1, there is no chance of winning in the competition with competitors for the popular crowd. You can segment the target crowd. For example, for a high-order postpartum repair device, the crowd must be mothers who have just given birth, but you can segment it further, such as entrepreneurial mothers, mothers who work night shifts, elderly mothers, mothers who like yoga, mothers with gynecological diseases, etc. The more segmented the crowd, the higher the conversion rate.

If your products and functions have a first-mover advantage in the industry, then you can compete for the general public at the beginning, after all, you are different from your competitors.

Scenario: Consumers buy products based on a certain scenario. Take baby cream as an example. The effects are similar for removing acne, moisturizing, etc. However, different scenarios give users different resonance.

During the Chinese New Year, the scene can be returning to hometown, playing outdoors, and repairing and preventing apple face.

The northern scenario is about protecting sensitive skin from the temperature difference between indoors and outdoors.

The changing of seasons is a good time to repair your baby’s sensitive skin.

Babies love to drool after repairing.

Therefore, if the foundation is not well thought out, the launch will definitely not have good results.

2. Selling points speak human language

Many selling points are expressed in high-sounding terms rather than simple language.

The so-called human language must be plain language, which tells consumers what benefits they can get by purchasing the product.

In terms of the selling point of the product, according to the crowd and language, a transformation is made to find altruism. The Xiaohongshu notes written in this way will impress consumers more.

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3. Budget allocation and pacing

When you first start advertising, what’s important is not how much money you spend, but what kind of people, scenarios, and content will be more efficient.

Therefore, during the delivery process, it must be content evaluation  daily content batch  information flow amplification during big promotions.

Many brands are confused about how much money Xiaohongshu costs every month, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars?

Budget allocation is related to the team’s experience, team size, and track.

In some tracks, the commercial atmosphere of influencers is average, so replacement and low-budget investment will do. I have seen a brand that targets fat girls and invests 10,000 yuan a month and can see obvious results.

The skin care products, maternal and child care, and home furnishing sectors are very competitive, with influencers being heavily commercialized, with at least tens of thousands invested each month.

The above are all about the starting cost of a single medium.

About rhythm:

In the allocation of influencers, we also follow the rhythm of mainly distributing small and medium-sized influencers, supplemented by mid-to-top influencers, and coordinating the release of amateur content.

Small and medium-sized talents: planting grass

Top experts: provide professional perspectives and content, which has the meaning of endorsement

Amateurs: Increase trust

There are a huge number of notes on Xiaohongshu every day. The same consumer will be reached by various brands. Without quantitative change, there will be no qualitative change.

As mentioned above, exposure to 100,000 people five times is better than exposure to 500,000 people once.

Therefore, in terms of delivery, we must maintain a high frequency of notes to reach users, with a minimum of 100 articles per month.

4. Decide on good content

What exactly is good grass-planting content? This itself has a threshold.

As a consumer, why do you like, collect, comment, and even share notes with friends while browsing Xiaohongshu notes?

The two core points: information asymmetry and altruism.

Things that are unknown will arouse consumers' curiosity, which is a common human trait.

Any valuable information that is valuable to consumers will trigger their desire to possess it, which is a common human trait.

Therefore, people like to read popular science articles, like professional experts’ information-gap content to recommend products, like shopping lists, review articles, etc.

Many experts like to write popular science articles, but the content of popular science is common sense. For example, an expert recommends brown sugar ginger tea. The content theme is several things that should be avoided for dysmenorrhea, including not staying up late, not drinking cold drinks, not eating spicy food, and all correct nonsense for girls. Although such content is popular science, there is no information gap, and the data must be very poor.

So remember, don't talk about trying, but say something that everyone doesn't know. Information gap is very important.

5. Pay attention to the details of execution

Talent screening:

Nowadays, many brands still prioritize fans when looking for influencers. Influencers are well aware of this, so they will work hard to increase their fan count. Even ordinary people have to increase their fan count to 10,000+.

In fact, the amount of interaction should be considered first. After all, the purpose of the campaign is to get better interactions, and the number of fans is only a reference dimension.

You can use dandelions, flying melons, gray pigs, etc.

• Don’t invest if the number of fans keeps dropping;
• The top 5 groups of people do not have the core group of the product;
• Historical content is mostly rigid advertising, and even product photos are not included;
• I won’t vote for those experts who are banding together to warm each other up in the comment section.

These are actually easy for brands to do with mature media, but the difficult part is sticking to the principles.

Title and first image:

Half of the note-taking time should be spent on polishing the title and first picture.

Especially the more expensive the quote, the more attention you should pay.

What if you have no idea for a title or first image?

Find comparable content and accounts and directly draw on them.

In addition, titles and pictures should keep up with the times and conform to current content trends.

You need pictures and headlines. If they are not attractive, even the best content will be wasted.

Text format:

Let me remind everyone that you must not over-text, but divide it into paragraphs, add emoticons, and make it easy to read, so that you can get better data.

Author: Keny Wei , WeChat public account: Marketing Lao Wang