There are 4 stages in doing business on Xiaohongshu. Which stage are you in?

In the stages of doing business on Xiaohongshu, each stage has different marketing focuses. This article summarizes the 4 stages of doing business on Xiaohongshu. Let's see which stage you are currently in and what you need to pay attention to. Let's take a look.

Merchants and influencers who are new to Xiaohongshu are not familiar with Xiaohongshu’s marketing methods. It may be challenging to sell products correctly on Xiaohongshu, achieve success, and achieve an annual GMV of over 100 million.

In the process of marketing on Xiaohongshu, I divide Xiaohongshu marketing into four key stages:

Phase 1: Crowd positioning and category selection

Phase 2: Content and rules optimization

Phase 3: Result Analysis and Review

The fourth stage: crowd management and fission

The whole process requires a lot of time and energy, and each stage needs to be carefully polished and optimized. At the same time, it is crucial to maintain faith and persistence in the cause. There are usually many invisible details and efforts hidden behind success.

I have summarized all the content into 4 stages. Read it yourself and see which stage you are in.

Contents of this article:

The first stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: crowd positioning and category selection

The second stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: content and rules optimization

The third stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: result analysis and review

The fourth stage of Xiaohongshu’s business operation: crowd management and fission

1. The first stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: crowd positioning and category selection

For those who are new to Xiaohongshu, they may only become interested after hearing people around them making money or seeing the market potential of a certain product. They have limited understanding of the market situation of the category, but this is not a bad thing, because this is also the stage of starting to explore and learn.

Category: For MBA students or people who intend to start a business, they will pay more attention to researching and understanding the market, category and related marketing strategies. They will determine the best marketing method through research, analysis and testing, and carry out actual operations on this basis.

Content: In the process of implementation or purchasing, they may find that the originally selected category is not ideal, but through actual operation and analysis, they may find that other categories are more suitable for their marketing strategy.

This stage requires testing and in-depth content analysis, including sensitivity and understanding of the cover, text, comments, etc.

Crowd: Understanding the target crowd is also crucial. Through the creation and dissemination of content, they can attract a certain amount of attention and interaction, but may lack a deep understanding of the target crowd.

At this stage, they need to learn to establish links between people and categories through content, and ensure that the content can attract and meet the precise needs of the population.

The first stage is the beginning of exploring and understanding the market, categories and population. It lays the foundation for subsequent marketing promotion and requires continuous improvement of market understanding and response capabilities through learning, research and practice.

2. The second stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: content and rules optimization

Rules: You may not understand the rules of Xiaohongshu well enough. However, the rules are not static, and the Xiaohongshu platform changes rapidly, so your understanding of the rules needs to be constantly updated. At this stage, we need to consider a series of issues, such as banned words, content duplication, account weight, and interaction volume.

Differentiation: In addition, we may see the results achieved by others, but we are not aware of the costs and silence costs they incurred. Marginal costs are usually higher in the early stages and are considered sunk costs until clear results are achieved.

So we need to think about how to write notes, copywriting, or batch shoot videos faster, but this does not guarantee good results.

Cost: People with knowledge in fields such as marketing, statistics, and finance will have an advantage when evaluating the cost of their time.

For example, we can think about the time required to write 10 notes in a day, or the human resources required to manage 10 accounts.

At the same time, we want to explore how those who are able to produce a large number of notes in a short period of time do so. They may have adopted efficient methods and spent less time, ultimately forming a replicable model.

In addition, we also need to consider the cost of investing in French fry advertising or authenticating corporate accounts, as well as the cost of testing. These are all factors that need to be weighed.

The second stage requires a deeper understanding of Xiaohongshu's rules and an assessment of the time, manpower, and cost required for different operations. In order to improve efficiency and output quality, we can explore innovative methods such as applying AI technology or finding replicable original strategies.

At the same time, we also need to consider the costs of various inputs and conduct testing and evaluation.

3. The third stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: result analysis and review

Results: In the third stage, we began to see results, and whether the results were good or bad, we had to review them.

If the results are not ideal, it may be because there were problems with the previous choices or operations, and we did not objectively consider aspects such as categories, content, people and rules.

When faced with bad results, but the direction itself is not a problem, we need to continue testing and ask people around us for advice, or buy the book "Exploding Little Red Book" and communicate with Zhuang Jun. These are all to reduce our trial and error costs in this process.

When the results are not ideal, we should review and think about why others did well. When the results are ideal, we should review what we did well and save it in an SOP manual.

Replication: However, this process is often difficult to sustain, so we need to find like-minded people to do this work together. If the results are good, then we need to think about how to quantify, replicate and scale up.

We need to conduct in-depth research to determine which channel or field to expand from. If the target audience is correct, we can consider expanding categories or products, or adjusting the target audience, so that the same category can adjust the content for different groups of people.

Specifically, for our accounts, for example, I started managing 5 matrix accounts, we can gradually increase to 10 accounts, or increase the human resource budget in these 10 accounts, increasing the human resources from 2 to 5 people, or investing more resources in the accounts, increasing paid traffic to improve exposure.

This is what we call replication, but we need to decide which aspect to replicate.

In the third stage, you need to continue testing and looking for partners, review when results are not good, and think about how to replicate successful cases.

At the same time, we need to consider how to quantify and expand the scale, including adjustments in the number of accounts, human budget, and paid traffic. Ultimately, we need to clarify the specific direction of replication to achieve long-term development.

4. The fourth stage of Xiaohongshu business operation: crowd management and fission

Crowd management: In the fourth stage, we begin to think about operating products for a specific group of people, and this group of people is always changing.

However, the population has not changed because we have sufficient understanding of this population, so our marginal cost and sunk cost will be the lowest, and we can provide more services and extended products to meet their needs.

For example, we can start with clothing and understand what kind of clothing or content women between the ages of 28 to 30 to 35 like, and then extend to areas such as shoes or bags to operate around this group of people, thereby increasing our profit margins.

We are no longer just a single-line business, but are developing in a diversified manner based on the population.

Fission: The last key point is fission. Based on the previous work, we need to fission the team, fission more categories, and fission more content and gameplay. Each step requires effort, and nothing is easy.

It’s just that when we find the crowd in the category, if we are lucky, we can get the results quickly or have a reference result, and then we just need to copy it.

Final summary

Therefore, from categories to content to crowds to rules to costs to results to replication, and finally to crowd management and fission, we must be clear that each link requires time and investment.

But the only thing that remains unchanged is your belief in this matter, and then gradually improving each link. Selling goods on Xiaohongshu is not something that can be achieved overnight.

We must understand that behind others' final results, there are countless efforts and work, and perhaps there are many factors that we cannot see.

Author: Zhuang Jun, WeChat public account: Zhuang Jun