Horizontal Marketing: The Underlying Code for Popular Articles on Xiaohongshu

Which factor is the key to success in Xiaohongshu operations? How to create a hit article? What is horizontal marketing? How to use horizontal marketing? The author of this article uses cases to answer these questions, hoping to bring some help to everyone.

Last week, I saw on Xiaomi Auto’s official website that “autonomous driving is the key to the success of smart electric vehicles.”

As an Internet tycoon, Lei Jun entered the field of smart electric vehicles without considering factors such as batteries, car appearance, and power. Instead, he focused on the key points of autonomous driving, grasped the essence of the industry, and used funds and professional technology to establish strategic advantages.

Figure 1: Xiaomi Motors official website about autonomous driving

As a marketing practitioner of Xiaohongshu, I am also thinking about which factor is the key to the success of Xiaohongshu's operations?

The key to success is to generate benefits. Brand investment leads to sales, blogger operations lead to the accumulation of fans and the ability to receive business orders. The root of all this lies in hot articles, especially high-conversion hot articles. (A hot article is defined as one with more than 1,000 likes and comments, and high conversion means the ability to convert fans, inquiries, and orders, and search conversions.)

Why is high-conversion explosive content the key to success?

A hot article can raise the account traffic weight to a higher level. When you have a hot article with 10,000 likes, you will find that the initial traffic of your note will be very high, and the account weight will be raised. More importantly, the hot article will bring conversions and consultations.

1. How to create a viral article?

In addition to the cover, title, and comments, what is more important is the topic selection. The topic selection represents user needs. Currently, the topic selection has vertical and horizontal forms.

The core of the verticality is segmentation and differentiation. The most commonly used tool is the logic tree, which allows infinite segmentation of industry categories.

There are also infinite subdivisions on Xiaohongshu. For example, for beauty products, there will be subdivisions into lipsticks, facial masks, lotions, perfumes and other types. Perfume bloggers will further subdivide into affordable, domestically produced, high-priced and other attributes.

The benefit of segmentation is that it can reach the most precise group of people, but at the same time, due to infinite segmentation, the content audience is getting smaller and smaller.

Figure 2: Philip Kotler, Horizontal Marketing

Vertical marketing brings about disorderly competition. Take new media operation as an example. When you write notes on tools, and 40 operation tools become popular, she writes 50 operation tools, and some even write 100. The content on the site is homogenized, and with similar tool notes, you will naturally get very little traffic.

Figure 3: New media operations work

In this case, horizontal marketing is needed.

2. What is horizontal marketing?

Horizontal marketing is a necessary complement to vertical thinking. It reorganizes current information through exploratory, probabilistic, heuristic and innovative thinking.

For example, in the traditional sense, cars can only move on the ground, but Xiaopeng made a flying vehicle. Cooking can only be done by humans, but Elvis uses kittens to cook. This unconventional approach brings new markets and groups of people.

How to do horizontal marketing? 3 steps of horizontal marketing:

1. Choose a focal point

A focus can be something we want to focus on, a problem to solve, a goal to achieve.

2. Perform lateral displacement to generate stimulation

Horizontal displacement is an interruption of the logical thinking sequence, creating a new blank market, such as sending roses on Valentine's Day. There are currently 6 methods: substitution, inversion, combination, exaggeration, removal and permutation. Example"

Substitution: Pencils instead of roses

Inverted: Send roses every day of the year except Valentine's Day

Combination: Roses and pencils for Valentine's Day

Exaggeration: Send a bunch of roses on Valentine's Day or send only one rose on Valentine's Day

Remove: No roses for Valentine's Day

Change of order: On Valentine's Day, the loved one sends roses to the admirer

3. Establish a connection

To establish the core of connection is to rationalize the logic of horizontal replacement of content. For example, if you want to send lemons on Valentine's Day, you need to know how to achieve it and in which situation to send lemons so that the whole process goes smoothly.

3. How to use horizontal marketing?

Horizontal marketing can also be used in Xiaohongshu operations.

For example, when we want to become a food blogger, we can focus on one point: is it necessary for food bloggers to have people appearing, or is it okay for animals to appear? Then we can think about how animals can be bloggers. In this case, the cooking Elvis blogger appears.

For example, Cooking Elvis is not simply a pet category, nor is it about cooking. Instead, it is about using cats to cook. The kitten holding a kitchen knife creates a sense of conflict, generates a new category, gives users a new visual experience, and attracts more new groups of people.

Figure 4: Cooking Elvis’s Xiaohongshu homepage

The three-step breakdown of horizontal marketing is: first focus on the cooking point. Cooking is usually made by people, using the inversion method.

If we don't use people, but use small pets, such as kittens, to do it, and then build a connection in the third step, how the kitten does it, highlight the close-up of the cat's paws, complete the whole process, and finally the scene of the kitten enjoying it, this will create a brand new viewing experience.

Figure 5: Video account homepage

Suppose we want to be new media operations bloggers, there will be topics such as new media operations plans, new media operations PPT, new media tools, etc., but this industry is too competitive.

At this point, we can also reverse our thinking. What users care about is nothing more than smoother work, promotion, salary increase, and more income. If we can help them earn more income through side jobs, it may be a good idea.

At this point, we are not only positioning ourselves as new media operation bloggers, but also as sideline bloggers, and our crowd is further expanded. This is the charm of horizontal marketing. Otherwise, we can only compete in new media, which is also an invisible breakthrough in the original crowd.

Author: Jiang He, WeChat public account: Jiang He Talks Marketing