Several misunderstandings and solutions for Xiaohongshu advertising

Xiaohongshu has become a new frontier for new consumer marketing, but how to launch a brand? What kind of products are suitable for launching on Xiaohongshu? What is the purpose of the promotion stage? Let's find the answers in this article.

As a brand-planting marketing platform that new consumer brands cannot avoid, many brands and merchants have set their sights on Xiaohongshu. However, due to the lack of understanding of platform rules, community mechanisms, delivery techniques, etc., many brands have made misunderstandings in their delivery, resulting in the failure of marketing strategies. It is very likely that the entire brand word will be cut off due to illegal delivery, let alone actual conversion.

So, today I’m going to talk to you about some misunderstandings that may occur when brands are advertising on Xiaohongshu. I hope it will be helpful to you.

1. What kind of products are suitable for placement on Xiaohongshu?

When we do brand promotion, in addition to being familiar with the product features, we must also understand the platform features.

If the product is not suitable for launch on the platform, then the entire plan is wrong from the beginning, and subsequent plans and strategies will be useless no matter how good they are.

1. Check whether the product matches the platform

Xiaohongshu is a lifestyle community whose main group is post-90s people in first- and second-tier cities, mainly women.

The community atmosphere is beautiful and diverse, like a utopia, with many different lifestyles coexisting in parallel in the community.

It seems to be open, diverse and inclusive, but the premise of everything is beauty. The community atmosphere will be strongly controlled, and all the content that is not beautiful, positive and not positive will be cut off and hit for a long time. A beautiful community atmosphere is the tone of Xiaohongshu's community.

In other words, compared to the product functions themselves, Xiaohongshu users pay more attention to the brand's values, fashion attitude and aesthetic values.

No matter what your brand tone is, it must be linked to beauty, maybe in vision, maybe in expression, in short, please link it to beauty!

2. Have a high tolerance for ROI

Planting grass is a long-term "project".

As more and more brands join Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu users are less and less receptive to product recommendations. It is difficult for just one recommendation to influence consumer decisions.

We need to face our target audience and repeatedly reach them through different interest circles, influencers of different levels, and different content types. Only after being planted with ideas many times can they form an impression in their minds.

For brand products that are in urgent need of conversion, it is impossible to achieve rapid sales conversion by placing brand ads on Xiaohongshu. From the initial note distribution and word-of-mouth promotion to the subsequent sales conversion, it may take several rounds of note placement process. The whole cycle will be relatively long, and the conversion is also quite long-tail. It is necessary to extend the conversion cycle to look at the ROI in order to effectively calculate the effect of placing ads on Xiaohongshu.

Many brands stopped their first round of advertising because they saw no short-term effects. Therefore, before advertising on Xiaohongshu, please be prepared to have a high tolerance for ROI in the short term.

2. Clarify the current purpose of Xiaohongshu promotion

After you have determined that your product is suitable for Xiaohongshu, you should first think about why you want to launch your product on Xiaohongshu. Some people may think that this is nonsense. The purpose of promotion is of course to ship as much and as quickly as possible.

However, each brand is at a different stage, and the campaign actions are certainly different. Some brands are still in the brand packaging stage; some brands are in the word-of-mouth promotion stage; some brands need to create a hit; some brands want to attract traffic to their Taobao official stores...

Therefore, if you want to do a good job in promoting Xiaohongshu, you must first clarify the purpose of the current promotion. You must know that different promotion purposes will require different corresponding promotion strategies.

Trying to solve all problems perfectly at once may lead to strategic errors and affect the final results.

1. Have the right marketing mindset

No matter which platform we use to promote our brand, we must clearly define our product positioning and which main selling point can correspond to the needs and pain points of Xiaohongshu users.

For Douyin users, price may be a pain point, but for Xiaohongshu users, it may be the brand’s aesthetic values.

2. Understand the platform rules

Although more and more brands are using Xiaohongshu to promote their products, many people do not understand the platform mechanism of Xiaohongshu. Each platform has its own content rules, and Xiaohongshu is no exception, and may even be stricter.

Take the example of promoting a new product. If the brand is just a niche brand and did not have many notes on Xiaohongshu before, and the daily increase in the number of notes for the brand is also very low or even non-existent, then when the brand suddenly starts to post notes on Xiaohongshu, the number of brand-related notes will surge, which may lead to the platform judging it as malicious marketing, and the overall traffic of the brand word may be affected.

This may result in users being unable to see or search for relevant brand placement notes on Xiaohongshu. The money spent on hiring bloggers to promote the product may not be achieved at all.

In particular, the Xiaohongshu platform has increased its review efforts some time ago, and will take action on notes and blogger accounts that violate the platform rules. Friends who have just been involved in Xiaohongshu or are not very clear about the rules will easily receive penalties.

Therefore, if you want to do brand placement on Xiaohongshu, even if you don’t have to find a professional company, you must at least have a good understanding of Xiaohongshu and be clear about the platform rules before you can make a brand placement plan.

3. Post-launch

Brand placement on Xiaohongshu is a long-term plan, because the notes placed can be retained as long as they do not violate the platform rules, and will have an impact on users who search later.

But how can we know whether the published notes are effective and whether they can have an impact on potential consumers? We also need to do the following things after publishing the notes:

1. Volume data

A big part of the reason we invest in advertising is to increase the volume, so this data needs to be counted. The statistical method is to find the number of notes that appear when searching for brand words in Xiaohongshu. Compared with before the launch, how much has the data increased?

2. Read the data

We encourage Xiaohongshu bloggers to proactively provide the actual reading data of their notes. If they are unwilling to do so, you can also request this before selecting a blogger. If the blogger disagrees, we recommend selecting another blogger. The cost of a single reading is calculated by dividing the publishing fee by the total number of readings.

3. User interaction data

As we said before, user interaction data is used to assist in judging the effectiveness of note delivery. Here we need to not only count the absolute value data of user interaction, but also calculate the user interaction cost through the delivery cost/user interaction data. However, the content of the comments is also an important focus of ours, which is the current user attitude towards the product.

4. Note Ranking

Statistics on the ranking of notes under different keywords, and what changes have been observed compared to before the release.

5. Community Effect

After posting the note, if it has a high search popularity, a search drop-down box will appear. Search for your brand word, and maybe only type the first two words, and your brand candidate words will appear. We need to count whether such an effect occurs. If the product is included in Xiaohongshu, we can also see whether the ranking of the product in Xiaohongshu has increased.

6. Conversion Effect

Although our delivery goal may not be direct conversion, it may also have a positive impact on conversion. So compare Tmall or Taobao stores to see if there is a certain increase in traffic during the delivery period compared to other times.

Author: Vic

Source: Vic's Marketing Thinking