The search page is the most important defense for merchants on Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu is a community platform where many users share their shopping, life and beauty experiences. Grassroots promotion has become a popular culture on the platform. The search page has become an important brand marketing tool.

What is grass planting?

That is, you didn’t actively look for anything, but you were impressed by a certain point of a certain brand while browsing your notes. You remembered the brand, or directly became a user of this brand.

So it is easy to understand how to plant grass. It requires us to impress different potential consumer groups through different influencers, different selling points, and different interest scenarios on the content platform, so that more potential consumers can remember you. Therefore, the efficiency of planting grass can be directly linked to sales and brand awareness. All brands know the importance of planting grass, and they all know that they need to plant enough grass.

But is it enough to be recommended once? When consumers are recommended by other products of the same category, how will they make consumption decisions? What are the subsequent actions after being recommended?

1. Search is the beginning of planting grass

Today's Xiaohongshu has gradually replaced Baidu and become an indispensable link in the user's consumption decision-making chain. No matter how a brand attracts the user's attention, the user will search on Xiaohongshu: brand words, competitor words, core words, major category words, and crowd scene related words. These are all things that brands must pay attention to!

And because the exposure and clicks of search results will reversely leverage the degree of brand awareness among users, the internal ranking that appears after the search is very likely to affect consumers' shopping decisions.

2. Xiaohongshu platform search content sorting logic

After the user searches, the platform will use the form of pictures, texts and videos to mix the grass-growing ads with the search native content. Although there are thousands of faces for thousands of people, there is not much difference in the proportion of some content. The remaining variable content is determined partly by the user's recent preferences and partly by the platform, which is mixed with grass-growing ads of other brands. That is to say, whether it is a category word or a scene word, or even your brand word, the searched content may contain grass-growing ads of competitors. Therefore, Xiaohongshu is a platform that is particularly easy to be "intercepted", so keyword search optimization becomes particularly important.

3. Brand Product Words

Different from the starting point of searching for brand words on Taobao, when users search for "brand/product words" on Xiaohongshu, they are most likely not familiar with the brand and hope to search on Xiaohongshu to understand the brand's core selling points, user reputation, and overall strength.

In the through train, the conversion rate of people searching for brand words is 20 times that of category words. This core group of new customers must be captured.

Therefore, please regard Xiaohongshu as the first step in brand keyword optimization. No matter what channel a user sees a brand and becomes interested in it, as long as she is not familiar with the brand, she will most likely search for it on Xiaohongshu.

To grasp this most accurate new customer group, the brand needs to convey the information that users want to convey most in the way that is easiest for users to absorb - popular notes about the brand. In addition to the popular notes about the brand, we must also focus on the public opinion of the content related to the brand words. In layman's terms, it is to see whether the current voice orientation of the brand is positive or negative.

If a brand has already accumulated some positive traffic on Xiaohongshu, then in subsequent campaigns it may focus more on guiding conversions.

But if the voice is directed in a negative direction, it will undoubtedly be a disaster for the brand.

On this platform that has the greatest influence on users' consumption decisions, any negative impact is likely to affect the brand's sales across all channels.

Through different IP accounts, we conduct comprehensive self-examination under brand words, track all negative content and provide after-sales service. We negotiate when possible, delete posts when possible, and report, complain and warn malicious content with one click to nip every little flame of negative public opinion in the bud.

4. Core efficacy words

Functional words are usually the words with the highest conversion rate. The core of Xiaohongshu's content marketing is to provide information and value to users who search for the word. For the layout of the core word function, it is necessary to do a good job of content matching and occupying the first place. Functional words should be planned and embedded in the notes before the notes are created, and the search terms should be set and expanded according to the plan.

For core efficacy words, please be sure to use "exact match". After the core words are accurately matched, you can then rely on "phrase match" to supplement them. You can bid a little lower and optimize long-tail words based on the results.

5. Industry/Category Words

Brands need to understand the needs of users in each channel in order to market most efficiently.

When users search for "industry/category words" on Xiaohongshu, 90% of them already have vague needs. They hope to search on Xiaohongshu and understand what is currently popular, what everyone recommends, and what is fresh and interesting under this category/demand point. To cater to users' demand for information, in other words, use "highly praised notes" to intercept target customers rather than forcing crude product selling points.

(Tips: When you see that there are no hot notes in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd positions of your core word search results, congratulations, you have found a bright and beautiful path, please be sure to take it decisively)

6. Competitive Keywords

Choose different competitive product settings according to different product lines/selling points/effects: for example, if W brand’s competitor in meal replacement shakes is S, then when purchasing the “S” brand word, you should choose high-heat meal replacement shake notes; if its competitor in probiotics is F, then when purchasing the “F” brand word, you should choose high-heat probiotic notes.

VII. Conclusion

Searching is the beginning of accurate grass-roots promotion. Finding content through searching is the main behavior path of Xiaohongshu users. While promoting grass-roots products, keyword optimization should also be done well.

The traffic brought by search is more accurate. You should continue to find ways to have your notes recommended by the system to accurate target users, so as to improve the ranking of your notes and make them easier to search.

Author: Vic's Marketing Thoughts

Source: WeChat public account "Vic's Marketing Thinking (ID: Viccps0227)"