Secretive and drastic, the traffic changes of Douyin and Xiaohongshu and how to deal with them

The author of this article shares an in-depth methodology for traffic management, points out the drawbacks of a single business model, and describes the plans and reasons for managing data on multiple platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, hoping to help friends who have difficulties in brand marketing and product management solve some problems.

I have been preparing this for a long time, but when I started writing it, I felt a little entangled:

Who is it written for?

For those who play with traffic or operate platforms, there may be some inspiration for operations, but the essential control and management of traffic requires a higher-dimensional brand and marketing perspective. To put it in a more emotional way - control traffic rather than become a prisoner of traffic. In the e-commerce or operations industry, few people can break out of the traffic thinking of a single platform.

Traditional brand and market people often lack the feel of operating things themselves, are not sensitive to algorithms, traffic and data, and may be unfamiliar with the methods mentioned in the article.

But we still decided to write it, and this is the point we have always insisted on:

As a marketer, you should focus on both branding and marketing - with each hand separately.

Managing a brand with a marketing mindset can make you "less naive" , and planning marketing based on brand thinking can make you " less short-sighted".

This article is written from the perspective of an actual operator and industry insight, combined with my own first-hand experience and in-depth communication with peers from the platform and institutions. It may be the most complete and true review of the traffic ecology and marketing strategies of Douyin and Xiaohongshu this year, and I hope it will be of some inspiration to everyone.

Douyin and Xiaohongshu both have the dual attributes of content and e-commerce, which makes the marketing environment more complex. They are also the two platforms where brand owners have the most concentrated marketing budgets this year.

It is worth noting that, in addition to the difference in size, Douyin and Xiaohongshu also have different essential content attributes:

When most people open TikTok, relaxation and entertainment are the core motivations - if you understand this, you will understand why Dong Yuhui (learning) and Liu Genghong (self-discipline) were only popular for a while, while Crazy Xiao Yangge (general entertainment) has such a long life cycle.

When opening Xiaohongshu, many people have the purpose of "discovering valuable content" , whether searching for a certain product or browsing the life experiences of different people - knowledge popularization is the fastest growing track of Xiaohongshu this year, and the proportion of on-site search behavior has been increasing.

These two different types of user motivations correspond to different platform commercialization logics and different brand marketing methods.

With this basic understanding, let’s get back to the point. Let’s take a deeper look at the traffic changes happening on Douyin and Xiaohongshu and how to deal with them.

1. Tik Tok

1. Changes in Douyin’s traffic

If you are promoting or broadcasting on Douyin, you should also feel the same this year:

The efficiency of influencers’ recommendation is reduced, especially for trailers or product cards. You can find an influencer to check the data. The basic natural traffic and commercial traffic are very different.

It is difficult for stores to increase their volume through self-broadcasting. Except for certain categories, direct broadcasting or short videos do not perform well, and all kinds of data in the live broadcast room have also declined sharply;

On the contrary, Dabo’s volume (whether entertainment or e-commerce) has been pretty good recently, and several of our collaborations have exceeded expectations;

Pushing some soft-implanted entertainment and livelihood videos on Douyin has a high chance of becoming popular. Here are the videos planned by our team this year. The cost of streaming each video is no more than 50,000 yuan, and the number of likes for each video can reach more than 1 million. Dozens or even hundreds of active reposts on the entire network:

The increase in brand search popularity is also very obvious:

Brand word search popularity in the background of Juliang Suansu

I believe you have already noticed that Douyin is adjusting its allocation of organic traffic and commercial traffic:

• Star map content flow limit: Once the expert video is linked or the product is stuck, it will completely belong to the commercial traffic pool. If it is not linked, it can still give some natural traffic;
• From 2020 to 2021, the biggest move of Douyin e-commerce is to increase the proportion of live broadcasts, which is equivalent to opening the floodgates. There is a popular saying that 50%-60% of the traffic is given priority to blue V self-broadcasting, 30%-40% of the traffic is given to mid-level influencers, and 10% of the traffic is given to top influencers. However, at the beginning of this year, traffic was further equalized, and everyone competed for content to get their own traffic;
• Most stores usually have no content other than passing by products. Apart from wanting to buy something, there is almost no value in watching them. After losing the traffic from TikTok this year, the data is very ugly.
• As for short videos used to attract store traffic, except for a few categories such as clothing and store visits, most merchants have no competitiveness at all, and are highly homogenized. Except for the materials of celebrities and top influencers, the chances of hits are getting smaller and smaller. Local lifestyle brands are an exception, after all, they are the favorites of the platform this year;
• Dabo has grown rapidly this year, because it is not only more watchable than store broadcasts, but many influencers have accumulated a considerable number of private fans (these fans are not entirely attracted by the price, but have a sticky and trusting relationship with each other).
• From the popularity of "Waa Wa" to the Xiaodu hit video mentioned above - if Douyin does not want to lose entertainment traffic, it must give more support and preference to entertainment and people's livelihood content that everyone likes to watch.

Here’s some more information for you:

• Douyin has launched a new feature called "Live Heating", which can be simply understood as "live broadcast can also be used to advertise Dou+". The delivery targets include views, clicks, and fan growth, which is a way to attract shallow users. This once again verifies the logic of Douyin's traffic adjustment: improving the watchability of live broadcasts and retaining people are more important, so live broadcasts must also be entertaining.

• Vigorously promoting influencer native bidding and "Zhongcaotong" to merchants can be understood as allowing high-quality content to find the target audience more accurately (Zhongcaotong uses system algorithms to find A3). In other words, Douyin is further narrowing the target of commercial content delivery. For brands, the advantage is improved efficiency, and the disadvantage is that the audience is narrower , and the cost for merchants to pay for the precise target audience is higher .

To sum up, Douyin further refines the segmentation and operation of commercial traffic and content traffic to balance commercial revenue and content watchability, with the aim of maximizing the monetization of commercial traffic (narrowing price increases) and the content health of the platform (traffic tilt).

For brands, the operation methods of Douyin, whether it is paid traffic gameplay or brand content creation, have also changed accordingly. Let's analyze them one by one:

2. Tik Tok Marketing: How to Play with Paid Traffic Pools

From planting to harvesting, we recommend that brands create two closed loops of planting and harvesting this year.

The first is a big closed loop, which includes three links: single-point head influencer start-up + batch vertical influencer chain + material three-ring harvesting

In March, we launched a new product under Xiaodu , "Tiantian Girlfriend Machine" . Three days after its launch, the GMV of the single day exceeded 3 million sales , and it is currently out of stock in pre-sale across the entire network. The promotion of this product on Douyin was mainly completed through a large closed loop.

First, it is the cooperation with top single-point influencers. The core is: less but better + no hanging links. Why do we need top influencers? For new products, we need to attract a wave of high attention. But top influencers also require a lot of investment. It is recommended to select 1-2 for natural content implantation (don't hang links, otherwise the traffic loss will be very serious).

After the momentum starts, you must immediately launch a batch of vertical influencers to promote your content (the cooperation fee is low and cost-effective). It is recommended that all of these influencers’ content be linked in order to measure the effects of clicks and back-end conversions, so that you can select high-quality materials. Then use the materials to conduct a closed-loop cooperation that achieves three goals :

1. Expand the closed loop - expand a larger circle of precise people (people tags, search habits, brand cloud map, expert fans, competitive product categories, and A3) through content promotion (contract advertising). This is also the most direct way to drive e-commerce traffic and sales.
2. Self-broadcasting closed loop - high-quality materials are used as the materials for Qianchuan’s self-broadcasting, and the content quality is usually far superior to the brand’s self-made content.
3. Spillover closed loop - using expert content for bidding and directing traffic to external e-commerce platforms. The logic is to use the crowd portraits of Tmall and JD.com to "find people" on Douyin and reap the benefits outside the site.

During the execution of the large closed loop, a small closed loop can be done at the same time, that is, a closed loop in which live broadcast experts plant seeds and harvest. That is, experts plant seeds through preheating short videos, and then harvest through special or mixed live broadcasts.

These two closed-loop approaches are the most cost-effective ways to promote products, and they can also show the performance of back-end e-commerce more quickly. The underlying logic is: low-cost production of "good-looking" commercial content recognized by the algorithm, and repeated push to potential target groups

"After all, TikTok is a content e-commerce platform. Content capabilities are the fundamental driving force for you to live a comfortable life on this platform." - by Li Rongxin

However, the above is still at the technical level. The irreparable trend is that traffic is becoming more and more expensive, and the scope is becoming narrower and narrower, which is also a manifestation of the peak of the platform dividend.

Therefore, at the marketing level, a deeper consideration is to jump out of the platform thinking, start from the product itself and the user's perspective, plan the marketing strategy as a whole, and pay attention to the rhythm coordination between different platforms and the flexible allocation of marketing resources. Rather than being trapped in the single point platform of Douyin and following the baton of the algorithm (think of the Taobao brands in the past).

3. How to build a brand on Douyin

Is Tik Tok suitable for branding?

We have also thought about this soul-searching question for a long time.

The conclusion is that in terms of brand types , in 2023, the article "Brands are old, products are new" divides brands into three types:

• Popular value brand——Be a familiar neighbor
• Social brand - be an active member with stable output
• Lifestyle Brands - Become Users' "Circle of Friends"

The first and second brands are more suitable for brand building on the Douyin platform - they can "brush their presence at a lower cost" . Douyin is an information-intensive, short, fast and fragmented pan-entertainment content platform. Here, the shallow task of building a brand (brushing cognition) can make full use of this large traffic pool: low-cost investment, making users more familiar.

One more thing, to be a familiar neighbor, besides being familiar, more importantly is trust and intimacy. If a brand wants to become a "socially active member", in addition to being familiar, it also needs to gain the likes and preference of users. These deep tasks usually rely on brand communication on other platforms, especially platforms where users are more patient in communicating with each other.

Back to Douyin, how can we achieve low-cost "brand recognition"? According to our "Brand Visibility" methodology, we mainly do two things:

1. Determine the brand’s bright line – the core brand message
2. Create high-quality content at low cost to obtain natural traffic

Note that mere exposure cannot establish a brand impression - there must be consistent brand elements (unified cognition) + attractive content (to deepen the impression) .

On the short video platform, we do not use hard advertising - a slogan repeatedly conveys the core brand information, but rather we use the core brand elements + fixed target audience to infiltrate different short video content.

For example, as mentioned above, Xiaodu has made various popular short videos. The core element of the brand has always been the wake-up word "Xiaodu Xiaodu" , and the fixed target is the elders . The content and form of the videos are different, but everyone's perception of the brand is the same.

So, how to plan content to leverage Douyin’s natural traffic?

Here is a formula that almost always works: "Familiar atmosphere" + "Fresh elements"

That is to find familiar hot spots, familiar music, or even familiar scenes on Douyin to start with, so that everyone can get into the game and enter the familiar atmosphere within 3 or 5 seconds, thereby retaining users; then add new elements to the video to stimulate a sense of surprise and chemical reaction from users (reposts, likes, etc.).

Our video "Grandpa and Grandma's Earthy Love Talk" starts with the familiar music of "Wumeizijiang", with a fresh element added - Xiaodu suddenly interrupts;

To sum up: "Cost-effective brands" and "social brands" are more suitable for brand content on Douyin, mainly to solve the problem of presence (building brand impression). To this end, on the one hand, it is necessary to determine the core elements of the brand that can be naturally integrated into various videos, and on the other hand, use the explosive formula to create video content with self-propagation power to obtain natural traffic at a low cost.

2. Little Red Book

1. Xiaohongshu’s dual-wheel evolution

The transformation of Xiaohongshu should be understood from two aspects: community ecology and platform guidance. This is different from Douyin, where the dominance of Douyin's traffic transformation is basically completely in the hands of the platform.

Before we talk about these two points, let’s first talk about the original genes of Xiaohongshu. It was born as a niche community for sharing and helping each other in overseas shopping guides, and has grown into a national-level grass-roots grass-roots community. In China’s Internet community, its atmosphere is very unique:

Here, everyone has their own life pursuits, strong consumption interests, empathy, and willingness to share experiences with each other. In a community with a high concentration of women, the word " sister " best summarizes this user relationship. Here, the concentration of nitpickers is the lowest on the entire network, and the friendliness between users is much higher than on other platforms.

"Under the sisterhood logic, recommending products and consumption ideas to each other will also be considered by users as a form of mutual assistance, using personal experience and experience to help others optimize their lives."

"Although its community users know that bloggers and brands are promoting commercial products, they are not on guard. Instead, they treat those marketing notes as ordinary notes with a normal attitude." (by Cai Yu, "Business Reference")

For businesses, Xiaohongshu's traffic is both expensive and cheap . Expensive refers to the CPM of influencer cooperation and commercial traffic. We have compared the same targeted granularity of information flow delivery, and the promotion cost of Douyin is about 1/10 of Xiaohongshu . Cheap refers to the fact that Xiaohongshu's traffic is very high-quality, and even if it is advertising, users are much more willing to accept it than other platforms.

On this basis, let's talk about its two changes this year:

1. The content ecosystem continues to evolve into a "playground" ( Xiaohongshu founder Zhai Fang: "Xiaohongshu is not an e-commerce, but an amusement park" ) . Indeed, with the development of community content, the fresh individual life experience is becoming more and more abundant, gradually becoming an encyclopedia of life, taking on the knowledge, information and emotional needs of more people.
2. It is the change led by Xiaohongshu (commercialization) : accurately cutting commercial traffic and making a closed loop of transactions - Xiaohongshu's grass-growing attribute has always made the platform both happy and worried. The happiness is that it naturally has grass-growing attributes and users are not averse to it, and it can obtain grass-growing budgets from brands; the worry is that it is fleeced by the main merchants, and a large number of underwater and non-reported notes have not received real money investment from the corresponding merchants.

Therefore, taking advantage of the popularity of Dong Jie's live broadcast this year, Xiaohongshu is bound to make heavy arrangements in terms of commercialization and monetization. In order to achieve the goal as soon as possible, it will increase its efforts to divide commercial traffic , such as limiting the number of unregistered and underwater notes - setting level restrictions on bloggers or deducting points from merchants, so that brands can invest budgets in exchange for traffic instead of taking advantage of the platform.

These two types of changes determine the general logic of branding and marketing on this platform, which is:

1. Combine life experience to plan natural traffic (high-frequency and low-price categories)
2. Combine search behavior to fine-tune business traffic (low-frequency heavy decision categories)

This involves two key issues: how brands determine the proportion of their marketing budget on Xiaohongshu, and how to layout marketing content on Xiaohongshu.

2. How to determine the investment budget on Xiaohongshu?

For the two groups of people who make high-frequency and light decisions and low-frequency and heavy decisions, the underlying logic of budget decisions is "browsing life experience" and "active search and learning" respectively.

(1) High-frequency, low-decision categories

Xiaohongshu is a community of life experiences. When people browse the "Discover" page every day, they may be interested in any content that is highly relevant to them. Therefore, if the product or service is a high-frequency food, clothing, entertainment, and entertainment (basically related to everyone) and the content is of high quality, it is easy to get a lot of natural exposure;

There are some categories that can be seamlessly integrated with natural content, such as clothing and dressing, food reviews, internet celebrities’ store visits, etc. (beauty and skin care are of course also included, but they are currently being closely monitored by the platforms).

For these categories, on the one hand, you can cooperate with BD (free broadcast, etc.) to soft-implant expert reviews or tutorials; on the other hand, you can also cooperate with reported KOCs at a low price, because their content is obviously altruistic and has obvious viewing value, and relies on natural traffic, so the chance of a hit article appearing is also very high.

Therefore, for high-frequency, low-price products or services (relatively easy to decide), the key to deciding how much budget to invest in Xiaohongshu is: how much traffic can be obtained through natural traffic. In other words, if the cost of getting traffic on Xiaohongshu (read CPM) is maintained within a certain range, you can continue to increase the investment.

(2) Low-frequency, relatively heavy decision-making categories

For low-frequency products (heavy decision-making), the key to determining investment lies in: what proportion of people in this category will search on Xiaohongshu before placing an order - this proportion corresponds to the proportion of the overall marketing budget invested in Xiaohongshu.

Many low-frequency products are difficult to integrate into the content of seeding, such as 3C digital products or expensive household products. For these categories, the target customer base is mainly obtained through the active search behavior of Xiaohongshu .

Search is divided into brand words, category words, and competitor words. Advertisements around search behavior include not only bidding ads under search terms, but also search follow-up targeting on the "discovery" page of the information flow. Although the search price of Xiaohongshu is not cheap, the quality and accuracy of this part of traffic is quite high, which will also provide important motivation for people with purchasing intentions.

3. How to layout marketing content on Xiaohongshu

If there is only one keyword for Xiaohongshu this year, I think it is "authenticity". To put it more bluntly, it means "simulating real life experience".

Needless to say, reviews, tutorials, and store visits are inherently beneficial and practical, and they conform to the "authenticity quality".

For search traffic, authenticity is also very important today as commercial content is involuted and even on Xiaohongshu, people are more sensitive to advertisements:

——If you search directly for niche content, and at the same time lay out "detailed product in-depth evaluation" and "short, flat and quick colloquial evaluation" , you can increase people's trust in the content and stimulate conversion;

——If the content is searched and followed by information flow, the layout should be emotional and informative to attract clicks in the browsing environment.

4. How to build a brand on Xiaohongshu

Due to the core population characteristics of Xiaohongshu, the aesthetic tone of the platform, and its suitability for long-term accumulation of content value, the most suitable type of brand on Xiaohongshu is the "lifestyle" brand, that is, a brand that becomes a "user circle of friends."

How to do it specifically? Here are two more efficient methods:

First, bind and cooperate with high-profile celebrities

Whether it is daily content or the "buyer store live broadcast" popularized by Xiaohongshu, it is suitable for brands to reflect the quality and tone of the brand through cooperation with highly compatible talents and celebrities. Some relatively niche but good-taste brands have the opportunity to move to a bigger stage.

Note that the key point is to embody the feeling of being "favored by experts" , so long-term cooperation can make people believe this.

Second, operate brand accounts to output high-quality content

Running a brand account on Xiaohongshu and creating high-quality content that is more original and of high aesthetic or altruistic value is also one of the ways to accumulate brand assets. If there are more video content, you can also use Xiaohongshu’s video stream (which is also the lowest-cost method of delivery on Xiaohongshu) to amplify the value of the content and accumulate passers-by fans.

Summarize

Douyin: Commercial traffic is distributed equally, and the right to decide on content is enhanced; the commercialization tendency is to narrow the targeted population, improve efficiency and reduce advertising interruptions, resulting in an increase in the cost of paid traffic for merchants, and the need for further fine-grained segmentation and use of high-quality content to reach the precise population; the platform supports pan-entertainment traffic, and brands are expected to obtain natural traffic at low cost to increase brand awareness.

Corresponding method: Use two types of closed loops (marketing) + continue to create popular content that highlights the core elements of the brand

Xiaohongshu: In terms of community ecology, it is developing into a "playground" that enriches life experience, and the platform hopes that commercial traffic can be cut and closed. Therefore, on the basis of controlling investment costs, products or services of different categories have the opportunity to obtain high-value users at a lower cost from the natural traffic of life experience and search traffic.

Corresponding method: Determine the budget scale of Xiaohongshu by maximizing natural traffic (high frequency and light decision) and the proportion of active search in the user decision link (low frequency and heavy decision) , and create original and authentic content according to different types of content to enhance interest and conversion; lifestyle brands can build their brands on Xiaohongshu by binding high-quality KOLs or building their own accounts.

Author: Lan Lan

WeChat public account: Taro and Cat Talk (ID: taro_cat)