"Since the beginning of this year, there has been a crazy growth of brands interested in Xiaohongshu. ”
A veteran media of a leading advertising agency was deeply touched by this. In his opinion, Xiaohongshu grass makes up for the marketing pain points that cannot be met when other platforms are launched, and can not only bring the best to the brand, but also bring conversion and mental precipitation, and quickly establish cognition.
Betting on Xiaohongshu has become one of the most significant trends in brand marketing in the past year. According to the 2022 China Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Survey Report, Xiaohongshu's advertising ratio reached 53%, and the brand's budget continued to grow.
What these brands are looking for is the strong grass planting atmosphere of Xiaohongshu. As of the end of 2022, 2With 600 million monthly active users, an average of more than 3 million notes published per day, and an average of nearly 300 million search queries per day, 60% of users will actively search for information, developing the mentality of "Xiaohongshu when encountering problems".
More than 70% of Xiaohongshu's post-90s users are both trend creators and consumers. Therefore,The "grass" planted by the brand on Xiaohongshu is not only a product, but also a concept, a style, and a trend, just like the previous morning c night a skin care concept became popular from Xiaohongshu, this year's Maillard style is also popular in Xiaohongshu.
As the saying goes, "everything can grow grass". The editorial department of the new list found thatOn December 22, Xiaohongshu will hold another business conference, with the theme of "Everything Can Grow Grass".
This is the second time Xiaohongshu has held a business conference this year, and both times it focused on planting grass. At the WILL Business Conference held in February, Xiaohongshu upgraded and iterated its commercial products, and for the first time proposed the effect measurement dimension of "TrueInterest".
10 months have passed, and the sample size of the brand growing grass in Xiaohongshu has been expanding, and the marketing pain points have been reflected more directly and strongly. For example, whether marketing expenses are spent on the cutting edge"Our assessment standard is whether the money invested is the most cost-effective, and the CPE must be less than 20 to just reach the passing line.", a beauty brand practitioner said.
For another example, many brands have revealed that they are struggling with how to discover the target group of their products, and want to know how to stand out and be seen in the Red Sea category, and how to evaluate the acceptance of grass content by users, rather than just relying on feelings to deliver and luck to get ** traffic
The editorial department of Xinbang learned that as a platform, Xiaohongshu has realized the insecurity brought by the uncertainty of grass planting, and the business conference in December will release a series of new actions for grass planting.
This time, what big moves will Xiaohongshu release on "planting grass"?Based on the brand appeal, we made a few pre-meeting **.
Cost performance is the point that brands are most concerned about in marketing in the past two years.
For a long time, growth was tied to traffic. However, the era of extensive traffic will eventually come to an end, and the Internet is entering the era of stock, according to data from GroupM's China Longitudinal Field Research Report "Shanhai Jin".Traffic costs have increased by 57% over the past three years
The dilemma of the brand is that even if it spends a lot of money to buy traffic, it is difficult to precipitate the user group in many cases due to the lack of accumulation of user mindsNot only can the marketing effect not be guaranteed, but once the action of throwing money to buy traffic stops, the brand voice will decline rapidly
Marketing will be more effective if you understand and feel real people, which is the H2H (human to human) marketing concept proposed by Philip Kotler, a master of modern marketing theory. He believes that brand marketing lies in the "people" themselves, that is, by tapping user needs and generating connections.
This kind of people-to-people interaction is also a feature of Xiaohongshu, with 69 million sharers and 90% of UGC content in the decentralized community. Therefore, Xiaohongshu will be regarded as a "more accurate and efficient" incremental platform, so that brands will not spend a lot of money on marketing without much effect, and avoid wasting marketing budgets.
Some brand managers said that they spend 1-2 hours every day to brush Xiaohongshu, just to gain insight into the needs and pain points of the target audience and what kind of expectations they have for the product, and use this as a basis to improve the product in a targeted manner.
But not all brands have insight into trends. In order to solve the brand's grass planting needs, Xiaohongshu has done a lot of infrastructure work on commercial products and theoretical models.
Previously,Xiaohongshu proposes the "crowd anti-funnel model".The brand first identifies the core group of the product, penetrates it with the value of the product, and then breaks through the interest group and the pan-group through the word-of-mouth of the core group, and gradually breaks the circle.
In this process, brands can first conduct a small-scale demographic test to determine whether to increase investment based on audience feedback, and can directly influence the most potential consumer groups, bringing more certainty.
In order to facilitate the brand to do market insight,Xiaohongshu also launched a commercial product "Lingxi"., to help product opportunities, users, crowd audiences, and product reputation, so as to facilitate brands to find grass planting opportunities in subdivided tracks.
We found that based on the insight data of the "Lingxi" platform, Xiaohongshu regularly publishes industry insight trend reports to guide and inspire brands in different tracks. For example, in mid-November, the "Xiaohongshu Makeup Trend Report" pointed out that the base makeup category is still in the blue ocean market, and light makeup and boiled water makeup have become the mainstream demand.
If nothing else, this time will be the business conference, planting grass insight will still be one of the core topics.
With more and more grass content, brands naturally become more and more granular in their market segments. Some brands directly put forward demands such as "the reference dimension of data is broader and more accurate".
Therefore, Xiaohongshu is likely to improve the brand's grass planting insight capabilities in a targeted manner, such as iteratively upgrading the platform functions and data dimensions of "Lingxi", or building a more complete theoretical framework for insight analysis.
It has been observed that there are four steps for brands to plant grass in Xiaohongshu:
The first is insight, find new consumer trends and user pain points, and cut into the segmentation track;For many brands, every step of planting grass is taken carefully, and they are worried that the wrong step will make the plan go down the drain. However, after stepping step by step, how to judge and evaluate the results of grass planting has become a new problem.The second is creation, with a product, it is necessary to cooperate with suitable creators for high-quality content;
The third is to launch and promote, combined with the platform's business tools to expand the voice and reach the audience;
Fourth, the precipitation of crowd assets and long-term operation.
"Growth Black Box" conducted a survey of 40 brand marketing leaders and found that their biggest pain point for Xiaohongshu grass planting is that "they cannot scientifically attribute the effect of marketing business"., as well as the difficulty of creating popular content, KOL cooperation effect does not meet expectations, and other problems continue to plague.
*From the "Growth Black Box".
To achieve scientific attribution, it is necessary to show brands how the budget is clearly spent, and what room for optimization is at each step.
According to the "KFS Product Planting and Grass Combination Delivery Method" proposed by Xiaohongshu, the three core points of grass planting are the detonation of KOL high-quality content, the reach of Feeds information flow, and the search for search and conversion card slot people.
In this process, the dandelion platform and the spotlight platform are used as business tools to provide guidance and effect evaluation reference for brands in the process of talent placement and target group reach.
At the last business conference, Xiaohongshu put forward the concept of "TrueInterest" to quantify users' deep interaction behavior, in addition to the interaction value of notes, it also integrates data dimensions such as in-depth reading, positive & purchase comments, saving**, sharing, and searching for product terms.
StillThe effect of Xiaohongshu's grass planting and transformation is often global。Although tools such as Lingxi, Dandelion, and Spotlight can view the data on the site, the data is scattered, and there is no universal and comprehensive dimension for evaluating the effect of grass planting.
One brand once told us that it was difficult for them to accurately assess how much of the third-party platform** and sales came from Xiaohongshu's success. Senior media Wenjie also revealed that with the saturation of the market, brands have higher and higher requirements for grass planting data"If data capabilities are better brought together, I believe that the brand's budget will also be spent more".
Xiaohongshu has recognized the need for brands to return third-party data. In September 2023, Xiaohongshu and JD Alliance will cooperate to launch the "Little Red Alliance" plan.
Judging from this series of actions, Xiaohongshu may further integrate third-party data, integrate more back-end link channels, and provide more refined and sustainable grass planting data.
At this stage, how can brands position the role of Xiaohongshu?
The grass gene has made Xiaohongshu the first choice for many brands to do event or new product marketing, but it stops at marketing. The editorial department of Xinbang observed that many brands have not opened official stores on Xiaohongshu, and the account notes released are mainly based on simple product introductions.
Although Xiaohongshu has run through the closed loop of grass planting in the station, if the station can be directly transformed and put in place in one step, it may be able to further improve the efficiency of grass planting, which is why many platforms are making efforts in closed-loop e-commerce.
After all, the pursuit of the integration of quality and efficiency is the inevitable development direction of brand marketing. According to the "2022 China Digital Marketing Trends" released by Miaozhen Systems, 83% of advertisers believe that the main goal of planting grass is to increase sales.
A number of brands and advertising practitioners also said that when Xiaohongshu planted grass, they would pay more and more attention to the ability of cooperative accounts to bring goods. We found that Xiaohongshu is actually making efforts to improve the efficiency of the brand's grass planting and transformation.
On the one hand, the closed-loop of grass planting in the station has been gradually improved, mainly covering two forms: commodity sales and e-commerce live broadcast.
Brands open stores on Xiaohongshu, put product links on the shelves, and grass notes can be hung on the chain, and users can directly jump to the product purchase page through the note link after their purchase interest is stimulated to complete the conversion.
For example, during the 618 promotion, Naturetang's new lyophilized collagen** was planted in Xiaohongshu, which met the repair and anti-aging needs of people with sensitive skin, and it was directly available for purchase in Xiaohongshu stores, and its sales volume was on the top 1 of the store.
Combined with the linkage between the outside station and Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room, planting grassIt is understood that during the promotion period, the sales volume of new products on the whole platform exceeded 250,000 boxes
Brands can also live stream their stores or collaborate with bloggers. This year, Zhang Xiaohui, Dong Jie and other buyer anchors have successively exceeded 100 million yuan in a single live broadcast, and more than 20 tens of millions of buyer anchors appeared in Xiaohongshu during the Double 11 period, and the vigorous development of the e-commerce ecology has also provided a boost for the closed loop of grass planting.
According to official data from Xiaohongshu, as of November 3, the number of matchmaking between brands and buyers increased by 370% year-on-year.
On the other hand, the jump link between Xiaohongshu and the off-site platform has also been further opened.
On November 30, Xiaohongshu announced an in-depth cooperation with Qunar at the Cultural Tourism Summit to carry out a deeper data connection. After Qunar recommends hotels and destinations to users on Xiaohongshu, users return to the Qunar app to make transactions through a specific password code.
Therefore, we believe that Xiaohongshu will continue to make efforts to close the loop of grass planting in the station, open up the global grass planting link, or launch tool components or solutions oriented to the transformation of grass planting operations.
2.600 million monthly active users, with an average of nearly 300 million searches per day, covering 37 first-level categories and 232 second-level categories, covering multiple interest groups and diversified fields. Until now, Xiaohongshu has been the most suitable platform for growing grass.
Judging from the feedback of many brands and practitioners, Xiaohongshu's future grass planting opportunities depend on whether the platform can iterate on more advanced business productivity and whether it has the ability to scientifically attribute.
Obviously, Xiaohongshu is trying to provide a better business ecology for grass planting and solve the thresholds and problems in the process of grass planting. As Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng said at the conference at the beginning of the year, the ultimate goal of Xiaohongshu's commercialization team is to improve the certainty of the success of grass planting"From metaphysics to science, from uncertainty to certainty".
At the upcoming WILL Business Conference on December 22nd, what kind of new story will Xiaohongshu tell about planting grass?Let's wait and see.