The disappearance of the Internet population growth dividend has made all platforms and brands focus on how to "fully tap the value of stock". More precisely, it is how to effectively promote consumers to enter the "consumption decision-making chain" jointly built by the platform and brands from various touch points, so as to promote conversion and maximize consumer value. Under the same goal, all walks of life have aimed at the same marketing position - search. In addition to "push", "search" has become the main way consumers acquire content. Especially at present, in addition to the "information search" provided by independent search platforms, the search behavior that depends on major content planting platforms has long become a key part of consumption decision-making. Stimulating demand, guiding search, and promoting consumption are the key marketing links for brands. If there is a demand for brand growth, there will be a commercial update of the platform. From Douyin, Kuaishou to Xiaohongshu, the search products of "using the platform's search ability to help brands do good business" are iteratively updated every year. For example, two days ago, the "2024 Xiaohongshu WILL Business Conference" officially announced that the platform will upgrade its search business again - the overall upgrade of the past "Xiaohongshu search advertising" is Xiaohongshu search direct product, which can meet the diversified marketing demands of users in different industries to a greater extent through the improvement of various capabilities of search promotion. 
Taking this opportunity, 007 also wants to talk to you about why search has become a must-have option for brandsHow can brands leverage the search opportunities provided by the platform to improve their growth in an all-round way?01 Under the wave of rational consumption, search has become a must, and any brand marketing model update is a response to the change of consumer needs and habits. The "rise of the wave of rational consumption" makes "search" occupy a more important position in consumer decision-making, and makes "search" a must for brands. The "rationality" of contemporary consumers is not only reflected in "shopping around", but also in the changes in consumer information acquisition and trust habits: on the one hand, consumers begin to feel tired of being fed information, and instead begin to look for valuable references on their own. "Search before you consume" has become a consumption inertia. On the other hand, consumers' judgment of reference value is no longer limited to official and authoritative releases, but prefers real user experience and experience. In addition to seeing the necessity of "search", brands also need to have a clear understanding of the "search" differentiation between different platforms. According to 007 observation, compared with Douyin heuristic search, information search, and consumption search, Xiaohongshu search is more like a life decision - no matter which platform the pre-planting grass reached by consumers comes from, they will habitually search Xiaohongshu for the experience and experience of other users when making the final decision. According to official data, "70% of Xiaohongshu's monthly active users have search behaviors". Xiaohongshu search has become the last round of mental decision-making before users consume. 
Not only that, Xiaohongshu relies on a large number of real user life scene content to build a "grass" interaction between users, and its search and presentation content is more credible, and the search behavior also has its own commercial recommendation purpose. Whether it's in terms of content type, user base, or community atmosphere, Xiaohongshu's search is an untapped growth opportunity for brands. 02 Enhanced Search How do you open up the growth opportunities behind closed-loop and open-loop product closed-loop and open-loop two-way search?Or from another perspective, how can brands take the initiative to embrace platform search traffic and seize the dominant ecological niche?In 007's view, on Xiaohongshu, brands must aim in two directions: to undertake content and grass traffic through search, to do a good job in the closed loop of on-site marketing, and to seize every conversion opportunity;Use search to open up global reach channels and seize every business opportunity. It is based on these two major directions that the conference officially announced the product upgrade of "Xiaohongshu Search Direct", and launched 6 new product capabilities, adapting to 6 major marketing scenarios in both closed-loop and open-loop business conditions, creating unique marketing value for brands. 1. Closed-loop: Seize every opportunity for on-site conversionXiaohongshu has already become an important full-link business position for brands, and it also has consumer-oriented content planting scenarios and e-commerce marketing closed-loop scenarios. However, in the face of on-site scenario opportunities, brand merchants are also facing a similar problem - how to further improve efficiency and conversion at consumer decision-making nodes or e-commerce marketing touchpointsIn 007's view, Search Direct For brands that have already laid out on Xiaohongshu or intend to open Xiaohongshu stores, at least two sets of conversion and efficiency improvement plans are given: on the one hand, brands can choose from their own products, Service features, etc., layout the corresponding content and independently set relevant keywords for targeted delivery, so as to seize the first-mover advantage of the track and unique mental tags based on multiple scenarios, while realizing search diversion, consolidate brand awareness tags with keywords, and improve the user's reach experience to ensure the conversion effect. On the other hand, if the brand opens a store in Xiaohongshu, it can also realize the "product notes + live broadcast, accompanied by e-commerce advertising" presented after the search through Search Direct. For example, when users swipe the content notes or live broadcasts laid out by the brand, they can directly click on the link of the notes and live broadcasts to purchase after being planted by these interesting and useful content, and the brand can achieve instant conversion. One is based on the grass-search link, which uses the content of the Xiaohongshu scene to plant grass to trigger the "search" behavior, and uses search to efficiently undertake content trafficThe other is based on the search-grass logic, which realizes the user's planting of the product with the post-search content, and accompanies the e-commerce conversion. No matter which link it enters, the brand directly uses the search action to complete the accurate consumption traffic introduction in Xiaohongshu, and builds the most direct conversion path in the search field, reducing the jump loss, and also completing the brand mind occupancy in the search, planting and consumption process. 2. Open loop: Seize every global business opportunityMost platforms mainly focus on building a marketing path of "planting grass - search" for brands, but ignore that search can actually achieve a wider range of user reach and drainage for brands, and the search marketing scenario can be extended to the global business scope to respond to more brand refined marketing needs. 
For example, 007 has been in contact with many industry brands such as housekeeping, education and training, etc., which are mainly based on offline services, unlike brands that can complete "planting-searching-ordering" in Xiaohongshu in one stop, and the consumption ordering and service delivery of this kind of industry are centralized. Online "search" is only the entrance for consumers to enter the offline transaction scene, so online operation focuses more on broadening the source of customers and collecting customer information. In view of the business characteristics of such an industry, Search Direct also has a solution - users can directly connect private messages, group chats, forms and other scenarios when searching, improve the opening rate, achieve more efficient capital retention and add fans, and thus increase the ROI. The brands that have stores in Xiaohongshu have been introduced above, and there are efficiency improvement plans for searching. For those users who don't have a Xiaohongshu store, but have accumulated a lot of content on Xiaohongshu, how can they directly convert the volume into sales?According to the release of the conference, Search Direct will launch a new feature next year to directly attract e-commerce scenarios, so that brands can directly connect to off-site channel stores. Through searching, Xiaohongshu users can jump to the brand's store or product page in **, Jingdong and other channels to promote off-site consumption. In this way, Xiaohongshu search has become a global conversion hub. Looking at it one step further, this is also more conducive to the brand to open up major channels in the integrated marketing of the big promotion node and undertake the grass planting traffic more comprehensively. To 007's surprise, this upgrade did not only focus on the growth demand of various consumer brands. In response to the user growth of trading platforms (such as JD.com, Qunar and other platforms) and the application ** growth demands of games and other industries, the upgrade service of Search Direct also responded. For example, after placing "Search Direct", user search can be directly connected to the trading platform (such as JD Qunar, etc.), and by jumping to the homepage of the e-commerce platform, it will open a channel for brands and platforms to attract traffic and growth at the same timeAt the same time, through search, it can also realize the direct delivery of goods, mini game trial and other service jumps, effectively enhance the user's willingness to activate the trial. In fact, before the release of the "Search Direct" upgrade, Xiaohongshu had already shown rapid growth in search traffic. The 3C home appliance industry increased by 84% year-on-year, the education industry increased by 173% year-on-year, and the travel and tourism industry increased by 242% year-on-year. Under the rapid explosion of platform scene traffic, brands need to adhere to a refined operation strategy, so as to more accurately transform platform traffic dividends into brand growth dividends. Obviously, the upgrade of Search Direct has just delineated the accurate direction of refined operations for brands, and has taken the lead in building a feasible operational framework. From online to offline consumption, from on-site to off-site operations, from customer information collection scenarios, trading platform UG scenarios, drainage e-commerce scenarios, to application scenarios, brands always have different business priorities and marketing goals. In the general direction of forming an efficient connection between user needs and brand products and services, Xiaohongshu's comprehensive upgrade of several capabilities is aimed at the diversified marketing scenarios and needs of different categories of brand merchants, and carries out point-to-point satisfaction, so as to help brands achieve global business goals in various marketing nodes and business fields, and seize every opportunity to improve operational efficiency in global scenarios. Finally, from the perspective of the platform, in response to the trend of high-speed "search" convergence and brand differentiation on the site, the timely upgrade of commercial products and tools is also Xiaohongshu's continuous improvement and development of its commercialization system. 03 The new business value of search comes from strengthening the connection between "people" Xiaohongshu search direct The upgrade of products shows the characteristics of diversification and refinement, but in 007's view, its upgrade ideas have not departed from the foundation of the Xiaohongshu platform, that is, to strengthen the connection between people. At the conference, Xiaohongshu and Kotler Consulting Group jointly released the "Third Paradigm of Marketing", defining grass planting as the third marketing paradigm. As the first choice for brand planting, Xiaohongshu truly realizes human to human marketing, that is, taking people as the marketing center, promoting the co-creation of brand and user value, and establishing diversified and connected digital content interaction. Specifically, looking at Xiaohongshu's grass planting model, push grass planting is the platform to actively build a connection between people for users based on user interests, while search is for users to actively find connections between people, and its essence is to focus on the important value of "people" as the core of marketing in the decentralized era. In 007's view, H2H's marketing is not just for Xiaohongshu or the brands operating on Xiaohongshu, but an irreversible marketing megatrend. Previously, in the two eras of material scarcity and the rise of head brands, we have experienced two major marketing stages led by commodities and brands, and at the moment when the "user-oriented" consciousness is rising in major consumer fields, the marketing stage led by users (people) is bound to accelerate. Under the trend of people-oriented marketing sweeping the whole industry, brands only need to embrace new technologies, new products and new models, and often can always take the first to eat the dividends in the trend change. A platform that can tap new value for the brand with its unique ability also has its own broad development prospects.