XIAOHONGSHU BRAND MARKETING
Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book”/“Red” is a Chinese social-commerce platform founded in 2013. Red started off serving as an online tour guide for Chinese shoppers abroad for consumers to review products and to share their shopping experiences. Currently as a lifestyle sharing platform, Red is considered as one of the prominent channels for brands to reach the wide Chinese consumers.
Young and urban users with significant purchasing power
- The monthly active user (MAU) of Red reached 200 million in November 2021, doubling the MAU of 100 million in January 2020; 50% of the users live in tier 1/2 cities and 72% of them are born in the 1990s; More than 71% of users held a college degree.
- High penetration of female users: In 2020, female users accounted for 90% of total users. By promoting content targeting male audience e.g., men’s hair style, Red successfully increased the share of male users to 30% in 2021, which enables Red to serve as a diversified platform with a more balanced gender distribution possible for marketing campaigns of diverse products.
- Strong purchase intent: 69% of the users find the content in Red convincing and consider Red as a trusted source of advice and recommendations for purchase. Understandably, Red has become an indispensable link in the customer journey and the content in Red has direct impact on the conversion. Hence, it’s important for brands to understand and leverage the potential of Red brand marketing.
How to kickstart a brand marketing campaign? The “IDEA” methodology + “BKC” methodology
Based on the characteristics of Red’s community, Red revealed its "IDEA" brand marketing methodology, which are Insights, Define, Expand and Advocate and “BKC” – Brand to KOL (Key Opinion Leader) to Consumer methodology.
- Insights: To generate insights of user demand through Red data analysis tools or external data analysis platform e.g. Qiangua, Chanmama to analyze the behavioral data of users within the community including user insights, content insights and sentiment analysis, etc.
- Define: To define the essential parts for a marketing campaign in Red, including the unique selling proposition, product selection (the potential “Baokuan” - bestseller which is highly trending) and corresponding marketing scenario (including concrete content of the post und influencer personas).
- Expand: To increase brand exposure through Red’s advertising tool and influencers marketing matrix to forge more relevant and personal connections with consumers. It’s significant to build a corresponding influencer matrix based on the BKC methodology – vertical influencers combined with non-vertical influencer matching your brand; celebrities/mega influencers combined with micro influencers/Key Opinion Consumer.
- Advocate: To further strengthen customer loyalty and enable customer retention through diversified advertisements tools, long-term cooperation with best practices of influencers and consumer engagement campaigns e.g., giveaways and live streaming.
Summary
Red plays a key role in customer decision-making process in China and is one of the essential channels for brand marketing, especially for international brands entering the Chinese market. To expand the business in China, it’s important for brands to leverage Red to increase the visibility of the brand and to engage closely with the customers using the IDEA and BKC methodology.