RED TRENDS | How Brands Utilize RED In 2024

ABOUT RED

⚫ RED (Xiaohongshu) is a popular social commerce platform in China, known as the ‘Chinese Instagram’ that prioritizes content over influencers.

⚫ With rapidly increasing number of UGC posts and brand accounts, it has become a ‘search engine’ and an important platform for brands and influencers to connect with consumers and promote their products.

CONTENT MARKETING

Brand Account

⚫ Brand’s official channel to communicate with followers and consumers.

⚫ Build brand image and a unique lifestyle, emphasizing brand philosophy.

⚫ Interact & engage with users through lucky draws, votes, etc.

⚫ Collect consumer insights for future marketing campaigns.

Influencer Cooperation

⚫ Select influencers on the official marketing platform.

⚫ Co-create scenario-based authentic contents with influencers. Native KOC contents are usually more popular than KOL contents.

⚫ Add action buttons allowing users to further engage with the brand & directly purchase from official store.

⚫ Analyze post performance, review and adjust future influencer & content strategies.

Tags & Key Words

⚫ Tightly link the brand/product with popular trends & key words in both brand account contents & influencer contents.

⚫ Search optimization for gaining better conversions within or outside the platform.

PROMOTIONS & ADVERTISING

'Shutiao' (薯条) - General promotion for non-commercial contents

⚫ Expand influence of brand account posts or sponsored influencer posts with ‘Shutiao’(薯条).

⚫ Choose targets from increasing video plays, post views, post engagements, and followers.

⚫ Simple settings at cost, hours & duration, and target users' demographics.

   Posts not applicable for "Shutiao" (薯条):   

× Commercial & sales promotional contents.

× Contents directing users to external platforms.

× Poor quality & forbidden contents.

× Exaggerated & false contents.

'Aurora' (聚光) - Precise traffic for commercial contents

⚫ Focused performance ads for marketing & commercial purpose on the official advertising platform ‘Aurora’(聚光) by enterprise accounts only.

⚫ Marketing objectives including products seeding, market share seizing, sales converting, client acquisition, and live-streaming promoting.

⚫ Content feed ads, search ads and smart combinations available.

PROS:

⚫ Higher precision of target audience based on scenarios & platform intelligence.

⚫ Real-time manual/smart budget & bidding adjustment allowing optimized costs & ROAS.

CONS:

× Strict marketing content rules apply.

'Aurora' (聚光) - The new 'Search Direct' (搜索直达) launching 2024

The new search ads can directly:

⚫ Link to the brand’s official RED store.

⚫ Link to the brand’s external ecommerce stores such as Tmall store or JD store.

⚫ Link to privat chats between the brand and the user.

⚫ Link to mobile apps or games downloading.

SALES CONVERSION

Market Insights from 'Lingxi' (灵犀)

⚫ Lingxi(灵犀) is a data system launched by RED providing market insights for brands.

⚫ Brands can use the data for market research, consumer insights, product analysis, social listening, etc. to build strategy.

⚫ With 1400+ segmented labels of 20 kinds of featured lifestyle crowds, brands can better understand consumers by their lifestyles.

Internal & External Sales Conversion

Within RED Platform:

⚫ Selling in brand official store.

⚫ Selling in personal or reseller stores.

External Ecommerce Platforms:

⚫ Search ads redirecting to external ecommerce platforms such as JD, VIPSHOP, Dewu, Qunar.com and Meituan.

⚫ Conversion data traceable since 2024.

Content Commerce

⚫ Product links added to sponsored influencer posts for direct conversion.

⚫ Product links added to any qualified users’ posts that getting free samples from brand store and sharing the product. Any sales for certain % of  commission.

Live Commerce

⚫ Cooperate with KOL buyers or celebrity live-streamers to introduce products in their live streams.

⚫ Product links from brand official store pop up during introduction.