Overview & Strategy

Xiaohongshu is a lifestyle app and social media platform with over 200 million active users in China.

The platform is regarded as a beauty and fashion platform for women, despite offering a wide variety of content. Moreover, it has hit a plateau of user growth – new users are hard to obtain, and many current users are not active on the platform.

Its main challenges include:

·       Stereotypes: Many still consider Xiaohongshu as an app only about beauty and shopping guide for women. To clearly convey new brand image and break the old stereotype is an urgent issue for user growth.

·       Limited connections: Competitors from main short video platforms and Weibo have blocked Xiaohongshu and made it impossible to connect with more users through them. It is more difficult for Xiaohongshu to find a high traffic as well as efficient media vehicle to communicate with wider groups of users.

The only way to keep expanding was to break away from such a stereotype and show the several other facets of this platform. The primary goal of this campaign was to promote the other qualities of Xiaohongshu. Moreover, it should turn it into a valuable source of information for pretty much any occasion.

One of the campaign’s main goals was to demystify the brand as solely focused on fashion and beauty. So, the agency played a vital role in the campaign, identifying the hottest topics of the moment. It invested in a wide range of themes, from tips about camera lenses to the best holiday destinations.

Such a variety of themes aimed to reach the broadest possible audience of mobile internet users. It helped raise brand awareness beyond Xiaohongshu’s traditional market, expand its user base, and dilute the stereotype of a women-oriented platform.

Because the campaign’s main point was to diversify Xiaohongshu’s user base, the demographic scope was also pretty wide. Visitors can find helpful content about different situations and life stages, regardless of age, gender, profession, or education. In other words, the primary purpose was to transform Xiaohongshu into a valuable platform for everyone.

One of our contributions to Xiaohongshu was finding the right topics to talk about. Improving its search engines is one of the strategies, but we can do more for the brand.

Hence, Xiaohongshu’s Lifestyle Guide was born.

The Chinese New Year (CNY) is a momentous part of the Chinese calendar – an important festival and social holiday in China. It was the perfect moment to forward Xiaohongshu’s goals.

This guide brings practical advice on how to get around this time of the year and make the right choices in subjects like grooming, gifting, spring-cleaning and more. While most brands are trying to sell their products or emotional messages, Xiaohongshu opted to develop a guide to help people make the best decisions during this frantic period.

We tapped into the symbolic digital “red packet” tradition; a popular communication channel at this time of the year. Exchanging red packets is one of the oldest Chinese traditions. It was also the perfect opportunity to create exclusive red packets with links to Xiaohongshu’s contents. An average of 5 billion red packets are exchanged in China every year.

It’s the first year of Xiaohongshu’s campaign with Wavemaker. Other optimization keys were tried before, with the sole purpose of bringing in new users. It’s the first time we have focused on different paths for user interaction and the quality and duration of such interactions.

Execution

After carefully selecting the trendiest Chinese New Year related topics, such as home decoration, gifts, ski equipment, and others, the result was a how-to book for life. The red packets commonly exchanged via WeChat in this period carried links to this guidebook, Xiaohongshu’s Lifestyle Guide, was sent along classic red packets, building solid brand awareness.

It improved user interaction, adding more fun to the process. Moreover, Xiaohongshu’s red packets increased brand desirability, boosting the platform’s statistics. A wide array of OTV and OTT platforms were also used in the campaign. The expansion effort also counted on the popularity and reputation of Eileen Gu and Haoran Liu, who endorsed the brand during Winter Olympics and Chinese New Year.

Their popularity created a ripple effect, where users began to share and look for new stories on the platform. The rise in the number of users was the natural effect of efficient brand repositioning and a wise investment in brand awareness.

The budget for this project was entirely dedicated to digital media to ensure seamless user interactions.

WeChat was instrumental in this campaign. WeChat is one of the most popular apps in China for exchanging instant messages, reaching approximately 90% of the Chinese market. Here, the strategy consisted of picking eight high-affinity interest tags, better framing the target audience. Those tags helped us to send different red packets to different users according to their presumed tastes.

The creative content output was also planned according to the season. Three special periods of the year were considered: the Spring Festival, the Spring holiday, and the Winter Olympics.

Each event was surrounded by content on related topics. During the holiday preparations, for instance, most topics were about cooking, clothing, and skiing. Meanwhile, most topics around the Spring break were about travelling or parties.

Hot topics were used to trigger user comments and reactions. Subjects like Gu Ailing’s gold medal race, “fried Chinese leek dumplings” attracted loads of comments, increasing brand engagement. The goal of such a strategy is to infiltrate different kinds of communications as a means of remaining in the audience’s minds longer.

Results & Business Impact

After the expansion of mobile internet, the traffic volume was stagnated, with no significant peaks or falls. Such a scenario contributed to the stagnation of Xiaohongshu’s user growth rate. It did not help that the number of active users began declining as old users started disconnecting.

The platform also failed to retain a large portion of new users. The information cocoon effect was hitting users and the entire online sphere. Breaking through these cocoons was one of the main challenges of the campaign in its pursuit of brand repositioning.

For a campaign-first. the results were outstanding and the campaign was successful in its pursuit of market expansion. According to QuestMobile, the platform DAU increased by 38% year on year.  The growth rate of usage duration during the Spring Festival was #1!

The Lifestyle Guide managed to raise brand awareness and gain mental space among its users. In fact, brand association improved and brand recognition increased by 20% after the campaign, according to a customer site research.

More key highlights include:

●      Total exposure exceeded KPI by 16% (1.41 billion times)

●      Total reached audience exceeded KPI by 56% (470 million people)

●      Advertising interaction: 56.17 million times (CTR 4.18% exceeding the historical level by 200%+)

●      More than 1M WeChat’s red packets covers received, exceeding the industry average

●      Close to a whopping 7M red packets opened (via WeChat groups)

●      CTR of the outer layer of WeChat moment advertising is 3 times higher than the historical average

●      90x more first comment replies on WeChat moment advertising, shattering the historical average

The campaign reached its most intense period during the Spring Festival. During this period, there was intense communication between users. There was also fierce competition for market space and a search for blank spaces in the content supply.

The Spring Festival was a focal point in our campaign. During the Festival, countless red packets were sent. These red packets also carried the Lifestyle Guide developed by Xiaohongshu. So, the brand rode on WeChat’s traffic increase during this period. The skillful operation of this tool allowed the brand to pierce through bubbles and cocoons, speaking the brand’s mind to a much larger audience.

The whole strategy included highly focused social media communication, advertising interaction, and exposure for the brand. Such an approach resulted in a sizeable increase in the platform DAU users. Additionally, it increased the adherence of these users to the platform.

This approach has positioned Xiaohongshu among the fastest-growing platforms during this Spring Festival.