This Article is written by Tingyi Chen 亭伊 and originally published on Walk The Chat on July 18th, 2021
Little Red Book (小红书, pronounced Xiaohongshu), sometime referred to as RED, is the Chinese equivalent of Instagram. It’s the best platform to read about product reviews, share outfits of the day, learn about fashion tips, and discover high-quality brands. Since RED reviews could directly impact sales, it’s one of the most important social media channels for brand marketing.
Overview
RED targets a specific user group: young, female shoppers living in top-tier cities. Having 100 million monthly active users (MAUs), it is not the largest Chinese Social Media App (WeChat has 1.2 billion MAUs) but its audience is distinct in that 90% are female, and 46% of the users are under 24 years of age.
In general, RED’s users are based in tier 1 and tier 2 cities, with higher than average purchasing power. The platform’s content has a strong focus on premium brands, and content containing notable foreign brands usually can get stronger engagements.
RED’s design is similar to Instagram: pictures with text descriptions usually between 20 to 200 characters. The style of the content on Little is usually personal, often with lots of emojis. Users engage with algorithm-driven content distributions via likes, bookmarks, sharing, private messaging, and comments.
Brand Marketing on Little Red Book
RED has played an important role in the consumer purchasing experience:
- Building Awareness: RED is an excellent channel to discover new brands
- Generating Interest & Desire: RED pushes relevant content based on users’ browsing habits. It’s a good channel to create multiple consumer touchpoints. For example, oftentimes before a consumer make a purchase, he/she will open Little Red Book to read the product reviews
- Pushing Action: Although RED has a native store system, majority of brands choose to open stores on marketplaces where they could get more traffic as consumers go to e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.
- Delivering Loyalty: Once a consumer becomes a buyer, brands create closer relationships via WeChat Official Account and WeChat groups. That loyal customer often share product reviews and advocate for your brand on RED.
Even though purchases usually don’t happen on Little Red Book, it could still have a strong impact on your sales.
For example, Bobbies, a French shoe brand, got their first China orders via Little Red Book marketing even though the brand didn’t have much brand awareness in China. After operating its RED account for 3 months, without expensing for any influencer advertising, Bobbies was able to grow to more than 2,500 followers organically. This interest directed traffic to Bobbies’ WeChat store, generating 70% increase in sales revenue.
Marketing Limitations on RED
Compared to WeChat (微信) and Douyin (抖音), RED still remains a much smaller social media channel by user base. The user demographic is also skewed toward female who reside in top-tier cities.
Accordingly, the top industries that promote heavily on RED are skincare, cosmetics, and fashion. Below is the number of promotional posts (in thousands) on RED in a given month with skincare leading the way.
Another rather glaring limitation on RED is the inability to track sales conversion data as the platform blocks any 3rd party links and any mention of other Apps such as WeChat, Taobao or Tmall. So brands will need to think of creative ways to direct traffic to the right sales channel.
However due to the recent government crackdown on Chinese Big Tech conglomerates and their seasoned practice of blocking outside links via “walled gardens”, cross channel promotions are closer to reality than what many Internet observers and eCommerce marketers may think. The future of China’s internet and eCommerce is one of fluidity and efficiency.
How to Create Attractive Content on RED
Little Red Book is a great channel for medium to long-term marketing because its content has longer lifespan when compared to other social media platforms such as WeChat.
Many posts on RED still receive traffic after a month as the platform’s algorithm delivers exposure according to keywords and post engagement score. Comparatively, WeChat’s content lifespan is usually under 7 days as the posts are only pushed to official account followers. On WeChat, it’s difficult to generate organic traffic.
1. Choose the Right Cover Image
Cover picture can strongly impact the click rate of your Little Red Book content. A clear product picture works better than a mysterious, blurry picture. On RED, a picture that looks like it was taken by a real customer will attract more clicks.
Additionally, localized content performs better on RED because as a community, people prefer genuine content to professionally shot, commercial content with foreign models. One good method to create localized content is through gifting products to RED influencers and allowing them to create and post content rather than paying $ for exposure.
2. Keep Experimenting
In general, a brand account can post 1 or 2 posts per day. It’s difficult to tell what exactly makes a post go viral on RED so brands should keep testing out different content styles and copying the best-performing content in your industry is not a bad start.
Below are 3 pieces of similar content. The second post is keyword optimized with “business casual” and it performed 20 times better than the first post.
Adopting a similar approach using another account, the post went viral… as it is much more likely to create viral content when the brand is simultaneously running an influencer campaign.
3. Optimize Keyword & Avoid Censored Keywords
RED’s content is algorithm-driven with the performance strongly correlated with search volume and post engagement. Thus optimizing keywords in your post title is a shortcut to success.
You can start by doing research on the best-performing content in your industry. You can record the top-performing post titles in the last 3 months. These titles give the best examples of the types of content that works. You may reuse some of the keywords to create similar content.
Examples of good titles are:
- How can short people choose outfits to look skinny and elegant?
- 8 beige colors for French sandals recommendation this summer
Similar to a search engine, RED’s keyword trends change all the time. You can use 3rd party keyword monitoring tool such as Qiangua to find the top ranking keyword in your industry. It’s a paid service costing around $500 USD/month.
Keyword ranking = Number of search queries X Engagement of top posts containing the keyword
Copywriters also need to avoid censored words and forbidden words. These words will definitely impact traffic. For example, the Chinese advertising law forbade the use of “best”, “No. 1”, “most” to avoid misleading content and political words could cause your content and even the account to be blocked. Finally, any indication of trying to redirect traffic to other platforms such as WeChat or Taobao is sensitive enough to cause your content to be blocked.
Here is a free tool to check for sensitive and forbidden words in your content.
4. Brand-oriented Content Should be Long
While some influencers’ posts contain only a couple of emojis and are still able to reach over 15,000 engagements. this might only work for a personal account. Brand-oriented content benefits from longer, more thoroughly planned content.
For example, 500+ characters length content is a lot more likely to pick up trendy keywords, thus benefiting from the search traffic. Best performing brand on RED, such as Perfect Diary (完美日记), often has long content combining with lots of emojis to increase readability.
5. Bring Fast Traffic Thru Lucky Draw Contests
Little Red Book has an official system for brands to launch lucky draws. Users could participate by following, bookmark, and like the content in order to win a gift. It’s a very good way to quickly push a new account to a larger audience.
While the first participating users are usually low-quality users who are only in it for the gift, as more users engage, the campaigns could go viral and eventually reach your target consumers.
For Vitaly, a Canadian jewelry brand, a lucky draw was able to bring over 600 new followers and since the lucky draw prize is a 500 RMB gift card for its cross-border WeChat Mini Program, the brand also draws attention to another sales channel the brand possess.
For DeMellier, a niche bag brand that just entered the Chinese market, a lucky draw contest attracted over 2,000 new followers, a significant feat for a new account. And over 500 users, attracted by the luck draw, asked how to buy the product.
Since WeChat and Tmall are sensitive words on RED, a brand can use private messages to share the sales channel with the users. The prize was a newly launched bag as a free product is usually more attractive when compared with a gift card.
Influencer Strategy on Little Red Book
On RED, typical influencer spending schedule looks like this:
Display ads
It’s used to promote the most popular influencer post, expand the reach. 10-15% of the campaign budget should be allocated here.
Gifting/seeding
Lots of micro-influencers accept product seeding for collaborations. It’s an effective way to work with a large number of influencers on a smaller budget. 20-30% of the campaign budget can be allocated targeting tier 4 influencers with average post view below 10,000 users.
Agency and MCN companies provide gifting and seeding services. The engagement price ranges between $50 to $150 USD per micro-influencer depending on quality and size of his/her audience.
Top Influencer campaign
Larger influencers and more promotional content will require payment to engage. A pyramid style of operation is the most typical model: working with top tier influencers at around $10,000 USD per influencer). Influencers in tier 2 and tier 3 should cost a lot less to engage with 50-60% of your campaign budget allocated to the total influencers pool.
It’s common to work with 50-200 influencers during a couple of weeks for a campaign as this allocation structure enables brands to work with the most amount of influencers during campaigns.
Some of the most popular content is created with micro-influencers, thus playing numbers games increase the chance of producing the best content. Brands could target select product/brand-specific keywords during the promotional campaign to further attracts traffic.
So How do You Find RED Influencers?
Pugongying (蒲公英) – an official Key Opinion Leader (KOL) platform on RED. (Pugongying)
Pros:
- Official channel to place an order with KOL
- Influencer’s cost are displayed
- Ability to find influencers by industry, tags, follower demographic, price, etc.
Cons:
- Pugongying charges a 10% service fee.
- Little Red Book encourages all KOL collaboration to go through Pugongying, otherwise, the post could risk being blocked or limit in traffic distribution. (Although brands often take the risk by working with influencers directly to save the 10% platform fee. If the content looks native and personal, it could often fly under the radar.)
- Around 90% of the campaigns in the cosmetics industry goes through Pugongying, while only 50% of the campaigns in the fashion industry goes through Pugoingying since the content could look more native.
- Some influencers and celebrities are not listed on Pugongying as they do NOT have an official agreement with Little Red Book.
- Limited level of search query when compared to Qiangua
Qiangua (千瓜数据) – a 3rd party social monitoring platform for RED. (Qiangua)
Pros:
- More influencers listed
- More search options than Pugongying such as the ability to filter influencers by more specific tags
- Easier to tell the number of active followers judging by the engagement rate of the content
- Ability to gauge reasonable estimated cost of an influencer. This could be used as a benchmark against the real engagement price
Cons:
- Do not display the actual engagement price of an influencer
- Some features require a paid account; cost start from around $250 USD per month
Influencer Seeding Process
Seeding means gifting products to influencers in exchange for free posting. It’s an important Little Red Book marketing method. Here are some of the reasons why brands should do product seeding:
- It is the most cost-effective way to work with influencers and celebrities.
- It’s a good way to build strong relationships with influencers at the beginning. We suggest brands gift high-quality influencers during every new product launch.
- Seeding is a good way to measure the impact of an influencer before official collaboration.
- Seeding could increase consumer touchpoint, especially if an influencer is willing to share your brand multiple times. They are your new brand ambassadors.
- Influencer seeding is a market survey to define your hero product. The most popularly picked product by influencers could be the hero product of the season.
- Seeding are not limited to the size of the influencers.
This is our seeding process:
For many seeding products, the influencers and celebrities will not include a sales link in the post. Thus using the brand’s social media account to engage with the post as soon as the post is released is the key to bring tangible sales/marketing impact to the brand.
Another key is to reuse the pictures and videos created through seeding (not directly because seeding photos usually don’t have commercial use copyright). But by using other personal accounts to comment under a product or posting on social media, the content could be repurposed effectively.
Walk The Chat usually focus on the quality of the photoshoot during seeding, instead of designing the user conversion path like we do in a paid influencer campaign. Depending on the goal of the brand, we will utilize different seeding strategies.
During the first month of a brand/product launch, we often seed high-quality, median-size KOLs. The goal is to ask the KOLs to choose their favorite products, thus giving helpful feedback on which product is the most potent offering.
Examples of monthly seeding to product content and create branding:
Vitaly create great localized content with musicians and rock bands via product seeding on RED.
Hunter Boots gifts out at least $4,000 USD worth of products per month, and in exchange, KOLs are able to create over $20,000 USD worth of marketing posts. A smart arrangement to create amazing content while minimizing marketing cost given that the product cost is only a small percentage of the retail price.
Micro-influencer seeding:
For skincare, cosmetics, health supplements, F&B, or electronics brands, when you target micro-influencers with around 1000 followers, it’s a lot more difficult to get product seeding if your product won’t fit into the KOL’s outfit and style. An unfit seeding will appear too promotional and lose authenticity for the KOL.
Instead, brands can pay a small amount (usually between $30 to $100) to individuals on RED in exchange for guaranteed postings. The premier objective will be placed on the quality of photos and videos. As long as the content quality is high, it’s still possible for a post to go viral even if the post is from a smaller account.
Celebrities seeding:
While celebrities usually charge between $80,000 to $140,000 USD for one promotional post, working with showrooms and stylists can be a great way to access celebrities as their stylists and showrooms will borrow a lot of products from brands for photoshoots and TV appearances. Then it’s crucial for the brand to use its own official social media accounts to engage with the fans who in turn share photos of celebrities.
Note: all collaboration photos and videos are copyright-protected. While the brand can use these photos to post on social media channels it cannot use them in e-commerce stores or as display ads material. A smart way to use these copyright-protected photos is to post under product review using personal or KOL account. In this way, brand is not directly using these photos, but the content gets to be distributed widely regardless.
While jewelry, shoes, and clothing are easier items to be picked for celebrity’s stage styling. Bags, cosmetics, and sunglasses are usually a bit harder to be placed. Products such as skin care are almost impossible for celebrity seeding.
Running an Influencer Campaign on Little Red Book
Little Red Book influencer campaigns often target building brand awareness and creating engagement. It’s difficult to track the sales conversion from the platform, however, a good campaign can create strong purchase intention, and directly impacting sales.
Unlike seeding which we mostly focus on the quality of content, when it comes to paid influencer campaigns on RED, we utilize much stricter selection criteria.
1. Strong engagement ratio
The engagement ratio is an important indicate demonstrating how active is the KOL account. The influencer profile page shows total followers and total engagement amount. The higher this ratio is the more engaging are the account’s followers. We usually work with influencers that have a ratio higher than 2.
Engagement ratio = Engagement amount / # of Followers
2. Identify the real KOL
Little Red Book has quite a lot of fake accounts and zombie followers. A real KOL usually receives comments from real users. A real comment usually contains specific product information with realistic username and profile picture.
Another way to check if the influencer has fake followers is by using Qiangua, a 3rd party App. It provides an estimation of the % of the active followers vs. % of zombie followers. We usually choose influencers with greater than 50% of followers as active followers. Zombie followers are defined as followers who started to follow the influencer only in the last 90 days, and do not have any activity on Little Red Book. Usually, we choose accounts with less than 20% of followers as zombie followers.
3. Average post engagement should be over 200
For mid-tier to top-tier influencers, it’s important to choose influencers that have strong daily engagement. Internally we prefer influencers with over 200 post engagements, these are often the influencers with strong follower loyalty.
Note: For smaller influencers, it’s common to have a very uneven engagement performance across content. Smaller influencers are also more likely to agree to work on a seeding basis.
4. Strong follower growth in the last 3 months
In Pugongying’s backend, you can monitor the follower growth curve of an influencer. You should make sure that the influencer you choose to work with is ACTIVE in the last 3 months. If the influencer is trending, it will boost campaign performance exponentially.
5. Follower demographics
Pugongying also offers follower demographic data. You can compare it with the brand’s own follower demographic to find a good match.
6. Influencer campaign social monitoring
An effective way to choose influencers is to monitor the competitor’s influencer campaign performance. Qiangua enables you to export brand keywords, this way it’s easy to sort through the best performing influencer campaigns of your competitor. You can choose only to work with the influencer with the strongest engagement.
Here is an example of an export file that contains information such as engagement performance, follower amount, influencer location.
We also suggest brands monitor their own influencer mention. Especially if your brand has a large amount of organic user-generated content. This could help you to identify the most influential customers. Brands could reach out to these influential fans to gift new season’s products or to make them new brand ambassadors.
Things to do during an influencer campaign
Once you’ve identified the right influencers, it’s important to apply the same checklist that create great content:
- Choose the right cover picture
- Match the content with the influencer’s personal style
- Make sure throughout the campaign, target 1 or 2 keywords that are both memorable and specific
- Monitor the campaign for any viral content, make sure to use display ads to amplify the best performing posts
- Make sure to communicate with the influencer on posting time, use the brand’s official account to engage with the influencer as soon as the content is posted to attract traffic to the brand’s account
- If performance is not as expected, communicate with the influencer to try to get more resources. Usually brands can ask for a repost or some soft-exposure
Advertising on Little Red Book
Little Red Book ads work just like Instagram: promote the best performing content and use ads to further enhance the reach.
Unfortunately, when it comes to targeting and retargeting, RED’s advertising platform is nowhere as sophisticated as Instagram with main shortcomings being:
- Only offers a limited amount of targeting categories; less than 20 interest groups.
- No way to retarget or track followers
- No integration with other platforms and data is limited
- Only 3 types of ads format
- Traffic is also limited since Red only has 100 million monthly active users while WeChat has more than 1.2 billion users
Due to the limitation, ads are only a supporting feature for brand marketing on RED. We recommend that brands spend no more than 15% of the budget on ads.
Types of Ads on Little Red Book
1. Newsfeed Ads (Personal Accounts)
Called Shutiao (薯条), these are the only ads available for personal accounts. With Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) around $11 USD at almost 5 times more expensive than brand ads, personal ads enable leading traffic to a personal accounts. The one upside of Shutiao is that it’s not displayed as “promotional” content, thus enabling the content to appear as more native to the platform.
2. Newsfeed Ads (Brand Accounts)
Brands can place newsfeed ads with below average prices in CPM for different industries as of June 2021:
- Beauty $2.50 USD
- Cosmetics $2.80 USD
- Mother & Baby $2.50 USD
- Fashion $1.90 USD
- F&B $2.20 USD
RED’s CPM is generally more affordable when compared to other social media channels: Douyin’s CPM is around $3 USD and WeChat Moments Ads could be over $15 USD at times. The average click-through rate on Red is strong as well at between 2% to 5% depending on the industry promoted.
Newsfeed ads have relatively larger traffic compared to other types of ads. Agencies recommend allocating 70% of their clients’ ads budget on RED to these.
But the biggest issue with newsfeed ads is the lack of specific targeting options. Brands can only choose from less than 20 interest groups, and the groups are very general. For example, under fashion outfits, brands can only target 3 subcategories: clothing, shoes, and hats while RED’s ads backend look less professional than its competitors in social media.
Since targeting is broad, ads optimization on RED is about optimizing the asset. Brands should take care to have attractive titles with trendy keywords and the most attractive cover picture.
3. Keyword Search Ads
Keyword Search Ads are the only ads on RED that enables brands to be more specific in targeting users since you are bidding on specific keywords.
Search ads are generally more expensive when compared with newsfeed ads. Here are some CPM benchmarks in different industries as of June 2021:
- Beauty $13 USD
- Cosmetics $17 USD
- Mother & Baby $8.70 USD
- Fashion $2.30 USD
- F&B $3.00 USD
However, due to traffic limitations, it’s not as easy to spend on specific keywords. For example, we were only able to spend around 100 USD on the keyword “rain boots” per day on RED.
E-Commerce Stores on Little Red Book
Little Red Book has a native e-commerce system which offers a few benefits:
- It enables users to make a purchase without leaving the App
- It supports cross-border payment and shipping, brands can operate a store with an overseas business license with a Chinese entity as the guaranteed party
- Low cost: 5% platform commission & no technical fee
- Relatively good user experience especially for Little Red Book live-streaming purchases
The commission on Little Red Book’s e-commerce stores is much lower when compared to other major marketplaces. Comparatively, Tmall charges a $9,000 USD annual technical fee and 6% commission (1% for Alipay and around 5% industry-specific commission).
So should you open a Little Red Book store?
Little Red Book store is not for everyone. Lots of larger brands such as Adidas, SK-II, and LANCOME, in fact don’t have a brand store on RED. Instead, these brands choose to sell on RED via distributors. Your brand is unlikely to need a branded Red Store if:
- The brand already has a strong distribution network
- The brand has less than 5k Little Red Book mentions
For other brands, the Little Red Book store is a cost-effective way to break into the Chinese market and expand the sales channel. You can consider opening a brand store on Little Red Book if:
- You have a strong Little Red Book performance
- Your brand does lots of Little Red Book live-streaming campaigns
- You sell mostly direct-to-consumer (D2C)
- You’d like to test the Chinese market with a small investment and with a cross-border store
For example, Perfect Diary and apm MONACO are some of the best performing brands on Little Red Book. Both brands have strong D2C channels.
On the other hand, a foreign brand can create cross-border Little Red Book store to test the Chinese market. It doesn’t require a brand to have a Chinese business license, products could be shipped directly from overseas, and payment will be smoothly settled in foreign currencies.
Cosmetics and skincare brands are the best industries to launch stores in Little Red Book. These are often the high-margin products that could easily afford a 20-30% live-streaming commission.
Sales Conversion on Little Red Book Stores
The major drawback of a RED store is the lower organic traffic. Most users still use Little Red Book as a social media and product review platform. And these users are used to switching to a dedicated online marketplace to make an order. According to Quest Mobile, upon leaving Little Red Book, 77.1% of the e-commerce purchase goes to Taobao or Tmall. Therefore brands with strong Tmall flagship store don’t have strong need to open a Little Red Book store in tandem.
How To Drive Traffic to WeChat (in the days of “Walled Gardens”)
Many of the brands choose to create a WeChat cross-border store as their first D2C channel in China. WeChat users are more loyal and have stronger sales conversion rate. Unfortunately, Little Red Book blocks 3rd party links or any mention of WeChat so brands need to be very creative in order to drive traffic from Little Red Book to WeChat：
- The brand can pin a post as the first post on the first page. The sales channel displayed in a picture is hard to be detected thus won’t be blocked by the platform.
- Instead of writing out WeChat in the comment, users can send private messages for sales channel inquiries
- Brand can also send WeChat coupons and launch lucky draw for the WeChat coupon to driven users to the right sales channel
Live-streaming on Little Red Book
90% of Little Red Book’s sales come directly from live streaming. Live-streaming is a very effective way to target sales conversion. However, the size of Little Red Book live-streaming is relatively small compared to other channels.
Below are top-ranking live-streaming influencers on RED. Average sales created during these campaigns are less than $10,000 USD, which is small compared to sales campaigns on other channels. For example, top Douyin (TikTok) live-streamer Luo Yonghao moves more than $1.6 million USD in one campaign. And on WeChat, a good article could sell more than $50,000 USD of goods.
Having said that, Little Red Book live-streaming does have a much higher average order size compared to Douyin live-streaming. Top influencers achieve average order size of $60 USD, while Luo Yonghao’s average order size only reached $13 USD.
The best-selling products on RED live-streaming are usually premium skincare products. While Douyin live-streaming is best for cheaper skincare, cosmetics, F&B, and electronics products.
Little Red Book live-streaming could effectively promote a brand:
When our agency launched Rouje, the content was pushed to the top of the RED page, and the brand was able to grow its follower base to more than 41,000 in just 2 months. In this case, live-streaming with one of the top fashion influencers Lu played an important role in pushing Rouje viral. In the campaign, Lu posted 2 live-streaming previews, and 5 follow-up videos after 2 weeks for continuous exposure for the brand.
Conclusions
- Little Red Book is a great platform for brand marketing and creating multiple consumer touchpoints.
- Its content can be augmented via specific tactics just like with SEO.
- An influencer campaign is the most effective way to drive traffic and convert sales.
- We suggested moderate advertisement spending.
- E-commerce conversion takes place via live-streaming and directing traffic to other marketplaces such as Taobao/Tmall, WeChat, etc.
Mastering Little Red Book marketing could be the key to quickly raise your brand awareness in the Chinese market.
About Walk The Chat
Founded in 2013, Walk The Chat helps brands to market and sell in China. We care about tangible results, often go out of our way to help a brand to take a creative approach to grow in the Chinese market. We are best at delivering result-driven social media campaigns.
We are a Tmall Partner (TP) focusing on premium fashion brands. We build the only official Shopify sales channel in China via a WeChat-Shopify connector. We also integrated Shopify with Tmall and Little Red Book, Magento with Wechat…
Our blog is a great resource to learn about social media marketing and e-commerce.
Find out more at our website.