How can catering businesses find new increments through Xiaohongshu?
This article was originally published by Red Meal Network (ID: hongcan18), author: Wang Bo.
The catering industry is embracing new changes. At the "2024 Xiaohongshu Commercial Catering Industry Summit" held recently, the "Xiaohongshu Catering Industry White Paper" was officially released, and a new catering marketing solution (hereinafter referred to as the "solution") was proposed.
Xiaohongshu has always played a prominent role in the catering ecology - bringing together a large number of food and beverage exploration and food strategy UGC content, it is a gathering place for young and trendy business formats, as well as an important catering traffic and catering grass planting position. "New Retail Business Review" pointed out in the report: "In the matter of planting grass, Xiaohongshu has an irreplaceable advantage - a large group of active users, which can provide a lot of real feedback. This is especially precious in the current era when sincerity is nirvana. ”
In this context, what changes will the solutions released by Xiaohongshu bring to the catering ecosystem, and what development advantages can catering businesses gain from it?
In the era of self-pleasing consumption, emotional value has become a breakthrough in catering growth
To understand the value of Xiaohongshu's solutions to F&B businesses, we have to start with changes in consumer trends.
Recently, Guan Qingyou, president of the Institute of Financial Research and vice president of the China Private Economy Research Association, pointed out at the "2024 China Catering Industry Summit" that the current consumer market is in the stage of "consumption upgrading", with both consumption upgrades and consumption downgrades. For example, some consumer groups have become more cautious in bulk consumption, such as not buying a house, but instead spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a car or more expensive 3C products, or going out to travel, eat and drink.
The implication is that people's consumption nowadays pays more attention to pleasing themselves, and self-pleasing consumption and emotional value consumption are becoming a trend.
Self-pleasing consumption is an inevitable trend under social and economic development, when people's basic material consumption is satisfied, they will pay more attention to the experience and emotional value brought by consumption, and care more about whether their consumption behavior can please themselves, and the value of people is more and more valued.
For F&B businesses, this is a new opportunity to find a breakthrough for growth.
Shen Chen, a new media marketing expert, said at the "3rd China Catering Brand Festival" that today's environment is constantly changing, and one of the next major focuses of catering businesses is to take data as the core and acquire customers through emotional value and social networking. For example, in recent years, brands such as Nan hot pot, Zhu Guang and hot pot restaurants have achieved rapid development, one of the main reasons is that this batch of positioning is very clear, to "be able to play and dry", to provide consumers with emotional value, the advantage of "can sun" is that it not only drives the amount of communication, but also can improve the profit of the store.
Xiaohongshu has a large active user base, and it is understood that the number of monthly active users of Xiaohongshu reaches 300 million. Active, high-quality users are the prerequisites for catering businesses to achieve conversions and obtain real user feedback.
△ Image source: Xiaohongshu
At a time when the Internet is highly popular and the social sharing economy has become a major trend, people are willing to share their consumption experience with others through social media, which has led to grass consumption, that is, users take the initiative to share their experience with others through Xiaohongshu after consumption, and other users will also consume after being successfully planted, and may take the initiative to share their consumption experience again, triggering a "grass planting cycle".
At the same time, Xiaohongshu's graphic and text planting mode is relatively mature, and compared with videos, graphic posts are more convenient for users to quickly find what they want to know, which improves the user experience and decision-making efficiency to a certain extent.
The above-mentioned characteristics of Xiaohongshu have, to a considerable extent, inherited the current trend of self-pleasing consumption and emotional value consumption.
Based on the logic of "grass planting cycle", Xiaohongshu has released a "beautiful rice cycle" solution for catering businesses. Nowadays, the catering industry has entered the era of wine fragrance and fear of deep alleys, and the value of "beautiful rice circulation" is to help businesses solve the problem of whether the wine is fragrant, how to let more consumers know the fragrance of wine, and how to make the wine fragrance spread by word of mouth among consumer groups.
It is understood that "beautiful rice" refers to those good-looking, delicious, resonant and emotional value of catering delicacies, which can inspire users to take the initiative to share. Consumers see attractive and credible content on Xiaohongshu, and they are often easily planted and motivated to buy. After the consumption experience, it will be spontaneously shared on Xiaohongshu, precipitating more high-quality and authentic content, thereby influencing more people to "be planted" and forming a "beautiful rice cycle".
△ Image source: Xiaohongshu
The core value of Xiaohongshu is to let merchants understand the real user needs, let more people see "beautiful rice", promote more people to buy "beautiful rice", and continuously improve the cycle of "beautiful rice".
Dig deep into the value of users, so that consumers voluntarily "advertise for brands"
As for how to keep the "beautiful rice loop" rolling, Xiaohongshu mentioned several sections in the solution.
1. C2B co-creation: let consumers push back product innovation and marketing innovation
Consumers often have some resistance to the traditional forms of passive acceptance and unilateral indoctrination of brands. But there is no shortage of advertising cases in the market that consumers will be happy with, such as "Starbucks Hidden Menu".
In recent years, Starbucks' customized ordering services have gradually become more and more abundant, and netizens have begun to try to create and combine products with different flavors, and share hidden ordering strategies through Xiaohongshu, which has attracted more and more consumers to participate in customized ordering.
△ Image source: Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
Under the huge natural traffic of the whole network, Starbucks officially "entered the game", released a new toffee roasted sweet potato-flavored tea latte, and cooperated with Xiaohongshu to launch a joint theme store check-in activity, through the Starbucks APP, mini program pop-ups, menus, sweet potato theme stores, Taiwan cards, stickers, as well as Xiaohongshu's opening screen, brand area, and enterprise account notes, further amplified the amount of communication, and the number of topic views on Xiaohongshu alone exceeded 230 million, and the sales of new products in the store also continued to increase.
It can be found that the core of this marketing case lies in "co-creation". After the related notes gained a certain amount of traffic, Starbucks gained insight into the needs of consumers, took advantage of the opportunity to launch new products, add topics, and launch related activities to encourage consumers to create and share. This model not only allows consumers not to resist the message that Starbucks wants to deliver, but also allows consumers to actively participate in it and become a member of the voluntary "advertising" for Starbucks.
The results are obvious, not only increasing the communication of brand activities, new product sales, but also increasing consumer favorability towards the brand.
In the whole process of dissemination, the empowering role of Xiaohongshu cannot be ignored. When a high-quality note appears, Xiaohongshu pushes it according to the user tag, so that users can "be seen", attracting more and more users to participate in it, and constantly amplifying the volume of communication. At the same time, the big data of user needs is accurately counted, so that brands can discover real user needs, and help brands improve the certainty of the success of new products through the combination of communication and feedback.
2. Turn consumers into brand operators
In addition to the "Starbucks Hidden Menu", "Crazy Four Literature" is also a phenomenal marketing case. At first, Crazy Thursday was just a regular weekly marketing campaign for KFC and didn't go viral across the web. But I don't know when, every Thursday, netizens will spontaneously create different jokes and emojis, which will be widely spread through various eye-catching jokes, and the content of each "Crazy Four Literature" is "Today is KFC Crazy Thursday".
This means that the concept of "Crazy Thursday" has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and the resulting "Crazy Four Literature" is also very popular among netizens. According to statistics from Xiaohongshu, the "Crazy Four Literature" contributed more than 15% of KFC's exposure and reading peaks. And KFC has also joined the trend, enriching different "Crazy Thursday Packages" every week. In order to get creative inspiration, many users often actively search for KFC menus every Thursday to find new products or the "Crazy Thursday Package" of the week, which not only contributes popularity to KFC, but also increases the potential conversion rate.
△ Image source: Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
What's more, "Crazy Four" has evolved from an Internet hot meme to an exclusive IP of KFC, and netizens have generally formed a cognition of the "KFC Crazy Thursday" event, and every Thursday, they will subconsciously think about whether to consume KFC once.
The logic behind it is not complicated, KFC's weekly menu update provides netizens with search motivation, while the light-hearted and interesting "Crazy Four Literature" provides netizens with the motivation to read; the low-threshold second creation and wide audience provide netizens with the motivation to publish, forming a steady stream of "crazy four cycles", and consumers have also become "brand operators".
Nowadays, such as the "crazy four literature", such as the unavoidable "pouring wealth", is gradually becoming replicable. In Xiaohongshu's view, there are four steps to turn consumers into brand loyal fans, namely identification, expansion, operation, and measurement, and in this process, Xiaohongshu can help brands turn consumers into "operational loyal fans" of the brand by identifying and motivating user tags, and further improve the voice and conversion rate.
Spend your budget where you need to go and increase your potential conversions
In the era of "mobile phone eats first", doing a good job in social media marketing has become a topic that most catering businesses must face, and an important part of it is to spend the budget on the cutting edge. From Xiaohongshu's point of view, doing a good job in peak marketing and more accurate grass planting can be an effective channel to optimize the budget.
From the perspective of communication, further promotion during the peak period of concentrated traffic growth can often win higher traffic bursts, and this characteristic is especially obvious in social media with strong UGC attributes.
Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, when a restaurant brand has a new product release or new marketing campaign, it often attracts users to spontaneously experience and share their experience on Xiaohongshu, which triggers a round of small traffic spikes. If you increase the number of propagation at this node, you can often reap several times the effect.
For example, the two major activities of "Bawang Tea Ji First Cup of School" and "Good State Wakes Up with Spring", the former accurately captures the habits of young consumers, initiates topics during the school year and accurately amplifies traffic, fully links user emotions and penetrates the emotional value of the brand, drives a large number of users to share check-in notes through online and offline activities, and gradually engraves the mind of "drink a cup of Bawang Tea Ji at the beginning of school" in the minds of consumers.
△ Image source: Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
The basic logic of the latter is basically similar, through popular spring activities such as the Spring Festival new tea and spring outing, the running check-in and the "green label" check-in activities of Bawang Chaji are launched, which deeply binds the healthy sports and brand concept in spring, and focuses on promoting the dissemination of traffic and the release of UGC content in the spring, so as to further strengthen the concept of health sugar control conveyed by Bawang Chaji.
In addition, while focusing on promoting peak marketing, taking the initiative to distribute coupons at key functions such as high-quality notes, APP opening screen, and brand area in the search bar can promote the release, dissemination and conversion of more UGC content.
Of course, "thousands of people and thousands of stomachs" is a major law of catering consumption, and it is difficult to have a certain brand or a certain product that can get a 100% praise rate. In this context, the active empowerment of social media can further amplify the volume of positive reviews. Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, it will soon launch its big data product Koubeitong, which will improve the positive communication effect of merchants by screening positive and high-quality notes and giving traffic support.
On the other hand, creating "explosive articles" through Xiaohongshu's discovery page is also a major channel to increase the efficiency of this cost.
Specifically, by cooperating with waist and tail KOLs and brand employees to produce high-quality content and a large number of drainage notes, and implanting merchant jump entrances, coupon distribution entrances, and group purchase links on the note page, consumers can directly reach the purchase page at low cost and high efficiency after being planted, reducing consumer decision-making costs to a certain extent and improving potential conversion rates.
Conclusion
Jiang Yi, the founder of the brand of Giant Prawn and the columnist of the Red Food Network, once said that when new channels such as Xiaohongshu enter the catering market, they must first clarify to the industry what kind of value they can create, which is mainly divided into two levels, one is what value can be brought to catering businesses, and the other is what value can be brought to users.
For now, the value of Xiaohongshu is clear. For users, they can get fresh, interesting, on-trend information, as well as a direct channel to talk to their favorite brands. For catering businesses, it can create a closed loop of "beautiful rice circulation" to form a positive flywheel of brand development, and catering businesses have a marketing and consumption method that is closer to young consumers, as well as a channel to obtain the real needs of consumers, and use this as a springboard to find new growth breakthroughs in the market with intensified involution.
Note: The cover image comes from the idea of the picture worm.