Direct search brings more convenient connections and more comprehensive openness to the search scenarios closest to consumers' decisions, giving birth to a new blue ocean in the Xiaohongshu community. With the launch of search direct, Xiaohongshu has also sent a strong signal to brands - brands that operate both the content field and the search field can tap the greater value of Xiaohongshu's grass planting ecology and find new increments.
Author | Li Wei (Beijing)
The launch of search direct has opened another floodgate for the release of Xiaohong's business potential.
Whenever they encounter problems such as how to choose gifts, where to go during the holidays, and whether the new iOS version is good or not, many users will open Xiaohongshu for search as soon as possible, and then complete the decision. On Xiaohongshu, 42% of new users will use Xiaohongshu's search function on day one, and 70% of monthly active users will have search behavior on Xiaohongshu. Nine out of ten users interviewed by Xiaohongshu said that their spending decisions would be influenced by Xiaohongshu's search results.
Becoming a search engine for more and more people's life decisions means that Xiaohongshu has reached the last mile of commercialization around search. At the 2024 Xiaohongshu WILL Business Conference, Xiaohongshu's vice president of technology, Bagpipes, said in his speech that Xiaohongshu has launched a direct search product, which not only upgrades the capabilities of content planting, e-commerce closed-loop, customer information collection, and drainage e-commerce, but also will successively launch application downloads and online trading platform UG.
Openness and connectivity are the key words for this upgrade. First of all, the search direct completes the original closed loop of commercialization of Xiaohongshu. Merchants who operate stores in Xiaohongshu can directly click on the link in the note to enter the store to purchase. Secondly, the search direct has further opened the loop of Xiaohongshu's business capabilities. Search direct not only supports jumping to stores or product pages outside Xiaohongshu, but also enables direct application delivery and application recall.
Finally, the launch of search direct connects Xiaohongshu's content planting, customer information collection, e-commerce and other scenarios to form a complete system with higher conversion efficiency. On this basis, Xiaohongshu's community ecology has the ability to meet diversified marketing demands for customers in different industries. Especially for users in the non-consumer industry, search direct opens the door for them to make full use of Xiaohongshu's grass traffic.
Direct search brings more convenient connections and more comprehensive openness to the search scenarios closest to consumers' decisions, giving birth to a new blue ocean in the Xiaohongshu community. With the launch of search direct, Xiaohongshu has also sent a strong signal to brands - brands that operate both the content field and the search field can tap the greater value of Xiaohongshu's grass planting ecology and find new increments.
1. Doing a good job of searching is an inevitable choice for Xiaohongshu
Before the brand reaped the dividends of Xiaohongshu's search field, Xiaohongshu had already reaped the dividends of consumers' changing mentality. Wei Wuhui, a senior engineer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of Media and Communication, believes that a changing trend in the consumer market at this stage is that consumers are increasingly reluctant to "spend money in vain", and will check a lot of strategies and notes before buying to ensure that they are spending their money wisely.
As a result of this change, many of the consumer's decisions are made before they enter the consumption channel. Compared with the traditional channel-commodity-discount consumption paradigm, the product-planting-channel paradigm with the pre-consumption decision as the core feature emphasizes consumers' ability to collect information, and search has become the main tool to support consumers to continuously collect information for evaluation and judgment.
As the best venue for the production, dissemination and interaction of high-quality word-of-mouth content, Xiaohongshu provides a large number of high-quality and effective notes for consumers' decision-making. The KOL content shared sincerely on Xiaohongshu is 40% better than the average corporate content, and the best KOL content is 7-8 times better than the average conversion level of corporate content. This makes the final decision of many consumers happen on Xiaohongshu.
In his speech, Zhiheng, CMO of Xiaohongshu, introduced the case of Xiaohongshu users selecting confinement nannies. Before placing an order, Xiaohongshu users will search for notes related to "Yuesao" more than 30 days in advance, and browse 400 notes in depth, and the search keywords will gradually refine from "where to find a good confinement lady" to "how to take a confinement lady to a physical examination" and "how about the Swan Home platform". This shows that on Xiaohongshu, each round of the user's search is closer to the consumption decision.
When Xiaohongshu's search is increasingly becoming the last round of mental decision-making before users make purchases, many industries have reaped traffic growth in the search field. Among them, the 3C home appliance industry increased by 84% year-on-year, the education industry increased by 173% year-on-year, and the travel and tourism industry increased by 242% year-on-year. Factors such as strong user mentality, proximity to transaction links, and rapid traffic growth require Xiaohongshu to improve its business infrastructure for search scenarios and bring greater value to brands and users.
2. Search is Xiaohongshu's bridge to connect users with good products/services
The search direct product announced at the 2024 Xiaohongshu WILL Business Conference is an upgrade of the underlying capabilities based on the ecology of the Xiaohongshu community. The search direct connection connects Xiaohongshu's relatively fragmented marketing scenarios such as content planting, customer information collection, and e-commerce, and is oriented to six marketing scenarios: content planting, e-commerce closed-loop, customer information collection, drainage e-commerce, application download, and online trading platform UG, so that brands and merchants have direct conversion capabilities in Xiaohongshu's search field.
A person close to the commercialization of Xiaohongshu said that several marketing scenarios of Xiaohongshu were relatively fragmented before. The brand recognizes the effect of Xiaohongshu's grass planting, but also hopes that it can be directly transformed in the future, and the cultural tourism and other industries collect customer information, but the shallow private message opening and form submission functions can no longer meet the systematic operation needs of customers. To put it simply, each marketing scenario needs to be directly linked to the customer's business to help them complete the final conversion link.
Now, the launch of Search Direct has helped Xiaohongshu break through the last layer of window paper from interest to transaction, so that user needs and good products and services can be efficiently connected in the Xiaohongshu ecosystem. "In the search field, which is closer to the consumption decision, we have the opportunity to open up more possibilities. So that every user demand can be directly met by professional services and good products. Bagpipes said.
First of all, the search direct improves the transaction efficiency in the Xiaohongshu content planting scenario and the e-commerce closed-loop scenario. In the content planting scenario, Xiaohongshu will combine the search field to help brands seize the first-mover advantage on the track based on multiple scenarios. In the closed-loop scenario of e-commerce, product notes and live streaming methods can be accompanied by e-commerce advertisements to increase orders and improve ROI.
Secondly, through direct search, Xiaohongshu advertising links can directly jump to new capabilities such as off-site purchases, on-site private message communication, and offline transactions, so that the Xiaohongshu community ecology can be efficiently and directly connected to external transactions. At present, after users make life decisions through search guides and notes, they often need to exit Xiaohongshu and go to other platforms to complete subsequent conversions. Search Direct not only allows users to directly jump to stores on third-party platforms in the Xiaohongshu search field, but also enables them to jump to app downloads and third-party apps in the future.
This ability to mobilize increases the depth of connection between brands, merchants and potential users in customer collection scenarios. Before the launch of search direct, brands and merchants in the education industry were already using the Xiaohongshu search field to collect customer information. EF Education First, an English education institution, searches and places on Xiaohongshu. Leads increased by 46% QoQ and converted customers by 43% QoQ.
However, in the past, the conversion from customer information collection to in-depth communication on Xiaohongshu often required brands and merchants to manually switch ends based on the information collected from private messages and forms, and it was impossible to directly jump to in-depth communication platforms such as WeCom, which led to the inability of brands and merchants to respond to the customer information collected on Xiaohongshu in a timely manner and promote conversion. Third-party application calls realized by search direct can further help brands improve effective retention and ROI on the basis of decision-making, while making decisions, in a shorter path.
3. An open search ecosystem creates a new blue ocean
The launch of search direct has made the marketing link of Xiaohongshu's entire search field more complete and clear. The strategies and notes placed by brands and merchants on Xiaohongshu have become the basis of content for decision-making and conversion, and the search field has become a hotbed for consumer decision-making.
Openness is the most important attitude that Xiaohongshu shows in searching for direct products. Xiaohongshu has opened more marketing scenarios through search, and shared Xiaohongshu's fresh users with high commercial value with a more open mind to brands and merchants. Brands and merchants are closer to realizing "Xiaohongshu planting grass and global transformation". For brands, this will be a new blue ocean that can be efficiently explored.
In particular, the upcoming dynamic products and application direct access capabilities have expanded the UG scenarios and application download scenarios of the trading platform that Xiaohongshu had not been able to better cover before. In the former, platform e-commerce can directly go to Xiaohongshu for placement, and directly call up trading platforms such as JD.com and Qunar.com to help brands improve UV, GMV and LTV. The latter can realize services such as direct product delivery and mini game trial, effectively improving users' willingness to download and activate the trial.
In addition to the consumer goods industry, the opening of more marketing scenarios has given Xiaohongshu a toolkit to better serve brands and merchants in non-consumer goods industries such as home improvement, education, games, and tourism. This also means that Xiaohongshu's business ecosystem has become more diversified and open, and the increasingly rich needs of platform users can be better met through more and more industry brands.
This kind of openness follows the basic logic of Xiaohongshu's business system - following the original needs and links of users, and following the rhythm and law of ecological growth. Commercialization itself is to build a set of native business systems (including products, mechanisms, and rules) to help good business actors complete tasks and create value. After users make search decisions, they want to obtain products and services more conveniently, while brands seek direct and diversified conversion paths, and Xiaohongshu search direct meets both demands.
In the past, the launch of Search Direct has taken a big step forward in the commercialization of Xiaohongshu. As the bagpipes put it, "More Xiaohongshu search commercial product capacity building has just started, and Xiaohongshu's search advertising is a blue ocean. There are more industries whose search traffic is growing rapidly, and there are more user needs waiting for us to meet them in Xiaohongshu's search. 」