This year, ChinaJoy has many new faces participating in the exhibition for the first time in Hall N (interactive entertainment exhibition hall area), where game products and manufacturers gather. And one of the most special exhibitors that I care about the most is Xiaohongshu.
Why is it special? While many other booths at ChinaJoy were showcasing games, Xiaohongshu displayed portraits of five types of gamers at its independent booth with the theme of "Game Precision Crowd x Rich Life Label", reflecting Xiaohongshu's "human-focused" gaming ecosystem.
For example, with the company and witness of "Shining Nuan", someone got an admission letter from Tsinghua University for graduate school; or get beauty inspiration through "The Fifth Person"; and because of the acquaintance of the summoner canyon, he moved "League of Legends" into the wedding; and the ...... who found a good brother through "Against the Water and Cold Mobile Game"
Swipe left and right to view
For another example, someone found a real venue that looks like the world of "The Legend of Zelda" offline; There are also people who teach their grandfathers to play "PUBG"; In addition, some people are inspired to create, and they are researching the production of lo skirts in "Animal Crossing......
Click on the image to enlarge it
It is not difficult to find that the game users on the Mini Game are a little different from the traditional players we usually understand - in Xiaohongshu, if you want to talk about games, you won't just talk about games. In addition to hardcore content such as strategy sharing, gameplay discussion, and plot review, this generation of players is integrating the game into their daily lives.
What was displayed on the spot was only the tip of the iceberg of the ecology of Xiaohongshu's game. According to the sharing of the Xiaohongshu team during the private meeting held during ChinaJoy, the platform has 110 million game users, the average daily exposure of game content on the platform has exceeded 2 billion, and the growth rate of game category content has reached 239%, which is said to be one of the fastest growing categories of Xiaohongshu at present.
Moreover, most of the game users on Xiaohongshu are young, high-LTV people with spending power. At present, the post-95 population on the platform accounts for 50%, and half of the users live in first- and second-tier cities, with an average monthly consumption of about 5,000 yuan. These young people who are willing to try new things and have high spending power are the core groups that anxious game companies want to reach the most in the current environment where the game industry has entered the era of stock and peers are competing with each other.
Click on the image to enlarge it
Various leading manufacturers and popular games have also settled in Xiaohongshu, and even the recently launched "Naraka: Infernal Mobile Game", "Heartbeat Town", and even "Like a Kite", which has not yet been launched, have opened the official account of Xiaohongshu early. Obviously, major manufacturers have long been eyeing this "new continent of games".
It's just that when I talked to practitioners around me about Xiaohongshu before, I found that many people were skeptical about "placing on Xiaohongshu". Because compared with other platforms, Xiaohongshu has its own peculiarities - it is closer to life and has a strong community nature. As a result, some MCNs or manufacturers copy the marketing content of other platforms and distribute them here on Xiaohongshu, but the result is a complete failure.
But after ChinaJoy this year, I think the industry may have to re-acquaint itself with Xiaohongshu, because this "new continent of games" has been gradually improved: finding people, understanding people→ producing circle-breaking content that matches user preferences→ and promoting good content through good traffic, IP hotspots, etc., → conversion downloads, and effect verification...... In terms of the marketing links that game manufacturers must go through, Xiaohongshu has officially prepared a full set of solutions.
I believe that most practitioners can understand why this matter is worth discussing at a time when it is difficult to obtain volume: an emerging life community with a soaring number of game users, combined with its own unique community characteristics and crowd characteristics, has given a complete set of solutions, and each link has perfect product support. Manufacturers who didn't know how to get volume on Xiaohongshu now finally don't have to wait and see.
As for what is the key to breaking the circle in Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu gives the answer: users should not be regarded as cold game data, but should understand and pay attention to their hidden needs as "people". It is necessary to find people, understand people, in order to catch people.
01 The little red book, full of human feelings, is the best position for the game to break the circle?
In the private meeting, the most heard by Grape Jun is the phrase "human matters" and the word "human feelings". The reason why the official team continues to emphasize "people" in the face of practitioners in the game industry may be because human feeling is the foundation of Xiaohongshu's ecology, and it is also the traffic password for games to break the circle here.
To understand the causal relationship between Xiaohongshu's human sense and the game's circle-breaking gains, we must first understand what Xiaohongshu's human sense refers to.
According to official data, the UGC, that is, amateur content, in the Xiaohongshu platform accounts for as much as 90%, and they actively participate and share it. In other words, most of what you swipe on Xiaohongshu is the daily life shared by ordinary people. At the same time, Xiaohongshu users are also very happy to share their experiences and opinions in the comment area of the notes, and discuss interesting life stories.
This down-to-earth, sincere style of sharing and exchanging paintings is probably the human feeling of Xiaohongshu.
The atmosphere of being willing to share and discuss life has turned Xiaohongshu into a natural community for grass planting, experience sharing and learning. Some people even use it as a search engine, and "ordinary people help ordinary people" and "Xiaohongshu when things are undecided" have become the keynote of the community.
In January this year, when Grape Jun talked about Xiaohongshu, many readers said in the comment area that they used Xiaohongshu as a search engine.
After figuring out the characteristics of Xiaohongshu's "people", we can better understand why a community full of human feelings will be one of the most suitable positions for games to break the circle.
On the one hand, in this atmosphere of sharing with each other and planting grass, Xiaohongshu users are more willing to be Amway. Especially for those who use Xiaohongshu as a search engine, coming to the community to see content is itself to have the next step.
Similarly, when a user or brand shares their favorite games on a platform, they are often more receptive to recommendations and try these novel games.
On the other hand, online games seem to be a little far away from real life, but in fact, they can hit many emotions and hidden needs in the lives of Xiaohongshu users, and Amway in disguise to different potential pan-user circles. Games, colliding with different life demands, are also the way for game products to break the circle and gain volume on Xiaohongshu.
Sculpture art, outdoor travel, home remodeling, fashion matching, couple living, food...... Whatever you think of, the unexpected content of life categories may trigger Xiaohongshu users to discuss the game.
Swipe left and right to view
In this community environment where "life and games are constantly colliding", the original hot game topics on Xiaohongshu are becoming more and more diverse, and they are all very related to the demands in life - the #GamePartnering topic, which has a popularity of more than 9.8 billion, has gathered a group of social-loving Xiaohongshu people; The #fateful man topic with a popularity of 11.5 billion has triggered users' discussion of intimate relationships; The #cosplay topic, which has a popularity of 11 billion, has brought the aesthetics of the game to life......
In other words, in this decentralized community, game products can reach a far wider range of people than they seem. Games have long been a part of the lifestyle, and through the way of games and lifestyle people, manufacturers are more likely to tap new potential users.
02 How to find and understand people?
In Xiaohongshu, games have become a part of the way of life, and games can be everything, which is different from traditional marketing ideas, which explains why traditional marketing advertising is difficult to work in Xiaohongshu - that kind of marketing is very direct, but it is a little far from people, life, and people's needs.
Therefore, for game practitioners, in fact, the biggest difficulty everyone faces may not be to understand the ecological characteristics of Xiaohongshu, which focuses on people and lives, but to be: in this diverse community, how do I know which lifestyle audiences will be my potential users? Traditional marketing content is unbearable, so what content should I produce in order to break the circle in Xiaohongshu?
To put it bluntly, how can we find people and understand people?
In fact, Xiaohongshu has already considered this - they have prepared a new solution for game manufacturers based on their own crowd base:
First, in terms of insight into users and finding people, manufacturers come to Xiaohongshu for marketing, not only to find the core player group, but also to let the game collide with different lifestyles and reach out to interested groups and pan-people.
With the help of Xiaohongshu Lingxi data analysis platform, manufacturers can gain insight into the life tags of these people, the crowd portraits and content preferences under the tags. In other words, vendors can quickly locate the core and pan-user groups that their products may reach, as well as the content preferences of these groups.
Taking a female-oriented game as an example, from the perspective of the game circle, the game crowd it can reach may be two-dimensional and otome game players, and if it expands further, gamers such as strategy, card RPG, role-playing, and MOBA may also become the audience of this game.
At the same time, combined with the analysis of Xiaohongshu Lingxi, it can be intuitively seen that this product can be combined with many life labels. For example, emotional, literary and artistic, fashion, growth and advancement, and even users under the categories of cute pets, romance, digital intelligence, etc., are all potential pan-users that the product can reach and convert, that is, people who break the circle.
Second, in the process of understanding people and producing content that breaks the circle, Xiaohongshu provides a large number of available tools for manufacturers from a variety of content output channels.
Through Dandelion, manufacturers can collaborate with Xiaohongshu KOLs to produce content; Through Spotlight and its word-of-mouth tools, manufacturers can heat high-quality KOC+UGC content with one click; UGC creator incentive activities can also quickly increase the voice of the game on the site and promote Xiaohongshu users to produce a large amount of real content......
In addition, in the selection of marketing time, in addition to the major in-game update nodes, game manufacturers can also refer to Xiaohongshu's annual marketing IP nodes, such as the Inspiration Creation Competition, My Crossover Partner, Outsiders' Day, Xiaomei Festival, etc. With the help of these high-profile and influential events, game manufacturers can increase the exposure of their products and get twice the result with half the effort.
Third, in mid-July this year, Xiaohongshu has opened the link for app download conversion.
Its download conversion longboard is obvious: short enough. I believe most game practitioners know that in the transformation process, every additional step means more loss. The download/appointment conversion of Xiaohongshu is so short that it only takes one step:
When the user clicks on the lower left corner of the note, the app will be directly suspended. In the same way, after obtaining the user's authorization, the user's basic information will be captured to make an appointment, and there is no need to fill in the reservation repeatedly. If manufacturers want to jump to the H5 site, outside the H5 site, or the iOS store interface with one click, Xiaohongshu can also do it.
Appointment link
Fourth, after the actual game brand cooperates, it also has a rich data background to view and verify the effect.
Talking about Xiaohongshu's full-link marketing solution, some friends may not understand how effective this solution can be. We still use practical cases to explain further, I believe that after reading it, everyone will have a deeper understanding of the marketing effect of Xiaohongshu:
Taking a female-oriented game as an example, through Xiaohongshu Lingxi, they quickly located their core, broke the circle of pan-people, and produced different effective materials for different groups of people.
For the core crowd, the game's exquisite second creation and card combination strategy are enough to attract their attention; Emotional people may pay more attention to the love plot in the game, but the hardcore gameplay strategy can't keep them; In the face of a more outer, more generalized group of people who grow up, players and mothers discuss the male protagonist of the game and analyze which male protagonist is more suitable for the player's notes, which is more likely to resonate with the group of people in this category.
For another example, through this set of "putting different content for different groups of people", a certain female game has also successfully broken the circle. For core players, the product mainly puts character strategies - core users have a basic understanding of the product, so they will search for the corresponding strategy; In the face of a wider range of users who will not actively search for strategies, they put character wallpapers/plot notes in the information flow and search field, reaching the film and television/emotional groups, and even finally breaking the circle to the pan-hot group.
In terms of the results, the overlap between game conversion users and film and television/entertainment in this marketing reached 40%, which shows in disguise that through the circle-breaking content x accurate matching of the crowd, Xiaohongshu helped the game reach more pan-users and achieved the effect of breaking the circle.
In addition, there have been some second-game games that have achieved good marketing results on Xiaohongshu after using Koubei. Koubeitong is an operational tool under Spotlight (Xiaohongshu's one-stop marketing service platform), which can help manufacturers quickly find core players through automatic learning of the system, and capture the content direction that this part of the audience likes through algorithms, listing the dark horse list (content newly released in the past three days and the content with rapid growth in popularity) and hot list (the most popular content for a long time) notes. Manufacturers can choose the high-quality UGC content for one-click exposure, impress ordinary people with ordinary people's content, and achieve the marketing effect of "moisturizing things silently".
A second game has focused on its own characters, created content interaction on Xiaohongshu (characters settled in Xiaohongshu, like special effects, etc.), creator incentives and other activities, combined with word-of-mouth to heat the original KOC+UGC content, and finally realized the triple growth of creators, content consumption scale, and new content customers, and drove the overall crowd volume and growth of the game through the popularity of the characters.
Seeing this, you should have discovered that the core role of Xiaohongshu's full-link infrastructure is to help manufacturers find people and understand people's needs. This means that the entry threshold for manufacturers has been greatly reduced - perfect infrastructure + high-quality communities and consumer groups can make greater efforts to help game brands find the people they need and achieve business growth.
03 "Treat people as people": understand the circle from a different perspective
After talking about this, I think many friends can see that Xiaohongshu has completed a qualitative change.
Grape Jun has talked about the traffic value of Xiaohongshu in the game circle many times before, and many practitioners around him have also talked about the importance of Xiaohongshu. It's just that Xiaohongshu, which lacked full-link marketing solutions and conversion and download functions in the past, may be a mysterious platform that makes people greedy but don't know how to enter the game in the eyes of many people, or it is just a brand marketing position that "puts money in, but doesn't know how much conversion effect there is".
After ChinaJoy, it is clear that Xiaohongshu's traffic password is no longer mysterious, and it has successfully transformed from a single brand and word-of-mouth marketing platform to a more comprehensive game breakthrough platform that can also create effect marketing.
Although this emerging community, which has just laid the foundation and opened its doors to game manufacturers, is not the most famous and old-fashioned traffic platform, it can provide the industry with the most urgently needed value in the era when everyone is competing for each other's stock: breaking the circle and acquiring new players. Jing Yang, head of business game strategy at Xiaohongshu, also mentioned in his sharing that Xiaohongshu is actually a new latecomer in the game industry ecology, and he just wants to do a good job from an entry point: "We must do the ultimate in breaking the circle and do a thorough job in breaking the circle." ”
In terms of time, now is also the best time for manufacturers to enter the game - Xiaohongshu's full-link marketing infrastructure has just been laid, and at this time, Xiaohongshu users' in-depth planting of the game circle is also undergoing a qualitative change process, and the sooner manufacturers enter the game and touch these new traffic, the greater the chance of breaking the circle.
From another point of view, I think the rise of Xiaohongshu in the gaming industry is not just as simple as "game manufacturers have found new traffic pools".
From the rapid growth of Xiaohongshu's game content, to the fact that manufacturers are studying users' lifestyles in order to gain volume on Xiaohongshu...... In fact, this is a disguised push for manufacturers to understand the market demands from a different perspective - more and more people are willing to contact and understand games in an emotional way, in this case, manufacturers also need to use more "people" rather than traditional commercialization to understand the hidden demands in the lives of potential pan-users.
Players are not only consumers of games, they are first and foremost living people. Perhaps, after getting rid of the perspective of the "player" label, manufacturers can see more widely and discover the unknown side of players, that is, the side of players as people and in society. Through the life side, manufacturers have the opportunity to see a larger space for breaking the circle.
From this point of view, Xiaohongshu, which focuses on people and life and connects these lifestyles with game marketing, has become an emerging ecology that cannot be ignored in the game circle. As a latecomer to the infrastructure that has just been built, its traffic value and traffic growth potential in the game industry may be far greater than what we see now.
ChinaJoy小红书展位
Players experience the fun of finding a match