Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) Advertising Strategy Leads to Significant Increase in Event Registration Numbers

The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), recognised as a global leader in free zones and commodity trading, prioritises expanding its influence in China as part of its global strategy. DMCC organised multiple roadshows in China in 2024 to attract Chinese entrepreneurs and investors.

During these events, DMCC leveraged the Xiaohongshu platform for advertising, complemented by extensive promotions on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Zhihu. This comprehensive campaign led to a record number of registrations, with Xiaohongshu emerging as a key source of potential clients. This case study delves into how Oxygen used the Xiaohongshu platform to drive unprecedented registration numbers for DMCC.

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Despite multiple campaigns and a strong social presence on platforms like WeChat and Weibo, DMCC faced diminishing returns in new customer acquisition with these channels. To achieve their customer acquisition goals in China, exploring new social media channels became necessary.

Xiaohongshu has significant influence in the Chinese consumer market, featuring a unique community culture and a rapidly-growing user base. Despite DMCC's international presence, it lacked presence and content marketing experience on Xiaohongshu. Creating platform-appropriate content and engaging with users posed fresh challenges.

Roadshow events are typically promoted across platforms like WeChat, Weibo, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu. DMCC has requested a solution that can differentiate user sources, centralize user information from these channels, and send SMS notifications for registration confirmations and event reminders. Additionally, a tool to help track event attendance is also sought.

Xiaohongshu possesses a strong influence on the Chinese market and boasts a wide user base, especially among the younger demographic. Among them are globally-minded individuals who are keenly interested in overseas investment and business opportunities, aligning with DMCC’s target customer group.

In 2023, we at Oxygen helped DMCC establish a Xiaohongshu corporate account to promote DMCC’s various roadshow events, providing services including topic planning, content creation, customised design, content publishing, and user conversion path design.

In June 2023, with Oxygen’s assistance, DMCC launched its first Xiaohongshu ad campaign. During the campaign:

Followers grew rapidly;
The number of private message leads surged;
Lead costs were lower than all other advertising channels.

The only drawback was the overwhelming number of private messages received simultaneously; DMCC lacked sufficient customer service representatives to manage all the incoming inquiries at once. This highlighted a need for us to identify and deliver a solution that could address this challenge and optimise tasks handled by DMCC’s customer service team.

In subsequent campaigns, we explored and implemented automation options using IParllay for managing incoming leads on Xiaohongshu in order to address the aforementioned challenge.

In July 2024, DMCC’s latest two China roadshow events prioritised Xiaohongshu as the primary promotion channel, combining it with iParllay's automated marketing tool to execute targeted ad campaigns and automated event tasks.

Aligned with DMCC's target audience profile, we used Xiaohongshu’s audience targeting feature to reach relevant prospects accurately, ensuring effective ad placement.

We pre-embedded event registration links for users to automatically receive relevant information via private messages. Users could click the registration button to instantly receive the link, significantly reducing the burden on customer service staff.

We utilised the iParllay platform to manage DMCC’s large influx of leads. During the pre-event phase, form tools collected registration information from users across various channels. Through pre-configured workflows, SMS messages confirming successful registration and reminders before the event were automatically sent to users. On the event day, attendees used iParllay’s online check-in feature to sign in.

With iParllay’s automated marketing tool, DMCC achieved end-to-end event management solutions, from registration and event reminders, to check-in, streamlining event administration tasks while optimising efficiency for an elevated customer experience.