- 种草(Zhong Cao), directly translated as “grass seeding”, is now a super popular word in China, everyone is talking about it daily. For consumers, Zhong Cao, describes the strong purchasing benefits of products recommended by peers or influencers. For marketeers， Zhong Cao, or simply known as seeding, is a tool for influencer marketing, by which, you can create and distribute content across the web to attract your target customers.
Seeding can also be seen as a much more humanized form of advertising that seamlessly combines advertising messages with real customer experiences. On every social media platform, there are people recommending all kinds of products in their posts or videos. It’s just not confined to niche sectors like home accessories or makeup anymore. Nowadays, streamers analyze the pros and cons of everything from electric vehicles to philosophy. This results in consumers having greater ease and exposure to key information before they purchase. Brands are finding this medium extremely important to provide potential buyers with rich product insights.
Grass Seeding on RED, the most used UGC platform in China
On RED platform, you can find endless creative content, ranging from highlights of a hot TV series, to the thoughts on newly-released makeup, the evaluation of popular restaurants and shops, stories of ordinary people working hard to make a living, and fashion and styling. These content creators play many roles, a friend, peer, a mentor, to like-minded customers on the same journey. Hence, when they deliver the message, it will resonate and work effectively.
Grass seeding on RED is an essential process for consumer marketing for all brands, it’s widely adopted by beauty, fashion and FMCG brands when they need to: launch new products, promote a certain product, build brand awareness in a new market, and promote campaigns. The common practice for grass seeding is to hire a large number of suitable KOC (key opinion consumers, aka, micro influencers) and KOL (key opinion leader, aka, macro or mega influencers) to write testimonials of the product/brand/campaign, in order to create authentic user reviews online that are easily accessible for target consumers. As RED reviews play a key role for the consumer decision-making process, grass seeding on RED has become a critical element in a brand’s strategy.
While influencers receive more likes and fans, the influence they can exert on the promotion of a certain brand, or a product is considerably increased and amplified. That’s why more and more brands are willing to pay influencers a great amount of money for promotion rather than making huge investment on advertisement on TV or in the radio. With good influencers marketing brands can get decent amount of attention and share of the market.
How can AtMall help with “种草” seeding?
As a technology-driven marketing and distribution company, AtMall brings premium European brands into the Chinese market with an integrated marketing communication strategy combined with a strong distribution network. We are experts in match making brands with suitable cross-border influencers (Chinese influencers living in Europe & China). We have successfully brought European brands into Chinese market by providing influencer marketing on RED, including Hunkemoller, ELEVATIONE, Fanllory and Swiss Alp Health to name some.
Are you planning on entering the Chinese market by leveraging word of mouth marketing on RED to penetrate the market? If so, we have the expertise to help!
Contact us: marketing@atmall.com
