How to Drive Ticket Sales with Xiaohongshu

Dragon Trail’s 2024 Xiaohongshu and OTA campaign for Disneyland Resort California is a case study in how to effectively use Xiaohongshu and KOC marketing to drive attraction ticket sales on Chinese OTAs, with more than 8 million impressions and sales growth of at least 16% across four OTAs.

The Situation

Disneyland Resort in California wanted to leverage the immense popularity of social media platform Xiaohongshu (aka Little Red Book, or RED) with Chinese travelers, designing a campaign to increase social buzz and turn that buzz into real sales on Chinese OTAs.

The Results

From July to October 2024, Dragon Trail delivered a KOC campaign for Disneyland on Xiaohongshu that surpassed KPIs by more than 2 million impressions and significantly increased admissions sales across four different Chinese OTAs. The campaign’s success demonstrates Dragon Trail’s strength in influencer marketing as well as our strong OTA connections.

• 102 Xiaohongshu posts
• 8.7 million impressions (128% of KPI)
• 1.15 million campaign page views
• Year-on-year admission sales on Fliggy, Ctrip, KKday, and Klook increased by at least 16% – and more than doubled on more than one of the OTA platforms

Our Work

We selected 100 KOCs (key opinion consumers) on Xiaohongshu for the campaign, focusing on US-based lifestyle, family, and travel accounts with strong and engaged follower bases. We chose to work with this group of KOCs with a precise target audience in mind, and in order to optimize results based on the Xiaohongshu algorithm, which favors high-quality, authentic, and useful content.

We provided information to the KOCs for them to publish travel guides to Disneyland. The 102 posts included both photo and video content, alongside informative text about visiting the park and practical information on buying tickets. Leveraging social buzz to drive real sales, the posts linked to Chinese OTAs Fliggy, Ctrip, KKday, and Klook, enabling followers to easily and instantly purchase Disneyland Resort tickets after viewing the KOCs’ Xiaohongshu content.

We also complemented the social campaign with KFS media buy on Xiaohongshu, boosting the posts’ reach through users’ feeds and search activities.

The campaign shows that when used correctly – with the right target audience, content, and integration with OTAs – Xiaohongshu can offer strong, short-term sales value to tourist attractions in addition to longer-term branding and inspiration.

Need help launching your next Chinese social media campaign and working with Chinese OTAs? Contact Dragon Trail to find out more about the solutions we offer and how we can help you reach your sales goals for the Chinese market.