In past years, Key Opinion Leader (KOL) campaigns were considered a novel method to communicate with Chinese consumers. However, nowadays they are an essential part of campaign dissemination in the East. According to iiMedia Research, the number of Chinese Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) has grown rapidly from 160 in 2015 to 28,000 in 2020 – 175 times larger in just five years. As more and more KOLs are incubated by MCNs, the way they approach followers has become formulated and so the majority of their content is becoming increasingly similar.
Being faced with homogenized content, people are beginning to tune out, and it’s becoming harder for brands to have overwhelming success by conducting KOL campaigns. This is in part because some of the rules in the industry have changed, and so to better navigate these changes and help maximize your China marketing strategy, we’ll walk you through 5 key steps to creating a successful KOL marketing campaign.
In this article you’ll learn…
STEP 2: Decide who to work with
This is a crucial step in a KOL marketing campaign, as deciding who to work with directly influences the spending and overall effectiveness of a campaign. But this is also the most complicated step for brands.
It’s getting harder for brands to find well-matched Key Opinion Leaders due to the increasing number of KOLs in the sector. What makes the selection part quite tricky is that the KOL who has the largest number of followers is not necessarily a perfect candidate for a campaign. Brands have to take many elements into consideration, such as determining whether the amount of followers that a KOLs has is authentic or not, follower engagement and interaction, their media impact, prices, as well as brands that they have worked with before… The list goes on.
Choosing the right KOL is vital, and it requires a huge amount of time from brands. An influencer marketing tool that can evaluate and tells brands which KOLs are most suitable for a campaign is an immeasurable asset to a brand’s campaign and planning process. Leveraging digital tools helps break down key KOL metrics including impact, community, cost efficiency, relevancy, activeness, and content creativity. The importance of each metric should be adjusted to align with the goals of the brand. After each evaluation, a brand can save this list of recommended influencers along with their overall score for future reference. And if brands already have someone in mind to work with, they can manually add KOLs into such a platform and receive a list, marking both added or recommended KOLs based on the six metrics.
3 more stepts are comming up. Stay with us for more China KOL marketing strategies.
