How to achieve "real sales" KOL marketing in 2 steps?

Unilever CMO Keith Weed announced at the recent Cannes Lions Festival that he would never work with KOLs who purchased “fake fans”.

From the craze for exposures of tens of millions to the resistance to traffic fraud, the marketing circle has become calm about KOL marketing. However, we see that in the torrent of digital marketing with fragmented information, relying on KOLs to promote products will still be an important way for brands to attract fans and quickly reap high returns.

In response to these problems, after browsing hundreds of KOL accounts and combining Zhongyin Communication’s practical experience in KOL marketing, we have sorted out a set of methods to “find effective KOLs”.

The power of planting grass: How many people can KOL make interested in a product?

The power of pulling out weeds: How many people can a KOL convert to buy a product?

There are thousands of factors that affect the ultimate effectiveness of KOL marketing (platform characteristics, product positioning, selling points, target groups, average order value, etc.). Here we would like to explore the value assessment of KOLs based on the marketing goal of effectively promoting and removing products.

The power of seeding: How many people can a KOL make interested in a product?

The so-called "planting grass" actually means that KOLs use their personal influence to convey product information to fans, allowing fans to develop a psychological identification with the brand or product (growing grass). We can evaluate the influence of KOLs based on the following three aspects:

• Can influence fans and effectively reach information
• Able to gain fans’ trust and let fans trust the product
• Can transform product trust and enhance fans' recognition of the value of the recommended product

First of all, how do we evaluate the effective reach of KOLs?

Basically, you can refer to the fan interaction rate (= number of interactions: total number of fans) and reading rate (= number of readings: total number of fans). For example, on Weibo, @MK凉凉 has 1.77 million followers, and @Rika0_0 has 1.83 million followers, with little difference in the number of followers. However, in the case of the same recommended video, @Rika0_0's interaction rate is almost twice that of @MK凉凉.

According to our observations on Weibo, in terms of recommendations, the fan interaction rate of popular celebrities can reach about 10%, while the fan interaction rate of internet celebrities KOLs is generally between 0.15% and 0.5%. If the interaction rate is too low, there will be a risk of low fan activity or even fake fans. If the interaction rate is too high, you need to be wary of the problem of inflated traffic. (Of course, factors such as content quality, interactive mechanism, and release time will also have an impact, but due to space limitations, we will not discuss this in depth.)

Secondly, can the KOL make fans trust the product enough?

First, KOLs all have their own tracks and personalities, and they need to maintain their personalities through daily content output. KOLs who have a high frequency of promoting content and whose daily content is good content have stronger stickiness for promoting content, and their information is more easily accepted by fans.

Let's compare @MK凉凉 and @Papi酱. Papi酱's daily routine is mainly about funny jokes, while Liangliang's daily routine is mainly about recommending beauty and personal care products. Who do you think fans would rather see recommend a pair of clothing fragrance beads?

The picture shows that Papi Jiang and MK Liangliang are attracted to Downy

Second, internet celebrities who have “true fans” and “die-hard fans” can more easily convert their fans’ trust in themselves into trust in their products. If you read the fan comments on Xue Li and Zhang Dayi’s Weibo, you will often see comments like “I want everything you recommend” and “I’m recommended again, and my wallet is empty” (if the comments are all the same positive reviews for the product and there are very few comments related to the KOL, you should be wary of the Internet scammers). In addition, KOLs will also interact with fans by answering questions, providing support, and other responses to maintain and strengthen the content.

Screenshot from @张大奕eve Weibo

The last and most important point is, can KOL enhance fans’ recognition of product value?

First, you can use the keyword cloud to confirm whether the KOL’s personal tags match the product features. For example, for a fashion KOL, we need to determine whether her keywords are concentrated on "high-end" or "affordable"? Do you discuss more about "beauty" or "clothing" with your fans? No matter how good a product is, if it targets the wrong target audience, its value will ultimately be wasted.

Here I would also like to share with you a little trick for choosing KOLs. Our subsidiary Zhongyin Media has a long-term partnership with an international beauty brand. The brand uses two monitoring systems to review and evaluate the output of KOLs. Therefore, purchasing KOL resources commonly used by big brands (effective KOLs after layers of screening) may become the most cost-effective marketing strategy for other brands.

Pulling out the grass power: How many people can the KOL convert to buy the product

If planting grass is still at the stage of promoting purchasing intention and generating value recognition, then pulling grass out actually generates purchasing behavior. We can consider the following two points:

1. Can KOL directly distribute and sell products? The fewer intermediate links there are from planting grass to pulling grass, the more likely it is to convert purchases. KOLs who have sales channels ( Taobao C stores, WeChat stores, mini program stores, etc.) and can directly distribute and bring products, as well as KOLs who cannot distribute but can implant official sales links, can both reduce the intermediate links in sales conversion.

2. Does the KOL have sales cases of similar products/categories? For this, we can ask the KOL to provide store data, and at the same time look at the fans’ comments on similar products that the KOL has recommended in the past. Fan replies directly related to purchases, such as “price”, “in store”, and “please give me a link”, can largely reflect a KOL’s expertise in a certain category.

Screenshot from @Rika0_0 "Sharing 14 Affordable But Amazing Skin Care Products"

There have been a lot of discussions about the problem of fake fans recently. In fact, what we want to say is that the model of only looking at false indicators such as the number of fans and the amount of dissemination has caused great waste. Finding the right focus in social e-commerce and using KOLs to achieve effective marketing of "real fans + real sales" are issues that brands and agents should focus on in the future.

In fact, different KOLs have their own advantages. In order to make a clearer comprehensive evaluation, we have summarized the above experience into a physical examination table, hoping that each brand can choose a KOL that meets its marketing goals.

## KOL Physical Examination Form##