Should brands cultivate KOLs?

According to media reports, in 2020, more than 30% of the traffic of the beauty brand Huaxizi came from Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room and Douyin account. On Double Eleven, the GMV contributed by Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room even accounted for more than 60% of Huaxizi’s total GMV. This allows us to see the highlight of "people" in marketing, and understand why Li Jiaqi dared to say twice in front of more than 17 million viewers in the live broadcast room with full confidence: "Hua Xizi was promoted by Li Jiaqi."

It's not just about "pushing", in fact there are also many brands that are "created" by one's own efforts.

Kylie Jenner, a member of the Kim Kardashian family and an American reality TV star, founded her own beauty brand, Kylie Cosmetics. Her 200 million followers on Instagram became the driving force, directly pushing Kylie Cosmetics to achieve sales of $420 million in just one and a half years, becoming a company valued at over $1 billion.

Photo: Kylie Jenner

Following closely, Rihanna, a world-renowned singer with a huge number of fans, also founded the beauty brand Fenty Beauty, becoming a new star. She is also an important figure who made Puma, which was in a slump, become the focus of young people again.

Image source: Brand official website

Now it seems that this trend has also spread to China, and more and more celebrities and KOLs are planning to establish brands based on their social influence.

But the creation of brands by internet celebrities is not the point that Shiyouqu wants to convey. The real core point is that in these different cases, there is a significant commonality, that is, these high-profile figures will stand up for the brand for a long time, and will continuously output brand content on social media, eventually becoming an important channel for the brand in terms of traffic and sales.

This raises a question: If some people can create a brand on their own, can established brands choose some KOLs for long-term bets?

KOLs have only used half of their abilities

Compared to irregular celebrity endorsements or hiring KOLs for large-scale promotion at a certain communication node, brands currently rarely choose KOLs for long-term and in-depth cooperation. This is because most of the time, KOLs are just a communication channel for brands.

But in fact, is KOL really just a communication channel?

Let’s take a look at Li Jiaqi, who frequently promotes Hua Xizi in the live broadcast room, showing users everything from “conscientious domestic products” to “product efficacy” and then to “product research and development”, the entire product life cycle to who the brand is. This role is not limited to selling products. Its strong persuasiveness also helps brands occupy people’s minds.

Therefore, from the rise of Li Jiaqi & Hua Xizi to internet celebrity brands, they have actually shown the business community that KOLs are more than just a communication channel. They have brand energy on social media, and their social marketing value can penetrate the entire business logic and product life cycle.

Image source: Brand official

Therefore, brands should use KOLs not only from a channel perspective, but also from a brand perspective. There are many reasons for this.

First, consumers’ media behavior is changing dramatically. They are gradually allocating more time and attention to KOLs on various social media platforms.

Secondly, consumers’ trust in advertising is also shifting from brand trust to personality trust. They are more willing to listen to KOL recommendations and refer to reviews from existing buyers.

At the same time, fans will "materialize" their love and trust for KOLs. When they trust, buy what KOLs recommend, or use a brand, it is a materialized expression of this emotion.

These consumer behavior phenomena illustrate that brand logic has produced new ways of playing.

The traditional process of brand creation is: the company sets strategy, promotes products, does brand positioning, plans advertising and placement, and uses marketing to influence public perception and build channels to generate sales.

But the birth process of Internet celebrity brands is as follows: KOLs build their own user pool through some interest content, and then through frequent content interactions, they first form emotional identification with fans, and finally a brand is established based on this identification.

This shows that KOLs not only conform to media behavior and purchasing behavior, but also have the ability to shape brands.

But looking back, the way brands use KOLs today is mostly just a change in channel placement thinking - gradually choosing KOLs for placement from traditional media channels, which actually only uses up half of KOL's capabilities.

Two major issues for brands to raise KOLs

If brands want to choose KOLs for long-term cooperation and make them an important mental location for the brand on social media, they have to face two problems.

The first question is: how to find the right KOL.

Gerardo's data shows that the value of influencer marketing depends mainly on three basic qualities of the influencer: reach, credibility in context, and sales skills. It can be seen that brands cannot decide who is more suitable for their brand by randomly selecting categories or the number of fan portraits.

Let me give you a typical example. Recently, Disco, a US men’s skincare startup brand, completed a $5 million seed round of financing. The brand launched in 2019, and the company has reported triple-digit month-over-month sales growth since the summer of 2020.

The founder of this company is a KOL named Benjamin Smith. However, it is worth noting that this KOL is not from the skin care field, but from the fitness field. However, its skin care products mainly target skin problems such as acne that fitness enthusiasts often face.

Photo: Benjamin Smith

Therefore, the logic behind the birth of this brand is not normal: Benjamin Smith first recruited male fans as a fitness coach, and then provided corresponding solution products for the skin problems commonly faced by male fitness practitioners. And in private, this blogger herself has a very strong awareness of skin care.

There are many successful cross-border cases, which shows that brands need to choose KOLs that are truly suitable for long-term cooperation, not just vertical channels, but very diverse choices, which require the professional support of professional institutions.

Image source: Brand official website

Secondly, compared with long-term KOL cooperation, high-frequency and in-depth content output will be very important. Whether it is product-oriented or brand-oriented output, this further requires the brand to have refined content operation capabilities.

In the face of this, Shiqu believes that in any content marketing process, understanding the fan group's preferences, values, and sharing points through data-based analysis is a compulsory course that needs to be taken before launch.

In addition, there is another issue that cannot be ignored. The importance of Li Jiaqi to Huaxizi has made the brand realize the importance of "fine-grained operation of KOLs". Brands should avoid over-reliance on a certain KOL, but instead establish a reasonable and scientific matrix to balance this relationship.

In summary, long-term cooperation with KOLs is a new idea worth trying in future KOL marketing for brands, but it also tests the core capabilities of the brand in two aspects:

On the one hand, KOLs should be managed scientifically. When brands select and build their own KOL databases, they should be logical, data-based, and technical. Instead of simply screening or placing KOLs, they should propose a complete set of KOL management processes based on specific customer needs, including KOL screening, evaluation, content customization, release tracking, precipitation, recommendation, and elimination.

On the other hand, it is an upgrade of the creativity of KOL marketing; the core of KOL marketing is content creativity, which requires marketing agencies with strong strategic and creative capabilities to provide plans and execution.

Author: Time Fun

Source: Shiqu