Overseas KOL influencer marketing and promotion skills!

2019 can be said to be the year when live streaming by domestic influencers became extremely popular. During the Double Eleven pre-sale period, Li Jiaqi shouted "All girls!" and 410,000 bottles of Estee Lauder's "Little Brown Bottle Eye Cream" were sold out in the Chinese warehouse.

In fact, many foreign Internet celebrities had already followed the lead of Li Jiaqi 10 years ago. Jeffree Star opened a YouTube channel 5 years ago to promote his own cosmetics brand, which is now becoming more and more popular. Kelie Jenner also relied on Instagram to sell products and transformed herself from an ordinary rich second-generation into the world's youngest self-made billionaire overnight.

So, with the Black Friday Christmas season approaching, how can the many merchants eager to go overseas find suitable KOLs to promote their brands in the local market? In this article, Bulan will share with you the value of KOL marketing for overseas brands, how to choose KOLs, and the KOL usage strategy during the year-end Christmas season.

1. “Black Friday” is coming, why should overseas brands do KOL marketing?

For brands going overseas, how to penetrate into the minds of local consumers and narrow the psychological distance with consumers has always been a major pain point.

KOLs have a certain prestige and voice in their fields and can endorse brands. They have a group of loyal fans and are well versed in communicating with them.

KOLs’ recommendations for brands will undoubtedly help increase the brand’s popularity and favorability among these fans, thereby attracting them to pay attention to, consume, and even support and spread the brand.

Why should we rush to do KOL marketing during the Christmas sales and Black Friday? Don’t you need to do it normally?

Not really, KOL marketing needs to be done at ordinary times, and even more so during the Christmas season.

The consumption habits of foreign consumers are different from ours. While we go on a shopping spree on "Double Eleven", foreign consumers concentrate on making big purchases during the Christmas sales. For people in many countries, Christmas is as important as the Chinese New Year. Chinese people give red envelopes during the Spring Festival, and foreign friends give gifts at Christmas.

However, the huge demand for gift purchases will bring tremendous pressure, and present pressure makes countless people in society feel uncomfortable.

It is not difficult to understand how much of a headache it is to choose an anniversary gift for your girlfriend. The anxiety of buying things for the whole family at Christmas must increase exponentially. Moreover, at this time, all businesses are doing year-end promotions, and countless advertising information, coupons, and discount codes are indiscriminately everywhere the consumers' eyes can see, making it dizzy and difficult to make a decision.

Whether it is to avoid information overload or to make more rational shopping decisions, consumers tend to look for information sources they trust as a priority reference for shopping.

Facebook’s Christmas marketing insights indicate that more than one-third of consumers will refer to video recommendations from social media influencers to choose the brands they want to consume[1]. New media on social media (YouTube videos, Instagram Stories, etc.) have become new windows for brands, presenting products and services to consumers in a more interesting, rich and creative way.

KOLs are not only window guides, but also community leaders and spiritual confidants of consumers. They use expressions and performance methods that fans love to convey brand information to fans' minds in a subtle way, turning them into potential consumers and supporters of the brand.

2. How to choose a KOL: Are KOLs with more fans better?

The number of fans should be the most common and intuitive indicator to measure KOL. Click on the social homepages of internet celebrities and you can see at a glance whether they have 10k, 100k or 1M fans. However, is it better for brands to choose KOLs with more fans?

The answer is obvious. No.

First of all, not to mention that the larger the KOL, the higher the cost for the brand. This is not a marketing solution suitable for most brands.

More importantly, before choosing a KOL, you need to be very clear about what your brand’s appeal and goals are. There are usually three goals for KOL marketing:

1. Brand awareness
2. Expand new user base
3. Promotion conversion

If you want to increase your popularity, you naturally have to pay attention to the number of KOL fans, activity, and influence; if you want to expand new user groups, you must ensure that the KOL’s fan attributes are consistent with the target consumers; and if you want to achieve promotion conversions, the KOL’s ability to bring goods becomes the most important consideration.

Whether a KOL can effectively promote products depends on whether his fans are willing to accept his/her promotion. The more fans like and support the KOL’s stance, the more willing they are to like, comment and forward their posts. Of course, they will also trust and support the brands recommended by the KOL. "Fan interaction rate" is an important indicator to measure the KOL's ability to bring goods.

An interesting finding. The smaller the KOL on the social platform, the higher the engagement rate of its fans. [2]

Caption: specialist (<15k followers), mentor (15k~100k followers), rising star (100k~500k followers), superstar (>500k followers)

In general, the fan interaction rate on Instagram is higher than that on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Instagram, the general interaction rate is 1.5%~3%, and the excellent one is 3%~5%. If it reaches above 5%, it can be basically determined that this KOL knows how to operate his or her own fan community, and you can leave the goods to him or her - he or she is reliable. (Of course, I have also seen a few KOLs with an interaction rate of more than 20%... I am really curious about how they raise their Instagram activity to a level higher than that of their family group...

Therefore, if sales conversion is your goal, you don’t necessarily need to look for a KOL with a huge number of fans. Instead, you should focus on which KOLs are particularly influential in their own communities, who are so popular that a single “OMG” can make people want to buy, buy, buy.

Of course, in addition to the number of fans and interaction rate, brands should also pay attention to relevance when choosing KOLs, that is, whether the KOL’s area of ​​influence and content style are consistent with the brand’s target market and positioning. Many foreign KOLs are selective about brands, and you cannot cooperate with them just because you have money. The product positioning, brand influence, and compatibility with the brand itself will also become criteria for KOLs to choose a brand to cooperate with.

3. KOL Marketing Strategies for Christmas Season

There are certain rules to follow for KOL marketing during the Christmas season. You know, at this time there are no shortage of consumers holding long shopping lists looking for their favorite products. Whether you can attract them depends on whether the brand can touch the hearts of consumers and accurately meet their shopping needs.

KOL marketing is different from the simple and crude hard advertising that puts a huge billboard outside a department store with a colorful logo and 365-degree all-round pictures of the products. KOL marketing is aimed at a specific group of people. It is to use the community leaders they trust and love the most to tell a story about the brand and convey the brand's value.

The essence of successful KOL marketing is to tell a good story.

After looking at a series of cases of brands doing KOL marketing during the Christmas season over the years [3], Bu Lan compiled several promotional themes that are suitable for the year-end Christmas season. You can refer to them and think about the angles from which to tell your brand story when working with KOLs:

1. Focuses on relationships and emotions between people, such as family, love, and friendship

Emotions are common to all human beings. Overseas brands often find it difficult to penetrate the minds of local consumers due to cultural differences, but don’t forget that people will be moved by sincere emotions and love. Being associated with beautiful emotions will undoubtedly greatly enhance the brand's image in the minds of consumers.

Such content can collaborate with a wide range of KOL types, and is suitable for categories such as household products, fashion and beauty. An electric rice cooker that brings convenience to parents, a razor that expresses thoughtfulness to a boyfriend, etc. can all create touching stories around the emotions between people.

1. Cater to people's desire to reward themselves or their relatives and friends during festivals

This type of content is particularly suitable for products such as luxury goods, holiday hotels, etc. At the end of the year, who doesn’t want to reward themselves for working hard and living seriously? The Christmas season is the shopping season. As the wonderful holiday approaches, reward yourself with a big-brand bag you’ve been eyeing for a long time, a new mobile phone, and a plane ticket to a tropical vacation...how wonderful!

KOLs in the fields of fashion, travel, and lifestyle often create a lifestyle that their fans desire. Cooperate with these KOLs and tell consumers how your products or services can bring them the best enjoyment and enable them to live an ideal life, and you will naturally win their favor.

1. Gift list, cure the difficulty of making choices

The Christmas season is here, and everyone has a gift-giving KPI. The "gift list" topic is the most widely applicable and practical content type.

If you are a platform, quickly select the best quality children's products, care products, outdoor products, etc. to provide consumers with your "gift solutions".

If you are a vertical brand, you can also combine your own diverse products or those of other friendly companies into a gift list, and then find KOLs in this field to promote it for you.

1. The main festival atmosphere

The purpose of celebrating festivals is to have fun, and it’s the same everywhere in the universe. Food, beverages, party supplies and other essential commodities for holiday gatherings can create party scenes, highlight the festive atmosphere, and can be cleverly soft-implanted in the Vlogs of influencers.

Finally, I’ll attach a case that I think is super awesome! From Amazon's 2016 promotional video with influencer Ingrid Nilsen~

Amazon 2016 KOL Christmas Advertisement

summary

In summary, this article mainly revolves around the topic of whether and how overseas brands should conduct KOL marketing during the Christmas season, and contains three parts:

1. The value of KOL marketing to overseas brands
2. How to choose KOL
3. KOL Marketing Strategies for Christmas Season

I have just started working in this field and my experience is limited, so I welcome readers to share their thoughts and suggestions. The Christmas season is here, I wish all the overseas brands happy making money!

Author: Bu Lan (WeChat ID: Esssssssie__L)

Source: Noteblue