The most comprehensive! Understand how KOLs promote products in one article!

There are hot topics in the marketing industry every year, such as this year’s KOL live streaming sales .

After all, this is the first time that marketing is so close to results. However, when brands invest large budgets in KOL marketing, they ignore the fact that behind cases like Li Jiaqi selling 15,000 lipsticks in 15 seconds, false data is rampant and high traffic with 0 conversions is also common.

What is the essence of KOL sales? How to avoid data falsification and screen reliable KOLs? How to match the right platform? What role will AI play in KOL marketing? You can find answers to these questions in the following articles.

What is more important is the power behind the realization of these functions. It is low-key and unknown, but it surpasses the popular phenomena of KOLs bringing products, and points to a future called smart marketing.

KOL data fraud: a fraudulent profit chain that cannot be eliminated

“When the market explodes and KOLs become an industry, all kinds of people will do business around it, and problems will arise,” said Maggie Wang, president of AdMaster, in an interview with TOP. Therefore, KOL marketing urgently needs to establish a standard, transparent, and real-data-based selection, evaluation, and management system.

Basic fraud includes falsifying the number of fans, comments, and reposts. More advanced fraud includes services such as promoting Douyin hot spots, changing sales, handling negative reviews, and upgrading levels. It is even possible to falsify the entire process by displaying "someone entered the live broadcast room", "someone followed the anchor", "someone is on the way to buy" in the live broadcast room.

Image source: Internet

Currently, there are two main ways to fake KOL traffic: machines and real people. In this regard, AdMaster launched a KOL selection and evaluation platform that supports de-watering as early as 2016. This year, this platform was upgraded to the Mingjian Preferred KOL Selection and Evaluation System. In the fight against companies that inflate traffic, AdMaster is also constantly upgrading its algorithms, models, and even thinking patterns.

"For example, on some social platforms, the data was often jagged at first, which was abnormal at first glance. Now they have learned to be smart and make it smooth, but we can still find flaws in it. For example, by comparing the number of likes and the number of views, we can find inconsistencies. For real people who are fake, we will use knowledge graphs to find abnormal behaviors such as frequent likes and comments between these KOLs. However, the devil is always stronger than the saint. Their methods are constantly upgrading, and we can only keep upgrading the algorithm."

Although we have a lot of data on KOL fraud, to fundamentally eliminate fraud requires efforts from all parties in the industry chain. “AdMaster will use various technologies and model algorithms to combat counterfeiting, but it cannot eliminate it alone because once KOL is industrialized, it proves that there is a chain of interests involved. As a third party, all we can do is help advertisers distinguish false data. The formulation of management and control and industry rules requires joint efforts from advertising associations, regulatory authorities and all parties in the industry chain to help the industry develop in a positive direction.” Maggie said.

In fact, the regulatory authorities have already taken action. On October 17, the State Administration for Market Regulation announced a special campaign to strictly investigate online influencers who sell products, and to investigate and punish illegal acts such as "fake orders" and "false reviews" that are suspected of violating the Advertising Law, the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, and the Consumer Rights Protection Law.

However, supervision is only a temporary solution. To solve this problem, we need to fundamentally explore the ins and outs of KOL sales, including the cultural soil.

The “essence” of the rise of KOLs and young people who “no longer believe in advertisements”

“The essence of social marketing is word-of-mouth marketing, and the essence of KOL sales is expert word-of-mouth marketing.” Maggie revealed the reason behind the current popularity of KOL marketing.

Why KOL marketing has suddenly become popular this year? On the one hand, it is due to the rise of short video media represented by Tik Tok. After all, compared with text content, videos are more likely to be inspiring, similar to previous TV commercials. In addition, it is precisely because of the poor economic environment that brands pay more attention to the desirable monetization capabilities such as live streaming sales, so KOLs have become popular instantly.

But in fact, KOL sales promotion is not a recent phenomenon. Maggie introduced that as early as when the melamine incident occurred, some mothers recommended foreign milk powder on the first generation of social media such as forums and blogs, and then naturally developed into purchasing agents, which was the earliest KOL sales promotion. Later, many followers emerged because of profitability, and with the rise of cross-border e-commerce platforms, KOLs gradually expanded from overseas shopping to other fields.

"Social media naturally has the ability to promote products, and this does not need to be proven. Word of mouth is the most valuable byproduct of social media. However, social media did not start to promote products from the day it was born. It was the market's requirements for KOLs that made them abandon word-of-mouth marketing and start to shift to promoting products." Maggie said, "Everyone knows that social marketing has value, but where exactly is the value? We have never seen it before. Finally, there is a way to prove the value of social marketing, and everyone is willing to try it."

In addition, the popularity of KOLs is also closely related to changes in social economy, culture and consumer behavior.

"KOLs are popular because young people today are completely different from those of the last century. When those born in the 1960s and 1970s were young, they believed in big brands and TV commercials, and pursued uniformity and consistency. It was an era of 'If you want good skin, use Dabao morning and night.' Today's young people believe in niche products, trust the recommendations of experts, pursue individuality and difference, and are a generation of 'My territory is mine.' This completely different consumer psychology and consumption habits have led to completely different consumption behavior paths."

As Maggie said, young people nowadays no longer believe in advertisements or authoritative media. They are more willing to believe in recommendations from acquaintances, social word of mouth, and believe that expert reviews on Xiaohongshu are real UGC. Some small brands that went bankrupt in the past are now starting to make a comeback because social media has brought them new life.

“Why do many companies need to do content marketing? Because nowadays everyone wants to see different things. When young people no longer believe in advertisements, brands can only reach them by making themselves part of the content,” said Maggie.

In other words, the essence of the rise of KOL sales is that young consumer groups trust word of mouth more than traditional brand advertising. From this perspective, it is understandable why word-of-mouth fraud cannot be eradicated. Brands can only think about how to correctly guide word of mouth from the perspective of the mechanism of occurrence.

Social marketing needs to be operated in a refined manner to avoid the misunderstanding of KOL marketing

According to AdMaster's survey data on brand advertisers over the past three years, in 2019, 81% of advertisers said they would increase their investment in social marketing, and 60% of advertisers said that the focus of social marketing would be on KOL promotion.

Within the existing thinking framework, KOLs can certainly be used to promote products, but advertisers must avoid making misunderstandings when conducting KOL marketing.

“Many KOLs are chosen on a whim. They choose whoever is popular or has the most followers. However, the followers of these KOLs may not necessarily match the target consumers of the brand. Therefore, we recommend that you choose KOLs based on the target consumers and find out who the consumers really care about. No matter how many followers there are, if the target consumers don’t pay attention to them, the KOL will not be of much value.”

Maggie suggested that in the face of a KOL market with tens of millions of followers, brands must choose a cost-effective KOL combination and conduct refined operations based on data, including: dividing KOL levels according to fan data; determining active industry KOL types and fan effects; understanding the different personalized styles of KOLs; grasping the characteristics of highly interactive content; and understanding the distribution of different platforms. KOL content should be released in accordance with platform characteristics.

5 Key Factors of KOL Marketing

In terms of KOL level classification, based on the number of KOL fans on each platform, AdMaster uses a clustering algorithm to divide the KOLs on different platforms into the top, middle and bottom levels. Data from its recently released "2020 KOL Marketing Trend White Paper" shows that the number of fans of top KOLs on Weibo and Douyin is far higher than that on other platforms, making them more suitable for large-scale brand communication; while Xiaohongshu and Zhihu have more tail accounts, and amateur KOLs account for a larger proportion, making them more suitable for planting grass. This requires brand owners to consider their own needs and the overall situation when communicating with MCN agencies or KOLs, consider the roles played by different platforms, and use a combination of methods to achieve better marketing results.

AdMaster will help advertisers define the target audience based on the brand campaign, generate a list of KOLs preferred by target consumers, and recommend KOL types and combinations with higher fan effects by evaluating KOL data performance such as true fan rate, fan portrait, fan overlap rate and fan effect.

"For example, if the brand's target group is men who like sports, AdMaster will specifically study this group to see what kind of KOLs they follow, and then screen and eliminate those with no commercial value or data problems. Finally, a list of KOLs will be generated and given to the brand, and the brand will find an agency to place the advertisement. In addition, based on different data dimensions, we can also provide more detailed KOL services, such as controlling the scope and frequency of reach, whether it is a large-scale reach once, or a precise reach of certain groups of people five times, all can be achieved."

It is understood that AdMaster's recently upgraded Mingjian Youxuan KOL selection and evaluation system can integrate data from nine major social platforms including Weibo, WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin, and realize the full chain from pre-selection, monitoring and optimization, to post-testing and management.

The overall process of KOL marketing activities

Embrace smart marketing: AI+social in three steps, AI may be the assistant for KOL content creation in the future

Many of the solutions for KOL marketing mentioned by Maggie are related to AI technology. If KOL sales is the hot topic in the marketing industry this year, then AI is the hot topic across industries this year. Everyone is discussing AI, but they know nothing about its true power.

AI will subvert every aspect of future society, including the marketing ecosystem. Social data is very messy, including text, pictures, and videos. To use this data, we must rely on technological solutions, which is impossible to achieve with manpower alone.

"Artificial intelligence will replace humans and take over social media, accurately analyzing large amounts of text and image information in a short period of time, helping brands get rid of tedious analysis work," said Maggie. Currently, AI technology has been widely used in AdMaster products, including the use of NLP natural language processing technology to systematically realize emotional judgment of social posts and interactions, automatically divide content by category, and intelligently extract discussion angles and discover new words. And through image recognition technology, it can intelligently identify brand logos and scenes in which they appear, and generate crowd portraits with one click.

"We have previously helped the People's Daily make a large screen that displays the real-time public opinion summary of each province. During the two sessions, it was displayed in the Great Hall of the People." But this is only the most basic application, Maggie revealed, "The future application of social big data combined with AI will not be limited to traditional fields such as public opinion monitoring and KOL selection and evaluation. It will expand to multiple levels such as insight mining and analysis model construction, which may subvert many industries in the future."

First, the subversion of traditional data processing methods. In the future, the competitiveness of research companies that traditionally rely on small data sample surveys and a large amount of manpower to produce reports will gradually decline, or even disappear. Faced with massive amounts of data across the entire network, traditional research companies are unable to provide full coverage and monitoring, nor are they able to perform massive data processing and analysis. This will result in them being unable to make timely and accurate judgments on market information, nor being able to provide on-site analysis and decision-making guidance for corporate behavior.

Second, the traditional content production model has been subverted. AdMaster has launched the "Instant Publish" system, which uses semantic analysis technology to quickly analyze massive amounts of content and extract the central ideas. This will completely subvert the future use and production model of content. For example, marketing self-media can use this system to analyze all the popular content in the industry in the past six months, find common points, and see what kind of beginning, ending, and logic are more likely to become popular. Brands can also use this system to quickly find the core keywords that the target group is concerned about, and thus find the precise entry point to communicate with them. This means that algorithms and AI can not only improve marketing efficiency, but also help brands explore content angles and produce faster and better ideas. In the future, KOLs may rely more on insights brought by AI when creating content.

In Maggie's opinion, if companies want to use AI, social and other multi-dimensional big data to "understand" consumers and assist in real-time decision-making, they must go through the "AI + social three-step" approach: first, make all social data online in real time; second, connect large and small data to generate insights; and the last step is to formulate an action plan based on the insights and create a closed-loop operation system. By continuously learning from existing insights, companies can build analytical models that are close to business needs, reduce labor costs, and achieve timely response and large-scale innovation. AdMaster hopes to help companies tap into the treasure trove of social data, better understand consumers, and achieve long-term brand growth through a three-step strategy of "putting all social data online, connecting large and small data to generate insights, and a closed-loop operating system of AI+BI+HI."

Author: TopMarketing

Source: TopMarketing