KOL Promotion: How to Identify Inappropriate KOLs and Fake Influencers

Recently, an incident of fake traffic on Weibo has set off a storm on the Internet, with the focus of the debate between the two parties centered around the word "effect". So for us, how can we achieve the desired effect in KOL promotion?

With the rise of social platforms, the essence of KOL marketing has also transitioned from one-way advertising communication of the "Wang Po selling melons" type to word-of-mouth communication. KOLs are often people with a certain influence in their field, who can influence and drive users' content output and dissemination. Today, from the perspective of selecting KOLs, let’s talk about the factors that affect the effectiveness of KOL marketing:

1. Enterprise: product strategy, pricing, brand type, investment

Products are always the bottom line. Once the product strategy is set, there will be requirements for product selection and pricing. At the same time, different industries tend to have different conversion rates. A real estate company cannot compete with a company that sells beef balls. Even for companies of the same type, brand background will have an impact on marketing effectiveness. For example, if a brand insults China, even choosing high-quality KOLs in China will be of no avail. Finally, and most importantly, investment.

These factors are determined by the company itself and are beyond the scope of my discussion today.

2. KOL: Compatibility with the brand

1. Brand characteristics

When it comes to brand fit, the first thing we need to consider is brand characteristics.

As we all know, the essence of KOL marketing is to influence fans' consumption decisions by delivering positive business information . However, the amount of information about merchants is huge, so before cooperating with KOLs, they need to understand the brand characteristics, select the most important information to convey, and then proceed to the next step.

However, when some companies are looking for KOLs to cooperate with, the information and materials they need to provide are messy or even missing, especially in terms of product selling points.

For example, as a product, the selling point of a mobile phone is sometimes the camera function, sometimes the battery life, and then it is said that it can add a high-definition screen. The information that the merchant requires to convey is inconsistent and bloated, which will actually seriously affect the creation of KOL content.

The core of KOL promotion revolves around its social attributes and high-quality content output . Through KOL, the distance between users and merchants is shortened and the advantages of products are understood.

Therefore, the brand characteristics must be sorted out first. KOLs don’t understand your situation and don’t know what information to convey.

2. KOL Types

The type of KOL is more related to the brand’s promotion purpose and brand type , thus affecting the degree of fit. Based on the strength of KOLs’ social and professional attributes , I roughly divide KOLs into two categories:

(1) Social KOL

They are a bit like internet celebrities, with extremely strong social attributes and relatively weak professional attributes, but they still have certain professional knowledge. This type of KOL has a large fan base, strong appeal, and strong interactivity, which can ensure the breadth of dissemination of business information.

They are mainly active in a certain fan circle, their identity and background are closer to their fans, and they have more social interactions with their fans.

For fans, social KOLs have enough energy and time to deal with products, have sources of business information and richer knowledge and experience, so compared to Internet celebrities, their fan stickiness is obviously stronger.

The fan base and certain professionalism make it more suitable for fast-moving consumer goods promotions and bulk product publicity . After all, for low-priced goods, consumers will buy them on impulse just because KOLs say they are good; but for expensive items, it is better to look for professional recommendations, and then think about it and compare.

At the same time, social KOLs are more expensive and traffic fraud is more serious, so it is necessary to analyze data from social interactions such as reading, comments, and likes .

(2) Vertical KOL

It is a bit like an expert, with a profound influence in the vertical field. Although the fan base is not too large, it is still considerable, and the fan stickiness is extremely strong.

This type of KOL can bring more continuous, stable and high-quality information recommendations to others in the vertical field, and provide more reliable guiding opinions, that is, practical information. It uses positive business information and social characteristics as inducements to guide consumption, stimulate secondary dissemination by fans, and produce word-of-mouth communication, focusing on the depth of communication.

There are two types of fans of vertical KOLs: other KOLs in the group and ordinary fans. KOL-type fans have the effects of secondary dissemination and KOL mutual promotion, while ordinary fans are refined target consumers.

Due to the high-quality content and credibility of information, these two types of fans have strong stickiness and identify with the vertical KOL in all aspects of values. This has a profound impact on the purchasing decisions of large items or products with high professional attributes , which is equivalent to giving consumers a sufficiently convincing answer to "consider it" and "compare and contrast".

In addition to promoting sales of small items, it can also help explore user consumption trends and demands . The selection of this type of KOL should be analyzed based on their personality, professionalism, and the quality of their creative content . Traffic is not that important.

3. KOL Platform

The KOL platform is related to the brand type and promotion purpose .

For example, if the brand type is automobile, and the KOL platform is chosen as Douyin, the conversion effect can be imagined; if it is also automobile, if the promotion purpose is brand publicity, then choosing Douyin will not be a problem.

Currently, KOLs are mainly concentrated on Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Douyin platforms. Below is a brief analysis of the characteristics of these platforms to facilitate selection.

(1) Xiaohongshu – Beauty

Xiaohongshu is back online after just being rectified.

Xiaohongshu can be said to be a holy place for female users to recommend products: female users account for 83.7%, which is higher than male users; at the same time, 65% of users are under 30 years old, 29% of users are between 31 and 40 years old, and are mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities. Therefore, the effects of brands such as fashion products and beauty products will be better, and the purpose of promotion is more inclined to directly bring in goods for conversion or to promote sales .

(2) Kuaishou - Dear

Most of the KOLs on Kuaishou have strong social attributes, interact frequently with users, and have similar identity attributes, which leads to common consumption patterns among them. The main products they promote prefer mass brands .

The report pointed out that the products favored by Kuaishou users are mainly snacks, beauty products, men's and women's clothing, agricultural and sideline products, cultural relics, fishing, fitness products, etc., and the purpose of promotion also tends to be direct conversion of goods .

(3) Tik Tok – Cool

The biggest characteristic of Tik Tok users is their youthfulness. Therefore, young people prefer interesting and fun things, and impulse consumer goods, interesting new products and other types of products are easy to convert.

At the same time, because users are concentrated in first- and second-tier cities and have developed the habit of comparing information, Douyin’s promotional purpose is more suitable for planting grass and is relatively weak in its ability to bring goods .

4. KOL Content

KOL content is mainly divided into sales model and promotion model. These two combined with brand characteristics directly affect the output content .

(1) KOL sales model

A Direct conversion - breadth/depth of information transfer:

The two factors that influence consumer decisions are exposure to products and receipt of product information, that is, the breadth and depth of merchant information transmission.

If conversion is used as the purpose of promotion, there are strong requirements for the professionalism of the KOL itself, and there are also extremely high requirements for the fan base. This type of sales model is generally suitable for fast-moving consumer goods brands + social vertical KOLs , and the investment is relatively high.

B Planting seeds, marking products - the depth of information transmission:

Planting grass, that is, marking products, also aims to achieve sales. In terms of merchant information transmission, more emphasis is placed on depth. Generally, product characteristics are related to the tone of KOLs and can directly influence consumers' decisions. This type of sales model is suitable for bulk brands + vertical KOLs .

C. Brand promotion-the breadth of information transmission:

I won’t explain too much about product promotion. There are various ways, so I won’t go into details here. Of course, I prefer to choose social KOLs .

(2) Promotion model

Generally, it tends to be soft promotion, such as evaluation, popular science, collection inventory, KOL mutual promotion, etc. These soft promotions are more persuasive and directly affect the purchasing decisions of group fans.

These modes each have something to note:

• For example, evaluation and popular science require KOLs to be professional enough to make the results convincing enough. Therefore, this type of promotion model generally works better with vertical KOLs.
• Another example is KOLs promoting each other. If you choose a vertical KOL, you have to consider the secondary dissemination effect of his fan base (see vertical KOL above); if you choose a social KOL, you have to look at the degree of overlap of fans among multiple KOLs.

In general, when the brand characteristics remain unchanged, the KOL type, the platform where the KOL is located, and the chosen model all have a great impact on the promotion effect. Sometimes the results do not meet expectations, which may be related to not considering these aspects when selecting KOLs.

The right person can do the wrong thing at the wrong time. I hope this is useful to you all, sorry for the poor performance.

Author: fat c

Source: Weird Brain Hole