Why is KOL marketing so difficult?

If you want to do a marketing campaign that will go viral, what should you do? Obviously, hard advertising channels such as television and newspapers are becoming less and less considered. Today, almost all screen-sweeping events are created through social communication techniques. The most important booster in screen-sweeping is the sharing and forwarding of KOLs.

Today, the publication rate for a Li Jiaqi Douyin video is 950,000 yuan, and the price for a GQ Lab headline is 1.3 million yuan. From many aspects, KOLs have greater influence than traditional media.

The emergence of KOL and other Internet celebrities has broken the traditional communication chain. Today, if a brand wants to do online marketing and promotion, KOL placement has become a must. According to the data from "China Digital Marketing Trends 2019", 63% of advertisers said that the focus of social marketing will be on KOL promotion. One fact that brands cannot ignore is that the efficiency of a company's online marketing depends to a large extent on KOL marketing .

Why is marketing so difficult today?

KOL is a product of the rise of new media. New media has given everyone more rights to express themselves, but it has also made information fragmented, which has brought many challenges to corporate marketing.

In the early days of media monopoly, marketing activities tended to be "high-profile", with advertisements placed on centralized platforms such as CCTV, which would become household names the next day. But nowadays, in the era of media fragmentation, users' attention has been diluted, so marketing needs to move towards "intensive cultivation". Otherwise, even if a budget of over 100 million is invested in social media, it may not generate enough brand response.

From the perspective of information dissemination, the centralized media era was a typical star-shaped dissemination model. Therefore, an important means of brand marketing in the early days was to win the bid for CCTV. Winning the bid could guarantee brand awareness and thus promote product conversion. For example, after Qin Chi won the bid, it became a household name overnight.

When Internet media emerged, the communication model began to change to a tree-like model. Traditional media such as CCTV were still important, but the general public had begun to be segmented, and user attention was gradually dispersed. Communication needed to be reached more times and at a higher frequency. For example, Melatonin covered users through a combination of high-frequency fragmentation of media.

In today's digital media era, each individual has more communication energy and can interact more conveniently. The communication model has changed into a network model, but there are still key nodes in network communication. These key nodes are KOLs. In social marketing, opinion leaders often trigger communication across the entire network.

The mesh communication structure brought by the mobile Internet is actually much more efficient in information dissemination than traditional tree-like communication. Hot events are often known to the entire network within two hours of occurrence, which provides many brands with huge marketing opportunities. But on the other hand, companies always find it difficult to find appropriate and accurate communication channels, a large amount of brand information is unnecessarily drowned out, and the information asymmetry between supply and demand sides becomes more severe.

Compared with traditional media placement, the difficulty of KOL placement increases exponentially. Faced with the huge KOL resource library, choosing the right KOL has become the main challenge in brand marketing.

Why are users more willing to trust KOLs?

The failure of traditional media is an indisputable fact. It is not only because user attention has become generalized, but the deeper reason is that the user's trust chain has shifted. In the socialized network communication structure, users are shifting from "media trust" to "personality trust". Business value is shifting to people, and people will play an increasingly important role in future business.

The persuasiveness of KOL/Internet celebrities/stars far exceeds that of Blue V/traditional media because the former have strong personalized attributes. The interactive communication between users and KOLs is essentially more like a social behavior rather than an information acquisition behavior. In the long run, users' business trust will gradually shift to personalized media. Based on trust in people, KOLs will promote the completion of transactions more efficiently.

In complex purchasing behaviors, "Consumer Behavior" breaks down consumer purchasing decisions into five stages: arousing needs, collecting information, evaluating plans, deciding to buy, and post-purchase behavior. In the KOL marketing process, KOL can help users explore their own needs, collect product information, and evaluate plans, directly triggering user purchases and shortening the user behavior chain.

In specific communication scenarios, users' personalized trust in KOLs greatly reduces their requirements for brands. For example, in the KOL live broadcast scenario, users' purchasing behavior actually rarely depends on the brand power or product power, but rather on their trust in the KOL and the KOL's on-site conversion methods. Users' requirements for brands and products have largely shifted to the KOL, and KOL helps fan users screen products.

Where is the value gap of KOL?

KOLs can be divided into two types - cross-border and vertical:

Cross-border KOLs are usually top KOLs with high coverage. They can help brands expand their user base and break through the circle of communication. They are more suitable for creating momentum during the promotion of new products and quickly increase brand awareness.

The vertical type usually belongs to the mid-level KOL, which has a deep circle endorsement and can stimulate in-depth circle dissemination of content, form brand loyalty and high conversion, and is more suitable for daily delivery and combined delivery.

Many big brands still continue to adopt a "high-profile" marketing strategy in their daily marketing, focusing on top KOLs to ensure communication effects. However, the network communication environment of social media is very different from the traditional communication environment. As a result, on the one hand, top KOLs have become a red ocean market, which may not be cost-effective from an ROI perspective. On the other hand, the value of mid- and lower-level KOLs has not been deeply explored, and has become a traffic depression that many brands have ignored.

Many brands are aware that mid-level KOLs have a higher ROI, but there are many mid-level KOLs and the cost of selecting them is high.

The huge number of KOLs has become a marketing problem for companies. Manual screening alone is very inefficient and it is almost impossible to find truly high-quality accounts, making it difficult to maximize brand benefits. On the one hand, brands are facing a gold mine of value from mid-level KOLs, but on the other hand, companies do not have effective tools to assist in mining, and no scientific way to assess the value of KOLs. This is the pain point for companies in deploying KOLs.

How to choose the right KOL?

The KOL market changes very rapidly, especially with the emergence of new platforms. It is extremely difficult for brands to select and manage KOLs, and they need to use technical tools to significantly reduce the cost of selection.

However, in the current environment, many brands still use an empirical approach to select KOLs. There are three main methods:

1. Use KOLs you have worked with in the past;

2. Recommended by MCN and other media;

3. Rely on the brand’s own discovery or recommendation from friends.

But it is obvious that all three KOL selection methods are too risky and too random. In addition, the overall KOL data is seriously inflated nowadays, so it is difficult for brands to discover high-quality KOLs through empirical methods.

In Shiqu’s marketing plan for a beauty brand, the brand hopes to launch an annual KOL cooperation plan and use KOLs for brand marketing and conversion. But the reality is that there are more than 120,000 KOLs to choose from in the beauty industry, and it is extremely difficult for business personnel to directly find matching KOL objects during the actual implementation process.

The brand faces at least five challenges in selecting KOLs:

• How to find KOLs who often talk about categories such as "eye cream"?
• Which KOLs do competing beauty brands use for promotion?
• Which KOLs prefer to mention product efficacy words?
• Which KOLs frequently mention the brand information?
• Which beauty KOLs are frequently collaborated with by industry brands?

What actually needs to be solved behind these five major problems is the comprehensive data insights of KOLs. Only by measuring the matching degree from five dimensions, including sub-categories, competitor dynamics, social content, user interests, and media attributes, can the most suitable KOL list be selected for the beauty brand.

The multi-dimensional screening of KOLs can be solved through professional technical means of AI big data monitoring and analysis, but after preliminary condition screening, we still found that there are about 6,600 KOL resources from different platforms that need further detailed analysis. These 6,600 KOLs require a detailed secondary analysis with a finer granularity.

Through a secondary analysis of the KOLs screened out in the first round and the specific product characteristics of the beauty brand, the matching value with the brand was further calculated from four dimensions: fan portrait, content portrait, interaction analysis, and brand analysis. Finally, a list of about 420 highly matching KOLs was screened out.

These 420 precise KOLs will play a huge role in the subsequent marketing process, but in the specific implementation process, the brand still needs an execution-level combination strategy. Since each brand has different characteristics and competitive situations, each brand should have a unique marketing model. Shiqu will choose the best combination of marketing and communication strategies based on the specific situation of the brand.

Due to the particularities of each brand’s specific circumstances, KOL marketing strategies will also be different for each brand. Faced with the complex KOL delivery environment, if brands want to quickly find a KOL list and delivery combination that suits them, they need to rely on the technical means of data algorithms. Otherwise, it will be difficult to take the initiative in marketing by relying solely on manual and experience-based investigations.

With the development of mobile Internet and the Internet of Things, the future media communication environment will undoubtedly become more and more fragmented. KOLs will continue to emerge in various emerging vertical fields, and the selection costs for brands will continue to increase. But on the other hand, the marketing implementation of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence can help companies reduce the cost of selecting KOLs, and using technology to empower marketing will be an inevitable trend in future brand communication.

Author: SocialTouchST (ID: SocialTouchST)

Source: SocialTouchST (ID: SocialTouchST)