Top 3 Insights about Influencers & Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)

1. Influencer or KOL objectives & performance

There is no KOL campaign success without clear objectives! 

For your first campaign, you need to consider the KPI limitation per Social Media and also the type of accounts to make sure you are fully utilizing the right platform to achieve your campaign goals. For example, although Instagram previously has limited metrics, it is now gradually offering more valuable insights and metrics through Instagram Stories.

Learn more about how to analyse stories performance on Instagram

Potential Social Media Campaign Goals

• Brand Awareness
• Traffic Generation
• Sales (Don’t be too optimistic at the very early stage)

How to track

• URLs, Promo Code, Product Tags help monitoring ROI of influencer and KOL campaigns
• Third party Social Media listening platforms help monitoring influencer campaign impacts in terms of sentiments and reach
• Third party SEO solution platforms help monitoring backlinks and impacts of  influencer campaigns

2. Influencer or KOL segmentation

For an influencer campaign, the most important part is to identify which type of influencer fits the best with your brand positioning and your core audience.

Just like what you would do for a traditional online ad campaign, you have to test, optimise and validate its success, then collaborate again with influencers and KOLs that performed well. However, make sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and miss potential influencers.

Segment influencers or KOLs into groups based on:

• Audience size e.g. KOL Group 1 = below 30K followers, KOL Group 2 = below 70K followers etc.
• Engagement rate e.g. Likes, Comments and Shares
• Content e.g. fitness, beauty, lifestyle etc.

Read more to know how to choose the right influencers and KOLs

3. Influencer or KOL activation

To make your management easier, we recommend planning different incentive packages per group, especially if you need to engage a large number of KOLs and micro-influencers. For example, KOL Group 1 gets Incentive Package A, KOL Group 2 gets Incentive Package B.

From our point of view, social media is not traditional media which you always need to pay to make your presence felt! High engagement rate is based on authentic and appealing content, social media influencer campaign has to respect and reflect social media codes. 

By offering a mix of services, products and first-hand experience instead of cash incentives, you can assure influencers work with you because they like your brand and not because you’re paying them. This is important for brands because establishing an authentic relationship with influencers leads to candid content, which is combined with the usual storytelling style that their followers like.

Read more to know how to properly activate the KOLs you selected?

Take Away ! How to stay one step ahead with your influencer marketing campaigns

Long tail influencer strategy

When you think about Influencers and KOLs, you need to think about SEO!

Since everyone is fighting to reach the same big influencers, try to target other new influencers with small and medium-sized audience that are under the radar of your competitors. Micro influencers are also more engaging and much more open to work with brands through win/win partnership.

Influencer relationship management strategy

When you think about Influencers and KOLs, you need to think about CRM! 

(Almost) No one will buy a new product immediately by merely seeing a KOL’s posts on Instagram. Considering a long term influencer relationship program is maybe the way to reach several time your audience to boost conversions.

Read the full version of our Influencer marketing campaign definition article on our website!