Viral Access: Discovering And Creating Brand Values Through Micro-KOL Marketing

With the rising popularity of social media where everyone is able to share their opinions and lifestyles with their audience, the ones having strong followings and greater influences over others with their fields of expertise, knowledge, and professions are defined as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), including TV celebrities, bloggers, vloggers, and online-streaming hosts, which are considered as the core elements of influencer marketing strategy since KOLs have the power in affecting others’ purchasing decisions. The prior successes of several influencers making KOL as careers on social media have inspired more individuals to begin establishing and building their own channels, resulting in a massive growth of KOL in numbers in recent years. With numerous KOLs currently being active on all sorts of social media platforms, how to choose the right KOLs to promote one’s business effectively remains a challenge.

Reputation and Review

Positive reputations and reviews have always been incredibly important factors in influencing consumer buying decisions. A product with excellent online reviews is perceived as the most trusted source in delivering brand information and messages to both prospects and customers. According to Nielsen’s Global Trust In Advertising with over 28,000 Internet respondents being surveyed from 56 countries, 92% of consumers consider recommendations from friends and family more trustworthy than all other forms of advertising. In other words, word of mouth recommendation is essential for any business as it serves as the trigger behind up to 50% of purchasing decisions especially on social media. People who have developed substantial fondness towards an influencer’s content and channel over time naturally become their loyal followers. They tend to engage in conversations and further share a KOL’s posted contents, even just a simple message or a photo, to others. By observing various niche groups on social media which attract and connect group members over specific shared interests, Viral Access, the pioneer company specializing in social media and micro-KOLs marketing in Asia, has foreseen the business potential and profitability that could be drawn from collaborating with KOLs from Asia Pacific region for marketing purpose.

Content

Businesses used to promote merchandise by focusing on product qualities, but such focus has shifted to marketing content and channels lately. No matter how boring or unappealing a product seems to be, marketers can still produce campaigns that are entertaining and engaging by adding in creative content. Take marketing campaigns of a new whiteout tape made by Tipp-EX in 2011 for instance, the content featured a series of customizable YouTube videos showing encounters and possible interactions, which could be repetitively edited by their whiteout tape, between a hunter and a bear. It was launched right before the start of school year in hopes of generating more revenue. Shortly after the launch, their campaign was viewed over 46 million times with more than one million shares on social media, resulting in over 30%.of increase in sales. In light of the case, content is undeniably the most crucial element in determining the success or failure of any marketing campaigns. Therefore, instead of controlling contents under the hand of marketers, Viral Access empowers micro-KOLs to create their own original contents to provide a sense of authenticity of the promoted brands or products and to build micro-KOLs’ trustworthiness from their followers since such marketing contents not only fit with influencers’ personal styles, but the same time still being well-received by their audience. 

Databank

Viral Access specializes in collaborating with micro-KOLs across all major social media platforms to advertise brands and products. By possessing the largest influencer databank with over 85,000 micro-KOLs covering more than 35 categories in most of the Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam just to name a few, Viral Access is capable of constantly delivering new influencers to its clientele. As micro-KOLs from different categories have their own unique personalities and styles in content creation, through analyzing demographic data of their audience and what contents generate the best engagement, Viral Access can create marketing plans tailored to clients’ needs and deliver their brand massages more explicitly. Moreover, due to the tremendous growing amount of micro-KOLs in the databank, the company has developed its own fully-automated influencer grading system to conduct evaluations of each micro-KOL’s performance and ROI rate, which allows Viral Access to efficiently match the right micro-KOLs of different ages, genders, the amount of followers, and lifestyles to its clients in order to promote marketing campaigns to their target customers and increasing sales as well as brand values in a more strategic manner.

Many marketers hold the assumption that big-name KOLs such as celebrities would increase their brand or product exposure since they possess massive fan bases. However, the engagement rates from their audience are often relatively low, which indicate their followers may likely to have seen/read/watched such content while browsing through social media channels but forgotten it soon afterwards. In this scenario, hiring big-name KOLs offers no guarantee in increasing online traffic let along generating more profits. Instead of working with big-name KOLs, Viral Access believes in the power of micro-KOLs, who are defined as influencers with fewer than 50,000 followers, as they carry higher levels of authenticity and greater abilities in establishing closer relationships with their followers hence can create better engagement rates and deeper impacts comparing to the former. Those advantages would most likely lead to better raises of brand publicity and more effective increases in sales and conversions.