How Key Opinion Leaders Can Boost Your Brands Reputation

Key Opinion Leaders, or KOLs for short, are celebrities or online personalities with a large following that your brand can utilise to boost reputation, leads and sales. It has become increasingly popular to use Chinese celebrity endorsement in social media campaigns, as they target a new market of young millennials effectively.

One thing that all KOLs on social media have in common is that they all have a huge following of people who engage with their content daily. In terms of social media marketing, this translates to a great amount of trust. Their followers are loyal to them and believe that most of what they endorse must also have value. This makes KOLs excellent tools for your brand to utilise.

In this blog post, we will outline some of the different ways your brand can use KOLs to boost its reputation.

Sharing Your Content

One of the easiest ways to utilise KOLs, whether they be Wechat influencers or other Chinese celebrity endorsements, is to pay them to share content directly from your profile. A share from a KOL is like giving your product a tick of approval from the KOL and in turn their community of followers.

If you are going to use this tactic, it is key to make sure your KOL is authentic in their approach. It is one thing to share a social media post, but it is important that there is an ‘authentic’ purpose behind the share. This generation of youth consumers can easily see through advertising tactics, and KOL content sharing is often caught out by seeming inauthentic.

For example: if you want a KOL to share a post from your social media page about one of your products, they need to look like they were sharing it for a purpose. This can be done through adding a caption such as ‘I absolutely love these shoes’. An uncaptioned product share can be instantly recognisable as a marketing tactic from consumers and ignored as a result.

Giveaways

For a more truly authentic approach, send KOLs giveaways of your brand’s product or vouchers for your service. Getting a KOL to experience something themselves is an excellent way to ensure they respond with authentic content that their followers will trust.

By sending a giveaway, you do not ensure that the KOL is going to respond publicly to receiving this product. So do your research and learn which KOLs will truly benefit from being gifted your product. This will increase your chances of a positive review.

For example, if you have a cosmetics brand, sending giveaways to makeup bloggers and beauty reviewers will be much more effective than sending them to food reviewers. Cosmetics KOLs will hopefully appreciate the gesture and post about your product in return once they have used it.

This tactic requires you to have trust that your own brand is going to be something the KOL will enjoy, as their response is likely to be authentic. The fact that you have given them something for free is not always a way to ensure their response will be positive, especially if they are a major KOL who is earning much more than just product giveaways.

Choose Between Macro and Micro-Influencers

Understanding the difference between macro and micro influencers can really help to enhance your influencer campaign. Macro-influencers will usually have tens of thousands of followers at least on their chosen social media platform. These influencers are handy to utilise if you want to reach a larger audience and gain exposure, but they don’t tend to have excellent engagement levels.

Micro-influencers, however, will have much fewer followers – usually in the low thousands. The benefit of micro-influencers is that their followers are much more likely to engage with their content, and they can be viewed as much more authentic as a result.

Exclusive Events

A key way to generate buzz for your brand or product is by hosting influencer events. These events have seen brands blow-up overnight. You could host a simple Instameet with a selected group of micro influencers that are relevant to your brand. Or you could fly a group of models and macro influencers out to a private Island to generate hype for your music festival.

The great thing about influencer events, whether they be big or small, is that they create a powerful buzz around a ‘who’s who’ of the exclusive invite list. Attendees will be posting about it on their social media, with your brands collateral scattered throughout the imagery. This will help boost your brand’s reputation as a result of association.

Weibo Influencer Campaigns with Star China

If you’re looking to boost your brands Chinese reputation through a Wechat or Weibo influencer campaign, Star China has the resources to help you pull it off seamlessly.

We have a resource bank of over 150 Australia Chinese influencers at our disposal to help you expose your brand to the right kinds of people. Talk to us today to discuss what our KOL campaigns can do for you! Contact info: 1300 228 525 Email: info@starchina.com.au