What is Influencer Marketing? Here is what you need to know!

catalogue：

• What is Influencer marketing?
• What are the benefits of Influencer marketing?
• Three marketing methods for KOLs to combine with “social selling”
• How to start implementing Influencer marketing?
• When tracking the effectiveness of Influencer marketing, pay attention to these three key points
• To enhance the effectiveness of Influencer marketing, consider implementing the following “KOL+” marketing strategies
• Do I need to find a professional company to execute Influencer marketing?

In an era dominated by social media, “Influencer Marketing” is a crucial marketing strategy for brands to establish influence in the market. How can a brand maximize marketing benefits through key opinion leaders（KOL)? Utilizing exclusive AI data analysis technology combined with years of practical experience in influencer marketing, KOL Radar will guide you step by step to understand the fundamental concepts, execution details, and marketing strategies of influencer marketing. This will empower you to excel in planning and executing influencer marketing projects!

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing is a marketing strategy in which brands collaborate with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to utilize their social influence to promote products and services. KOLs leverage their strengths and product features to create content, including visuals, videos, and written materials, that align with the brand’s identity. This content is then shared on social media platforms, generating significant traffic conversion and building valuable word-of-mouth reputation for the brand, ultimately achieving various marketing objectives.

What are the benefits of Influencer Marketing?

Increase Brand Exposure

When the traffic dividend (benefits arising from online traffic) diminishes and organic reach in social communities declines, KOLs can utilize creativity and personal charm to package product information, swiftly disseminating it within their networks. This assists brands in reaching potential customers, generating product buzz, and enhancing brand recognition.

Boost Conversion

Compared to overtly promotional content, consumers are more inclined to trust influencers’ personal experiences and recommendations. Therefore, brands can seize a larger share of consumer sentiment through genuine sharing from highly popular influencers, harnessing online traffic to drive opportunities for conversion.

Create Community Buzz

Unlike traditional media advertisements with fixed exposure periods, KOL’s native content can persist on social media platforms through “website retention” and “SEO search strategies.” Regardless of when consumers seek product-related information, they can find recommended content. Therefore, brands can easily establish long-term reputations through KOL endorsements on social media, enhancing consumer impressions.

Three major benefits of Influencer marketing: brand exposure, achieving conversions, creating word-of-mouth. (Source: KOL Radar）

Three Marketing Methods for Influencers “Social Selling”

Brands collaborate with internet influencers, inviting KOLs to promote and sell products on social media platforms, converting their influence and appeal into “product sales” Depending on the format of social selling, this can be categorized into promotion, guidance, and group buying. The following are common Influencer Marketing strategies.

Influencer Promotion for Sales

The most common brand marketing strategy, primarily involves the brand inviting KOLs to simply introduce products, emphasize product advantages, and share personal usage experiences, aiming to generate interest among followers.

Influencer Guided Selling

The difference between Guided Selling And Promotion lies in the fact that in Influencer Guided Selling, apart from introducing the product, KOLs also directly include purchase links in the post captions or video descriptions. This encourages followers to make immediate purchases, actively facilitating conversion.

Influencer Group Buying

Directly initiated by influencers, influencer Group Buying rallies followers to make purchases. Brands usually offer an “influencer exclusive price” lower than the market price to enhance the incentive for followers to place orders. The collaboration between brands and influencers often revolves around a profit-sharing model, intensifying the promotional motivation for influencers.

Three forms of KOL social selling: KOL Promotion for Purchase, KOL Guided Shopping, KOL Group Buying. (Source: KOL Radar）

How to Start Implementing Influencer Marketing?

Confirm marketing objectives, formulate marketing strategies

Brands should first establish the primary goals of their Influencer Marketing project, such as increasing exposure for a new product or boosting product conversions. Next, brands need to consider which social media platforms to utilize for exposure, how many KOLs are required, and the anticipated style of content to achieve the main objectives.

Search for suitable KOL candidates for collaboration

After determining the project goals and outlining strategies, brands can begin searching for suitable candidates. KOL Radar suggests that brands can observe influencer data such as “view rate,” “follower growth rate,” and “engagement rate” to assess whether the influencer aligns with the brand’s needs.

For instance, a KOL with high view rate and engagement rate signifies strong interaction with their followers, indicating higher potential for conversions due to active audience interaction and loyalty. On the other hand, influencers with a high follower growth rate indicates rapid popularity growth and viral potential. Leveraging the advantages of content’s long-tail effect, brands can choose to collaborate with influencers having higher follower growth rates among those with similar follower counts. This approach enables brands to achieve higher social media traffic with relatively lower collaboration costs.

Advertising and promotion

After influencers have created content, brands can obtain authorization for related materials and proceed to advertise on various social media platforms. This amplifies the exposure and engagement of KOL collaboration content, resulting in greater benefits for Influencer Marketing and boosting brand reputation.

Project closure and optimization

Brands can assess the outcomes of influencer collaborations and determine if their performance meets the average standards. This evaluation helps identify areas for improvement, including candidate selection, content presentation, and platform choices, for better planning in future influencer marketing campaigns.

Additionally, consumers’ reception of influencer collaboration content often becomes evident directly in social media interactions. Brands can analyze comments from followers on collaboration content to understand audience preferences and assess whether influencers have successfully generated a positive social media impact for the product.

Four steps to execute Influencer marketing. (Source: KOL Radar）

When Tracking the Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing, Pay Attention to These Three Key Points

Interactive metrics

This encompasses metrics such as likes, comments, shares, views, and reach of stories. Brands can utilize “interactive data” to comprehend the interactive feedback that the influencer collaboration content receives within social media platforms.

Performance metrics

These include engagement rate, view rate, and click rate on story links, among others. These metrics help brands analyze the “level of audience engagement with influencer content.” Brands can also use performance metrics to compare the outcomes of the current influencer collaboration with past collaborations or differences in effectiveness among different candidates, aiding in planning for future collaborations.

Conversion metrics

Closely tied to the cost of Influencer Marketing, these include CPE (Cost Per Engagement), CPV (Cost Per View), CPA (Cost Per Action), and word-of-mouth value, among others. Brands can use conversion metrics to evaluate whether the Influencer Marketing campaign aligns with cost-effectiveness.

For instance, CPE and CPA represent the average cost a brand has to invest to prompt customers to further explore a product or even take a purchasing action. KOL Radar recommends brands include elements like “discount codes,” “Influencer-exclusive purchase links,” and “UTM code links” within collaboration content. This enables tracking of Influencer Marketing effectiveness.

Influencer marketing performance indicators Interactive metrics, Performance metrics, and Conversion metrics. (Source: KOL Radar）

To Enhance the Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing, Consider Implementing the Following “KOL+” Marketing Strategies

Influencer Marketing assists brands in achieving effective exposure and conversion of products and services within social communities. Taking it a step further, integrating the “KOL+” concept into your strategic planning can maximize the social influence of KOLs and deliver exceptional Influencer Marketing results for your brand!

Influencer + Influencer

By crafting a well-thought-out campaign that brings multiple influencers together, your product can benefit from the follower traffic of different influencers. This creates a buzz and amplifies the exposure of your product through various angles, generating increased visibility and interest.

Influencer + Media Buy

Brands can transform the native content produced in collaboration with KOLs into advertisements to be distributed across various channels. This enhances the visibility of both the product and the brand.

Influencer + SEO

By integrating influencer collaboration content with SEO keywords, brands can elevate their visibility within social media platforms, making it easier to reach their target audience.

Influencer + Offline Event

Extending influencer’s online traffic to offline activities can amplify exposure benefits. For example, brands can invite influencers to be one-day store managers or special guests, attracting followers to visit physical stores, make purchases, and share their experiences through check-ins or posts.

The “KOL+” strategy concept. (Source: KOL Radar）

Do I Need to Find a Professional Company to Execute Influencer Marketing?

Brands can execute Influencer Marketing projects on their own or entrust the projects to professional influencer marketing agencies. However, the typical brand has limited access to influencer lists and social media data. This may lead to significant costs in terms of human resources and time when selecting candidates and formulating Influencer Marketing strategies. Additionally, estimating the project’s effectiveness can be challenging.

Hence, having an “AI Big Data Technology” equipped influencer marketing company is the ideal partner for brands executing Influencer Marketing. AI influencer marketing companies can leverage vast data to help brands swiftly and accurately identify suitable influencers.

With their extensive experience in Influencer Marketing services, they can devise content strategies that align with social media trends, providing brands with professional closing reports and optimization suggestions after projects conclude. This ensures brands have a more directed approach in their next Influencer Marketing strategies, effectively enhancing the outcomes of Influencer Marketing campaigns!

“Traditional influencer search” VS “AI data-driven influencer search” (Source: KOL Radar）

iKala’s KOL Radar possesses a database of over 1,000,000 international influencers and over 100M of real-time social media platform data from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. By utilizing advanced AI technology, it delivers optimal recommendations for influencers and builds precise and outstanding influencer marketing strategies with data.

The professional team of KOL Radar possesses substantial experience of providing services to brand customers. We offer marketing and planning, influencer matchmaking, digital advertising, etc., with coverage in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Japan. Our services have successfully met the requirements of over 10,000 enterprises.

Interested in learning more about Influencer Marketing strategies? 

Feel free to inquire for a free consultation with KOL Radar