KOLC Marketing: The ABCs of executing an effective KOL + KOC Activation Part 2 – 评价达人

The ABCs of Effective KOLC Activations: Part 2

11 May 2022

Last time, we walked you through the 5 steps for an impactful, measurable and scalable KOLC marketing campaign in China. Today, we’re going to show you how you can maintain the success of your campaign, touching on areas such as retaining influencer engagement, boosting social media interactions and impressions and leveraging the success of an existing campaign to launch a newer, more impactful campaign.

So, picking up from where we left off…let’s take a walk through the campaign management process!

Section 1: Launching your campaign

You’ve selected your influencers, you’ve developed content angles for your target audiences. Now what? It’s time to launch your campaign!

With the help of your dedicated campaign management team, the green light is given to your influencer pool to commence with posting. The horses are off to the races as you see content from your campaign appearing in your social media searches.

Section 2: Monitoring your KOLC content

After you’ve launched your campaign, you need to constantly inspect content drafted by your KOLC pool. Are they drafting as agreed? Are they posting content that aligns with your content brief?

At this stage, it is very important to maintain a stable and clear channel of communication with your KOLCs. This is best handled by a dedicated team tasked with handling communications with KOLCs.

Content should be thoroughly validated before being sent to KOLCs. This helps to minimise any back and forth communication between you and your KOLCs. If content is not properly validated prior to executing, your team will notice content errors after execution. Then they will have to reach out to all the KOLCs affected to request that they modify content as the campaign is underway. This would involve deleting posts, submitting a revised content brief and reposting. The result is not favourable on all fronts:

Influencers will grow tired of collaborating with your brand and eventually cease to work with you.
Inaccurate content will be delivered to your target audiences.
Inconsistent content will damage your brand reputation.

These are problems that often occur when brands attempt to execute a KOLC campaign without the proper resources or with the assistance of an unreliable influencer service provider.

Section 3: Monitoring your campaign performance

You need to understand and visualise how effective your campaign is. How are general consumers and social media users responding to posts by your content creators? How do you measure the success of your campaign?

These are some of the most important metrics of evaluating your campaign performance.

CPE (Cost per engagement) – how much it costs to get one like
CPR (Cost per reading) – this metric gauges cost-effectiveness tells you how much it costs to get one read
CPV (Cost per view) – this metric is more applicable to video platforms such as Douyin. It is a measurement of how much it costs to get one video view
CTR (Click-through rate) – this metric defines the proportion of people who are exposed to the content and actually open/read/view the content
Share of voice – this is the proportion of the market your brand owns in relation to your competitors. This metric enables you to quantify the visibility of your brand so that you can understand how much you dominate the conversation in your industry
Exposure – this indicates how many people your content is displayed to on a social media platform
Engagements – this indicates the number of interactions your content received from users, such as likes, comments, shares, collects, etc.
Engagement rate – this metric measures the amount of interaction earned by your content relative to reach
Reach – the number of people who see your content
Sentiment – analysing emotions towards the brand behind comments and messages on social media posts
Keyword search in marketplace – stay on top of searches for keywords related to your brand on Tmall, Taobao, JD.com and other platforms you are selling on. This will help you later on when understanding the ROI of your KOLC activation.

Section 4: Keeping your KOLCs engaged

As a brand, it is of the utmost importance to maintain steady, constant communication with your KOLCs. In addition to communicating with them about content, you also need to keep them updated about new products and activities you may be planning. This is important on several fronts, including

Influencer retention – keeping influencer relationships warm so that the opportunity for future collaborations remains
Content monitoring – track the content created by your influencers so that you can respond to comments from their followers, giving the impression you are a brand that actively listens to its audiences on social media. This goes a long way in establishing brand authenticity, a major component of brand equity
Accurate, up-to-date influencing – if your influencers are kept on track with the latest information on your brand and products, they will be able to relay that information to their followers and accurately respond to questions their followers may leave on their social media posts.

With constant, consistent communication with your influencers, you can help increase the overall efficacy of your campaign.

Section 5: Understanding your campaign metrics

As your campaign rolls on, you need to stay on top of vital campaign metrics to understand what is working and what is not working. Your campaign performance metrics are vital in enabling you to compare current results with those from previous campaigns. The idea is for you to understand what went differently between these two activations so that you can identify areas for improvement as well as practices that facilitated greater campaign success and ultimately zero in on ROI-boosting best practices.

At the same time, campaign metrics enable you to benchmark your campaign against similar campaigns from competitors so that you can see how your China KOLC influencer marketing strategy stacks up against those of competitor brands. Of course, any benchmarking needs to take place against a competitor in the same industry sector as your brand. For example, a skincare campaign can only be compared to a skincare brand.

Let’s take a look at how this all folds out in practice:

After totally rocking it with their first official product release in China, Gold Standard, the Canadian skincare brand that did its due diligence testing its products before release, wanted to execute a KOLC campaign to further boost the success of its Little Gold Bottle serum product. The PJdaren team selected 1000 KOLCs, which consisted of 15 top-tier KOLs, 35 mid-tier KOLs, 70 micro KOLs, 180 top-tier KOCs, 250 mid-tier KOCs and 450 micro KOCs.

After conducting a thorough IHUT, Gold Standard’s team had a clear idea of their brand’s target audience and market perception. With this data, the PJdaren team was able to profile Gold Standard’s consumer spectrum and design the best fitting content angles for the brand.

Then, PJdaren’s team reached into its 4 million-strong KOLC community to filter through and identify the right content creators for Gold Standard’s activation. In particular, this consisted of KOCs that frequently publish skincare tips and product recommendations to their followers. The majority of Gold Standard’s KOLC pool were Xiaohongshu and Douyin influencers.

The PJdaren team worked with Gold Standard to develop content briefs for each KOLC category. After these were verified by both teams, PJdaren delivered the content briefs to influencers in each corresponding category, and were responsible for ensuring that all product samples arrived to each influencer on time as expected.

Along the way, PJdaren’s influencer services team liaised between Gold Standard and its KOLC pool, communicating information about Gold Standard’s 618 pop-up store to all influencers so that they could broadcast said information to their followers. This contributed significantly to the turnout at the brand’s offline event.

As the campaign rolled on, Gold Standard’s team were able to log onto the dedicated PJdaren Campaign Management System to view real-time campaign performance data. From this dashboard, they could see detailed engagement and exposure statistics for the campaign.

Through the dashboard, Gold Standard’s team could view samples of content posted by their KOLC pool along with engagement statistics. At the same time, the dashboard’s real-time data enabled Gold Standard to understand which campaign strategies worked and which were less successful through an analysis of campaign interaction data. For example, the brand realised that posts with certain keywords such as “Canadian users” did not receive as many engagements as posts that emphasised “Chinese users”. With further consultation with PJdaren’s campaign management team, the content strategy was revised to refocus all content as designed for the Chinese consumer.

Let’s get in touch and we’ll show you how you can execute a gold standard KOLC campaign in China!

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About 评价达人 – PJdaren:

Since 2016, PJdaren has helped some of the world’s largest brands build trust, collect insights and drive sales in China by engaging Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) through our state-of-the-art influencer marketing platform.

Our software and services connect brands with our over 4 million-strong KOC and KOL community. We facilitate targeted, authentic conversations and content, enabling brands to capture the market with measurable results.

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