Influencer Marketing: How to Do it Right

Willabelle Ong, a Singaporean premium fashion influencer, has 2.1 million views on her Chanel No.5 Advent Calendar unboxing video. Meanwhile, in China, Li Jiaqi, a popular live streamer with millions of people on average tuned in to his live streaming event, sold 600 million USD worth of goods in 6 hours. In Indonesia, 1.54 million user-generated short videos were generated for the Philips Home Appliance campaign by utilizing TikTok and its content creators.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer marketing industry is set to grow to approximately $16.4 Billion in 2022. More than 75% of brand marketers admit that they intend to dedicate a portion of the budget to influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is lucrative to lift brand awareness, reduce buyers’ consideration time, and drive sales. However, doing it successfully requires a lot of research, negotiation, creativity, and project(crisis) management. With our years of experience working with hundreds of content creators across Southeast Asia in numerous campaigns, we will spill our secrets in creating a successful influencer marketing campaign!

Influencer Marketing: Does Bigger Always Better?

When it comes to influencer marketing, the industry usually divides them into four categories: Mega Influencers, Macro Influencers, Micro-influencers, and Nano Influencers. Mega influencers is usually a celebrity with more than 1 million followers. Macro influencers is usually an individual with a large follower base ranging from 100k-1M followers. On the other hand, micro and nano influencers have smaller follower counts with micro-influencers ranging from 10k-100k and nano influencers having less than 10k followers.

However, sometimes, micro-influencers with fewer followers can produce the best results for companies and brands. This is because they can produce more clicks, more engagement, and more ability to create a bond with their followers resulting in higher ROI. On the other hand, engagement is often not very high for influencers that have a massive following.

So, whenever you start an influencer marketing campaign always ask yourself first:

“What do you want to gain from this campaign?”

If you’re a new brand and in need of big brand awareness, utilizing mega and macro influencers is the best choice to grab more audiences. However, if your objective is to build trust or drive sales, utilizing micro and nano influencers is often more successful as they drive more engagement.

Tips & Tricks for KOL Recruitment

Now that you know your campaign objective, it’s time to browse and pick the right KOL to fit your campaign. Here are 5 tips and tricks that you can use to pick the right KOL(s):

1. Design Your Campaign

After knowing your objective the next things you have to decide are:

What platforms are you choosing?

Not all platforms have the same KOL that fits your campaign criteria. A KOL may be very popular on TikTok but does not have much impact on other platforms like Instagram or YouTube. Each platform also has a different target audience. If your target audience is mostly Millenials and Gen-Z, TikTok might be the right platform for you. However, if most of your target audience is male, YouTube might be better because the platform has more male viewers than females.

What kind of content fits your campaign?

There is a lot of content you can create together with your KOL, but first, you must decide the type of content that fits your campaign. Is it short videos, static pictures, or long videos? Do you want the creator to create hard-selling content with a call-to-action and a brand name appearing everywhere in the video? Or do you want your creator to do more soft-selling content by incorporating your products into their daily content?

2. Come Up With a Creative Concept

Now you might roughly know the design of your campaign, the next step is to come up with the creative concept that will serve as the basis for your influencer to create content for your campaign. Yes, usually influencers will share ideas on how they would incorporate your brand in their content but from our experience, having your own creative concept is better. We say this because you’re the one who knows your product best, this way you can also give a clear direction for the influencer to work on their content. Having a creative concept in mind also helps you screen the KOL you need to pick for your campaign.

3. Do Your Research

By now you have your objective campaign design and creative concept. You could start shortlisting some influencers for your campaign. Your next step would be to check your influencer’s background and history. It is as simple as checking their social media timeline and googling their name. By doing your research, you would know whether the influencer’s persona fits your brand, whether they are working with a direct competitor, or whether or not they have issues that could negatively impact your brand.

We usually start with a simple google search of the influencer to understand their background. We don’t want them to have a bad reputation or be involved in a situation that could turn into a PR nightmare.

Then, we would go through their feed to see what brands they have been working with. Some brands avoid working with a KOL who has recently worked with a similar competitor. Scrolling through the feed will also give us a glimpse of their personality which we can use to assess whether they are suitable for the brand.

We also use analytic tools like Social Blade to help us get deeper insights into an influencer such as engagement rate, impressions, demographic, etc., which the influencer may not be willing to provide. Furthermore, not all those data are presented on their profile but as marketers and brand managers, we need such data to plan the campaign and set KPIs.

4. Adjust the Budget

Influencers’ rate varies from one another even though they may have the same number of followers. Sometimes, a lower number of followers does not guarantee a cheaper price. This is because they have other unique selling points such as higher engagement or higher sales rates. You must be ready to adjust the budget you have determined before.

5. A Good Contract Is a Must

Before starting to work with a KOL, we usually draft a contract that would best serve both parties. Make sure you discuss thoroughly the scope of work you want and state them on the contract. Other than the scope of work, timeline, delivery, number of days the post will remain on the account, commercial rights, IP rights, and payment terms should also be included in the contract to prevent miscommunication and failure to deliver.

There could be a situation where some micro and nano KOL would have little knowledge of the importance of contracts. Make sure to spend 30-50 minutes online meeting to discuss this work contract with your KOL if needed.

TikTok Winning The Heart of Indonesian With Influencer Marketing Campaign

Back in 2018, when TikTok was still a brand-new app in Indonesia, they were challenged with public image backlash, so it needed to charm the millennial generations and boost its image. They came to us because of Nanyang Bridge Media due to our expertise in influencer marketing.

Working with hundreds of influencers and content creators, we came up with a customized solution for an integrated marketing campaign, combining a series of online challenges and big-scale offline events to strategically leverage the promotion of the spirit of ASIAN Games, catering to the young generations. Winners of the social media challenges across SEA were invited to ASIAN Games as special guests to experience the enthusiasm of organizers, athletes, and volunteers on ASIAN Games.

Our integrated marketing solution was a huge success and the numbers speak for themselves: