We at Kobe, an influencer marketing agency, constantly encourage our clients to rethink their KOL marketing strategy. As influencer and KOL marketing becomes popular, brands and marketers alike have begun honing in on their campaign strategies.
However, approaching influencer marketing just like others is a critical limiting factor to your campaign’s success. Hence, in this article, we will show you how you can rethink your influencer marketing approach.
How brands typically approach KOL and influencer campaigns
Most KOL and influencer campaigns begin with a straightforward goal: engaging well-polished, popular social media influencers to promote your brand to help boost value and awareness. From there, the brand’s marketers will focus on objectives and KPIs, tracking them over the campaign’s duration to measure its success.
Once the campaign’s objective is set, the brand’s marketers will choose the social media platforms that they wish to promote. From there, they are able to develop a list of KOLs and influencers that they look to partner with.
The limitations of a data-driven strategy
Choosing the promotional platforms and types of content and setting benchmarks for your marketing campaign prior to hiring a content creator limits the effectiveness of the KOL and influencer marketing campaign significantly. Marketers often undervalue the influencing aspect that influencers and KOLs offer, prioritising data and numbers during their strategising process.
Marketers occasionally fall into the trap of quickly selecting KOLs and influencers who looks good on paper but may not be the most cost-effective and beneficial choice for the campaign.
While numerical data is vital when choosing who you want to partner with, such a quantitative figure alone will only offer a surface-level perspective of the influencer and KOL. You also need to consider their expertise, storytelling ability, relationship with their followers, content quality, and, most importantly, alignment with the brand’s value.
The general public, with their savviness in media, is experienced and knowledgeable enough to notice when a brand campaign feels forced, which might result in adverse consequences, such as reduced engagement.
Adopting a creator-first approach
Rather than prioritising benchmark metrics, adopting a creator-first approach will further your brand campaign. Selecting and partnering with influencer creators whose creative content and reach can help your brand target the right customers authentically.
A creator-first approach also helps you to solidify your campaign according to the individual influencer profiles. For example, rather than limiting the campaign to solely Instagram, a creator-first approach must extend your consideration to include YouTube or TikTok, depending on the particular influencer’s profile.
Planning your marketing campaign in such a manner offers your brand the opportunity to broaden your campaign’s reach in an organic manner across varying social platforms, allowing you to capture a wider scale of audience.
Developing the best strategy
The primary advantage of a creator-first approach in your marketing campaign strategy is that the selected KOL’s or influencer’s strengths will shape your campaign strategy. As a brand, you need to have a clear campaign goal, planning out vital talking points based on the service or product you are promoting. Nevertheless, you need to leave room for personalisation and customisation for the influencers to suggest.
The partnered KOL or influencer knows their followers the best, and this is a crucial element that brands should put their trust in. Allowing for creative approaches and breathing room enables them to make the campaign concept their own, which increases the genuineness of the content.
It is vital that brands establish open feedback with the partnered influencer, cutting out any content that may not be aligned with the brand while keeping an open mind in trusting the influencer’s knowledge and expertise. After all, you have decided to partner with them for a particular reason – their creative expertise. So, know when to relax and let their creative approach take precedence. That is the whole meaning behind partnership and collaboration.
Conclusion
KOL and influencer marketing have long been a staple aspect of digital marketing. By leveraging the partnership aspect of KOL and influencer marketing campaigns, both the creator and brand will benefit, with the end results being more impactful, collaborative, and results-driven.
This is why engaging agencies, such as Kobe, can help match brands to the right influencers and KOLs. In our many years in the industry, we have enabled and empowered brands and businesses, helping them achieve their marketing campaign goals. If you would also like to experience success, then look no further than https://www.getkobe.com/ to get in touch with us today!
