Last but not least, the final article of our 3-article series distilling our best practices for KOL campaigns. You can find our entire series “How to implement your KOL campaign?” in the DBL insights section of our website.
Once you have defined your objective and selected your KOLs, you need to properly activate the influencers. Here are our recommendations on two key topics: repetition and incentives.
Repetition
No one sees, clicks and buys in 5 minutes. A multiple-activation and long-term influencer collaboration is probably the best way to maximize your impact. Repeated activations of KOLs are ideal to re-target your audience in order to inshore a sustainable awareness before any conversion opportunity. Don’t consider influencers as a one-off reach provider! A sustainable KOLs strategy could also help you to enrich your content storytelling with more engaging and inspiring content. Influencer marketing is also a very efficient way to collect relevant feedback about your products/services quality.
Overall, a strong Influencer or KOLs relationship management strategy could help your brands to be more visible, more inspiring, and more aligned with your customer’s expectations.
Incentives for KOL campaign
The incentives are one of the most important ingredients to engage the right influencers. Hence, below we summed up some of the options:
Cash or paid sponsoring: this is one is the most common way to activate KOLs.
- Pros
- Faster and easier activation of influencer
- Better content control for the brand (brand can request pre-posting review)
- Cons
- Some KOLs with a large audience can request a lot of money, “sky is the limit”.
- KOLs could be more interested in your money than in your brands.
- Some brands are over-using their right to control the KOL content, which affects the content authenticity and the engagement.
Win-win partnership or “non-cash incentives” activation strategies are more used by brands targeting “micro-influencers.”
- Pros
- Leverage your existing assets instead of your cash to engage influencers
- If the KOL is genuinely interested in your brand, it means that the KOL’s audience could also be!
- By non-payment, brands have to respect KOLs’ freedom of speech
- Cons
- KOLs activation and negotiation are much more complex and time-consuming
- Limited level of control of the influencer: proper tagging and hashtags
Over the years, we’ve experienced that most of the Brands are underestimating their existing assets! Companies could connect with high quality micro influencers in the ways below:
- Products giveaway, product testing, limited editions
- Exclusive access to experience, event, “avant-premiere”, product launch
- Exclusive content, news, interview, training, courses
