KOLS MARKETING IN CHINA – FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

What is a KOL? 

Key opinion leader (KOL) is a marketing concept. It is usually defined as a person who has more and more accurate product information, is accepted or trusted by relevant groups, and has an amazing influence on the purchase behavior of this group. Chinese KOLs are particularly powerful.

Why should I use KOL for my marketing in China

Compared with more traditional channels, KOL marketing can bring higher return on investment. Besides, Chinese Key opinion leaders has great influence than what you can image and have a huge impact on a brand’s reputation in China.

They are experts in specific fields. Their followers attach great importance and to what they say, so they can easily influence the discussion in their field.

How to easily find a Chinese KOL?

There are many types of KOL from stars to micro-influencer and also many fakes.

1. Find it on douyin, douyu, Little red book etc directly and try to follow and communicate with them directly.

2.Find it on some China KOL platform or website source. Here is some for your reference. 

3.We Domatters have a dedicated KOL team as well as KOLs partnerships to help you find your perfect match. Or any other MCN.

THE GREAT INFLUENT KOLs IN CHINA

李佳琪 Li Jiaqi  Austin Li   China’s top beauty influencer

Known as China’s ‘Lipstick King,’ Li Jiaqi is a famous Internet celebrity in China. However, Austin Li has become a household name among the country in just two years.

2018 is special for Austin. In September, Austin successfully challenged the Guinness World Record for ‘The most lipstick applications in 30 seconds’ and became the world record holder of lipstick. On Alibaba’s annual day of discounts called the “Singles Day”, which is China’s largest online shopping day” (similar to Black Friday in the United States), Austin outsold Jack Ma- the Alibaba founder, by a big margin, selling 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes.

In February 2021, Austin Li Named in Time Magazine’s Next Top 100 Most Influential People in recognition of his personal achievements in China’s e-commerce livestreaming as well as charity contributions. This achievement is quite remarkable. In the past 3.8 women’s Day pre-sale day, the sales of Austin’s live studio reached 2.825 billion yuan, nearly three times the cumulative sales of Li Jiaqi last two years. Such achievements can indeed be called the top talents in the industry. It has to be said that Li Jiaqi is the best representative of China KOL.

李子柒 Li Ziqi: famous youtuber influencer, vlogger

Since she began posting rural videos of her life in Sichuan province in 2016, Li Ziqi has become one of China’s biggest social media stars.  In the videos, Li Ziqi has amazed billion views of how she makes daily food and other traditional Chinese items and the new face of China’s countryside, which full of simple beauty and devoid of the daily stresses of modern living. Li Ziqi has 22 million followers on Weibo, 34 million on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) and 7 million subscribers on YouTube. Although there are only a bit more than 100 videos uploaded, but most of which watched for more than 5 million times.

In 2018, after operating overseas, Li Ziqi’s original short video won the silver and gold creator medals of YouTube platform. On February 2, 2021, Guinness World Records announced that Li Ziqi broke the Guinness world record of “the largest subscription of YouTube Chinese channel” with 14.1 million YouTube subscriptions.

罗永浩

If you haven’t heard of Luo Yonghao before his Douyin live stream debut on April 1, you are not alone. Luo, however, has been making his name well known recently for the excellent result of his Douyin e-commerce live stream. On March 26, 2020, Luo Yonghao officially announced that Tiktok had become his exclusive live delivery platform, and completed the first show of live delivery on the evening of April 1. The live stream earned more than 48 million views, which set a record high on Douyin. Registered on Douyin in March 2020, Luo now counts more than 19 million followers on the short video-sharing social media platform.

Luo Yonghao is not only a Chinese entrepreneur, but also an internet celebrity. He is the chief executive officer and founder of Chinese technology company Smartisan and hoped to become the next “Steve Jobs of China”.

China KOL Marketing

Key Opinion Leader (KOL), China KOL marketing has become very popular recently. KOL has become a highly visible form of marketing in China, perhaps because social media in China is different from that in the West, and it is more popular than “normal” influencer marketing.

In China, the most common way for companies to conduct KOL marketing is to encourage users to generate content, or to pay KOLs to use your promotional materials or share your posts. User-generated content usually includes KOLs evaluating products or creating some other forms of content to promote the brand. Different from the western marketing channels in China, KOL in China tends to share content via weibo, WeChat or zhihu rather than YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.

China key opinion leader marketing

Why choose us to do China KOL marketing？

1. Years of marketing experience: The marketing team has always been at the forefront of marketing, has a deep understanding of various industries, and has a large number of high-quality channels to provide companies with accurate marketing programs.
2. One stop service: Lock the target audience according to the brand target population and product characteristics.
3. First-hand channels: First-hand resources, while achieving the purpose of promotion, save marketing costs for the company.
4. Industry trend insight: By summarizing the experience of numerous industry consulting services, wecan quickly make systematic analysis of various industries and formulate promotion strategies, providing accurate direction for the development of enterprises.
5. Technical excellence: team members will learn diligently according to the development of Internet marketing industry, and constantly strengthen our professional ability to provide you with better service.
   

   china key opinion leader marketing

   Our cooperation process:

   Customer access: propose requirements, goals, budgets

   Confirmation purpose: brand marketing target decomposition

   Determine the audience: audience analysis, characteristics of target groups

   Media strategy: determine distribution channels, budget allocation

   Content planning: formulate appropriate content plans according to the audience

   Customer selection: communicate with customers to select solutions and assist them to launch

   Real-time monitoring: monitoring the effect of delivery, real-time optimization

   Final report: transparent dissemination of data and summary of results

   More services from Domatters:

   More services from Domatters

   Chinese copywriting marketing

   Chinese creative copywriting

   Chinese translation

   Baidu SEO

   Chinese link building

   China commercials video production

   China mobile search drop

4 criteria for selecting KOLs

1. The price of KOLs

In the market, the price of KOL fluctuates greatly. We need to consider whether the budget is enough and charges are reasonable.

2. The degree of cooperation of KOLs

Is it easy for KOLs to collaborate and promote products on time? Besides, is it possible to cooperate with KOLs agents?

3. The image of the KOL

Some KOLs may get caught up in negative news and scandals, who we should try to avoid.

4. Commercialization of KOLs

Some KOLs may have a large number of followers and be great partners, but they may be too commercial and may endorse a large number of brands, which may not be suitable. Especially in the era of high reputation, KOLs who are too commercial are likely to be less persuasive.

How to choose KOLs

First, when choosing a KOL, you must consider does he fit with the brand or product, and conform to the brand characteristics and the relevance of the brand itself. You need clarify the KOL’s fan portraits, fan engagement and interaction rate between KOLs and fans etc. These data reflect the real influence of KOLs and the ability to bring goods to a certain extent. Although some KOLs have many fans, their content style is not similar to yours. The business is not relevant, then there is a high possibility of problems with the conversion. Marketing is effective only when it reaches real users.

Second, pay attention to distinguishing data: whether a KOL should be used as a choice depends on the size of his data, such as: reading volume, update frequency, interaction, and industry reputation. Also refer to the case he promoted before.

Third, pay extra attention to the authenticity of the data. Some KOLs spend money to buy zombie fans, just a bunch of fake data, and their own promotion and writing skills are not very good. So when screening, open several third-party public account data monitoring platforms to see its reading trends, account values, etc.

 Which platform should you find KOL

In the Internet age, the same content is not applicable to all platforms, because each platform has its unique characteristics, which will attract different types of people with different needs.

At present, the six major social platforms are: Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu. Let’s take a look at the selection of several platforms and introduce their characteristics for easy selection.

(1) Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu is a platform for lifestyle sharing mainly with pictures, texts and short videos, and it is increasingly recognized and valued by users. It focuses mainly on young women, so brands such as beauty products, daily products, baby products, and food are more dependent on it, and can achieve better results.

(2)Bilibili

As a medium video and long video platform, quality is its core strategy, and users are very active and sticky. On this platform, fashion, technology, electronics, and game products account for more. In-depth analysis, evaluation KOL are more popular. In recent years, the scale of investment has increased significantly.

(3) Douyin

The biggest characteristic of users on Douyin is their youth. Therefore, Douyin users like more interesting and fun things, impulse consumer goods, interesting new products and other types of products are easy to convert. Douyin’s KOL placement is a continuous and rapid upward trend. On Douyin, the majority of users are women, and beauty KOLs are the most popular and account for the largest volume of transactions. And Douyin is relatively selling products with higher unit prices.

(4) Kuaishou

Most of the KOLs on Kuaishou have strong social attributes, interacting with users a lot, and have very strong fan stickiness and high loyalty. Although the unit price of the products is generally low, the user base is large. The main products promoted are biased towards popular brands. The products that users prefer are snacks, beauty makeup, clothing, agricultural food, entertainment, fishing, fitness, stationery, etc.

How to contact Kol

In the process of looking for KOLs, you can often look for the following sources.

1) Existing relationship/platform

You can filter in your own Wechat Moments and community, and you can also filter in your own website, forum, and applications. This source is the easiest source for KOL discovery

2) Competing products

Mining from competing products is an accurate and targeted source of KOLs, but you must choose carefully to reduce your own legal and public relations risks. At the same time, community operators should also try their best to serve these KOLs, because their loyalty is low. If the service of community operators is not good, these KOLs may leave at any time.

3) Social platform

Major social platforms are a relatively mainstream way to find KOLs, especially on platforms with KOLs as the core, such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, where KOLs can be easily found.

You may already heard that internet celebrity boost China E-commerce sales in recently years. It is a huge chance. Want to access China KOL/internet celebrity, living streaming? Want do brand awareness improve in China? Interest in China influencer marketing strategy? Need an individualized KOL marketing strategy in China? We’re here to help.

Send email to support@domatters.com to get specific info. And find KOL source directly from Domatters Chinese official website www.Domatters.cn today.

KOL, better known as Key Opinion Leaders, are what consumers are gravitating towards in hopes to filter the clutter that digital advertising has created.

Key Opinion Leaders work double-duty: they not only connect with their audience, but in most cases, they also have a specific target demographic.

Domatters will assess what influences are most obvious to the target audience, will ensure the right people, and wants future customers to see it. After discovering the relevant influencing factors, we can provide you with better services.

More service we provided: web develop, SEO, link building, translation, copywriter, China commercials video production,China mobile search drop, please feel free to contact us.