5 Things to Know About KOL Marketing for Hospitality Businesses
by Stelliers Greater China 2022 PR Partner
If you are responsible for marketing your property or venue, it can sometimes be a challenge deciding which of the broad range of marketing channels you have at your disposal is the best one for achieving your marketing objectives and for giving you the best return on your marketing investment.
Influencer or Key Opinion Leader (KOL) marketing has rapidly become a core pillar of any China marketing strategy for all kinds of businesses. In fact, the China KOL economy is now valued at almost USD $9 billion. Hotels and hospitality venues have been at the forefront of this marketing phenomenon, with countless social media posts of glamourous influencers creating content to promote the latest beachfront resort or countryside retreat.
Part of the reason for the popularity of China KOL marketing is that the digital ad platforms are not as targeted as, for example, Facebook, so this pushes the campaigns to engage with KOLs. The KOLs themselves are also spread across multiple platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), Pinduoduo, etc, all with different target audiences.
However, there are challenges and pitfalls that come with choosing this approach to your marketing strategy, so Brandigo, our PR partner for the 2022 Stelliers Awards, offers 5 top tips for hospitality marketers to keep in mind and make sure you get value for money.
1 – Look Who’s Talking
‘KOL’ is a broad term and it’s important to understand the different levels of KOL that are out there. Most China marketing specialists break the landscape down into 3 ‘tiers’. Tier 1 KOLs will typically have 1 to 2 million followers with each post averaging 200K to 1 million views. Tier 2 KOLs will have around 200,000 to 500,000 followers and average 50K to 200K views per post. Finally, Tier 3 KOLs can have between 5,000 and 50,000 followers, averaging 2K to 30K views for each post. Tier 1s are more likely to be celebrity influencers or KOLs who have monetized their social media channels and can make huge numbers of sales, one example being fashion blogger Becky Li who famously sold 100 Mini Cooper cars in 4 minutes during one of her live stream events.
Recent years have also seen what some consider to be a 4 th tier emerging which has been labeled KOC, or Key Opinion Consumer. These are usually social media users who are ordinary people who have a small number of followers, but whose followers have a significant amount of trust in their opinion, and who can therefore be very influential for sales. This trust has developed because of the KOCs genuine desire to test and review the products they are interested in. This rise has been encouraged by platforms such as Xiaohongshu whose algorithms rank posts according to their quality which in turn pushes genuine reviews higher up the feed.
2 – Money Talks
There is no hiding the fact that KOL marketing can be expensive, especially for marketers looking to work with top tier KOLs. Access to their millions of followers comes at a price. And while some of the lower tier KOLs and travel blogging specialists that hospitality and hotel industry marketers are more interested in can cost considerably less, hitching your China marketing spend entirely to the KOL bandwagon will likely lead to a disappointing ROI.
What some professionals in the space look to do is agree a commercial relationship with KOLs that isn’t 100 per cent fee based. This can include discounts and value-in-kind in return for content. It is still important to have a signed agreement in place under this arrangement so that all parties are agreed on what each is expected to provide.
3 – Finding Value
Identifying and quantifying the value that your KOL marketing is contributing to your business is a challenge, particularly when reach and engagement figures can be a little opaque. It’s important to set KPIs upfront and appreciate that working with a KOL with a big fanbase doesn’t automatically make for a successful campaign.
If your target audience is niche or you are looking to reach a smaller amount of decision-makers, KOLs with smaller audiences are likely to be more relevant and impactful despite small numbers of followers. A good way to benchmark KOLs and assess their value is to borrow a metric from traditional media campaigns. Cost per thousand (CPM) helps marketers to work out how much their campaign activities are costing per thousand people reached.
Like most of these things, it is not an exact science, but it does help marketing managers measure the performance of their KOL marketing and benchmark it against their other China marketing activities.
4 – Media or Influencer?
There is a wider conversation to be had on making a distinction between paid and earnt media here in China, and that is a whole article to itself. But for the purpose of this topic, it’s worth noting that the social media channel of a well-known journalist or even travel publication can be considered a KOL. Sometimes this is also the individual accounts of senior editorial personal. Putting it simply, your KOL marketing might include an agreement with a key media title/journalist to cover your property or venue on their social media channel in exchange for a fee.
5 – Spotting the Fakes
Fake KOL and influencers have been a problem for the marketing industry all over in the world, with stories of fake follower numbers, staged engagement and ‘click’ farms to be found everywhere. China is no different.
The simplest way to spot how legit a KOL fanbase is to review previous content, paying attention to any comments left by followers, how the KOL responds or engages with followers, and so on. You can also capture a bit more insight as to what the KOLs fanbase is interested in, the types of products or services they discuss, maybe even what their gripes are, and so on.
Access to previous performance of e-commerce campaigns is also critical – watch out though, the cheaters are smart and leaving thousands of comments through click farms is a common tactic to be vigilant of.
If all the comments are perfunctory, always positive, if most of the comments are blocked, or sometimes not even related to the conversation, then alarm bells should be ringing. This should also be done over an extended period of time. If all the comments are coming from similar KOLs it is possible that they are all helping each other out to boost numbers and therefore the fee they can charge, and ultimately this will have a negative impact on your ROI.
There are social media listening services and specialist KOL agencies (MCNs) that will help you tell the difference between a genuine KOL and a fake, but all will charge a fee for their services themselves. In some cases the agencies will want to steer you towards a KOL that is on their roster or a persona that they have developed in-house. This might be the way to go for your campaign but doing the due diligence covered above first anyway is going to put you in a more informed negotiation position.
KOLs play a huge part in the China marketing landscape and are very much here to stay. They can be a valuable marketing tool to have at your disposal and part of any well-rounded campaign. They are not, and never will be, a silver marketing bullet, however, and knowing what you are investing in before you make decisions is key.