Is KOL Marketing Really Useful For Brands?


KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) better known as influencers, are people who are viewed differently from celebrities with many followers. Why is that? These Influencers share their everyday lives with all the happy moments as well as problems they go through. It naturally builds their relationship with the audience and the followers then logically trust them. The influencers become their “virtual friends”. And it is exactly the reasons why marketers involve influencers in marketing strategies – because influencers have a trust-based relationship with their followers (it is impossible to achieve this in mass media like TV or radio) as well as a specific target audience (for example beauty influencer is followed by users interested in beauty products).
However, there should be always long-term beneficial cooperation between the influencer and the company, but also the viewers! The content should bring them new or interesting information, entertainment or some other benefit. That is why it is important for influencers to make all their cooperation meaningful, to fit with them and their content. Once the influencer has disappointed his audience, it would be hard to get back the credibility (it is the same situation as if companies try to turn their negative PR into positive PR).

Nowadays, there is a big theme of tagging sponsored content. Some research claims that only 1/10 kids under 15 years old recognize hidden advertising on the Internet and only 60 % of parents realize the “power” of influencers. This has led one agency in the Czech Republic to run a project “A month of transparency” in order to modify the advertising labeling rules to make them more transparent and fair. Influencers marked all their posts with hashtag #cooperation at the begging of the comment of their post (instead of “invisible” #ad at the end of the post's description). As a reaction to this, many companies started to perceive the mark #ad or #cooperation positively and they even started to require it from influencers (they adjusted ad tags to their internal rules). All the companies that participated in this movement got very positive feedback from the public (subsequently positive PR attracted new customers).

Another phenomenon in online influencer marketing is ad fraud. One marketing agency wanted to call attention to fake influencer’s profiles. To prove that it’s possible for fake accounts to secure paid brand deals, they decided to create two fake Instagram accounts (not active anymore). The first fake Instagram account was called Calibeachgirl310 featured images of the model from Los Angeles called Amanda Smith, and the second account featured the amateur lifestyle travel photographer Alexa Rae (@Wanderingggirl) and was filled with free stock photos. They spent in total the amount of $1100 on both accounts for fake followers and engagement. Within a few weeks, brands offered their fake Instagram influencers a combination of free products and money in a total amount higher than $500. 
To sum it up, companies should always verify the influencer and make sure that he/she shares the same visions and values as the firm does, only then the KOL marketing could be really considered as useful.

Nikola Jurasová 
1906372661



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