Tell Me What I Want: A Look at KOLs


Now if you’ve been following my content for a while, you’ll know that I always have trouble with task organization, but thanks to the life-changing help of---

I’m kidding. But you get the point.

Most days, you can’t go on the average Instagram explore page without tripping over a public figure telling you what brand shoes they use on their morning jog, or an actor swearing up and down about the effects of the supplements they take, or maybe even a vaguely familiar face next to a blue check mark that might be someone you knew in middle school, praising a weirdly specific app to high heaven. 

The basic idea of KOLs and influencers is pretty simple; whether it’s this season’s latest streetwear or how to cultivate bonsai trees, any topic will have its experts, people who can talk the talk and walk the walk, they’re respected, or at least listened to. Give them some communication skills, and once they get a platform and a decent audience, you’ve got yourself some pretty solid content. 

And is this method really useful for brands? 

Well, yeah, I’d say so. 

KOLs provide the opportunity for a reach expansion to their built-in masses of followers, and can be a great way to start approaching a demographic, but it’s not a guaranteed success, choosing the wrong partner could easily backfire and damage the brand, and of course, as a purely social media based method, it might have difficulty standing on its own if there is no external/physical campaign.

In a way, KOLs represent an aspect of marketing that was always there (Ancient Roman gladiators did endorsements, for crying out loud), that now has been magnified to a higher level in social media; KOL endorsements can reach millions of people with relatively high engagement and low cost, but on the other hand the risks grow too. Any action taken by the company and the partner can reflect on the entirety of them in the court of public opinion, which now works faster than ever. Thanks, Internet!

Overall, it is a newer, maybe less refined (for now) method for the digital age, and there’s nothing inherently wrong or right with that, what makes it helpful is the unprecedented level of opportunity it provides. It’s not a perfectly safe or foolproof method, but what is? At the end of the day, it’s just like every other tool mankind has ever invented: useful if you know what you’re doing, and dangerous if you don’t.


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Bangga Erizal




References:
https://influencity.com/blog/en/what-are-kols-and-what-sets-them-apart-from-influencers/
https://www.sekkeistudio.com/blog/kol-marketing-in-china/


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