Last week we lay out the ground rules for finding KOLs in China and how to estimate a fair amount to compensate the KOL for endorsing or promoting your product, brand or services. In this article, we’re going to finish off this series with a home run and share with you 12 different ways that your brand can collaborate with KOLs in China.
1 Product Review & Gifting
One of the most common and simple ways to work with a KOL in China is to simply ask them to review your product. There are two methods to ask a KOL to review your product. The first method is simply asking them to review your product and compensate them for the review. The second way if you’re looking for a more honest genuine review you can try sending them the product and perhaps they will review it.
If you’re going to try your luck using the second method, it ideally only sends your products to a KOL who often reviews products as this will increase the likely hood of them trying out your product and doing an honest review for your product.
2 Sponsored Soft Content
“软文” (ruanwen) is a Chinese term for soft copy content. These are types of content are often used to promote products by KOLs in China. The idea of ruanwen is to write entertainment or education content that doesn’t really appear to be actively endorsing or promote any product but it really is.
Often time every KOL will have a different version of Soft Content, that is because every KOL even ones that may be in the same niche may have a different style of communication with their audiences.
3 Competitions and Product Giveaways
Running competition and product giveaways with KOLs is a great way to increase your brand awareness and exposure to a potential new audience.
Most KOLs love to work with competition and giveaways because this also allows them to engage and build loyalty with their audience and potentially use your product giveaway to attract even more followers for themselves.
4 Exclusive Promote Codes and Discounts
An alternative to running competition and giveaway products, you can also offer exclusive promotion codes or discounts to KOLs. This is a great way to collaborate with a KOL if you’re looking to drive sales and obtain paying customers.
The trick to make this work is to offer exclusive, unique promotions to individual KOLs that you’re going to work with and make sure that the incentive you give them to give to their followers is well worth it otherwise most KOLs won’t be interested in working with you.
5 Interviews or Be Interviewed
Another great way to develop a strong relationship with KOLs is to interview them and ask them to share their experience and story with your customers. If your brand has a large number of followers and is well known, you’ll find that many KOLs will be more than glad to be interviewed by your brand as they will often gain followers from your customers.
Vice versa you can then ask the KOL to interview you or your brand in return so that you can introduce your brand to their followers and gain the brand exposure or even potential new customers.
6 Digital Event
In China, there are often days where many events are run only digitally. For example, on Single’s day which is an extremely popular day amongst young Chinese people to celebrate that they’re single. What’s unique about this festival is that often most of the celebration and events for this day is done digitally.
You can collaborator with a KOL to orchestrate a single’s day even to promote and raise brand awareness for your product or services. But beware of orchestrating a digital event like this with popular KOL can be very expensive in China.
7 Creative Collaboration
If you have the budget and want to work with KOLs that has a large following on streaming platforms or YouTube like platforms such as A站 (acfun.cn) B站 (bilibili.com). You can collaborator with the KOL to create an entertainment short film, commercial, or an interesting documentary. The sky is the limit you can be as creative as you want.
8 Brand Ambassador
Charlize Theron and Dior, LeBron James and Nike, Charlize Theron and Dior, etc…
Much like A-lister celebrities will often become exclusive ambassadors for a particular brand, if you have had a lot of success with a particular KOL who really resonates with your brand and your audience why not ask them to become your Brand, Ambassador.
The challenge of striking a deal with a popular KOL to become your brand ambassador is you must convince them to be exclusive to your brand and your product. This can be a challenging tank, as you could be asking the KOL to give up a large portion of their earnings.
The trick to making this work is making sure you only work with KOLs that are genuinely in love with your product and offer them a great compensation to be exclusive to your brand.
9 Invite them to Your Events
If you have a large industry event or a product launch event you can always invite a bunch of KOLs to come to your event for fun. Many KOLs love to attend large industry event as it is a great opportunity for them to network and even meet another influencer that they might like to collator with as well.
As for you, this is a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness since most KOLs will document your event and share it with their follower, viewers or audiences.
10 KOL Takeover
This one is actually rarely done as it depends on whether you have your own media that you use to communicate with your customers. KOL takeover is where you invite a KOL to “take over” one of your media such as your WeChat subscription account or your Sina Weibo account to let them directly communicate with your customers.
This, however, will only work if the KOL you’re collaborating with is well known to your customer or at least to a good percentage of them.
11 Have Them Work Directly with Your Brand
If your brand works really well with a particular KOL or you find that certain KOL’s core audience resonates extremely well with your brand then perhaps it is even good idea to put them on your team as a creative director or product designer.
You can collaborate with eh KOL to come up with an exclusive product line sponsored by their name specifically designed for their audience. This is a very expensive process but it works really well if it is done right.
12 Banner Ads
If your budget is limited and you tried gifting and contra strategies but it didn’t work you can always pay the KOL for a banner ad on their WeChat or Weibo account. Banner ads are less risk approach to working with KOL and a good strategy to start building your relationship with your KOL that you’re not sure if they’re a good fit for your brand.
You can start by placing banner ads with them to see how well their audience respond to your product and if it goes well, you can continue to work with this KOL in all the other ways we’ve mentioned above.
Of course, all the above are what has been done, you as a brand are not limited to only collaborating with KOLs in these 12 ways.
