Working With WeChat KOLs

Because KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) are so popular in China, I had to dedicate an entire section just to working with WeChat KOLs because it is important for you to know for a few reasons.

1. You can work with WeChat KOLs even if you don’t have a big budget.
2. You can work with WeChat KOLs even if you don’t want to set up a WeChat Official Account.
3. A good WeChat KOL campaign can potentially get you a lot of sales for a small amount of investment.
4. There are all kinds of WeChat KOLs around the world.
5. WeChat is a social network first, and endorsement from trusted sources can be a huge source of conversion

Ok… If you’re staring off into a corner and wondering “What the heck is KOLs”, allow me to explain…

Basically, this is just another term for influencers, but for whatever reason in Asia, the term KOL is more popular. So, just imagine Instagram influencers, Youtube Influencers but on the Chinese social media such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, etc. and 10X bigger in China.

The reason why KOLs are so popular in China is that advertising is expensive, and some time working with KOLs are a lot cheaper in comparison. For example, you pay KOLs $500 or $3,000 to run a promotion for your product or service while paying for WeChat moment ads you’ll pretty much be spending thousands of dollar every month.

6 Ways To Work WeChat KOLs

Like I said, working with KOL is another way to advertise or promote your product or service on WeChat with the need for approval from Tencent and you don’t even have to have your own official account. There are many WeChat official accounts with 10,000 to millions of subscriber that are location specific and niche-specific with a very targeted audience.

To work with WeChat KOLs you can directly approach these official account owners to arrange some kind of promotion with them. Typically, the most common way for this account to help you promote your product or services is to write a “softcopies” article for you that seems like content but really is there to promote your product or services which is call “软文” in Chinese. You can order to push 1 article to promote your product or services for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars or you can pay for a few articles or few months of drip promotion.

There is really no set rules of how you can work with this WeChat KOLs as every KOL will have their own preferred a way to work with brands and businesses but here are 6 most common ways that you can work with WeChat KOLs.

1 Sponsored Soft Content

“软文” (ruanwen) is a Chinese term for soft copy content which are contents written to promote or sell a product or service without looking like advertising. These are types of contents are probably the most common way to promote products or services on WeChat with KOLs.

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.

2 Product reviews

One of the easiest ways to work with a