In recent years, the popularity and reach of influencers has grown significantly. Many brands have started collaborating with influencers who align with their product image, hoping to utilize the social appeal of KOLs to drive sales.
To meet market demands and followers’ expectations, influencers build their personal brands by cultivating a persona on social media through their appearance and behavior. This persona allows influencers to fully express their individuality and successfully create a specific image that attracts partnership offers with brands and generates business opportunities.
What Exactly Is An Influencer Persona?
- Character setting
Originally, “character setting” was used in the context of animation and film to describe the creation of a character’s appearance and attire based on the needs of the storyline. Later, this concept extended to the idol and influencer industries, where individuals package their appearance and personality to meet industry demands and follower expectations. Through this, a unique and personal persona is created.
- Impression management
The impression management theory proposed by American psychologist Erving Goffman suggests that people attempt to influence others’ perceptions of an event, object, or person during social interactions. In the context of influencer personas, influencers use social media to interact with followers, convey specific information, and create a positive image. By doing all of those, they shape the public perception of themselves. This process is a crucial aspect of building an influencer’s persona.
How Can a Well-Crafted Influencer Persona Create Business Opportunities for Brands?
- Deepen consumer trust in the brand
When an influencer’s persona aligns with a brand and no negative image issues arise, brands can collaborate with these influencers who match their product tone and brand style. As the influencer promotes the product, the trust that their followers place in them will extend to the brand, enhancing consumer goodwill toward the brand and increasing their willingness to purchase.
- Increase the value of the product
Recently, there has been a surge in group buying and co-branded products with influencers. Through influencer live streams, promotional codes, and limited purchase measures, followers are driven to buy. This often leads to a rush for the promoted products. Consequently, the value of these products also increases.
For example, 7-ELEVEN collaborated with French influencer 酷的夢 to launch a series of taro-themed products. The convenience store chain recognized 酷的夢‘s well-known love for taro and the commercial potential of his YouTube subscribers of about one million. They aimed to leverage his high popularity to drive follower purchases and increase the product’s value.
Source: 7-ELEVEN YouTube
Three Key Tips for Selecting Influencers
- Define target audience
Before selecting a candidate, a brand must first formulate a sales strategy for the product and identify the target audience. By understanding the preferences of a specific demographic, the brand can then plan its strategy further and choose the most suitable influencer for marketing promotions.
KOL Radar offers a “Content Type Analysis” feature that analyzes the proportion of different content types created by influencers, along with interaction rates and video view counts. This information can help brands select influencers whose content aligns with their product image.
Source: KOL Radar
- High positive visibility
In addition to observing the types of content created by influencers, brands must also consider the influencers’ online reputation and the effectiveness of their posts. Choosing influencers with high engagement rates for word-of-mouth marketing can help brands disseminate information more effectively and achieve better promotional results.
KOL Radar’s “Word-of-Mouth Value Estimation” feature can evaluate the minimum market value of an influencer’s posts based on likes, comments, and views. This helps brands gauge the collaboration cost with influencers. (This feature only uses social media interaction metrics as calculation indicators and does not consider other influencers’ additional influence values or collaboration formats. The actual collaboration cost needs to be discussed in detail between the brand and the influencer’s team.)
Source: KOL Radar
KOL Radar also provides a “Growth Trend Chart,” which helps brands track changes in an influencer’s follower count. Using this chart, brands can assess recent online visibility trends of influencers. For example, in the case of a particular influencer recently involved in significant negative publicity that affects their image, their follower count might rapidly decline as observed in the KOL Radar “Growth Trend Chart.” By using AI to carry out automated detection of the changes in an influencer’s follower trends, brands can assess the feasibility of collaborating with influencers in advance.
Source: KOL Radar
- Alignment in values
After brands decide to collaborate with influencers, disagreements due to differing opinions or incompatible values may sometimes arise, resulting in the termination of the partnership. Therefore, brands can benefit from selecting influencers with relevant collaboration experience and after reviewing their previous partnership cases. By understanding an influencer’s posting habits and patterns beforehand, brands can better maintain positive and productive collaborations.
In addition to seeking new collaboration partners, brands can also opt to work with influencers they have previously partnered with to establish long-term rapport and reduce potential communication costs. Using KOL Radar’s “Influencer Relationship Management (IRM)” function, brands can record past collaboration details with influencers with customized notes and tags to enable more efficient management of partnerships. Apart from reviewing an influencer’s collaboration history and assessing their past performance, brands can utilize feedback from project leads internally to understand influencers’ personalities and collaboration habits beforehand to prevent misunderstandings.
Source: KOL Radar
Conclusion
The persona crafted by influencers not only allows them to quickly establish a personal style and stand out among many creators but also plays an integral role in influencer marketing where brands continuously seize and create opportunities. Besides observing how influencers manage their presence on social platforms, brands can leverage KOL Radar’s AI capabilities to swiftly identify suitable influencers, effectively grasp their personas, and conduct successful influencer marketing campaigns with precision and efficiency.
If you would like to know more about influencer marketing, feel free to consult KOL Radar for free at https://www.kolradar.com/en/solution.
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