How to use influencers to expand your business across the globe?

This article describes how brands can maximize their global business by making good use of influencers. Let’s take a look.

Last week, I talked about the difference between advertising and content. I said that good content must have at least three things: 1. It has specific people 2. It understands algorithms 3. It can stimulate unknown needs

At the end of that article, I previewed a knife-like content strategy formula—

Content seeding strategy = brand product strategy (triggered demand) * crowd * content plot * KOL interpretation * platform algorithm mechanism

When it comes to scientific marketing, the Douyin system is undoubtedly ahead of the industry. So in this article, I would like to use the Douyin system as an example to explain how to understand the content seeding strategy formula.

Looking back at this formula, the role of KOL is crucial.

Because it is a direct carrier of content, like the central medium of all things, connecting brands above and reaching the crowd below. It can make conversions with its left hand and create brand image with its right hand.

So in the era of global content marketing, how should we better use influencers to connect the other elements in the formula?

Last week, I found three very representative marketers: Terry, Digital Head of maternal and infant brand Royal FrieslandCampina, Alfred Wu, Brand Director of beauty brand Filorga, and Sun Hengyuan, General Manager of the Social Business Department of Juxing Media, and had an in-depth chat about this topic.

Beauty and cosmetics require speed, maternal and child care requires depth, and MCN agencies require novelty. These three points are indispensable for new marketing.

In this article, I will summarize the essence of my conversation with them and try to solve three problems: In the era of global marketing, how to understand the relationship between influencers and segmented groups? How to improve the accuracy of finding influencers? How to transform the value of influencers into global business?

I will also post the chat video on the "刀姐doris" video account, everyone is welcome to watch it

01The essence of people being divided into groups is “divided into groups based on content”

To understand the people-oriented approach, an important premise is that “people are divided into groups”.

My previous understanding of people being divided into groups is that now there are many different small circles, and the value gap between circles is getting wider and wider. So my advice to many new brands is that you need to carve out a small but core circle and provide them with long-term and unique value.

But if you think more deeply, why are so many circles formed?

When I was chatting with Rentuo CMO Charles, he said something that really inspired me: You are what you browse.

We used to say You are what you eat, but now we say You are what you browse.

It is easy to understand. Now if you randomly find three people around you and open their Douyin homepages, you will find that no two posts are the same.

When chatting with Terry from Royal Friso, he also mentioned that the brand's consumers now want to watch a wide variety of content. Some mothers prefer entertainment content, some mothers whose babies have just been born need to watch content with stronger empathy, and some users are very professional and have a spirit of exploration. When they study whether a product is good or not, they will even read SCI documents and papers.

Therefore, if a brand wants to target different groups of people, the key is to create different content.

If we break down the content, it is actually the plot and the actors. The talent is the actor, and is the most critical part of the content.

In the past, we delivered value through widespread advertising, but in the decentralized era, we pay more and more attention to people who are similar to us, so brands can find users faster and more accurately through influencers. For example, Royal Friesland Clinic uses maternal and child influencers, and Filorga uses medical beauty influencers to quickly reach the users the brand wants to reach.

Not only that, if brands make good use of influencers, they can also discover more unexpected product scenarios.

For example, Alfred from Filorga shared with me that Filorga focuses on medical beauty scenarios, so it is natural for the brand to think of cooperating with some ingredient lovers and medical beauty lovers to focus on the post-medical beauty repair scenario. However, in their cooperation with makeup experts, they found that the difficulty of putting on makeup after medical beauty is actually a huge pain point, so the two sides jointly discovered the new scenario of "before makeup", which can even be fed back to product development in the future.

Compared with big advertising, the biggest feature of influencer marketing is that the content produced is different for each person and has a subtle influence.

Compared to brands with a unified image, different influencers have very different personalities, personas, stories, narratives, and language styles. 1,000 Hamlets can find 1,000 different groups of users.

It is precisely these differences that have attracted a group of people who love them. Compared with brands, influencers know better what their fans like to watch and why they like to watch it, and can subtly make brand content more easily accepted by users.

Terry gave an example. They once handed a script to a celebrity and asked them to use her voice to describe her true feelings after using the product or her understanding of the product formula. However, the celebrity told him that her users prefer to see the cute little moments and conflicts in life, so the suggestion was to turn the product into a role in resolving conflicts and making the family more complete.

The brand went with the flow and implanted its products without disrupting the influencer’s content atmosphere and ecology.

If TVC is the loudspeaker at the village entrance, influencer marketing is like a surround sound system.

When a brand does influencer marketing, it is not about shouting at or indoctrinating users, but about truly understanding that “content divides people into groups”. It is about throwing a big party, inviting people, and letting these people gather into small circles in the way they like. Through continuous content presentation, more people will turn around and run into you unexpectedly, and discover that you are there too.

02 To find the right expert, you must first understand the content

So the question is, how can we do good influencer marketing?

In the past, brands chose influencers blindly based on their feelings, but later it gradually changed to choosing whoever was popular or who had the most fans. However, this is a bit like placing a bet. You don’t know what the result will be, and you feel uneasy after placing the bet. Moreover, most of the time, it is not possible to truly achieve brand-effect synergy.

Especially for vertical categories, there are only so many vertical experts, and it won’t take long for the cooperation to end, or users will get tired of it after a second or third cooperation. Moreover, if you keep cooperating with vertical experts, you will never be able to break the circle of the category in your life.

Good content = good script + good actors.

A good script is the foundation, and actors can follow the script. So the decision-making chain should be: know what content I want to make → find experts who can translate this content into human language.

In a word, find talents through content.

This model has been very mature in Douyin. Julebao Star Map has a content insight product that can directly extract content tags from category content to crowd content and hot content.

After figuring out your brand’s target audience and what they like to watch, the brand can then connect to relevant KOLs through vertical tags, content style, personal characteristics and platform hot spots. It can also combine product selling points and platform hot spots to provide content creation guidance and achieve one-click delivery.

A friend of mine who works in a brand business told me about his case. He made a hair care set, targeting high-looking mothers and white-collar workers, and the selling point of the product was "easily create a high forehead." But the problem was that there were already many products on the market that hit this point, and the content of everyone was very homogeneous.

Through Star Chart's ability to gain insights into the crowd, he discovered that users who buy this type of product tend to be younger. So he immediately shifted the core crowd from sophisticated mothers to Generation Z and younger white-collar workers. After locking in the crowd, he used category content insights to discover that one of the pain points of this group of people was itchy scalp, which was a point that the previous content completely missed. So in the end, he chose workplace drama experts to talk about workplace content, and Meichu experts to talk about professional scalp health content. The brand successfully broke through with content, attracting more than 34 million new users, and a 167% increase in searches compared to the previous month.

The experts selected based on the content are not only more scientific, but also not limited to the product categories, and the types will be more diverse.

For example, Terry said that Royal FrieslandCampina collaborated with a film and television influencer last year. In fact, the brand realized through content that new mothers born after 1995 and 2000 do not always watch maternal and child-related content. They also chase stars, watch movies and TV series, and go to concerts. Reaching them through these daily content that they are interested in has led to one of the most effective collaborations of the year.

Filorga, which focuses on medical beauty, found the "stewardess" expert label through the content that senior middle-class and sophisticated white-collar workers like to watch every day. The brand has successively cooperated with the expert label and produced content such as stewardess daily vlogs, skin care store visits, airline interviews, etc., to achieve deep mental planting.

Veronica from Juxing Media also introduced me to the new gameplay of short dramas and talents. Brands can reversely select suitable plots and talents based on brand marketing scenarios and target TAs, making customized talent short dramas possible and producing 1+1>2 content. Veronica said that a domestic skincare brand cooperated with Juxing Media to invest in three customized short dramas. The first short drama had more than 230 million online views, and the average daily search increased by 3.3 times, and the CPM also decreased by 30%.

At this time, influencers are not just actors in content, but the real handles that can achieve actual conversion effects. To put it bluntly, the world is a huge label system, and Juliangxing Image is a sophisticated machine that can match the labels of key links of marketing among people, influencers, and users one by one, making marketing more certain.

03On -site + external, use experts to open up global business

The biggest advantage of the Julebao Star Map marketing system is that it has a series of tools to open up more forms of influencer marketing.

For example, experts + advertising traffic can give more certainty to the data; experts + content heating can amplify the effectiveness of content that is more in line with the brand tone; experts + search component 2.0 can better link live broadcast scenes to complete transactions.

By using the right influencers and tools, you can connect A1-A5 and solve different issues at each stage of the brand, from exposure to word of mouth.

In addition to achieving a closed loop effect within the Douyin site through “Star Push and Search Direct”, the spillover value of influencers is also increasingly being proven. Data shows that after users promote products on Douyin, 20%-40% of their conversions occur on non-Douyin platforms.

Terry told me that maternal and infant products are a category that requires trust, and it often takes a long time for users to know you and buy from you. So after a brand does influencer marketing on Douyin, it can immediately see a conversion rate of about 15%, but the rest are not non-conversions, but will search and collect on other e-commerce platforms, such as deep interest behaviors.

He shared two sets of data for Friso: 84% of new customers reached by Douyin marketing were from outside the site; and 93% of new customers reached by Star Map marketing were from outside the site.

In addition to long-term communication scenarios, the spillover effect of Douyin has also been verified in new scenarios for single products that many brands value most.

When Filorga's counterclockwise cream was launched, the brand chose Douyin as its first launch platform. At that time, the cream category was dominated by classic products from other brands. Filorga identified the brand's interest group + the overlapping group of competitors, and identified a group of high-quality waist and bottom experts. Then, it launched a strong visual impact content such as "explosive head change", which not only achieved mental planting on the site, but also achieved a 12-fold increase in search volume on Tmall, and the transaction volume was on par with classic old products.

When the spillover effect can no longer be ignored, Julebao Star Map has joined hands with Taobao Star Mission to launch a full-link grass-planting product "Star Cube", allowing brands to measure the value of influencers more comprehensively.

To put it simply, this product adds indicators in several new dimensions. For example, after influencers promote products, the in-store behavior and transaction behavior brought about by Taobao/Tmall can not only measure the effect of influencers’ promotion more scientifically, but also “reversely select influencers” based on the influencers’ off-site post-link value, and analyze and formulate selection strategies in a more scientific and refined manner.

After this tool is completed, brands can use the logic of "Star (Star Map) - Push (Content Hot Push) - Star (Star Cube)" to complete one-stop delivery from influencer selection to traffic coordination to conversion assistance, connect inside and outside the Douyin site, and help brands solve all business problems. For brands, all the grass they plant, whether inside or outside, will bear a good fruit one day.

04 End

The essence of a brand is commitment, and the essence of marketing is to create and deliver user value. No matter how things change, the essence remains the same.

In the past, we delivered value through large-scale advertising. However, in the era of decentralization, brands do not need to get better playback data, but to let users understand the product in a real and effective way and present the brand to them in a more comfortable and pleasant way.

Marketing, after all, is a combination of art and science. Influencers are the artistic part, and brands are able to reach consumers from more circles with more interesting souls. Platforms like Julebao Star Map add a lot of scientific elements to marketing, allowing brands to feel more confident when doing marketing.

However, compared with previous advertising marketing, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the attribution of influencer marketing. I also believe that more refined measurement methods will appear in the future.

Author: Daojie Doris WeChat public account: Daojie Doris