Ten thousand words analysis | How do brands use celebrity and influencer marketing?

On March 30, 2023, the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Bureau issued the "Beijing Celebrity Advertising Endorsement Compliance Guidelines", which clearly regulates "celebrity" and "endorsement qualifications", identifies endorsement behaviors and obligations, lists a negative list of celebrity endorsements, and further guides and regulates celebrity advertising endorsement behaviors. This article will start from the perspective of brand content marketing and explain how brands can play Star Marketing through the four parts of "Current Situation and Trends", "Underlying Logic", "Key Steps" and "Lightning Avoidance Guide". It is recommended that brand marketers come to learn.

1. Current status and trends of Xingda Marketing

1. Annual summary of artist endorsement cooperation

The artists on the TOP 10 list of new endorsements for male artists in 2022 are all traditional entertainment stars, and mainly male actors with hit dramas, including Xiao Zhan, Wang Hedi, Yang Yang, Tan Jianci, Zhang Ruoyun, Wang Yibo and Bai Jingting.

Among them, Wang Hedi has the strongest endorsement momentum recently. Because he starred in the popular hit TV series "Cang Lan Jue", Wang Hedi has successively endorsed Pepsi, Estee Lauder, SABON, Donnie, Jinwei, G-SHOCK, Tyrannosaurus, Xtep, Anker, Yili Anmuxi and Lays since August.

It is worth mentioning that in April 2022, 50-year-old Liu Genghong became the hottest star by live -streaming aerobics on Douyin.

In the distribution of male spokespersons in 2022, traditional entertainment stars accounted for the largest proportion, of which actors accounted for 43% and singers accounted for 36%. E-sports players are relatively distinctive in the distribution of male spokespersons. In recent years, the e-sports industry has been booming, and e-sports projects including League of Legends and King of Glory have a wide audience.

In the past, e-sports clubs were the targets of brands' cooperation, but now some well-known e-sports players are also favored by brands. Among them, King of Glory e-sports player - Chongqing Wolves Fly Peng Yunfei has added 4 new brand endorsement cooperation in 2022, including mobile phone brand realme, health care product brand Swisse, Tmall luxury products and alcoholic beverage brand Chongqing Beer.

In the TOP10 list of new endorsements by female artists in 2022, Bai Lu has the most new endorsements, reaching 17. In 2022, Bai Lu not only participated in the recording of the popular variety shows "Running Man Season 6" and "Running Man Common Prosperity", but the drama "Police Honor" starring her was also well received after it was broadcast, which rapidly increased Bai Lu's attention and promoted the increase in the number of Bai Lu's endorsements.

In the distribution of female spokespersons in 2022, traditional entertainment stars accounted for the largest proportion, of which actors accounted for 55% and singers accounted for 20%; athletes ranked third, accounting for 13%. The fourth largest proportion is virtual idols . In recent years, virtual idols have been a popular choice for brand cooperation. In 2022, popular virtual idols including AYAYI and A Xi have added multiple brand endorsement cooperation.

In the category distribution of endorsed brands, beauty and skin care and clothing and accessories both occupy the top two categories.

2. Trends in artist-business collaborations

Among the TOP10 brands with the largest number of collaborating artists at the beginning of 2023, the proportion of artists and the proportion of social media posts by artists have increased compared with the same period last year, indicating that artists tend to concentrate on leading brands .

At the beginning of 2023, the number of celebrities collaborating with brands decreased compared with last year, indicating that in the context of a downward economic environment and increasingly stringent supervision of celebrity endorsements, brands are becoming more cautious in cooperating with artists.

As Douyin and Hongshu become the mainstays of social media, they have attracted a large number of celebrities and artists to join, and the channels for celebrities and artists to publish brand-related content have become more diverse . At the beginning of 2023, the number of celebrities who publish brand-related content on Douyin and Xiaohongshu is catching up with Weibo. However, in terms of the number of posts, the number of commercial posts by celebrities on Weibo is still in an absolute advantage .

On Weibo , among the top 10 brands with the most commercially cooperating artists in early 2023, luxury brands such as Lancome and Dior accounted for 60%, with more than 10 cooperating celebrities. Initiating topics on Weibo is the main marketing method. Holiday live broadcasts, fashion shows, and evening party sponsorships have become important ways for luxury brands to cooperate with celebrities.

Xiaohongshu is a platform for sharing lifestyle products. On the one hand, celebrities cater to the characteristics of the platform and promote brands through down-to-earth soft implantation methods such as daily wear and experience sharing . On the other hand, as a media platform, celebrities directly upload advertising films to complete brand commercial promotion. In early 2023, luxury brands such as Dior and Chanel were the most promoted by celebrities.

On the Douyin platform, in early 2023, most of the short videos released by celebrities on Douyin mentioned beauty and skin care brands. Among the top 10 brands with the most cooperating celebrities, beauty instrument brands accounted for 40%, and celebrities mainly released single videos related to brands on Douyin.

3. Current status and trends of talent business cooperation

In the era of Internet advertising stock game, on the one hand, mobile Internet traffic has peaked and the bonus is gone, and on the other hand, the market size of influencer marketing has reached a new high . According to Chanquanquan data, it has become a general trend for brands to cooperate with more influencers. The number of brands with more than 2,000 influencers increased by 275% throughout the year, mainly distributed in the food and beverage, daily necessities, kitchen and bathroom appliances and other industries. According to estimates, the market size of influencer marketing will continue to grow year after year in 2023, and is expected to increase to 59.8 billion yuan .

Under the new marketing ecology, brands are paying more and more attention to influencer marketing. The highly convergent attitudes show that industry leaders with a keen sense of smell are reaching a consensus: the bonus period of influencer marketing cannot be missed. The status of influencer marketing and video platforms is leaping from " experimental " to " critical ". Although influencer business cooperation started later than artist business cooperation, it has huge potential and higher flexibility . But influencer marketing is not just about cooperation with influencers, it should be a systematic process built around influencers, covering all aspects such as strategy, content and integrated communication.

In a survey jointly conducted by ByteDance and Kantar at the beginning of the year, 94.67% of CMOs affirmed the role of influencer marketing, believing that influencer marketing can help brands to promote products and increase the capacity and activity of the fan pool . At the same time, 73.33% of the respondents clearly stated that the growth rate of influencer marketing will accelerate.

In the early stages of growth, brands tend to choose to cooperate with top influencers to achieve rapid expansion and conversion. As brand-effect integration began to receive attention, three-dimensional grass-seeking methods began to be promoted. Coupled with factors such as traffic becoming more expensive and a large number of small and medium-sized influencers entering the platform, mid- and tail influencers have gradually been valued and selected in the brand operation process. In 2022, the number of brands cooperating with small influencers and tail influencers increased by 27.4% and 34.3% year-on-year respectively, indicating that more and more brands are trying to cooperate with mid- and tail influencers.

When collaborating with influencers, brands tend to collaborate multiple times with proven influencers, and the collaboration model shifts from " many people once " to " one person multiple times ."

2. Four underlying logics of Xingda Marketing

1. Information dissemination nodes and product sales nodes

The logic of content dissemination in the Internet era is fundamentally different from that in the past. There used to be an economic phenomenon called the " water cooler effect ". Economic masters believe that once a major TV program or major event occupies the water cooler time (the time when everyone gathers in the tea room to chat) the next day, it means that it has occupied the public's attention, occupied advertisers, and occupied the commanding heights of economic effects.

This reflects a kind of human nature defined by sociology : although there are differences between people, as social animals, people all care about what is happening around them . However, in the past five years, the rise of social software such as WeChat has brought subtle changes to the dissemination of content . In decentralized media, in theory, everyone only sees the content they care about. In daily use, everyone constantly removes content that is irrelevant to them and adds content that they like.

From a psychological point of view, this is correct. As animals with complex emotions, all human behaviors follow only two principles: first, obtain as many details of information as possible ; second, try to interpret the information obtained in the way that is most comfortable for one's own cognition.

This leads to the decentralization of the media, which is actually contradictory in sociology and psychology .

Therefore, we often see some obvious centralization phenomena in decentralized media, such as the frequent appearance of nationally popular events and articles in Moments. At the same time, the popularity of WeChat has not eliminated Weibo, which has strong media attributes. So how is this contradiction resolved? In fact, in an era of decentralized media, people still have a social need to find the center of public opinion .

This has given rise to a new identity, which can be called information dissemination nodes , that is, opinion leaders (KOLs ). Therefore, brands now need to spend a lot of budget on KOLs, the active nodes of the network information structure, to cover more people through KOLs. At this time, the value of good content is obvious, because good content has a very strong self-propagation attribute, provided that it meets the needs of KOLs, expresses certain views on their behalf, drives fans' emotions , and even brings extra benefits to them. This greatly saves brand communication budget .

With the continuous development of the content e-commerce era, content and transactions are getting closer and closer . In addition to helping brands spread information, some KOLs can also directly increase business for brands and become commodity sales nodes . Taking the just-concluded 618 as an example, the cumulative sales of the top anchors Guangdong couple exceeded 1.36 billion, once again breaking the highest sales record of Douyin promotions, with a total exposure of 2.929 billion people and a total number of viewers of 157 million. Among them, the sales of 2 single products exceeded 100 million , and more than 90% of the big-name single products were sold out , including both international brands such as LAMER and new domestic brands such as Ji Meng.

In addition to the top live streamers, the content e-commerce system is actually filled with countless small commodity sales nodes, namely the KOC tail influencers . These KOCs are like mom-and-pop stores in traditional offline channels. Although they do not have as much sales as large supermarkets, the number of KOCs is large enough and the coverage is wide enough to help brands penetrate into every corner of China.

From November 2021 to November 2022, 6.27 million e-commerce authors earned income through Douyin e-commerce, of which 4.1 million were new authors, fully demonstrating the vigorous vitality of Douyin's e-commerce ecosystem for global creators. These people can become information dissemination nodes and product sales nodes for brands.

2. Trust logic and persuasion logic

When users are interested in a product, they may search for more information. Users will obtain information from the following channels: personal channels (family, friends, colleagues, etc.), commercial channels (advertising, sales staff, websites, packaging and exhibitions, etc.), public channels (mass media, review organizations, online searches, etc.), and experience channels (operation, inspection and use of products). Generally speaking, most product information users get comes from commercial channels , but the most effective information channel is actually personal channels . Commercial channels generally serve to inform , but personal channels have the function of judging or evaluating products. In particular, actual buyers or users similar to themselves will make users more likely to trust . This is the trust logic of planting grass. Through content, users seem to know the evaluation and judgment of a product from their friends ( personal channels ) and then trust the brand.

We are in an organization, which does not necessarily determine our words and actions. Only reference groups can have a real impact. Reference groups are real or fictional individuals or groups that have a significant impact on an individual's evaluation, pursuit or behavior. There are three types of reference groups: member reference groups , which are made up of people the user knows . Desire reference groups are made up of people the user does not know but admires . These people may be business people, athletes, actors, singers, etc. Avoidance reference groups are made up of people the user wants to try to keep a distance from .

Star Marketing is a marketing method that leverages the creative talents and influence of celebrities to stimulate consumers' interests and needs in a variety of content forms, and provides popular brand content to a large number of target consumer groups, thereby achieving brand information transmission and promoting conversion . The brand's marketing insight into consumer needs is attached to the content creativity of celebrities, which takes on the interests of consumers to achieve marketing conversion.

A 2019 global survey by Edelman showed that 63% of consumers participating in the survey would rather believe what influencers say about a brand than what the brand says on its own.

Persuasion logic refers to opinion leaders in the user's desired reference group , those who are more influential in persuading and advising users than most people. They have stronger communication networks , which makes them more capable of directly or indirectly influencing the consumption decisions of others . The real impact of "planting grass" on people is to link the product with the self-value that users expect to achieve (such as the niche, trendy, and individual characteristics that users pursue on the Xiaohongshu platform), creating a positive psychological experience for users. Over time, users will transfer the positive emotions obtained from these experiences to the products that are planted , which is manifested in behavior as paying for the products (pulling grass), and emotionally as the realization of self-value ( the experience brought by pulling grass).

3. Accumulation and circulation of crowd assets

Traffic used to be the key driver of brand growth. But now, the short-term growth model driven by traffic faces many uncertainties. Brands need to pay more attention to the balance between short-term GMV revenue and long-term brand building . Building relationships with consumers through the accumulation of crowd assets is the key to long-term brand growth. In order to better measure the flow of brand crowd assets, referring to the concept proposed by marketing guru Philip Kotler in "Marketing Revolution 4.0", all crowds related to the brand can be classified through the 5A model .

The O-5A model divides the brand's overall population assets into two parts - the O opportunity population and the 5A brand asset population .

O opportunity group refers to the main target group for brands to break through the circle. Through the operation of O opportunity group, brands can help increase the volume of crowd assets and solve the problems of attracting new customers and breaking through the circle and increasing GMV at the growth level. Through the integration of five categories of data ( content, people, goods, venues, and influencers ), brands can customize the circle and expand the opportunity group in a variety of ways.

The 5A brand asset population is defined as A1 (understanding population), A2 (attracting population), A3 (planting population), A4 (purchasing population), and A5 (repeat purchasing population) based on the closeness of the relationship between consumers and brands. Through the diagnosis of the 5A brand asset population, brands can understand the total volume, structure, and circulation of different stratified populations, identify problems in a timely manner, match them to the execution team, and implement specific optimization measures.

Through a lot of practice, the asset transfer of O-A5 people can be broken down into six core business links :

Link 1- Attract new customers , find new target consumers and business opportunities, and stimulate the interest of target consumers.

Link 2 - water storage , through large exposure means to let the target consumers know the brand, initially build a shallow relationship between the brand and consumers.

Link 3 - Planting grass . After the target consumers are exposed to the advertisement, they generate deep interactions such as searching and adding to cart.

Link 4 - Direct conversion : target consumers who originally had no knowledge of the brand directly make purchases on Douyin e-commerce after being exposed to a large number of advertisements in a short period of time.

Link 5 - Grass-planting conversion , consumers who have completed the grass-planting are encouraged by the brand to make purchases on Douyin e-commerce.

Link 6 - Repeat purchase , encourage consumers who have made past purchases to make repeat purchases.

The establishment of the O-5A crowd asset model has created a solid foundation for the brand to conduct efficient and refined crowd operations. The A3 seeding crowd is in a key position , and research data shows that the conversion rate of the A3 crowd in the same industry is much higher than that of the opportunity crowd and the A1 and A2 crowds , and can be increased by up to 24 times.

Brands usually have four ways to promote content in e-commerce and accumulate A3 crowd assets :

1. Branded content (such as live broadcasts, short videos)

2. KOL content (such as Star Map Expert × advertisement)

3. KOC content (such as viewing tasks, crowd testing tasks)

4. Brand advertising (such as splash screen advertising and grass-growing ads)

Coupled with the linkage of search, they point to two major transaction areas: on-site and off-site.

Among them, most of the content produced by brands themselves has a weak effect of planting grass, and mostly serves to harvest. The brand advertising traffic such as splash screen ads is relatively broad, so Xingda Marketing (KOL+KOC content) has become an important way for brands to quickly accumulate A3 grass-planting crowd assets.

The accumulation of crowd assets is the result of long-term brand construction and will eventually become an important part of brand assets. The circulation of crowd assets is a process, and Xingda Marketing is the accelerator of circulation.

4. Infinite shelves and limited resources

In traditional commerce, due to the limitation of physical space, shelf space is scarce, so only the best-selling products can be placed on the shelves, and some personalized needs are often ignored, so offline is called the battle of limited shelves . The emergence of e-commerce platforms has made shelves infinite, and even niche needs can create a market and be met, but do infinite shelves really mean infinite opportunities?

Obviously not! Infinite shelves bring space to brands and also bring unlimited supply and unlimited choices to users. Brands do not have too many competitive barriers. So the infinite shelves online are actually a competition for limited resources .

In the era of content e-commerce, the most scarce resource is actually traffic , and Xingda Marketing can play a key role in obtaining traffic . Needless to say, obtaining free traffic is very important, because celebrities and influencers have their own popularity and fans as the traffic base. At the same time, the content released by celebrities and influencers is more likely to naturally ferment and become a hot search. It is very likely that brands will take advantage of this opportunity to break through the circle and spread.

In terms of paid traffic, Xingda Marketing can also help brands achieve growth. Analyzing this from the user's perspective, when a user sees an advertising video, it is an opportunity for the brand to display paid traffic. There are multiple advertising creatives competing for this display opportunity, but in the end, only one advertising creative is successfully displayed to the user.

What determines whose advertising creativity can be displayed is the push logic behind Qianchuan. One of the most important is the eCPM value evaluation. eCPM value = bid (Pbid) * estimated click-through rate (eCTR) * estimated conversion rate (eCVR) * 1000. From a brand perspective, eCPM is the estimated cost of one thousand impressions . The higher the eCPM, the more competitive the ad is, and the lower the cost of delivery required to obtain the same amount of traffic. The click-through rate is a direct test of the content and also determines the life and death of the entire delivery plan. The appearance of celebrities and talents will directly increase the click-through rate and completion rate of the content.

To give an example of a recent case, it is well known that Douyin’s Crazy Brother Yang ’s live broadcast room is a very scarce and limited resource. It is not easy for new brands to go live quickly and get a good spot. The Sangjia 1 brand successfully obtained a schedule and achieved very good live broadcast effects by inviting Sun Yizhou , the male lead of the recent hit drama " The Little Swallows Flying Together ", to enter Crazy Brother Yang’s live broadcast room to participate in the live broadcast interaction . In addition to the hot sales of products on the day of the live broadcast, the brand also obtained the artist’s short video slice authorization . The subsequent saturation delivery will bring a new wave of revenue to the brand.

3. Four key steps of Xingda marketing

1. Develop your marketing strategy with the end in mind

Star marketing is an important part of the overall brand marketing work, and the strategy of Star marketing should serve the overall brand marketing strategy. From the perspective of user asset accumulation, we formulate targeted Star marketing strategies for brands, and use technology and data to select influencers, create content , and track delivery to achieve marketing implementation .

Brands must have a clear understanding of the differentiated value of Star Marketing. Star Marketing is not limited to live streaming by celebrities and influencers, but also includes product recommendations, brand events and other forms. Star Marketing is an accelerator for the growth and circulation of brand population assets .

Formulating a marketing strategy with the end in mind means clarifying marketing goals from the beginning. Based on Accenture's continuous research on the global brand market, the current growth goals of consumer brands are mainly centered around three aspects: improving the efficiency of core businesses , testing innovative businesses , and maintaining long-term operations . Brands need to address the difficulties and risks behind growth at different levels of value creation expectations.

In brand marketing with the core business efficiency improvement as the main growth goal, facing consumers' forgetting of traditional brands and the continuous challenges of new entrants, leading brands choose to convey the brand's " freshness " through influencer marketing in order to activate old users and gain the favor of new users. Brands can convey their voices to the target user groups through the new communication model of cross-industry influencers + content , and at the same time, through the continuous accumulation of user insights , feed back the crowd contact strategy and achieve brand effect growth.

In brand marketing where the main growth goal is to test innovative business, whether innovation can be achieved and risks can be reduced or avoided in the process often depends on whether the company can quickly enter the market and obtain sufficient feedback.

Brands can cooperate with influencers who cover a higher proportion of the target population, quickly reach potential groups through influencer content, and use the feedback of the reached user groups on the influencer content for preliminary verification. After the market initially recognizes the innovation, brands can start with the insights of the high-feedback groups accumulated in the early stage, expand the cooperation boundaries of influencer marketing, and complete the transformation from " planting grass" to " pulling grass" through live broadcast and other forms.

In brand marketing, where the main growth goal is to maintain long-term business operations, expanding the user asset base and deepening the flow of relationships among people are the core strategies for business development scale. Brands can use influencer content as the main form of brand advertising content, and long-term delivery to influence user minds , achieve effective seeding, and promote the healthy flow of user processes in brand relationship assets.

Heat up high-quality expert content to increase content productivity, edit high-quality expert content, and apply it to the performance advertising delivery stage. Re-invest in users who have received good feedback from early content interactions but have not purchased (high-potential groups) to achieve efficient grass-pulling conversions .

The budget for influencer marketing can be divided into influencer purchasing budget and traffic budget . The influencer purchasing budget is the direct expenditure for influencer purchasing, while the traffic budget can be used to follow up on traffic at different stages based on the performance of influencer content. When refining the traffic budget, standards can be set based on the growth goals set by the brand, thereby setting influencer content indicators to plan what kind of content requires what kind of additional traffic.

Expert content can be classified from low to high according to GPM , and traffic can be increased for some videos with medium conversion effects. For content with high-quality conversion effects, materials can be purchased based on traffic increase and re-edited and re-invested .

When formulating specific influencer marketing strategies, brands should start from the current health of the brand’s population assets, identify the problem first and then formulate an influencer marketing strategy .

For example, when the brand awareness ( A1) and attraction ( A2) groups are large, but the inquiry ( A3) group is small, it means that the brand interest group has not been deeply converted , and there is a possibility of wasting early marketing resources . At this time, we should consider formulating influencer marketing strategies, and select category vertical influencers to deeply promote the group with shallow brand relationships, so as to accelerate the flow of people to deep brand relationships.

The executable goals of influencer marketing are divided into three categories, namely " brand exposure ", " mental seeding " and " effect conversion ". In actual marketing scenarios, flexible combinations can be used to align with the overall growth goals of the brand to optimize marketing results.

2. Build a Star Matrix based on strategy

The establishment of the Star Matrix is a direct reflection of the formulation of the Star Marketing Strategy. Whether the expected reach of the crowd and accumulation of brand content assets can be achieved will produce phased results as the establishment of the Talent Matrix is implemented. The instant feedback of the crowd on celebrities and content can help brands realize the dynamic optimization of the Star Matrix and continuously improve the Star Marketing effect.

First of all, we need to understand influencers and comprehensively measure their value. Influencers are not a certain popular video, nor tens of millions of fans, but a new marketing channel that is fully tracked and evaluated by data. I can measure the value of influencers from five dimensions: communication index, seeding index, growth index, cooperation index and cost-effectiveness index .

The next step is to select influencers . The result-oriented influencer selection method is more effective. In the early stage of the development of the star marketing market, the selection of influencers mainly relied on past experience and personal experience. Usually, marketers had to rely on their feelings to select influencers with labels such as those that matched the brand tone, had good audience appeal, and had good market response to cooperate with. In the era of experience, the results of marketing are difficult to predict for both brand owners and influencers themselves, and the conversion is difficult to quantify. Brand owners and influencers cross the river by feeling the stones, passively waiting for the final feedback from the market.

But now, the way to select influencers has shown a trend of being data-driven and increasingly refined . Because for every marketing campaign, the overlap between the target users and the influencer’s coverage is extremely important. It can be divided into four stages: initial screening, fine screening, sorting, and selection . In the initial screening stage, the brand uses the target population to be expected to reach and influence, and matches the influencer group with a high degree of overlap in population coverage .

In the two stages of fine screening and sorting, brands need to consider various factors that may affect the achievement of marketing goals, sort the list of available influencers in descending order to meet the total marketing budget limit, and filter out the final matching influencer group. In the last step, you can combine the brand concept and proposition to eliminate influencers who do not match the brand tone from the candidate influencer list, and finally get the ideal influencer list.

Finally, influencers are combined in a matrix to achieve a balanced improvement in marketing input and output. After all, the number of consumers that a single influencer can reach is limited, and it is difficult to meet the marketing needs of brand owners to reach the same audience repeatedly. Practice has proved that effective influencer marketing is implemented in the form of influencer matrix to achieve large-scale distribution of influencer content. Brands deploy diverse influencers based on different marketing scenarios and marketing needs to achieve different marketing goals.

The purpose of matrix influencer combination is to achieve influencer marketing value by improving marketing performance or reducing marketing costs under the premise of determining marketing goals and budgets. Overall, improving marketing performance comes from quickly reaching potential consumers from "spreading" to "planting grass" and then to "pulling grass" through influencer marketing, while reducing marketing costs needs to be achieved by improving influencer cost-effectiveness and optimizing paid traffic expenses .

During a longer marketing cycle, brands can target target groups and use the influencer matrix in stages to achieve "brand exposure", "mental planting" and "effect conversion", thereby realizing influencer matrix operations with the final marketing results as the evaluation criteria.

If the goal is "brand exposure", you should cast a wide net, use content reach efficiency and crowd overlap as screening criteria, and use the " expert audience matching" and " expected playback volume " indicators as screening criteria. In terms of talent categories, brands can be relatively open-minded and expand from industry talents to general life talents, which will bring unexpected gains.

To achieve the goal of "mental seeding", we must balance seeding conversion and focus on the influencer's interest-stimulating ability, which can be measured by historical indicators such as the influencer's "content completion rate", while considering the influencer's coverage scale and business service indicators such as CPM. When selecting and assembling this type of influencer matrix, give priority to influencers in vertical industries as much as possible, and give full play to the professionalism of these influencers to achieve a better "seedling effect".

To increase the conversion depth of the focus group, the influencer matrix screening with the goal of "effect conversion" needs to evaluate the direct sales conversion or boosting value of the influencer content that can bring about the final conversion. Pay attention to the influencer's " component click median" and " component click rate" indicators to ensure that the conversion goal is achieved. Due to the deep seeding of the first two waves, the influencer matrix grouping in this stage can be based on the purchase possibility of the target group, with the primary goal of improving GPM , and select more cross-border potential influencers to participate in promoting the conversion of the target group.

In the context of the ever-changing content and influencer ecology, brands do not have a fixed influencer matrix type. They need to closely integrate with the brand’s current marketing strategy and dynamically adjust the cooperative influencer matrix.

3. Create customized content with Synda

As a carrier for brands to reach consumers, content is responsible for telling good brand/product stories and successfully touching consumers. Under the wave of digital intelligence, content has also been given new possibilities. Content creation under the power of data has enabled Xingda's creativity to be targeted and the brand's investment to be effective.

The key to good content is to focus on the end users of the content. They need to have sufficient reasons to stay on the content and gradually break down their guard and open their hearts to accept the value points of the brand/product. At this time, the content can go a step further and stimulate consumers' potential purchasing desire and form conversions by promising benefits.

Brand owners pay attention to Xingda’s content not to "interfere" with their creativity, but to use the brand's understanding of its own situation and its advantage in platform data control to point out the direction of Xingda's content creativity and jointly create customized content.

First of all, we need to identify the core selling point . In influencer marketing, focusing on the interests of the brand or product is an effective way for brands to find creative entry points for influencer content. Then we need to grasp the overall creative trend of the content platform. Brands can always trust the creativity of influencers , who are well aware of the trends of content platforms.

Brands need to pay attention to the creative trends of content platforms and the industry in which the brand operates, such as background music, topics, elements, etc. Only by knowing yourself and your opponent can you win every battle. It is best to have insight into the content preferences of the target group. Brands can select influencers based on the target group, and can also understand the content formats that the target group likes to watch by analyzing their content preferences.

Brands need to quickly find the best content paradigm among the endless stream of short video content ideas, and fully verify the reliability of the content paradigm before cooperating with a large number of talent resources. The AB testing method can be used to quickly verify the feasibility of content ideas.

The core interest points of the brand influencer content generated during the creative phase are combined with the content preferences of the target audience (TA) to form preliminary creative insights. The brand content team can further discuss and process the creative insights, combine the insights into multiple executable creative scripts, and co-create and publish them with a certain number of mid- and low-end influencers.

By controlling the content creation variables , different content scripts are produced and released by mid- and low-level experts of the same type. In order to ensure that the content effect is fully comparable , each test content can be evenly and uniformly heated with directional traffic to highlight the comparison effect as much as possible.

High-quality content is combined into a content matrix . In terms of controlling the direction of matrix content themes, brands can design theme entry points for the population assets that are in urgent need of reinforcement based on the current status of brand-user relationship assets: approach from different depths of brand information dissemination angles (such as brand value, product selling points), build content scenarios ( such as ingredient revelations, auto show test drives), and closely follow the scenario pain points of the target population ( such as summer commuting and self-driving hikes).

Brands can allocate information units to be delivered by each influencer from a global perspective, ensuring that each influencer’s entry point is clear and concrete, and that the matrix content is rich in creative levels .

For example, if a brand's current user relationship is shallow ( A1/A2) , it needs to deeply promote the upcoming e-commerce promotion ( A3) . The brand should ensure that the content output of the cooperating influencers is mainly mind-promoting videos, and repeatedly reach the shallow interactive crowd in a targeted manner to accelerate the flow of people. In the long run, the brand should also maintain the level of crowd coverage through brand exposure influencer content, and ensure that the promotion information reaches the promotion crowd through promotion effect conversion content themes.

4. Effect review and agile delivery to improve efficiency

In addition to brands being able to select influencers to create content, influencer marketing also requires brands to make use of integrated platform marketing methods when launching their campaigns, allowing high-quality influencers and high-quality content to take advantage of traffic and optimize the brand’s content marketing value.

When launching a campaign, brands can first test different influencer content for " high potential groups ". "High potential groups" can be groups with past e-commerce conversions or groups with high interaction rates with past brand content (component clicks, shopping cart clicks, likes, forwarding, favorites, etc.). After launching multiple influencer content for "high potential groups", influencer content with good conversion efficiency will be targeted for follow-up investment, and the target of follow-up investment will be further expanded from the brand's "high potential groups", which can be the brand's 5A group or the brand's industry group.

By continuously testing the crowd, the brand has obtained a huge number of "efficient" crowds. Then, in the subsequent promotion nodes, the brand can repeatedly use the " efficient" crowds for continuous operation and improve the effect of seeding conversion.

Data research shows that when people who have been exposed to expert videos are followed up with information flow/ads, the conversion rate is increased by 20%-50% compared to users who have not seen the expert content before. When placing advertisements, brands should first consider following up with users who have been deeply attracted by expert videos, using the expert's high-quality content for advertising, and increasing user exposure at more touchpoints within the massive system, which will help significantly improve conversion efficiency.

High-quality content marketing can mobilize consumers' curiosity , penetrate into consumers' minds , and improve brand favorability . Using the search control at the bottom of the influencer's video to guide consumers to actively search for keywords and enter the search results page can accelerate the deepening of consumers' brand relationship from A2 to A3. Search behavior can also bring traffic to brand owners. Through search, consumers can be guided to the brand's own positions: such as review collections, which focus on displaying product or brand-related content, thereby accelerating the mental implantation of brands and products.

Through the huge cloud map , we can review the effect of expert marketing, and judge the effectiveness of the expert matrix through the overall marketing performance of experts. Different goals of "brand exposure", "mind planting" and "effect conversion" can also be evaluated through different data indicators. The VV of the commercial content created by experts can best reflect the coverage scale of the people that experts reach. Thousands of people show cost CPM and interactive cost CPE , and while covering a large scale, the efficiency of expert marketing can also be evaluated.

To judge the effect of the content matrix, we need to judge the interaction results such as consumer stays, heartbeats, and actions brought by content creativity. Efficient content creativity and content matrix CPM must be correct. When the content is added with interactive components, the component click-through rate CTR also needs to be paid attention to.

Four lightning protection guides for Xingda Marketing