Building Brand Awareness and Audience Engagement
Over the past few months, we have engaged in a number of great discussions on China’s digital marketing trends with leading experts.
Here we talked with Research and Strategy Manager at AgencyChina, Michael Norris.
Are brands yielding too much audience engagement to KOLs?
While influencers are intent on becoming brands, Brands need to become more like influencers. Brands have been renting demand from KOLs who stand between them and their customers. Many brands - who are working with KOLs to reach audiences - are now realizing that they are handing over the keys to the kingdom. Audience relationships are everything for brands. So, brands need to start creating content centered around the subject of their products/solutions and must do a better job at building and retaining connections with audiences. For instance, Austin Li who used to work as a beauty consultant for L’Oreal has gone on to become one of China’s leading KOLs, for beauty and makeup. His livestream sales are phenomenal, often selling out of products in mere minutes. Imagine if L’Oreal had built a program with Austin before he struck out on his own. L’Oreal now does have a program with its in-house beauty consultants as livestreamers, so they have taken note of this opportunity. Moving forward, the questions brands should be asking themselves are: - What solutions can we help our customers with? - What are the big questions we (and our team) have answers for?- What other content can we create that is interesting and informative?
How are cost increases for marketing affecting smaller brands?
A lot of smaller brands are hurting, as a result of costs increases - especially those cost increases around big ecommerce events like Double 11. Larger brands can keep up with the spending necessary to; (1)maintain wide scale brand awareness, and (2)drive traffic during big sales events. For smaller brands, who have not built strong equity in the market, its been hard to keep up spending on both. Those brands have had to make difficult choices around whether to drop spending on brand or sales. Most brands have chosen to drop spending on brand and concentrate on sales performance. China is an expensive, competitive market and so, brands looking to build, need to either (a)have robust budgets to both build brand and sales, and/or (b)be really nimble, be creative and be patient about growth. Pushing too hard, to grow sales too quickly has been a common fault of incoming brands.
