The blogging market is like the Wild West – budget-wise and in the specifics of planning. Olga Golubina of Mediaplus Russia shares how data helps in the strategic choice of KOLs.

According to official data, by the end of this year some 14 billion rubles will be invested in this channel, while unofficial sources say that it will be double that. There’s also a degree of “wildness” in the specifics of planning, purchasing and in the subsequent evaluation of results.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of an understandable and unified assessment mechanism that’s accepted by the entire market, it is the real efficiency that advertisers see in this channel that has ensured such rapid growth in cooperation with opinion leaders. Working with bloggers is of particular interest to advertisers because it provides a unique opportunity to create a need and build awareness among consumers through one competent channel,  motivating them to make a purchase right now. This corresponds with the expectations of the modern advertising market and the world, which has made a quantum leap in the speed of all processes: today, you can instantly convert a consumer who three minutes ago knew nothing about the existence of a certain brand or even a product category. This powerful advantage over traditional advertising tools is forcing even conservative advertisers to reallocate ad investment in favour of such an unpredictable and poorly controlled channel. Most often budgets are diverted from offline media (TV in particular), since the reach of bloggers enables the creation of full-fledged awareness among any target audience. 

Naturally, demand has generated supply, and this year alone around 250 tools for the selection and assessment of influencers have been developed globally. But none of them still provides sufficient guarantees that the content will attain the emotional recall of the audience, that the investment will pay off and that the brand will not undermine its reputation. For an advertiser or agency, buying bloggers is still a process accompanied by a frisson of excitement, as it goes hand in hand with the risk and desire to “hit the jackpot”, not unlike a game of roulette.

While treading this thorny path together with our clients, we invariably looked for options for making our choice less emotional and biased when encountering the personal interest of marketing or agency teams, so that results can be more stable and guaranteed. We have to protect advertisers from failing to follow trends and help them to appreciate the real consumer as they are and not as we would like them to be, or the way it is more convenient to see them. After a series of tests and analysis of the results, we realized that it is most effective to move towards the micro-segmentation of consumers according to their values or consumption patterns. This is what most often brings people together and makes them listen to the opinion leaders in those groups. Therefore, our approach is based on a first,  obligatory step – a detailed analysis and real consumer micro-segmentation of each of our clients. Next, we connect the matrix with a system for evaluating potential ideal opinion leaders for each of the consumer segments we are interested in. This matrix is based on the scoring system for important criteria, where alongside the standard CPU, ER, Reach, Intersections, UReach, etc., we add a qualitative assessment of the blogger’s content and people’s reaction to this content by each micro-segment over a long period of time. We call this the KOL’s Credibility Approach.

One important challenge that we can solve using the KOL’s Credibility Approach is building a long-term and effective relationship with bloggers, not through an endless “test and learn”, but through the basic understanding that each of the selected KOL’s is really interesting to our real consumers and has a high level of their trust. This allowed us and our clients to begin to perceive influencers not as an experimental budget item within the media plan, but as one of the most effective and creative fields.

The best way to work with bloggers is to find them among already existing fans of the brand  or those who have a high potential to become fans. Such partners stay with the brand for a long time, even after the end of the paid cooperation, continuing to buy a product or service and sharing it with their audience simply because they love the brand and want to do it. We call this kind of relationship with KOLs “hitting the jackpot”.