Brands used to allocate a lot of their marketing budget into billboards, radio ads, TV ads, banner ads, etc. Now we have entered an era where if a brand doesn’t engage with any influencers, content creators, brand ambassadors, Tik Tokers or social media influencers to promote or raise awareness of their products, consumers will not know about the brand that much.
With that being said, it’s not all glamorous as you seen on social media when a brand engages with KOLs (key opinion leaders). From time to time, especially for brand owners or media agencies, we see these KOLs removing themselves from an on-going campaign despite having agreed to the campaign requirements. Based off our past experiences of working with KOLs, these may be some of the contributing factors as to why KOLs pull out from campaigns.
- Personal reasons such as health, family, unforeseen circumstances, etc
KOLs are humans too. Sometimes unexpected things can happen to them too such as getting into accidents, falling sick, the need to take care of family members due to unforeseen issues, etc. When things like these happen, we as the agency will try our best to discuss with the brand to see if we can move the timeline to a later date or if it’s okay with the brand to replace this KOL because we do understand that certain campaigns are very time sensitive such as festive, promotion or giveaway campaigns. Therefore we want to be able to come up with a solution that can cater to all the parties involved
- KOLs overpromising
In Nuffnang, it is a common practice for us to check with a brand when they engage with us, which brands are considered as our client’s competitors so that when we reach out to KOLs, we will inform the KOLs to NOT take up those competitors during the campaign period. This due is various reasons :
- This will increase the trust from consumers to the KOLs & the brand cause the customer can see that the KOLs are loyal to a brand and don’t simply just start to promote a product/brand of a similar nature
- This will safeguard the brand also so that the KOL is not promoting 2 brands of the same nature within the same period of time
- Uncertainties from brands
For instance, Brand A has already locked down KOL A to be part of their upcoming campaign but halfway through, Brand A decided to change their whole campaign direction into something that’s totally different from what was communicated in the beginning. KOL A might not be comfortable with the new direction, hence KOL A might drop out of this entire campaign.
In closing, I think that brands, agencies & KOLs need to understand that this KOL engagement service is NOT a one-way communication and instant posting kind of service.
There are a lot of uncertainties that can happen along the way during this KOL engagement but I think the question that you have in your mind right now would be,
“Then how can we counter all these uncertainties?”
Well, there’s no one direct answer that can solve all the uncertainties that you might be facing during your KOLs engagement services with an agency but when such an incident does take place, we would encourage that all the relevant parties such as the brands, agencies, and KOLs to come together and have a proper discussion to come up with various solutions that can achieve the best outcome possible for each party.
“Even the most seemingly unpleasant situations- if you become aligned with it, something good will emerge from that.” -Eckhart Tolle
