What Chinese case studies teach us about influencer marketing
China is one of the world\’s most widely used influencer marketing where celebrities, stars and bloggers make a living and enjoy a luxurious life by helping brands create awareness and sales.
‘Zhand Dayi’, the talk-of-the-town influencer on Weibo (the leading Chinese social media platform with 4 million users), is the best example as she stunned the crowd by helping a brand close 9 million yuan sales within 1 hour!
Next, ‘Mr.Bag’, the fashion blogger, generated 1.2 million yuan sales to a brand by reviewing bags to his followers on Valentine’s Day.
Why has influencer marketing insanely ‘influenced’ the chinese market as we have spoken?
Here are strategies we have summarised for you.
1. Different sense about ‘influencer’ in Chinese and Western markets
It’s no doubt that ‘hard sale’ is one powerful marketing tactic but is extremely complicated because it may alienate and overwhelm customers to the point where they dismiss the sales pitch. However, Chinese influencers can pitch products and services in a forceful and insistent way naturally without any resistance… This is why Chinese influencers generated a huge profit in a snap.
2. Micro influencers play a big role
Chinese brands choose micro influencers, the ordinary people who are not even a star, singer nor celebrity but have a good personality and presentation skills, to advertise their brands. These ordinary people cost less and create an ‘intimate’ feeling to the target market. While, niche brands choose an expert influencer who is knowledgeable and well-known on field to create ‘credibility’ among customers.
Case Study
Semir, a Chinese fashion brand, launched ‘what to wear tomorrow’ campaign and picked Ting Wu, fashion magazine editor, to promote the campaign instead of influencers on Weibo or WeChat as they believed she can convince open-minded and high self-esteem girls of all ages.
The result is Ting Wu’s post about this campaign was engaged with up to 3,000 times and #明天穿什么 (what to wear tomorrow) was exposed up to 530 million times.
3. Dare to try new things
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”, Albert Einstein said.
Pechoin, an 80-year-old skin care brand in China, found that the old-school marketing strategies didn’t go well as before and decided to change for the brighter future by hiring influencer to rebrand, capturing the teenage market once again.
They hand-picked 127 influencers who are famous among the newer generation to review their product on Singles’ Day (11.11) and enabled the brand to gain 143 million followers and 160,000 times engagement on social media.
4. Make a big play
Coca-Cola in China is the best example of this sentence…
As the launching of the new product Coca-Cola Plus, the brand’s marketers aim to engage people both offline and online by hiring sexy male stars and influencers to promote the campaign, and cooperate with restaurants and festivals in parallel to have their brand appear everywhere and every time.
As expected, Coca-Cola enjoyed a huge increase of followers and engagement on social media but what surprised us the most is Coca-Cola didn’t force hired influencers to put links or hashtag on their posts. This is perhaps the synergy between offline and online marketing strategies.
Chinese case studies are good examples of influencer marketing as it has a large population as well as advanced technologies. Turn to Thailand, influencer marketing is one of the most picked online marketing tools by leading brands. In the previous year, brands have spent up to 2,000-3,000 million baht, or 20-30%, of a digital advertising budget to influencer marketing.
So, what brands need to take into account are how to make the most from the investment, what we have learnt from the Chinese case studies and find well-experienced digital experts who are capable to drive your business to success online.
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