Web3 KOL placement is currently the most common marketing method and plays an important role in various stages such as project launch, preheating, sales, and operation.
However, there are endless chaos in KOL placement, which makes many project parties headache. How can we find the right KOL, how can we evaluate the effect of placement, and how can we avoid data fraud?
This article aims to address the pain points of Web3 KOL advertising in order to provide some feasible solutions for project parties.
Delivery process
KOL campaign steps: identify target users, set campaign goals, select appropriate KOLs, prepare promotional materials, communicate with KOLs, and evaluate KOL campaign results. Standardized processes help effectively manage and execute campaigns, thereby maximizing success.
Identify target users
Before looking for KOLs for advertising, most project owners will overlook a very important step, which is to identify the target users. Why do we need to understand this? Because product users and investment users are two completely different types of users, the logic of KOL advertising is also significantly different.
Product users refer to consumer users who focus on the user experience and functions of the product itself and expect to gain satisfaction or convenience through the product. Therefore, KOL placement targeting product users should focus on the effect of the placement, with the goal of increasing user conversion rate.
Investor users refer to those users who expect to get a return on investment through products. They focus not only on the user experience, but also on the economic value and future development potential of the product. Therefore, KOL placement targeting investor users should focus on user expectations to enhance users’ trust in the product and their willingness to invest.
Therefore, the project party needs to formulate differentiated KOL delivery strategies based on the different characteristics of the target users.
For product users, you can focus on cooperating with KOLs whose product tone is consistent with yours and whose fan base overlaps with your target users to improve the effect of your campaign. For investment audiences, you can focus on cooperating with influential KOLs to improve the trust and attractiveness of your campaign.
How to determine whether the target audience for this campaign is consumer users or investment users? The key is to see whether the content of the campaign is related to the asset.
If the content is not related to the asset and only needs to attract product users, then the experience of Web2 is universal, that is, to contextualize the content to address user pain points. For example, the promotion I did for the legal currency payment platform Poko successfully attracted a large number of product users.
If the theme of the content is related to assets, the target users are investment users. At this time, the importance of the content itself is relatively reduced, and the key lies in the project expectations behind the content. The biggest difference between investment users and product users is that they will actively pay attention to project information. Therefore, we can see that a large number of top projects can easily have many users even without publicity. The reason behind this is that the expectations of the projects are high enough.
But if it is not a top-tier project, can the project owner still create high expectations? Of course, it depends on planning + content. The most common method is to spread good news about the project, such as the expectation of listing on an exchange.
Set delivery goals
As we all know, KOLs have strong endorsement and secondary dissemination characteristics due to their close relationship with users. Evaluating the effectiveness of KOLs based on data alone is not comprehensive. In addition to the expectation itself, we also need to consider the duration of the expectation.
When the expected duration is longer, such as an airdrop, then the potential target user group is more important. When the expectation is realized quickly, every key point in the user path needs to be monitored and goals are set around this.
If it is a potential target user group, how to set a goal? First of all, it is necessary to make it clear that expected communication is more like brand building, and its goal is long-term rather than short-term traffic monetization. Therefore, you can set a big goal and get the target of each delivery by breaking it down.
Choosing the right KOL
After the target users and goals have been confirmed, the next step is to find the right KOL for delivery. Currently, KOL usually refers to social media influencers with more than 10,000 followers. However, due to the lack of third-party data platforms, KOL selection mainly relies on subjective judgment rather than past data support. At present, the market generally uses three dimensions for evaluation: number of followers, content data, and KOL classification. However, Twitter data is seriously falsified, resulting in the above indicators no longer meeting the needs of project parties.
In order to avoid the risk of data falsification, the project party has taken a variety of measures, such as offering the same price to each KOL, or allowing KOL to obtain early project shares to establish deep binding.
So, is there a more effective KOL screening strategy? Here are a few data indicators for reference:
Common Followers: The more followers an account has, the higher the quality of the account.
Comment reading volume: Comment data is not easy to inflate and can reflect the account activity more objectively.
Content reading volume: KOLs create content that is good and bad. If the reading volume is the same, it is a problem.
In addition, you can also determine the fan portrait and matching degree of the KOL by analyzing the KOL’s recent high-read content, and customize more suitable content.
Evaluate the effectiveness of KOL campaigns
The data indicators currently used in the industry, such as reading volume, forwarding volume, number of participants, etc., can actually be measured in several other dimensions.
The first is project popularity, measured by search volume on multiple platforms, such as CMC, Twitter, etc.
The second is the popularity of the project. If the community becomes more popular after the release and attracts new people to join, the expected communication effect is good.
The last step is secondary dissemination. If the first wave of KOL dissemination can trigger follow-up dissemination by other KOLs, it means that the expected acceptance is high.
Therefore, when there is no obvious response in terms of awareness, community popularity or secondary dissemination, it indicates that there is a problem with expectations. We need to clearly understand that KOL placement is like a megaphone. Although megaphones are different, what is more important is the content played in the megaphone.
KOL placement case
Regardless of whether the campaign achieves its goals or not, it is necessary to summarize and generalize the experience, so I will share three summarized practical cases.
Project A
Purpose: The project has not yet issued any tokens and wants to attract users by directly giving away tokens.
Expectation: AI computing power protocol, token incentives, the first 100 users who sign up for the event will receive excess rewards, and then users will share the rewards equally.
Strategy: The top English KOL with 300,000 followers will take the lead, write long content to endorse the project + share the event, and 20-30 mid-level KOLs will share screenshots of excess rewards received from participating in the event + expectations for the future increase in token prices.
Results: The number of fans on the official account increased by 5,000+, and the number of users participating in the event exceeded 3,000+
Project B
Purpose: The project has issued tokens and will be listed on a new country’s top exchange one week later. It needs to gain industry attention in that country.
Expectation: Listing on new exchanges, expected price increase
Strategy: An unknown Twitter account posted a picture of what appeared to be an internal dispute among the project team, and about 10 mid-level KOLs diverted attention to the listing on the major exchanges.
Result: With the help of the market pull, a lot of discussion was generated in the community, and the transaction amount reached a new high
Project C
Purpose: The project is preparing to issue tokens and sell them on a certain IDO platform, hoping to attract more users to participate in IDO
Expectations: Token, roadmap
Strategy: Top KOLs post articles to guess the growth rate of the project after it goes online. Those who guess correctly will win a grand prize. More than 30 mid-level KOLs analyze the project to make it a top project in a certain vertical track.
Results: The official account gained more than 10,000 followers, and the community gained more than 3,000 users
Summarize
The above are some of the practical experiences I have accumulated while helping many Web3 projects to conduct KOL placement. Welcome to discuss with me. In the future, I will work with Consensus Power to provide professional growth services to more project parties.
About the author Tracy
Web3 KOL｜Six Years in Crypto Market Operations｜Prev Binance｜ Twitter
About Consensus Power
Consensus Power is the first Web3 consensus incubation platform, dedicated to cultivating and supporting consensus-based Web3 projects. We will provide early Web3 projects with comprehensive services such as funding, marketing, community, and resources, and use the power of consensus to drive user growth and asset value.
