Nowadays, the influence of influencers is far-reaching, and when they promote their products on platforms with huge fan bases, they can often achieve the effect of spreading ten or ten to hundreds in an instant, directly stimulating the sales of products, so it is no wonder that advertisers are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to sponsor some Instagram KOLs and YouTube superstars, so that a new influencer economy has emerged in the marketing industry.
It is precisely because the Internet celebrity industry has a market price that it has also led to the birth of some specialized disciplines that “teach people how to become KOLs”. In China, Yiwu Business School (YWICC) has opened a university course in recent years, focusing on cultivating KOLs. The content of the course is very wide-ranging, including acting, make-up and styling, public relations etiquette, posture, dance, catwalk on stage, etc., and the final exam includes an assessment section of “15 Priests in 30 Seconds”.
However, although there are more and more such KOL training courses nowadays, in fact, it is not as easy as imagined to breed hot KOLs, and it often requires a lot of cooperation from the right time and place behind it.
For example, Korean singer PSY, even though he became an instant hit with the song “Gangnam Style” in 2014 and became a world-renowned Internet celebrity, in fact, he has gone through more than ten years of hard work and attempts, coupled with the Korean wind effect, and mastering the psychology of the public in music, to get his current achievements.
As for young people in Hong Kong who are interested in entering the KOL industry, although they may not be able to fully borrow PSY’s successful tricks, it is not impossible to follow the rules to become an influencer and earn thousands or even tens of thousands of influencer income. The key is to find out what the public loves but have not yet popularized, continue to develop it, attract the attention of more and more netizens, and regularly analyze the data and make improvements, so that becoming a great influencer is not out of reach.
