IMPLEMENTING AN EFFECTIVE KOL ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

Project background

Google, a U.S. tech giant, specializes in innovative internet products and services, offering unique search features. Its core mission of global information organization highlights its commitment to social impact and company benefits beyond tech innovation.

Each year, Google offices around the world celebrate International Women’s Day. In 2023, Google wanted to redefine the concept of “searching” by encouraging modern women to explore what makes them brave, strong, confident, smart, independent, and happy. By prompting behavioral changes, the Google #SearchForChange campaign in Vietnam and Indonesia sought to challenge stereotypes about women, enhance beliefs in intrinsic values, and encourage self-development to reach personal goals.

Our challenge

As Google’s strategic PR partner in Vietnam, we faced two big challenges throughout the implementation process:

Our biggest challenge was serving as a “bridge” between Google and the voices of Vietnamese women and to stand out with our unique message and delivery among the sea of content on International National Women’s Day, the 8th of March. Many other brands alongside Google also used the special occasion to dominate the discussion on social platforms. However, we wanted Google to stand out for understanding the prejudice and challenges that Vietnamese women face by solving a central and painful issue as a socially responsible company, rather than repeating the message of the crowd.

We worked closely with Google’s team in Singapore and other agencies from Indonesia and Vietnam to ensure consistent communication, maintain a tight timeline, and build tactical key opinion leader (KOL) lists in alignment with key ideas as well as expected outcomes.

Our execution

Our approach was to highlight women’s perception transformation accompanied by different behaviors and attitudes. On one side, we showcased the reluctance to change according to stereotypes in society, while on the other side, we emphasized the efforts Vietnamese women have made to change based on their own intrinsic values, leading to their personal happiness and pride. By comparing these contrasting sentiments towards these societal perceptions, we demonstrated that challenging societal norms and conservative beliefs is the best way for modern women to shine and spread positive messages to their communities. We identified and implemented a detailed step-by-step plan with the following key focuses:

We developed the selection criteria in collaboration with Google and the Indonesia teams, ensuring that we recommended three groups of KOLs who possessed purposeful attributes and aligned with the story Google wanted to convey. Subsequently, we built partnership packages with influencers, ensuring satisfactory benefits for both sides and maintaining close cooperation. The final KOL list went through multiple rigorous selection rounds, with consideration for tactical indexes such as number of followers, engagement rate, audience age, and influencers’ personal images.

We also oversaw KOL management on-site during the shooting of two hero videos. We worked to ensure clear two-way communication and the delivery of key materials on time with the expected quality, including script, social media content, and video production, for the group of influencers in –charge of independently creating content. These influencers included Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien, Mai Ngo, Lynk Lee, Sammy Dao and over 15 other famous profiles.

Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien, for example, was one of the remarkable influencers who we had the privilege to partner with. Besides holding the title of Miss Grand International 2021, Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien is nationally recognized as a woman who is beautiful both on the inside and outside, having overcome many obstacles in her past. With a unique inspirational story to tell the world about overcoming social stereotypes, we were ecstatic about the opportunity to work with her. Beyond expectations, Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien’s impactful and authentic voice and relatable experiences elicited a response from young Vietnamese people across the nation. Her videos for International Women’s Day 2023 reached 2M views on all platforms, 92K likes, and 600 comments.

Our results

We gained some amazing results after the campaign.

In November 2023, we were thrilled to be shortlisted for the MMA SMARTIES APAC Awards as one of the most effective purpose-driven projects of Diversity & Inclusion.

What we learned

After the end of the #SearchForChange campaign, we looked back at how we did. Here are our key learnings on how we implemented a successful PR campaign:

• Embrace the power of social media: Facebook and TikTok serve as vital platforms for engaging the public and disseminating messages in today’s world, contributing to heightened attention and improved conversion rates. Testing was conducted across three platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok—revealing that only Facebook and TikTok delivered such positive outcomes.
• Partner with the best-fitting influencers: The compatibility between the PR campaign and the selected KOLs was shown through both influencers’ index (number of followers, number of hard fans, engagement rate) and followers’ profiles with targeted ages and similar interests. For example, groups of fans who pay attention to appearance and funny content tend to care less about meaningful and deep messages or inspirational stories. Although these groups of followers contribute to increasing engagement for the campaign, their discussions will not reflect the brand’s expectations, or align with the campaign message.
• Focus on authentic value: We needed to ensure that the campaign’s key message related to the influencers’ personal stories rooted from their real-life experiences and their living philosophy.

• Implement the 3S-recipe content:

1. Short: short videos or short posts are more eye-catching
2. Straightforward: hook the audience in the first few seconds
3. Share a relatable story: the story should come from insights made by members of the target audiences to reach the wide audience’s hearts.