【Influencer Marketing Failure in Taiwan】- Avoiding Failure is the Key to Success

Hello, I’m Leo Sato (@slamdunk772), the CEO of applemint, a digital marketing agency in Taiwan!

In Taiwan, the use of influencers/bloggers plays an important role in digital marketing. In this blog, I would like to share with you 4 mistakes we made in influencer marketing and Taiwanese bloggers?

Why do I share our failures ? It’s because I believe key to success in digital marketing in Taiwan is to to avoid failures. I hope whoever reached this blog will avoid making the same mistakes we made?

Failure #1: not knowing the cost of hiring influencers

I was once asked by a client to arrange a Taiwanese influencer. We did not have any contact information for any Taiwanese influencers back then so we reached out to an influencer agency that I was introduced by my friend.

When we got the estimation for several influencers, I felt very uncomfortable. It only wrote the overall price and excluded details. In other words, there was no indication of how much the purchase price of the influencer would be and how much the margin would be.

At first, I didn’t know how much it would cost to use a Taiwanese influencer, so I just accepted it. But when I checked the usual price and margin with another agency, I found out that the reasonable margin for influencer is somewhere between 20 and 30%.

However, the company we asked to arrange was charging us 30%-40% margin. 40% margin is fine if we agreed but as I mentioned, we were not informed what was included in the overall price.

Check point 1

make sure you ask the details of agency’s estimation/purchase order.

Here is an old information (from 2013…) of how much the Taiwanese influencers are. Since the information is very old, I recommend you multiply 1.5 times – 2 times to the listed price.

Failure #2: receiving likes but no CVs

At that time, we hypothesized that the number of likes on the influencer’s post would lead to conversion (purchase). In order to increase the number of likes, we created eye-catching photos using snapchat filter (Nowadays, almost every social network has such function but back then it was limited to Snapchat).

After one hour of posting, as expected, the number of likes had increased to more than 1,000 at a very fast pace, but we received a very few direct conversions. The next day, the number of likes increased even more to over 3,000, but the conversion still didn’t look well…..

With closer analysis, we found out the following:
1) I we used a female influencer for a product aimed at women, but most of the likes came from men.
2) Fewer clicks on the URL: The focus went on the photo, not the URL

Failure #3: relying too much on past results

We used an influencer who was very effective in the past, but when we asked her for the 2nd time after about 3 months, the results were not as good as we had hoped. We later found out that the influencer had discovered the joy of making easy money by posting on social network and repeatedly promoted different products on her social network.

In other words, her PR posts on social network were excessive. As a result, the post about our product was buried along with other products within 1-2 days. We also found out that many Taiwanese consumers started disliking her Facebook page due to excessive promotions.

Failure #4: relying too much on the number of followers

At first, I thought that the more followers influencers have, the more different people we can reach, so I chose influencers with a large number of followers. However, I later found out that there is not much correlation between the number of followers and the number of conversions.

I came to think that what is important for FB posts is not the number of followers or likes, but the number of shares. In fact, the correlation between the number of shares and the number of CVs was quite high.

Therefore, when we plan our influencers post, we think how shareable the post may be. If you only promote your product on social network, do you think people will share? Probably not unless it’s a really good product. You need to think the benefit of the post.

Lastly, influencers who reply to users’ comments are more likely to lead to CVs due to their engagement. So we also make sure to tell the influencers to reply to any comments on their post.

Conclusion and tips (celebrity posts and ad management)

The following is a summary of our failures.

1. was overcharged
2. thought that more “Like” = more”CV”, but this hypothesis was proved to be wrong
3. Blindly used a past successful influencer, not knowing she actually started promoting other products excessively
4. the number of followers was not very reliable

Another important aspect of influencer posts is whether you advertise the post or not. If you do not advertise the post, the post will be buried along with other posts but if you advertise the post, the post may appear on targeted users feed.

The effect of a single post will only last for 2-3 days so I highly recommend you negotiate with influencers regarding the right for advertising post.

If you would like to contact applemint to discuss your influencer needs in Taiwan, please click here to contact us! We can also help arrange influencers in Japan!