Influencer Marketing vs. Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Marketing

One is WAY more effective than the other. Let's break it down 👇

**Influencer Marketing**:
-Pay someone to make a canned promotional post about your product
-Pay for distribution (akin to paying for advertising)
-Often the “influencers” don’t even use the product in real life
-One off campaigns with short-term thinking and no long term aligned interests
-"Influencers" usually don't provide any strategic input (best practices, use cases, product feedback, etc.)
-Track impact with UTMs (like an affiliate) or reach/impressions (like advertising)

**Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Marketing**:
-An external thought leader with tons of existing trust and credibility promotes your product authentically and organically because they get tons of value from it
-KOLs use your product in real life and deliver ongoing strategic input (best practices, use cases, product feedback, etc.)
-Collects DATA that supports and advances the product positioning
-Collaborates on recurring campaigns, events, and content (not one-offs)
-Long-term partnerships with long-term aligned interests
-Track impact with business growth and category awareness with self-reported attribution and qualitative customer research as directional feedback

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Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Marketing is not new, by the way. It’s a strategy that’s been used for decades in other industries outside of Tech/SaaS, such as Medical Device and Pharma.

In 2016, we had a robust KOL Marketing strategy where we partnered with physicians who:

-Spoke at all the industry conferences our customers attended
-Had already built large, relevant audiences on social media platforms where they posted about topics our ICP cared about
-Used our product in real-life at their hospital every day
-Built clinical best practices that hundreds of other hospitals adopted and followed
-Ran clinical studies and clinical trials to demonstrate effectiveness
-Developed new use cases for what patients to treat with the product
-Hosted sponsored webinars where they shared how they use our product with hundreds of prospective customers live
-Consistently compensated for their expertise and long-term relationship, not based on how many deals they referred us or how many times they posted about our product

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Stop thinking about external partnerships like “influencers” as an affiliate relationship or an alternative to advertising. It’s short sighted and way less effective.

Instead find partners (KOLs) that already have large audiences and influence AND love using your product in real life. And build deep long-term partnerships with them.