There seems to be some debate about whether key opinion leaders (KOLs) and influencers are the same. After all, people recognize key opinion leaders for their knowledge, so therefore they should influence people’s decisions. And people clearly respect influencers enough for people to take notice of them, so presumably, influencers must be key opinion leaders to their followers.
The real answer is probably that some key opinion leaders are influencers, and some influencers are key opinion leaders, but not all would consider themselves both.
- What are Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)?
- How Do Influencers Differ From Key Opinion Leaders?
- Examples of Key Opinion Leaders
- How to Use Key Opinion Leaders in Your Marketing Strategy
- Many Key Opinion Leaders Become Mega or Macro-Influencers
- Key Opinion Leaders Work Full-Time. Influencers Spend Their Work Time Online.
- Influencers have a Ready-Made Audience for Influencer Marketing, KOLs Less So
- Sometimes Brands Can Help Turn Influencers into Key Opinion Leaders
- As Always, Brands Need to Begin a Campaign by Setting Goals
- Frequently Asked Questions
What are Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)?
Wikipedia adds fuel to the fire, by defining a key opinion leader (KOL) as being also known as an "influencer,” a person or organization who has expert product knowledge and influence in a respective field. Relevant interest groups trust them and have significant effects on consumer behavior.
However, there is one key difference between a key opinion leader and an influencer. In modern use, at least, influencers operate online, making their name and exerting their influence on social media, blogs, and on YouTube. There is no requirement that a key opinion leader operate on any online or social platform. They are merely the “go-to” people for their subject of expertise.
One of the most common places you encounter key opinion leaders is in traditional media. KOLs are the subject experts that the press calls in when they want a quote or credible soundbite about some current topical issue. For example, your local television news is likely to go to some KOL to give credibility and offer their opinions about some topical new issue.
They could be a weather expert, somebody knowledgeable about gun control, a political pundit, or a university professor. The key is that they have developed a reputation for their knowledge of some specialist topics.
You regularly see KOLs making an appearance in court cases. Both the defense and the prosecution try to find some key opinion leader to support their argument. They then present the KOL to a jury as an expert witness – even if the opposition also uses a KOL with an opposing viewpoint.
How Do Influencers Differ From Key Opinion Leaders?
Influencers can be key opinion leaders and vice versa. However, there is no need for the two roles to overlap.
There have been key opinion leaders for virtually as long as humans can speak. Many key opinion leaders actively avoid the Internet because they have little spare time to devote to it. Some consider social media a massive waste of their time.
There is no requirement for KOLs to operate any social account or have any followers. They just need recognition for having expertise on a topic. Let's learn about the differences between key opinion leaders and influencers.
Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)
KOLs are recognized experts within specific fields or industries. They possess deep knowledge and credibility, often built through years of experience, academic credentials, or significant achievements. Their influence is rooted in their authority and the respect they command within their niche communities.
- Expertise and Credibility: KOLs are known for their in-depth insights and provide valuable information that helps their audience make informed decisions. They often engage in educational content rather than promotional material.
- Niche Audience: KOLs typically have a smaller, highly engaged audience that seeks specialized knowledge. Their followers are often industry professionals or individuals with a strong interest in the specific topics the KOL addresses.
- Motivation: Their primary motivation is to educate and inform rather than to promote products for financial gain. This authenticity enhances their credibility.
Influencers
Influencers, on the other hand, primarily gain their following through social media platforms. They may not possess specialized knowledge but have the ability to engage and entertain a broader audience.
- Reach and Engagement: Influencers often have large followings, which allows them to reach diverse demographics. Their content is typically lifestyle-oriented, focusing on entertainment and relatability rather than in-depth expertise.
- Promotional Focus: Influencers are often motivated by financial compensation, showcasing products or brands in exchange for payment or free products. Their collaborations are usually designed for short-term campaigns aimed at generating buzz and immediate sales.
- Content Style: While social media influencers can create engaging and relatable content, their expertise in the subjects they discuss may vary significantly, leading to less credibility compared to KOLs.
Overlap and Differences
While there is overlap—many KOLs can also be considered influencers due to their online presence—key distinctions remain:
- Focus on Expertise vs. Reach: KOLs emphasize specialized knowledge, while influencers prioritize broad reach and engagement across various topics.
- Content Purpose: KOLs aim to educate and inform, whereas influencers often focus on entertainment and lifestyle promotion.
- Audience Relationship: KOLs cultivate deeper relationships based on trust and expertise, while influencers maintain broader but less specialized connections with their audiences.
Examples of Key Opinion Leaders
Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) can be found in various industries and fields. Here are some examples of areas where KOLs are prevalent, along with specific examples:
Areas Where KOLs Appear
- Business and Entrepreneurship
- Healthcare and Medicine
- Technology and Innovation
- Beauty and Fashion
- Food and Nutrition
- Sports and Fitness
- Politics and Current Affairs
- Media and Entertainment
Examples of KOLs
Business and Entrepreneurship
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
- Lori Greiner, "Queen of QVC" and Shark Tank investor
- Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock
Healthcare and Medicine
- Dr. Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent
- Dr. Oz, cardiothoracic surgeon and TV personality
Technology and Innovation
- Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX
- Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Meta (Facebook)
- Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media and open-source advocate
These KOLs have established themselves as trusted experts in their respective fields through their knowledge, experience, and ability to influence opinions and decisions within their communities.
How to Use Key Opinion Leaders in Your Marketing Strategy
Incorporating Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) into your marketing strategy can significantly enhance your brand's credibility, reach, and engagement. Here's how you can effectively use KOLs in your strategy:
Identify the Right KOL
Firstly, you need to identify the right KOLs for your brand. Use media monitoring tools to find KOLs who align with your brand values and have a substantial influence in your industry. Look for individuals whose expertise and audience match your target demographic. It's crucial to evaluate the authenticity of the KOL's following, ensuring that it is genuine and engaged, not inflated by fake followers. Authenticity is key for maintaining credibility.
Develop a Clear Strategy
Develop a clear strategy for your KOL partnerships. Define your goals, whether it's increasing brand awareness, launching a new product, or reshaping public perception. Having defined objectives will guide your collaboration. Decide on the type of content you want the KOL to create, such as blogs, videos, or social media posts, and how it will fit into your overall marketing strategy.
Leverage KOL Influence
Leverage the KOL's influence to boost your brand's credibility. Their endorsement can significantly influence consumer trust and purchasing decisions. KOLs can also help you reach niche audiences who are genuinely interested in your products or services, leading to higher engagement rates.
Monitor and Measure
Finally, monitor and measure the impact of your KOL campaigns. Use metrics to evaluate success, such as engagement rates, sales conversions, and overall brand sentiment. Be prepared to adjust your strategy based on performance data to optimize future collaborations with KOLs.
Many Key Opinion Leaders Become Mega or Macro-Influencers
As we have discussed in previous posts, there is a range of different influencer types, depending on the number of followers they have. While the definitions appear to be fluid, a current view is that there are now five tiers of influencer:
- Nano-influencers: 1,000 - 10,000 followers
- Micro-influencers: 10,000 - 50,000 followers
- Mid-tier influencers: 50,000 - 500,000 followers
- Macro-influencers: 500,000 - 1,000,000 followers
- Mega-influencers: 1,000,000+ followers
Most successful online influencers tend to be micro- and mid-tier influencers, although nano-influencers are gaining popularity in really specialist niches.
However, people who have already made their name offline as key opinion leaders often become macro- or mega-influencers if they choose to operate social media accounts. Stephen King, for example, has 7.1 million followers on his Twitter (X) account, putting him in the mega-influencer category. Gordon Ramsay, with 7.6 million Twitter followers, along with 18 million on Instagram, also fits this category.
While brands traditionally opted to work with celebrities and mega-influencers, they faced a few challenges. Firstly, famous people tend to charge a lot for their posts. Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian have reportedly charged upwards of $500,000 for a single post, often going in the millions. Secondly, these key opinion leaders have far less engagement with their followers than specialist online influencers do.
Gordon Ramsay, for instance, may upload tantalizing images of excellently prepared food, and make a comment as he makes the post, but he appears to reply to others’ comments on his images rarely. Let’s face it, he’s a busy man, running businesses, making television shows, and rescuing restaurants that are near collapse. He hasn’t the time to fully manage a busy Instagram account.
Key Opinion Leaders Work Full-Time. Influencers Spend Their Work Time Online.
Ultimately, one of the main differences between a key opinion leader and a genuine social influencer is how the person spends his/her time. Sure, both have to be highly knowledgeable about a subject. They’re both topic experts. Yet, for most influencers, social media/blogging/YouTubing is their full-time job. They specialize in disseminating the message about their topic of expertise.
Key opinion leaders, on the other hand, spend the bulk of their time participating in their area of expertise. It is the doing, rather than the telling that they specialize in. They may spend some time on social media, but it is their spare time. They are not going to devote all day to building up their following, creating YouTube videos, or constructing the perfect post. They are far more likely to spend their day, cooking, writing horror novels, or acting as a Hollywood socialite (all right, the boundary is blurrier for people like the Kardashians and Jenners).
Influencers are expert communicators – it is one of their specialties, as much as they are knowledgeable about some niche or special topic. In many ways, influencers are like teachers. They have mastered the craft of explaining their specialist knowledge to their online audience. Although key opinion leaders need some communication skills, particularly if they are to appear credible on media such as television or radio, they usually don’t need to place as much emphasis on it as their online counterparts.
Influencers have a Ready-Made Audience for Influencer Marketing, KOLs Less So
A common mistake brands that are new to influencer marketing make often is to equate success with the number of followers somebody has. They think that the more followers somebody has, the more influential they must be. The logical next step from this thinking would be to assume that any business would gain their most significant marketing success by working with the people with the most followers whom they could afford within their marketing budget.
If you followed this assumption through to its logical conclusion, it would mean that all large, successful businesses would work with celebrities and other key opinion leaders. Small businesses and failing larger ones would have to limit themselves to working with micro- and nano-influencers.
However, as we have seen in other articles on the Influencer Marketing Hub that is not how the influencer marketing industry works. Many of the best and most successful campaigns have involved relative no-name influencers, best known to a group of passionate fans. Some of the most expensive marketing failures have involved celebrities promoting products that they would never use in their daily life, or that seem to contradict their usual image. The regularly panned Kylie Jenner Pepsi ad is a case in point.
While some KOLs may be happy to participate in a campaign, others may be less comfortable. University professors, for example, may feel that representing a particular brand would affect their impartiality.
While celebrities often have large social accounts with millions of followers, that doesn’t mean that the celebrity is necessarily active on their account. Often he or she may pay a personal assistant to run the account on their behalf.
Sure, the account may be useful for promoting a celebrity’s activities, a musician’s upcoming gigs for instance, but it may not be suitable for promoting third-party products. Also, these promotions tend to come across more like advertisements, because of the lack of enthusiastic engagement between the KOL and his/her audience.
Sometimes Brands Can Help Turn Influencers into Key Opinion Leaders
Many brands opt to work with micro-influencers, as they have some of the best engagement rates. This is particularly so in the more niche and arcane areas of knowledge. Over time, the fame of these influencers may grow, particularly if they become spokespeople for a brand over multiple campaigns.
As their online grows, people are more likely to ask them for advice and help, and often this expands to an offline setting. This could very easily make an online influencer the town expert on his or her topic of expertise, certainly outside major cities.
Some of today’s fashion designers began as influencers before they made the leap into the industry themselves. These include Natasha Oakley who had nearly 2 million followers when she set up Monday Swimwear. Similarly, Zoe Foster Blake made her name as an influencer before she set up fashion brand Skin & Threads. Danielle Bernstein successfully made the transition from blogger to designer with two brands Second Skin Overalls and Archive Shoes.
Some influencers have successfully made the transition to television. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, YouTubers have an advantage with this. Inc. reports successful social media influencers killing in TV include Franchesca Ramsey, Murray Newlands, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grace Helbig, Peter Shankman, Brian Solis, Tyler Oakley, and Adam Conover.
As Always, Brands Need to Begin a Campaign by Setting Goals
Every influencer marketing campaign should begin by the brand setting campaign goals. What are you trying to achieve with your influencer marketing? This will significantly affect the type of person you choose to work with to promote your campaign.
If you aim to promote awareness of a social cause affecting youth, and you have a sizeable budget, you may well benefit from working with high-level KOLs/celebrities such as Katy Perry or Justin Bieber. They speak to the youth you are trying to target. If your cause is important, enough Bieber or Perry might even mention it during a show, or in one of their media appearances. They are sure to refer to it in their social posts (and both have massive followings). Just be aware that their engagement rates are incredibly low.
However, if you were hoping to use influencer marketing to sell baby clothes to new mothers, using either of those superstars would be an incredibly expensive venture for the return you were likely to receive. If you were to spend that budget on hundreds or thousands of micro-influencers, who targeted the mommy market, you would probably be happier with your ultimate results.
Similarly, if you were a young horror writer, you undoubtedly love to receive an endorsement from Stephen King. However, he is unlikely to take money to give you a good review if your book isn’t particularly chilling. Moreover, if your book were that good, King would probably tweet enthusiastically about it for free, anyway
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are key opinion leader people?
Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are individuals recognized as experts within a specific field or industry. They possess deep knowledge, experience, and credibility, making them influential figures whose opinions are highly respected and trusted by their peers, industry professionals, and the public.
KOLs often hold positions of authority, such as academics, industry analysts, thought leaders, or professionals who have gained significant expertise through years of experience.
Who are known as opinion leaders?
Opinion leaders are individuals who have the ability to influence the opinions and decisions of others within a particular community or industry. They are respected for their knowledge, expertise, and credibility in their field.
Opinion leaders are often sought after for their insights and perspectives on specific topics, and their recommendations can significantly impact consumer behavior and public opinion. They can be found in various sectors, including business, healthcare, technology, and media.
How do you identify a key opinion leader?
To identify a Key Opinion Leader (KOL), consider the following criteria:
- Expertise and Knowledge: Look for individuals with deep knowledge and expertise in a specific field or industry, often demonstrated through years of experience, academic credentials, or significant achievements.
- Credibility and Trust: KOLs are highly respected and trusted by their peers, industry professionals, and the public. They are often cited in media, academic publications, or industry reports.
- Recognition and Influence: KOLs are recognized as authorities in their field and have the ability to influence opinions and decisions within their niche communities.
- Engagement: While KOLs may not have large social media followings like influencers, they typically have a highly engaged audience that values their insights and recommendations.
What is an example of a KOL?
An example of a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Dr. Gupta is widely recognized as an expert in the medical field, often providing insights and analysis on healthcare-related topics in both media and academic circles. His credibility, expertise, and influence make him a trusted figure in the healthcare industry, shaping public opinion and guiding decision-making on health-related issues.
How do Key Opinion Leaders Differ from Influencers?
Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) differ from influencers in several key ways:
- Expertise: KOLs are recognized experts in a specific field, with deep knowledge and credibility built over years. Influencers, while they may have a strong presence and large following, often do not have the same level of specialized expertise.
- Content Focus: KOLs typically produce content that is educational or analytical, aimed at informing their audience. Influencers focus more on creating engaging, lifestyle-oriented content that appeals to a broader audience.
- Audience: KOLs usually have a smaller, more specialized audience that is highly engaged and values their expert opinions. Influencers tend to have a larger, more general audience that follows them for entertainment, trends, or lifestyle content.
- Motivation: KOLs are often motivated by a desire to educate and share knowledge, making their endorsements appear more authentic. Influencers are often driven by financial compensation, promoting products or brands as part of paid collaborations.
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