Nuffnang Lab on how to succeed with hair care influencer marketing campaigns

The hair care market in Malaysia is a very competitive and aggressive one, driven by the huge variety of brands, with each one offering its own unique selling propositions. 

In a survey conducted by Nuffnang Lab, which conducts brand and communication strategy research for Nuffnang Malaysia and its clients, the country’s premier influencer marketing specialist, there was a different hair care product brand mentioned for every 1.2 respondents (based on 83 respondents). 

As such, social influencer awareness campaigns are one of the more commonplace, effective, and always-on approaches for brands to create recallability, and eventually leading to purchases and hopefully building up brand loyalty.

According to Nuffnang Lab Lead Koh Huiying (pic above), when brands run these awareness campaigns, the common benchmark that denotes success currently is to ensure that influencer social postings reach specific targets in terms of ‘impressions’ and ‘absolute reach’. 

However, there is little hard evidence to suggest how high impressions and absolute reach can be ensured beyond the size of the influencers’ followers, as these two metrics are often perceived to be heavily reliant on the platforms’ algorithms.

That’s the challenge for marketers – but Nuffnang appears to have found an innovative and ‘scientific’ answer to address it.

“We decided to take up the challenge to study if there’s a pattern behind all of our past influencer awareness campaigns for hair care brands. This hopefully addresses the knowledge gap specifically for the hair care product industry,” says Huiying.

Using the 400+ hair care awareness campaign posts that Nuffnang together with the influencers have generated in the past, Nuffnang Lab managed to come up with several conclusions on the type of content that generated the most results besides just relying on the size of followers, 3 of which are listed below.

Make more video-based content

Major social media platforms – including Instagram – are now becoming more video-centric. In Nuffnang Lab’s study, the video deliverables regardless of platform performed almost 3 times higher than still photos in terms of absolute reach. This is despite the fact that video deliverables formed only 1/3 of the total deliverables.

Guna Bahasa Malaysia

Nuffnang Lab noticed that content delivered in the target market’s native language (in this case, Bahasa Malaysia, as Malay-speaking communities formed the largest market for hair-care products) was key to push the content beyond the influencers’ audience. Nuffnang Lab believes this is because while social users don’t necessarily interact with the content directly, they might share the content to their community if they think it’s relevant.

Trust the influencers to make the content relevant

Both Instagram and TikTok have revealed that their algorithms will push content based on the likelihood of social users interacting with the posts. And if the content indeed receives interactions, the algorithm will favour the post more. Essentially, content that promotes interaction is prioritised by social media platform algorithms. On top of that, the success of the posts is also closely related to the followers interacting with the content and beyond that, sharing that content with their communities. These two factors mean that influencers who make posts that are relevant to their audiences will have a bigger impact.

Huiying notes that the full report of this study is full of exciting insights. “We highly encourage you to reach out to your respective servicing person from Nuffnang to have a full report walk through. Or you can drop us an email at [email protected] to request for a walkthrough.”