Hello, I’m Leo Sato (@slamdunk772), the CEO of applemint, a digital marketing agency in Taiwan!
Today, I’m going to talk about the latest 2021 influencer marketing in Taiwan. It’s already been 4 years since the golden age of Taiwanese influencer marketing.
For those who are not familiar with the influencer marketing in Taiwan, the influencer promotion was one of the most effective
In my previous blog, I talked about how I don’t recommend using influencers in Taiwan for small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have enough budget to afford them?
It’s been a few years since then, and with the emergence of Youtubers and relatively low-cost micro-influencers, it’s hard to know what’s going on now. I’m sure many of you are wondering what’s going on with influencer marketing in Taiwan right now.
So in this blog, I would like to tell you the price and effect of influencers in 2021 and talk about the future of influencer marketing in Taiwan.
Before I go any further, let me state my conclusion first: I don’t recommend the use of influencers in the long run.
The key phrase is “The longest way round is the nearest way home.” (by Ichiro)
Contents
The Cost of Taiwanese Influencers in 2021
Let’s get right to the point. Earlier in this blog (in Japanese), I talked about how the cost of influencers in Taiwan has been skyrocketing in the past few years? What about in 2021? The current cost of influencers has not changed much from 3-4 years ago.
Below, I’ll specially disclose the prices of influencers with over 500,000 followers that I recently contacted!
| Number of Followers | Content and Price | |
| Influencer A | approx. 550,000 | Cost per post: 100,000 NTD Live streaming: 150,000 NTD Secondary use of material: 100,000 NTD per month |
| Influencer B | approx. 620,000 | One 60-second video post: 150,000 NTD |
| Influencer C | approx. 600,000 | One video post: 120,000 NTD Secondary use of material (LP, etc.): 50,000 NTD |
As you can see, in Taiwan, an influencer with more than 500,000 followers will cost at least 100,000 NTD per post (as of Nov.12th, 2021: 3,594 USD). There is additional cost for the advertising agency fee. Furthermore, since influencers usually post something on their SNS every day, if they don’t repeatedly use the text and materials they post, the the promotion will soon be buried by other posts.
As a result, as of 2021, if you ask an influencer with more than 500,000 followers to promote your company, it will cost you 150,000-200,000 NTD (5,400-7,200 USD) including the cost of posting, commission and secondary use.
Of course, you can also ask micro-influencers for 10,000 to 20,000 NTD (350 – 700 USD). However, as far as I know, micro-influencers with a few thousand or tens of thousands of followers are not doing very well marketing-wise in Taiwan these days.
By the way, the above influencers are the ones we have tried and found to be relatively effective in promotion. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but all of them had more than 500,000 followers.
Keep in mind that as of 2021, it costs around 150,000-200,000 NTD to hire an effective influencer in Taiwan!
Popular Influencers in Taiwan Today
I’ve already mentioned that influencers in Taiwan who are effective in advertising somehow all have about 500,000 followers in common and cost about 150,000-200,000 NTD including all the expenses. However, there are influencers who are effective in promotion that have less than 500,000 followers but cost less than 100,000 NTD.
Can you guess who they are?
It’s lawyers and doctors. Lawyers and doctors are famous people who have about 100,000-200,000 followers and cost about 80,000-100,000 NTD (2800 – 3600USD) in most cases. Lawyers and doctors have a stable income from their main job, so they don’t have the need to earn high advertising fees in the first place.
It is true that when lawyers and doctors advertise, there is a sense of trust and credibility.
Maybe it’s because of this psychological effect that lawyers and doctors KOLs are so effective!
However, sooner or later, the lawyers and doctors will advertise so much that Taiwanese consumers will get used to it and it will eventually lose its effectiveness.
As of Nov. 2021, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and famous chefs are already modeling the image of the product. ….
By the way, in August 2021, a very famous and beautiful doctor who’s also an influencer was in the news for having an affair or something… I don’t care if she had an affair or not, but it makes their lives harder for lawyers and doctors to be famous …. (I was surprised to see that this doctor has 800,000 followers on Facebook! ?)
source: 最美性學博士「許藍方」與人夫暴不倫！意外曝光3「天王男星」求愛，吳宗憲笑嗆「什麼咖」
She is very pretty… If she’s my doctor I might want to go to the hospital everyday lol
Influencer PR is The Longest Way Round
It’s time to talk about the conclusion. Using influencers to raise brand recognition in Taiwan may seem like a shortcut, but I think it’s the most circuitous way. This is because the recognition gained through influencers will soon disappear.
Most of you who are reading this are probably on some sort of social networking site, but who can remember what their friends posted on social media yesterday? Not many, right?
Influencer posts only stick in your mind for a moment, so the effect of influencer PR is limited to people who want to make an impulse purchase when it is temporarily displayed. To avoid this, many companies use the influencer’s post as a secondary source and expose it as an advertisement many times, but in the end, it only increases the number of people who buy on impulse, and I don’t really believe that influencer posts have an impact on fan acquisition….
Also, if you keep having influencers to post, you might sell well the moment they post, but if you don’t post, your sales will go down, resulting in dependency on the influencer. It is like a drug.
Influencer posts are only memorable for a moment, and they are not likely to lead to continuous brand recognition.
This is why I believe that you shouldn’t rely too much on influencer marketing and it is not something to continuously use over and over again. (I’m not against the use of influencers at all, I’m just against the use of influencers in a way that depends on them)
So what should you do? I suggest content creation. You could call it owned media. Through blogs, audio, and video content, we need to tell people who we are, who sells our products, how our products are different from others, and what problems we are trying to solve.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure the direct impact of content creation on CV, so online-shopping companies that value direct response are reluctant to create content. As far as I know, there are almost no online-shopping companies that have expanded into Taiwan and are focusing on content creation.
But consider this. Why do you buy an iPhone over an Android phone? Are you buying an iPhone because it’s somehow cooler? (Or because everyone else has one)
This is just an example but in an age of uniformity, people are increasingly buying products because of their “image” and “people” rather than their functions. Like, “I’ll buy it because it’s cool,” “I’ll buy it because I like the CEO,” “I’ll buy it because I like the staff.
For the past four years since 2017, applemint has been expressing our thoughts and useful information, to the point that now people contact me saying things like “I share the same value with Mr. Sato so I made an inquiry” and “I was attracted to Mr. Sato’s challenge so I applied”.
The number of blogs that I have been writing for about 2000-2500 words a week has now exceeded 250. In 2021, companies with content and creators are becoming more and more prominent, while companies that prioritize short-term sales, using influencers and spending only on advertising are losing ground.
If you are planning to enter the Taiwan market, I seriously recommend you to create some contents.
If you’re interested in having applemint help you out, please contact us here. applemint has been successfully creating content in Taiwan for 4 years (I’m proud haha).
That’s it from CEO of applemint, Leo!
Click to contact applemint.
