New Kolsquare Feature : Audience Overlap

Key Takeaways

• Exciting news: Kolsquare has a brand-new feature that determines audience overlap between different Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on Instagram.
• High audience overlap helps to reinforce messaging but may diminish overall reach.
• Low audience overlap facilitates identification of KOLs most relevant to your campaign.
• Knowing the audience overlap between KOLs allows brands to strategically allocate budgets and deliver greater ROI on campaigns.

What is Audience Overlap?

Simply put, Audience Overlap refers to the share of an influencer’s audience which is the same as another influencer’s audience. That is, some of the people who follow influencer A, also follow influencer B, meaning that the influencers’ audiences overlap, resulting in a reduced total target audience. For example:

Influencer A: Follower 1, Follower 2, Follower 3.

Influencer B: Follower 1, Follower 4

Influencer C: Follower 1, Follower 3, Follower 5

Here, the followers of the influencers you might want to collaborate with are duplicated at least once each. The Kolsquare Audience Overlap feature quantifies the size of audience overlap between KOLs you are considering for your campaign. The ability to evaluate large amounts of demographic data within the overlap groups will help you decide whether Influencer A, B, or C is best suited for your campaign.

Why does audience overlap matter for influencer marketing campaigns?

It is important to understand that a large or small audience overlap between KOLs is neither a good or bad thing on its own. Strategic analysis of audience overlap in relation to your campaign objectives, however, will help you deliver better campaign performance and ROI.

Analysis of KOL audience overlap helps you make decisions about whether to prioritize reach over frequency in your messaging, or vice versa. Do you want to target a large audience of unique targets once, or a smaller audience with recurring, reinforced messaging? Knowing the audience overlap between KOLs on Instagram provides visibility over audiences and demographics to help inform choices about budget allocation and which KOLs will deliver the highest ROI in relation to your goals.

How does Influencer Audience Overlap impact campaign strategy?

Pros and cons of a HIGH Influencer Audience Overlap

Generally speaking, the higher the audience overlap share of your KOL group, the more homogenous the audience. A high audience overlap enables you to efficiently increase messaging frequency by targeting a lot of users several times in the same campaign with messages from different KOLs.

This kind of strategy enables you to reinforce messaging, increase awareness amongst the audience of the product or service you are promoting, and potentially generate higher conversions. Why? We’re all human after all, and recommendations received by more than one person help drive the conviction that “it must be good”.    

That said, choosing an influencer pool with a high audience overlap may deliver a smaller total audience with less ‘unique’ reach. The potential lack of diversity in the audience could diminish the opportunity to WOW new customers with your products. There is also the risk of overwhelming the audience with too much of the same message, leading to a loss of credibility and authenticity, and lower engagement rates.

Pros and cons of a LOW Influencer Audience Overlap

In basic parlance, a low audience overlap between KOLs should deliver a larger total audience, extending the reach of your campaign to different audiences and segments. Selecting an influencer pool with a low audience overlap increases the chance of reaching new customers which can be useful for driving awareness and conversion goals.

On the other hand, however, targeting more users but only once or twice in a campaign can dilute the impact of your messaging, making it easier for users to forget or ignore.

Audience Overlap: optimize your budget, results and ROI

Kolsquare’s audience overlap feature offers a host of demographic data that allows for comparison of audiences between individual KOLs and of the total audience of the pool.

Analysis of a pool of KOLs that has a low audience overlap allows you to identify and eliminate KOLs who are not relevant to your campaign, and select those who are.

As we know, thoughtful selection of KOLs is crucial to driving performance and ROI of influencer marketing campaigns. The cost of activating macro and top influencers is rising, and no brand can afford to invest in influencers who don’t deliver.

Careful examination of the audience overlap between KOLs will help inform decisions about which KOLs to invest in to optimize your budget, results and ROI. It can also help you identify potential KOL collaborations that could be beneficial to your brand and campaign goals.  

But be careful! Remember to always consider your initial campaign goals when making decisions around which audiences to target and when. Over the long term, the smart move is to continually update your KOL pool at the outset of each campaign, adding relevant new KOLs, and eliminating those who may have underperformed.  

With audience overlap analysis on Instagram, Kolsquare equips you with a powerful tool to optimize your influencer marketing campaigns, boost your performance and maximize ROI.

What is Kolsquare and what do we offer?

Founded in 2018 by Quentin Bordage, Kolsquare is a technology-enabled (AI, Big Data and machine learning) one-stop solution for your influencer marketing campaign. We help optimize your communication strategies and support brands from A to Z. In concrete terms, this means that we help identify influencers, create an address book, reduce time-consuming tasks, simplify campaign management, and track and evaluate.

"With Kolsquare, we can closely track the performance of our campaigns — we can see which posts, stories, and creators have generated the right buzz, which allows us to target and optimize our strategy. By saving stories, we never miss an impression again!" La Fourche Influencer Marketing Manager Anaëlle Antigny.