Virtual Influencers Part Two: Creating Your Brand Character

Executive Summary

Are you intrigued by the potential of brand characters and want to consider one of your own?

In Part One of this POV, Artificial People, Real Results, we introduced you to virtual influencers and explained their rise. We discussed the “watchouts,” potential, and healthcare applications. Now, it's time for you to see if this strategy is right for your brand.

Why isn’t this document called “Creating a Virtual Influencer?” This guide will help you determine if creating a social character to represent or promote your brand is a good fit. Sometimes, a virtual influencer is not the best solution, but a virtual character can still elevate your brand’s social presence.

What’s the difference between a virtual influencer and a brand character? It’s simple:

Getting Started

We’re going to take you through the process of creating a brand character with the option to grow it into a true influencer.

In the past, these characters were most often not realistic. Instead, they are anthropomorphic animals, illustrated people, comic characters, etc. However, with the recent developments in generative AI images and video, they can be made more realistic.

We recommend workshopping and testing several styles before you settle on the final one for the brand. The up front investment is worth it for a character likely to stick around for many years.

Objectives

First, clearly define your goals for the virtual character or influencer. It is critical to differentiate between disease education and brand promotion, as moving from unbranded to branded is a one-way trip.

Consider your primary metrics such as condition or brand awareness lift studies and more direct metrics such as website traffic or social media engagements (e.g., reposts or comments).

Ensuring the partnership aligns with your brand is crucial when working with a brand Character, virtual influencer, or anyone in between.

For virtual influencers, their influence, personality, and audience can enhance your brand’s visibility and message. Choose carefully by reviewing their content across social media and the web to avoid any reputational risks. Authenticity matters, especially when for niche or rare-disease communities—ensuring they are the right partner to talk to this community will help create a more compelling and impactful campaign.

Working with a brand character lets you leverage the company’s established brand equity. Though brand characters may be less of a reputational risk, it’s still worth asking yourself whether the brand’s ethos aligns with your company’s values.

Life Cycle Plan

Unless your virtual character is for a condition or family of therapies, you will likely consider an end date. This planning might seem premature at this initial phase, but it’s critical to ensure that any up front investment is sufficient. Underfunding a virtual character in the beginning will depress its payback through the entire life cycle.

Allocate a specific budget for influencer activities, separate from spending on non-influencer efforts, like celebrity endorsements.

Character Creation

A good starting point for creating your brand character is writing a persona. This activity will allow you to compare it to your target-audience personas and ensure a good fit.

• Consider the essential aspects of this virtual person at this stage:

Background and relation to the condition (e.g., patient, caregiver, or observer)

• Cultural history of the character, even if you want to keep that muted in the storyline

Personality and look of the character (e.g., photorealistic, animated, cartoon, etc.)

• Platform(s) that the character will use, likely TikTok and Instagram, but specialized characters might use others such as LinkedIn

• Secondary characters to use in the story (e.g., real people, virtual people, animals, pets, or even the environment)

• Character boards that show the personality and define some of the "trademark moves" and common expressions

The top virtual influencers use several platforms, with the audience dictating the breakdown. Nobody Sausage, for example, embodies a crazy irreverence that works perfectly on TikTok, while Barbie appeals to an older demographic on Facebook and YouTube.

See Appendix A in Virtual Influencers Part One to learn more about platform usage.

Storyline: Value Creation

For a traditional marketer, building a character’s story is the most unfamiliar part of the process. However, it is vital to the success of your brand character. Without a storyline, the character is just a mascot. Your character requires a compelling reason for followers to return time and time again.

Strategize content to balance character development and branded content to ensure an authenticity that matches the character’s lifestyle. Plan out major life events with minor ones to create a timeline, and involve the secondary characters. These major events could be starting college, getting a job, buying a house, going on a trip, meeting a partner, getting a pet, etc. Notice that none of this background work is especially connected to the brand, but without it, your brand character will never transition to a brand influencer.

It is likely obvious at this point that creating a true virtual influencer is difficult and involves some luck. The Geico Gecko wasn't their first mascot, that was the Caveman. Listening to the audience and adapting the character storyline can help maximize engagement.

This is one of the few times when paying to expand your character’s follower base is worthwhile. Building a follower base is difficult and time-consuming, so promoting these non-brand posts will likely be necessary to get some critical mass and spark organic follower growth.

Even once your character’s following starts to grow, the challenge is maintaining its growth with new content and community management. Like with any other brand channel, you should have a response matrix and/or strategy identified to guide how and when your character will respond to their followers. A more engaged and responsive character is arguably more relatable and has more of an ability to develop genuine relationships with their followers.

Community management becomes critical when dealing with virtual influencers, as this team is the brand’s eyes and ears in the market. Knowing how your audience reacts to your early virtual-influencer tests is vital to managing the campaign. Like “real” influencers, the brand’s community management team must work closely with the influencer’s team to ensure that pharma-specific rules are followed and brand insights are communicated back.

Influence: Value Extraction

Once your brand character speaks to an audience, it is time to engage meaningfully with the brand objectives. The execution can still be unbranded to highlight the aspects of the condition that your therapy treats or it can be directly branded. Remember that content must still be positioned as authentic. While a virtual influencer cannot technically have a condition they can still talk about symptoms and how it affects someone's life. Keeping the content relatable is critical to maintaining the character's focus.

Whether content is amplified or not, ensure you have a strategy around where you want to drive the audience or a linking strategy for paid ads. Where does this content lie in the funnel and what’s the end goal?

Some virtual influencers have large followings, while others are considered micro-influencers, with less than 1,000 followers. Micro-influencers are especially effective because they can foster a more personal connection. Despite being virtual, the real people managing these accounts can still engage with followers, providing the interactive experience they seek.

Wind Down and Close Out

Social media audiences are fickle. It is unlikely that there will be an uproar when the brand character is no longer funded and needs to be shut down. However, providing a closeout story for the influencer is still recommended.

Brand marketers may even wish to recommend the influencer to a patient association or other group if the brand character is no longer needed and has developed an active following. Alternatively, the influencer should be kept around if the company has a pipeline of products that help treat or manage the condition.