Unpacking Naver Blog Influencer Marketing Strategies
As we mentioned in our latest post about Influencer Marketing in South Korea, Naver Influencers are users officially recognized as the most engagement-driving figures on the platform.
With 58% of the market share, Naver is the dominant search engine in South Korea, integrating various services into one comprehensive platform. Among these, Naver Blog has emerged as a key tool for influencer marketing, allowing brands to leverage influencers’ credibility and audience reach to connect effectively with Korean consumers.
Why Naver influencers
Koreans are constantly on their phones – either while on the metro, at the gym, or waiting in a queue, they are on their phones. A survey by DigitalPortal shows that the average screen time of Koreans is 5 hours and 19 minutes; 28.6% of which is spent on chatting with friends, and about 20% on acquiring information.
In light of those 20%, Naver Blog has become the largest South Korean social media platform. Due to the lengthy nature of the blog posts, sponsored products/services are described in a more detailed manner. In addition, Naver offers a wide variety of cultures and subcultures – from mainstream to niche markets, which enables all brands to find their audience very easily. Because of this, the sponsored advertising on the platform feels more authentic and turns it into native advertising instead, creating the same amount of traffic as regular content compared to other social media, such as YouTube or Instagram, where sponsored content is much more obvious.
How to find the right influencer for your business?
South Korea has a population of over 50 million people as of 2025. Due to this, there are many people on Naver, as such, many cultures and subcultures have been formed on the platform. Thankfully, Naver has a discover page, which allows the users to filter their preferred content by categories and subcategories.
For instance, after filtering by fashion, users are able to then further filter it by specific look, and then by experience.
Categories of Influencers on Naver.
These are the 4 categories of Naver influencers:
- Best of the month – those blog posters are not official influencers, though they are on the way of becoming such. Naver creates a chart of their well-performing bloggers per category each month. Those people are usually much cheaper to sponsor than bigger creators. However, it is much harder to reach out to them considering that they are not official influencers.
- Micro-influencers – people with less than 100,000 followers (they are called neighbours on Naver). Those people create enough traffic on the platform in order to be recognised as official influencers. Sponsoring them would cost your business more than if you are to do so with a blogger of the month, however, the benefits of high traffic andca good image would certainly compensate for it.
- Macro-influencers – those users have a large following and the bigger ones in their niche are viewed as KOL (Key Opinion Leaders). This is a phenomenon seen all across Asia. Those influences are almost blindly trusted with their opinion of products/services. They are able to change the public mind quite fast with just a simple post. The cost of their services would vary based on the niche industry their content is focused on.
- Celebrities – those people are popular everywhere, not just on Naver. This allows your company to use a multichannel strategy and market themselves across many platforms, however, celebrity endorsements cost a significant amount of money. Thus, it is only suggested for luxurious brands to proceed with this.
To find the perfect persona for your company, you can use the Naver brand connect. This is a platform that allows businesses to filter all influencers based on a number of criteria – industry, age, gender, and whether or not the influencer has previous experience working with brands. For instance, if you are looking for a social media girl, age 20, with a lot of experience in the beauty industry, you will be able to find her. If you would like to work with such influencers, check out InterAd’s social media marketing services.
Blog Influencers for SEO on Naver
Naver works completely differently than any other other social media platform.
For instance, C-Rank (creator rank), which was introduced in 2016. This algorithm analyzes the credibility, popularity, and authority of the source, rather than focusing on the content itself.
These are the most important factors to consider for the C-Rank:
- Quality of the content;
- Content credibility;
- Content popularity;
- Backlinks;
- Blog activity;
- Topic focused.
This means that bloggers with higher popularity will rank higher than newer users, even if they are experts who create amazing content
How to work with Naver Influencers
After finding the perfect influencer for you – be it a social media girl or a Korean guy – you might want to partner up with them. However, before doing so, you, as a foreign business, have to think about the nuances that come with South Korean culture.
- Hierarchy is key – even though it is a partnership contract and both parties should be respectful of each other, the older person in the communication will have the seniority, which is at the core of South Korean culture.
- South Korean people are very loyal – showing an 86% long-term orientation (Hofstede). This means that even though they are able to do a one-off advertisement deal, they would be more open to the idea of a long-time partnership.
- Be descriptive and show an understanding of details. South Korean people are very respectful of rules, so it is essential that you provide the Naver Influencers with a set guide full of instructions on how you would like them to advertise the product/service that your brand provides.
Results and Expectations from working with Naver Influencers
All influencers generate traffic, but what are the specifics?
After analyzing data from 2025 with a sample size of 392, we came to this conclusion:
Sponsored content creates an average of 13% less engagement rate across all industries available on the Naver Brand Connect platform. This is much better compared to the sponsored content on Instagram, which receives an average of 50% less engagement, or to sponsored content on YouTube, which is 100% of the time the least viewed part of any video. This occurs due to the native advertising feeling on Naver Blog compared to the obvious sponsored content on Instagram.
Conclusion
After reading this article, you now understand more in detail about the process of working with influencers in South Korea. If you would like to read more about this topic, check out these articles: Influencer marketing in South Korea and Instagram in South Korea.
If you would like to learn more about how to work with influencers in South Korea, contact us and schedule a free consultation.
For other services that we offer, check out our 2025 brochure.
This article includes:
*Naver Influencer Research in your Niche;
*Create content guidelines for the influencers;
*Keyword research;
*Content Monitoring;
*South Korean business culture;
*Social media influencers in South Korea;
*Digital Marketing on Naver in South Korea.
