Advertising as we know it is dying. Instead, a new generation of advertising is emerging the form of influencers. People like Kim Kardashian makes $100,000s just by posting on Facebook or wearing that branded backpack. An Instagram influencer with over 100,000 followers has the potential to charge up to $5,000 per post or campaign in partnership with a brand. Instead of spending money on traditional print ads or those pop-up advertisements that interrupt your website browsing experience, big companies are investing in finding the right type of influencer to promote their product. Instead of that blonde model in a photo for Herbal Essence, Herbal Essence looks for a certain profile of influencer to promote their product and speak to their audience. It’s both the modeling agency and advertising form of the future emerging as we know it. So how do they set up these companies and influencers? Meet a company called SamyRoad – an influencer and content marketing company that mixes technology and services from their team to leverage influencer analytics for brand campaigns.
[tweetthis]Influencer marketing = the new advertising.[/tweetthis]
Having launched 4 years ago in Spain, this team leveraged their experience working in the marketing of big companies like L’oreal, Procter & Gamble and Red Bull to see the needs in these areas and emerging trends of influencers. A new market was emerging in Europe where content marketing was showing explosive growth. The team was inspired by those trendsetters who are making money by following their passions – those people who we now consider “influencers” and SamyRoad was created to help this new age profession that merges purpose, passion and work into a reality for more and more people. To do so, they started creating brand partnerships with these emerging influencers and creating these livelihoods to further flourish along with improving marketing campaigns of big companies. By identifying the profile of their ideal consumer, big brands are able to identify their ideal influencer who speaks to this audience leveraging the influencer analytics from SamyRoad. SamyRoad crosses the chasm so communities led by these influencers can connect with the brands who want to speak to them and create opportunities to discover one another and create partnerships.
SamyRoad’s team was inspired by those trendsetters who are making money by following their passions. To see more of why SamyRoad does what they do, watch here.
Chief Growth Officer, Sergio Mave says, “SamyRoad’s mission is to enable people to do what they love and become best in the world at it. By partnering with big brands, we are empowering people to follow their passions as a means to their livelihoods.” Currently, SamyRoad operates in Madrid, New York, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Latin America having scaled to those 4 latter countries in the last year, tripling their presence geographically during a year of high growth scaling. Their customers include Fortune 500 companies such as L’oreal and Pernod Ricard. They are now expanding to serve startups and smaller brands trying to grow their influence and acquire new customers in new mediums. They are the matchmakers of brands and influencers, the living Tinder of influencer marketing for brands. Their secret sauce is an algorithm that scrolls through social media profiles scraping data and aggregates information about each profile that is important to identify types of influencers and fit them with the wanted characteristics of their clients. Such data includes the number of followers, engagement rates, and demographics. Even information such as if a person has a tattoo or not is something collected so SamyRoad can get as close to finding the exact DNA of an influencer that a brand is looking for. SamyRoad’s team then leverages this data to validate the best influencers out there. Brands can reach out to be connected with the over 260,000 influencers in SamyRoad’s database. Usually, these brands and influencers relationship interacts working together on a particular campaign or event where the brand pays the influencer, an amount depending on the influencer’s notoriety (i.e. the vast gap that would be paid between Kim Kardashian and my humble self).
SamyRoad’s mission is to enable people to do what they love and become best in the world at it. By partnering with big brands, we are empowering people to follow their passions as a means to their livelihoods.
However, there’s a massive misunderstanding on how influencer marketing works most effectively though in that the number of followers someone has is equivalent to their influencer status. Size doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. On the contrary, it’s much better and more effective to work with an influencer who has a smaller following, but a more influential voice. Engagement matters overreach. Those niche influencers whose voices are heard louder to their smaller audience is much more impactful than an influencer with millions of followers but no engagements. Being able to say a call to action that rallies people are imperative. The brand clients are signing up to work with influencers not as sponsorship, but rather so these influencers can create awareness and share they’re a brand with people who will listen to their sharing. This enables brands to open new markets for customers and reach new audiences by engaging someone who has a voice to a different customer profile or demographic.
The most effective influencers don’t necessarily have the largest following, but rather have a community of followers who listen to them.
SamyRoad is most excited about having expanded geographically (to those 4 new markets) and having overcome the challenges that ensue when entering new markets. Their key challenge now is raising a Series A round and finding the right investor. There is also the ongoing challenge of the well-known long sales cycle that is part of the process of working with big brands – selling to large companies and getting to know prospective clients, usually starting with the director or senior management team in a marketing department. Getting from a verbal yes, to the final contract sign off from senior leadership and the legal department continues to be a bottleneck for working with multinational corporations who are organized by siloes structured with red tape. A challenge that is not foreign to most b2b startups. So if you are a marketer and are interested in working with SamyRoad to increase your brand awareness and better engage a new audience, contact them now.
If you are a marketer and are interested in working with SamyRoad to increase your brand awareness and better engage a new audience,