We all are aware of who influencers are, and it’s exactly the reason why they are valuable for business and influencer marketing exists. Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy based on partnering with social media influencers to promote a brand or product.
Companies turn to it because they want to engage with large audiences that influencers have on various social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Influencer marketing typically means creating sponsored content by social media influencers, big or small, such as product reviews, tutorials, or sponsored posts.
For instance, Daniel Wellington, a watch brand, is a company with one of the smartest influencer marketing strategies globally. In 2016 the brand gifted influencers a watch and asked them to post a photo of themselves wearing the watch, along with a discount code for their followers. The campaign was a huge success, with the hashtag #danielwellington generating around a million posts on Instagram.
However, today the influencer marketing industry is as huge as the global ocean. It’s difficult to provide an exact number of influencers as there are many different types of them across various social media platforms. Nonetheless, Instagram has over 1.2 billion monthly active users, and it’s estimated that there are over 500,000 active influencers on the platform. Other platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, also have a significant number of influencers.
Eventually, with the growth of the market, it became hard to navigate, especially for companies without a separate role of an influencer marketing manager in their staff schedule. It’s not easy even for specialized agencies since the industry is enormously huge.
Yauhen Razhko saw it as an opportunity and founded Hypetrain, a full-cycle platform designed to help agencies, brands, media companies, and freelancers navigate the influencer marketing sector and execute and manage their campaigns.
Why Influencer Marketing Is Important
At some point in the 2010s, the business world got hooked on influencer marketing because it proved to be highly efficient in achieving not one but a bunch of marketing goals. It helps to establish and improve brand image, increase awareness, and boost sales.
According to recent research, 33% of Gen Zs are purchasing at least one product in three months based on influencers’ recommendations. Other research shows that 50% of Millennials trust influencers they follow on product recommendations, while only 38% of them say the same about their favorite celebrities.
The thing with influencers is that we follow them on social media just like our friends – in our Instagram and Facebook feeds, they are mixed together. So, we perceive social media celebrities almost like family and trust them more than traditional advertising. The content created by influencers feels much more authentic.
Hypetrain Makes Influencer Marketing Easy
When influencer marketing emerged, it was quite wild, with very few rules and almost no regulations. It’s a much more established industry today, but it still has its difficulties.
First of all, the quantity of influencers is just enormous. There are hundreds of thousands of them, if not more. There are huge social media celebrities, but there are also numerous micro- and nano-influencers. In this environment, searching for the right influencers can take days. However, it’s just the first step of the process.
When you are done with the search, you have to do a lot of planning and coordinating in order to get content that satisfies both the brand and the influencer. Oftentimes a campaign requires not one but a bunch of influencers, so you have to multiply your efforts on each step.
In addition, both influencers and brands want their relationships to be sound and legal, with everything regarding the campaign put into a contract beforehand. And when the campaign is over, influencers want to be paid, and brands want to measure performance.
The team behind Hypetrain knows all about these processes and has created a tool that takes care of almost every aspect of influencer marketing campaigns. The platform has the Influencers Wikipedia, a database with information about millions of influencers around the world, which makes influencer discovery easier and faster.
Also, Hypetrain allows keeping all campaigns in one digital space within a built-in CRM, creating teams to include everybody involved in the working process, and measuring the performance of each campaign. Besides, the platform lets its users message influencers directly within its ecosystem and is enhancing this feature later this year by adding AI powered by ChatGPT. Other upcoming updates include drafting contracts based on a template and a built-in payment system. Basically, all the most mundane tasks get automated.
Influencer marketing is an important tool for many brands, but today it’s hard to navigate since the influencer world is constantly growing. Hypetrain aims to bring order to the chaos of this industry in order to make it easily accessible for all brands and agencies. By automating the process of creating influencer marketing campaigns, the platform allows both brands and influencers to focus on the creative side of their collaborations.
