What is the idea?The startup idea is to establish a platform to connect social media influencers with the brands and customers. There are a lot of personalities on social media who have a significant number of followers, and they profoundly influence their followers. The idea is to connect these social media influencers with the brands, which will pay the influencers to talk about their brands.
Market DefinitionTo start with, let’s see some key statistics of users on social media:
- There are more than 2.3 billion active social media users in the world;
- Facebook has 1.59 billion users worldwide and 241 million users across South East Asia;
- Youtube also has more than 1 billion users across the globe;
- Instagram has more than 400 million users worldwide;
- Twitter has more than 320 million users across the world. Out of which, more than 94 million users are from Asia Pacific region. It is expected that South East Asia will cross 35 million users by the end of 2016;
- Pinterest has more than 100 million users; and
- Snapchat, which is one of the newest entrants, already has more than 200 million users worldwide.
One of the important things to note is that the influencers on all these platforms have a niche following and category of influencers vary from platform to platform. Mediakix.com brought together some of the key influencer marketing statistics which included the following:
- 59% of brands will increase influencer marketing budget next year;
- The average return on the dollar spent on influencer marketing was USD 6.85. This is one of the most important factors while considering it as active marketing medium;
- Businesses acquired 22% of their customers through influencer marketing; and
- It is estimated that more than 90% people trust word-of-mouth recommendations over ads.
According to Mediakix.com, social influencer marketing spend will increase to USD 5 to 10 billion dollars in the next 5 years. Influencer marketing searches seem to be growing rapidly on google, with maximum interest coming from Singapore.
Competitor AnalysisThere are various platforms which act like agencies for all the social media influencers. Some of the examples of social influencer platforms are viralnation.com, vizified.com, instabrand.com, and exposely.com. Viral nation acts as an agency, and customers have to go through them to connect to influencers. These agencies charge a fee and provids other services like designing the campaign, relaying the campaign and buying the media spots.
Pain Point & Target AudienceThe target audience for this startup will be “Brands looking to market through influencers”. Various challenges are being faced by marketers these days like falling TV viewership and ad-blocking on websites and applications. Ad-blocking has been a major pain point for marketers.
The challenge for marketers right now is to find out ways and means to market brands in a way that it reaches the end users. Social Influencers are the set of people whom brands reach out to market and reach out to customers. The problem is that the market for reaching out to these influencers is not organized, so it becomes hard for the brands to find right kind of influencer who is ready to provide his services.
Value PropositionThe most promising tool for marketing right now is social influencer marketing. These influencers are widely followed on various social media platforms and their word matters to their followers. People prefer word-of-mouth to the usual mode of marketing. One more important aspect to this kind of marketing is the inbuilt analytical tools that social media platforms offer, thereby making it easier to calculate the reach and ROI.
For example, twitter analytic tool provides tools on calculating the impressions on every tweet. These analytical insights clearly shows the effectiveness and reach a particular campaign.
Business ModelSocial media influencers will sign up on the platform and connect their social media accounts; this will get the relevant information about the influencers like number of followers and other details available on the analytic dashboard. Brands and social media influencers will use the platform to access this information. The influencers will specify the amount that they will charge per post/tweet.
Brands will sign up and select the influencer and send the content that they want to be displayed on social media and pay for the same. Influencer will have the right to accept the post or reject it. Brands will also have to put in relevant information about themselves along with the content that is required to be displayed on social media. The startup will charge a percentage of every payment that is made to the influencer.
The startup can also add a section where Brands can hire the startup for creating content for them which will be then relayed by influencers. This will be a customized package for every client where the startup will provide personalized services to the brands.
Way to marketOnce the platform is ready, the first step would be to connect to social media influencers across all the platforms by sending a messages to them for introducing the platform. Once the influencers know about the platform and signup, they will automatically post about it, therby spreading the awareness. One other way could be to use paid social media marketing through the social networks to get the initial traction.
MilestonesThe reach of the influencers will check the success of the platform regarding posts made by them. Therefore, it is important that the platform includes more and more influencers to its platform. The target for the first year should be to add 5,000 influencers and at least 10,000 transactions.
Investment Needed For PrototypeFor testing & building the prototype, pitch for raising 50K USD from angel investors or incubators like 500 startups, seedfund and others in your local countries. There should be no office rentals or salary payout; the entire budget should be apportioned for customer acquisition and technology.
Team CapabilityYou would need to have a tech expert as a co-founder to drive the technology. Having a big social media influencer as a founding member and advisor will go a long way in getting more influencers to signup on the platform.
Investors / Expert TakeThis is a disruptive business. It is intending to connect all the social media influencers with the brands directly, giving the power to brands and influencers and removing the middlemen. If pitched properly, a lot of investors would be keen on investing. Also, few years down the line, a lot of successful marketing companies would be keen on partnering or investing in this business as it would be a great way of getting new leads for content creation.
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