Influencer marketing is fast becoming a core component of brands’ overall marketing strategies as they seek to tap into the deep social media reach and viral potential. According to Statista, influencer marketing was worth Rs 12 billion in 2022 and is set to grow at a CAGR of 25% over the next five years.
However, brands often struggle to seamlessly execute influencer campaigns due to the unavailability of a robust tool that could provide them with end-to-end insights, ranging from the discoverability of influencers to their respective reach and the measurability of their performance, among other factors. New-age startups like Cloutflow, Wobb, and Cosmofeed are trying to solve problems for both brands and influencers.
Among a handful of influencer-focused startups is Vhub, which leverages AI to provide detailed analytics of such campaigns. We spoke to Vhub co-founder and CEO Sachin Modi to learn more about his startup, the problem it’s trying to solve, and much more. Here are the edited excerpts.
What are the key challenges in the current influencer marketing space?
Currently, the influencer marketing space operates manually and offline, facing challenges such as discovering influencers, analyzing audience reach, managing campaigns with multiple influencers, pricing transparency, and measuring content performance for marketer ROI. Discovering suitable creators is time-consuming, with brands/agencies manually scouting platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Creators have limited access to follower analytics; for instance, an Instagram user with 100,000 followers may lack demographic or interest data. There’s a lack of customized tools for managing creator-led campaigns; communication between brands and influencers mainly occurs through manual methods like calls, emails, and WhatsApp, with campaign tracking often relegated to Excel sheets.
What expertise do you bring and how do you use technology to solve these challenges?
In this decade we are witnessing rapid advances in AI and digital marketing is one of the biggest businesses that is entirely driven by AI algorithms. It is the cutting edge AI algorithms that are running the show behind million dollar digital marketing campaigns on platforms like Google, Youtube, Instagram etc. I have experience of more than 8 years working on technologies and products related to AI. Our intent is to enable Influencer Marketing with AI so that it can be as effective as Digital Marketing. We are developing an intelligent platform which provides exhaustive discovery, analytics of millions of creators and helps brands to make intelligent decisions at every step of influencer marketing campaigns and helps in faster execution of campaigns.
How has your start-up performed since inception?
Since our inception, we have collaborated with over 50 brands. From our database of 5 million creators on our influencer discovery engine, we have onboarded more than 30,000 influencers onto our platform. Over a thousand creators have had the opportunity to work with one or more brands through our platform. Additionally, more than 50 agencies offering influencer marketing services are utilizing our platform to discover the right influencers for their clients. Brands working with us have experienced an average ROI increase of 3x, with a 5x faster execution rate compared to other platforms.
What are your short-term and long-term goals?
In the short term, our focus is on scaling and refining our technology. Hundreds of brands and agencies utilize our discovery engine to find relevant creators for their marketing campaigns. Currently, we believe we are at the cusp of the creator economy and Influencer Marketing becoming mainstream. In the long term, we envision our platform facilitating this transition significantly by providing all the necessary data support for the successful execution of creator-led marketing campaigns. While we have primarily worked with Indian brands thus far, we see ourselves as a global-first tech enabler for Influencer Marketing.
