Influencer marketing is quickly becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools, and marketers are rapidly starting to pay attention. We sat down with Norbert Kardos, Founder and CTO at Post for Rent, leading influencer marketing platform, to learn how public social media data is enabling brands to perform hyper-targeted influencer marketing campaigns. Before we jump into the interview, let’s take a look into what influencer marketing really is, and why it’s become such an effective marketing tool.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a relatively new kind of social media marketing. It utilizes individuals with a strong ‘sway’ over their followers, or those considered as experts in their niches, to promote brands’ products and/or services. The idea behind it is that consumers are much more likely to make a purchase following a product recommendation by someone they trust/admire, than from a company’s direct advertising. The industry is growing rapidly as brands see its effectiveness and impressive ROI – according to Business Insider, the industry will be worth around $15 billion by 2022.
Image source: Bright Data
What role does online data play in influencer marketing?
With demand for influencer marketing on the rise, brands are discovering that manually searching for the right ‘influencer fit’ is extremely difficult and time consuming. There is a high demand for streamlined solutions (like influencer networks) to save time and enhance efficiency. So how do these networks use public online data to find brands the perfect influencer fit?
- Hashtag discovery – identifying the right influencer fit by the hashtags the influencers use. For example, a fitness clothing company may want to collect large amounts of online data from a #fitnessfreak hashtag to identify the influencers regularly using this hashtag.
- Reach – depending on the campaign/brand/budget, brands may wish to use micro or macro influencers. By collecting online data around influencers’ number of followers, networks can offer the right fit.
- Audience demographics – an influencer’s follower demographics is another aspect from which brands can base their influencer choice. Finding the right influencer with followers from its target audience age group, location, and/or gender can be a strong indicator for the right fit.
- Competitor research – brands may wish to look at the influencers their competitors are using in their campaigns, to either approach these influencers too, or ensure they don’t use the same ones.
Catching up with Norbert Kardos, Founder and CTO at Post for Rent
We sat down with Norbert Kardos to learn more about his company, Post for Rent, and how public social media data is enabling his customers to perform more successful influencer marketing campaigns
Can you tell us a bit about your company?
Post for Rent was founded in 2015. We are in the social influencer marketing industry, based in Hungary with most of our customers in Europe, (but also in the US, Australia, and South Africa.) We are an online marketplace (like Airbnb) where we connect brands with the right influencers to promote their products on social media. We act as the ‘middle-man’ and deal with all of the invoicing, contracts, etc. between the two parties. Most of our influencers are micro-influencers who don’t have management, which gives us many more options for our database.
What is your role?
I’m one of the founders and the CTO of the company
Why do you need to collect online data?
We need access to large amounts of public social media data to share with our customers. We scour the web for relevant influencers by the hashtags they use, the field they’re in, and details about their follower base, in order to find the right matches for our customers. Based on the public online data that we collect, we can establish if an influencer is relevant for a brand or not.
How many customers do you have?
We have hundreds of customers
Which Bright Data product do you use?
We use both Bright Data’s (formerly Luminati Networks) Datacenter IPs and Residential IPs.
When did you start working with Bright Data Networks? What were you looking for in a data collection provider?
We started working with Bright Data two or three years ago. We needed access to large amounts of public social media data to share with our customers, so I was looking for a data collection platform that was reliable and affordable. I liked the fact that Bright Data offered so many products and options. We actually started using Data Center IPs, and as the websites became more sophisticated, we switched to Residential IPs.
Can you tell me about your experience with Bright Data?
I really like that we have a dedicated account manager. We’re given excellent service, and if we ever have issues or questions, they are solved very quickly. The interface is very straightforward and easy to use, and there’s not much downtime. Also, it’s nice that we were able to upgrade our plan the more we used the platform, and get better prices.
Do you see your company continuing to use Bright Data?
I’m sure we will continue using Bright Data – in order to grow we will need to. We plan to double our influencer database, and to get the relevant public online data that we need in order to do so, we need Bright Data’s platform.
