B2B tech SaaS platform Klug can help brands increase influencer campaigns' efficacy by up to 80%

Registered in March 2022, Klug has begun gaining traction in the global scenario and has already added various Indian D2C, institutional brands, and even global unicorns, in its kitty along with being a partner to global agencies like WPP.

Speaking to BuzzInContent.com, the Co-Founders of Klug Klug stated that the B2B tech SaaS platform, which has the ability to address the influencer marketing needs for over 230 countries, can potentially increase the efficiency of campaigns running on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok by 80%.

It is also to be noted that this is the second venture of the Co-founders of Social Catalyzers-Kalyan Kumar (alias KK) and Vaibhav Gupta in the influencer marketing space.

While Kumar is an IIT graduate and has an extensive background in marketing, having previously served in leadership roles in multiple organisations, Gupta is a digital-first native, who has done various marketing campaigns for several MNCs.

Because influencer marketing was growing, Kumar and Gupta formally launched Social Catalyzers - a digital content marketing agency - in 2016 with an aim to propel brand advocacy and ‘perfect’ the science and art of virality through earned media.

But for the past three-and-a-half years, the Co-Founders have kept the midnight lamp burning to set up tech and filters for influencer campaigns of Social Catalyzers.

“We looked at the landscape and explored the platforms in India, but there was always a lot lacking which is why we started exploring analytics and building tech not just for the sake of it but because we wanted it to work for us internally first,” said Kumar, who is the CEO and Co-founder, Klug.

He further also went on to state that one fine day they got lucky when the tech started clicking and it just wasn’t able to tell things about influencers in India, but all across the globe.

Commenting as to why they decided to name the venture ‘Klug’, Gupta, who is also the Chief Product Officer, stated that it was because they wanted to have a new and catchy name which would sum up everything it intended to do in merely one or two syllables, and ‘Klug’ in German means wise and clever, so it only felt right to name the new venture after it.

“Since we were not able to get the domain for Klug, we took reference from DuckDuckGo and made it KlugKlug.com,” he added.

On a slightly candid note, Kumar also said that since his batchmates from IIT and IIM nicknamed him ‘KK’ and the domain name is KlugKlug, the entire landscape did actually change to 4K (Full Resolution) in the influencer marketing space.

While throwing light on what led to the inception of Klug, he said, “Since the seven-year-old legacy of Social Catalyzers was stable and we realised that the management services business is a hard one to scale as one needs to evangelise to get more business, we decided to build tech for increasing our efficiency of answering queries and thus we got around to building Klug as part of our DNA.”

Commenting as to how it builds up its learnings to accommodate the queries of marketers and advertisers, Kumar said that Klug uses the AI and ML model very strategically in parts and lays more emphasis on Machine Learning as compared to Artificial Intelligence.

“Because Klug uses more of ML, it can predict and model the prediction algorithm and claim an accuracy of over 85%. In fact, it is like an astrologer, but with the right data to validate the predictions. The AI part is primarily used for image and audio recognition,” he added.

In the views of Gupta, Klug, unlike other platforms which claim to have the technology for audio and video recognition, actually has the technology that ‘works’ in real-time and enables to get an analysis of who and how many influencers are using a specific word or sentence in their audios along with getting the data of pictures which in parts or as a whole feature in their posts or Reels.

Adding to this, Gupta also stated that Klug being a global platform has the ability to identify influencers from Tier II and III cities including small towns from over 450 cities in India which enables the tech SaaS platform to cater to the needs of marketers and agencies even on a city or town level and that too on with a very easy user interface.

In the views of Kumar, influencer marketing until now has been very guesswork-oriented and has been seeing a 70-30 or 80-20 mix between Art and Science. “In the real-time scenario, luck is considered to be a very big deal, but at Klug, we’re working towards minimising it for influencer marketing with the help of layers of filters which aid in entering the desired audience definitions.”

He also went on to state that from a marketing point of view, Klug has the potential to boost the success of any influencer-led brand campaign by at least 40%  

Furthermore, Kumar also went on to point out that one of the massive problems in any influencer campaign is to find who is the right influencer with the right set of target audience and engagement since transparency in influencer management is still a long shot - owing to the number of bots and fake/inactive accounts on these social media platforms.

“A lot of influencers have been growing on the power of non-credible followers in the modern global scenario as there are multiple ways to get more followers including buying bot followers, fake followers, mass followers, etc. If we detect any user carrying out any suspenseful activities on these social platforms, we consider them to be either fake or sort them out as genuine but inactive users,” he added.

Additionally, Gupta also went on to add that although there are various platforms which talk about follower authenticity, there’s no one who talks about who are the real engagers with any creator’s content. “We provide the demographics of all engagers by gender split, age, location by city and country, etc and help determine if they are getting engagement by virality or by buying fake engagement through ill-practices similar to bot likes.”

He also went on to add that the other challenge that Klug solves for marketers is the misconception that a majority of any influencer would be from his/her respective city, town or country.

“As of now, we are building on Twitch, Twitter and Facebook as part of onboarding new platforms because we operate globally. Currently, we are technically addressing more than 85% of the influencer marketing spends globally through our database of Instagram, YouTube and TikTok,” stated Kumar.

Commenting on the short and long-term objectives that they have planned for Klug, Kumar stated that he is confident that the B2B tech SaaS platform would break even by the end of January and cross the $1.5 million mark by February this year.

“We are not a data provider, we are an intelligence provider because we thought through the entire analytics and structured layers of filters,” he added.