Future of Influencer marketing is going to be similar to that of digital- ‘programmatic': Sachin Bhatia of Good Creator Co

To solve the marketers’ woes of attaining results on the ROI front - in addition to other campaign metrics - The Good Creator Company has recently launched “Smart Campaigns” which can help them scale their campaigns with over five thousand creators at a time and have access to a real-time analytics dashboard, as per Sachin Bhatia, Chief Executive Officer, The Good Creator Co.

Bhatia told BuzzInContent.com that with the maturing of the influencer marketing space, brand managers and marketers have begun questioning about the results in terms of ROI. This is why the tech-focused influencer marketing agencies such as GCC have come up with RoI and ROAS focussed solutions like ‘Smart Campaigns’ which are available at a low cost.

“The genesis of this idea came from the many nano and micro-influencers on the GCC app who were essentially getting barter campaigns and therefore getting products or vouchers rather than earning money for their content. Also, because not many brands today want to pay small influencers for amplification, these influencers soon began dropping off from the app,” he said.

He further went on to add that it was in the pursuit of solving this issue that GCC opted for gamifying the experience for them and ensuring that they take part in campaigns which have the potential of making them earn.

“We encourage influencers to take part in multiple campaigns instead of just a few of them and for each of these campaigns, there is a bounty, for example, Rs 50,000, and then depending on how the influencer’s content piece has performed across KPIs such as sales, engagement, or repurposing of content, etc. whoever gets the maximum numbers then gets on the leaderboard, following which the top 20-50-100 influencers, depending upon the campaign participants, get a part of that bounty. On the other hand, the brand need not pay everyone but only the 20-30-50 pieces of content which actually performed well,” he said.

He also went on to add that while GCC was manually helping some of the nano creators get some paid campaigns earlier, the dropping off rate was not improving. All of it changed with the gamification brought about by the productisation of data through the Vidooly acquisition, and now small influencers have actually started sticking around for much longer.

“It doesn’t matter to the brand if they are receiving a million views coming from a mega influencer or if they’re receiving a million views from thousand non-mega influencers as long as the audience is the same for both of them. Based on our data, we first tend to make the right match for the brand and then the campaign is executed by those sets of influencers who’re interested in the same and basis the efficiency of their content, the brand eventually pays these creators, just like any other programmatic campaign, only in this case it is with the influencers,” he opined

Bhatia also shared the notion that influencer marketing campaigns, going forward, will have to be of two kinds- ones that will totally be brand-led in terms of the choice of influencers and the other which is done at scale through data programs which identify the right set of influencers based on the desired KPIs.

“We have more than half a million registered users as of now, and every month a little more than a hundred thousand creators come on the GCC app. In fact, the most visited, as well as the most popular page on the GCC app, is the leaderboard, wherein multiple influencers see themselves striving to move up on the leaderboard rankings and that’s what keeps The Good Creators going!” he said.

He also added that in cases where brands want to amplify their content in a short period of time when they haven’t been able to meet the targets, in that case programmatic influencer marketing has to be the way forward for activating the desired number of influencers on the go in the desired duration.

“Like the way forward for digital was programmatic (Google adword), influencer marketing has to also go that way, there is no option!” he claimed.

Commenting on whether the future of influencer marketing would be all about consolidation - owing to the emergence of a plethora of agencies and platforms in the space, he said that while there can be consolidation amongst the big guys in the industry, there is always room for smaller influencer marketing agencies to survive and thrive owing to their respective focus on regional, language, category, etc.

“We work with the likes of Mindshares of the world for the large brand campaigns where we get a curated list of big influencers or celebs for the big brands in addition to the brands that we ourselves have as clients. But we also work with smaller influencer marketing agencies for programmatic campaigns on a commission basis so that it doesn’t fall in the spectra of competition but actually helps them grow and build what they aspire,” he said.

Touching upon the pay parity between male and female influencers in the industry, he stated that it is actually the females who get paid more for they have a more varied audience and are comparatively more in demand owing to their content creation spanning across fashion, lifestyle, makeup, home and kitchen, etc. as compared to men who are mainly limited to gadgets, fashion, sneakers, etc. 

“Our focus has always been on the nano and micro creators and to bring them out of the pit of barter and voucher campaigns and give them a chance to actually earn from the creator economy. So, if they can create good quality content for a variety of brands across categories, they’ll keep getting more and more work and if paid adequately, the burnout won’t even exist,” he said.