The blogger advertising market in 2023 has already grown to $21 billion and continues to expand. Consequently, marketplaces that connect advertisers with bloggers are gaining popularity. The market is so vast that there can be numerous marketplaces. However, each of them must have its unique feature! Here are some excellent examples of such features that can serve as a foundation for building your own marketplace.
Project Essence
Primetag is a platform where brands can find the most suitable influencers to promote their products on Instagram and TikTok.
To achieve this, the startup has developed a powerful analytical platform, allowing advertisers to evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising investments as easily as they do in the personal dashboards of regular advertising systems, providing comprehensive information on impressions, clicks, and other important statistics.
The platform gathers and updates real-time statistics on 10 million influencers, enabling advertisers to quickly discover influencers in specific geographic locations with relevant themes.
Finding suitable influencers is easy, using keywords combined in complex constructs, such as “Lady Gaga fans who have traveled to Rome.”
Moreover, the search can be used to find examples of content receiving many likes and comments based on keywords, mentions, or hashtags, serving as a valuable source of inspiration for creating personalized advertising content.
The platform also collects and updates statistics for each influencer, including views, likes, comments, audience reach, and its dynamics.
Within the platform’s dashboard, there is a CRM where advertisers can easily add preferred influencers with a single click, keeping all communication histories and conducted advertising campaigns in one place.
Information about advertising campaigns is collected in real-time. Advertisers can integrate the platform with their sales systems, providing information not only on impressions and clicks but also on sales conversion, total sales volume, and return on advertising investment (ROI).
Constantly monitoring new posts, the platform displays competitors’ activity to brands, including the list of influencers used, geographical coverage, number of posts, audience reach, and engagement level.
The startup has garnered a considerable number of clients, including well-known names like Coca-Cola, IKEA, P&G, H&M.
Primetag originates from Portugal. Currently, it has secured 3.5 million euros in investments, increasing the overall project investment to 5 million euros.
What’s Interesting
The influencer marketing market is already quite large, but it continues to grow rapidly. In 2018, the market size was “only” $4.6 billion, by 2022 it had reached $16.4 billion, and in 2023, it surpassed the $21 billion mark.
Naturally, marketplaces have sprung up, resembling mushrooms, where advertisers can search for influencers.
One such example is Stack Influence, which I covered in November. They have compiled information on 11 million Instagram bloggers, focusing on micro-influencers with a smaller follower count, whose advertising proves to be more effective than that of celebrities.
As Primetag’s platform also features a similar number of influencers, it implies that they also work with micro-influencers. However, they haven’t explicitly highlighted their unique effectiveness.
Stack Influence’s distinctive feature lies in advertisers compensating influencers not with cash but with their own products. This trend, along with platform examples, can be explored in a separate overview.
Another example of such a marketplace is the Indonesian startup Slice, which I wrote about last summer. Initially positioning itself as a “CRM for brands,” it now identifies as a “payment system” through which brands can pay influencers for advertising. The platform’s search functionality for influencers and CRM for communication with them remained the same. Slice decided to delve into the financial side of the process to secure a share of passing advertising budgets more confidently.
As observed, a marketplace is the fundamental functionality of all influencer marketing platforms. However, each startup adds its unique twists. Stack Influence allows payment with own products, Slice ventured into financial technologies after CRM.
Primetag’s distinctive feature is its ability to calculate audience intersections among influencers. The problem arises when an advertiser aims to increase reach and decides to pay two influencers with the same follower count, assuming a twofold increase in reach. However, if these two influencers are from the same country and operate in the same niche, their audiences inevitably overlap. As a result, the advertiser might pay for two ads but waste 25% of the budget if the audiences of these two influencers intersect by 50%.
Primetag enables advertisers to see the degree of overlap between the audiences of their selected influencers, maximizing the overall size and frequency of audience reach while minimizing the money spent.
Additionally, Primetag allows assessing the incremental cost of reaching unique followers when adding additional influencers to an advertising campaign. This way, advertisers can understand at what point they can stop chasing reach expansion to avoid overpaying.
An interesting aspect is that Primetag was created back in 2016. However, in the press release regarding new investments, it is mentioned that these funds will help the startup “complete testing of its minimum viable product” (MVP). This reminds us that startups can continue experimenting with new ideas at any age, never giving up hope of finding new opportunities for growth.
Which Way to Go
Considering the substantial size and ongoing growth of the influencer marketing market, a potential direction is to venture into creating your own marketplaces for influencer marketing.
The main task is to find a unique feature for such a marketplace. Some of them are listed in today’s overview, but undoubtedly, these are not all possible options!
Here’s just one simple example. For instance, you can integrate an AI assistant into the platform that generates unique advertising post texts for each influencer, based on the essence specified by advertisers, but leveraging what approaches, phrases, words, and images elicit the most robust reactions from the specific influencer’s followers.
What features would you personally like to see on the “ideal” platform through which you would advertise with influencers? That’s what you can explore 😉
About the Company
Primetag Website: primetag.com
Latest Funding Round: €3.5M, 11.01.2024
Total Investments: €5M, Rounds: 3