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 of creators. However, brands often struggle to seamlessly execute influencer campaigns due to the lack 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.
Vhub, a Bengaluru-based startup, is trying to solve these challenges by leveraging AI to provide detailed analytics of influencer campaigns. The startup, which launched its platform in January 2024, aims to onboard 500+ brands and over one lakh influencers by the end of the year.
The problem with influencer marketing
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, the influencer marketing space operates manually and offline, facing challenges such as:
- Discovering influencers: Brands and agencies have to manually scout platforms like Instagram and YouTube to find suitable creators for their campaigns, which is time-consuming and inefficient.
- Analyzing audience reach: Creators have limited access to follower analytics, such as demographic or interest data, which makes it hard to assess their relevance and impact for a brand.
- Managing campaigns: Communication between brands and influencers mainly occurs through manual methods like calls, emails, and WhatsApp, with campaign tracking often relegated to Excel sheets. There is a lack of customized tools for managing creator-led campaigns, such as scheduling, payment, and feedback.
- Pricing transparency: There is no standard pricing model for influencer marketing, which leads to ambiguity and inconsistency in the rates charged by different creators and agencies.
- Measuring performance: Brands have difficulty in measuring the return on investment (ROI) of their influencer campaigns, as there is no clear way to track the engagement, conversion, and attribution of the content created by influencers.
The solution by Vhub
Vhub, which stands for Virtual Hub, is an AI-powered SaaS platform that aims to make influencer marketing as easy and effective as digital marketing. The platform provides features for:
- Influencer discovery: Vhub has a database of 5 million creators on its influencer discovery engine, which allows brands to search and filter influencers based on various parameters, such as category, location, platform, followers, engagement, and cost. The platform also uses AI to recommend the best-fit influencers for a brand’s campaign objectives and budget.
- Influencer marketplace: Vhub democratizes influencer search and collaboration with its marketplace, which allows brands to list their requirements for specific campaigns and creators or agencies to apply to participate with their commercials. The marketplace also allows influencers to make connections and collaborations with other creators based on their unique style, content, and engagement metrics.
- Influencer analytics: Vhub provides detailed analytics for measuring the performance of influencer campaigns, such as reach, impressions, views, likes, comments, shares, clicks, and conversions. The platform also uses AI to detect and filter out fake influencers, based on their authenticity and quality of followers, resulting in cost-savings and authentic engagement for brands.
- Influencer management: Vhub provides customized tools for managing influencer campaigns, such as contract generation, payment processing, content approval, feedback collection, and dispute resolution. The platform also enables seamless communication between brands and influencers through chat, video, and voice calls.
The vision of Vhub
Vhub was founded in 2023 by Sachin Modi, a former AI researcher and engineer, and Shubham Agarwal, a former digital marketer and entrepreneur. The duo saw the potential of influencer marketing as a powerful tool for brands to connect with their target audience, but also realized the gaps and inefficiencies in the current landscape.
“We are making influencer marketing as easy and effective as digital marketing. This gives confidence to brands and marketers to allocate larger budgets to influencer marketing. With Vhub, we are enabling influencer marketing with technology, which will eventually unlock sustainable income for creators as well,” said Sachin Modi, CEO and co-founder of Vhub.
The startup has already collaborated with over 50 brands, such as Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, and Swiggy, and onboarded more than 30,000 influencers onto its platform. The startup plans to expand its reach to more platforms, such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Clubhouse, and more categories, such as gaming, education, and health, in the near future.
Vhub is also looking to raise its seed funding round soon, and hopes to become the leading platform for influencer marketing in India and beyond.
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