CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Ritesh Ujjwal – Founder & CEO, Kofluence.
- Can you trace Kofluence’s journey for us from its inception. (CXO Today)
Kofluence started in 2020, headquartered in Bangalore with a simple vision of democratising the influencer marketing landscape and making social influence accessible for all.
We believe anyone can monetize their social reach, given the right opportunities and enablement. For creators, our mission is to help them effectively monetize their social value, interests and content creation capabilities, while for brands, we aim to draw on the social influence of users and make influencer marketing a viable performance-based alternative.
With such a vision, we have now evolved into an Ad-Tech Influencer Marketing platform that is empowering both brands and social media users to harness social influence. Our robust platform is easy to experience and interact with – having over 300k creators onboard as a part of the Kofluence Creators Community, who bring in a collective reach of over 3 Bn. Today, from pre-seed to unicorn companies, Kofluence assists more than 200 brands across diverse sectors engage in meaningful influencer outreach.
Since our inception, we have expanded our team over 4 different locations across India. While the world recovered from the pandemic, Kofluence showed incredible resilience and hit the ground running, amping up on skills, forging new partnerships, cracking new deals and redefining the company culture. In Feb’22, we have also raised $4 Million in our latest pre series A funding, from a group of unicorn investors.
2.Tell us about the Influencer Marketing ecosystem in India and How is it shaping the marketing technology trends in India? Especially post pandemic
The scope of influencer marketing in India is expanding, everyday. A recent study on consumer behaviour revealed that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations on social media to make their purchase decisions which makes it a very attractive space for brands. As organic social reach is increasingly limited, social influencers offer a more authentic voice, leading to a more engaged audience.
Targeted influencer marketing narrows down the overall awareness funnel, and brings effective experiences along with measurement and analysis, which is easier to quantify. We are potentially looking at a 2,200 Cr industry by 2025.
Given the expanding market share and the value influencer marketing carries today in the marketing mix, sophisticated tech and automation are some of the best allies that the industry can count on to bring some method to the madness.
3.What are the challenges typically faced by marketers in this industry and how is Kofluence doing things differently?
Primarily the current influencer marketing landscape is rife with inefficiencies, trust and transparency factors. Nano and micro content creators who have actual influence are often ignored because of a lack of platform play.
To combat the challenges that come with influencer management and its many related workstreams, we have designed our proprietary platform. Powered by AI/ ML capabilities, our platform seamlessly enables effective discovery / matching / pricing and performance prediction to help brands discover influencers with full stack integrations.
With industry best practices for data privacy, fraud protection & risk management, consider us your trusted allies and performance accelerators.
4.As more and more influencers join the creator’s economy, how does one ensure that the excitement with influencer engagement does not fade away?
I would say the only constant in the world of social media is constant change. Given how quickly the rules of engagement keep evolving and with the emergence of Social Media 2.0, it can be really hard to stay ahead of the learning curve and remain afloat without constant alignment/realignment of the market.
‘Influencer fatigue’ is also on the rise. The market today is cluttered with sponsored posts, and audiences no longer consume content blindly. They value transparency and integrity above all others. To ensure that Influencer engagement doesn’t dampen, it is important that brands and content creators constantly upskill themselves and retain their authenticity in the kind of collaborations they do and the projects they take on. A true sense of partnership and synergy must exist between brands and influencers for authentic collaborations to shine through.
5.Amidst an ongoing funding winter, start-ups have cut down on online marketing spends greatly. How do you see this impacting both creators and other Influencer Marketing platforms?
Because of the looming fear of an oncoming Winter, attributed to the recent economic downturn and funding cutbacks, market experts are predicting a slump in the growth trajectory of the Creator Economy in 2022. I believe while a market downtime may be on the cards, a complete slowdown is unlikely. The impact may vary across different market niches, so influencers may have to brace themselves and make conscious choices moving forward. This pertains to the collaborations they take on and how closely they resonate with their audiences. Maintaining a mindful balance between organic vs paid posts for credibility and better performance will also be crucial.
6.What are some trends in Influencer Marketing that you think will take centerstage in 2023?
What particularly stands out to me is how the introduction of the “Metaverse” will likely proliferate Influencer Marketing. By mobilising the functionalities of blockchain technology, we will soon start exploring opportunities for more immersive and multi-dimensional content where brands will be able to work with creators in intuitive ways. Constant targeted advertising will be pushed out through interactive reality, in a much more optimised manner than say an Instagram post. Metaverse will also probably raise the value of cryptocurrencies and the NFT marketplace in its entirety, with influencers now hosting events in blockchain gaming virtual spaces to interact directly with their audiences. And what’s exciting is that it’s not a distant dream, it’s already here.
7.How does Kofluence connect brands with Influencers? Talk us through your business model.
To put it simply, Kofluence aims to help people unlock value from their social influence. Our platform helps unlock the power of social influence of your existing users to amplify awareness/ drive retention/ increase transactions for our brand partners.
All our collaborations are targeted and we are data-driven and analytically-focused in our overall approach. Designed as 100% configurable from Brand’s dashboard, Brands can choose whom to target/ how much to offer and on what terms.
In other words, we provide the infrastructural support for brands to not only scale their social media campaigns ranging from 1 to 100k influencers, but also discover influencers through numerous feature offerings and cross collaboration opportunities.
8. How does Kofluence use AI to automate its Influencer marketing campaigns?
While players in the traditional Influencer Marketing landscape use more manual marketing aids like basic search, keyword matching, documents, calls & emails, Kofluence automates and simplifies each stage of a typical influencer campaign workflow in a contextualised manner.
Our platform seamlessly enables brands to leverage creators for branding, acquisition, retention & engagement with – Full stack Integrations; Deep Profiling across Persona/ Content/ Audience etc.; Automated Data driven decision making (Pricing/ Matching/ Content/ Campaign); Proprietary Risk & Fraud Detection/ Prevention and more to help them find the right influencers and deliver collaborations with high efficiency.
