The country’s first performance-based influencer marketing platform, DRIM Global

DRIM is India’s 1st & only performance based influencer marketing startup that offers end to end management to D2C brands and has over 250k influencers, 200 brands, and nearly 2000 influencer talent managers and develops campaign strategies to help brands like Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s, Swiggy, Amazon, Snapdeal, and others. Ms. Ms Yulia Aslamova, Head of Asia, DRIM shares more insights on the same.

1. Give us an overview of DRIM and its journey so far?

In 2019, upon organizing one of the biggest Indian digital marketing conferences for 2000 professionals and 50 international experts, I came to the realization that recommendation is a key driving force for sales in the country. And if this recommendation comes from a subject matter expert- it’s even better! India ran on communities & recommendations, and at that moment I had my eureka moment.

Micro bloggers and social media influencers can prove to be scalable performance marketing channels. At the same time use the power of influence of any subject matter expert no matter what the audience size (we work with influencers with 1500 followers plus).

DRIM disrupts the industry and brings transparency. Brands have to simply identify their desired goal, may it be, sales, leads or  app installs. DRIM’s team works with influencers to ensure the results come in and the brands pay only for the achieved results, not for created content, views and brand awareness.

I found investors, as well as a friend who owned the technology stack – an accumulated powerful ML algorithm that optimizes to match the brands with the perfect blogger/influencer who will deliver results. Kirill Pyzhov, the co-founder at DRIM, was looking to expand to Asia and I was looking for a performance influencer marketing platform and technology. It was a match!

Within one year we scaled the company’s growth and onboarded large brands like Domino’s pizza, Swiggy, Zepto, Amazon, Snapdel and more. All this while supporting the growth of over 70 000+ social media influencers.

2. Tell us about DRIM’s suite of offerings. How do you create value for brands and influencers?

At DRIM we believe that results are of the utmost importance- both for brands and influencers. Keeping this idea in mind DRIM helps generate sales for brands via effective micro-influencer/blogger campaigns. We are essentially a performance influencer marketing platform where brands meet the perfect influencers/bloggers and only pay for the results.

Our technology stack helps scale the campaigns. With innovative features like; smart segmentation where the platform identifies statistically significant segments of influencers who perform best for a particular brand. The look-alike & ML features help find similar to the best converting influencers for a particular brand.

Our flagship analytical system will find the top-performing influencers across 8 social networks within a database of 250k+ micro-influencers. Our 500+ managers will assist them to deliver results and scale your campaigns.

We have created an easy to use ecosystem for influencers to effectively collaborate with global brands. Influencers sign up & choose the brands they would like to collaborate with. They can fully concentrate on giving their creative best to the campaign, while our manager at DRIM does the negotiations & ensures timely pay outs. At DRIM influencers have no cap on their earnings, the sky’s the limit.

3.How do you see the landscape of influencer marketing changing in the coming years especially in India?

The world is heading towards another economic recession. We anticipate the advertising industry will face a challenging time. Every crisis is the right time for innovation. Influencer marketing traditionally delivers only brand awareness and visibility. Many brands are not willing to pay high prices for qualitative results that are also uncertain.  The industry sees a decrease in bloggers payout by 25% within one year. Brands increasingly seek the direct business impact of any marketing channel they spend on.

We offer a transparent solution and propose brands pay only for the result they get via bloggers/influencers. We believe the industry would collectively grow when brands & influencers are both able to justify their investment & efforts respectively. DRIM, a full-stack platform combines smart segmentation, Look-a-like & ML  to deliver the desired results at scale along with a project management tool kit.

If you would ask marketers in 2017; what is the next big thing? The most probable answer would be programmatic ads and traffic optimization. If you would ask the same question in 2022, the answer would be, performance influencer marketing.

4. How is your brand different from others in the market, what experience do you aim to provide to your community?

We anticipate the advertising industry will face challenging times ahead. Every crisis is the right time for innovation. Influencer marketing traditionally delivers only brand awareness and visibility. Many brands are not willing to pay high prices for qualitative results that are also uncertain. The industry sees a decrease in bloggers payout by 25% within one year. Brands increasingly seek the direct business impact of any marketing channel they spend on. DRIM is the only performance influencer marketing platform for the brands.

We offer a transparent solution and propose brands pay only for the result they get via bloggers/influencers. We believe the industry would collectively grow when brands & influencers are both able to justify their investment & efforts respectively.  Our full-stack platform combines smart segmentation, Look-a-like & ML  to deliver the desired results at scale along with a project management tool kit.

While most other agencies are still pitching the qualitative metrics, we at DRIM know quantitative metrics are as important as qualitative metrics.

5.How is DRIM helping women in India to build a community workforce, share a few success stories?

DRIM is building a women’s community where every single woman from any part of India, be it a student, be it a housewife with no experience, be it a returnee who can’t compete with others in getting jobs, gets a chance to start over and utilize the talent most productively, learning and earning, without any financial investments. 99% of all employees at DRIM are female and most of them are working from home with flexible work hours that could be combined with motherhood or career restart after the break.

One such story is of Dilshaz Bilakhiya who is a scout and mentor at DRIM. Dilshaz started her journey at DRIM in January 2022 and got promoted to Mentor by May 2022. She left her corporate job after having a baby and was looking for a work from home opportunity that gave her flexible working hours and time to take care of her baby. That’s when she found our platform and it was a perfect match. Dilshaz is now perfectly managing work, home and most amazing days with her child.

This proves that sky’s the limit for many more like her at DRIM.

6. What are some of the major challenges faced by your industry today, how do you deal with them?

The main challenge in the Indian context is the lack of sales based advertising. Influencers today are creating content without conversions in mind. If the audience find value in the promotional content then they will continue to engage with the influencer in the long run. For example in order to increase the sales for Domino’s Pizza we created unique codes for influencers who consistently created content around food, so that it looked organic & their audience had a direct connection with it. In addition to this, the influencers need to keep engaging with the audience, one can not just publish a post and leave expected returns.

In order to bridge this gap, we’re working on building a creators academy where we will educate influencers on how to work on the Cost-Per-Action model. Such a model provides stable income for influencers and brings value to both brands and audience. This is our way to give back to the creators community, we expect to educate over 15 lakh creators & help them grow with DRIM.

7. What are your plans going forward, how are you planning to add value to your community in the next year?

We at DRIM are significantly scaling by onboarding valuable partners which are top agencies in India. We are already working with over 10 brand marketing agencies and providing them with our unique model for India- performance influencer marketing services.

In the next year, we are going to grow our revenue by 10-20x and expand our team significantly. We’re gearing to receive direct integrations with some top social media marketing networks in the country and empower both brands and influencers to grow on social media.