In the past, TV and print media advertisements have always been the first choice of businesses for brand building. However, with the rapid development of the Internet, which has become an integral part of most consumers' lives, there is a trend of shifting marketing budgets to online media. At present, word-of-mouth marketing has moved from early collaboration with bloggers to collaborating with social media influencers. According to statistics, the global market for word-of-mouth marketing will reach US$13.8 billion by 2021, a growth of more than 50% from 2020. In view of this huge business opportunity, Influenxio has selected Instagram with its open format to establish a one-stop micro-influencer matching platform.
There are many types of social media platforms on the market, which can be broadly divided into two categories: closed types such as Facebook and LINE, and open types such as Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. If we analyze further, top-tier and famous influencers with more than one million followers account for about 1% of the total number of Internet celebrities, while micro-influencers, or those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers, account for about 30% of the total number of influencers.
In order to help more businesses use word-of-mouth marketing to promote their brands, Allan Ko, founder and CEO of Influenxio, pointed out that word-of-mouth marketing has changed a lot in the past few years. Previously, most companies looked for collaborations with top influencers, but in recent years, the trend of collaborating with micro-influencers has emerged, with three-fold growth in the past three years. One of the key reasons is that top influencers usually have their own agencies, so it takes more time to communicate with them on collaboration projects, and there are also more restrictions. Secondly, although collaboration with top influencers can help to sell products in the initial stage, it is difficult to guarantee the same effect in subsequent collaborations. What's more, the brand image would be tied to the personal image of the influencers. For this reason, in recent years, collaboration with micro-influencers has become the top choice for many companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing.
Helping brands to efficiently find micro-influencers to create best word-of-mouth marketing results
Founded in 2018, Influenxio is committed to building a leading influencer marketing platform. Its current automated influencer matching platform focuses on enabling advertisers to easily find the right micro-influencer to increase brand awareness and boost business growth through word-of-mouth promotion. The most important feature of this platform is that it helps small and medium-sized enterprises with limited resources, as well as large enterprises in pursuit of performance, to save the time and cost originally required to implement influencer marketing. By doing so, its customers can focus on product development and service optimization, in order to achieve enhanced brand awareness, stimulate business growth, and improve market competitiveness.
Although it has become a trend to collaborate with micro-influencers, many companies lack sufficient manpower and time to find suitable influencers to collaborate with. This is why the design of Influenxio's one-stop micro-influencer matching platform was geared towards simplifying the problems that companies may encounter in the process of influencer marketing through use of technology. Customers can also access all the information on Influenxio's one-stop platform hassle-free, including the style of the influencers, the profile of their followers, and past reviews and number of times they have worked on collaborations. The platform has an intuitive and user-friendly design, as well as custom templates for different industries, and a database of tens of thousands of creators. There was even a brand that was able to find a suitable influencer for collaboration within just a day. At present, well-known brands such as Carrefour, ezTravel, and KKBOX have already joined the ranks of those building their brand image and word-of-mouth marketing through Influenxio's one-stop micro-influencer matching platform.
According to Ko, compared with famous Internet celebrities, micro-influencers can get closer to the target audience. They can be just like your friends talking to you. This creates a higher degree of trust and gives people the impression of authenticity in their posts, so the loyalty of followers is relatively high. According to statistics, the interaction rate between micro-influencers and their followers is as high as 60%, which is estimated to be 22 times more effective than that of famous Internet celebrities. In addition, there are more candidates for micro-influencers, so it is easier for companies to find the ones who embody and add value to the brand concept. Therefore, it is naturally more efficient when it comes to brand marketing communication and can strike the best balance between influencer style and corporate needs.
According to the information provided by Influenxio, there are currently more than 10,000 quality registered influencer members on the one-stop micro-influencer matching platform. And the platform has accumulated more than 1,000 successful brand-matching cases so far. It is worth mentioning that Influenxio has received additional investment and mentoring from SparkLabs Taipei, and it is working on developing the Japan market in addition to Taiwan, in anticipation of making its own mark in the era of Internet celebrities.
(Editor's note: The original article was published in TTA Magazine Issue 7. Read more startup stories in TTA Magazines.)
Influenxio's one-stop micro-influencers matching platform
Photo: Influenxio
