This year, Post For Rent is a Gold Sponsor of the Influencer Marketing Show, and we caught up with the CEO and founder, Gary Csiszar to see what he’ll be talking about at the event, how to stay ahead of the competition, and what trends will begin to emerge next year.
You are a gold sponsor of the Influencer Marketing Show this year. What are you most looking forward to at the event this month?
We’re looking forward to catching up with existing clients and also meeting lots of new people in the industry. It will be nice to represent Post For Rent as a group at a professional event again after our activations with BBTV at VidCon London and LA earlier this year. We’ve been working hard on our product development and business structure over the past couple of months, so we’re really excited to evolve our services in the industry.Can you tell us a bit about Post For Rent’s journey since it all began and how you’ve changed your strategy to evolve with the industry?
We started as a marketplace platform three years ago as a small team with a vision. Since then we’ve innovated and adapted Post For Rent to cater to the rapid industry growth, expanding into new territories, and locking in partnerships with The Hello Group, BBTV, TuneMoji, and other industry entities. These partnerships give us a truly unique market position and value offering to our advertiser and creator users.Your session will look at why you think just a platform isn’t enough – can you tell us more about what you’ll be discussing in the case study theatre?
Having three departments has elevated Post For Rent into an ecosystem, and provides our clients with many more opportunities than a mere platform would alone. We are able to collect first-hand information from all angles of the industry, empowering us to continuously rewrite our DNA through informed decisions about our products whilst ensuring we provide the best user experience. We’ll be discussing what we learned along the way and how you can keep up to speed with the industry.What is the best way for others to keep up with the ever-changing industry and stay ahead of the competition?
Innovate or die. We are constantly working on new features for our platform and looking for new social media channels that we can connect to provide a better experience to influencers whilst also empowering them to try new formats, which is also in the best interests of our advertiser users. Besides that, we have been able to expand our business into a three-pillar structure – alongside the technology platform itself, we also have our own influencer marketing agency, and a talent management division, complete with its own MCN. The synergy between the three pillars is very natural and they all support each other and allow us to serve a more complete array of needs for our clients.As a platform, how do you balance authentic campaigns with business efficiency?
We are very fortunate in that the technology we have developed makes it incredibly easy to be efficient in terms of discovering influencers, campaign management, talent relations, campaign reporting and handling payments, so the business efficiency side of things is always covered, and our brands and advertisers can focus instead on creating authentic campaigns. Our team of expert campaign managers helps ensure that the influencers selected to work for brands on Post For Rent will produce quality content and deliver strong results, so a brand can make full use of the platform regardless of their level of expertise or experience in the space. Our campaign managers are also an invaluable resource in their own right in terms of best practices, market trends and other recommendations they are able to provide having overseen such a wide array of influencer marketing campaigns themselves.You’ve recently launched new offices in Barcelona, Johannesburg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Amsterdam, which is great news. Could you share some of your other key developments this year?
Our fast and rapid expansion was one of our main development focuses this year. We’ve worked a lot on preparations and recruitment but wanted to make sure that the product was extremely polished before looking to expand, which is the position we found ourselves in this year. In 2020 we will open more offices in EMEA, so more exciting times are ahead no doubt.Lastly, what trends do you think we will see emerge in 2020?
Although the industry is still very young, there have been signs it is starting to mature, with brands requiring a bit less education than they have done in previous years and a bit more transparency and structure filtering in.
There has been an incredible influx of new influencers in recent years, many of which focus on new content verticals that simply were not present a couple of years ago. We will see budgets continue to grow as the industry has predicted for several years now, especially given that the speed bumps that have come up – particularly influencer fraud – have largely been addressed.
We believe brands will become more confident in using micro and nano influencers, whose influence is proving increasingly relevant, to bolster their campaigns once they realise that technology like Post For Rent exists to allow them to engage those accounts at the scale they need for it to be effective alongside their big-name influencer campaigns.
Meet Post For Rent at the Influencer Marketing Show next week, where you can learn how they evolved from a marketplace platform to an influencer marketing ecosystem.