Neve Fear-Smith chatted with Nisarg Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of the directory featured company, affable.ai, about how the platform supports the influencer marketing industry.
What is affable.ai? Please give our readers an overview of your platform.
affable.ai is an end-to-end influencer management platform which helps brands and agencies find influencers, manage collaborations, track campaigns, and measure performance.
We’re on a mission to empower brands, agencies and marketers to influence millions in the fastest way possible.
What is your USP? We would love to know what makes you stand out from other platforms.
We empower brands (or marketers) to find the right influencers that resonate best with their campaigns based on 20+ advanced filters. This helps save time to recruit and manage influencers seamlessly at scale with automated workflows. This includes influencers and their followers’ data to ensure you work with the right person.
We use proprietary machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to ensure influencer relevance and brand safety by:
- Recommending influencers based on their visual content
- Detecting fake followers with high accuracy
- Detecting the sentiment on the comments received on the influencer content
D2C e-commerce brands can also run product gifting and affiliate campaigns seamlessly, with integrated order creation, affiliate attribution, and shipment tracking in a single place, without hopping across platforms.
Users can automatically grab story screenshots of your Instagram campaigns and get them in a consolidated report, which helps measure the impact of campaigns with in-depth analytics.
One can manage more than a thousand plus influencers in a single place with no more messy spreadsheets and guesswork. We package all these offerings in a very intuitive, user-friendly, self-service platform so any marketer can get the ball rolling with influencer marketing within a day.
As well as being a discovery platform, what else does affable.ai offer and aid with?
affable.ai is much more than just an influencer discovery platform, and that’s what makes us different!
- Users can not only find relevant influencers but also manage all the influencers, campaigns, and commissions, at scale, in one place.
- Easy, simplified order creation and tracking without switching platforms. We take care of all gifting/affiliate programmes seamlessly in one place.
- Users can distribute affiliate codes and links at scale and track sales and conversions.
- One of our most loved components is our industry listening, brand and competitor analysis module, which helps users deep dive and understand how to adapt to the market and influencer campaigns run by competitors.
What advice would you give to a brand that is looking to enter the influencer marketing space, but doesn’t know where to start?
Influencer marketing resources like Talking Influence and also affable.ai’s resources section are filled with loads of information. Brands and marketers can also make use of following some e-commerce and retail influencers like Justin Cener, Neal Schaffer, Vinnie Potestivo, and more, who have quick, easy courses and resources too. Any brand can get started with influencer marketing using such resources.
The exciting thing about influencer marketing is that you don’t need to have mega budgets. Access to high-engaging micro and nano influencers enables any brand of any size in any part of the world to spread the word about their brands globally. Influencers are also amazing content creators so smaller brands can get reach as well as authentic content by partnering with influencers.
Why do you think that influencer marketing platforms are helpful?
Influencer marketing works. However, the current process of finding and managing influencers is very manual, time-consuming and full of guesswork… this does not scale. Using influencer marketing platforms gives you a more data-driven approach to the process.
As a brand, tracking and cross-checking for fake influencers is a tough job when you work with a range of influencers. Platforms like affable.ai give you features like suspicious follower count, audience engagement, audience affinity and more.
Having access to real influencers is only one part of the battle. Brands need help in understanding how the creator ecosystem works, what’s a successful brand collaboration, what metrics to measure and how to measure. Platforms provide a lot of data points which use data-driven insights to match your brand with the right influencer for the job.
Finding and managing two or more influencers can be done if you are an enterprise company where you have the workforce for it, but it’s still not the most effective way to manage influencers. And if you’re a smaller brand, handling influencers and their campaigns manually are close to impossible. Also, when it comes to building mass brand awareness, you need multiple influencers. Platforms help eliminate this spreadsheet nightmare.
Every influencer brings with them a specific audience, and every sponsored post in collaboration brings in increased brand engagement and awareness. If the brand wants to plug in five more influencers, engagement skyrockets. This not only has an impact on the engagement but also on conversions during the period of this campaign.
What are some of the biggest trends you’re seeing in the influencer marketing industry?
Micro-influencers to come centre stage: We’re seeing more brands value follower engagement over following size. Authenticity is being valued more than ever, the people who create a genuine connection with an engaged audience will come out on top, and millions of followers are no longer necessary.
Creators to own their audience: Creators want to be more in control of their content, as well as direct access to their audience. Rather being at the behest of collaborations and being told how their content needs to be created. They prefer campaign briefs over exact post content/design.
Monetisation of work: The biggest trend this year in the creator economy will be more and more creators turning to secondary platforms to monetise their work. Traditional platforms will remain useful as audience pipelines — a simple and natural place for viewers to access channels and topics they are interested in — but creators will want to find a way to divert their audience to other platforms and convert them into customers.
E-commerce will help creators turn into brands: We see more creators calling themselves entrepreneurs. Influencer-led commerce is the strategic integration of the right channel and products to deliver a differentiated shopping experience. Creators are the new face of content commerce!
Whitelisting: Brands are seeing influencer content working much better than their own content on paid-ad networks like Facebook ads. The future of influencer marketing involves re-purposing influencer content and boosting it across all social media channels to amplify the reach as well as ROI of the influencer collaborations.
