From tweet to receipt: How Smync tracks the bottom-line impact of influencer marketing

by Andreas Rekdal
December 2, 2016

If you’ve invested a lot of time into a hobby or passion project like running, playing music or decking out your apartment with technology, odds are you have developed some strong opinions about certain brands and products. And, if you're super impassioned, you might just proudly share that opinion with anyone who’ll listen.

Whether you've intend to or not, that makes you a brand ambassador. Smync, a Chicago-based adtech startup, wants to help brands amplify the voices of fan ambassadors on social media to reach broader audiences.

“Five years ago, we started seeing the problem of brands really struggling to connect with the audiences they had built on social media,” said co-founder and CEO Jeff Ernst, a social media marketing veteran. “There was also an increasing awareness that people don’t like being marketed to, and they don’t like advertising. With so much noise out there, how do you get people to pay attention?”

Like many others in his industry, Ernst thinks influencer marketing is the answer, but he and his team take a broad view of who the ‘influencers’ are. They believe consumers are more likely to trust people they actually know than celebrities, bloggers and Instagrammers.

One of the reasons brands haven’t fully embraced this way of thinking, Ernst said, is the difficulty of building a broad portfolio of true fans who act as brand ambassadors — a process his team has automated with a patent-pending tool.

“Identifying people is hard,” said Ernst. “But we can really find those people who are really excited about your brand and give them a unique two-way experience to keep them activated.”

After finding the right influencers, Smync lets companies invite them into a custom-built online community where that offers exclusive online content, events and other rewards for participating. Ernst said his company’s research finds that many consumers see deeper engagement with the brand as a reward in itself, but the platform also allows brands to pay professional content creators for their advocacy.

In addition to the tools for identifying and engaging true fans, said Ernst, Smync also strives to offer brands more tangible metrics on how an influencer marketing campaign is performing. This is accomplished through integrations with a number of third-party premium data sources that lets Smync follow consumer journeys from social engagement all the way down to purchasing decisions, including in brick-and-mortar stores

Chief experience officer Shawn Miller said these tracking capabilities address one of the biggest challenges marketing managers face: justifying their budgets to the rest of the company.

“The real problem for C-level employees who are running social for brands is that they can’t put likes on the balance sheet,” said Miller. “There are metrics that we’ve used for social, like how many hearts you get on an Instagram post, that the CFO just doesn’t care about.”

Founded just over a year ago, the five-person company already has a number of paying customers, including some industry blue chips like ConAgra Foods. Smync is also currently in the process of raising a funding round to bolster its sales force and expand its platform’s functionality.

Image via Smync.

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