INFLUENCERS
What is an influencer in the context of ZYGY?
An influencer is a person, a group or any entity that has mentioned your startup, company, products or services on websites or social media, and they have a ‘large’ number of followers. This is slightly different from the general definition (or perception) of an influencer, where the focus is on a person who has a large number of followers regardless whether the person makes references about your company or product/services.
In summary, influencers in the ZYGY context are ‘domain focused’ on sectors like fintech, women founders, agric-tech, health-tech, etc.
Complementary ways of influencers marketing to help startups
As mentioned here, Influencer Marketing is a way for brands to promote their products through endorsements or recommendations from influencers and content creators on the internet/social media. For example, companies will hire influencers with the largest number of followers and the mention of company/products should result in increased sales, hence, a more focused approach than broad scale PR/Advertising, ie, lower customer acquisition costs (CACs).
Thus, these types of influencers can easily command high fees. However, startups, especially in the early stage, may not be able to retain services of such ‘expensive’ influencers and may not want to give out equity in lieu of cash. For example, a top influencer retained by the Government of China to boost country’s image ahead of the Winter Olympics cost $300,000.
At ZYGY, we focus more on a broad spectrum of influencers. Our AI engine captures any influencers, both on social media (Twitter) and web, who have mentioned your startup, company, products or services. Thus, the AI Engine captures actual posts (message/content) and engagement (reactions) allowing for data driven interactive insights.
An additional ZYGY unique selling proposition (USP) of the AI engine is it also captures influencers that grow organically, but may not be known to you. For example, your startup is selling, say, fintech product/services, and you want to find/access a group (an influencer) that talks about financial literacy, wallets, payments, P2P platforms, etc, in social media in your geographical area or in a market you want to a presence in, you can connect with such people/groups influencers via ZYGY to ‘talk about’ or push your product.
Thus, startups have more options to access a variety of influencers within their budget for creating awareness to buzz about themselves or their products/services. Furthermore, in today’s environment of social media ‘always on,’ damage control must be part of risk management, certain influencers can be lifelines on reputation repair.
How does ZYGY vet and categorize the different types of influencers?
Once our AI engine captures influencers of a company, each influencer in the database will be annotated with:
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The reach and engagement customized to your needs.
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The topic of concern or issue mentioned by a specific influencer towards your startup and/or products/services
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Whether the influencer supports, opposes or is indifferent towards your startups and/or products/services
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Chronology of posts from the influencer about your startups and/or products/services
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Influencers Network that consists of people, organization and location (to be launched)
Sampling of displaying influencer for social media and web on ZYGY (as of Fe. 14, 2022)
Showing social media influencers for Carsome on ZYGY:
Showing web influencers for Carsome on ZYGY:
Approaching an influencer should not be a time consuming task for time stressed startups. One can use the influencers' topic of conversation and/or domain expertise (or ZYGY Knowledge Grid*) to approach them. It's extremely important to do your homework before approaching influencers, and EMS can reduce much of the friction on due diligence of identifying the right subject matter influencers.
*EMS Startup Knowledge Grid is chosen topic of concerns
Approaching an Influencer: