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Established in 2014, TRIBE is a tech platform that harnesses the power of micro-influencers to created trusted content for brands. Essentially a social content marketplace that lauds itself as ‘transforming how brands reach and engage consumers’, WNIP caught up with Lisa Targett, UK Manager at TRIBE to find out more…
Can you give us some background about your company?
TRIBE was founded six years ago by Australian TV and radio host, Jules Lund, who saw at first hand the power of social media after helping build the most engaged Facebook brand page in Australia. He discovered that, for the price of one sponsored post from a celebrity, fashion blogger or YouTuber, you could fill a campaign with 50 micro-influencers, all creating unique content. Since no-one had time to manually manage 50 influencers, Lund designed an app and TRIBE was born. TRIBE has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York, and London.
We like to think of TRIBE as the ‘next evolution of influencer marketing’ and we have already been responsible for the publishing of 650,000 pieces of branded content by global brands including Unilever, Diageo and Topshop. In essence, we exist to help brands take their social and digital media performance to the next level through the supply of unique content, created by real customers at a fraction of the normal speed and cost.
What business problem is your company addressing?
Social media is not just a place to market to people, but the ultimate forum for brands to find and collaborate with users of varying influence that can help push their marketing objectives forward. Yet many marketers are yet to truly crack social and build it seamlessly into marketing strategies.
In part, this is due to the shortage of on-point, authentic branded content that resonates with social audiences. A significant volume and variety of assets are needed to maximize commercial performance and drive positive brand sentiment, but current creative solutions don’t cut it. Creative agencies or in-house teams are often expensive and behind the curve when it comes to delivering on quality and volume of content (and low-cost stock image libraries are too generic). Brands need social content delivered on-demand and shot to specification – TRIBE provides the solution by connecting brands with real customers to make this happen.
How is your platform addressing this problem?
Typical, everyday customers have the technology and the talent to craft content that performs well in the current digital landscape – having been schooled through what we term as the ‘University of Instagram’. The pictures and clips everyday people are taking with their phones are magazine quality and billboard size, with the added benefit of helping marketers represent their customers with more diverse creative at a fraction of the cost.
Our marketplace connects brands with their own customers to craft ad-ready content and they either distribute the asset to their own audiences (influencer marketing) or the assets rights are retained for the brand to use in paid channels.
Here’s an explainer video:
Can you give some examples of brands successfully using your solution?
Bacardi creates Mojito Moments summer campaign is a good example of our work. The campaign tapped up more than 60 social media influencers to share photos of their #MojitoMoments on Instagram. It then placed the posts on digital outdoor screens geographically located close to where the original post was shared. Thanks to smartphones, this campaign was the first time in history that a brand’s own customers were able to directly generate creative-agency quality imagery at scale, speed and at a fraction of the cost.
It took two weeks from briefing the creators, to that same creative living on digital billboards – saving the brand a huge amount of time and about 80% on creative costs. Sales exceeded 5x their target – pushing ROI up from performance and further up from saved creative & executional costs.
What are the pricing details of your platform?
In our marketplace, influencers set their fee, but on average it’ll cost £200 for an influencer to craft content & reach an average audience of 30,000. You can then pay for the influencer to boost the post to extended social audiences. To license the rights to use that content across channels outside social, like OOH or in retail environments (what we see most brands doing due to performance of these native creative assets), prices start from £350.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
Other people are moving into managed services – as there is a huge amount of untapped potential contained that exists across organic influencer marketing (testing platforms & strategies on new platforms such as TikTok).
With Instagram launching Paid Partnerships tags, we’re seeing a future where organic & paid are placed together – all visible and manageable within one platform. For us, having seen the effectiveness of customer-generated-content on ad performance – we can see brands harnessing the talents of their very own customers to drive not only their marketing strategy but also their creative strategy.
How do you view the future?
Influencer Marketing is going to power the future of social – which is social commerce. Instagram has been working on several initiatives to enable commerce directly within the app and it has made big moves to bring creators closer to that purchasing process, for example, IG Checkout is being beta tested in the US. This is a huge development as it has the power to ultimately transform likes into sales.
I don’t think we are far away from a future where everything is shoppable on Instagram. Instagram is transforming the future of retail and TRIBE is uniquely placed to help brands harness the power of micro-influencers to create trusted content that delivers meaningful results at scale with speed & safety.
Thank you.
