A Chat with HyPR’s CEO and Co-founder Gil Eyal on Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is fast becoming one of the most effective ways to connect with your target demographic. HyPR’s technology allows brands and agencies to better identify the true value of influencers. They also recently raised $5 million in a seed round of financing led by Edgewater Capital, with participation from Silvertech Ventures, Star Farm, Klingenstein Fields and a number of strategic angel investors. With HyPR’s search engine, brands and agencies can easily access indepth, realtime audience analytics of influencers across major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. HyPR’s technology crawls every social media account in the world and creates an easily accessible index of influencers that are searchable by their audience demographics. We had the opportunity to talk withGil Eyal, CEO & co-founder of HyPR.
What was your inspiration for HyPR?
I did about 120 different endorsement deals as the COO of Mobli with many well-known celebrities and influencers. Some were extremely effective and others were very unsuccessful. As a marketer at heart, the first question I always asked before a media spend would be: “Who reads this magazine? Who watches this TV show?” With celebrities and influencers I couldn’t get a straight answer, and was inundated with vanity metrics like follower numbers and “we think that it’s primarily female”.
HYPR’s goal is to measure every influencer account in the world in real time and understand what their audience breakdown is.
What experiences from your past helped prepare you to start HyPR?
I came across a program called Ad Blocker. I was shocked to learn how popular it was. Users were not just ignoring ads (as seen by declining conversion rates), but were literally outraged enough with aggressive advertising, that they saw nothing wrong with blocking the ads and effectively “stealing” the content. I thought to myself as a marketer, do I want to engage potential customers who are annoyed by the fact that my ad was shoved in their face? Do I want to miss them as a whole because they blocked my ad? What if there was a way to get them to voluntarily consume my content and generate goodwill towards my brand?
What’s your main differentiator?
HYPR’s patent pending technology enables it to measure audience demographics for any social media account. This enables HYPR to automate and scale social media marketing campaigns intelligently and efficiently and take influencer marketing away from “cool factor” to result oriented marketing. This technology allows brands to launch targeted, measurable and effective social influencer campaigns at the push of a button.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who are looking to dive head first into their own startup?
Ignore the noise. The world is filled with people who will tell you why it won’t work. That job you have? The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll have to get another.
What do you think is the most important element in influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is still marketing. Appropriately targeting your audience and getting the right messaging in front of them is still the core factor of any successful campaign.
It absolutely amazes me how many influencer campaigns are run without putting any emphasis on making sure the influencer actually reaches the right audience.
What did you feel like on the best day of your company's existence and why?
It was after we ran our first automated campaign for app downloads and the results came through. We asked the customer before the campaign how much they were paying for a download and they said $3. We were able to get the same quality at $0.5. The client was ecstatic. They told us they were transferring all their spending to us. I woke up the next morning and realized that would have to be the standard from now on.
Any final thoughts?
Influence is everywhere. It has always been used as an extremely effective marketing channel – think about pyramid schemes, “tell your friends” and celebrity endorsement. Technology is now making influencer marketing accessible to everyone in a scalable and measurable way. If you feel like you could improve the way you’re engaging with your audience, this is where you need to be.
HyPR is currently accepting signups for its closed beta at www.hyprbrands.com/signup.