Valgeir Magnússon, Co-Founder and CEOThis very notion is now adding momentum to influencer marketing as an adjacent trend to celebrity endorsements. In a time when social media has entrenched as an integral part of our daily lives, social media influencers with thousands and even millions of followers are nothing less than mainstream celebrities. Resultantly, when they are recommending certain products or services, it naturally creates interest among their social cohorts. Rising to this trend, today, many brands—big or small—are leveraging influencer marketing and strengthening their market acceptance. However, it is still incredibly challenging to launch a successful influencer campaign. Why?
Finding, vetting, and contracting local influencers is a complicated endeavour for many marketers. This is particularly due to their unintentional lack of knowledge about different cities and countries. Because of the same reason, marketers struggle to scale their influencer campaigns. Above all, even if they did manage to execute a campaign successfully, there are significant constraints in terms of accurately reporting and assessing the influencer campaign ROI. Many marketers even opine that determining the success of influencer marketing campaigns would be a top concern in the coming years.
This is where Ghostlamp cements its cornerstone. The company helps independent marketing agencies, as well as in-house marketing teams of different brands, create and measure on-demand influencer campaigns. “Similar to wish-granting Aladdin’s lamp, Ghostlamp help marketers realise their dream influencer campaigns,” comments Valgeir Magnússon, co-founder and CEO of Ghostlamp.
Ghostlamp has developed an eponymous platform that automates the process of finding, contracting, and paying social media influencers
To this end, Ghostlamp has developed an eponymous platform that automates the process of finding, contracting, and paying social media influencers, thereby giving users the power to start a movement in minutes. Elaborating on this easy-to-use platform, Magnusson highlights that all a user needs to do is to create a brief of their marketing campaign and decide a budget. The in-built algorithm of the Ghostlamp platform also offers information on over 50 million social media influencers so that businesses can harvest the most suitable ones.
It is also important to note that Ghostlamp’s innovative approach to influencer marketing doesn’t end with just the platform. Going the extra mile, Ghostlamp has also created Engagement per Influencer Campaign or EPIC—a new and innovative metric to measure the performance of influencer campaigns. The company assigns a unique EPIC value to different social media engagement types (likes, comments, story views etc.) and charges its clients based on their desired EPICs. Once the marketing initiative takes off, Ghostlamp gathers all the different types of engagement across different social platforms and displays the total EPIC received for each campaign to help clients easily visualise the campaign progress. Ghostlamp always guarantees the minimum EPIC purchased by the client. If the performance of the campaign is less than the client's expected EPIC, Ghostlamp contracts more influencers without any additional cost to the client. And while doing so, Ghostlamp never compromises on the quality of selected influencers.
At this juncture, the role Ghostlamp plays in its clients’ influencer campaigns can best be explained through a case study. Whole Foods Market—an American multinational supermarket chain—was planning a nationwide campaign for Arctic char (a fish from the salmon family). They wanted the campaign to work instantly and be very cost-effective. Whole Foods contacted TBWA, a leading advertisement company, for planning and executing this campaign. TBWA, in turn, sought Ghostlamp’s help in getting a large pool of micro-influencers near every Whole Foods store. The selected influencers were then asked to buy and prepare a gourmet meal with the Arctic char, and then make a carousel post on Instagram using known hashtags such as #homecooking.
The campaign was an instant hit. Most Whole Foods outlets exhausted their stock of Arctic char during the campaign period. The supermarket chain and Arctic char both were trending under #homecooking on Instagram for a full month with loads of recipes. Such a favourable outcome has now inspired Whole Foods to carry out multiple influencer campaigns for their other products.
Notably, this is but one of the many success stories that have helped Ghostlamp carve a niche of its own over the years. Apart from Whole Foods and TBWA, the company’s clientele includes other big names like Icelandair, Subaru, KFC, and more. And as Ghostlamp continues to light up the relatively obscure route of influencer marketing for such clients, it is also poised to upgrade its offering to reach newer milestones. To this end, Ghostlamp is currently enhancing its technological capabilities further to position itself as a leading influencer marketing platform. “The future holds many new promising opportunities for us, and we are all set to leverage each one of them,” concludes Magnusson.
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