With the increasing use of influencers to market brands across the region, and an even greater number of influencers entering this new content marketing arena, the newly launched Dubai-based digital firm, Influencers.ae, promises to be an all-encompassing online platform that enables brands and agencies to discover, compare and book relevant influencers for effective digital campaigns across the GCC. Easy to navigate and use, the first ever-Arab focused Influencer Marketing Platform (IMP) provides data on over 1,780 of the regions' most successful influencers who, collectively, have over 640 million followers. Developed in the UAE with an in-depth understanding of regional needs, Influencers.ae relieves many of the pain points marketers have when attempting to conduct influencer marketing. According to eConsultancy, the greatest difficult for 73% of marketers is identifying the right influencer and 82% of brands are still conducting their influencer research manually. The Influencers.ae platform alleviates this by allowing brands the ability to search for relevant influencers across the GCC according to multiple parameters, compare them according to performance data analysis, and book them all online. Marketers now have transparent and real time data on influencers and their followers for benchmarking analysis and comparison of regional performance/cost value, including image vs video engagement trends across sectors, in depth demographics of the followers down to city level, gender, interests, follower's popularity index and much more. For even more thorough analysis of how followers interact with influencers' content, Influencers.ae created the Influential Rate, a proprietary algorithm which takes into account a variety of metrics such as weighted average of comments, tags, likes and views, and cross matches the data with comparable influencers regionally. "In the GCC, most brands are using influencer marketing like they would celebrity endorsement or brand ambassadorship", said Feras Arafe, CEO of Influencers.ae. "They find, with difficulty, one or two influencers that have relevant profiles and promote a brand through them in one-off campaigns. Our platform harnesses the power of mass campaigns through influencers. The more influencers that promote a specific hashtag within a set period of time, the higher the number of social media channels that will boost it. With the right amount of influencers, your campaigns will not only reach difficult to target consumers, but also have the ability to go viral." The interactive portal enables users to choose and compare critical date for up to 5 influencer's on a single page for easier evaluation. Additionally, to determine the campaign ROI, users are provided with an overview of the campaign content with details on reposts or produced content along with the number of ‘Likes', comment, views and engagement. The in-depth data on engagement levels based on geography, demography and interactions allows users to analyze the penetration of campaigns. "Digital spending is up, but marketers continue to spend on programmatic advertising even though they realize that the banner ad is dead", said Clark Williams, COO, Influencers.ae. "The average click through rate (CTR) rarely exceeds 1% and their target audiences are more and more employing ad blocking software, especially on their mobiles. Our platform offers a viable alternative. Brands can now reach consumers with created or reposted content from relevant Influencers that their followers trust. A campaign can achieve receive mass impressions and a higher conversion rate for much less cost than other forms of digital advertising." Additional services provided by Influncers.ae include content creation and sampling. For marketers needing help with the production of videos, Influencers.ae has in-house videographers who can create videos and animations for brands wanting to create specific content for influencers to repost. For brands wanting to get their products in the hands of influencers to sample, review and potentially post on their social media channels, Influencers.ae offers a product sampling delivery service. Product samples can be picked up from a client, packaged and shipped directly to the home addresses of influencers across the GCC. This extremely effective marketing tool can now be in the hands of agencies and brands. Influencers.ae has a robust database influencers that have 20,000 followers and above from UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. This number continues to expand as the company's well trained staff register and sign up over new influencers every week. — SG
