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We Are AspireIQ

Creative communities built through data and analytics

I am excited to announce that as of today, we have rebranded from Revfluence to AspireIQ.

The new name represents the evolution of influencer marketing from a focus on purely fame and reach towards scalable, authentic content creation. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an overwhelming demand from sophisticated marketers looking to build large scale communities of influencers to produce the content needed to power every marketing channel.

A Brief History of Influencer Marketing

We originally founded Revfluence in 2013, when influencer marketing was a nascent pursuit by a handful of fast-growing, entrepreneurial brands.

There were two fundamental truths that, to this day, make influencers critical to every business’ digital strategy:

  1. Social media and mobile are the new kingmakers for brands. Traditional media outlets like TV and print continue to decline, not just in terms of viewership but also their impact on the cultural discussion and consumer preferences. However, brands have not evolved their own approach towards content and branding to account for this shift.
  2. On social media, the people who actually matter aren’t celebrities, but “regular” people: influencers, tastemakers, creatives and your friends. Over 55% 1 of purchasing decisions are driven by social media and influencers provide a natural, engaging discussion for every audience on what to buy, what to wear and what to do.

But influencer marketing is hard to get right and most brands haven’t invested in building the right processes to do it successfully.

The reason is because most brands and agencies see influencer marketing as transactional: I give you money, you give me a post to engage your audience. While fair, that transactional nature creates the same inauthenticity and issues as found in traditional advertising and misses the entire point of working with influencers in the first place.

What we identified early in the most successful influencer-driven brands like ipsy and Fashion Nova - and why we built our platform the way we did - is that there is a competitive advantage in building your influencer program into a true community. This means building long-term relationships with influencers, giving brands and creators the flexibility to collaborate in any way they see fit, and focusing on developing the tools to manage communities of hundreds, if not thousands, of influencers at any given time.

Influencers as Creative Communities

Today, AspireIQ is the leading platform for influencer marketing, with over 200 clients among Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing e-commerce brands like Samsung, HelloFresh and The Black Tux. We grew over 400% in 2017 and are poised to more than triple our revenue in 2018.

We’re in the midst of a massive surge in demand for influencer marketing and influencer content, and the main reason is because consumer attention span is at an all time low. In order to break through on any digital or social medium today, brands need to reach each consumer with the right piece of content, from the right messenger, at the right time. But while this level of personalization could be the holy grail for every marketer, it’s also impossible for most because almost no one has access to the volume and diversity of creative assets needed to deliver custom content on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

This has led to a recent shift in what “influencer marketing” means to sophisticated marketing teams. In addition to getting influencers to post on their own social media channels, the most successful brands today leverage these communities to generate the large volumes of image and video content needed to personalize every customer touchpoint: from paid media, to website content, to email marketing and more.

Building Brands From the Bottom Up

Rocketship CPG companies like Glossier demonstrate that success no longer requires top-down control of your brand. It’s impossible to rely on a single creative agency or in-house team to generate the volume or diversity of custom content required to keep up. Rather, the fastest growing consumer companies are building bottom-up communities of influencers, customers and content creators to tell their own personalized stories that define these brands.

We renamed the company to AspireIQ because traditional influencer marketing only scratches the surface of what our platform can do. As marketing becomes more sophisticated and consumer attention becomes increasingly split across channels, being able to deliver customized, authentic storytelling across every audience segment is a necessity.

Here at AspireIQ, we’re excited to provide every business the platform to build their own successful creative community while empowering the next generation of content creators to realize the full value of their talents and abilities. Come join us!

Eric Lam
CEO | AspireIQ

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