Interview with Alla Inozemtseva, PR manager of the GetBlogger platform for finding bloggers

We continue our series of interviews with experts on marketing, advertising and business. Today our guest is Alla Inozemtseva, PR manager of GetBlogger, a platform for finding bloggers on Instagram and YouTube.

– How did you come up with the idea to organize the GetBlogger platform?

– The idea of GetBlogger — a platform where advertisers can independently find bloggers on Instagram and YouTube with the right target audience — came to the founders while working at the Delivery Club. “We looked for bloggers for advertising ourselves, waited a long time for a response from them, wasted time,” says Anna. “And in fact they bought a pig in a poke: how many subscribers actually saw our advertisement was known only to the blogger himself.”

Anna Shkirina and Levon Oganesyan “wanted to change the situation in which the blogger dictated the price to the market”, and realized that they needed to create a service for companies – a blogging ecosystem.

– What were the first steps?

The initial investment amounted to $500,000. First, we developed an online platform and website, and after 4 months we began to attract bloggers. Advertised with top bloggers — Lena Sheidlina (4 million followers on Instagram), Katya Klep (6.8 million followers on Instagram), launched targeted advertising on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. 5 thousand bloggers were recruited in the first month after the start in February.

Now GetBlogger continues to promote in popular social networks, as well as through publications in the media (Meduza, Forbes, VC.ru, Snob, RBC, Cossa) – both native advertising and editorial columns. The cost of attracting a blogger to the system is now below 100 rubles, an advertiser – less than 350 rubles. More than 1 million rubles a month are spent on attracting both of them.

How did you get your first success?

When, at the time of registration, a blogger gives the platform access to the statistics of his social media accounts, it analyzes his audience. Firstly, it evaluates the quality of coverage – the share of bots, mass followers and real subscribers, including active and popular ones. Secondly, it collects demographic data – gender, age, geographic location, as well as their availability (this parameter depends on the number of subscriptions – the more there are, the more “cluttered” the subscriber’s feed is and the less likely it is that he will see the customer’s ad).

Success came to GetBlogger due to the fact that it is the first unique service in Russia that provides customers with the opportunity to automatically select bloggers based on their audience. With it, an advertiser can search for a blogger exactly according to the parameters of the target audience to which he would like to distribute an advertising message.

– What difficulties did you face in the chosen field?

The founders of GetBlogger see the immaturity of the market as the main obstacle to business development. Not knowing all the intricacies of the case, companies try to work with bloggers directly, do not get the desired effect and are disappointed in the channel. GetBlogger intends to make a difference.

So far, the market hardly understands that it is necessary to pay for a quality service. Many advertisers are afraid of prices and try to search for bloggers directly, returning to GetBlogger after a series of bad experiences. The most important thing now is to reverse the gray and opaque approach in the market.

– How do you deal with the fact that bloggers found by brands on your site do not make deals outside of it?

On GetBlogger, the advertiser does not pay a commission for deals made, so there is no point in doing this outside the platform.

– How does your service differ from such services as LabelUp, Plibber, LiveDune, IconoSquare, Epicstars?

Special algorithms on our website detect fake and cheated accounts. Having analyzed all the indicators in aggregate (the number of subscribers of subscribers to avoid mass followers, geography, gender, age and interests of each of them), we draw objective conclusions about bloggers. According to current data in Russia, about 80% of all bloggers use various methods of cheating: after passing a two-stage check, out of almost 57,000 bloggers, only 14,500 were allowed to work on the site. Our competitors allow all bloggers to register.

Thank you for the interview and I wish you to achieve your goals and “retrain” the market.

Questions were prepared by Ekaterina Zmievskaya, SMM specialist of the MAVR marketing agency