Influencer marketing platform for brands and agencies, Hypetap, has announced today that they will be moving their business model away from annual subscriptions to a freemium service.
Brands and agencies will be able to use the Hypetap platform for free, but additional charges will apply for premium features on a campaign basis. Free users will only pay a 10 per cent service fee to Hypetap when they negotiate payment to an influencer.
Hypetap co-founder Detch Singh is excited about the change and feels that they will be able to offer a lot of value to smaller businesses.
“We found that a lot of SME’s and agencies were approaching us with the intention of running influencer campaigns, but they didn’t have the budget for an annual subscription and didn’t need some of the more sophisticated features we offer,” Singh said.
“We wanted to give them the opportunity to engage with influencers and use their budgets towards paying great influencers for their time and effort on campaigns, rather than paying us. It also allows them to trial influencer marketing without committing to a subscription they may not be able to utilise.”
Under the free model, brands will be able to post campaign briefs which influencers can respond to. Non-paying brands won’t be able to browse and invite influencers, or view the sophisticated results suite, but all the other features of the platform will be available to them.
A premium version of the software will remain for agencies and brands with larger budgets, who need to run on tighter schedules with sophisticated metrics and reporting. These users won’t be charged any service fees for payments to influencers.
“We still expect a lot of interest from agencies and larger brands who need more sophisticated tools and the ability to browse and invite influencers on our network. The free model also gives our influencers access to lots of great smaller brands who may have otherwise had to go through the process of running campaigns manually without a platform,” co-founder Nikhil Madhok added.
Hypetap already connects brands such as Nestle, Uber, LG and Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) with invitation only social media influencers, and has completed over 150 campaigns, seeing more than 4,000 collaboration invitations sent out to influencers on the platform to date. Influencers participating in these campaigns reached a total of more than 50 million followers across all their social media accounts for only a fraction of the cost of traditional media channels.
