Budget Influencer Campaigns

First, a bit of background...

Back in January of this year (2021) we experimented with a "budget" approach to influencer submissions where users could simply set a budget, tick off a few filters, and send their song off for influencers to share.

It flopped, for one major reason: it was first come, first serve.

This meant influencers were fighting over the same songs, which would disappear in front of their eyes when another influencer "claimed" it before them. Naturally this led to a lot of complaining, and we reverted the feature within a couple days.

Today, we're bringing it all back, but without the first come, first serve part.

How Budget submissions work

From a user perspective it's pretty darn simple. All you really have to do is move a slider to set your budget.

The filtering works pretty much the same way as most other submissions, though we've simplified the genre selection process by allowing users to select "parent" genres (which include a number of sub-genres), rather than getting very specific. We find this works well with influencers who aren't as pedantic about siloing every song into the perfect genre (unlike many of our curators!).

Why it's better

We've been working closely with publicists to walk them through influencer campaigns over the last few months and have encountered a few problems:

• Problem: Scrolling through an endless list of influencers you don't recognize to decide who to send to takes a lot of work
• Solution: We automatically select influencers based on a number of back-end statistics
• Problem: Waiting 48 hours for someone to *not* respond is annoying, and having to re-do the submission process every time credits free up is annoying
• Solution: The second an influencer declines a song, we send it to someone else with a similar profile
• Problem: A lot of influencers either weren't responding, or weren't sharing within the 7-day window
• Solution: When doing our automatic selection of influencers to send your song to, we make sure to avoid these folks

Changes that influencers might notice

The only noticeable change for influencers is that this new format of submission has a 24-hour response time instead of the typical 48 hours. The thinking here is that we want these budget campaigns to "fill" as fast as possible. If you put 1,000 credits in, getting 100 shares within a day or two is the hoped-for outcome. By shortening the response-time to 24 hours, we're able to quickly "replace" the non-responsive submissions and send them to others who might be available to respond.

Still to come

In classic "launch and iterate" fashion, there are a few loose ends to tie up:

• Allowing people to make "special requests" for influencers to execute
• Managing songs that don't get properly shared
• Handling cases where someone over-budgets vs. the number of influencers available w/ their filters
• Improving the "geographic" filtering
• eg, the whole "English speaking" country categorization doesn't work because 10% of our USA-based influencers speak Spanish
• eg, a lot of "meme" accounts have worldwide audiences, whereas individual creator accounts tend to be more geographic

I'm sure there's a lot more room for improvement - we'll be working on it.

Feel free to let us know if you've got any requests or feedback!