Agnes Kozera, co-founder of FameBit, got the idea for her current startup from a marketing technique she was using for her previous startup. As founder of SeasonsBox, a subscription-based service that sends members eco-friendly products each month, Kozera found Youtube was a great way to attract new subscribers.
“It’s very engaging,” she says. “The production quality is really high on Youtube and the influencers have a really big subscription base. It reaches a lot of people in a very engaging way.”
But the process to market on the medium was a manual and time consuming one. So Kozera decided her next project, FameBit, would connect businesses with Youtube content creators as a killer method to do influencer marketing. The web-based software showcased on Wednesday night at Extreme Startups fourth cohort grad event recruits Youtube influencers and gives businesses self-serve tools to find, manage, fund, and track Youtube campaigns using those influencers. The whole process, from connection to campaign goal delivery, can be accomplished in a web browser.
FameBit ensures marketing is done in a transparent fashion, Kozera says. “Our influencers always announce that the video is sponsored by a brand. We match influencers not only by the vertical of the brand, but for their passion and desire to do a video on that brand.”
Kozera recruited David Kierzkowski as CEO of FameBit, Kierzkowski was previously the co-founder and head of product development at TapClicks, another web-based software platform that delivered an analytics dashboard to enterprise customers. He says Famebit allows business users to hire Youtube influencers directly based on recommendations generated by the software, or create a campaign that Youtube influencers can bid on to complete. Businesses can approve a video for publishing or request changes be made. It beats the current approach of recruiting influencers through e-mail exchanges or going through an agency.
“We’re allowing businesses to deploy those campaigns by streamlining the whole process between the influencers and the users,” he says.
FameBit offers several campaign templates to businesses looking to get started with Youtube marketing. A business might want to try a “mention” campaign in which the video creator plugs a product or service at the beginning, middle, or end of a video. The “review” video tasks an influencer with completing a video dedicated to reviewing a product or service. Or a “giveaway” video has an influencer host a contest for viewers featuring your product or service.
After three months of running its service, FameBit has 400 YouTube campaigns completed with a total of 1.5 million minutes watched, Kozera says. The marketing opportunity at stake is worth $5.7 billion for the U.S. alone and growing.
Here’s an example of a Youtube influencer video made for SeasonsBox:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03V-uEFy_Jc