Winkl, India’s first platform helping brands and firms launch, manage and track influencer marketing campaigns, has launched ‘Winkl search’ today – A search engine to discover influencers within seconds. This service is available to everyone for free and does not require any subscription. Winkl is bullish about this being a disruptor in the market. They say, it will be the next-generation platform and will change the way brands engage with the influencers. By rolling out Winkl search, the company is expecting to acquire at least 300-500 new brands that are expected to run close to 2000-3000 campaigns on Winkl in the next 12 months.
Winkl understands what brands look for when they shortlist influencers for their campaigns. To make it easier for the campaign managers in working with the right influencers, Winkl search offers real-time influencer metrics such as follower count, engagement rate. Winkl search has been in closed beta (limited to Winkl customers) for the last 6 months and has catered to more than 100,000 searches, from 1000+ brands/agency executives from top e-commerce websites, D2C brands, FMCG firms and has allowed the discovery of 5 million creators/influencers. They claim to have saved more than 35,000 hours in the last 6 months alone for the users of this search engine.
Rahul Singh, CEO, and Co-founder says, “While working with numerous brands & agencies and executing hundreds of influencer campaigns for them, we realized that the industry is quite opaque when it comes to influencer access and pricing. We saw brands struggle with all major steps of influencer onboarding – finding relevant influencers with regards to their reach, engagement, and target niche, fishing for contact details to reach out to the right ones, negotiating the right commercials for the required deliverables, and so on.
Most agencies working in the influencer space are extremely secretive about their influencer list and commercials. Brands are often left in dark and often offered limited options when it comes to choosing which influencers to work with.
We realized that in order for the influencer marketing industry to grow and become the next big thing, we need to make influencers to become more accessible to brands or anyone willing to put money into the industry. The market had to be more transparent!
With the vision of bringing about a larger change in the overall industry in India and beyond, we are releasing Winkl search for free for anyone out there, who needs an influencer list. It could be a brand, a consultancy firm, or a freelancer and they do not need to be a Winkl customer. In fact, we do not have any paywalls on this tool and it is completely free to use.”
The platform is equipped with super cool tools and lets a marketer search for and filter relevant creators by category, reach, engagement, niche, and even keywords etc. For example, typing in the keyword ‘yoga’ will give you results for all content creators who create content around yoga and fitness. You can also filter by metrics such as the authenticity of an influencer’s followers, the city they are based in etc. Winkl search also offers a snapshot of some of the most recent content pieces of each influencer to help the brand make its shortlisting decision.
Nikhil Kumar, Fouder and CTO at Winkl said, “Since the influencer marketing industry has not been standardized yet, we see a lot of marketers struggle with figuring out how much to pay influencers. Working on hundreds of campaigns over the last few years and the AI algorithm that continuously improves with every campaign has enabled us to set a market price for each influencer on ‘Winkl Search’. This will greatly help brand marketers to set the right budgets for their marketing campaigns and avoid overpaying.”