Platforms

Emerging Platform Spotlight | Kale

With the prices of influencer marketing and Facebook advertising soaring, brands need a cost-effective alternative to power their business’s marketing engine. Hear from Isha, CEO and co-founder of Kale, on why investing in user-generated content from your customers will drive sales. Previously, the founders of Kale were at LinkedIn, where they built and scaled the video ecosystem to 30M brands.

image representing how Kale works. Text reads - when a Kale creator posts about a brand, their content is 50x more engaging than a traditional influencer's. Our creators share videos about everyday moments that their audience can relate to and trust.

The current state of influencer marketing

Every brand knows that user-generated content is mission-critical for brand awareness. Plus, it’s 1.6x more likely to convert a customer. But, it’s expensive to work with influencers and time-consuming to manage a brand ambassador program. Influencer rates are not only at their peak; consumers are losing trust in influencers because they are fatigued by seeing sponsored post after sponsored post: engagement rates on influencer content is dropping 40% y/y.

So how do brands like Glossier, OLIPOP, and Gymshark cut through the saturated feeds of TikTok and Instagram to acquire new customers? They convert their most loyal customers into their brand’s spokespeople.

Meet your most effective marketing channel yet: Your customers with a social following

  1. Choose small creators over professional creators
  2. Get 50x the engagement when customers share content
  3. Drive sales with UGC ads that have 53% higher CTR and 71% lower CPC

Reward your customers, instead of random influencers

  1. Once you’ve taken your brand 0 to 1, you probably have devoted superfans who love to talk about your products with their friends, neighbors and coworkers. Some of them also happen to have social media accounts. At Kale, we call these individuals your superfan creators. As consumers increasingly evangelize and discover products digitally, these superfan creators become a very valuable word-of-marketing channel for your brand.
  2. Brands successfully do this by focusing on everyday creators (with 5-10K followers) instead of big influencers. These creators are authentic and trustworthy because they aren’t trying to make content for a living. They are passionate about a niche (whether it’s coffee, yoga, or skincare) and create content as a hobby.
  3. So instead of paying a single big creator with one million followers up to thousands of dollars per post, Kale believes in incentivizing your customers (superfans) to share content about products they’ve already purchased.

Build out a content library of authentic, real voices

  1. Historically, it’s really tough to manage a brand ambassador program and track content creation, performance and payment. Plus, to most of your customers, brand ambassador is too heavy a title. It feels like a job to them, and they already have one of those.
  2. We started Kale so brands can recognize and reward your long-tail of enthusiastic customers, in turn increasing loyalty among your most valuable customers. Plus, their engagement rate is 50x that of a traditional influencer.
  3. Superfan creators will talk about your brand in a way that fits their tone and style. They go the distance to come up with creative videos, dances and skits to tell their community about their latest product obsessions. Kale harnesses this creative energy to jumpstart viral trends to support brands’ marketing moments and product launches.

Increase ad performance by 71% when you turn UGC into ad creative

  1. With the iOS14 changes, the cost of Facebook advertising has shot through the roof. Brands, who have traditionally paid to play, are desperate to find an alternative. Kale turns the top-performing videos into ads, which are run through the creator’s handle versus the brand’s handle.
  2. Because it’s a real customer talking about their favorite product in the context of their everyday routine, it’s relatable and trustworthy. We’ve seen ad clickthrough rate (CTRs) increase by 53% and cost per clicks (CPCs) decrease by 71%. Plus, real customer examples are 1.6x more likely to convert a customer.

About Kale

Kale enables brands to recognize and reward their social-savvy creators, at scale. We are flipping traditional influencer marketing on its head by rewarding everyday, trustworthy creators for talking about brands they actually shop at. By tapping into authentic voices, Kale equips brands with a more cost-effective marketing channel than advertising on Instagram and negotiating contracts with big influencers. We’re on a mission to create honest conversations around products on social media. At Kale, we’re obsessed with putting superfans in the driver’s seat to come up with trendy, fun marketing moments that amplify brands’ marketing initiatives.

Isha Patel

Isha is the co-founder and CEO of Kale. Kale enables brands to recognize and reward their superfans creators at scale to increase sales conversion. Isha has spent her career building social media products and creator communities, previously building out the video ecosystem at LinkedIn.

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