PitchBoard

Saleem Yaqub, the founder, and CEO of PitchBoard, has long lived at the intersection of marketing and technology. From his initial jobs in the mid-00’s as a Search and Social Media Optimiser to his time at other marketing agencies before starting his own, Yaqub’s career seems to travel a very defined path, following a general onward and upward trajectory the whole time. There’s one slight detour, though, one little diversion that was more tech than marketing and seems like an outlier when compared with his agency background. Covering a year’s time between 2016 and 2017, Yaqub consulted for NeoReach and led the effort to completely redesign the platform. This obviously got his mind working on the possibilities for his own agency—just about a year after completing his work with NeoReach, Pitchboard launched.

Pitchboard doesn’t compete with NeoReach. As a marketplace, its focus is executing campaigns quickly and at scale. There’s no influencer discovery feature and no relationship management, functions that many competitors include, and which Pitchboard shows to be unnecessary bloat for a marketplace. A marketplace’s value is the way it enables marketers to reach new audiences on a large scale. You can use a platform like NeoReach to find great influencers and data insights and to nurture a long-term partnership with them. But their audiences aren’t theonlyaudiences, and a good marketplace is effective at helping you reach new and different ones. If this weren’t the thinking behind the creation of Picthboard, then it’s definitely the lesson learned.

市场花费大量精力，试图让创作者加入并填充其数据库。自愿选择是他们导入数据的唯一途径，但这意味着一个相对较小的人才库可供选择。有些会构建算法以刮擦可能的影响者，但这仅意味着数百万个数据具有非常有限的数据。如果市场的重点是有效的外展活动（以快速而简化的方式找到新的受众，那么有影响力的人发现是一个多余的一步。您真的只需要找到这些受众即可。

这正是PitchBoard确实does well. Yaqub saw that other companies had already amassed all the data needed to accomplish this task. Pitchboard uses its own machine learning algorithm to parse through influencer data from several sources—NeoReach included—and identify those whose audiences for campaigns. This happens without customers ever having to scroll through lists of influencers then having to deliberate on each one. To be fair, other marketplace platforms do it this way, but they run into the limitations I mentioned in the previous paragraph: they either have good data on a small number of influencers, or they have very little data on an impossibly large number of them. Pitchboard’s approach cleverly avoids these pitfalls and has already attracted customers like Tik Tok, Blue Apron, and FanDuel.

---

概括：

---

Pricing

Pitchboard earns its revenue in three different ways: monthly subscription fees; fees charged to brands when they pay influencers; and fees charged to influencers for receiving those same payments. The payment costs are, to be frank, highly problematic, which we’ll get to shortly. The monthly subscriptions are already pretty costly for a marketplace, but the platform proves its worth in how well it works. There are three levels of access:

• 独奏，$ 499/mo- 您可以举办1个活动活动，每月最多获得25个音调，并每笔交易支付20％的现金或产品付款。您还可以获取受众见解，协作工具和实时广告系列报告。
• 标准，$ 999/mo— 3 active campaigns, up to 50 pitches per month, 15% transaction fees, and everything that comes with Solo plus multiple users and roles.
• 无限，1999美元/月— Unlimited campaigns, unlimited pitches, 10% transaction fee, and everything else.

这些不是我们看到的每月费用最高的费用，但也不是最低的。尽管如此，当您将相关影响者和轻松管理广告系列的竞争者比较到这里的竞争对手时，它们都是公平的价格。这些交易费用也不能这样说，因为我们都知道在互联网上赚钱的成本是多少。当然，这不是5％的影响者被收取的费用（要对10％-20％的品牌收​​费都没有收费）。

对于市场，从影响者的口袋里赚钱是一个不寻常的一步，尤其是当该平台第二次获得交易时。品牌费用甚至适用于给有影响力者作为付款的产品的零售价值。因此，如果您将$ 500的产品装箱并运送到有影响力的人身上，那么参数板从品牌中获得50-100美元，有影响力的25美元，即使它与促进这笔付款无关（而且它不花任何花费的钱，而且它花费了任何费用。发生了）。

---

细节

Because Pitchboard does away with influencer discovery and management, the user interface is clean and easily navigated. You log in and see a dashboard giving you quick access to all your campaigns—live ones, past ones, and drafts not yet published for pitches. If you had some campaigns going, you’d see a high-level view of each one on your dashboard—with quick stats telling you how many pitches you got, whether there are drafts to review, etc. Your first time logging in will be an especially minimal affair—just a simple white screen where your campaigns will go—but that just means you’ll easily find the “Start New Campaign” button. And from there it’s practically foolproof.

参与板做得很好的一件事是它处理对影响者的补偿方式（尽管处理费用）。品牌可以提出多个内容和完全充实的补偿包的详细请求，而不是将每张帖子定价或将薪酬限制在一个或另一个现金或免费物品的狭窄方法中。例如，一个品牌可以提供$ 500现金，再加上产品（或在酒店里吃饭或晚上的体验），并且需要回报，例如3个Instagram帖子，1个故事和1个YouTube视频。由于这些软件包是在参数板中定义的，因此它为您提供了实时信息，估计显示预计参与度和每次参与成本。

Once you’ve got everything in order, you can submit the campaign for review, at which point someone on the Pitchboard team will have a look and make sure everything looks good. These manual reviews are there to ensure that influencers are getting invited to something legitimate—that the brands are reputable and offering decent compensation. They also do a quality check on the brief itself: if it looks unprofessional or is poorly written then nobody looks good in publishing it. There are also some restrictions on the types of businesses that can advertise. If you’re a cannabis slinging pornographer with a new gambling app, you won’t find a home in the Pitchboard marketplace.

When your campaign is approved, then the whole thing goes live as relevant influencers are invited to pitch your brand. This aspect of Pitchboard is another where the platform excels. On the strength of an incredibly well-designed interface, managing campaigns is a downright pleasant experience. There are a lot of tasks involved—vetting the influencers and their pitches, negotiations, reviewing content submissions, and authorising payments to name a few—but everything is so well organised and easy to accomplish that it doesn’t feel like a chore.

挖掘提交音调的每个影响者，使您达到一定程度的数据andanalytics you just won’t find on competing marketplace platforms. You’ll get an estimated engagement projection for each influencer, as well as a breakdown of the cost of those engagements. You’ll get to know their audience—their likes and dislikes, their brand affinities, their locations, ages, and genders. This is accompanied by an audience credibility score, a result of the algorithm identifying any suspicious patterns in followers (or suspicious followers themselves). There’s also some brand safety insights: sentiment analysis of the influencer’s content to determine the overall tone (positive or negative), as well as the general emotional state of the influencer based on their social posts.

所有这些都在能够就每个影响者的相对价值做出明智的决定方面发挥作用。如果有人要比其他影响者要求钱，那么很容易评估他们是否值得。如果您接受他们的要约，则立即支付金钱和交易费用，他们的赔偿额置于托管中，直到他们结束。从那里开始，这是一个沟通和协调内容的问题，这在分门板上也可以干净有效地处理。

While your campaigns are live, you’ll be able to see which ones need attention from your dashboard—there are alerts telling you whether there’s content to approve or messages that need responding—and as the content is published you’ll see real-time reporting for at both the campaign and influencer level.

---

Conclusion

Pitchboard has elevated the idea of a marketplace by placing a bigger emphasis on data and analytics than most of its competitors do. They’ve done away with superfluous features that were until now standard, and focused on enhancing the strengths of influencer marketplaces. The result is a platform that can do a lot for its customers—and it looks great doing it.

这是将大量数据提升到外部资源外包的第一个平台。这一举动使他们释放了它们，以使用机器学习，可以研究大量数据并使其对所有内容的算法开发出杰出的算法。他们可能会从潜在客户和有影响力的人那里找到一些他们在处理付款时征收的高价费用的推动力，或者平台可能对双方都非常有效，他们乐于支付这些费用。绝对值得尝试并自己找出答案。