Scaling for growth
Humanz can quickly scale up its influencer profiles database as business grows by easily increasing storage capacity with Elastic Cloud.
Real-time reporting for better client service
Using Elastic Enterprise Search, Humanz generates real-time data results to match influencer content and demographics with brands and help increase the efficiency of social media marketing campaigns by 70% .
Enabling influencers to increase sales
Proprietary Humanz technology supported by Elastic Enterprise Search helps enable influencers to achieve sales conversion rates of 8.6%, well above the industry average of 1-3%.
The rise of social media influencers has transformed the way that brands engage directly with their customers. Most research puts the number of influencers in the tens of millions, and the influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth $16 billion in 2022, according to a report from Influencer Marketing Hub.
With so many influencer profiles in play, companies face a significant challenge when trying to identify the right personalities for their brands. Many are turning to Humanz to bring brands and influencers together on a platform where they can connect and collaborate on paid marketing campaigns. Humanz also enables brands to measure return on campaign investments with precise accuracy. In its first five years Humanz has acquired over 350 customers globally, including Disney, Google, and PepsiCo.
Data speed, scale, and relevance with Elastic
Humanz uses proprietary AI technology to analyze influencer profiles in depth including their bios, visual content, and captions. In addition, the technology looks closely at the behavior of the influencer’s followers to get a complete picture of their account.
To deliver this advanced analysis, Humanz gathers and stores massive volumes of data. As the organization grew, its original solution couldn’t scale to handle the millions of social media profiles being added. “We’ve tripled our revenue every year for the last three years due in part to the volume of influencer data we can process,” says Eliran Moyal, Co-Founder and CTO at Humanz. “Our technology must be fast, flexible, and scalable enough to support our continued growth.”
As he considered options to replace their original solution, Moyal recalled using Elastic in a previous role and recognized its potential to support Humanz’s cloud-first strategy with the data speed, scale, and relevance that Elastic and the cloud provide.
We chose Elastic Enterprise Search running on Elastic Cloud because it is so easy to scale and add nodes when needed. Now, rather than spending time on day-to-day infrastructure management, our technical team can focus on pushing the boundaries of our AI technology and other proprietary services.
Humanz now processes around 3 million influencer profiles a day and those that meet the right criteria are saved to the Elastic database, hosted on Elastic Cloud which runs on the AWS cloud platform. Elastic Enterprise Search currently stores aggregated data based on 10 million Humanz influencer profiles, totaling 10TB of data – the equivalent of around 7 million images on Instagram.
For the promise of influencer marketing to succeed, it is crucial that campaigns are backed by trustworthy data. Elastic Enterprise Search gives us the speed and scale to provide highly accurate ROI metrics in real time to our clients and registered influencers.
Real-time reporting that adds value to campaigns
With Elastic, they can now provide reports to their clients in real time, giving them a live view of their campaigns and return on investment. “We can show our brand and agency clients their marketing campaign results in the blink of an eye,” says Moyal. “Compared to our previous setup, it adds enormous value to our relationships with both clients and influencers. Elastic plays a central role in this process and is vital in enabling us to deliver these capabilities.”
Elastic dashboards provide the Humanz marketing team with real-time data on its main KPIs: sales funnel leads, app registrations, and active app users, allowing the company to report internally or to investors as needed.
Says Humanz Chief Brand Officer, Brett Solomon, “As an example, we have a custom Elastic dashboard that displays Instagram influencer accounts with between 10,000 and 50,000 followers who have registered with us in the previous 24 hours. This enables our marketing team to send a personalized message to these influencers and make sure they are active and engaged from day one.”
The ability to organize and analyze volumes of data quickly in such detail gives Humanz a competitive edge in matching brands with social media accounts that best apply to a campaign by demographic, region, or even the tone of their posts.
Elastic gives us the power to analyze social media accounts in enormous detail. If we are looking for a fitness influencer who meets certain criteria to align with a brand campaign, we can find accounts that post images from the gym, determine their age and expertise, and examine their posting captions including the use of emojis.
A brand can add influencers they already work with to their Humanz account or create a campaign within the Humanz Marketplace and invite bids from a pool of hundreds of thousands of content creators. Brands can also use Humanz data, gathered and orchestrated via Elastic, to quickly vet influencer content and audiences, saving up to 70% of the time typically required to bring a campaign to market.
The results for Humanz’s clients have proved to be highly impactful. One consumer goods brand saw a 400% increase on their campaign ROI using Humanz to identify influencers with the right audience and content for their brand. A global fashion business built a team of over 550 content creators to promote the launch of its online store in South Africa. It became the first branding campaign from Africa to trend number one on Twitter worldwide.
The data also benefits influencers. The Humanz Marketplace does the work of profiling influencer content and audiences, saving them time in partnering with retailers, leading to higher conversions. For example, influencers registered with the platform have sold over 400,000 products and generated $50 million+ in sales, representing an 8.6% conversion rate, significantly higher than the 1-3% industry average, according to Humanz.
“Elastic gives us the insights and confidence to develop proprietary technology that helps us stand out from the competition. This includes our Sales Pixel that tracks sales generated by SKU, line item, product size, or cart size in real time. It means that we can pay influencers faster because we always have an up-to-date picture of their performance,” says Solomon.
Live data from Elastic allows creators to not only fine tune their content strategies but also inspires them to produce more content and be compensated accordingly for sales generated from those posts.
In addition to the fast, relevant data Elastic delivers, the Humanz team is impressed by its scalability for ensuring reliable database availability whatever the demand.
Using Elastic Enterprise Search on Elastic Cloud can feel like magic. It’s amazing how quickly a complex query returns highly relevant results in a matter of seconds based on millions of documents. And with Elastic we no longer worry about scaling our service. Instead we can focus on growing the business and adding more sophisticated features for customers.
