Aspire's 2018 Year in Review

2018 was yet another year for the books!

Thanks to our amazing clients, network of influencers and dedicated team, we were able to hit some major milestones this year.

Firstly, we rebranded. In an effort to lead the shift in the industry from traditional influencer marketing to an emphasis on leveraging creative communities for content to be used in all marketing channels, we transitioned from Revfluence to AspireIQ in September of this year. We renamed the company AspireIQ because traditional influencer marketing only scratches the surface of what our platform can do. As marketing becomes more sophisticated and consumers become increasingly blind towards ads, being able to deliver customized, authentic storytelling across every audience segment is a necessity.

Since our rebrand, we have been dedicated to improving our software and showing brands that the true value of influencer marketing value lies not only in the potential for sales and brand awareness but within the content itself. With the help of feedback from our clients and our hardworking team, Aspire was named a Leader among Influencer Marketing Solutions in "The Forrester New Wave™: Influencer Marketing Solutions, Q4 2018." Forrester’s report is validation of our hard work and commitment to building an industry-leading platform.

We were also badged as a Pinterest Marketing Partner under the Content Marketing specialty. The partnership enables brands to discover and connect with influencers to produce branded creative and unlocks the ability to track creative performance on Pinterest – an exclusive feature for Pinterest Marketing Partners.

But our accomplishments as a community don’t stop there.

In 2018, Aspire was used to:

• Generate $15M in content value in comparison to $6.9M in 2017 and $4.8M in 2016
• Generate 59.9K social media posts compared to 24K in 2017
• Equip brands with 56.3K pieces of branded content
• Reach 3.3B Instagram followers and 224M YouTube subscribers
• Pay $6.5M to influencers compared to $3.5M in 2017

Top Features of 2018

This year we added dozens of features to continue helping brands streamline their influencer marketing process and achieve their goals.

Need to improve your speed?

• Mass Terms (beta) - brands can send collaboration terms to many influencers at once, drastically speeding up the collaboration process.

Need to streamline collaboration?

• Mass Content Review (beta) - brands or agencies can share influencer content to get feedback from multiple people.

Need to make better decisions?

• Follower Authenticity Check -see a holistic view of an influencer’s follower quality. The feature provides an influencer’s overall authenticity score and a sliding scale that shows the percentage of fake followers an influencer may have.
• Trends Tracking - brands can see what topics are trending in their industry as well as track the leading hashtags and accounts being mentioned by influencers across Instagram.
• Instagram insights - access to content creators’ official Instagram stats and data, including audience demographics like city, country, age, gender, brand affinity, as well as actual impressions and saves per post.

Need better content?

• Visual terms - Improve communications by providing images in your collaboration terms that provide influencers with clear examples of the content you're looking for.

What to expect in 2019

As we make our way into 2019, we will continue to see a huge surge in consumers’ demand for personalized content and experiences. In order to break through on any digital or social medium today, brands need to reach each consumer with the right piece of content, on the right platform, and at the right time. No one besides influencers has the ability to create the volume and diversity of creative assets needed to deliver custom content to power every marketing channel on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

That is why we promise to equip brands with the tools they need to source and manage large creative communities as well as manage and analyze all of the content they create. We are so excited for next year, and we cannot wait to continue to grow together!