Influencer Marketing is a type of marketing where an artiste or vendor pays an influencer – usually an individual with over 10k followers/audience in Nigeria – to create and post content(s) about the artiste’s music or the vendors’ products and services. This mode of marketing is usually immeasurable as the influence gets paid regardless of the post(s) performance.
In layman language, the result of using this strategy is a coin toss; your marketing goals might not be achieved.
What is Preffy?
Preffy is an app that allows the user to pay influencers based on their post’s performance or their creativity. This automatically eliminates the advance payment phase of traditional influencer marketing.
To start an influencing marketing campaign, users will host a competition with a cash price reward. The system then pays out participating creators based on the number of likes their posts gather.
The company is only focused on platforms with a lot of influencers; TikTok, public Instagram videos, and Instagram Reels.
Preffy founder, Charlie Davis, explains: “What Preffy is trying to do from an artist perspective is getting thousands of micro-influencers to post for the price of one macro influencer.”
It’s a very timely understanding of the way music spreads on short-form video platforms like TikTok – where a wide variety of content created by many creators is often more successful in encouraging user-generated content than a prescribed creative idea posted by one big influencer.
Everyone Uses It.
The company was started earlier this year, when Davis, a former employee of Laylo (Spotify for Artists and fan engagement platform), pitched the idea to Songfluencer as an innovative complement of their existing services.
Davis joined Songfluencer after the acquisition of Preffy and taking charge of including these new features in existing Songfluencer tech.
Johnny Cloherty, Co-Founder and CEO of Songfluencer, is bullish: “Preffy is going to 100% change the game. I’d bet my career on it. That’s why I needed to own it! Essentially, it’s a nano + micro-influencer contesting platform. Every major label is using it now.”
Get Noticed Through Competing Micro-influencers
Preffy works in a simple way: artists launch a competition around a song they want the influencers to use and set a “prize money” amount. Creators then compete for the prize by using the mentioned song in a TikTok or Instagram Reel, submit a link to the post back to the platform, which then tracks the post’s performance. ( An example of a current James Arthur competition.)
Posts are manually reviewed by the Preffy team, confirming if the right song was used and if it is loud enough in the video. The meticulous review then takes place before the prize money is awarded. Other safeguards include; account verification for first-time users to avoid post submission from a third party TikTok or Instagram account. This prevents people from submitting other accounts’ contents as their own. Davis says this trust is important: “We want this to be a fun and fair environment.”
Preffy sends newsletters to its influencers updating them of new competitions and also encourages the creators to frequent its website for new competition opportunities. The platform also comes with a referral system that rewards influencers points when their post links, alongside normal signup referral points.
Content Monetisation and Budget
Preffy charges a third of the competition price money for their services, and the minimum spend per competition is $1,000. The platform tries to distribute the money to as many creators as possible, and through data analysis have discovered that competitions with a higher number of winners are great incentives for more creators to participate in.
Davis says there’s a significant waitlist, a sign of the platform carefully managing the number of active creators in their network. This is to prevent the success of competition from being diluted, and how many competitions they’re able to run at the same time. At the moment, the platform tries to keep this at around 10 active competitions per 14-day period.
Preffy has a network of about 5,000 micro and nano influencers globally – and is actively onboarding as many new influencers as possible. The team is actively migrating Songfluencer influencers to Preffy to increase the network capacity – and therefore their output capabilities. However, Davis also notes that Preffy has its very own set of influencers: micro-influencers of between 50-100k followers.
Preffy competitions are often their first step into content monetisation. Songfluencer on the other hand mainly works with macro-influencers who already have a considerable following. It is this mix though, that is the appeal of the platform – and could make Preffy a very appealing platform for music marketing campaigns.
Creating an Authentic Feel of Organic Growth
An advantage of using this tool is the authenticity it creates around the song being promoted; as the artist does not need to announce the Preffy competition anywhere, making all the contents created from the competition seem completely organic.
A much-needed tool in the short-form video world (TikTok and Instagram Reels), where music promotion has become beneficial. A win-win situation for creators, as the song is also important to the post’s reach, while each content increases the reach of the song used.
Unlike tools like Creed Media, Fanbytes, or Songfluencer, which run specialised influencer marketing on their platforms, tools like Preffy or Zebr make these campaigns more affordable and reduce the investment risk in terms of getting your monies worth per campaign.
Preffy’s goals are to move their creator acquisition process into “hyper speed”, and they will attempt to get up to 100,000 – 500,000 influencers involved. “Then,” says Davis, “we’re going to be able to open the floodgates to any artist, in any genre, with any budget”.
