13 Mar Ignite Social Media Launches Carusele Influencer Marketing Company
Social Media Industry Leader Launches New Company After Selling $1M of Test Programs
Ignite Social Media®, The Original Social Media Agency®, announced today the launch of the Carusele®, a new standalone influencer marketing company. Through its network of content producers, Carusele creates high-quality, sharable content and then actively manages it through an Organish™ media approach that combines organic and paid syndication and aggregation, resulting in a scaled, targeted audience reach.
This Organish media approach delivers greater reach, engagement and conversion than paid advertising alone. In doing so, this approach also improves online share of voice for brands.
“Carusele creates a simple way for marketers to buy engaging social media content with defined audience reach much like they do with broadcast, print, and digital media,” said Jim Tobin, president of Ignite Social Media and Carusele. “By leveraging our eight years of social media marketing for large brands, we’re now able to create a packaged social media buy that delivers true engagement vs. just pushing messaging at consumers.”
“We’ve found that by having flexibility in the sourcing of content and blending influencer content with premium and branded media, we can create greater audience scale and engagement,” added Christian Sullivan, director of productions & network development for Carusele. “To date, our initial Carusele Network buys have delivered over 500MM branded impressions, high levels of engagement, coupon downloads and in some cases measurable lifts in sales, at a price that is highly competitive to that of other digital media.”
What sets the company apart is the unique positioning of avoiding the traditional “buckets of bloggers” approach, where the end result is mediocre content living on blogs. Carusele’s Organish approach engages a smaller sub-set of premium, hand-selected influencers to produce high-quality, brand infused content and images that resonate with their audiences and drive action. The primary focus then becomes the strategically organized syndication and aggregation of the content via a multi-channel approach resulting in Content Everywhere™, a term coined by Ignite Social Media.
Carusele has been in stealth mode over the past year as it built initial approaches and processes following Lean Startup methodology, focusing efforts on building a minimum viable product to learn how to grow effectively in the social media space.
“Driving real ROI in the content marketing arena has to start from the ground up,” said John Andrews, the founder of Collective Bias who joined Ignite Social Media as CMO last year. “Our processes derived from the idea of implementing test-and-learn scenarios that not only help us learn more efficiently, but intelligently while doing so. We’ve found a mix that benefits the brands and the influencers equally, which makes for a strong value equation.”
The company was created by Ignite Social Media founders Jim Tobin, Marcie Brogan and Deidre Bounds along with Mr. Andrews.
“As more and more brands are leveraging paid social media to reach their audiences, we wanted to develop a product that helped continue to drive organic engagement both on and off brand-owned social media channels,” noted Ms. Bounds. “Carusele delivers organic social media marketing in a packaged form to make it easy for marketers to integrate into their current media mix.”
As social media platforms have evolved, studies have shown a dramatic shift in digital referral sources. Forbes noted that as of December 2014, 31% of all referral traffic is driven from social media. Noting the shift, Carusele has seen success by transforming the traditional media spend and developing highly targeted product placement opportunities at a lower cost.
“We know the model works and can compete for marketing dollars currently being deployed in other media formats based on overall quality and efficiency of spend. We’ve already surpassed over $1MM in revenue from leading brands and retailers before the company has even officially launched” said Mr. Andrews. “This could only have been achieved through the relationships and work we’ve done with well-known brand partners like Evite, influencer network partners like Partybluprints, and local Raleigh, N.C. startups Photofy and Stealz, which do their own work with large brands and retailers. The sheer volume of new adtech entrants into the social media marketing space shows you that no one has this figured out yet, we’re excited about our new model.”
Carusele has nine full-time employees and is based in Cary, N.C. inside Ignite Social Media’s offices, with a satellite office based in Fayetteville, Ark.
For more information please visit Carusele.com.
