Influencer marketing management company Grin Technologies Inc. has released a creator discovery platform to help consumer-brand companies to find and recruit social media content creators to work with.
Sacramento-based Grin develops software that allows direct-to-consumer brands to manage and track social influencer marketing and creator marketing.
"There’s no universal approach or simple solution that guarantees results. To succeed, it is imperative that brands implement a multichannel recruitment strategy that taps into diverse creator groups," said Grin CEO Brandon Brown, in a news release. "Our creator discovery suite and the range it offers brands is the secret to going viral on social media in 2023."
In March, Grin launched curated lists, a platform that allows brands to find social influencers to meet their needs.
The new platform adds to that and helps brands reach and recruit content creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
Grin says about half of brands say their biggest challenge with influencer marketing is finding and connecting with creators.
Creators tend to create content to share online while influencers do the same thing, but they are also promoting their own brand.
Grin built a platform that manages the logistics, record keeping, analytics and payment for influencer marketing, which is online social media marketing and endorsements on multiple social media platforms and sites. It tends to work through e-commerce platforms like Shopify Inc. (NYSE: SHOP), Salesforce Inc.'s (Nasdaq: CRM) Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Inc.'s (Nasdaq: ADBE) Magento and BigCommerce Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: BIGC).
Brown and co-founder Brian Mechem started the company in 2014 to market social media influencer advertising, but they pivoted the company in 2017 to provide systems to manage that kind of advertising for their direct-to-consumer clients.
In October 2021, Grin raised about $113 million in a venture capital round. Grin has raised a total of $145 million, according to tracking site Crunchbase.
Grin was part of the ninth cohort of the Launch Accelerator in 2019.
Grin earlier this year and at the end of last year had rounds of layoffs. The company said its customers were dealing with inventory challenges, difficulty finding financing, increasing costs and inflation, and so they were cutting back on expenses. That prompted Grin to cut its expenses as well.
Before the economy slowed, the company's revenue had doubled in 2020 and tripled in 2021.
