Julius
A Leading Influencer Marketing Software Solution

As an influencer marketing software with a best-in-class product suite featuring Search, Influencer Relationship Management (IRM), Campaign Management, and Reporting and Analytics, Julius has been adopted by major brands and agencies. Since its inception in 2015, Julius has led the search and discovery market as the only influencer search solution that applies human intelligence to influencer profiles, making for the most robust profiles and search results available. Most recently, Julius acquired another leading influencer marketing software company, HYPR, to further expand its influencer database and apply new features to workflow tools.

The following is a conversation that CIO Applications had with Jared Augustine, the CEO and Co-Founder at Julius, about the company prioritizes brand safety by applying human intelligence to influencer profiles before adding them to the platform.

What are the major challenges that CIOs face in the MarTech Consulting space, and how is Julius effectively addressing these issues?

When it comes to influencer partnerships, the biggest challenge marketers face is finding the right partner who is organically aligned with the brand values, speaks to the brand's target audience, and ultimately will drive impact. On the one hand, it seems that there are too many influencers to choose from, but not enough data to quickly make an educated decision.

On the other hand, for more niche industries or campaign needs, marketers are also challenged to discover them on their own. Julius helps make both tasks much simpler by providing vast audience analytics and social media performance metrics that are filterable to help cut through the clutter. Additionally, Julius prioritizes quality data and brand safety for marketers, which is why we rely on our in-house research team to manually curate and select all of our influencer tags for more meaningful, detailed, and thorough identification. We cater to our customers’ needs—no request is too small—and our expert researchers can hunt down even the most niche influencers on social media.

Please shed light on Julius’ MarTech services based on the methodology, features, and benefits involved?

Julius is platform agnostic—it is our mission to help our customers find the influencers they need, regardless of channel, industry, or follower size. As we continue to release features and evolve our search capabilities, we optimize for all listed channels. Now, we are also proud to include TikTok in our search capabilities. This includes our primary influencer filtering, where you can select the platform(s) you desire and filter against follower count, engagement rate, average engagements, and more to find the influencers you’re looking for.

Additionally, you can search through over 450 million pieces of social media content across all of these platforms to discover the influencers who are talking about important things to your brand. With thousands of influencers who can potentially fit for a branded campaign, it is important to make the filtering capabilities vast, but simple and easy enough to use to help marketers efficiently find partners that meet their criteria.

Please elaborate on a case study where Julius enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes.

The beauty space is one of the most influencer-saturated industries, hands down. Our customer, Biossance, was challenged to not only sift through the endless array of influencers in the space but also to find partners committed to sustainability, which is a pillar of their brand and product. To help launch their presence in the US, Biossance leaned on Julius to discover high-profile YouTube and Instagram beauty influencers who could deliver large impressions with excellent engagement rates, but who were also aligned with their green mission—which can be challenging in the beauty space. However, Biossance persevered and drove 3.5 million impressions and almost 150K engagements at a 4% engagement rate, enabling them to secure a $13 CPM and a CPE of just $0.34.

On the agency side, Praytell was growing its influencer marketing practice and needed a solution to optimize their business. With over 80 percent of their clients working with influencers, it became imperative for their leadership team to find ways to save time internally and position themselves as trusted advisors to their clients. Using Julius' influencer discovery was vital to scaling their growing search demand. By leveraging Julius' Shareable Links (a whitelabeled feature that enables non-Julius users to view Julius data), the agency was able to provide research updates with minimal effort. Whitelabeled assets were key to helping preserve the Praytell brand, so they also leveraged Julius' whitelabeled PDF and PPT.

Campaign Reports to share results with clients without doing the heavy lifting of calculating all of the metrics manually and building stylized decks on their own.

What differentiates Julius from its competitors?

Julius has, and always will be, a people-first company that focuses on relationship building. Yes, this is central to our tech and is how we've built our tagging taxonomy, but this really manifests in our never-ending mission to be customer-centric and treat our subscribers as people, not just 'another logo' on our website. This is how we've been able to secure and maintain relationships with the likes of big brands like Foot Locker, CBS, UNICEF, and agencies like GREY, GS&P, and BBDO. We simply do not hand over the keys and walk away. Our Customer Support and Account Management teams are hands-on, and we strategically deliver services that are one step ahead of their needs whenever possible. Influencer marketing is hard work, and it is our pleasure to support them every step of the way to find success.

What does the future hold for Julius?

The next 18 months for Julius are going to be very exciting. With our acquisition of HYPR, Julius looks forward to letting customers explore many new influencer profiles and data, enabling them to increase their campaign performance and storytelling prowess. From a features perspective, we're gearing up for a workflow tool that will make influencer content collaboration and approval much more streamlined, which our customers have vocalized is one of the most challenging parts of the influencer marketing process. This will eventually tie into CRM-like capabilities for both enterprise and SMB accounts, including a shipping workflow for sampling efforts. As our Campaign Management suite grows, so too will the Reporting and Analytics capabilities, which will enable first-party metrics to help inform and justify influencer spend and propel campaigns in the future.

We believe that the influencer marketing industry can improve and become a beacon of cultural progress that battles racism and inequality. Because of influencer marketing's innate and unique centricity around community, storytelling, and relationship building, there is an opportunity to make a positive change in the world by connecting people through tech and social media.

We are proud to invite marketers to follow and engage with our #InfluencersForInclusion series on our Instagram channel, @Julius_Works, which celebrates and uplifts the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ creator communities. To nominate influencers to be featured in our series, marketers can use the #InfluencersForInclusion hashtag in the comments of an influencer’s post and tag @Julius_Works. Together, as an industry, we must come together to be a shining example of what it means to drive inclusion through community and unwavering support of diverse voices.