Julius
Combining Social Media and Human Intelligence

The biggest challenge for influencer marketers in 2021 still revolves around discovering the perfect influencer. With a growing pool of talent, emerging and evolving social media platforms, and a constant need for creative innovation, marketers find themselves overloaded with options and underwhelmed by a lack of data. As a result, they face obstacles with vetting influencers beyond vanity metrics and qualifying them with a full picture of what their audience looks like. At first glance, a marketer can make a snap judgment on who they are and the stories they tell, but ultimately will have to make many assumptions about their followers in terms of their psychographics, demographics—and in some cases, their legitimacy. That’s where Julius can help.

Julius is an easy-to-use software solution that combines social media data with human intelligence to facilitate and elevate the influencer discovery process. “We focus on providing our customers with vast audience datasets that make it crystal clear if the influencer audience indexes are favorable across key touchpoints. This is the only way to make sure you’re working with the best influencer partners,” says Jared Augustine, CEO and co-founder of Julius.

Julius’ influencer discovery toolset is—and always will be—platform, vertical, and talent agnostic. The company understands that the influencer landscape is evolving, and that community leaders come from all walks of life. Thus, Julius’ goal is to surface influencers who have stories to tell, so customers can discover them and potentially partner with them. “Strategic advertising is built upon a solid story, and having the perfect influencer in the mix is the best way to strengthen the brand and return on advertising spends. This is a big part of why we acquired HYPR—to fuel customer success by combining our strengths and like-minded approaches to discovery,” states Augustine.

“HYPR’s strength has historically been volume to scale discovery, while Julius applies human intelligence to build depth and find the perfect partners. We can now comfortably say that the industry has never seen a database of influencers with such breadth and depth as ours.”

Gathering vast amounts of data from social media platforms—including TikTok—Julius is able to present complex data in ways that produce actionable insights for marketers across industries. Forging this with an in-house research team, Julius provides ample cultural context and personal details (like ailments, causes, interests, and ethnicity) that fuel influencer discovery. “Our customers can distill actionable consumer insights to inform their content strategy. And while we pride ourselves on this, our Campaign Management and Reporting Suite serves as a one-stop-shop for marketers throughout the entirety of their campaign,” adds Augustine.

Recently, in the wake of bot activity on social media, Julius took its audience analytics a step further with a new feature called Audience Health, which assesses influencers’ followership in terms of engagement, social media presence, and other metrics. Marketers can now ensure that they are spending money to reach an audience that not only aligns with their messaging but actually reaches a real consumer.

What differentiates Julius from other players in the market is the spirit of innovation and the urge to evolve with the ever-changing market for bringing solutions that help customers in their day-to-day efforts. The company is doubling efforts to add more TikTok influencers—arguably the most in-demand community. Going forward, Julius is excited about its upcoming Shopify and Bitly integrations as well as the release of its revamped Reporting Suite, providing new dashboards, workflows, and automation, for customers to tell stories and produce consumer insights that propel their marketing strategies to new heights.

Additionally, from an industry perspective, Julius hopes to progress the influencer partnership landscape in the right direction. “We are proud to highlight underrepresented creator communities through our #InfluencersForInclusion series on Instagram (@Julius_Works), and encourage marketers to subscribe to our newsletter where we spotlight BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ influencers as potential brand partners. If any brand or agency would like to collaborate and find ways to further expand this important conversation, please get in touch,” concludes Augustine.