When Dealspotr first launched in 2015, we had a pretty simple goal of making working coupon codes easier to find. The online coupon market featured outdated sites which were all too often full of expired deals and codes that didn’t work. But coupons are awesome, everyone needs them, and we thought there must be a better way.
The rise of influencer marketing
As we built Dealspotr, we spoke with lots of smaller, up-and-coming brands who were promoting deals on our platform, as well as influencers and bloggers with whom we partnered to grow our platform.
In our conversations, we heard over and over again that brands and influencers wanted to collaborate with each other in promotional campaigns, but found the overall process of finding, contacting, negotiating, and managing logistics for these campaigns to be too time-consuming and difficult. Further, many brands saw poor results with influencer promotion campaigns, with high costs and results that were hard to measure.
As product designers, we couldn't help but start thinking about how we could solve this problem. Given that we already had thousands of brands and influencers coming to Dealspotr each day, we were in a great place to create a better platform for them to collaborate with each another.
Introducing the Dealspotr Marketplace
Hundreds of interviews, surveys, usability tests, whiteboard brainstorms, and late-night coding sessions later, in late 2017 we proudly rolled out the Dealspotr Marketplace, which we think is the industry's leading influencer marketing platform in terms of ease of use, low cost, and feature set geared towards helping brands reach positive ROI when working with micro-influencers.
The influencer marketing industry is exploding with tons of startups offering a range of tools to help brands find and work with influencers. Many of these are quite expensive, with high upfront costs or monthly subscription fees. Smaller brands often can't afford to use these tools, which often operate as full-fledged influencer agencies behind a software tool (meaning you may end up paying agency-type fees).
Dealspotr is different. It's a purely self-serve platform, sort of like Facebook Ads or Google Adwords. You create your campaign, track your analytics, and manage communications and logistics on your dashboard. Dealspotr's Marketplace handles notifications, reminders, and payments for you.
And Dealspotr also a social network, sort of like LinkedIn. Importantly, it's free to use. For example, people use LinkedIn mostly for free as a social tool to connect with other people about jobs and work opportunities. You may pay for enhanced features or to list a job, but LinkedIn is first and foremost a social network that's open and free to use. Dealspotr is just like this. We're an open social network for shopping, where brands, influencers, and shoppers can all connect together to share and discover today's best deals.
As a brand on Dealspotr, you can claim your page, login, and start browsing and connecting with the influencers on our platform for free. You can post deals which shoppers will see on their feeds, post discussions, even share your own links and content. Shoppers can follow you, message you, and you can even see your daily social statistics to see what's resonating with your followers.
Running influencer marketing campaigns on Dealspotr
What brands to pay for on Dealspotr is each influencer's fee when they promote your brand. Here's how it works. You create your campaign on Dealspotr, outlining who you want to work with and how you want them to promote you. You fund your campaign with as much or as little as you'd like to get started with. $100 is a good place to start if you'd like to experiment with smaller or mid-size influencers, $500 to $1,000 if you'd like to work with larger influencers.
Publish your campaign, and influencers will begin applying. You can also proactively browse and invite particular influencers you're interested in working with. You'll see each influencer's profile, social links and stats, and fee (which we calculate for you, more on this in a sec).
Once you decide to work with an influencer, Dealspotr will kick off the campaign process which includes mailing and receipt of product samples, reviewing content, and handling revisions. Once you're happy with a given influencer's content promoting your brand, you can approve their campaign and their fee is debited from your account and credited to theirs. Dealspotr takes a 20% cut of this fee, so there's no fee you pay beyond each influencer's posted rate.
Once an influencer's content has been posted for you, we'll report for you in real-time on your dashboard the clicks and sales originating from this content. If you're happy with the results, you can add more funds to your campaign and keep working with more influencers, managing all the logistics and tracking clicks and sales all on your Dealspotr dashboard.
That's how influencer campaigns on Dealspotr works in a nutshell.
Exclusive discount codes
On Dealspotr, we require that brands share an exclusive discount code on Dealspotr and then build their influencer campaigns around that code. Why? Three reasons.
First, we'll take your code and customize it for each influencer in your campaign. Influencers love having something special to share with their fans, and they like feeling like an official ambassador of your brand with their own unique code to share.
Second, in our view, influencer campaigns that include a compelling discount code perform better in terms of conversions and sales. If sales is your goal, in most cases, a compelling discount code is key.
Third, we want to make Dealspotr the internet's best source of deals, so part of our motivation in creating such an awesome marketplace is to encourage you to share your best deals with our community. We actually operate the Marketplace at close to zero profit. Our goal is not to charge you an arm and a leg to run influencer campaigns. To us, influencer marketing is a feature we provide to you at low cost in order to motivate you to share your best deals with our community.
Our mission is to be the web's best deal site, and the Dealspotr Marketplace is one important ingredient to help us achieve this.
What is Influence Score?
One of the biggest challenges brands face when doing influencer marketing is knowing how much to pay influencers, and discerning which influencers will be effective brand advocates. This is understandable, since stats like numbers of followers can be misleading (fake followers is an industry-wide problem), it takes time and expertise to analyze influencers to know how much value they can bring.
What if there was a simple score that you could rely on to indicate an influencer's true reach and promotional power? Well, you're in luck, since we've created this for you. It's called Influence Score, and it's the most accurate measure of an influencer's true promotional power. You can find it for every influencer on Dealspotr.
When an influencer joins Dealspotr, they connect their social accounts and their website to our APIs. Our scoring system analyzes their historical engagement stats, prioritizing activity levels and social interactions, and produces their Influence Score which represents a high-level estimate of their promotional reach.
Importantly, the fee an influencer will earn for promoting your brand is determined by their Influence Score. We don't allow influencers to post their own rates, nor do we allow negotiations for each campaign. In micro-influencer marketing, streamlining the process is key to efficiency, and negotiation is often the most time-consuming (and stressful) part.
Also, in our view, monetary compensation should be just one of many motivating factors behind an influencer collaboration. Just as important is whether the influencer truly likes and appreciates your product or service, as is the fact that they can get a free product sample as well as an exclusive personalized discount code to offer their readers (unique content is king). We've designed the Marketplace around these principles.
For brands: A free shopping social network offering low-cost influencer marketing, with high ROI
For brands, this is what Dealspotr is. We're a free platform on which you can engage with over 1 million monthly shoppers by sharing deals and updates. You can claim and curate your page so that shoppers and searchers are finding your best deals easily, all in one place. Best of all, you get an easy button to promote your best offers through our network of lifestyle influencers who can amplify your message and drive sales and conversions at low cost.
For shoppers: The best place to find and share deals
If you're looking for the best deal for a given product, or a working promo code during checkout, there is simply no better resource than Dealspotr. We have 3.7 times as many working discount codes as any other competing site or extension. Plus, you get a personal feed of deals tailored to your interests and favorite brands, and you can follow top coupon bloggers and lifestyle influencers to see the deals they're sharing. Dealspotr is the most social, most complete, and most reliable way to find deals.
Also, don't forget that you can earn rewards for sharing deals on Dealspotr. Become a deal editor and start earning points and gift cards for helping to curate our database of 10 million deals and growing!
For influencers: A transparent marketplace and always-on source for high-quality collaboration opportunities
Bloggers and social media influencers are always looking for brands to collaborate with. With thousands of brands, Dealspotr is a massive source of opportunities that influencers can search and browse anytime. Plus, we'll send you a weekly newsletter containing all the new sponsorship opportunities that match your interests.
You'll also get up-front payments, free product samples, and personalized, exclusive ambassador codes with every campaign you run. Combined with instant payments and a transparent bi-directional review system, Dealspotr is an indispensable resource for collaboration projects online.
The internet's largest and most reliable source of deals
So we created a crowdsourcing platform for deal sharing that tapped into the power of community to maintain what is now the internet's largest and most reliable database of promo codes. Akin to Wikipedia, Dealspotr is community-driven, with hundreds of thousands of people just like you sharing and editing our deals. Our massive community makes tens of thousands of edits each day, such that Dealspotr's database now has 10 million verified coupons. You'll often find a working discount code on Dealspotr that you won't find on any other coupon site.
Introducing the Dealspotr Marketplace, where brands and influencers connect to promote new, innovative products.
Meet micro-influencers on Dealspotr
We have over 3,000 influencers in our community, spanning dozens of lifestyle verticals. Follow your favorite influencers to see what brands and deals they're promoting. Brands: invite influencers to promote your brand through the Dealspotr Marketplace.
Recently launched influencer marketing campaigns
Brands can post promotional campaigns in the Dealspotr Marketplace and connect with influencers to promote them. We work with thousands of merchants large and small and offer a fast and cost-effective influencer marketing platform.
Dealspotr makes influencer marketing faster, easier and more cost-effective.
No more spreadsheets & emails
Dealspotr handles all notifications and deadlines, and tracks performance of each influencer.
No more overpaying influencers
Our algorithm fairly prices each influencer and protects you from fake follower syndrome.
No monthly fees or commitments
Pay only for completed promotions on your approval. Start a campaign with as little as $50.
