Imagine a world where every time you shared a link with a friend, you got paid. How many TikTok videos have you shared since the week started?? What if every time you generated buzz online, you got a tip? This is the future of advertising that Cliqki is building.
Cliqki is an ad-tech platform and social media marketplace on which brands, content owners and creators can create awareness for their product and services, and offer incentives to users and influencers who help to promote these services.
Co-founded by Adetomi Odufuye (CEO) and Aderemi Odufuye (CTO) and launched in April 2021, with Adekunmi Odufuye as CCO, Cliqki was born out of personal observations when the founders were trying to promote a financial services brand, music content and expand their following on a crypto platform. They realized that most big name ad-tech platforms make millions of dollars in ad revenues from brands/companies and only share a small portion with influencers and users on their platforms.
Cliqki is democratizing advertising by taking a small commission and making most of the ad revenue available to the community of users. With Cliqki everyone is a paid influencer.
The future of advertising
Advertising is often aspirational; brands get celebrities and big name individuals to advertise their products and regular people who aspire to be just like that celebrity buy the products. But with the advent of social media and the emergence of influencer advertising, brands are finding out that a combination of celebrity advertising and the organic and more personal reach of micro-influencers is needed to fully maximize their ad reach and marketing goals.
A 2016 Twitter report found that when looking for product recommendations, 56% of consumers sought guidance from friends and 49% relied on influencers. Micro influencing, which is even more personal than influencing, is predicted to become even more essential to brand storytelling post-pandemic as media consumption has shifted from glossy magazine images to at home TikToks and Instagram stories.
According to a 2019 study on millenials—the largest consumers of social media—and the effect micro-influencer marketing has on their purchasing habits, millennials regard influencers as an authentic way of assessing brands and products and micro-influencer marketing “trigger millennials to engage in further research regarding a specific product or others in the same category”.
Word-of-mouth carries weight on social media and in the modern world being relatable is a currency. From reality TV to YouTube and TikTok, content driven by regular people who look and feel just like us, thrives. Social media and advertising on social media is driven by the perception of authenticity. How much do we love that YouTube make-up artist who seems like a friend? How many reels and stories do you watch per day?
You don’t need to be a celebrity anymore to get engagement, everybody is connected now and everyone influences everyone.
For brands, content creators and businesses advertising on social media is not always smooth sailing as all the major ad-tech and social media platforms offer a wide audience but an impersonal touch, they also cost more and most of the profits goes to the advertisers. These platforms’ services often have restrictions on the types of content allowed and general restrictive advertising rules which make it harder to promote content.
Also, in countries like Nigeria where there’s a monthly dollar spending limit, creators have a hard time even paying for marketing campaigns to run on social media.
What Cliqki is offering is a chance for brands to personalize and maximize their marketing reach and for everyone who contributes to that, both the influencers and you who shares a link, to profit from that.
Cliqki functions as a platform to facilitate both the advertisement and the payment aspects of marketing. It is unique in this field as most advertising platforms only advertise — you pay, they advertise. Cliqki goes the extra mile of sharing those profits with everyone involved in the process, down to the regular non-influencer who simply shares a link with a friend. It also offers brands the opportunity to reach a wider, more personalized audience at less cost.
How it works
Brands and content creators, come onto the platform, upload the content or campaign they would like to promote, and then attach a budget to it by purchasing tokens.
Anytime a Cliqki user shares the content on behalf of the brand, a unique URL is created, and the user/influencer is rewarded anytime someone clicks on the link shared. Rewards per click can vary from ₦10 up to ₦1,000 depending on the budget set by the brand.
Rewards are credited to the user’s wallet and can be redeemed by either converting tokens to cash directly to their bank account or for airtime, gift vouchers and other prizes.
What’s next for Cliqki?
The first of its kind in Africa, Cliqki began with about a hundred users when it launched its beta version in 2021 and has since become one of the fastest growing influencer marketplaces with thousands of users currently on the platform and the growth rate steadily increasing.
Cliqki is banking on trust and already established relationships to change the future of advertising. They take advertising from big name brands and their impersonal approach to one-on-one levels where users can earn for their engagements and control what they want to promote.
“Our mission is to give people the power to promote their product offering to a diversified and relevant audience, as well as provide a means for others to earn while using their regular social media platforms. We are extremely excited to share some of the progress we have made over the past few months, as we remain steadfast towards our vision to build Africa and eventually the world’s largest marketplace for influencers, where users can monetize their social media engagement” – Adetomi Odufuye (Cliqki CEO).
Cliqki’s vision is to become the largest influencer marketing platform in Africa and beyond. The startup just raised an undisclosed amount in funding from angel investors which include Sixteen Sands, Adeta Capital and Aztec Synergy.
They have also signed on several big brands including one of Africa’s largest financial institutions, major commercial banks, content creators, and are looking to sign up many other major brands.
Cliqki is currently registered as a Delaware C corp with offices in the United States and Lagos.
They hope to establish their proof of concept first in Nigeria, before expanding to other locations in Africa including Kenya, Ghana and South Africa and eventually the rest of the world.
