Meet Brother Duo That Has Added AI To The Influencer Marketing Industry; Helps Small-Scale Creators Get Brand Deals

If you're a brand or business owner, what does influencer marketing look like to you?

The traditional way of hiring an agency, telling them your requirements, and letting them take over, right?

And if we had to boil it down even further—what do you think the agency does?

Make a list of random influencers in a specific category, contact them individually, negotiate on prices, and get a sponsored video on the product or service. Correct?

What follows next is an incessant back-and-forth between you, the agency, and the influencer. 

Of screenshots. Of numbers. Of clicks. Of sales. 

“The conventional way influencer marketing is conducted is slow, inefficient, and misses the important angle of analytics. There's so much guesswork that it is difficult to know how successful a specific campaign was. With CreatorTag, we are flipping the picture,” Prince Khanna, co-founder of CreatorTag, tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview. 

A product of Eleve Media, one of India's fast-growing tech companies in the marketing domain, CreatorTag is an Artificial Intelligence-powered end-to-end influencer marketing tool. 

With a concrete database of 9.2 million influencers, the tool has helped companies like Nestle, OnePlus, Tata Motors, and Flipkart run successful influencer marketing campaigns on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter). 

THE BEGINNING 

Rohit Khanna and Prince Khanna are brothers who come from a small city in North India. 

After earning their MBAs, they entered the corporate corridors of sales, advertising, and marketing. 

They worked at Moneycontrol, one of India's top financial platforms. 

Eventually, Prince joined MensXP, a digital platform as the Business Head. 

While the brothers worked in the field of sales and business development, they realized that content marketing would play a huge role in how the consumer market interacted in the future. 

“This was back in 2012. Influencer marketing, or even online marketing, was at a very nascent stage. But Rohit and I recognized that this would open up a big opportunity in the future. We could see marketing changing shape and becoming a part of raw advertising,” entrepreneur Prince Khanna shares. 

In 2012, Rohit and Prince quit their respective jobs at Moneycontrol and MensXP. They wanted to dive into the waters of entrepreneurship and build something that tapped into the growing field of influencer marketing. 

In the same year, they started Eleve Media, an influencer marketing agency that looked at things from an analytics point of view. 

At the time, Twitter (now X) was the primary influencer marketing platform. Eleve came into the mix and began helping brands track their online campaigns and metrics. 

“By 2015, we became the pioneers in launching live tracking for Twitter campaigns. Eleve Media brought together a team of tech experts and created an analytics dashboard that could help brands navigate and view live numbers, clicks, and conversions on their influencer marketing campaigns,” Prince says. 

Eleve Media’s innovation directly helped increase the scalability of Twitter campaigns. 

The agency soon started thriving.

By 2020, Eleve Media acquired a company called RankMe. It was built by DCE grads and had a powerful social media listening tool as its USP. 

“When Eleve Media absorbed RankMe, our influencer marketing efforts and the results skyrocketed. This social media tool could listen to a specific brand name, analyze the kind of market sentiment it had across social media platforms, and ultimately collate and provide this data in an easy-to-understand manner,” startup founder Rohit Khanna explains. 

This tool began to be used by Eleve Media’s clients to tailor their influencer marketing campaigns in a better, more informed way. 

The result?

Brands were empowered with to-the-point market insights that were ultimately utilized to curate the best possible marketing campaign. 

As entrepreneurs, Prince Khanna and Rohit Khanna have always been at the forefront of technology. 

Even though the influencer marketing industry has conventionally taken a more manual approach, the brothers knew that the space needed a technological advancement that made everything simpler and more efficient for brands, brand managers, and influencers.

In 2022, they built CreatorTag. It is an end-to-end influencer marketing tool that runs on artificial intelligence and data-driven insights. 

“We envisioned CreatorTag to solve the current challenges of the influencer marketing industry. Andit has really done that and so much more,” startup founder Prince Khanna says. 

Also Read: Info Edge founder claims company achieved 9.3x gains by investing ₹3,959 Cr on Zomato, PolicyBazaar, Naukri

JOURNEY AND CHALLENGES 

Building an AI-powered tool that would eventually revolutionize the influencer marketing industry meant bringing together significant resources. 

Initially, entrepreneurs Prince Khanna and Rohit Khanna utilized their savings and hired a team of tech experts.

The mission was simple: make a user-friendly tool that removed the guesswork involved in influencer marketing. 

However, they had to deal with certain challenges. 

1. The influencer marketing industry is mostly agency-led. Brands are habitual in assigning the work to a creative agency and letting them take over the campaign completely.

“We addressed this by doubling down on our efforts to convince stakeholders to adopt a tech-driven tool that would simplify everything and make things move faster,” startup founder Prince Khanna tells Startup Pedia. 

2. When CreatorTag entered the market, it opened a pool of 9.2 million influencers to brands and companies. This was the beginning of democratizing the influencer brand deal market.

“Earlier, brands were only exposed to a select few influencers who had built relationships with agencies. They would be the ones bagging the most brand deals. There's a certain statistic too that tells us that a very, very small percentage of influencers actually make money via brand deals,” Rohit shares.

“We wanted to change that. And this meant having long discussions with brands as well as agencies,” he adds. 

Eventually, things started falling in place, and CreatorTag became a go-to for some of the leading consumer and lifestyle brands in the country. 

Also Read: 'Not learning Hindi cost me Rs 1 lakh crore': Aircel founder C Sivasankaran

CREATORTAG: GAMECHANGER IN INFLUENCER MARKETING

CreatorTag is an AI-powered tool designed to search across 9.2 million influencers.

It is a one-stop shop for all things influencer marketing. By leveraging data-driven insights and advanced filtering, brands and businesses can easily find influencers and creators who align with their product, service, or offering. 

Serving 250+ brands annually, the AI-powered influencer marketing tool facilitates and smoothens numerous functions of online marketing.

1. CreatorTag has a total of 9.2 million (and growing) creators and influencers available to search and select on the platform. 

2. By getting access to detailed insights into metrics and audience demographics, brands can zero down on the ideal influencer for their influencer marketing campaign.

3. As an AI-driven influencer marketing tool, CreatorTag steers away from surface-level descriptive analysis. Instead, it offers in-depth information about each creator's profile, engagement metrics, posting patterns, the genres they post about, and a demographic breakdown of their audience and its interests. 

“These detailed insights are like a goldmine for brands that want their influencer marketing campaign to truly land and make a difference. The tool also does a fake follower audit to recognize the amount of fake or bot followers a profile has. Earlier, most of this was done by guesswork. With CreatorTag, you can be sure you're getting pure data. And data doesn't lie,” entrepreneur Prince Khanna says. 

4. Brand managers often struggle to find niche influencers that fit a specific age, gender, and brand profile. With a fast and efficient option for outward searches, brand managers can simply enter the required metrics. In a few minutes, CreatorTag will scan the pool of influencers and pull up results of ideal influencers that exactly fit the parameters entered. 

“This is far better than painstakingly making a manual search for influencers and then logging them on a Google Sheet. We also offer an option to track competitor hashtags and many other features, so more informed decisions could be taken to launch your campaign,” the startup founder explains. 

5. The AI-driven influencer marketing tool provides robust features of reporting and analytics for live creator campaigns. Through the report page, brand managers can track hook rates, CTRs, CPMs, and conversions, and make data-driven decisions in real-time.

“Instead of exchanging screenshots of analytics and manually entering these numbers on a separate sheet, this kind of live automation makes the job faster and smoother,” Rohit says. 

6. To help brand managers who are working on multiple influencer campaigns, CreatorTag offers a Collaborate feature that simplifies and manages the workflow.

7. CreatorTag democratizes the brand deal market by bringing nano-influencers to a brand's peripheral vision and helps them receive and curate high-converting campaigns.

Also Read: From 0 to 500 crores in 5 years; How Siddharth Dungarwal’s Snitch Became India’s Top Men’s Apparel Brand

GROWTH STORY

What started as a Gurugram-based company with just eight to ten people has now grown into a specialized influencer marketing tech company with a team of more than 100 people across India, UAE and Indonesia. 

CreatorTag has been catering to more than 250 brands on an annual basis.

Close to 20,000 influencers have organically registered on the mobile app.

Servicing brands from a variety of industries like FMCG, electronics, consumer goods, entertainment, and automobiles, the end-to-end influencer marketing platform witnessed a growth of 253.5% in FY24 and a 45% growth in FY25

Apart from adding technology to the mix of influencer marketing, CreatorTag assists brands with content strategy and content production.

“We've become the one name that top brands turn to every time they have an influencer marketing campaign on their agenda list,” Prince Khanna tells Startup Pedia. 

FUTURE PLANS

Currently, CreatorTag is working towards AI content creation, introducing SaaS products in the American and European markets, building products for creators, enhancing the platform’s UI/UX, and scaling its business across India, Europe, Indonesia, the UAE, and the USA.

“We've cracked the functionality aspect of the platform. As companies are shifting their ad spends from print and TV to influencer marketing, now is the time to scale in India and across the globe,” Prince Khanna explains. 

As an end-to-end influencer marketing tool, CreatorTag aims to scale the micro and nano influencer market, dabble in AI and scale creator-led commerce. 

Also Read: OYO becomes most profitable Indian startup in FY25 with ₹623 Cr profit, says Founder Ritesh Agarwal