Influencer Marketing: success story of Buzzoole

Influencer marketing is growing year after year and this requires companies to understand how to properly integrate it into their communication strategies, measuring its effectiveness within the marketing mix so that its value can be correctly defined.

Buzzoole, an all-Italian pride, is an Influencer Marketing platform that connects Brands and Content Creators and offers solutions for companies, agencies, and media centers. It has been successful and has obtained millionaire fundraising, rapidly expanding internationally.

Buzzoole and Influencer Marketing

The name Buzzoole comes from the association of Buzz and googol (a number consisting of 1 and 100 zeros) which means “infinite word of mouth”. Buzzoole is an Influencer marketing platform, which uses artificial intelligence to connect Brands and Content Creators, the “Influencers”. They are people capable of producing valuable content using social networks, exercising a significant degree of influence on their own followers. They are now considered real media, and, for this reason, Brands involve them whenever they want to make their business, products or services known and increase their brand awareness.

Buzzoole uses proprietary technology based on artificial intelligence to create the perfect match between Brand and Influencer. GAIIA (Growing Artificial Intelligence for Influencer Affinity) is the heart of Buzzoole’s technology, which combines image recognition systems, big data, and natural language analysis, to identify the Content Creators with the greatest affinity and thus create successful Influencer Marketing campaigns.

How and when Buzzoole was born

Buzoole was born in Naples in 2013, launching a technological platform of influencer marketing that manages and measures marketing investments with content creators. The purpose is to help brands to improve their presence on social networks by creating ad hoc campaigns.

The meeting between the founders 

It all started thanks to the meeting between Fabrizio Perrone and Gennaro Varriale. The two met at a startup event in Naples in 2012.

Fabrizio says that he has an idea about the creation of a platform for the generation of word of mouth (Viral Eye) to Gennaro, who is impressed by the project, and immediately decides to join it.

Luca Pignataro and Luca Camillo (who will become co-founders of Buzzoole), trusted people with whom Gennaro Varriale had already collaborated on successful projects, are then involved.

In 2012 they took part in an event called “The battle of ideas”, held in Naples, where they won the “Microsoft BizPark” program, obtaining web services worth 30,000 euros.

In a few months they developed a prototype version of Buzzoole that quickly won the trust of users and investors, reaching the first investment of 180,000 euros from Digital Magics.

Buzzoole S.r.l was born in October 2013.

The team

The first team of the four co-founders soon expanded and, subsequently, welcomed the new CEO to lead the group. Let’s get them all together.

Fabrizio Perrone, first CEO and co-founder of Buzzoole, attended the University of Naples “Federico II”, graduating brilliantly at the age of 23 in business administration. He became a startup founder in 2007, and in 2008, he founded Fan Media. In 2010 he was one of the first in Italy to deal with buzz marketing, an experience that led him to found Viral Eye. In 2012 he became a teacher of new marketing at the IED in Milan.

Gennaro Varriale, CTO and co-founder of Buzzoole, attended the University of Salerno and started as a freelancer, creating websites and web portals. He creates some apps like “Munnezza” – an app to raise awareness of the Neapolitan problem of garbage – and “Io sono Abruzzo” dedicated to the victims of the 2009 earthquake. In 2012 he created “Pingram.me” – an app for personal use, born from the idea of mashup between Instagram and Pinterest – enjoying some success.

Luca Pignataro, Art’s director, and co-founder of Buzzoole, attended the University of Naples “Federico II”, immediately dealing with graphics, communication and design, ranging from the web to the press and to social networks. These skills lead him to meet Gennaro Varriale, with whom he collaborated on the creation of the “Munnezza” app.

Luca Camillo, programmer, and co-founder of Buzzoole, attends the computer engineering course at the Politecnico of Milano, immediately dealing with programming and systems, getting to know and collaborate with Gennaro Varriale in a profitable way.

In 2020 Gianluca Perrelli is appointed CEO of Buzzoole. Perrelli has been part of the Buzzoole team since 2016 and before this important position, he held the roles of Chief Marketing Officer and, subsequently, Managing Director for Italy.

Fabrizio Perrone, who was CEO until Gianluca Perrelli settlement, is today in charge of the finalization and launch of the new business unit for the company on the development of the SaaS offer.

How it works for Influencer Marketing

Buzzoole follows its customers step by step in the design, creation and measurement of Influencer Marketing campaigns and designs, for each business, a tailor-made strategy, creating the best match between the most online brands and content creators.

On the technological platform it also offers a real-time system where you can monitor each phase of the activity.

Let’s see what the steps for the success of an influencer marketing campaign on Buzzoole are:

• Strategy: Buzzoole manages the campaign, the project from the strategic phase to the exit, planning each activity to achieve the objectives and KPIs for each customer with the appropriate timing.
• The creators: involves the creators best suited to the kind of business, for each client company, to be able to create the most effective design for the campaign.
• Identification: Buzzoole seeks for brands the content creators who are most related to their business and does so through talent managers who are market experts and make use of sophisticated technologies capable of understanding the areas of influence and performance of creators. All this is made possible thanks to the use of first-party data (data collected by website owners on the behavior of their visitors).
• Creativity: the customer can decide to approve or replace the content creators that artificial intelligence has selected for him if he is not fully satisfied and convinced.
• Review: the customer can make a review of the content that the creators have made and can suggest changes to better meet their needs. When the contents are ready to be published, the customer has the possibility to take advantage of tools already present on the platform to use and sponsor them.
• Measurement and reporting: Brands can monitor, in real time, the progress and performance of posts and stories, thanks to real data and insights provided by social networks. At the end of the campaign, a report is generated with the KPIs and metrics for the customer.

In conclusion, Buzzoole drives the Brands towards the success of the influencer marketing campaign and does so by providing an excellent team of strategists, managers, and creators who, added to the support of sophisticated technologies to ensure the success of the business for its customers.

Artificial intelligence applied to influencer marketing

Buzzoole suceeds to match brands with content creators thanks to the use of a sophisticated artificial intelligence named “GAIIA”.

GAIIA has made Buzzoole the first technological platform for Influencer marketing thanks to the set of three systems: one of big data, one of natural language understanding and one of image recognition, and it is the latter that makes GAIIA, and consequently Buzzoole, unique; it is in fact the first image recognition system applied to influencer marketing.

The image recognition system has proved to be fundamental for influencer marketing since visual platforms, such as Instagram, are preferred for brand marketing campaigns. A system of deciphering and understanding images and context offers several advantages for both influencers and businesses aiming for a successful strategy.

Influencers, for example, make use of much more detailed profile analyzes than those of Buzzole’s competitors, which are integrated with topic data and channel performance.

Brands, who rely on Buzzoole for their strategies, also benefit from image recognition. The latter, in fact, can identify and assign sector specialists with the highest level of affinity. The campaign failure margin is therefore significantly reduced.

Artificial intelligence brings countless advantages:

• It helps, in the brief phase, to calculate the affinities between brands and creators and thus creates the right match for an effective strategy.
• offers real-time feedback, thanks to which influencers can take inspiration and modify their content to optimize campaigns.
• sometimes it may even suggest addressing a different target and to optimize performance.

Some successful Buzzoole campaigns

Buzzoole’s successes are really many, it is worth mentioning a few campaigns to better understand the extent of the resonance given by this platform.

In 2016, the seventh edition of the “Social Case History Forum” in Milan presents “the success story of CERES and Buzzoole”. It was a successful collaboration, with over 20 communication campaigns, and which generated a reach of almost 17 million users and an engagement of 23,000 interactions, involving almost 9,000 publishers and producing over 13,000 content.

Just recently, in 2021, Buzzoole closed an important agreement with De Cecco, who chose the platform to enhance the Italian character and quality of its products in Germany. Six digital testimonials with a large German following were chosen. They are five professional athletes (Alica Schmidt, Louisa Lippman, Christina Hering, Lisa Ryzih and Monika Sozanska) and a lifestyle influencer (Laura Noltemeyer).

Success figures

Buzzoole is the platform of records, in fact it has grown and established itself on the market in exceptional times, managing to obtain customers and investments with dizzying numbers.

Today Buzzoole is present in 100 countries and on the platform, it has over 300 thousand content creators, almost 2,000 customers and over 52 million contents.

Fundraising: the various rounds

The first to have believed in Buzzoole was Digital Magics, which in 2013 was invested 180,000 euro in the seed phase.

The second major capital increase comes in 2014 from Smart & Start which invested 500,000 euros in the startup.

But the first million is just around the corner, and in fact in 2016, Buzzoole received $ 1,050,000 from Impulse VC.

After a series of successes including the release in New York and inclusion in Gartner’s Market Guide for Influencer Marketing Solutions, in 2018 they received a staggering $ 7,800,000 funding from StarTIP (Tamburi Investment Partners) and Vertis.

In October 2019, a capital increase of 2,000,000 was carried out provided by the founders Fabrizio Perrone and Gennaro Varriale, by some employees of Buzzoole, by Digital Magics, StarTIP and Vertis SGR.

The last major round ends in 2020 with an investment of 5,000.000 euros subscribed by the Fondo Italia Ventur II of CPD Ventur Capital SGR, Vertis SGR and StarTIP. This huge capital increase will contribute to the development of SaaS solutions (managed by Fabrizio Perrone) which will integrate Discovery, a tool that allows you to independently discover and choose the content creators to be involved in influencer Marketing campaigns and which will help tracking of the campaigns by the businesses that have relied on Buzzoole.

If you are interested in Buzzoole, please read more on: Fundraising success story on influencer marketing

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