As social media platforms reshape marketing strategies, influencer & NIL marketplace MOGL introduces Athlete Audience Insights™, offering brands detailed visibility into campaign performance and influencer audience demographics. 

“Brands spend billions of dollars to get their products in front of customers,” says Ayden Syal, founder and CEO of MOGL.

“But they need to know that their spend is reaching their ideal customer profile – that the money isn’t wasted on people who aren’t ultimately going to buy or use their services. The first-party data available in MOGL’s Athlete Audience Insights offering does exactly that,” he adds.

Customer feedback sparked the shift to first-party data. “Historically, we had been providing all this data to them using third-party vendors, but now we provide all of the first-party data, which is directly available within the platform in real-time for all these brands,” Ayden notes.

The platform addresses key industry challenges and brands’ core needs through its comprehensive approach. 

“Brands and customers of influencer companies often struggle to understand why campaigns worked and the ultimate value was delivered because they don’t have access to this data,” Ayden says. “Athlete Audience Insights™ shows them which areas of the campaign worked best and who they ultimately reached so that they can optimize their spend into the best-performing assets and influencers.”

Real-Time Data Drives Campaign Success

MOGL’s new product provides immediate performance metrics in real-time. According to the company, brands can track core social media metrics like impressions, engagement, reach, and click-through rates as a post goes up.

“After the organic reach and value have been derived, brands can now decide where to run paid ads and if they want additional posts,” Ayden explains.

He adds that brands gain invaluable audience insights through the platform because the new offering leverages first-party data directly from the social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok.

“Brands can now see their audience breakdown for an individual influencer,” Ayden says. “They can see the age, gender, and geographic breakdown of all their followers. At a campaign level, once they’ve started to build a bucket of influencers, they can see the collective audience of those influencers and get visibility into who the campaign will ultimately reach.”

To accommodate different client needs, the platform offers both self-service and managed options. “One of the unique things about our offering is it is available as a self-service offering. But for our larger brands, we remove the burden on the brands and do it for them,” Ayden shares. 

“We take the time to have a discovery call with the brands, understand their goals, who they’re trying to reach, and what their target market is, and then we source the influencers, develop the creative, and deliver the results.”

The platform’s data capabilities transform campaign evaluation. “Historically, we received consistent feedback that ‘This was a great campaign, but we don’t know if it worked,'” Ayden reveals. “Now, we can point to the data which shows, on average, our athletes yield engagement rates of nearly 15%, over five times the average Instagram engagement.”

Brands have responded enthusiastically to these enhanced analytics. “The overwhelming feedback is that being able to target markets and age demographics specifically is a massive improvement for these brands,” Ayden notes. “It has helped brands understand the areas working best in their campaigns to increase investment because now they can understand with true data, not third party or scraped data, that specific areas of their campaign have worked well.”

Liquid IV Campaign Showcases Platform Capabilities

A recent collaboration with Liquid IV demonstrated the platform’s effectiveness. “They had a mandate where they were looking to target specifically Gen Z college students, given that the product is something that they would use on the go from class to practice to all their other different engagements,” Ayden explains.

The partnership tackled Liquid IV’s previous marketing challenges. “Liquid IV was looking for a partner who could help them specifically target college and Gen Z audiences as opposed to just broader audiences, which is what we specialize in,” Ayden says.

The campaign involved mass-scale product seeding. “On average, we sent Liquid IV product to almost 1,000 athletes each month who were responsible for posting Instagram Story posts and in-feed posts promoting the product to reach their network of primarily college students,” Ayden says. “Over a six-month period, we connected them with over 4,100 athlete ambassadors.”

MOGL implemented an all-round marketing strategy. “They were also looking for activations and appearances with larger, higher profile talent, so we did a tailgate tour throughout the SEC and then did a Day in the Life called Live24 with a March Madness athlete, which was distributed on YouTube,” Ayden says.

The results validated MOGL’s approach. “This data tells us that if your main goal is to build awareness for your product or your service, and currently you’re doing that on Meta, you can reach a larger audience with much better targeting through MOGL, specifically athlete influencers,” Ayden explains. “It enables you to target Gen Z audiences directly at a much more affordable scale than what you’re going to spend on, for example, Facebook advertising.”

The campaign generated additional value beyond metrics. “The other added benefit, though, is that you get all of these new customers and brand ambassadors, which are athletes,” Ayden adds. “Depending on which site you look at online, the average piece of UGC content would cost $150 on average. We also provided Liquid IV with 11,000 pieces of this unique content.”

The campaign set new industry benchmarks. “I don’t think anyone within this space has delivered a campaign of this magnitude with over 4,000 athlete influencers and over 11,000 pieces of content,” Ayden notes. “That’s a testament to how well our company and account management team works and how easy the platform is to source influencers.”

Strategic Growth Through Leadership Expansion

The recent board appointment of Adam Hansmann and the addition of seasoned sales leader Benjamin Briggs align with MOGL’s growth strategy. 

Adam Hansmann Benjamin Briggs

Hansmann co-founded The Athletic, a digital sports journalism company that sold to The New York Times for $550 million in 2022 in one of the largest digital media exits of all time. His deep experience building a subscription business into a major advertising conglomerate will be valuable to MOGL. 

Speaking about Hansmann, Ayden shares: “They took a gamble that 10% of sports fans would be interested in true journalism and would pay subscriptions for that, as opposed to just understanding what happened in the game last night. They focused on that smaller portion of the market, which, in a way, is similar to what we’re doing. We’re focusing on college athletics, not broader athletics of today.”

Briggs, a former Studio71 and Whistle Sports exec, joins as VP of National Sales, bringing strategic expertise. “Ben’s going to be working on many of our strategic initiatives with large national brands,” Ayden explains. “All of these large advertisers are used to paid media in the traditional sense, where they’re advertising across Facebook or linear television ads. But we’re allowing them to advertise directly through influencers’ pages to their audience and look-alike audiences.”

Platform Enhancements Ahead

MOGL plans significant platform improvements. 

“Now that Athlete Audience Insights™ has launched, it’s going to all be about optimizing it,” Ayden reveals. “The data is there, but how do we make it more actionable for the brands? How do we make it more accessible for them? And then how can we leverage that access to drive immediate business impact?”

The company also now offers guaranteed impression packages. “We can now guarantee impressions because we’ve done it several times now, and we can understand with the first-party data how many impressions we get on an individual’s average spending,” Ayden explains. “We’re giving brands an avenue to reach their target customer at an affordable rate that they can optimize as well.”

“We wanted to streamline the process and democratize access to these incredible influencers and creators. Now, influencers can get a sense of their data. They can understand their engagement rate and how many impressions they get per post basis, which helps them understand how to grow as creators,” Ayden concludes.