SEO Specialists - Influencers have become an essential element in promoting a product or service online. Although the influencer marketing market is still in its infancy, the growth is a constant one.

Last year it reached 8-10 million euros and will continue to grow this year. The artist and entrepreneur Florin Grozea, founder, and CEO of MOCAPP, a platform that helps brands find the right influencer to get closer to the desired audience, talks about digitization and how this market will look like in Romania.

Florin Grozea founded the Mocapp platform in 2019. Still enthusiastic about this technological side, Florin took the path of entrepreneurship after a successful career in music.

Eight years ago, the artist launched an influencer agency named Hit Yourself. After hundreds of campaigns with well-known brands, Florin realized that he could go to the next level and create a platform that would bring together the entire process of searching and implementing a marketing campaign.

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"We are an app, a platform for customers who want to optimize influencer marketing processes. Customers are brands, agencies, online stores, NGOs.

This platform helps companies on the research side of the market to discover the relevant influencers, helps them in the contracting side and on the implementation side of advertising campaigns,” says the entrepreneur.

The platform features 1,000 influencers from nine countries, mainly from Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria, as well as dozens of national and international brands: PR agencies, digital agencies, NGOs and online stores.

Last year, the influencer marketing market reached 8-10 million euros in Romania. According to Florin's personal estimates, the year 2021 is expected to be a better one, despite the pandemic.

"From our estimates, subjective estimates, I would say that the influencer marketing market has grown in Romania by 10-12% and will probably reach about 10-12 million euros this year".

Constant growth of SEO Specialists

Although it is constantly growing, the Romanian market is an exceedingly small one compared to the US, which reached eight billion dollars.

During the lockdown, the impact on the influencer marketing market was a huge one. For three to four months, advertising budgets were frozen. Small and medium influencers were the most affected, while celebrities made more money during the pandemic.

"The rich have become richer, the poor poorer. This happened in the spring and summer. Meanwhile, the whole market I think has gotten used to and is growing. We feel in digital advertising a rapid v-return. At the end of 2021 we will be higher compared to the same period last year”.

Florin Grozea said they want to attract new financing and are in talks with two investment funds for a new round that will take place in spring 2022. The entrepreneur wants to attract about one million euros from private investors to launch the Mocapp product in the UK market.

"We are still early in discussion with these funds, but it is a natural step in the growth of a tech start-up. We attracted an investment of 176,000 euros through crowdfunding in autumn 2020, at a valuation of 2.4 million euros,” said the founder of Mocapp.

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The product, which will be launched in the UK, is an influencer marketing software dedicated to e-commerce. Florin says it will include the same values as the Romanian product: transparency, decentralization, data driven marketing, technology combinations to optimize creativity processes for satisfactory results in social media.

"We are not trying to waste a lot of time for no reason. The product will be based on the same values only that it will be on a much larger scale and a different type of customers than with those with whom we have worked so far,” he specifies.

Expansion plans do not stop at entering new markets. The company aims to increase the number of influencers on the platform, but also the number of brands it works with.

"We are looking to grow more in Hungary and other countries in the rest of Europe, and on the customer side we look closely both to customers who want to enter new markets, such as Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria, and to customers who want to increase their presence in the market with the help of influencers. This is our target for the next year, " says Florin Grozea.