Tribe has created a new type of marketing, with tech as a core function.

Australian start-up Tribe has embraced a tech culture to create a platform designed to bring together brands and ordinary Australians with a bit of social media clout, for the financial benefit of everyone.

“Our top earning creator is on track to make $65,000 a year and she’s not a celebrity, she’s a dietitian,” says Jules Lund. “We’ll be paying out over a million dollars to our creators this year alone, in our first year.”

Mr Lund founded the company but you probably know him better as a TV and radio personality. However that looks set to change as the business he started, and launched in the market just 11 months ago, has grown rapidly and is gearing up for an international expansion.

So how does it work?

Tribe provides a simple online marketplace for companies looking to use customers, and their corresponding ability to create original content, to promote its products.

Brands will post a campaign brief and individuals can send in content, such as a picture of them using the product to be posted on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. If it gets approved, the individual posts it straight to their designated social media channel and watches the money roll in.

It costs the brand nothing to set up a brief and shortly afterwards the company has a range of original marketing material from real-life users of its brand to choose from.

Most importantly for Mr Lund, the Tribe platform has opened up the world of content marketing to average Australians and given them access to major brands — which has been a huge game changer in the age of social media influencers.

“It’s democratised content,” he said.

Jules Lund, the founder of Tribe. Picture: Christian GillesSource:News Corp Australia

Among the companies to use Tribe include Vodafone, Qantas, Adidas, Spotify, Canadian Club, Disney, Kelloggs, Jeep and Subway.

So far the company says it’s had 30,000 pieces of content submitted to the platform from 5500 creators — a number which is growing by about 25 a day.

It’s not just the Kylie Jenners of the world making money from Tribe’s platform either. According to Mr Lund the typical content producer on the platform — “about 95 per cent” — has between 3000 and 100,000 followers on their chosen social media medium.

“We deal with everyday Aussies that are either food bloggers or passionate around fitness, health, travel, art and design,” Mr Lund said.

“The smaller the tribe, the more potent the influence.”

After moving from TV into radio presenting, Mr Lund struggled with the lack of visual-based creativity.

“All my ideas were visual ... They kept getting blocked by the producers,” he said.

He was told to work on creating some social content for the show’s Facebook page (“those platforms that no one in radio really cares about”) and it quickly became one of the most engaged brand pages in the country.

Pretty soon businesses were offering him briefs for sponsored posts.

“This was before there was even a term for influencer marketing,” he said.

It was that “pure passion and obsession” that led Mr Lund to embark on creating an app nearly four years ago that would become Tribe.

“I visualised an app and just started working on it. I realised it wasn’t just going to be helpful for me, it’d be helpful for thousands of people as this category started to gain momentum,” he said.

Currently the company has about twenty full-time staff including CEO Anthony Svirskis and is undertaking a “massive” recruitment drive for developers.

After a recent round of funding the company has $5.35 million in the bank primed for a launch into the Asian market.

The platform means small scale deals can be executed with speed.Source:Supplied

ALL ABOUT THE TECH

“Everything that we do is with the filter of tech,” Mr Lund said.

Plenty of marketing agencies work to partner content creators with brands, but it’s Tribe’s focus on technology that he believes sets it apart.

“It’s why we’re the only pure tech self serve influencer marketing platform in Australia,” he said.

For a company with global ambitions the platform must be scalable - and robust tech is the key.

“The tech solves a paint point because no one has time to have a coffee and a conversation with someone who has 3000 followers and make a campaign with 40 of them,” Mr Lund said. “But with tech you can do it overnight.”

Sometimes brands arrange major deals without having any contact with the staff at Tribe.

“The most exciting thing about it is that so much of our greatest growth in the platform is from brands that we’ve never met,” he said.

“There was a brand that was selling these memo water bottles ... and they just literally uploaded a brief at 8:30pm at night, by 8:30am not only had they got all this content back from people who already owned their bottle and loved it, but they had bought five pieces of content that were already live on social media and tracking engagement before any of us had come into the office.”

Research shows that consumers trust a message or endorsement if they think it’s coming from a friend or an average, independent Australian. As such social media marketing has emerged as an incredibly effective space for brands.

For Jules Lund, ensuring the authenticity of the transaction is another crucial element of the model.

“We don’t send out samples which means that if they don’t own it or they’re not willing to buy it then that creator has no right to recommend that their tribe does,” he said.