Episode Summary
In episode 10 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast, Greg kicks off by discussing the recent Google Core algorithm update targeting AI-generated content and its implications for content creators. He then shifts focus to a conversation with Shawn Stallings, CEO of Ampify, highlighting Shawn’s journey into influencer marketing following the challenges posed by iOS privacy updates. Shawn delves into five key influencer marketing strategies: influencer seeding, product-for-post, paid partnerships, white-listing/spark ads for enhanced ad reach, and affiliate/ambassador programs. He emphasizes the importance of proper engagement and negotiation with influencers, along with strategies for measuring ROI, including the use of affiliate links, promo codes, and pre/post-checkout surveys to gauge effectiveness.
Key Takeaways
- The importance of influencer marketing as a resilient strategy amidst changing digital ad landscapes.
- An understanding of various influencer marketing tactics and their application based on brand goals and budgets.
- Effective methods for engaging influencers, negotiating collaborations, and the potential need for customization to stand out.
- Strategies for measuring the impact of influencer marketing campaigns, highlighting the challenges of direct attribution and the value of creative approaches to track ROI.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Shawn Stallings LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-stallings/
Ampify: https://www.ampifi.io/
Episode Transcript
Greg: 0:27
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 10 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. So before we get started today, I just wanted to make a quick announcement about the latest Google Core algorithm update that they pushed out a few days ago. That was primarily targeted at websites that produce AI content at scale. I mean, we kind of knew, or assumed, that this one was going to be coming, because a lot of businesses have just been cranking out content and they were pretty vicious with this one, honestly. So if you’ve ever thought about producing this type of content or actually have started to produce AI driven content, you might want to go read up on this algorithm update before you do anything else. You will not want your site to disappear from Google, as so many have in the last couple of days. Again, they were pretty vicious with this one and you’re going to want to make sure that you are in compliance with Google. So thanks for joining us today. We’ve had some really awesome discussions as of late, and I’m super excited to chat with our guest today. Our guest is Sean Stallings, the founder and CEO of Ampify, so I’ve known him for a few years now, and the way he approaches influencer marketing is exactly what the modern e-commerce brand needs these days, so I’m super excited about that. As I mentioned, his company is called Ampify. They are the world’s most, I guess, easiest most easiest about that I don’t even know if that’s proper English Nice to use influencer marketing platform. That will help you find the best influencers to work with, help you rally those influencers to easily promote your brand and will give you insight into the success of each of those influencers, which is just a critical piece of the puzzle these days. So in our discussion today, we’re going to be talking about the different influencer strategies, when you should use each one, what to expect when working with influencers in general. If you’re a DTC brand which chances are pretty good that you are if you’re listening to this, you’ve probably tried working with influencers before. Most brands I’ve chatted with over the last couple of years have tried it. They’ve had mixed results by working with influencers and, honestly, most of them that I talk with haven’t been overly successful with the strategy. So they stopped doing it all together and, honestly, I believe this is probably because of the way that we’ve been trained to think about and execute influencer marketing strategies. So Sean has some really good insights to share with us today. That will hopefully get you thinking about influencers differently. So before we dive into our discussion, sean, would you please take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Shawn: 3:44
Absolutely, greg. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I know at the core of every entrepreneur’s story or at least most entrepreneur’s story is the family support that they have. So to start by saying I married to an amazing wife. I have three incredible kids, including a baby, which is probably the cause of these bags under my eyes, but I’m so grateful to have that support and through that I guess my story. I’ve been working in digital marketing and e-commerce for about the past five years and heavily focused in influencer marketing for about three years now. That’s about when I started Amplify, and since then I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of brands and thousands of influencers. That’s helped me to learn a thing or two along the way, so I’ll be excited to share some of what I’ve learned in that journey. Just before I started Amplify, I was actually working in private equity and finishing my MBA, and I was actually also launching my own Econ brand. And this was around the beginning of 2021, which, as many of you know, that’s right. When the iOS privacy updates hit, as someone who was building my strategy centered around Facebook ads, I took a step back at that time and thought well, if Facebook ads aren’t going to pan out. They’re going to change drastically, which no one was really sure was going to happen at that time. What am I going to do? So that question led me to Google. I’m starting to research everything, and every direction I was looking was pointing towards influencer marketing. The premise made sense of it, the success stories I was reading made sense. So I thought, man, it’s time for me to go get some influencers. I thought it was that simple. I opened up Instagram, I started DMing and I just had the worst experience. It took forever to find influencers and then, if I was lucky enough for them to reply which most of them just didn’t reply and speaking of that too, I think I had like a two or a 3% response rate. Particularly with a new brand who doesn’t really have a social presence, influencers aren’t interested in replying to you, even if you are a brand with a social presence. It’s hard to get an influencer’s attention on DMs. And on top of that, instagram capped how many DMs I could send each day, so I’m only sending like 20 a day before. Instagram doesn’t let me send anymore, and then anyone who did say yes, I had no way of making sure that they actually would post, so like we’re talking hours and hours of wasted time for no results. So I’m going through this and thinking there have got to be other brands dealing with the same issues, the same problem. Who want to work with influencers is just tough process, and I guess thus from that experience Amphi was born, and sure enough I found through this that most brands are going through that same process. They don’t really have any options. You’ve got platforms out there that do help, but they’re $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 to even get access to it before you even get started, yeah, before you even pay an influencer, before you pay an employee to use the platform for you. And so there is kind of this gap for I don’t even want to know if it’s, or call it small and mid-sized brands, but just anyone who’s not ready to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in influencer marketing. Which brings me to today. Now it’s been about three years into Amphi, where we’ve built an amazing platform. I appreciated your intro, greg. I think that highlighted it well. Basically, all we do is we help brands find and partner with more ideal influencers faster and easier than anywhere else, and we’re not going to charge you $20,000, $30,000 to do it. We’re much more tailored to your SMBs out there. So brands who are maybe just getting started or who haven’t really scaled, or maybe if you have scaled but you haven’t really built an automated process, we can help with that too, that’s awesome.
Greg: 7:40
Thank you for sharing that. I think your experience described the experience of most brands like when they get started with influencers. So this is going to be a really, really great discussion today, so I’ve prepped a couple of questions. You have some notes to kind of guide our conversation today. Are you ready to jump in? Let’s do it Awesome. All right, so to get started, why don’t you start off by talking about the different influencer marketing strategies that brands are executing against right now?
Shawn: 8:12
Sure, there are probably five main strategies. The fifth one I don’t know if you want to put it influencer marketing, but I’ll still talk about it. I think it’s relevant. The first one is just influencer seeding, which you hear about a lot, which essentially it’s bulk outreach to as many influencers as you can and you send them something along the lines of hey, can I send you some product, no strings attached, and you’re just trying to get your product in the hands of as many influencers as possible. The idea here if you get your product in their hands, they’ll send you their address. You send them the product. Then it’s about follow up, follow up, follow up, so that you’re coming back and saying, hey, now that you have my product, how’d you like it? Would you be willing to post for me? If they do post, then it’s a matter of going back and asking for content rights and asking if they’ll post again, asking if they’ll be an ambassador for you. It’s about first getting your product in their hands and then backfilling the contract, the upfront work, with follow up to see if the influencers will continue to work with you. I guess brands here who feel like their product is so interesting that if someone had it in their hands. They would love it. That’s who I usually see going for an influencer seeding approach. Now, just numbers speaking here. I like influencer seeding because of its simplicity and there’s also a low barrier to entry for influencers. Right, hey, I’m just going to send you some product. Having correct expectations is probably the most important thing for seeding. You’re going to have to contact probably 500 influencers. You’re going to get maybe 100 responses, maybe 50 of them are going to send you their address and then maybe 20 of them are going to end up posting for you. There’s some variability on the numbers there, but those numbers are probably at least in the ballpark of what you’d expect if you’re running a seeding campaign.
Greg: 10:04
Cool.
Shawn: 10:05
That’s number one. Number two is product for post, kind of like seeding, but instead of you saying hey, no strings attached, you’re actually saying hey, I’m going to send you product and I expect you to post for me. The upfront expectation is slightly different. I prefer this one over seeding slightly because at least when you send product, you know that it’s going to do you some good. The difference here is you’re going to have a lot less influencers, fewer influencers who are going to accept to work with you on a product exchange basis. Again, as far as expectations go, you’re probably reaching out to 500 influencers to get I don’t know 10 to 15 who end up will post for you. The other asterisk to this would be the more that you ask from an influencer, and you’ll see that through the theme of what I continue to talk about. The more that you ask from an influencer, then the more that they’re going to require from you. The lowest hanging fruit for an influencer, the easiest thing you can ask from them, is an Instagram story. There’s low commitment, low production. If you’re going to do a product for a post, I have no problem starting with an Instagram story. You have an agreement in place. You get some interaction with influencers, you see how it is to work with them, how their audience resonates, and then you can get something more formal after you work with them on a product for post agreement.
Greg: 11:42
That’s strategy number two.
Shawn: 11:43
Number three strategy is, instead of trying to get influencers to work with you in exchange for product, it’s working with influencers in exchange for payment, just a flat fee. You might go to an influencer, a micro influencer, and say, hey, we’ll pay you $250 and we’ll give you some product if you’re willing to post an Instagram reel and an Instagram story for me something along those lines. If you have the budget to pay influencers, you’re going to find, by and large, the most influencers willing to work with you on this type of engagement, whereas before you had to reach out to 500 influencers to get 10 to post. Well, now you only have to reach out to maybe 30 to get 10 to post, just because most influencers are readily willing to take this type of engagement. It’s almost a trade off of your time for the previous types of engagements versus the upfront cost of working with influencers on a paper post. I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. I think paper post is. You’re going to have a lot easier of a time, but it really just depends on your brand and your situation. If you have the resources to pay influencers, you’re going to save yourself a lot of time and a lot of headache to try and get influencers to say yes and then get influencers to post because they’re highly incentivized to post because they’re paying. The one note to speak to that too is if you are paying influencers generally I don’t pay influencers until they post because, again, we’re trying to keep them incentivized through the campaign so that they actually post If you pay them before they post, you’re going to lose a lot of incentive for them to actually post. Something’s going to come up. They’re going to get busy. This isn’t all influencers, but it’s happened before where it takes a month, two months, three months for them to post because you paid them before they posted and they lose the incentive it’s always good to have in your contract. If you are paying an influencer upfront, say hey, I’m going to pay you 24, 48 hours after you post or whatever your timeline is. That keeps them engaged and incentivized in the campaign, so it’ll go a lot faster and a lot smoother for you. Number four is white listing, spark ads, branded ads there’s so many names for the same thing. The premise is you’re going to go to an influencer like you would with one of the first three types of strategies seeding product for post or paper post as the influencer posts, you can request a code from them that will allow you to boost their post in your TikTok ads manager, your Facebook ads manager or your meta ads manager so that you can essentially run an ad from their post, from their account. All you need is that code from an influencer once they post. The benefit of these types of ads and honestly, I’m seeing this more and more and I will say I’m seeing it more and more from the top like e-commerce brands, the brands who feel like they know what they’re doing and running ads, are focusing heavily on running white listed or branded ads, spark ads. The benefit is you take an influencer’s organic reach and you’re able to see kind of whose organic reach is performing well, so that gives you some insight into which posts likely will perform better as a boosted post. So you’re getting some traction up front. You’re getting some insight before you even boost it, so you know where to allocate budget. But it also allows the algorithm to know from the organic reach who’s interacting with this. It feeds the algorithm before you even run the post or boost the post, boost the ad, so it has more data before you even run it. That’s one benefit which ultimately means Cheaper views, cheaper results, because the algorithm has more information. Tiktok is especially good with Spark ads is what they’re called on Tiktok. They’re especially good with these because when you run a spark ad, not only does it allow you to boost the post, but it also, like, takes the organic post and it will run the organic post higher and higher, whereas Instagram it almost makes like two different posts. Hmm, so you have like your organic post and you have the ad post. It’s very confusing how they’re doing it. Sometimes it looks like it’s boosting their post, other times it doesn’t. But I know for sure Tiktok is taking the influencers organic posts from their profile and that’s where it’s. That’s what it’s boosting. So Spark ad seem to be Tiktok seems to be a really strong Way to run those, those boosted ads. I Also have seen. If you want, let’s say, you get an awesome post from an influencer and you think the content is great and you’re not necessarily focused on like a conversion ad, but you’re thinking, man, I just need as many eyeballs as I can get on on this influencers post. I’ve never seen any cheaper CPMs than I have with spark ads. So if you get an interest post, you boost that thing. It’s like I think I’ve seen as low as, like a dollar, dollar fifty for a CPM. It’s crazy. Also it was wild because you’re also getting the influencers organic Reach to feed the the paid, so the CPMs can be ridiculously cheap if you get a good influencers post on it. Tiktok spark ad.
Greg: 17:27
I keep wondering how long is this gonna last, for like it’s too good to be true.
Shawn: 17:33
They must be. They must be feeding it, like I Assume they’re trying to incentivize more brands to do this and so they’re publicly giving you favorable Costs on this. It may be you’re right. I haven’t seen it slow down in the past. It’s been maybe 18 months since I’ve seen people doing these and even walk tracking them, so has it slowed down yet? Yeah, it’s good. Now the fifth one, and again, I don’t know if you want to put this under influencer marketing, but I will, and I see a lot of others talking about this under the realm of influencer marketing, so it’s related. But you have your like affiliate and ambassador feel with an influencer, which is more of like a commission based, will give you 25% of every sale that you drive In the. On the brand side of things, man, they want to do this all day long and I understand it from as a. From a brand’s perspective, I would want to do this all day long. I’ll give you 20 25 percent of every sale. Okay, I heard you are, but if you’re an influencer, heck, yeah, I’ll do that all day long. From the influencers perspective, they get pitched these deals Left and right, like they’re getting. If you have a hundred thousand followers on any platform, you’re probably getting 50 messages a day and 90% of them are pitching you this type of engagement. So it is hard to get an influencers attention when you are out of the gate pitching them an affiliate and an ambassador, you, a commission Structure. If you don’t have any sort of flat fee associated with it, it’s hard to get an influencers attention. It can be done. I’ve seen it be done. But I will say you’re, you’re. You got to be ready for an uphill battle because influencers Get pitched these types of deals on a very regular basis because it makes so much for the brand. If you are going down the affiliate or ambassador route, my suggestion for you would be starting with one of our previous types of engagements seating, product or post, anything really to get your foot in the door, to get them Associate with your brand, your product, so that they start to fall in love with your brand. Then it’s more of a true ambassador anyway, because they already have had to expose you to brand. They’re their fans of your brand. Their likelihood to do something on commission is going to go through the roof. But if you pitch them cold out of the gate to do an affiliate or to an ambassador deal, commission deal, it can be done, but you’re gonna have a harder time and influencers, nine times out of ten, are gonna come back and say I’m prioritizing. Paid collabs is the term I hear all the time. So there may be something there for some brands, particularly if maybe you are brand that has lots of followers and maybe an Influencer is already a big fan of yours, so maybe you can go and get some low-hanging fruit there. But generally speaking, if you’re going cold to an influencer, philly ambassador is an awesome strategy for brands, so I’m not knocking at all, but you’re just gonna have an uphill battle if you’re going after that route.
Greg: 20:37
Yeah for sure, cool, cool. You know, as you shared those examples, those those different strategies, you know, the one thing that really hit home to me Is it’s just it’s a lot of work, right is? It’s a lot of effort and a lot of outreach and a lot of negotiations. So I kind of dovetails into my next question is what is the most effective way to engage Influencers and why?
Shawn: 21:05
You know, it’s almost like an SDR, like a sales rep who’s trying to get leads and set meetings. It’s almost the same process. It’s the most similar process I’ve experienced to recruiting influencers, where you go build your list of prospects so figure out who your target customer is or your target audience. Go find the influencers who are reaching your target audience based off of keywords, hashtags, words or phrases in their bio, similar profiles. Go, build your list of prospects and know that a list of 10 prospects is not going to cut it. You need to build a list of prospects influencers that’s hundreds if you’re going to do anything meaningful here. So you got to build a large list of these and then you need to go through a normal outreach process, which is going to mean probably multiple points of contact, multiple emails. I will caveat that too and say if you’re trying to DM and you’re not a large brand with a big presence, you’re going to have a hard time. I mentioned that before, but you’re going to have a hard time getting even an influencer’s response. So I know it’s an extra step for brands, but emailing them versus DMing has about a 10 times or 15 times higher response rate with DMs for most brands.
Greg: 22:27
Interesting.
Shawn: 22:28
When I’ve seen others post about this on LinkedIn and I even was on a Reddit thread or some thread this last week and they were, I don’t know, bragging or saying how amazing their response rate was with influencers and it was like a 20% response rate that they’re talking about and that doesn’t seem very high. It’s actually not bad. Most brands on our platform I see are averaging about a 30 to a 40% response rate, which is better than anywhere I’ve seen. So we have some templates that you can use to help incentivize influencers. Response Of cool, but really, at the end of the day, it’s it’s quantity, it’s having a large list of influencers, it’s making sure you’re following best practice on sending them emails. You know, following up with influencers, you know in the best case scenario you would send them an email, you’d send them a DM, you’d follow their page, then you’d follow up again on email. You do all these things, which I know takes a lot of work, but if you want a higher response rate from influencers, if you want to burn through prospects, then you kind of have to put in the work to get influencers to respond. Unfortunately, that’s the case. Influencers get so many of these messages. You got to do the work to cut through the noise. Yeah, so that would be engaging with influencers how to get their attention even about. There’s going to be some light work to do that.
Greg: 24:01
Yeah, are you finding that there’s like specific hooks or or anything that you can use in your email subject line that gets more opens and gets more engagement than others?
Shawn: 24:13
Yeah, so the biggest thing is customization, unfortunately, but that’s the same with with sales outreach Right. They need to feel like you handpicked them, that you understand what they’re posting about, that you are the right fit, and if you can show that you’ve done your homework and that you have some evidence as to why you’re the right fit for them, they’re going to hear you out. And I think the reason why that works so well is because they’re getting so many of these template messages that are. They just don’t look like a human wrote them. For one, it definitely looks like a chat. He wrote them. So if you’re sending outreach messages to influencers, be weary of sending chat to you, because everyone’s doing that right now. Sure, so you’re going to get lost in the noise of all of the others who are doing it. But if you’re going to try and make a simple process, I would just customize the first line to say something about hey, I noticed this content, this post. I like that. You’ve been posting about X, y and Z. One hack, if you will around this. So if you want to use chat I’ve actually seen some success with this you can. While chat you can’t scrape Instagram for you. They can do a Bing search. So if you say, hey, I’m going to reach out to this influencer, here’s their username. Can you tell me what they post about? It’ll usually be able to tell you in a sentence or two generally what they’re posting about. You can take that and say hey, influencer, I’ve noticed that you’re posting about X, y and Z, so I wanted to reach out, and then you can go into the rest of your message. No, it’s not going to be one way to shortcut that personalization Instead of having to go through every single influencer and all their posts. Yeah, one other note here that I think will be helpful for brands. Another pitfall of engaging influencers is that first message, that first email that you send to them, needs to be short and sweet. If you get into too many details up front, if you start pitching them on your amazing affiliate commission deal that you have for them, you’re going to expect a 5% response rate. And those who do respond are going to say, hey, I’m prioritizing paid collabs right now. So I would suggest that first message is just some personalization around. Hey, I noticed this about your content. Here’s a short snippet about our brand three to five words. Hey, we’re at XYZ brand who works with target customers that match the influencers followers, and we’d love to chat about a collab with you Before I send them more details. I want to even know if you’re interested. Like what do you think? Just keep it super short, super simple. You’re going to see a much higher response rate and if you get that first response, you’re going to have a much greater chance of end up working with the influencer anyway. So don’t fall into the trap of outlining your entire website and your one page or to the influence in the first email, because influencers aren’t going to give you the time of day more often than not, at least from what I’ve seen.
Greg: 27:19
Gotcha Cool. Well, thanks for sharing. That’s awesome. So I mean, one of the burning questions that a lot of brands have is how much does influencer marketing cost?
Shawn: 27:30
Like when you look at it as a whole, broken down on maybe a month to month basis, like, what does this look like for a brand if you are paying influencers, yeah, that’s the big side note there is, if you are paying influencers a lot of the brands I talk to, maybe they don’t have the budget for influencers and so, at the end of the day, like you’re gonna pay influencers what you can, and if you don’t wanna pay influencers anything, you don’t have to. It just requires a little bit more of your time and effort, which is totally fine. You wanna go through that. That’s a very valid option and, again, I outlined some of the strategies that you might follow if you don’t wanna pay influencers up front. So that’s definitely a valid option. And so, at the end of the day, your influencer budget is what you want it to be and you build your strategy based off of what your budget is. Now, assuming you are paying influencers. There was a report that came out at the beginning of the year from Influencer Marketing Hub and it was a survey from like 3000 different brands across all industries and sizes, and it basically said all of these 3000 brands, or the majority of these 3000 brands, are having success with influencer marketing. They’re planning to increase their budget, their resources, everything from 2023 to 2024. And then it went into like the specifics of their different strategies that they were using and one point that it made was what was their monthly budget? So these brands that are having success, how much are they paying month to month? And the strong majority were paying less than $10,000 a month, and that was the lowest cap that it had. So there was nothing lower, so that we might be talking about 1000, 2000 month. I didn’t specify that much. So if you’re looking at building an influencer campaign, you don’t need tens of thousands of dollars. You may need hundreds or thousands of dollars. If I was meeting with a brand who wanted to pay influencers and they wanted to say maybe you have 10 influencers post a month, which is probably a good starting point, you would probably want to work with nano or micro influencers. So nano is like one to 10,000 followers. Micro is probably 10 to maybe 100,000 followers. Everyone has a few different definitions, parameters there, but let’s talk about that group 1,000 to 100,000 followers. You could probably hire 10 influencers and pay on average $100 to $300 per post, and per post meaning an Instagram reel, and you might be able to throw in an Instagram story on top of that or a TikTok post. So on the low end, you could reasonably set up, if you’re paying influencers, a campaign for $1,000 a month if you’re working with nano and maybe micro influencers in that as well. Maybe a quick rule of thumb, if you will. There’s a few ways I like to price influencers. For brands who are like. The quick and dirty way of how to price influencers is just one cent per follower. I’m not a huge fan of this approach because there is way too much variability. Influencers, I find, usually will price themselves based on this rule, so it’s not quite as data driven as I’d like. But 10,000 followers, 1 cent per follower, they should be around $100. Gotcha and again, that would be for maybe an Instagram reel and potentially an Instagram story as well. On top of that, maybe just a TikTok video. Depends on the influencer what you’re able to negotiate. Another way to price influencers this is maybe the next level up from just the one cent per follower is looking at it on a CPM basis. You’re able to see the views that an influencer is getting on their posts. So if you’re on Instagram, you go to their Reels tab. You can see their last 30 posts, how many views that they were getting, and I wouldn’t necessarily average those number of views because I find sponsored posts sometimes will go big, but generally you’re going to be in their first quartile. So if they have 30 posts, you’re going to land somewhere around the 9th or 10th video in that number of views. So price that accordingly to a CPM that you think is fair. I find most influencers generally end up being around a $25 to $35 CPM. When you price it that way Interesting At least you can feel a little bit better about pricing an influencer rather than the thumb in the air. One cent per follower A little bit of data there. Oddly enough, if it’s a quality influencer, it usually ends up being one cent per follower in the end, so you could just shortcut it to that. But that might be another way that brands can quickly go spot check to see what a pricing an influencer should be. I also like the idea of just having an influencer tell me what their prices are, because probably 90% of the time influencers are willing to negotiate. The influencers who are less willing to negotiate are usually the ones with agents. So if they’re being represented by an agent, know that you’re probably in for a treat there. They’re going to have an inflated price. The agent needs to make money and the influencer needs to make money. And so when I reach out to an influencer and they have 10,000 followers and they tell me that it’s going to cost $4,000 to work with them. Usually I find that it’s because they have an agent and I move on very quickly because there’s no way I would ever get a return from. I shouldn’t say no way, but I find it very hard to believe that I would get a return from an influencer with 10,000 followers for $4,000. It just feels irresponsible. So, anyway, if you find yourself in that position with an agent, well, have your red flags up already, because it’s likely that there will be an inflated cost. Influencer agents who hear this are going to be knocking on my door, but it’s the reality. From what I’ve seen, we’ve probably contacted and priced I don’t know 15,000 influencers at this point. And so, seeing it time and time and time again, and if you do come across that, it’s OK, just move on and find an influencer who will give you a better price and who will negotiate with you, that’s fine, just don’t work with that one. So there you go, for pricing.
Greg: 34:06
Awesome, all right. Last question of the day, which is probably one of the most important questions, is how do you measure the impact of individual influencers? To prove out ROI.
Shawn: 34:21
There are. I’m going to talk about three different ways. Each one gets a little bit maybe more creative, if you will. So I’ll start with what I’ve seen as like low hanging fruit and then I’ll progress from there. But the way I see most brands attempting to track ROI and what I think is probably a fair way of doing it is using affiliate links and promo codes. As we all know, influencer marketing the challenge is attribution tracking right, because they might see your post and then there’s maybe a disconnect from when they see the post to when they actually purchase. One way to at least pick up the like, I said, the low hanging fruit there, those who you can directly attribute, is affiliate links and promo codes. So like at a bare minimum, that’s at at at least a good start. Promo codes are probably the first step and then affiliate links and UTM parameters etc. Those are going to be maybe your next level up from that. But you have to think about it. When an influencer posts, unless it’s a story or a YouTube video, those have links accessible from the post right In the YouTube video. There’s a link in the description right beneath it and a story they can put a link directly in that you can click. That’s a beautiful place for an affiliate link Both of those are. You can track results perfectly there. So if you’re going that route, but if you’re getting an Instagram reel or a TikTok video, which I find most brands, that’s where their appetite is these days so if you are going that route, you’re going to find that the only reasonable place to put a link is in their bio and you’re going to be competing with other links in their bio. You’re going to be competing with someone who sees the video to be so interested that they need to go into the influencers profile. Then you click the link in bio, then they need to find a link in their link in bio, choose a link tree and you know your three or four clicks in.
Greg: 36:20
So that’s, and then you’ve got five links to compete with in their link tree.
Shawn: 36:25
You got five links. You’re getting filtered out and you got to get to your checkout page. You’re like six or seven clicks in. So someone really has to be committed. Once they see that video, and unless they’ve seen that product from 20 influencers at that point, or if they see you know one influencer in it they just love the product and even then they might take a different route to go find you. Yeah, it’s tough, it’s tricky to see the direct journey from influencer post to attribution or I guess a real or a TikTok video to attribution. It may not look so clean of this step to this step to this step. It’s usually some version of that journey, which takes me to number two, where you can kind of see that this is almost like almost like a billboard. It’s like I sometimes think of influencer marketing as a really engaging billboard where the only people driving on that road are your target customers. So it’s a nice billboard. But you can think if you’re driving on the highway and you see a billboard, well, you’re probably not going to stop and search it right then and there You’re probably going to come back to it when you get home or you’re going to have it in the back of your mind and when someone brings it to your remembrance, you know, a week later you’re going to say, oh, I’m going to go look into that. So it’s likely just going to be a Google search. They’re going to try and find your brand. They’re going to type in if you have a domain on the billboard or if the influencer has it in on the post somewhere. That’s how they’re going to go back and find you. They’re going to Google search or they’re going to go straight to your website, which means there’s a disconnect between their video and the purchase, which I’m kind of harping on this. But that’s kind of the challenge with attribution. So one way to overcome that as a brand, to track this, is having pre and post checkout surveys where you can ask questions like hey, where did you first come in contact with us? And have one of those sources be influencer. If you want to get fancy, you can ask hey, which influencer did you come across? You can track attribution that way. Again, not a perfect science, because there are other ways they may have come in contact with you. They may not remember the influencer’s name. There might be some disconnect still, but it’s a pretty solid way of tracking and I agree, you can speak to this too. Pre and post checkout surveys probably are an important tracking tool regardless of influencer marketing. You should probably have them there anyway. Now that takes me. Let me put a 2.5 in here. Now the thing about I just remember I was on Instagram last week and I saw an influencers post and I’ve been seeing these more and more recently where in the influencers caption of their post they say something like comment, shop in my or down below and I’ll send you the link in a message. And those influencers are probably well, they have to be using some sort of program like many chat. There’s others that do something automated where as soon as somebody comments a keyword as a comment, then it automatically pushes out a message that the influencer can set up or you can set up with the influencer. So that might be another way of directly tracking attribution. You can have the influencer set up some sort of many chat automation. It’s an extra step for you and you’re going to have to work with the influencer, but it could be a powerful way, especially if you’re using kind of a like a spark ad type tool where you’re just trying to get as many views on it and engagements. We’ll just throw that in there. As soon as the follower comments on it sends them an affiliate link to your page so you can track from start to finish there too. So anyway, that one just came back to me, but that would be another side note that brands may look into Cool, which takes me now to number three, maybe the most creative approach here. I’ve seen other brands do this and I will say the brands who I see having the most success with influencers generally are following this, and which is odd because it’s probably the least attributable, like directly attributable. But the brands I’ve worked with that seem to be having the most success with influencers is they’re looking at more of just a lift of their brand. They realize that if someone sees a TikTok post, even if you do have a link in bio, they’re probably just going to go to Google and they’re going to search your brand. They’re going to go to Google, they’re going to say enter brand here. They’re going to show from a Google search that they went to your page and then it’s going to look like your Google ads are killing it, which is great. But really what it is, it’s coming from some activity that’s happening on TikTok or Instagram that’s driving those Google searches or it’s driving your page traffic from some sort of traffic or source besides a link in bio. And so the way that you might approach this is looking on a more granular basis, like a day over day or even, if you want to be super granular, an hour over hour basis of influencers views and then layering that on with how many Google search or your Google search volume on an hourly basis or your page, your website traffic on an hourly basis. That does give you a little bit more insight into what are these views from an influencers post actually doing. You’re seeing at least some activity that’s directly attributed from a view to your web traffic or your Google search volume. So that would be a third way that brands want to get creative. I’ve seen them have some success doing that.
Greg: 42:18
Great, awesome. Yeah, I love that you talked about post purchase surveys. I mean, we talk about those a lot and I talk about those a lot on LinkedIn. I mean, they’re only as good as they are, though, right, I think average response rate on those things are about 40%, and so it’s not everyone, but it does give you some good insights, and I think that you’ve shared some good examples and ways to be able to track that and figure out the return and the effectiveness of those influencers. Good stuff there, awesome, all right. Well, I mean, that wraps up our discussion today. So thanks so much, sean, for your time and your insights. That was a really good discussion.
Shawn: 43:04
Thanks, greg, I appreciate you having me on.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
