#everything-marketing
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Does anyone have a strong understanding around creator / UGC / influencer marketing they can share to help shed some light on a topic that feels like a huge can of worms? Especially around Tik Tok vs Instagram right now.
Nik had some really interesting points on leveraging Tik Tok creators for top of funnel creative: 1) That they are relatively better value for building awareness than solely relying on Meta ads; and 2) You can leverage the highest performing creative in your paid ads to improve conversion.
This sounds very appealing, but I have a couple questions/topics I don’t understand, mostly around how this Tik Tok creator strategy compares to traditional ‘influencer’ marketing on Instagram:
1. Is this ‘arbitrage’ Tik Tok specific? Is it because Tik Tok has a better interface for finding / working with creators compared to Instagram?
2. How does finding Tik Tok creators relate to what I understand as a more traditional ‘influencer marketing’ tactic of searching for micro-influencers, doing product seeding, and bringing them on as affiliates? Is that traditional process just more of an Instagram thing because of the way Tik Tok allows you to interface with creators?
3. How highly would you all prioritize Tik Tok over Instagram right now for smaller brands who have minimal creator / UGC / influencer led content?
Nik’s recommendations for Tik Tok were really exciting, so I’d love to hear any thoughts you all have on the above.
Actually, this is more nuanced than it is made out to be. Every major network, TikTok, Instagram, and even YT now, has an affiliate management system, allowing creators to tag products, and get commissions. They may order it of their own accord, or they may actively be pursued by your team.
You can possibly find freelancers in India & Pakistan, that will do the "outreach" on TikTok for you for $100/week and will send out anywhere between 100-500 requests per day
You get a ton of free sample requests, but the pain is in filtering out the ones that are freeloaders, aka live their lives off of free product, have 10K followers all built off of every conceivable form of product that they can get their hands on (happy to share some links with you)
So what do you do? Well, you bring a staff member on board (or an agency - not so subtle plug, is it now, is it? 😉 ) that takes the pain out of filtration process and builds you genuinely interested creators for TOFU awareness.
Next, you build PR style machine with mid funnel blogs, like vice, refinery29 etc that do commission deals to include you in the "top perfumes we tested this January" and so on, gets you more content rich exposure
Last, but not in any way least, is the coupons, deals and rewards websites. Look Nik hates honey, but (that's part of a different discussion and we can debate till the cows come home) there is no way you can avoid them in the ecosystem. They're just too big to ignore, because whether you like it or not, your customers WILL go searching for coupon codes right before they enter their credit card
One of our best sources of new business, is coupon sites, where we pay <8% commissions, and get nearly 90% first time customers, that we wouldn't have ever found otherwise - and I have done incrementality testing on this.
The bottom-line being, influencer marketing has diminished to a point, where your buyer does understand the difference between a promoted post and a genuine product review, and cares deeply about the creators true intent and purpose
You cannot build it in-house, unless you're 9 figures or more, because it needs a team (or an agency, another plug 🙂 )
Happy to answer questions, though, even walk you through some of this - no sales pressure - but I've been in the affiliate industry for over 25 years now to try and sell the concept.
BTW, our motto (if you went on our about page is) you buy when you want, when you're ready, we don't need to sell you anything at any time.
@Sandeep Bansal - why not just present a 1st time customer with a 10% promo or free shipping at check out and save the commission as part of your own margin?
@Avery Mehlhorn where do you get that customer from? The structure I'm describing above is to actually build free traffic (and then you can offer whatever you want to them, either through the affiliate - claim 15% off with my coupon, or direct - welcome fans of XYZ, here's a special offer for you) but you do need to get that customer to your site first, right?\
@Sandeep Bansal - talking about the incrementality of Coupon Sites. 100% agree that people search for codes before entering a cc, but you've already done to work to get them there, vs Honey etc. (at least I haven't seen a trend of brand discovery happening via coupon sites). So why give that margin away when you can give them an offer to get them across the finish line?
Yes, of course you can, in my experience, the reason to have a coupon site is this - lets say you sell baby clothing, the prospect isn't really on your site but on hannah andersson and they're trying to buy a gift for their new born nephew, or grandson... and they have a 10% discount code so they want to find a discount code of higher value - they searched online, a site like retailmenot or honey (because of their SEO) appeared in their feed, and they clicked on that page, but that page said the code only worked 60% of the time, here are some other codes you might like - and then, they get your code, which is 15%, so now, suddently, they get your code click on it and come to your site - that's discovery, via a coupon site - there's a lot (and I repeat a looooooot of traffic like this) that's first time visitor, that discovers your brand through coupon websites. that's why you need them in the mix
super interesting! TYSM
<@U081XNJ7FTL> looks interesting, would you be open to a quick call to see if there's a fit for some of our brands
@Sandeep Bansal Thanks for the input!
<@U07KL3TGX8X> This is awesome. I’m still looking through, will shoot you some thoughts when I process everythign