#everything-marketing

@Wyatt Kern

We’ve found no single approach to the influencer channel works best in isolation, but the large majority of brands find best results utilising a mixture of three core strategies. That is:

1. Influencer Seeding
2. Influencer-Affiliate
3. Paid Partnerships Each funnels into the next. Do seeding at scale, then nurture into affiliates, then run paid partnerships with the best.

In the ‘mumfluencers’ niche in particular this works incredibly well (being the most engaged audience on Instagram). We’ve outreached over 4000 Mumfluencers for one client alone (8-figure personal care brand) and consistently see great results both with awareness and conversions.

While I can’t share detailed info on public forum, ping me a DM and can go into more details on any queries about how best to approach influencer as a channel

I think a clarity on your immediate goals would be a big determinant in which org you put this under but I would also put it under performance. Are you using influencers for more of TOF awareness or are you also hoping they’d drive sales for you?

For Hexclad, their partnership with Gordon Ramsey has added a lot to their Brand equity. And I am sure it is one of the top drivers of their sales. That’s a rare case where a celebrity partnership levels up your brand AND boosts your sales

If you run of lot of influencer content as ads or do whitelisting, that would also add to the case you should put it under performance to create more collaberation between those teams

Build influencer-affiliate programs for all our clients. Agree with both Luke’s points.

Also some other tips:

• Work on non-monetary ways to celebrate affiliates reaching sales milestones (personalised video from the founder works pretty well)
• #1 driver for how much content affiliates is (and will always be) the affiliate offer. We stack free product + welcome gift + high commission
• Seed product first to increase affiliate sign-up rates
• An ‘instagrammable’ unboxing experience makes a huge difference
• Building a system for regular check-ins saves heaps of time

Hi all, Does anyone work with a celebrity/influencer brand who might be interested in free retail space in Los Angeles for 2025?

I represent Beverly Center, an iconic Taubman Company shopping center in West Hollywood. They are looking to amp up their brand popups in 2025. They will provide free retail space at Beverly Center (and a possible small fee) to secure a celebrity or influencer-fronted brand to execute a popup. I'm at priscila@thebrand-agency.com|priscila@thebrand-agency.com if you want to send a note.

Happy to swap time for anything influencer-affiliate!

We have a new version of our product coming out and I would like to start utilizing influencers more. We sell baby products and the mom-influencer world is huge. However I get confused with how we should go about it.

It seems like there are a few different avenues. We could pay influencers to make distinct ad posts, we could pay influencers to do more “stealth” ads where they just incorporate our product in their page, or we could pay them to make more “UGC” style videos that would benefit us on our website and ads. Does this sort of encompass the different avenues people most often use influencers in their marketing mix?

We are still small so I am planning on manually reaching out to influencers. Should we plan on paying them per post/UGC video? Do you do up front payment + affiliate commission? How have you been able to get the most value out of influencers or what has been most effective?

I’m trying to wrap my head around all this, but I might be making it more complicated than it actually is.

If anyone has good resources in mind, feel free to pass them along.

Influencer Platforms: We are looking to work with one starting this month to get 10-20 USA based influencers with 100,000-1,000,000 followers to review our baby monitors and security cameras per month that have some credibility in those respective spaces. We will pay affiliate commissions of around 6% and our ASP’s are $300. Ideally we don’t want to pay them any fixed fees as well, but are open to to pay up to $200 for high quality influencers in addition to the affiliate commission. Our goals are to drive sales primarily from the influencer reviews directly with a secondary objective of getting content to repurpose into ads to drive more sales and lastly use these for social proof throughout site and social channels.

We have tried minisocial, social cat, Shopify Collabs and influencer candy so far, but these junior platforms haven’t been successful for us.

We are willing to spend more to work with stronger mid size platforms, but hate the yearly contract lock in some of these platforms have and prefer a month to month deal.

Can anyone help with insight for platforms they have “actually” worked with that might suit our needs? Looking to hear specifically about pricing and pitfalls on any of these providers and any feedback on how to run a successful influencer campaign would be awesome as well. Thank you very much for any help! :)

@Tilen Krivec apologies for the delay in response mate.

For start ups we typically go fairly broad at the 3-100k. We outline engagement rate benchmarks for each range as an indicator for performance (eg we’re looking for 5%+ ER for influencers with 3-10k followers, while usually around 1.5%+ ER for influencers with 50-100k followers).

Exception to the rule is if you’re looking to build affiliate or retainer partnerships with influencers post-seeding (which a lot of the brands we work with do). In this case, there’s a case to only work with influencers with 10k+ followers due to their ability to add links as ‘swipe-up stories’, which typically have highest CVR for us.

2.
Definitely use ‘no strings attached messaging’. As @Tom Brown - BRND Labs mentions, asking for honest feedback is the way to go for building strong relationships. Despite this we typically see 35-50% of influencers post, producing 2.5-3.0 creatives each on average. Consistent communication with influencers is key here, and extra points for onboarding onto an ambassador/affiliate program

Re packaging, I have some examples from clients that I can send over if you’d like - DM me if so!

Hope this helps and good luck 💪

For those that are doing a lot of influencer seeding, what is your process and what are some best practices we should be a aware of?

We are wanting to send our pizza dough out to 20–30 micro and nano influencers but we only sell/fulfill out of the US, so our influencers need to be in the US as well.

We are starting with Instagram and have found a few manual techniques to find influencers, but it's a lot of manual work considering most we come across are not in the US.

How do we do this at scale where we're seeding 50–100 new influencers per month, and what's the best way to keep track of each influencer?

Preventing Influencer Code Leakage: I've been seeing a lot of chatter lately about Social Snowball, which has a Safelink feature that automatically issues unique discount codes to customers who click on an influencer's affiliate link.
• The problem is that in my experience, affiliate links massively underperform standard influencer discount codes, because influencers aren't able to share direct links on Instagram posts and Reels.
• Currently, we audit discount code sales in GA4 and remove referral traffic from discount code aggregators before we pay commissions, but this is a very manual process.
• Does anyone have a better solution for using static influencer discount codes, while preventing leakage?

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.

What we at Groflo.io do for a lot of clients is provide them with unique links for each influencer to use. The link drives people to a digital coupon for an in-store purchase. When someone buys in brick & mortar, we can track which influencer drove the sale. Then we pay out commissions on behalf of the brand. So now your influencer campaigns can be data-drive and performance based instead of just throwing money at influencers and hoping to see a sales lift. Let me know if you would like to know more.

@Sambhav Chadha @Tom Brown - BRND Labs

Hey, just starting product seeding with a small brand, so low number of products sent.

1. For starting out, would you go with getting bigger local influencers and making a more custom goodie boxes, mid-sized influencers or actually go to people not even real influencers, but more focused that they fit the target persona for our future customers.
2. How do you structure the initial communications, i'm guessing its a different approach than influencer collabs, here you're not really asking them for "deliverables", more just sending the product to test out and what... "please share it if you want to"? type of messaging? I'm sending out products that are in the 40-60€ price range for context

We have a dedicated influencer manager who also handles organic social.

A good influencer program is mostly about relationships. Understanding what works for one-off quid pro quo arrangements, what works with ongoing ambassadors and brand partners, etc.

The outputs of our influencer program then tend to fall either in brand or performance, depending.

So we now have a critical mass of Youtube reviews across dozens of micro and major influencers that now generate huge returns in terms of awareness and sales. We also have on-going "ephemeral" content on Instagram and Tik Tok that helps us gauge the fit of a creators audience and the quality of their content. From there we license the best stuff and turn it into performance creative.

In terms of responsibilities, the head of marketing works with the social/influencer manager to determine & manage budgets/negotiations. When new UGC comes in, the media buyer (myself) works with the social department to review the content and earmark it for licensing/re-purposing.

Full disclosure I work at Skeepers, but we're an influencer marketing platform and our whole goal is to allow brands to work with influencers at scale. Brands set up campaigns and the influencers raise their hand to participate in the campaigns you launch (this is just for gifting and just with micro/nano influencers) but happy to share more info if you're interested

@Cody Wittick I thought it was valuable to know the numbers! It definitely encouraged me to start product seeding.

1. I've been very picky about influencers, so this was helpful for me to be a bit more open about who I send to.
2. I still have some questions about engagement rate. 1% seems good for the massive influencers, but are there any guidelines for those who are using micro-influencers? 1% seems very low for someone with say, 10k followers. I'm sure it varies drastically based on the niche.
3. It helped me to significantly reduce my email length to the influencer, which seems to have a higher response rate.
4. I think it would be beneficial to dig deeper into how to capitalize more on this this from an organic marketing perspective. I think it's great for those who are doing ads to use the organic content they're getting. I've found that there's so much content around ads, so would be cool to have someone as knowledgeable as you talk about how to further utilize organic.
5. I loved the ad comparison, I was not expecting the last ad to perform well. I think this is still super useful for organic, so it's something I want to try out on my Pinterest account.
6. I definitely plan on re-visiting this when I incorporate ads into my marketing strategy! Overall, I found it really succinct and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to offer this info for free!

@Dan Staub’s advice is solid ^

Best to think in terms of CPMs

That said, chances are you'll get a better CPM on Meta Ads unless you can afford to stand up an influencer campaign with several influencers

I wouldn't be concerned with hiring influencers unless you've already proven you can sell your product though

You only really want to run influencer campaigns when you can afford to hire a bunch at once to trigger the "oh wow everybody is talking about XYZ brand" effect

Hiring creators on the other hand for ad content is a different story, if that's what you're asking about.

Reach out to a higher volume of creators (i.e. 1,000) and tell them your rate range. That way you can weed out the creators with high rates.

Email 1:
Ask if available for a collab. No links in your email. No mention of money, product, or anything. Simply asking. That way it's more likely to land in their Primary Inbox.

Email 2:
Once they reply, you can now send them links to your creator brief + budget range.

I've used tools like SARAL to export hundreds of creators and then bulk email via YAMM

Lmk if you have any questions!

❓Influencer Marketing Strategy Resources❓
I'm looking for resources on strategy creation for brands for their influencer marketing programs. Most of the things I've found online are for creators, not brands. This is a new area of focus for our company this year and I'm not entirely sure where to start.
• Who are the best people to follow to learn about brand strategy for influencer marketing?
• Are there any masterminds for directors of marketing about influencer marketing?
• Are there any online courses/live events I should look into?
We're currently using GRIN and working with our CSM but would like to dive deeper into the strategy side of things. Thanks!

We seed 1000+ influencers per month across clients like lululemon, Fussy etc.

Fundamentally hard to track results from seeding, so instead we typically use it as a funnel to bring influencers in on an affiliate capacity.

Basically seed influencer -> build relationship -> convert into affiliate.

Then use UTM links and discount codes for hard attribution, post purchase survey for soft attribution.

We use a number of different discovery platforms to find influencers (Tagger, Modash, SARAL, Archive) and typically find 15-25 vetted, high quality profiles per hour.

The way that I finally confirmed my influencer strategy is working for new customer awareness is using a post purchase survey and asking 1st time customers "how did you first hear about us?". Included all the normal channels (google, ig, tt, word of mouth, in-store, etc). We add "Influencer" as an option as well, and when they choose that they are asked an additional question of "Which influencer" and they are able to write in which one. We review this monthly and can see where and who is driving our TOF awareness. We use KnoCommerce for the survey. If you use TripleWhale they have one as well.

For those of you who use a lot of influencer marketing, have you found a specific type of influencer content type that converts well?

I'm working with a nano influencer and I'm her first brand (I'm also pretty new to this type of marketing), and she's wondering how best to showcase my products. I have some ideas for what I want, but wanted to check in here and see if anyone had specifics/data on what works best!

Great question mate. Need to essentially find the sweet spot between both. Identify 2/3 niches you believe you have product market fit in - 2/3 different audience niches, then be very selective about the influencers within these niches.

Look at:
• engagement rate
• Authenticity rate
• Influencer demographics
• Audience demographics
• Audience sentiment and content style
What's good to remember is that through influencers you'll unlock markets you may never have thought of. For example, in targeting mumfluencers, you access a slightly older female audience.

D2C ecommerce founders and operators let’s settle this debate:

In the marketing org where should influencer marketing go?

I can see the different benefits and disadvantages of putting it under performance or brand marketing? What do you do?

Or does it go right under marketing leader?

I know it depends on goals, but what are your goals with influencer marketing in 2023? Conversion or brand credibility? Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?

I’m leaning towards performance because you want your influencer program to be focused on revenue generating KPIs and have a positive ROI (which is very possible, usually with micro level). Content/brand credibility/social proof is more of a positive side effect.

Hi all!

Does anyone have recommendations for agencies that specialize in direct response paid celebrity partnerships? We use BM Digital for gifting micro influencers partnerships, Influencer Response for paid mid-tier influencer partnerships, and now we're looking to test into the celebrity category.

Thanks for your help!

You can use influencer marketing. But use Groflo's digital coupons so that you can track which influencers drive in-store sales. Then drop the ones that don't and put the good ones on commission. Now your influencer campaign can be data-driven and performance-based. Let me know if you would like to know more