influencer marketing 101

Heeeeelllllooooo! Another Thursday, another newsletter.

3 weeks of travel in and your girl is ready to go HOME. I am tan, still stuffed with jamon from Spain, and craving routine. I’ve been staying in Sarasota in Florida for the last two weeks right on the beach and honestly it reminded me that winter shouldn’t exist.

Anywho, back to NYC we go to get an actual start on the new year. Anyone else feel like January has been a weird month? Please tell me I’m not alone.

If you’re around this weekend and live in New York, I am starting off strong this Saturday with a little 4 mile-ish run (that I hope I can finish) led by my client, Graza, and the wonderful folks at Bandit Running and the Greenpoint Runners. I know some of you reading this are already signed up, but if you want to join, just click here! Hope to see ya there! All paces are welcome so no pressure.

Today’s topic? How to become besties with influencers.

We’ll chat:

• Why should you work with influencers and why they can support your biz

• How to find influencers that can support your brand and initiatives whether online or offline through retail (and how to talk to them without sounding like a robot)

• When you should work with influencers for your brand (hint: always)

We’re keepin’ it simple and straightforward this week.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by my fam at Social Snowball, one of the platforms I love using for influencer attribution and gifting. It’s similarly loved by brands I admire in the space such as True Classic, Fanjoy, and Tabs Chocolate.

If you’re a brand looking to lower your customer acquisition costs, increase your monthly revenue, search and find new creators, improve your community efforts, especially when it comes to rewarding your top customers and creators, Social Snowball is one of the platforms you really should not be scrolling by on.

Also, keep it a secret, but their AI Influencer Discovery tool is officially in beta and Noah and the team are letting you guys be the first to try it when you click here. 

Anyway, here’s how Social Snowball is changing the influencer game:

First off, it’s important to mention that the modern day affiliate has changed. It is no longer just publications you might be featured in. It is influencers, creators, and even customers!!!! I get too passionate about this stuff, but anyway, look at this:

ACCURATE (!!) Influencer campaign attribution: A word that seems to cause a lot of ruckus in the marketing community. Track all of your influencer revenue in one place. Create separate programs easily for different creators with unique attribution settings. I personally like tiering and separating campaigns for new product campaigns, retail awareness initiatives based on location, and more. Plus, instead of spending so much time in Google’s Campaign IRL Builder, you can autogenerate UTM links and discount codes for those who sign up. UTMs ARE UNDERRATED IN GENERAL SOMEHOW. PLEASE USE THEM.

Drive More Revenue: Brands like Tabs Chocolate increased top-line revenue by 17% thanks to being able to configure, organize multiple creator campaigns at one time, see real time attribution to be able to help performance, and save up to 10+ hours a week. Just an extra added bonus. Although brands benefit, so do their customers and creators.

Automate Product Seeding and Gifts: Save hours of time of answering DMs and making sure you actually sent that order out by replacing it with Social Snowball’s easy gifting tool. You can automatically send gifts to new creators when they join so that they can get to doing their thing. It doesn’t stop there. Create tiered incentives that allow creators to unlock gifts and products from your Shopify catalog as they reach performance goals. They choose what they want, submit their shipping, and an order is automatically made in Shopify. Chef’s kiss.

Social Snowball doesn’t only help make your influencer marketing initiatives easier, but it transforms a very important aspect for businesses that is overwhelming into an easy experience that allows you to stay organized, increase your revenue, and have data that will inform your future decisions as you expand your creator efforts.

To learn more about Social Snowball, check them out here.

WHY SHOULD YOU WORK WITH INFLUENCERS

There are really four reasons why influencer marketing should be part of your strategy. Before we get into this, I am also not saying you need to spend $1,000,000 to make things happen. We’re chatting baby steps so keep reading and stay with me here. If you’re looking to do more paid partnerships with creators, I can do a whole newsletter on that.

1. Increase Brand Awareness: All influencers have a “purpose”. Some may convert more than others. Some may drive more awareness to your accounts. At the end of the day, the more hands you’re in, the more you become known. Plus, FOMO IS REAL.

   Yes, whether an influencer is nano, micro, and macro still apply and each have different KPIs, but those aren’t set in-stone, but more so expectations. Being that the creator community is always changing, note which group influencers fall into so they can be approached effectively.

2. Build Community: Instead of always trying to get the #1 person in the space, you should be using influencers has a way to expand your reach into new niches, strengthen your brand within your main niche.

   A simple example of this is getting your product into videos and into hands that people would not really expect. For example, when I started on Graza, my goal wasn’t to only get it into the hands of some of biggest folks like the Molly Baz’s of the world (who did end up posting IG Stories - love you, Molly), but to completely go after communities where olive oil can be used even if people wouldn’t expect it. In an execution format, this can look like active seeding to new communities every month or working on collaborative posts with creators on Instagram.

3. Acquire UGC: #Content. People buy from people. Being able to have influencers that people respect or just hearing someone’s true feelings towards your product can help efforts across organic social, e-mail, paid media via whitelisting, and more.

4. Increase Sales, Conversion, or Traffic: Please note that you should not be expecting all of this immediately from the start. Yes, you might have someone completely sell you out unexpectedly because they love the product that much, but while you’re starting out, you cannot expect sales allllll the time. Increase brand awareness to increase traffic. Increase traffic to increase conversion and then increase your sales 🙂 Be everywhere first and then see where your loyalists are. Of course, it is harder to know the attribution from creators once things move offline. Not all creators will convert and you must remember that more followers ≠ more dollars, followers, etc.

SOURCING THE RIGHT CREATORS

Listen, I know it’s so easy to what to only focus on the biggest creators in the game because people love them or say “yes” to every single inbound request or “UGC creator” (iykyk), BUT you have to be strategic. Think about how the influencers you work with can support partnerships, new product launches, events, and more.

When it comes to finding new faces, here are quick and easy tactics:

• Use tools that are accessible to get started as you begin building your influencer lists. If you’re working on a retailer-oriented campaign (ex. Walmart), you might need to find creators who have mostly audiences in Florida and Texas. These tools can help make sure their audience breakdowns are accurate.

• Use the “suggested follows” features on Tiktok and Instagram. For every person you love, you can find another 10 you might similarly want to send to.

• Make the communities that creators have built work for you. Go through their comments to see who else is commenting on their content or perhaps even mentioning your brand down the road. See a clear example here. Go through who those creators are also following to find like-minded folks.

If you’re open to spending a smidge of cash money:

• Virtual assistants can change your life. For the last 2+ years, I have worked with a virtual assistant who helps me source influencers based on criteria I am given, handle outreach, shipping orders via Shopify, and more.

• Use tools and play around with free trials. Save time, stay organized, and scale your efforts faster than being the only one doing it all.

KNOWING HOW TO HANDLE OUTREACH IS TRULY AN ART

Robot talk is out in ‘24. If you’re sending the same generic copy and paste messages still, you cannot complain that people aren’t answering you. People want to know that it’s a real person behind the screen. Be a human, get specific, form a connection.

Are there ways that can help your output increase? Sure, of course.

1. Keyboard Shortcuts + Saved Replies. I don’t get why people don’t use them more. I like personally having a few outreach messages for each client that I work with to keep things fresh, funky, and fun. To be able to maximize outreach, I can simply type like “outreach” and one of those prompts will load immediately in. From there, I like to build on top of it to make it more personal. You can do these so easily in Instagram and make ones that relate to different parts of the business (CX, wholesale, etc.)

When it comes to my outreach, I am a huge fan of asking a question that is rhetorical. Your goal should be use these as a north star of the ways to make the answer from the creator an instant “yes”, but also when you see a situation of a creator posting something where you could act - have fun with your message. You cannot plan everything in how you communicate, creators can tell. Also, stop forcing affiliate links at the first interaction - they don’t even know if they like you yet!!!

2. Depending on the time of campaign that you’re doing, I always love having a campaign/influencer brief that lists information about the brand, the deliverables the brand is looking for, timelines, etc. Otherwise, I always love having an easy one-pager about the brand I can share with creators if needed, especially if it’s a more detailed product that needs extra explanation.

3. Just be HONEST. Stop wasting your time and others. Want to work with a creator? Tell them in what capacity, what you can offer, what you’re expecting (more in the case if it was a paid partnership), all in one e-mail if you’re already familiar and/or friendly with said person.

Quick Format Below:

[INTRODUCE YOURSELF]

[WHAT DO WE WANT TO DO WITH THEM]

[WHAT CAN WE GIVE THEM IF THEY PARTICIPATE]

[CREATIVE EXPECTATION] [REMEMBER TO ATTACH BRIEF TO EMAIL]

[ IS THERE A DEADLINE? ADD IT]

WHEN SHOULD YOU BEGIN WORKING WITH INFLUENCERS

From the start, y’all. Yes, I know some products are more expensive than others to ship so it might not be the easiest, but you should still be building our your yearly plan thinking how you can use creators to support launches, retail initiatives, and more.

Anyway, here are just some general rules and things I want to reiterate:

• Integrate influencer posts into the marketing plan overall because it’s one part of a blanketed approach. It can make your efforts stronger.

  • If you have a great product with great branding, it will want to be shared. Product gifting in high volume can allow you to give the “everywhere” affect. That should be the goal. Bonus: If you’re a product that has multiple servings or multiple uses, the more chances you have to be shared so think about experiences where a creator can feature you more than just once OR make sure your unboxing experience is dang good.

• In pre-launch? or launching something new? Start early. Build relationships. Get people hyped. Collect e-mails. Get feedback. Work ahead enough that they can receive product, try it, and send content back to you for approval, if paid.

• Back again with testing influencers outside the spaces where people would NOT expect you to be. This diverts from the norm and can force a pause when scrolling. There is always crossover appeal. People have many interests, you don’t need to give your life to just one niche!!!!!

As you can probably tell, I love this stuff, but there are so many moving parts and ways that things can build off of one another in different directions so hope this e-mail helped a bit in terms of getting some ideas flowing.

Please shoot over feedback or let me know what you would love to see built off of this by sending over questions, etc!!

With that said, it’s brand of the week time.

BRAND OF THE WEEK: CeraVe

If you live online, you have seen the amazing influencer campaign launched by the team over at L’Oreal-owned brand: CeraVe. They teamed up with Michael Cera on a quirky guerilla marketing campaign where he signed his named on a bunch of bottles of the beloved products along with a sticker of solely his face with no context. From there, CeraVe activated influencers who received the bottles posting the videos as brand partners or even catching Cera in the act to help overall exposure and awareness across Instagram, Tiktok (this is my fave), and even Reddit.

Truly an organic integration IMO as it seems on brand for him to just do something like this and hilarious.

THAT’S A WRAP!!!!

As always, thanks for spending some time with me this morning. If you liked it, I would love to hear more about you, what you’re working on, what snacks you can’t get enough of, and any questions you’re dying for answers to.

My goal of this is to similarly take feedback (like you should be doing on social media) and making sure you get something in your inbox every Thursday that you want. Sure, I have tons of ideas, but it’s a team effort!

Also, we have had some new faces that joined so HELLOOOOO!!! If you have a friend or coworker who you think would love to join the part, just shoot them this link - would mean a lot 🙂 https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

See you next Thursday!

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