EP445: Influencer Marketing That Drives Sales: Finding the Right Creators

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This is the High Voltage Business Builders podcast. Daily intelligence for operators building brands that last on Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Walmart, and every channel where demand gets captured. No theory, no gurus, just what's working right now from operators who are in the trenches every single day. Strategy, tactics, real numbers, real mistakes, transparency, everything built with the end in mind, the exit. I'm Neil Toit, let's get into it. All right, folks, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders podcast. I'm Neil Toit, and today I got a quick question for you before we get started. How much of your influencer budget is buying views and how much is actually buying you sales? So because most sellers talk a lot about paying for vibes and followers, and they call it marketing, what we wanna talk about today is what actually moves the needle, right? Which one does, which one doesn't change? How does it impact your brand and your business for that social media presence? And today, I'm gonna sit down with somebody named Paula, who we're gonna get into in just a minute. She is a part of a group called Intuition Media, and she is an influencer agency who's been doing this since the days of the bloggers. Now, it doesn't sound like it was that long ago, but blogging was a cool way to get started, but that's changed a lot. The last several years, she's been focused predominantly on real business investment in your social media and influencing space, verifying and contracting with influencers and tracking what actually moves the needle, what actually drives revenue. So we're gonna unpack the differences between an investment versus a gamble. We're gonna talk about what soft skills beat reach and what we can do to actually reach the right influencers that reach the right market for us. And then we're gonna pack that down a little bit farther by going after what a physical founder or seller might be doing in the space around locations they should be approaching for where they should actually put their time, energy, attention, and money, and why a viral video might sound really cool, but if it doesn't generate any sales, that doesn't work for you. How'd I do there, Paula? Is that a great way to start this off, or do we need to do something different? No, awesome way to start it off. I think you've touched on a lot of different nuances and a lot of different, you know, very, very hot points that are bubbling up or that have been bubbling up in the influencer space for a long time. So excited to like dive in, and thank you so much for having me on. Well, it's a pleasure. Yes, today. Yeah, I enjoyed our pre-show call and really wanna talk about this a lot because it's an area that people know can be very impactful. It's an area being touched by more people wanting to get involved in it personally, or their, you know, life, their family, friends, their own purpose in that space. And there's, of course, AI that's tying into that a lot too now, what we call AI slop, and how that's impacting this space. And you've been around this for a long time, so you've seen all of that, right? I've seen all of that. So, you know, I started the company at a time when what we call creator marketing wasn't really an industry yet, but it was still word of mouth marketing. There weren't like sophisticated platforms like TikTok, TikTok shop, Shopify, et cetera. There really wasn't any like established rates or playbooks. And brands at that time were really trying to understand this new world of building street teams or audiences online. And, you know, so we were like figuring it out alongside them. And over the years, you know, I think we've evolved multiple times just because the industry, as you know, at like all of the topics that you're talking about right now, the industry just keeps evolving. And I think that we as a company have had to navigate changes and platforms and algorithms and technology and consumer behavior. And I think brands need to be able to be that nimble. And because the industry is always changing and the reality of building and running, you know, influencer campaigns through all of it, you know, it just, it changes each and every, you know, month, week, year, et cetera. And I think what I think I've learned as an entrepreneur and what brands can also learn is that, you know, you have to learn, you can't really romanticize and fall in love with the way your business used to work in driving sales. You have to be able to really look and pivot and sometimes take calculated risks. And that's what I think brands should be thinking about as they're thinking about their sales, influencer marketing, et cetera. What is considered a calculated risk when you're thinking? Yeah, I think you have to know, I think you have to know, like, where is your customer going? Where, you know, where have they been? Where are they going? Where is the market going? And where do we need to go next, right? What do we need to do? And I think brands really need to spend some time, you know, before they take that calculated risk, they need to spend some time within culture, within the social realm to see, you know, what is driving commerce? What is driving sales? What are creators talking about and how does your brand fit into that culture? Yeah, no, and that's great. It's really doing your research, right? It is, it's figuring out how can your brand play, you know, within that realm and what's the best way, especially if you're an e-commerce brand, what's the best way to use creators? So for me, and I think, you know, I've been in this a while, creators drive real trackable sales, not just awareness. So a current stat that I have is that 44% of brands paid media creative and 77% of marketers that were surveyed said creator content outperforms traditional branded ad creative. So there's a nuance there. So you can have, you can create branded ads, right? And you can run paid media or you could use creator content. And what we found and what brands have said is that it drives more sales and gives you more credibility. Yeah, yeah. Well, it gets down to a point that you, you know, we've had videos that went really far traffic wise. We've had a couple recently that went into like 2 million in views, which is awesome because the creator, you know, it helped them out with their monetization, et cetera. But for us, it only drove a few thousand in sales. And you're like, well, what the heck? You should have expected maybe 10,000 in sales or more on that many views. And it just gets down to, you know, the content and the intent of who you're speaking to and how you're speaking to them. And it's not, I think we see a lot of people just doing shotgun blast style content, hoping that something's going to hit and that's just a lot of wasted time, right? I think, I think you're like, so I think brands and the agencies that they work with, they need to really figure out what are they looking to do? You know, some brands want to drive awareness. They don't really, you know, there is an awareness play where it's an always on awareness, where they want to be in culture continually. But then other brands are specifically wanting to drive sales. So what's the difference between a creator who is good for an awareness and one who actually drives sales? Now, they're not always the same person we have found. So an aware, someone, a creator who drives an awareness, who may have enormous reach, right? And maybe they have great entertainment value and they are able to really put your brand in that cultural conversation. Now, a conversion creator may be smaller and they may do something different, right? They may not put your brand in that cultural conversation. However, they have developed a community that is so strong. They have these super fans, I like to call them, and they've developed this community and their recommendation is enough to encourage people to act. So the difference between the two is really subtle. And I think, based on our experience, I think certain creators are really good at driving conversions and they're not always the most largest or have the largest reach. Yeah, and that's kind of a misnomer. I think we've heard this before and I'm gonna say it again and I want you to give us your insights. But the idea that the creator has millions of followers is great in some cases, not in others, but really when it gets down to who has the better influence in terms of sales, it's usually the micro creators who have a relationship with the people they're selling to. Is that a fair way to say that? Yeah, like I said, they have super fans, they've built a community, people trust them. People act right away on their recommendations. They don't have to have a huge following. I'm not saying that macro creators can't drive sales because they do, it just really, we've worked on several campaigns, one in specific recently, where we've had some larger creators with reach, meaning they had a million followers. And that's why I don't think follower count is the right stat that you should be looking at if you're a brand. You should be looking at engagement rates and views, consistent views, and you should be looking at their community and their comments, et cetera, to see, do they really have that fandom? That's what I like to call it. So if you're selling a product, like you wanna see clicks and conversions and sales. And so, I think you're looking for a different type of creator. It's just, it's very nuanced, I think. Yeah, yeah, and again, it's that, we're gonna refer to it as niches, right? Like, the riches are in the niches. So what you're trying to do is find those people who are niched, and then go find 10, 50, 100 of them to create that network and to really grow against it. That's, you know, it's easier said than done though, right? What are the ways to focus in on the platform or the methodology that you would advise somebody to create a 30, 60, 90 day plan that really helps them figure out how to impact this positively for their brand? Yeah, I think it depends on the type of brand and if they are new to the market or not. I think that's a really key question for me when I'm talking to a brand. You know, if they're new to market and there is not a lot of awareness about who they are, I think, you know, you're looking at, you know, you're looking at a period of, I think first an awareness play. Yeah. Followed by, once you have that awareness followed by those conversions. So I think you're looking at, you know, at a program that could potentially work with, you know, some influencers that are more high reach and are more culturally driven and then some micro creators that have, and I'm not just saying, oh, just go after micro creators. Some micro creators don't have that community, right? It really depends on who the micro creator is and whether or not they have that community. Yeah. No, that's very smart. That trusts them. Yeah. Well, and I assume over the years you built one, right? Yes, yeah. Tell me about that. Oh, I built, we built, in terms of building a program, we built a lot of programs. Is that what, is that the question I wanted to ask? Well, you have a network of creators yourself, I'm sure over the years that you leverage as part of your, as part of Intuition Media, right? Yeah. So we actually don't have a quote network of creators. Okay. What we do, and there are, we work with management companies and other, primarily other management companies who manage the creators, and, or we work with a SaaS platform to find the influencers. Yeah. And so the SaaS platform we work with is called CreatorIQ, and they have, you know, I want, for lack of a better word, I'm gonna call it a database, and that database is, consists of any influencer that has more than like, say, 5,000 followers. So you're able to go into the database and you're able to select filters. And the filters have gotten very refined with AI because you can filter it based on, you know, what they have in captions, what their video is about, et cetera. So when you're looking for certain creators, or you can set the filter to location as well as engagement rate, as well as video views, and you can select different platforms. So it's gotten very sophisticated. And you could say, oh, say you're a fashion brand or a sneaker brand or something like that. You could go into this platform and you could say, you could put in sneaker and you could see what Nike has done, what creators they've worked with, or another sneaker brand. Like you could put them in and you could see actually all of the content that has worked or maybe has not worked. So then you have a pool and you can filter the influencers based on, say you found an influencer that did really well and the brand really likes them. And then you can filter based on, you could find similar influencers. Right, right, right, right. Which is a really- Want today's Voltage 3 written out? The daily Amazon seller puts the three tips in your email, plus a free Alexa gap audit. Go to voltagedm.com slash Amazon seller newsletter. And now back to the podcast. Really great tool. If you're trying to, if you found success, you could just set it to similar and it'll find similar influencers based on size, what they talk about, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, and it's really getting down to the details and the numbers, right? If they have a platform that you can track that shows how much they've actually made, how many views they've gotten, how many samples they took, how many videos they created, it creates more authority if you're gonna spend some time on that person to give them a sample or a product that you hope actually makes a video. Right, right. In some of these places you give a video or move, so let's unpack that for a second because there's a piece of that that I know about called creator briefs that really ensures that you're driving the kind of video content, the kind of outcome, the kind of goal-oriented. How much of that do you guys work with in the creator brief space? Creator briefs? Yeah. So yeah, we do that a lot. We do that for the companies that we work for. We develop a brief. So there's been a lot of controversy, I guess, around surrounding briefs and whether or not, you know, whether or not they should be so strict and should they be scripted, right? The genuine affect or the scripted. Yeah, should they be more genuine? Should they be scripted? For me, it really depends on the brand I'm working with. If I'm working with a bank or a pharma company, it's gonna be a little bit more legally strict, right? There's gonna be a lot of guardrails upon what you have to talk about. If I'm working with a fashion brand or a beauty brand, there's a little bit more flexibility when you have the brief. I think no matter what you're working with, you want to give the creator a little bit of, you want to give them, you're hiring them for a purpose, right? So you want to give them creative freedom within guardrails. In someone working with you, is there a right time to start this process or is there a wrong time? Is there a, you know, you need to see these things happen before you do, you know, this kind of thing that you're looking for? I think when they should, like if you're a brand, when should you- When should you engage in this kind of activity? Yeah, I think that, like if I was a DTC brand or a smaller brand or just entering the market, I think first what I would do is I would probably, you know, I would test small, I would find the winners and then I would scale the winners. If indeed it is a performance-driven campaign, right? So, you know, what do I mean by test small? You know, find, you know, figure out the budget that you're comfortable with and then, you know, call the budget, you know, 50K and that budget is, you know, working with X number of creators and then you find the winners that are creating the winning content and then you take their content and you run paid media ads or you edit it, et cetera. If you got the usage rights, that's another thing. Usage rights is important, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that right now I feel, you know, creator content and paid media is becoming very big. Most brands were using, you know, branded content and now it's really shifting and they're using creator content and paid media in some capacity and I really feel it does drive the conversion rate and the click-through. Are you using any AI in any of your influencing stuff at this point? Are you saying? I think that's a loaded question. It is a loaded question but I know there's others who are gonna ask. How much, not 100% influence this way? Well, I think AI is transforming everything in the creator economy from processes, meaning creator discovery and vetting and research. Like I talked about the tools within CreatorIQ, you know, all of these big large platforms are using AI in some way for creator discovery and vetting and research and they're taking, you know, the videos that creators are creating and those videos are uploaded into CreatorIQ so they're able to do not only searches via text but searches via video. So it's becoming very, very, very good but I also think on the other side, so that's the process point but then there's also optimization. So there's some other AI tools that are out there that will look at the video that the creator creates and you can upload a bunch of videos and the tools will say, will look at the videos and tell you which one will be best optimized and which one will work best for paid and how you can optimize it so that they may give you some tips like cut it, you know, edit it here, make it shorter, et cetera. So I think there's tools in every aspect of creator as well as like reporting. It's just in every aspect. I mean, there are AI influencers and I don't think that like, I haven't worked with an AI influencer and I don't really have it. I haven't had any brands that have wanted to work with AI. Yeah, yeah, there's a gray area in all of that between, you know, what is the slop of the internet and being used from the dropshipper communities or just in general people out there trying to make all this content and then there's, you know, could it be affecting positively in certain kinds of brands or certain areas? Yeah, I think AI is a limit. Yeah, AI is, it doesn't eliminate the value of human creators. Of real human, that's right. I agree. It's stronger. Yeah. Any, you know, look, you can use AI to create videos and branded content, et cetera, but genuine human trust is way more valuable. Yeah, I agree. We still need some of that genuine humanity. And by the way, I'm not AI today, so I don't think you are either. So just with that disclaimer in there. One of the final questions I'm gonna have for us today as we're thinking through, there's a lot of information to unpack and you obviously know your stuff. The difference between influencer content costs and paid media, are they conflicting? Are they cheaper? Is one better than the other? Like, I have ideas, but I wanna hear what you have to say in terms of, you know, influencer content as a strategy for cost and growth and paid media in comparison to it. I think it's not one or the other. Okay. I think you have to use both. So I think what you, what I would like to do and what I have been seeing more and more of and brands are talking about this. And there's a lot of studies that, you know, influencer content used in paid media performs better than branded content. I'm not saying abandon branded content or content that the brand is creating on their own, et cetera but I'm saying that creator driven content should be used in paid media. So you have to think about that when you're working with influencers, right? You have to make sure that you're getting those usage rights. And what I mean is, so you hire an influencer, you contract them. And during the negotiation, you're gonna negotiate not only the rate for the video that they're creating or the images or whatever, but you're also gonna negotiate a rate for usage. And what does that usage entail? Is it organic or paid or is it both? And if it's paid media, what type of usage is it? Is it going to be on, is it, can they use the content on every platform? Is it white listing or dark posting? Is it, you know, what type of usage does the brand get? And so you wanna make sure that you have a period of time to use it. I like to get, you know, within the rates, it depends on the influencer, but I like to get at least a few weeks of paid media within the initial rate or have an option to negotiate the usage because if it starts performing, if the video starts performing well, I wanna have the ability to take that video and run with it. And I, you know, I wanna make sure that we have those rights. Yeah, no, that's smart. So I'm hearing, and I'm gonna say it in my language, we call that direct response in terms of top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel, where we need the brand awareness at top of funnel, continuing with the expectation. Someone's aware of us, they see us, they click, they engage, even though they don't necessarily buy. Middle of funnel is there in that question, Markov, could I put an influencer or a campaign that kind of influences a little farther down the line to buy faster or buy more. And bottom funnel is really somebody is following a tribe. They really see what you're doing and they wanna buy because they're following that tribe, they're following that influencer. Right, I think for, you know, for e-commerce brands and TikTok, I think that, you know, creator content that feels native and unpolished often converts way better on TikTok shop than traditional branded polished TikTok ads. I would agree with that on my own experience. Yeah, yeah, so some of the biggest mistakes I see people making is treating creator content as like a one-off, right? Instead of like a repeatable, always on system. And so that's one of the things, that's another thing that I think brands should be thinking about is how to, you know, not only start small and then test and then take the winners, but how do you make that a system? Yeah, systemizing and support. And if you don't understand that process, that's why Paul is here today. So if you're in that component of needing systemization, if you have understood the differences between when you should do it and how you should do it and where you should do it, if you've understood micro versus macro influence in the business, you know, not just throwing and spraying, praying influencers out there to figure out what's going on, but being, you know, in a research, being in a place where you really understand who your audience is and how you're going to try to approach them and then finding creators that have a natural affect towards that. So if you give them some brand or creative ideas that naturally they will do in their own way what they've done really well to help drive that content and push it forward and then find ways to work with them more and more. Did I get that right? You got that right. Okay, awesome. Anything I didn't cover today or any questions I didn't ask that you want to bring up here at the last? No, I think overall, I think, you know, maybe one of the questions could be like, what are some common mistakes at e-commerce? Oh, great question. Yeah, what are common mistakes? What are some common mistakes e-commerce founders might make when they think about a creator or working with creators? One, I think we already covered it. The first one would be looking for or paying for reach instead of relevance. So, right, paying for a huge following doesn't mean it's the right following. So that's the number one mistake I see. Oh, we want to hire like this mega creator. It has changed over the last year where people are, it's all about finding the right audience and the relevant audience. So that's number one. Number two is not having a contract or defined usage rights. So I had a brand reach out to me, a smaller brand, and they wanted to do gifting. And they wanted to, so, but then they wanted to have the usage rights for any video that went, you know, that did well. So even, and that's like, if it's gifting, if you're gifting someone a product, they don't necessarily, they don't have to post. There's no requirement for them to post. You're gifting them something you'd like them to post, but if they post something and you want to use the content, you really need to make sure that you're clear with the influencer on those usage rights. So I find that as well, like having no contract or unclear usage rights can lead to disputes down the line. And then third is treating influencer as a one-time campaign like we talked about, instead of building an always-on creator program. Awesome, great insights. Thank you for sharing. Those are the big three things. No, those are wonderful three things, guys. So go back, take a look at that, listen to it, figure out what your strategy is. If it makes sense to reach out to Paula, the notes and everything below this podcast or on our YouTube or on our website will be available for you to go check out what she's doing. I encourage you, if influencing and media is a part of your strategy for this year, that you definitely jump on that. Paula, thanks for coming on. Thank you, thank you so much. Well, this is another episode of High Voltage. And as I always say at the end of every podcast, do something imperfect and something perfect will happen on the way. I'll see you tomorrow on the next episode. Until then, stay high voltage. Thank you. Paula Bruno did a great job breaking down how to find creators who actually move product. The main point is clear. You stop chasing vanity metrics and start looking for real sales data. If an influencer cannot show you units sold, they are just noise. You need partners who understand the customer journey, not just people with a big follower count. This shift changes how you approach your entire marketing strategy. It saves you money and time. You do not need more e-commerce noise. You need clarity. That's why I send out the Voltage e-commerce brief. It gives you the five updates that matter most each week. We break down what changed in the market. We explain why it matters to your bottom line. Then we tell you exactly what to do next. It's free every Tuesday and Friday. It keeps you ahead of the curve without the fluff. Go to voltagedm.com slash newsletter to sign up today. It's the fastest way to stay sharp. We will see you back here tomorrow. Until then, stay high voltage.