Happy Sunday!
I hope wherever you are in the world, you are starting to feel that Fall season energy in the air! The cold air just hit New York all of a sudden, and now I can't walk outside without wearing a hoodie. That said, I hope you're all cozied up right now, feet up, and have a special drink from the Chamberlain Coffee x Blank Street pop-up (yes, of course, I went).
On Friday, Moiz and I recorded the final episode of the season for Limited Supply. It was bitter-sweet knowing that it was the last episode. But we still have 3 weeks of podcasts coming out — the next two are with Harley Finklestein, the President of Shopify before we air the one we just recorded. If you haven't already checked it out, you can find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
For today's email, I came to the prompt on how to work with influencers as a result of this tweet. Instead of just DM'ing Jake the answer, I thought I'd just write it out for everyone. Hope you enjoy it!
So there are a few ways to work with influencers that are pretty low-hanging fruit. Of course, there are other ways to do this, but I'm speaking for 99% of the brands out there that are looking to take notes and get started on this tomorrow.
First off, it's worth noting — we're not really just talking about influencers (defined as creators with a ton of followers and influence), we're also talking about creators. And if you're confused, then forget I just said that. I'll say it again at the end of the email and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Let's talk about traditional influencers, first. Here are easy ways to work with them.
Influencers
Whitelisting. You've most likely seen ads as you tried falling asleep on time but couldn't stop scrolling Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or even Twitter. With whitelisting, brands create content with an influencer, aligning themselves with the content created by the influencers as well as their values, ethics, morals, etc. For example, when Hilma partners with Holly Owens, they're not just getting content from it, they're also borrowing the trust that Holly has built with her content around what she consumes, and how she does her own diligence for supplements. With all of that, they also get a piece of content that is run as an ad, coming from Holly's account, and blasted to the audience of their choosing. TL;DR: Ads that come from an influencer to sell a product — that's influencer whitelisting.
Product Seeding. If you have an influencer involved on your cap table (they're an investor or advisor) or they're a huge fan of the brand, it can create an opportunity to send products out to their friends (aka, other influencers). You also don't NEED to have an "influencer" or celebrity in your reach to do this… if you have a super well-connected investor or advisor (for example Alli Webb), work with them to create special shipments that go out. The costs of doing this is basically the COGS + any special packaging you want to include.
Collab Product. If creating a new product is not a massive (costly) lift in your supply chain, then this is a great option. Essentially, create a new product/SKU/variant of a product with an influencer or celebrity (at this point, they're the same thing), and then blast that out to this celebrity's network of influencers or famous friends. Just a couple of weeks ago, Snif (fragrance brand) came out with a scent, Suganami, in collaboration with Steph Shep. The launch party for the SKU, the seeding, and the launch campaign for the product itself must have at least 500 million impressions. For Snif to pay for those 500M impressions out of pocket, at a $30 CPM, would cost $15M.
Giveaways. If you have an influencer who's a huge fan of your brand, there's a good chance they already have spoken about it to their audience, and would be interested in a giveaway on Instagram. While these work for boosting followers (since a part of the rule to be entered to win is to follow the brand and the influencer, leave a comment, and maybe something), the quality of the followers is usually not that great. Similarly when doing giveaways where you're collecting people's emails, the quality of those emails is generally bad — they bring down your overall revenue per user, open rates, click-through rates, etc. I'm not a big fan of these, in 99% of instances, but if you have an influencer who you feel is super aligned with your brand, this could work well.
Create a contest. This can be done in a couple of ways. One way to do it is to work with an influencer (for example Steph Shep and Snif) where the influencer would announce the content and encourage people to create content to contribute to the contest. Another way would be for the brand to announce the contest, but then have a bunch of influencers ready to contribute to the contest. You mainly see this on TikTok when brands announce hashtag challenges, and they'll have 20-50 influencers ready to put up paid content they've already approved, and it *tricks* their (the influencer's) audience into contributing to the contest as well. This is more of a brand play, unlike the whitelisting where you're running pretty much a mid/lower funnel customer acquisition campaign.
Creators
Ok, so those are some easy ways to work with influencers. Now, let's talk about creators. Creators are quite literally anyone who's good at creating content, regardless of their following size. Generally, creators who are pretty good at content creation (as a freelancer) also have a small following of their own. For the record, we love to see the validation of a small following, because it means in addition to creating content, they do know what seems to work on the social platform — hence, why they have a following. Here are some low-hanging fruit ideas:
Whitelisting. Even if someone doesn't have a huge following, you can still whitelist content they create, especially if it's authentic and good content. In this Caraway example, Erin is the creator behind the content, but her own following doesn't really matter. What matters is that she is really good at articulating the benefits of the cookware set, why she loves it, why you might love it as a random person scrolling Instagram, and most of all — she converts! We don't know Erin's personal values or morals, but that doesn't matter here. She still drives clicks, sales, and revenue, and it comes from her page, not the brand's page, so it feels natural (aka contextually native) in the feed.
Commercials or Testimonials. Similar to whitelisting, getting testimonial-style videos or stories outlining a lot of the things you see in customer reviews, creators are a great way to fill this. Most commercials you see on TV do the same thing — they figure out what people love about Verizon, then they pay some family to come and say the same exact thing, they record it, put it on TV, and you go pay for Verizon. Anywhere you would otherwise use actors or actresses, you can use creators. We did this for JUDY's first national TV commercial — instead of spending $100k on a TV commercial, we spent $10k, got 4 versions from it, and were able to run it nationally.
UGC Reviews. Creators who have 10k to 50k followers on a social platform are generally not seen as influencers, so they are usually down to create content, like a product review or product-in-action video, in exchange for free product. This video of a creator refilling her Cadence capsules is a perfect example — she has 2.4k followers, but this video has almost 100k views. If you've ever wondered how brands are able to create, launch and test new content so quickly, it's because they have a network of creators they've built themselves, or they use a tool like #paid in order to quickly facilitate these deals.
Why do I love creators? The exception with creators, is that they're generally an all-in-one production company, meaning you're not paying for a wardrobe person on set, a hair stylist, makeup, etc. You pay the creator and you get pre-production, scripting, content, editing, post-production, and (in most cases) posting to their socials. That said, make sure you pay your creators properly and very fairly — word travels fast about which companies compensate fairly and which ones try to rip creators off. You absolutely do not want to be a company known for not paying creators properly, in fact, you should do everything to make sure you treat creators better than any other company can. You're playing a long game here. Once a post or campaign is done, it doesn't end the relationship. You'll likely work with creators for years to come.
The last thing — on the influencer side, if you want a good influencer marketing measurement solution, check out the #paid measurement product, specifically for influencer marketing.
Ok, now, on to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Rebuy — The easiest way to increase conversion rate, even Chamberlain Coffee took advantage of it.
I will preach about Rebuy being the most founder-friendly app until the day I die. We recently installed Rebuy on the client's website and have seen a very favorable increase in the sessions converted, as a result. What used to just be an empty cart, now has a gamified free-shipping threshold, suggested products to add, and the option to subscribe when adding a product to the cart.
Another example I came across this week of Rebuy that made me fall in love with the app again was the Magic Spoon up-sell and cart. If you click here and add the variety pack to your cart, you'll not only see a beautiful subscription up-sell, but also a perfect slide-out cart with product suggestions that are populated dynamically based on you adding the variety pack.
While these benefits are mainly on the website, Rebuy also has an integration with Klaviyo to use their AI (aka their recommendation engine based on what else was purchased) to include dynamically in email flows.
If you don't have Rebuy installed on your site for the upcoming Black Friday, I highly recommend it. It's probably one of the first things we do for any client, because the technology of Rebuy is phenomenal, and their pricing is the fairest pricing in the Shopify app ecosystem. They truly want their brands to win, not just be stuck paying them absurd monthly fees.
Landing Page of the Week:
One of the brands that I've admired as it has grown since September 2020 is Nori, a portable iron. As a brand that focuses on being first-order profitable (or as Dennis calls it, a "unicorn"), they wanted to create two landing pages that helped cold traffic learn about the Nori press, how it works, and why it should be in everyone's closet or suitcase.
This is the first landing page.
This is the second landing page.
Both were wireframed, copywritten, designed, and developed by HOOX. If you are looking to get a landing page built out to run more efficient customer acquisition campaigns, buy a page here, and we'll be in touch for a kickoff call!
That's all for this week
How did you like the random Wednesday send? On slower weeks, I might throw those in occasionally — I enjoy writing anyways, it helps me articulate thoughts better. This coming week, however, is a busy one. If you're in New York City, I'll see you this Thursday at the Marketing Millennials meet-up (even though I'm a Gen Z'er). Otherwise, I might see you on Tuesday for LinkedIn Live with Tandym.
A couple of pieces of content I wanted to recommend you check out:
28 Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics You Must Know in 2022 by Optimonk
BFCM Peak SZN Report by Tapcart
I hope you have the best upcoming week ever. Stay hydrated. Get those 9 hours of sleep. Get a good sweat in (there’s no better feeling than your lungs working as hard as they can during a workout). I’ll see you next Sunday!