Winfluence with Jason Falls

Can you achieve influence marketing traction, then success without having to pay influencers? We’ve asked that question several times on this show and it’s a bit of a controversial one.

One perspective is you might be able to, but you shouldn’t. You are, after all, getting not just access to someone’s audience, but also their talent in creating content, plus the content you can then negotiate to use. All three of those elements are worth money you would have to invest otherwise to get the same output. So why disrespect the creator by asking them to post for just product.

But then there are creators, mostly micro- and nano-influencers, who might be happy to just receive free product in exchange for a post. Those just starting out want to appear to be successful and big enough to warrant brands approaching them. Plus, they can also use the product-only content to prove their audience is responsive or content is successful enough to convert customers. That leads to them making more real dollar collaborations down the road.

The answer to most question in the marketing world applies here. Can you gain traction or be successful with influencer marketing without paying the influencers? It depends. 

One person who can illustrate how to do it successfully is Taylor Lagace. He’s one of the co-founders of a company and application called Kynship. They are focused on product seeding to drive organic influencer placements. That’s right! Seed product with influencers, no payments on top of that, and they post everything from unboxing videos to honest reviews and endorsements of your brand.

If you’re a regular listener to this show or an influencer/creator advocate, that approach on the surface is probably going to irritate you. My stance has always been that you’re asking for an influencer’s time, creative talents and access to their audience. You should pay them. 

But give Taylor and Kynship’s philosophy here a listen. They simply ask content creators if they’d be interested in receiving the product. For those that say “yes” they ship them the product. And that’s all they ask for … their approach is no strings attached. There’s no requirement for the recipient to post anything. They only do so if they wish to do so.

And the results Kynship’s customers are seeing are quite impressive.

I tried to shoot some holes in the philosophy with our conversation, but quickly realized Taylor and his team have emerged as the reason “it depends” is often the answer to marketing questions. Paying influencers to post isn’t a black or white issue. I think when you hear what he has to say, you’ll agree.

I also think for you brand or agency folks out there listening, you’ll very quickly lose your skepticism that just sending product out without asking for something in return is a bad idea. 

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One avenue of conversation we haven’t really explored here on the show is diving into the nuances of influencer marketing within different social networks. A great creator on Instagram may not be very good on Twitter. A strong YouTuber may not help you at all on Facebook. 

YouTube is the first avenue I think it’s worth diving deeper into. Not only is video far more engaging for consumers, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google, which owns it. So a YouTube influencer posting something relevant about your brand can solve problems in awareness, search rankings, conversions and beyond. 

And, unlike other nascent social network features, YouTube videos typically stay online forever. So one investment can benefit your brand for far longer than other influencer content. 

But YouTube can be a bit of a puzzle for some marketers. Video work is more expensive and takes more lead time that other types of content. YouTube is a noisy platform so you may not know how the influencer is going to get eyeballs against all that other content out there. 

Fortunately, we know a few folks. One of those is Hilary Thompson. She is the digital PR lead at Portent, which evolved from and SEO firm into a performance-driven digital agency based in Seattle. Hilary has been running YouTube influencer campaigns for a couple of years now. She started with a low five-digit monthly spend for a client two years ago. She now manages a monthly spend in the low six-figures.

She gets results. 

I caught up with Hilary to chat about her approach to influencers on YouTube. She has great tips and advice for reaching out to influencers, negotiating pricing with influencers, measuring success and how to manage campaigns to optimize results. She also shares a couple of nuances about working with YouTube influencers you wouldn’t know if you didn’t do it all the time.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters talks more about Tagger's deep search and discovery features. Give the episode a listen and see how Tagger helps her consultancy get to the right list of the right influencers.

Learn more about the software at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Of all the questions marketers ask about building successful influencer marketing campaigns, the two that stand out are the top two, by a mile:

First, how do I find the right influencers? The second is how do I measure success of influencer marketing. 

And honestly, those two components of the process are probably the most important. You can have a great idea, messaging and such, but if you don’t choose the right influencers, it won’t succeed … at least not optimally.

And if you don’t understand how to measure your success, you won’t know if the effort was worth it in the first place. When the higher-ups don’t have that information to go on, they’re much less apt to continue providing the resources to do it.

I wanted to solve for those two problems in my book, so I shared what I call the Winfluence Scorecards in it. They’re discussed in those sections of Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand and added as appendices in both the hard copy and the e-verison of the book. 

But I’ve now added those scorecards as interactive elements on my website for anyone to use. I’m going to walk you through both the Winfluence Priority Scorecard and the Winfluence Success Scorecards and tell you how you can use them -- completely free of charge and whenever you want -- in today’s commentary. 

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters explains her favorite feature of Tagger. Give the episode a listen and see how Tagger helps her consultancy get to the right list of the right influencers.

Learn more about the software at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A recurring theme on this show is finding examples influence marketing, not just marketing involving online influencers. When we uncover a non-traditional perspective on this thing we do, it unlocks a lot of interesting thinking for all of us.

I am one who geeks out about offline examples of influence marketing, but there are variations of the theme online, too. And you find those examples sometimes in the most unexpected places.

Travis Huff cut his teeth in the digital marketing space with local businesses in Northern California. Instead of listening to the social media talking heads about how to do all this, he experimented, tried things, learned and developed his own approach to influence marketing.

He tried to forge partnerships from business to business. So one brand, let’s say a car dealership, would create a partnership with, let’s say, a bank offering car loans. Each would leverage one another’s social accounts and audiences to increase the reach of their offers and messaging.

Travis was an old TV station sales guy, so building creative advertising solutions came natural to him. He’s coordinated a number of brand-to-brand influence relationships over the years, but also manages social media and what we call regular influencer marketing campaigns, using online influencers rather than brands, with his firm Realtime Outsource. 

One of the things I love about Travis is you get the feel he doesn’t worry about fancy strategies or consultants or big software packages. He just rolls up his sleeves and figures it out. You can learn a lot from someone like that. He even shares an astonishingly simple, but apparently effective tactic on the show today that flies in the face of what the “experts” say. Listen close for that. I was kind of stunned.

Travis and I caught up to talk about his own path to figuring out influence marketing and what works for the businesses he works with.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Winfluence episode number 100. We started this journey back on September 2, 2020 when the old Jason Falls Show live stream turned podcast switched to an audio-only show dedicated to discussions of influence marketing. Thank you for joining me along the way. Here’s to another 100.

In keeping with the theme, this episode is all about history. Not of the show, but of the craft of influence marketing overall. Some people think influencer marketing started in 2011 with the advent of Instagram. I’ve seen some say things like, “I’ve been doing influencer marketing since its beginning, back in 2013.”

The truth is, influence marketing—or influencer marketing, even the nuance with the “R”—have both been around for centuries. What’s happening today is not new at all. 

Sure, the environment is different in 2021 than it was in 2000, or 1980, 1960 and so on. But part of the impetus for writing my book and starting this podcast was because we had become fooled into thinking what we’re trying to do is somehow a mysterious, bleeding edge practice full of tech nerd voodoo that is hard to understand. 

It’s not. I’ll explain more in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, I tell you more about the amazing campaign management features of the tool. When my clients have a project for our influence partners, I can load a brief into the system, ask the influencers to pitch their concept for their posts, give feedback or approve the concept, then ask for the content, more feedback and then the posts go live, all while pulling data into the platform to measure.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In my day job at Cornett, influence marketing is very important, but it’s not the only thing we do. So small businesses or startups that need consulting don’t typically fit into what I can provide. Lately, I’ve found that I needed either a small firm or an independent consultant to either manage something for us or to just refer the business to.

That’s why I was excited to get to know our guest today. Meredith Jacobson is an independent consultant, but one that has gone a step further to provide the industry with something unique and incredibly useful. Her experience at big agencies like Digitas and influencer marketing firms like Studio71 and Branded Entertainment Network helped her see the gaps in the ecosystem.

So, she started a community … a network of sorts … of independent influencer marketing consultants, each who owns their own business, but Meredith has brought them together to be a connected web of providers businesses of all sizes can leverage.

Smart. 

We talked about her community and why there was such a need for it, but more importantly we dove into her perspective on what brands and agencies are doing right and wrong, the shift I’ve perceived in brands attitudes toward influence marketing as a practice and much more. 

Meredith has a really smart perspective about the practice, the industry and is grounded in a great philosophical position around what we do. You’ll enjoy hearing what she has to say today.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Do you even know what true influence looks like? We get lost in the day-to-day of influencer marketing, where we count on people who post interesting things on social media to persuade their audiences to try and buy our products and forget the core thing we need to do … really influence people.

Does seeing a product in the hands of a person you follow on Instagram have a real impact on you? Probably not. I follow Patrick Janelle, @aguynamedpatrick, who has been a guest on the show before. His instagram feed is what I call an aspirational one. I aspire to be as stylish in my dress, home decor and what-not, as he is.

Never mind that I won’t ever be. 

But just because he wears a fancy watch or a perfectly tailored blazer or the latest comfy but snazzy dress shoes from Del Toro, or whomever, doesn’t mean I’m going to make a conscious decision to buy those products. In fact, I don’t wear a watch, and seldom wear blazers or dress shoes. 

Over time, it might be that when I’m ready to buy a new pair of dress shoes, I think, “I like what Del Toro has. Let’s go look at them.” I may never make a direct connection to Patrick, but it’ll have an effect through frequency of impressions. 

Still, that’s a fairly long-game and light form of influence. And some would say is not true influence. 

I wrote about a shining example of true influence in my book. Chapter 12 of Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand dives into influence marketing as a proxy for what we generally know as public relations. In it, I tell the story of Naakh Vysoky. 

I’ll read the passage to illustrate true influence for you in today’s commentary. 

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. Here’s all the information I have on the campaign report … and remember … I built this in five minutes using Tagger’s drag and drop report builder. But here’s all the things the client sees in either a webpage version of the report or a PDF I can kick out on a daily basis if needed:

The first page has the overall campaign performance in a succinct chart broken down by platform. So I see that this particular campaign currently has a reach of 2.4 million people and 102,000 total impressions. I see my total engagement, engagement rate and the organic lift for the content. But I see that broken down by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.

I then have a timeline chart so the brand team can see how the volume of content has hit over the last couple of months.

Page two breaks it all down by creator. So I get to see all those performance metrics by influencer. This makes it super easy to see who is performing well for us and who might need some help, paid spend to supplement their post and so on.

Next I have a list of the top Instagram posts for the campaign and their corresponding metrics, then Facebook. Then YouTube … you get the picture.

The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re creeping up on a year of Winfluence the podcast and in that time we’ve talked to a number of incredibly smart people who are working to make the influence and and influencer space better for creators, brands, service providers, agencies and beyond. I think by now you all probably get a feel for my perspective on influence marketing being more about finding ways to create influence than finding people who are influencers. And the relationship building over time is preferred to one-off, transactional campaigns.

One of the things I like to do on the show is gut-check my own thinking with other experienced influence marketers. It gives you an opportunity to hear someone else validate those thoughts, or for someone to bring a new perspective to the table and even call B.S. on my take, which is perfectly in-bounds here.

Jeanette Okwu is one of those people in the industry I respect a lot who I’ve wanted to have on the show for a while now to bounce ideas off, vet perspectives with and so on. She’s the founder of Beyond One, an influencer marketing agency and network based in Berlin. Prior to that she was the co-founder and CEO of 1nfluencersmarketing, a technology platform used to drive influencer campaigns based on data-driven insights. 

Her work over the years led her to be named on of Talking Influence’s Top 50 most influential people in the industry. She is also a founding member and advisor to the American Influencer Council.

Jeanette and I connected to talk about the influencer industry. It’s size and potential. How influencers and creators collaborate with brands and vice-versa. I think you’ll find it very interesting that the perspective of influencers isn’t different from the U.S. to Europe and the perspectives we often discuss here are right in line with what she sees halfway around the world.

We get granular, too. Jeanette shares how she finds the right influencers, what she looks for and how she approaches building strategies for brands. 

She’s one of the most well-networked and influential people among the influencer industry, so having her on the show to learn from is a big deal, and a big thrill.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. Here’s all the information I have on the campaign report … and remember … I built this in five minutes using Tagger’s drag and drop report builder. But here’s all the things the client sees in either a webpage version of the report or a PDF I can kick out on a daily basis if needed:

The first page has the overall campaign performance in a succinct chart broken down by platform. So I see that this particular campaign currently has a reach of 2.4 million people and 102,000 total impressions. I see my total engagement, engagement rate and the organic lift for the content. But I see that broken down by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.

I then have a timeline chart so the brand team can see how the volume of content has hit over the last couple of months.

Page two breaks it all down by creator. So I get to see all those performance metrics by influencer. This makes it super easy to see who is performing well for us and who might need some help, paid spend to supplement their post and so on.

Next I have a list of the top Instagram posts for the campaign and their corresponding metrics, then Facebook. Then YouTube … you get the picture.

The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are influencers worth the rates they charge? Isn’t that the most frequently asked question among brand managers when it comes to influencer marketing these days? The answer, as always, is that it depends. 

It depends on what they charge versus what the brand gets in return. Determining that depends on a variety of factors. How many followers does the influencer have. What’s their engagement rate, which indicates how many people actually interact with the content. What’s the conversion rate of those people to purchase the product in question? 

And if you know all of those numbers, the answer of the influencer’s worth is still, “it depends.” Because you also need to know how much the average order value of this segment that converted was. Then you can compare the influencer’s rate to the financial return.

But even then, the answer is still “it depends” because one influencer program’s return might be fantastic margins for a low-margin company. That same number could be disaster for brands that typically have high margins.

And we’re just talking about transactional goals here. Influencers also bring content creation talent to the table, which is of value outside of any measure of their audience or conversions. You’d have to pay for that creative with a freelancer or internal employee’s time and resources otherwise. 

Focusing however on the transactional goal -- we want influencers to drive sales of our product -- the financial equation is easy to understand, but often hard to implement. I’m going to break down the basics of the equation for you today using industry averages and standards so you at least have an idea of what an influencer costs versus what type of sales numbers you need for them to be worth the investment.

Note: This podcast episode has an almost required reading companion that includes an important chart I talk about. Visit the episode's blog post at jason.online/influencermath to follow along.

Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger. They reached out to me recently and asked me to give their influencer marketing platform a try. I set up a campaign with a client project and kicked the tires. I wasn’t sure an influencer marketing platform could really impress me much anymore, but boy was I wrong.

I was so impressed, I’ve switched to using Tagger for client projects.

Here’s what got me: I didn’t do a demo or training session. I just jumped in and tried to hunt and peck my way to figure it out. Within an hour, I had a campaign set up for a client, a campaign brief loaded, five influencers invited to authorize into the platform for automatic reporting, including Instagram Stories by the way, and two customized reports for my client. One for assessing influencers, the other for measuring the campaign’s success.

The client saw that report and said, “This is what I need to show to senior leadership!” I call that a win-win!

The drag and drop customizable reports took me about five minutes each to set up. And I can either create new ones for each client campaign, or I saved the first two as templates I can plug any client into. 

We’ll be talking a lot more about Tagger in the weeks to come here on Winfluence. They’ve just built a better mousetrap. So I’m in.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger.

Tagger is the new influence marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too. Jason.online/tagger.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Each episode of this podcast begins with me asking the question, "Want Instagrammers and YouTubers to mention your brand? Or do you want to influence an audience to buy your product?" I then say this podcast is about illustrating the difference between using influencers and actually influencing.

There are few venues that underline the necessity of that approach than healthcare marketing. The short-term conversion approach to that audience is tacky. People who need healthcare now are in need of urgent care. Marketing to them then is, frankly, horrible. You have to influence people who don’t need you now to choose you someday, when they do.

That’s very different than trying to drive 1,000 sales of your thing over the weekend.

In a way, healthcare marketing is all about that long-term influence. Building a brand and ensuring people are not just aware but predisposed to choose you is an effort in influencing the way they think, not just the decisions they make.

And that is not accomplished with Instagrammers and TikTokers. 

Colin Jeffries is not just a healthcare marketer, but one who knows and understands influence marketing … not influencer marketing. And he leverages influence through people who are influential in the communities and with the patients and customers he serves in very interesting ways. 

Colin’s day job is as vice-president of marketing for Brightview, a comprehensive addiction treatment provider across several states in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid-West. He’s also the co-host of the Rethink Marketing Podcast. 

We dove into the concept of influence marketing (without the R) and the very specific challenges in healthcare marketing that force that segment of the marketing world to have to think about people with influence, not just influencers. He threw out some brilliant concepts and ways to think about influence marketing that might just inspire you to raise your own bar.

Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger. They reached out to me recently and asked me to give their influencer marketing platform a try. I set up a campaign with a client project and kicked the tires. I wasn’t sure an influencer marketing platform could really impress me much anymore, but boy was I wrong.

I was so impressed, I’ve switched to using Tagger for client projects.

Here’s what got me: I didn’t do a demo or training session. I just jumped in and tried to hunt and peck my way to figure it out. Within an hour, I had a campaign set up for a client, a campaign brief loaded, five influencers invited to authorize into the platform for automatic reporting, including Instagram Stories by the way, and two customized reports for my client. One for assessing influencers, the other for measuring the campaign’s success.

The client saw that report and said, “This is what I need to show to senior leadership!” I call that a win-win!

The drag and drop customizable reports took me about five minutes each to set up. And I can either create new ones for each client campaign, or I saved the first two as templates I can plug any client into. 

We’ll be talking a lot more about Tagger in the weeks to come here on Winfluence. They’ve just built a better mousetrap. So I’m in.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger.

Tagger is the new influence marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too. Jason.online/tagger.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.