Winfluence with Jason Falls

The circle of life isn’t just an inspirational Elton John and Disney song. It’s an apt description of how a lot of things work, especially trends in the marketing world. Remember about seven or eight years ago when all the marketing talking heads were trashing QR codes? Alright, now think about how you’ve accessed the menu in a restaurant in the last couple of months. 

Whether it's the technology or just whatever method is hip at the moment, everything seems to come and go in cycles. And we’re starting to see that come true for influencers as well.

About the same time people were starting to roll their eyes at QR codes, the same social media thought leaders were telling brands not to put too many eggs in Facebook’s basket. That’s starting to happen again. Only this time with influencers.

But that brings to mind the question: Will the influencer marketing industry be able to keep up with that trend? 

I explain more in today’s commentary.

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.

In one of the chapters of Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, I tell the story of a fashion and style influencer who launched a product only to have it fall on deaf ears. The chronicle is of Arii, who was a teenager at the time and should have been lauded just for trying to start her own business based on her social media fame. Instead, she was mocked and declared a failure by the venom of social media users and the rubbernecking mainstream media of the day.

I went through the exercise in the book of explaining what she could have done differently in advance of her product launch to make it a successful one as a helpful guide for both influencers, and for brands who can use the story to better understand which influencers they target are most effective.

Last month, another social media influencer in the fashion, style and health space launched a brand of her own, but this one was a smashing success. Sommer Ray, who has about 40 million followers across her social networks, launched a new skincare ingestible product called IMARAÏS. The full name of the product, in fact, is IMARAÏS by Sommer Ray. 

Her path to launching the product is very different from Arii’s. Her two co-founders, Aaron Hefter and Felicia Hershenhorn, had the product concept and a beta version of the gummies, but were looking for the right influencer to be the third co-founder and face of the product. IMARAÏS is PETA certified, sugar free and with all sorts of other unique features that finding the perfect influencer to front this brand wasn’t simple. 

Hefter and Hershenhorn literally reached out to Sommer Ray as if they were pitching a regular influencer engagement … a direct message. But this one said, “We have a product we think you can get behind. We want you to be the face of it and become a co-founder and partner in the business.”

That’s a hell of a payoff for an influencer, even in a small company. 

But IMARAÏS is not small. Their launch now successful, Hefter and Hershenhorn are readying retail partnerships and distribution plans, along with direct to consumer plays. Sommer Ray? Well, she’s in it every step of the way, offering product feedback and collaboration on top of the marketing and exposure powerhouse her social channels bring. 

I caught up with Aaron and Felicia earlier this week to talk about the partnership, the product and how and why a social media influencer was the right path for IMARAÏS. Hefter spent the last 20 years or so as the CEO and co-founder of Nutrabolics, a very successful health supplement company. Hershenhorn is an attorney and friend of Hefters who tried everything under the sun for her skin until giving up and calling Aaron. The rest is almost history. If the product launch is any indication, that history will be a healthy one very soon.

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.

Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is serious, though playful and fun. We have interesting conversations about the industry, how brands can leverage influence, how influencers can better connect with brands and how the software companies and agencies all fit into the mix. We do that in order to help you get smarter, better and have more success leveraging influence marketing, influencers and all things related to the space.

But we’re not above poking a little fun at our world, too. Erik Deckers pointed his sarcastic pen at our little world last week. He’s the co-author (with me) of No Bullshit Social Media, but he’s also a syndicated humor columnist. And the title of his tome last week was, “Influencer Marketers, Just Stop Asking for Free Stuff.”

I grabbed him by the collar and drug him to the playground of this podcast so we could roll up our sleeves and have a good, old fashioned fistfight about it … or something like that … today on the show. 

Before we get to the fisticuffs, let take a moment to tell you about a new project I’ve launched with my pals Ryan Foland and Kim Garst, along with our friends at Get.Online, the .online domain name provider. We have produced three online courses that combined, form the .Online Business Academy. 

It’s a series of easy to follow online courses built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for that thing you’ve always wanted to launch. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons all in one day.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The dot-Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now. 

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.

Probably the most frequent quality of influencer selection I’ve talked about in the last month or so is brand alignment. Does the influencer match your brand in terms of values, aesthetics and beyond. The more aligned your influencers and content creators are with your values, your brand voice and perhaps content pillars, the easier their audience will make that leap to accepting you as a trustworthy brand. And the better your brand will be able to see relevant growth and engagement from their followers.

Julianne Fraser is someone who believes steadfastly in the value of brand alignment. She started out building influencer campaigns and executions way back in 2013 in the hospitality industry. She then launched her own influencer marketing firm called Dialogue New York and now boasts a stable of amazing fashion, style and beauty influencers and campaigns.

I invited Julianne to come on the show so we could dig into that concept of brand alignment. We got into a deep discussion about that and several other topics. And Julianne had a quick answer to my rant on the last episode of Winfluence. I claimed in that show that affiliate marketing and influencers will not work. Julianne explained how she layers that in with other ideas to prove me wrong.

Which is fine. I’m used to that.

But pay attention and take notes on this episode. Julianne and I have a delightful conversation about influencers, alignment, driving ROI and more.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is less sponsored by someone and more just presented by a new thing I’ve built I want you to know about. My friends at Get.Online, the domain name provider, along with my pals Ryan Foland and Kim Garst have produced three online courses that combined, form the .Online Business Academy. 

It’s a series of easy to follow online courses built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for that thing you’ve always wanted to launch. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons all in one day.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The dot-Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now. 

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.

Instagram announced last week it was testing new affiliate marketing tools for influencers. Many influencer marketing software solutions have begun integrating affiliate marketing components into their softwares as well. 

The reason is brands have been clamoring for them because brands think the affiliate model of marketing is going to magically make influencer marketing cheaper. They’re looking for an easy way out … a way to cut costs … and a way to disrespect content creators. 

Pay for performance marketing, like traditional affiliate approaches, will not work with influencers. I explain why in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is less sponsored by someone and more just presented by a new thing I’ve built I want you to know about. My friends at Get.Online, the domain name provider, along with my pals Ryan Foland and Kim Garst have produced three online courses that combined, form the .Online Business Academy. 

It’s a series of easy to follow online courses built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for that thing you’ve always wanted to launch. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons all in one day.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The dot-Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now. 

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’ve thrown around the term micro-influencer a lot on this show. The term refers to someone with generally around 5,000 to 50,000 followers. They’re probably not quite to the point of making a living doing it, but they have an impact on a fair number of people.

Lots of brands love micro-influencers because they can be cheaper and less hassle to deal with. No offense to our mega-influencer friends, but let’s be honest, once you get someone whose primary income is through influencer marketing activity, or content creation for brands, and certainly when you mix in a management person, well … brand people see layers of costs, people to deal with, paper work and so on.

That’s not to say that micro-influencers shouldn’t be paid. And certainly, anyone who is creating content for your brand, regardless of how few followers they might have, deserves to be compensated for their craftsmanship. But micro-influencers bring certain advantages to the table for businesses who want to leverage influencers or scale the number of influencers they use, without always having to find more money in the marketing budget. 

David Morneau leads a Canadian firm called Inbeat Agency which specializes in helping brands build campaigns with micro-influencers. And they’re quite good at it. I invited him to sit and chat with us about the advantages of going micro-, some of which you might find surprising.

David’s background and the seed that became Inbeat Agency, was work in SEO -- Search engine optimization. Those two disciplines don’t often overlap. 

We sat down this week to talk about micro-influencers, how they can impact a brands’ SEO, reputation and bottom line. I think you’ll enjoy the discussion as we make an argument for going small with your influence marketing.  

Instead of a traditional sponsor for this episode of Winfluence, I want to take a moment to tell you about a new project I’ve launched with Ryan Foland, Kim Garst and our friends at Get.Online … the dot-online domain name provider. Ryan, Kim and I have produced three online courses that combined form the .Online Business Academy. 

This series of easy to follow online courses is built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for whatever it is you’re passionate about. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! You heard that right. FREE. The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons in about four hours.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The .Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now.

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.

I know what brands want from influencers. But what brands say they want from them and what they actually want from them are different things. Ask a brand manager what they want from their influencers or influencer programs and they’ll say things like:

But brands are not measured by the amount of content they collect. Or how many people endorse them. Nor by how many people see the endorsement. And authenticity is not a KPI on anyone’s ledger sheet.

I know what brands really want from influencers. And I’ll tell you what those three things are in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius really is easy to use but super powerful all at once. I can search for influencers by topic, interest, geography, age … I can also filter them by the demographics of their audience, which networks they’re relevant on … the permutations of isolating the ones that are super relevant for me are seemingly endless.

Then, I can build lists of candidates, reach out to them for engagements, share contracts and assets with them, load in deliverables that I can track, measure the ROI of everything … it’s got it all. 

I literally work in Julius every day for my clients at Cornett. It’s become a required tool in my arsenal. I think you’ll enjoy having it in yours, too. 

All I want you to do is a demo. They’re free and will show you the magic I use every day for influence marketing campaigns. If you love it like I do, you’ll sign up. If you don’t, what harm is there in checking it out, right?

Sign up for that demo! Go to jason.online/julius and request one.

What do brands really want from influencers? That’s in this episode of Winfluence.

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.

It’s always a treat to get insight from influencers on the show. My research and analytics tell me most of you are brand-side marketers or agency folks that serve the brands playing in the influencer marketing space. So, when we have the opportunity to hear from a content creator, there’s a lot of insight to be had. How to work with them. What works well or doesn’t. How they view brands, agencies, pricing and beyond. 

A few months ago, I interviewed one such content creator for my other podcast, Digging Deeper, which is a live video show turned into an audio podcast. That influencer was Malvika Sheth. She is an up and coming fashion and style influencer with an engaging blog, Instagram and YouTube feed. She’s a smart, enterprising young woman who had already scored brand collaborations with Dove, Reebok and others. 

We talked about how she came to be an influencer and why, what her experience has been collaborating with brands and she gave some sound advice for those out there looking to build their own influencer platforms. 

I thought that interview would be good to share with you here on Winfluence, so that’s what this episode is -- a replay of the original Digging Deeper interview. I think you’ll find it supremely insightful and useful, regardless of your place in the influencer ecosystem. 

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

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.

The underlying theme of my book Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, is that we have to stop thinking about this practice as all about influencers and think of it in terms of how to drive influence. That can come from online influencers with big followings, but it can also come from your own brand building influence in your industry. It can come from partnering with community leaders and elected officials. It can come from friendships and alignment with people who have influence in certain spheres but don’t have big online followings or even accounts.

When you look at the world of influencer marketing software platforms out there through that filter, one company emerges as a clear “it-getter” in focusing on true influence versus just ranking influencers. That company is the UK-based Onalytica.

I spend a good deal of time in the book sharing cases studies from Onalytica. There are great ones in there from facilities management brand Mitee, USB and Marie Curie—the hospice organization in Britain named after the famous scientist. And I do that because Onalytica’s approach is more aligned with how I think influence marketing (without the R) should work.

Tim Williams is the CEO of Onalytica. I’ve long wanted to have him on the show and finally found a window on his schedule to chat. We sat down so I can pick apart Onalytica’s position and approach and why it is different. My interpretation of Onalytica is they are better suited for public relations and comms than, say, for an advertising approach. And, as a result, they are far more relevant for B2B companies than B2C. I asked Tim to gut-check that observation.

We also talked about my hypothesis that British PR and comms professionals have a little something more than their United States counterparts. And we dove into his observation that employee advocacy is becoming a fruitful avenue for at least B2B companies to building their own influence within their respective spaces.

There are only a handful of people in the influencer marketing space I think are truly driving conversation and innovation that greatly advances the practice and Tim Williams is one of them. You’ll learn a lot from him in this episode.

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

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 of the biggest challenges for brands in influence marketing is tying all these wonderful content collaborations with creators back to the bottom line. Not only do brands not often have full or direct exposure to an influencer’s analytics, but many don’t sell direct to consumer, meaning sales data is often in the hands of another third party in the form of retailers. And if you’ve ever dealt with big box retailers you also know that sometimes, they just don’t share enough data for the appropriate granularity in measurement.

So answering the question of the ROI on influencer marketing is hard. 

One company trying to solve for that is gen.video. The platform is built working from measurement and attribution backwards, rather than where most other software companies started … on the front end with influencer discovery. It’s a platform built from web video technology, but allows a brand to partner with influencers and measure how much traffic goes to purchase points, either direct to consumer or through retail platforms like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart, then measure conversions and sometimes complete shopping cart activity on those retail end points.

Jessica Thorpe worked her way up through the original iteration of the company and is now president and co-founder and Gen Video. She also happens to be the newly donned president of the Influencer Marketing Association. We talk about how gen.video helps brands and influencers better connect the dots to the age-old question of What is the ROI? I also talk to her about the state of things in influencer marketing, particularly around the fact that everyone seems to be desperate for industry leadership and organization, but no one is truly stepping into that role.

It’s a good discussion with some great learnings and ideas.   

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

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.