Winfluence with Jason Falls

If there’s one type of influencer or content creator that I am asked to find more than others these days, it’s the performance-based, affiliate-type of micro or nano influencer that can just drive sales. It make sense that most businesses, particularly direct to consumer brands, would rather skip the high cost, awareness influencer types and just drive revenue.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to identify creators with smaller audiences but good influence, particularly in terms of whether or not they can convert.

But where there’s a difficult path, there’s always someone carving out a trail for us. 

William Gasner is the chief marketing officer at Stack Influence. It is a micro-influence managed service that specifically focuses on creators who will trade a post for product, and who are more likely to want to sign up for affiliate programs and referral deals to get paid more when they get you paid more.

Because Stack Influence has some very specific parameters for who should use it and what types of creators they’ll get, William actually has thought very deeply about the space and the differences between creators of various sizes and effectiveness. He makes for a good conversation about topics like influencer pay scales and the differences between creators of various audience sizes and more.

I invited William to come on the show to tell us more about Stack Influence, but to also hold him to the task of answering some of the trending questions in the space. We talk about pay, performance-based compensation, programmatic versus high touch and more.

And I happened to stumble upon a huge missed opportunity for Stack Influence. It has something to do with its name and how the company got started. Listen closely for that in the conversation.

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.

There are dozens of different types of influencers. The two that often get the most grief are the superficial fashion and beauty, maybe food and lifestyle influencers that I like to call the peace sign, duck lips crowd. The other are the self-promoting talking head types in the B2B space … often fraught with marketing nerds like me. They don’t seem to have clients or case studies, but they claim expertise and try to pull you into their online course to pay them a ton of money to learn what they know.

You can probably hear the contrarian tone coming out in my voice here. But there’s a reason I’m pointing those folks out. It’s not that I don’t like the online course pushers or even consultant types who seem more style and less substance. In fact, my opinion on them aligns with my opinion on the long-standing debate over whether or not someone is a social media expert. 

If that person’s clients learn from them, are happy with the work they are doing for them, then for the client, he or she is an expert and our opinion doesn’t matter. 

I’ve always wanted to have an online course, frankly. I’ve started and stopped building one over the years. It can be overwhelming. It turns out there’s help out there for folks like me who struggle with that. Or you content creators or subject matter experts listening who might also be thinking of starting an online course. 

Rocky Buckley is the creator of Platinum Path and The Power Persona Project. He helps experts, thought leaders and influencers “Go Platinum” by reinventing their brand, strategy and even business model. One of the primary ways he does this is through online course, masterminds and other virtual products that serve a direct audience for a subscription fee or similar revenue stream. 

I asked Rocky to come on the show and illustrate to us how one can not only tap into these types of information products to build a community of paying customers around them, but take that to a next level and build that community into raving fans of your content, too.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/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.

When you pull back from the narrow focus of influence and influence marketing and look at marketing and advertising overall, the linchpin to being successful in any of this stuff we call a job or career is understanding consumers. The first rule of any type of communications is to know your audience. If you don’t know them, or don’t start there, you’re creating a long way to the goal rather than an efficient one.

But it’s more than just understanding where they live, how much money they make, their gender, age and ethnicity. To be really good at persuading an audience to take action, you also have to understand their behavior, their psychology and as much as you can, get in their heads.

Nancy Harhut studies human behavior. Her background is in the advertising world. She spent time at Mullen and Hill Holiday in Boston. She’s been a creative director which may sound nothing like studying human behavior. But the best creatives put that topic at the front of their mind to better inform their ideas.

Nancy has a new book out called Using Behavioral Science in Marketing. It’s actually refreshing to see a book about understanding consumer’s brains coming from someone other than a researcher or scientist, though I love me some Roger Dooley and Martin Lindstrom.  

I asked Nancy to join us to talk about human behavior through the eyes of a marketing creative person, to uncover how those insights can help creators, agencies and brands in the influence space and beyond. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/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.

Did you know that 41 percent of Americans 12 and older have listened to a podcast in the last month? Twenty-six percent have listened in the last week. That’s 74 million people. 

And of the people who listen each week, they average hearing eight podcasts. 

All that information is from The Infinite Dial. It is the annual social media and audio listening habits research provided by Edison Research. I mark my calendar each March to get the latest download. 

It’s easy to be bullish about podcasting when you are a podcaster. But if 74 million people listen each week, that means over 200 million people in the U.S. alone do not. So there’s room to grow, not just in listenership, but in understanding of why podcasts matter.

They matter to businesses and content creators because they are an easy platform to build authority and trust upon. And you don’t have to start a podcast to build it … you can simply be a guest on one.

Spencer Carpenter saw the advantages and opportunities for businesses and creators at the onset of the pandemic. He spent 15 years in the music business but saw podcasts as an opportunity to communicate in a world where communication was changing. He founded Outlier Audio to help businesses and brands, including content creators, take advantage of podcasts.

Outlier Audio can not only pitch you to be a guest on relevant podcasts that help build your brand and trust in the community, but they’ll also help you build of podcast of your own, if that suits you better. 

Spencer joined me recently to talk about the challenges some businesses have with understanding the power of podcasts, the opportunity and advantages they bring and who is right and maybe not right for podcasting. We’ll hear from him and learn more to help you with the pods today on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/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.

For those of you out there who are content creators, whether you call yourself an influencer or not, you know I am a loud champion of owned channels. I harp on the fact that you can’t rely on the social networks … borrowed channels … for your content or audience forever. You need to have your own website. Your own email newsletter and list. Perhaps your own podcast.

I do talk about podcasting a lot, but it’s not because I love podcasts and podcasting. It’s because podcasters are influencers. And understanding them and their world, which is a little different than a regular social media content creator, is good for those of you who are brand or agency side professionals. It’s also hopefully inspiring and helpful for the creators among us who are trying to build something out of their online presence.

The challenge for many people with podcasting is that there’s so much technical know how perceived to be needed to start, it’s intimidating. You have to have software to record and edit. A place to host. Maybe software to make it sound better than you can muster in Garage Band. Do you have a website for it? How do you get it to post on all the podcast apps …

It can be a challenge. The less technically inclined someone is, the bigger the challenge.

Zencastr recently made some holistic changes to its software platform to make all that technical challenge go away. By way of disclosure, I am a paying customer of Zencastr and use it for my interviews here on the show. Zencastr is also a recent sponsor of Winfluence and its Creator Network has placed advertisements on the Marketing Podcast Network. Neither of those things have anything to do with my guest being invited on today.

Josh Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Zencastr. When you have the opportunity to interview a big shot, you take it. Sponsorship or not. 

Josh and team unleashed a new beast on the podcast industry in late August. Zencastr now is far more than a place to record your web-based interviews for podcasting. It now has full production and editing capabilities for shows, hosting, transcripts, the Creator Network which matches shows with advertisers for monetization. It’s a whole new animal. 

Josh visited with me to talk about the new features there to help make your owned content easier to manage. But we also talked about the industry as a whole, why podcast apps are terrible at search and discovery and more.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/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.

You're starting to hear a theme emerge in a lot of influencer marketing industry predictions and trends talk, it's been there but seems to be getting louder. The word or phrase I'm referring to is "data-driven."

Most of your influencer marketing platforms have that verbiage in their marketing literature because marketing decision makers like you respond to it. Data means more insights, more predictive decision making, better chance of success without us humans mucking it up. But to understand the data of any marketing channel is a level of expertise few have. That's why we rely on the software platforms and engineers to come up with metrics and formulas and dashboards. Then we look to thought leaders in and around our industry to know which of the metrics and formulas and dashboards really matter.

In our evolution as marketers, we decide which we care about from our experiences. When a campaign is successful, we look to the metrics to decide which may have been the predictor or indicator of success. We personally get more expertise and start to make those data analysis decisions on our own. Just in case we miss something along the way or need a fresh perspective on the data we use every day, there are people like Bill Hildebolt.

He's the CEO and co-founder of Gen.Video, an influencer marketing platform that focuses on video and social commerce. Bill is an analytics guy and loves to talk through and think through measurement and data analysis problems. A few months ago, he started an ambitious blog series at GenVideo's website at gen.video, it's called The Math and Science of Influencer Marketing. At this recording, it's 20 articles long and dives deep into various ways to use math and science techniques to understand influencer marketing better. I invited Bill to come on the show and talk turkey about the turkey. If you will. We get deep into the great ROI debate.

We went into metrics that matter beyond reach. Bill has a great point about segmenting analytics along content topics and verticals, that's really smart. In essence, today's episode is a couple of data nerds nerding out, and I think you'll enjoy listening in as I think we make some points that might make you smarter about your influence marketing efforts.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at 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.

If you read the tea leaves of the conversations people are having about social media channels these days, you’d probably think TikTok was dominant, Instagram was struggling, YouTube was relevant and everything else was dead. But the way the conversations go and reality aren’t always aligned. 

HubSpot published two reports over the last couple of months specific to Instagram. One was its 2022 Instagram Engagement Report. The other was a report specific to shopping on the platform. Both reports offered up reminders that not only do consumers still prefer Instagram over TikTok and other platforms, but so do marketers. 

But … research reports come out weeks and sometimes months after the surveys and data analysis is done. And social media often changes by the day. So are HubSpot’s Instagram reports even still valid?

Well, the short answer is yes. Consumer trends often take months to shift. Instagram is still bigger and used by more people than TikTok, though that gap is closing. And the perception of Instagram’s waffling wasn’t helped when its CEO came out recently and said, “Make more vertical video,” in an obvious attempt to compete with TikTok-like content.

But I wanted to dig in deeper to the information and question it a bit. When I do that I like to go to the source. I invited my old pal Kipp Bodnar, who is now the chief marketing officer at HubSpot, to sit in with me and talk Instagram, TikTok and more.

I asked him if he was concerned at all the survey data might be old the day it was published, if Instagram is still relevant and a lot more. We also dug into the shopping report a bit to talk about how marketers are leveraging those features to turn Instagram into a frictionless, shopping app, while also being a fun social network.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at 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.

Influencer marketing software is a hell of a lot of confusing. There are platforms that do everything … help you find, prioritize, analyze, select, book, contract, collaborate, review, measure and even pay creators. Then there are softwares that do just one of those things. And some that do 2-3 of those tasks.

Then there are managed services that will do all or part of the full process for you.

But then there are derivations of all that that only do one platform, like TikTok or Instagram, but nothing else. Then some that do millions of influencers. Others that have a database of just hand-picked creators. Others that are only micro-influencers.

Then those can be broken down by network or feature.

It’s maddening.  

One such derivative of influence marketing software that I’ve never really been a fan of is marketplaces. This is where a brand can go post their influence or creative need like they would on Craig’s List. Wanted: Online content creators with X numbers of followers to post about this brand for Y dollars. Creators plugged into that marketplace can apply. You don’t normally get big audience, or even highly relevant creators, but you can go grab a bunch of willing participants if you like.

Tinashe Chopanda runs a marketplace, of sorts, but certainly knows the influencer space well. He is a former creator and influencer in his own right. He built a nice YouTube following with Okay Tinashe … which was a reaction channel to K-Pop videos and such. Funny, engaging stuff. You can go look that up if you like.

But he got into optimizing videos and digital ad campaigns. He started pitching brands to be on his channel as sponsors. Then he realized being behind the camera and development of brand deals and partnerships was where his passion really laid. 

Today, he’s the man behind Sosani, and influence marketing agency that connects content creators with brands to tell stories and create great content. Part of Sosani is a bit of an influencer marketplace so I pushed on him a bit to convince me marketplaces are worth my time. We talked about his process and thoughts around building better influence campaigns and content. And I asked him if he had to do it all over again with Okay Tinashe, what would he do differently.

Good stuff from a former big shot YouTuber turned influence marketing strategist and agency owner Tinashe Chopanda, on today's episode of Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at 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.

The world of social media and content is changing … again. It does that every so often. Unfortunately. more often than we probably care for it do so. Where Instagram, then Instagram Stories were the content du jour for influencers and, thus brands, a year or so ago, now our focus is on snack-able, vertical video.

Thanks TikTok.

Actually, platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are just a continuation of the evolution of what consumers consume. Now, we can get into a chicken-and-egg discussion about what caused this. Did the social networks prioritize vertical video content that forced people to consume it? Or are people really so dumb they can’t turn their phone 90-degrees and watch a video the way it was meant to be viewed … horizontally?

The cause doesn’t matter. The effect is in full force. TikTok is currently the dominant social content channel and mechanism consumers are spending time with. Instagram has responded with algorithm changes and outright guidance that short-form video is its priority. 

That presents an interesting challenge for brands and agencies whose creative departments are art school grads and cinematographers. That also created the space influencers and online content creators needed to emerge as highly relevant and useful partners for those brands and agencies.

Where traditional creatives have perhaps been slow to adjust to creating short-form, snack-able and vertical content, TikTok-ers and Instagrammers have jumped in. 

Lena Katz and the team at Ampersand recently announced an interesting solution and approach to that agency creative gap for this content demand. Lena is the content and creator strategy lead at Ampersand. It is a production company that works on video and film production from big budget commercial shoots to TikTok-like snack-able videos. 

A few weeks ago, Ampersand announced an offering for its clients called creator integrated services. They pull online content creators in at any and all steps of the marketing creative process to deliver better social video content, and underlying marketing campaigns, for the brands and agencies it works with.

Lena also happens to have served a short stint at TikTok, so he had a look-see behind the curtain of the explosion that is that social network. I asked her to come on the show and tell us more about how Ampersand is solving the creative gap issue, how to overcome client objections to creator programs and a lot more. 

Pay attention here folks, Lena’s thoughts on the industry and how to tackle certain issues is smart stuff. And it’s coming up on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at 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.

Winfluence was nominated to be a part of Guru Events' Top 50 Marketing Podcasts of 2022. Now, the creators have arranged for four shows at a time to go up against one another in an NCAA Tournament-style bracket to determine which is (allegedly) the top podcast for the year in the category.

Winfluence is up this week against three other great podcasts, but is far behind in the voting. Get out and vote for Winfluence to support Jason's competitive drive and have a little harmless, silly fun for our community!

Go to https://jason.online/vote and pick 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.