Aaron Conant 0:18

Hey, everybody, Happy Wednesday. My name is Aaron. I'm the co founder, Managing Director here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking group of brands. We host a ton of these informational networking events. As a whole, do a couple 100 of these a year. Also do close to 100 small format dinners. And just really enjoy connecting with people. I spend the majority of my time just talking to brands as 20 to 30 a week. We'd love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today, and in those conversations, it's just kind of picking apart. Hey, what are your biggest pain points? What are the things you're trying to solve for? What are the things that are most intriguing to you? And when the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this. At the same time, we're also asking a who's, who are the leaders in the space, right? Who are the people you trust, who's executing, performing for you? And that's who we bring in as a sponsor and kind of a thought leader here on these calls. And so before we get started, a couple housekeeping items. We're starting three to four minutes after the hour, like we always do. Just want to give everybody a chance from the last meeting to be able to join we're also going to wrap up before the end of the hour as well. I guess before 2:30 Eastern time. We're going to give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is, we want this to be as educational informational as possible. At any point in time, if you have a question, drop them in the chat, drop them in the Q and A and we will get to those questions as real time as possible. And I guess the only other thing is we are kicking off a full day event again in New York City the 12th of December. If anybody's like to attend that, just ping our team. We'll get you signed up. And other than that, let's jump into kind of the topic for today, which is around influencers as a whole. It's been an interesting trend over the past. I would say, really, like three to four years from the time, I guess you think about TikTok taking off, when you think about the pandemic and all this other stuff, this trend around, hey, what's going on with influencers? How do we use them? And it's gotten I don't think anybody's surprised. It's kind of really complicated to use them effectively and efficiently, cost effectively. And so we've got some great friends, you know, partners, long time friends and partners, supporters of the network over at Blue Wheel, Zach and Dayna are here today, and I'll kind of like kick it over to them if they want to do a brief intro, and then we can kind of jump into all the information. And again, if you have questions, drop them in the chat. But Zach, I'll kick it to you first, and then if you want to kick to Dayna, and then we'll jump into some of the content. Sound good?

Zach Riegle 2:50

Yeah? That sounds great. Appreciate it. Yeah. Aaron and I have been working together for over five or six years at this point, so it's always great to connect and reconnect. I'm Zach Riegle. I'm the VP of sales at Blue wheel. I am joined today by Dayna. Dayna, do you want to give a brief background on your role at Blue Wheel?

Dayna Henninger 3:09

Yeah. So I'm Dayna Henninger. I'm the Director of Social at Blue Wheel. I receive organic social and influencer marketing, and I've been here for about seven years or so.

Zach Riegle 3:16

I've also been with blue wheel for over 12 years at this point. 

Aaron Conant 3:23

So seven years was long

Zach Riegle 3:25

agency space. It's like dog years or, you know, it should be time seven. So we're really excited today to talk more about influencer marketing in specific. Blue Wheel as an agency. We're an omni channel advertising and marketing agency. We help brands from click to ship. Today, we're going to be specifically talking about influencer and to Aaron's point, influencer has changed. It's evolved. It's a different breed than it was a few years ago, but also how we use influencers and how influencer content can unlock our complete omni channel advertising strategy. So today we're going to dive in, and Dayna is going to give us a breakdown in terms of modern influencer. What are we talking about when we talk about influencer? What does it look like? How has the market shifted? And then we're going to take a look at three ways that influencers are impacting omni channel advertising, and potentially ways that you're not thinking of them today. So the goal is to give you a better understanding and maybe a few ideas of how you could be leveraging your current influencer efforts or starting influencer efforts anew to support your digital strategy.

Aaron Conant 4:35

Cool, size, really quick, is there a size of company that we're like, this isn't relevant for, or is it for literally everybody? 

Dayna Henninger 4:49

I mean, really, every company can benefit from influence marketing as long as you have a product that is something that has interest. I mean, I'm sure there's like, weird plumbing tools or like something super random. That even like an influencer. You know, there could probably someone in that space as well. But yeah, really, any brand that's selling products to people can benefit from using influencers. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 5:10

And one more thing, just I've seen a bunch of more people join here. If you have questions along the way on anything at any point in time, drop them the chat, or drop them in the Q and A, and we'll get them answered real time. So awesome. This is my probably, I think, I don't know. May have multiple favorite slides, but this is the one that I'm most intrigued by, because this is something that's changed, I think, drastically over the years, or how people view it, or at least how I did so anyways, back to you and the team. So kicking it off with what

Dayna Henninger 5:34

is an influencer? So a lot of terms are kind of thrown out interchangeably when it comes to emeralds are marketing, so we wanted to break it down just before we get into everything a little deeper, like what everything is. So when someone's talking about a creator, so that is just any person on social media that is posting to entertain an audience. So if you have a profile, and you're not private, you're not just posting to like your friends and family, you can be called a creator. So on TikTok, there's a lot of a lot of a rise in the use of creators. So a lot of people on TikTok aren't necessarily influencers. They're just like people posting and kind of gaining a phone and gaining gaining an audience. They can become an influencer, but they're not necessarily that's not their job. They're like setting out to do that. They just want to share their content and opinions. And then affiliates are creators who earn commission on sales through the content that they're posting on social. So obviously there's different kinds of affiliates, so there's like publications and things like that. But when we're talking in regard to like influencers and creators, affiliates are the creators that are earning commission on things that they're posting. Again, they don't have to be like a mega influencer to be an affiliate. You can just be a smaller creator and still earn commission and whatnot through your posts. And then influencers are creators who have built an engaged audience, so they have more followers than just a smaller creator or smaller affiliate. And their their followers are really influenced by their recommendations. So influencer, obviously, is called influencer. So you want to make sure that these people have the ability to give recommendations to people that they're taking and actually engaging with. And when it comes to the sizes of influencers, there's different terms as well. So Nano, in our kind of setting, typically means someone with a following from one to 5000 and kind of goes up from their micro macro power user at Blue wheel really specialize in using influencers power user and under really specializing mostly in that micro and macro space. When you get into influencers who have the celeb level, not necessarily actual celebrities, like Kim Kardashian, but just celebrity levels in terms of, like, over a million followers, they're pretty well known in the influencer space. Their costs can just be astronomical, and they can be difficult to work with in terms of getting contracts and all of those things through so we really found that the sweet spot for getting great content, getting people who are posting that have engaged audiences, and just easy, easy to work with, are in that macro and micro space.

Zach Riegle 7:54

Would it be fair to say we work with influencers, and a lot of them are creators and affiliates, or they are all creators, but some of them are affiliate. Yeah, so anyone,

Dayna Henninger 8:01

everyone's a creator. Essentially, if you're posting on social media, you can be called a creator if you're posting, but yeah, in terms of affiliates, some some influencers don't want to be affiliates. Some creators don't be affiliates. It's ultimately dependent on if you want to kind of turn your audience into a money making effort, or if you want to keep it more organic, so that affiliate piece is kind of just if someone wants to start earning through their content. But, yeah, influencers can be affiliates, but everybody's a creator, so hopefully that clarifies, yeah,

Zach Riegle 8:33

dive into how you structure campaigns, or how you structure your influencer based on what you're trying to accomplish, creating content, driving revenue, top line awareness. So there's more of that to

Aaron Conant 8:45

come. I appreciate the insight. Yeah, and really quick. So the influencers, if they're deciding to take cash up front, right, which is traditional, what it is, right, just you're paying them for an action, they can also blend into. And maybe we'll get into this. Like, what you're talking about is, like, the Are you, are the you seen a trend where we're going to affiliates, because I've seen the pendulum swing back and forward where affiliates seems to be more of a performance marketing type initiative, which a lot of people are more comfortable in any trends there as a whole. Yeah, so

Dayna Henninger 9:15

with affiliate that's definitely been on the rise, just in general, and then through, like, TikTok Shop and things like that. I know we're not getting fully into that, but just noting, into that, but just noting, like affiliate is definitely on the rise. And things like you're saying, like, things have really changed. So in the beginning, back like 10 years ago, it was like you could just send products to influencers or to creators, and they would just post without needing a contract, without needing payment. They were just excited to get product. Then things really shifted into these, like mega, mega influencers, all of these brands were just reaching out to the top people, and then again, it's shifted now into this more kind of like smaller affiliate model. And while smaller affiliates are a great way to get a lot of widespread conversation going about your brand, we really find that actually working with the. Influencers in a more kind of, like upfront payment contract method is more effective for your full omni channel experience. So a lot of times when you're working with kind of like affiliates or people, you don't have as much control over the content, which sometimes is fine if you're going at scale, but a lot of times when you want to use that content in all these different places, if the people are, if you're paying them to create content, or you're, you know, working towards sending the products out and whatnot, sometimes they'll say the brand name wrong. Sometimes they'll use the product incorrectly. There's a lot of different kind of pitfalls you can fall into when you don't have as much control with an upfront contract or an approval process. So we found, again, we're working with smaller creators still, and it's really cost effective, but we're able to get more control over it in order to make sure we're getting a good end result. And I do also want to know that with that control, we're not trying to give scripts out to people or make it seem super inauthentic, like the benefit of influencers that you want they know how to talk to their audience in a way that is actually going to have that influence. So we don't ever want it to seem scripted, but we want to have control over Are you saying the brand name properly? Are you using the products correctly, those kinds of things. So a lot of brands definitely benefit from leaning into that method over just relying on an affiliate, an affiliate program where you don't have that much control. Awesome. And then I tried to call it this, like pricing slide. So this is, like a range, obviously, if anyone here has worked with influencers, you know, it's, it's all over the board. They're really no set standards. But we kind of use this as a guardrail. Obviously, celebrity, there's some celebrity influencers who are making like, $100,000 for a poster, or even above that. So that's obviously a huge scale. But when you're in the smaller section here, these are kind of the typical rates we're seeing with influencers, obviously, looking photos are typically less expensive than videos and reels. Videos and reels are really where everyone is going. So when you work with influencers, that's usually the kind of content you're going after these days, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok. But just wanted to call out that these prices are a lot more reasonable than a lot of people think. Like again, with what we're able to do, we negotiate and we're offering them different, different like benefits, products obviously come along with it. So just wanted to call out that these are some of the just general ranges of prices that we're seeing with influencers. Currently. They're obviously always increasing and changing with inflation and things like that. But currently, these are where things are standing for us. And are

Aaron Conant 12:20

these numbers, is that if a brand is going straight to the influencer, rather than using, you know, an agency or something like that, are these negotiated rates, or is this pretty much what you're standing you're seeing, even if it's just a brand going straight to one so obviously,

Dayna Henninger 12:33

like, we are an agency. So these are, these are the prices that we're seeing. So when we're when we're approaching influencers on behalf of brands. So this is, these are the general ballpark rates that we're seeing, kind of judging off of, obviously, if someone has, like, exceptionally good content or extremely high engagement, the prices go up and things like that. So again, these are, this is just like a base level here, but yeah, typically with as an agency, this is what we're seeing, what we're negotiating on behalf of

Aaron Conant 12:57

brands. You're right. It is a lot lower than I thought it was going to be Yeah, and again, like the

Dayna Henninger 13:01

size of influencer does matter, but yeah, these are kind of like the averages for each sector of influencer.

Aaron Conant 13:10

Awesome. And a quick reminder, if you have questions, drop them the chat or the Q and A, and we'll get to them for sure.

Zach Riegle 13:17

Yeah, Dayna, do you want to just touch on usage rights? And kind of that has shifted as well, yeah,

Dayna Henninger 13:22

for sure. So with usage, so typically, organic usage is automatically included. Whenever you're working with an influencer that you could have, you can repost the content onto your own social profiles. That's just kind of like a included cost when it comes to using the content in advertising or an email on your website, things like that. That's when the costs increase beyond the first rates that we're showing. So the rates that are to the left of that are like the organic usage rates, when you want to use it in different places, that's when there's usually a monthly cost. So you can decide you want three months, usually we're going after 12 months of usage. So those rates can increase based on what you're asking for. If it's something beyond organic usage, which most brands typically are looking for, that paid usage, paid advertising, at least, that plays well into our next slide. Yes. So if you're kind of wondering so what kind of impulse or program would work, right for me, you can look at a couple different things to determine, you know, like shifting you into the direction of what you should be going after. So based on the brand phase, that's a super important piece. So do people know about you? Are you recognizable? Has anyone heard of your products? Anyone heard of your brand name? That's a really big piece. And what kind of influencer program you should start out with. So if no one has ever heard of you, you need awareness more than you can actually, like you can't really convert people until they've heard of you at a mass level. So organic awareness is the kind of goal of your influencer program. You should go after initially, with that, you can have, like, an in terms of your advertising budget, it can range from being low to high. Just want to make sure you're getting out there, spreading awareness through your influencers, putting paid by. That and getting things going there, I often wouldn't recommend doing like the affiliate piece, with the discount codes with awareness, because, again, people aren't really likely to convert in the beginning when they have never heard of you and you're really just focusing on reach there when it comes to having an affiliate influencer program. So pairing together what we've been talking about, like working with these smaller influencers and also giving them codes, that's a great way, if you have, like, a lower budget in terms of advertising, to get a lot of content and reach beyond what you'd be able to do just if you were only advertising. So that's when we really like to utilize the affiliate program. Is that kind of like middle brand to utilize that content and get conversions through repetition of working with influencers. So in the collaboration focus here, I reach in frequencies. You want to reach a lot of people, but also you want to work with the same influencers in that affiliate program multiple times, so people can see that they're consistently liking the product over and over again, and then they're more likely to convert again, more organically, just through the content, than relying on ads. Then when it comes to paid advertising, you want to make sure you have a medium to high budget. We're not usually using codes in this when your goal is really just to fuel paid ads, because you don't necessarily want to be pushing paid spend behind an influencer's code that you then have to pay commission on. So again, you can do that, of course, but you're kind of losing a little bit of margin there. So with paid advertising, the focus of the collaboration is really on content variety, so making sure you're hitting all of these different kind of personas of influencers to see which one's sticking being able to use and test different content with different audiences that you're testing just to gain a lot of knowledge. And then you can obviously go back and say, Oh, we're really doing well with mom. So let's go and get more mom influencers and just be able to test and learn and then optimize through the channels of personas that are working best through your paid ads. Okay, just some things to consider when working with influencers. If you've never done this before, there's like four main things that we think are the most important. So first off, esthetic. You want to make sure these influencers are posting good content if you're going to be paying for it, you want to make sure that you're going to be getting something back that is usable, that represents the quality and kind of just brand identity that you have, the content quality in terms of, do they have, like, a like, nice picture quality? Are they, is their videos professionally produced? Do they have nice sound things like that? They're not in, like, cluttered backgrounds or those kinds of things. And that engagement rate is a huge one. I'm sure you guys already all know this, but you know, some influencers can go out there and buy followers, or their followers aren't really authentic, and so a good way to spot that is by checking their engagement rate. You want to make sure that their audience is engaging with their content, they're liking, their commenting, their influencers responding back, just to make sure they really do have a sense of community, because that's when you can identify if someone actually has an influence. And the last thing here is controversy. So I'm sure you guys have heard of different influencer controversies that have happened throughout time, ever since the filters have been relevant. So making sure you're not aligning with someone who has had a past controversy is a huge thing. There's always different scandals going on. So there's it's not always something you can prevent if you work with someone and then then they have a scandal, but always making sure you're vetting and researching influencers, just to make sure that you're not aligning yourself with something that somebody did that was not very tasteful.

Aaron Conant 18:15

So question I get a ton is, where do we go find influencers, and how do we increase the number of influencers? Like, what's the best way to go? I mean, there's vetting, but there's also finding the people in the first place. And then there's always this,there's, you know, there's this little bit of anxiety around, well, I see there an influencer in I space, but they're also dealing with, maybe it's competitor, maybe it's a competitor just left to center, you know that, does it? Is it bad? If you know they're talking about both our products, how do we how do we go find somebody that's niche that really works well for us? Is a lot of the questions I get, I need more. That's what that, I think is the right way to put it.

Dayna Henninger 18:54

Yeah. So we use a lot of different tools to kind of figure out which influencers are right for a brand. So first, we identify, like, what kind of personas we think are the right fit, again, whether it's like moms, like lifestyle influencers, or whatever it is. And then from there we, we do usually utilize the software to kind of find influencers and embed them and get more information on them. We also do a lot of things manually. So like we, my whole team, is really very like, overly online, I would say, so we, and we've worked with so many influencers in the past that we just like, past that we just, like, have category, we've categorized them, and like, we have a ton of influencers just kind of like, on deck that we know can top of mind, think of. But really, just like, searching and finding people through the platforms is one of the best ways to really make sure you're getting the right people, not soft softwares. Can't always pull everything you're looking for. I would say, if anybody is you know, on TikTok. TikTok is a great way, like TikTok search, you can find so many good people just through, like, the native search capabilities of TikTok, their algorithm is just like unmatched. So that's really something that legalizes, both in our past experience our software, and then, just like getting our hands dirty with searching and finding people there. Um. In terms of your question on working with influencers who have worked with competitor brands, it can be tough. You definitely want it depends on your product as well. Like, how niche of a product you have obviously in, like, the beauty space, if you didn't work with someone because they promoted like a lipstick with for another brand two weeks ago, like, it's just impossible to find a beauty influencer who's not promoting multiple products. But if it is a little bit more niche, you want to definitely look for someone who has more space between that. You wouldn't want to work with somebody who posted yesterday about something super niche. I can't even think of what would be like, I don't know, like a coffee maker or something like that. I posted about their favorite coffee maker they just got a week ago, and then you're going to do a new collaboration with them like that. Doesn't really make a lot of sense. So finding the right people definitely depends on what kind of vertical you're in. But yeah, just just ultimately looking and seeing who they're working with, when they worked with them, and if it's necessarily a deal breaker for your industry.

Aaron Conant 20:54

Yeah, awesome. I have a question that comes into right kind of in this vein, influencers I'm familiar with tend to dominate a specific channel, ie TikTok only to successful brands take a channel approach, or a multi, multi channel, holistic approach. Yeah.

Dayna Henninger 21:09

So we typically work with Instagram and TikTok are the channels that we're most used. Like commonly working with influencers on YouTube tends to be really expensive, and we just see that we get better, better reach there. So in terms of where we're working with these people, it depends on where you where their audience is. So if someone is huge on TikTok and smaller on Instagram, we'd rather work with them on TikTok. So we don't like discriminate on platform. We look at where the influencer has the most influence and work with them on that platform.

Zach Riegle 21:36

I think the big thing here is, for a lot of brands, influencer tends to be kind of an afterthought, or UGC, or hey, we're going to do it, and there's not a lot of critical thinking about where the content is going to go and how it's going to be produced, and what channels it's going to go to. What are the overall goals that you're trying to achieve, either a social growth or advertising revenue, right? Aaron, we talked about creative a while ago and how traditional creative agencies used to create this, like big I

Aaron Conant 22:10

might have done a whole podcast on it. Zach, everyone

Zach Riegle 22:12

had to, everyone had to take the trickle down content, right? That's how a lot of influencing is being done. It's just done, and then you take what you get and see how you fit it into your advertising. You're going organic social, or you're back to school, campaign, and what Dayna's team does a phenomenal job of. And what I think we want to communicate to everyone that's on this call is there's a level of planning and critical thinking that comes to influencer content. It's needed in order to solve these things before you get there. So we know who we're trying to target. We know what the goals are. We know how the client evaluates success, so we're gonna make recommendations for influencers on those channels at those sizes, in the bright niche that fits that. So there's a lot of planning that goes into it in order to make sure and kind of the second half of this, this presentation, is all of the additional things that you can do with this, this content that unlocks advertising needs to be thought of in that planning month, right? You asked, When does q4 planning start? And we said, August. It. We want to be three months ahead of everything, right? We want to be thinking about all of this stuff. So I think that's a really kind of good way to frame how we take a look at it. Is usage rights, what you're trying to do, the size of your brand, reach your revenue, awareness or channel growth. All of those things need to be discussed before you put your together, your your influencer campaign? Yeah,

Aaron Conant 23:43

just a little bit on this question. I want to dig in just a little deeper here, because this, because I'm what I'm reading into it, it's like, then, if I'm going with an influencer that maybe it's on three channels, I can just pick the one that they're dominant on, and they're not going to be offended that I'm not asking them to do for any any of the other channels would be my hope, then that's totally acceptable across the board. But the other part of it, though, is Zach is kind of what you're saying is we need to think about it. Let's take a step back and take a look at what our goals are. And it could be possible that for less money, I could have them produce content for me that I really need on these other platforms that they're doing. And if I think about it from a holistic content generation platform, yes, I want to drive sales, but I also have this other whole piece that I have to constantly be getting more and more content. How do I have that fit into who I'm working with? Yeah, and with,

Dayna Henninger 24:38

like, the channels as well. So if you're just going for awareness, you obviously want to work with them where they're the biggest they're the biggest but if your goals are to really convert, like, meta has a higher conversion rate than TikTok and things like that. So if you're looking for, again, more fuel towards paid in that planning process, you would want to post on the channel where you want to get, like, partnership code so you can then, like, take their content and white listed. Out there, versus just like going where you're going to get more organic awareness. So yeah, that definitely plays a part that I want to make sure that that's clear as well.

Aaron Conant 25:07

Yeah, for sure. Thanks Amy for shooting that in. Just a reminder, because we had a bunch more people join here as at the halfway point you have questions drop into the Q and A or drop into the chat, and we will get those answered right here. Actually another one just pops in. So many influencers have paid followers. How do you filter them?

Dayna Henninger 25:27

Yes. So that's kind of where we're looking at. The first thing you look at to really clock that is your engagement rate. So making sure that they have a high engagement rate is a good way to see if the people that are following them actually like their content, also looking through their comments on their posts as well. So sometimes there can be bots in there that are just going to be engaging too. So the first step is looking at engagement rate. Sometimes there's bots that can get past that. So then you have to take a deeper look at what their comments are looking like. If you're still concerned, you can also like, we have software that allows us to like vet who someone's audience is and who's who's engaging. But if you don't have something like that, you can also ask them to send screenshots of their like inside of their platform to see like who their followers are. Some influencers are a little hesit to do that, but the ones who have authentic followers usually are not. But yeah, that definitely is something you have to keep an eye out for. But those kind of three things are the ways to get around that awesome. Okay, next, this kind of goes into what Zach was saying as well as that we need to start in August. So when it comes to working with influencers and having this program where we are getting their rates, doing contracts, creating content, giving feedback and editing, if there's things that are wrong with it, and then the content going live, it's usually around eight weeks. So this is kind of a struggle for a lot of brands. They're like, Oh, we reached out to them, like, can they post in two weeks? And it's just like, it's really not realistic, because it both, there's both reliance on the brand side and also the influencer side. And so any delays in any kind of point of this, like, they're like, Oh, I was on vacation, or, Oh, I did this, that just adds to this timeline. So in an ideal world, you can maybe get it in six weeks, maybe seven weeks, but typically, just want to set that expectation that you should be planning for your influencer content going live and feeding into your campaigns eight weeks before you actually need it. That's awesome. Okay? And then looking at the organic social impact of working with influencers. So as I mentioned, it's really about brand awareness and kind of the early phase, and then Zach's gonna go into like, kind of the paid component. But working with influencers obviously provides that social proof beyond just what you're able to tell through your own brand marketing. So every brand is talking about how great they are, how great their products are. But when you get to get to see a real person that you trust, and put your put your time, and, like you know, energy into supporting these people, and they are recommending these products to you, and you've maybe tried something before from them now they're recommending something else, it just makes you trust that product more, since you have that built in trust through these creators, that also obviously then drives engagement back to the brand and just builds more awareness as well. Also it influencer marketing fuels user generated content use by the brand. I did want to note, not sure if everybody is aware of the kind of TikTok restrictions of using influencer like reposting influencer content that's been posted already on TikTok. It's called unoriginal content, and can get flagged by TikTok because they their algorithm recognizes that it's been posted before. So you can get kind of docked on TikTok, for that matter, does not have that currently, but just wanted to call that out, that if you're working with influencers and you really want to be fueling getting user generated content using your own page, it'd be beneficial to get maybe one piece of content that the influencers posting themselves. Posting themselves, and then another supplementary piece of content that's just user generated content that they're not posting, but you can then post on your own channel. So it kind of fills feeds into that feeling your content needs. And then, just briefly wanted to touch on the rise of social commerce. So again, we're not going to get super into TikTok Shop. But just wanted to note like with the increased focus on purchasing through social, influencers have more power than ever to actually really drive the bottom line beyond just this awareness. So we're getting closer and closer to it being kind of like a closed unit here, where influencers have the ability to really impact revenue more than they ever have before.

Zach Riegle 29:22

I thought this was supposed to be a bubble. I thought influencers were a trend that we're gonna fade out. Wasn't that the conversation a couple years ago, they're not going anywhere. Social platforms are only getting bigger. The connection between social commerce and social awareness is stronger, and if you're not doing influencer now, we really urge you to do it in 2025 for all of the the tangible reasons that Dayna just went through. And we'll talk about some of the kind of extrapolary impact as well. But this isn't going away. Um. The impact of influencer, as Dayna said, isn't going away, so continue to invest here.

Aaron Conant 29:22

Really quick. It says you also mentioned that TikTok search is a great way to look for influencers. Does that mean TikTok Shop

Dayna Henninger 30:17

for really both when you're searching for influence, like just the native search capability for searching for videos is more so what I was talking about, but you can also, you know, search for TikTok Shop influencers that way as well, but they just have a if you're looking for something specific, a lot of people are turning to TikTok Shop to search for things more than they even are on Google and whatnot. So it just has a really good ability to pull up exactly what you're looking for. So if you have a specific product niche that you're looking for, looking there, you can find a lot of different videos and content that surrounds that to find influencers that would you know work for you.

Zach Riegle 30:51

There's a different search we would be doing if you were looking at TikTok Shop and social commerce specifically,

Dayna Henninger 30:58

and those videos will come up in search. But it's, it's a different kind of platform. You can look within TikTok Shop to find TikTok Shop. Influencers,

Zach Riegle 31:08

awesome. All right, you ready to get weird? Aaron, yes, the beaten path. Okay, so we love influencer marketing. It creates this content, creates awareness. It can generate revenue if, if that's the model that you're taking. But one of the things that it does incredibly well, and it's even more important today than it was two years ago, is it creates content, and it creates content for advertising. So in order to understand kind of the impact or why it's so important, I want to just talk real quick about how most social platform advertising has changed in the last two years. So this is the old model. The old model, let's say we're on meta. We would create a campaign for every audience that we wanted to target. So if I sell granola, I would have a mom. Audience, I would have a hiker. Audience, I have a kayaker. Audience, etc. Each audience would have its own targets, it would have its own creative. It would have iterative creative underneath that. So we would have variations of the ads that we're trying to run, and each one of these would be launched separately with their own budgets. Fast forward today, and that's not capable anymore for a few reasons, when they just kind of taken away some of the advertisers ability, and instead, meta and these other platforms have leaned towards algorithmic, broad search advertising, meaning they give a conversion, in our case, conversions or purchase, so they will find audiences that engage with our content and purchase, and they will find more audiences like that. And so instead of creating these separate campaigns, we feed pillar content into this AFC plus, or into this performance Max campaign, these algorithmic campaigns, and those campaigns will show our creative to the right people. It'll figure out who is interested in the content and provide it to them. So this is the new model, and the new model does a couple things. The first is, when we have this new model, now we need to feed it with pillar content. So instead of iterative content, instead of versions on versions, we need to create our mom content, our kayaker content, our hiker content, and allow the algorithm to find the right advertiser so or to the Find the right the right user. So in order to use this really important advertising campaign, we need to create pillar content. Pillar content can be expensive if we're producing it ourselves, if we're in a studio or on site and we're paying models and model usages and full teams, that can be really expensive. So the way that we found to support this really important advertising technique is to use your influencers to create that pillar content towards Dayna's point, if her team knows that they have to create those influencer relationships, and they're going to be advertising focused who she works with, and the usage rights that her team negotiates are going to change completely. So we have this advertising piece. It's incredibly important. We know pillar content supports it. We know that influencer content makes it it makes it a lot easier to support that. The other thing that influencer content does is it allows you to get out of your learning phase quicker. So learning phase is this purgatory that meta sends you to. Essentially each campaign that you run has to have seven conversions or 50 conversions in seven days. So if we're managing all those multiple campaigns, each one of those has to have 50 purchases in seven days. If we're using an ASP plus campaign, we just need those 50 purchases to happen in one campaign. So now that pillar content that we're creating, it's actually making our advertising more efficient. So not only are we using this ad campaign better, we are being more efficient, more cost effective with our advertising, because we don't have 12 campaigns that are stuck in learning that. Aren't being as efficient as they possibly can. So this is what we talk about where, yes, influencer content has these very tangible benefits, but we're also looking at how to engage and how to unlock other parts of your Omni channel strategy.

Aaron Conant 35:15

So let me just unpack that a little bit, just make sure that I understand so you've got the learning phase, right, and maybe everybody else is listening. But this is, this is my brain breaking it down real time because of the advantage plus performance Max, whatever we want to call it, the campaigns. You can pile them all together into one and it will go learn you. The odds of you getting 50 purchases is higher. The drawback is you actually need the content to plug in, to hit all those different types. And the way to get that content the cheapest way, because it's so expensive to have, you know, photo shoot and models and blah, blah, blah, was actually to go to your influencers, pay them the extra recurring fee, right? That monthly fee, after they've created it, so you can have access and use it. You plug that into your campaigns, and maybe you have five different influencers across five different categories. They plug in, it goes and finds everybody, applies the content correctly, which is then more engaging, which then means you get purchases faster, and now you've leveled up all of your advertising on the PErforM, traditional, paid search, social side, you nailed it. That's literally perfect. You can't if you're gonna go at scale, you have to do this absolutely, because otherwise you're right. Every single one of those is stuck in a learning phase until it hits there. You're losing money in that, in that scenario as a whole.

Zach Riegle 36:46

People explain, how do you explain this to executive team? Like, not just more cost effective, but also, like we see with millennial and Gen Z audiences, there's an expectation to see UGC or content that's shot from a personal level. There also is a need for professionally shot, high quality content. That's that's a trust issue. But when it comes to demonstrating the product and connecting on a personal level, it's not just more cost effective in some cases, for some audiences, it's going to be the more effective, successful way of targeting, communicating to that audience

Aaron Conant 37:22

that's awesome. It's awesome.

Zach Riegle 37:28

Any question, just because the advertising stuff was kind of dense, any questions before we hop into the last two places, that influencer content might not be, that we need to think about influencer content

Aaron Conant 37:40

one, but I want to just hold it to the end. It's around Dayna's comment on, you know, TikTok versus Google search volume. But I want to hold that to the end. I want to, want to tackle that, because it's, I think we've gone pretty deep here. I want to keep us there. Okay.

Zach Riegle 37:59

Lastly, landing page optimizations. So we are seeing PDP, content, website, content, marketplace, content that features influencer and collaborative Creator content. Not only that, we see an 8.5% increase in Landing Page Conversion when you're using EGC. So there's a study that they did. They actually found that, again, all audiences, but definitely the the younger audiences, it resonates with them. They're they're expecting it, and they convert better. So that means not only are we converting better, we're just we're speaking to that new purchasing power that most brands that we talk to, even if they their current audience is older, they're they want to tap into that, that next audience. So it shouldn't just be in your advertising. Shouldn't just be in your organic Social Reach. It also should be included in all touch points that your your user may encounter on their path to purchase.

Aaron Conant 39:07

You can completely change my mind and influencers, this is my mind was going away from just a pay for performance type. That's where a lot of conversations I'm having right now are around profitability and being able to show it, and the easiest way is just pay on conversion, but from a pure profitability standpoint, you might not be able to do that, but you

Zach Riegle 39:29

might not get the best person aligned with your brand if you're not paying them upfront. And if we all agree that there are other things that this content is going to serve, then getting the right creators for your brand, depending on how you evaluate, this, could be more important than the on paper direct revenue calculation that I think some brands are still looking at this like, I'm going to pay them $1,000 I need them to make $5,000 Or it's not a good engagement, but what if it unlocks your advertising? What if it increases your conversion rate? What if it allows you to be more effective in your TikTok TikTok Shop and organic Social Reach? Those are questions that are valid and should be included in this conversation.

Aaron Conant 40:15

But it's getting back to the our conversation from a while back, which is when you're thinking about creative, when you're thinking about content, that has to be a strategy in and of itself, and then it can help shape other things down the way awesome. I love it. Basically

Zach Riegle 40:34

what we just talked about. We have the takeaways is content is key to unlocking our omni channel advertising, the impact that influencers have on organic awareness and growth isn't going away. Dayna fought me on this. She was like, everyone knows influencer is good for social. I'm like, I know, but the level that social is going the level that influencer plays in it, I don't, I it deserves to be reiterated and kind of shouted from the rooftop, that there is this halo effect that the influencer has on your greater your greater efforts, and then integrating those that content into further customer journey, including PDP pages, which has seen increase in conversion rate and better stickiness with younger demographics,

Aaron Conant 41:26

awesome. So let's jump back to a question. Here. It says, please ask Dayna to elaborate a little on the comment that people are searching on TikTok more than Google. Is it TikTok in general, or TikTok Shops?

Dayna Henninger 41:37

Yeah, so it's for TikTok in general. I mean, it's not like Google. Obviously, Google is still the number one thing, but when you're looking at there's different studies coming out about Gen Z and like, where they're searching for things, and a lot of them are taking to TikTok to search, versus going to Google and seeing a bunch of things that are paid, you know, to show up there. So there's a lot more trust right now in what's the search results within TikTokshop, not TikTok, TikTok search results over something like Google. I know. I personally, if I'm going to, like, a new city and I want to find, like, restaurants or, you know, things like that, it's just, there's a lot of really good content that's coming up. Or if I'm looking for a new product or something like that, it's, it's definitely where I'm going to I know I'm, like, super into social so I know, like older generations might not be there yet, but the search capabilities are really impressive on TikTok, and I'm definitely more able to quickly find what I actually want versus what people want me to find on Google. I guess I would say

Zach Riegle 42:35

Google, Google quality has gone down while TikTok has gone up, right? I mean, we could have a whole nother webinar on search and how that has gone the last couple years. But if you go to Google right now, you're getting AI responses, you're getting seven pages of ads. You're getting AI generated content that doesn't really answer any questions. So yeah, we're seeing a legitimate shift in how you find the right answer for and specifically, specifically, you know, product or service searches,

Aaron Conant 43:11

yeah, I mean, you do a search like, do you really need 1,000,000,004 53,237,000, search results or right yes.

Dayna Henninger 43:21

You're thinking like, Oh, I'm I'm going to Austin, Texas. I want to know what restaurant to go to. And it's like, Good luck finding that, like, an actual, you know, like, it's just, you can find so much more on TikTok. And there's videos and people show you what you know, what's all about, and explain it. So there's definitely a rise of TikTok search. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 43:39

So I don't know if there's any other questions. I have one more here. Are there any methodologies around estimating the total reach and return of influencer content? Good question,

Zach Riegle 43:54

yes and no. I don't think there's like a way to say, hey, this piece of content, we throw it into the the WYSIWYG, and it tells us how well or what impact it made, but you certainly can see the effect of advertising, or the specific ads, and the improvement that they had on ads where we weren't using influencer campaign. You can see your social organic growth. You can see your social commerce return. So I think the short answer is not right now, not not in a really intuitive, meaningful way, but if you kind of put together these disparate pieces, you can make a really good picture of the impact that that content is having.

Aaron Conant 44:35

Yeah, awesome. Love it. I'm looking for, if there's any more questions, oh, yeah, yeah, I scroll down here, right. Do you think gifting still plays a role in influencing partnerships? If so, what would be your approach, like

Dayna Henninger 44:53

just gifting without payment? I'm assuming they mean, maybe, yeah, yeah. So just. A lot of influencers these days, like, this is their job, or it's like their side hustle, and they're more so looking to to make money and, like, actually, versus where it used to be, like, Oh, I'm getting free stuff. There are different like services and things that people can utilize to just get free product. So there are like, sites and stuff like that that are more like affiliate base, that you can go more product oriented, but again, like with just the product seating, there's not often a contract you don't have the control. So kind of goes back to what we were originally saying is just like, you could get something out of it, but you're not going to get as much of an impact as you would if you went the more traditional route, as we're mentioning, with the contracting and usage rates and all of those things. We lovingly refer

Zach Riegle 45:41

to it as spray and pray when you're at high volumes, when we're just gifting and sending it out there. And there's there's some value in that, in terms of awareness and hitting a tipping point. But for literally everything that we just talked about in the last 50 minutes, we at Blue Wheel. Don't believe that's the most effective way to manage your your product seating

Aaron Conant 46:07

in the next one here wouldn't be a 2024, webinar without one AI question or any are there any predictions as to the impact of search moving to new AI channels and the visibility of influencers?

Zach Riegle 46:21

Yeah. I mean, honestly, just what we talked about, like, I think that AI, in a weird way, has made Google worse. And that's just not a personal thing. That's I hear it from lots of people that the results just aren't getting good, therefore you're pushing people towards these platforms, and these platforms give because the algorithm is so good, they are able to connect you with the right person talking about the right thing at the right time. So, you know, the AI is both effective and uneffective. Here it's on effective on Google because it's trying to synthesize and give you an answer, and it's not a very good answer. The AI on TikTok is recognizing your question and connecting you to someone that they believe will answer it the best, right? So it's two uses of AI in kind of differing ways, and we like the one where it's still the user telling the story. It's not the AI, right? And on Google, it's the AI that is saying, Oh, yes, you want to know the best way to apply makeup. It's this, and I've aggregated it from 20 different people. Instead of here's a user who has a lot of authority, we're going to connect you with them, because we noticed that the question you're asking is aligned with what they're talking about in this

Aaron Conant 47:44

specific video. It's just, it's a more complete, more trustworthy process. Yeah, I think it gets back to the old adage around, you know, Google being a search engine. And even, like, if you think about open AI, or if you think about TikTok now, right? It's an answer engine, right? It's not just giving you tons of more stuff to go search through to find something. Is literally like you're saying, connecting you with a resident expert that can help get you to the answer. Yeah, awesome. I do not have any other questions that have poured in, but this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation again. Thanks everybody for throwing in the great questions. They make these incredibly lively, more meaningful conversations. I think, as a whole, I would encourage you to have a follow up conversation with the team over at Blue Wheel, longtime friends, partners, supporters of the network have helped countless brands out in the network, out with everything from paid search and social to influencers to Amazon across the board. I think that click to ship is a pretty well rounded description of what everybody does, and one of the few people out there who can actually do it at scale and do it really, really well. From my standpoint, I'd love to have a conversation as well. Look for a follow up email from me. I'd love to set some time to pick your brain and see topics for other webinars. But Dayna Zach, you guys are awesome. You guys are awesome. And Zach, I think you and I have to set up another podcast, because I want to do a deep dive on this influencer stuff, because it it totally changed my view. So thanks again, everybody for dialing in. Thanks. Dayna, thanks, Zach and everybody. Take care, stay safe, looking forward to seeing you at another event.