Influencer Marketing: TikTok, Instagram and Youtube Driving SEO + Sales Growth on Marketplaces

Oct 28, 2021 2:00 PM3:00 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeaways

Influencer marketing has skyrocketed over the past couple of years. Influencers are great for driving traffic to your direct-to-consumer sites—but it doesn’t stop there! Influencer marketing is a powerful brand-building and upper-funnel tactic. But, many brands find themselves defeated before they even start. So, how do you measure success with your influencer strategy?

One way is to narrow down the scope of your influencer campaign to focus on one retail platform to drive traffic. With this method, it’s more straightforward to isolate the performance of those influencers and determine downstream traffic. But, this is only the tip of the influencer marketing iceberg.

In this virtual event, Aaron Conant sits down with the Head of Partnerships and New Business Verticals at Perpetua, Patrick Quaggin-Smith. They discuss how influencer campaigns can increase organic rankings for your retail site and drive sales, how to set up and manage influencer campaigns, the key metrics to track, and more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

 

  • Why do marketers love retail or sponsored ads?
  • Closing the gap between influencers and retail purchases
  • How to measure influencer marketing success: new metrics to track
  • Preparing for influencer marketing success
  • How to set up influencer campaigns
  • What percentage of your marketing budget should go to influencer marketing?
  • The upcoming trends in paid media
  • Patrick Quaggin-Smith talks about testing and learning
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Event Partners

Perpetua

Perpetua is a SaaS tool that uses AI powered automation in order to improve digital growth via Advertising performance across a variety of marketplaces & platforms.

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Guest Speaker

Aaron Conant LinkedIn

Co-Founder & Managing Director at BWG Connect

Aaron Conant is Co-Founder and Chief Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a networking and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. Speaking 1x1 with over 1200 brands a year and hosting over 250 in-person and virtual events, he has a real time pulse on the newest trends, strategies and partners shaping growth in the digital space.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith LinkedIn

Head of Partnerships at Perpetua

Patrick Quaggin-Smith is the Emerging Channels Lead at Perpetua, a company that helps brands, media agencies, and Amazon sellers improve performance through AI-powered automation. Before taking on his current role, Patrick was an Account Executive at Perpetua and helped grow both the team and customer count. Patrick is also a Business Analyst for Mannin Research and studied economics at Northwestern University. 

Event Moderator

Aaron Conant LinkedIn

Co-Founder & Managing Director at BWG Connect

Aaron Conant is Co-Founder and Chief Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a networking and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. Speaking 1x1 with over 1200 brands a year and hosting over 250 in-person and virtual events, he has a real time pulse on the newest trends, strategies and partners shaping growth in the digital space.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith LinkedIn

Head of Partnerships at Perpetua

Patrick Quaggin-Smith is the Emerging Channels Lead at Perpetua, a company that helps brands, media agencies, and Amazon sellers improve performance through AI-powered automation. Before taking on his current role, Patrick was an Account Executive at Perpetua and helped grow both the team and customer count. Patrick is also a Business Analyst for Mannin Research and studied economics at Northwestern University. 

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Aaron Conant

Co-Founder & Managing Director at BWG Connect


BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.

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Discussion Transcription

Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Thursday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the Co-founder, Managing Director at BWG Connect we are a networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands who do exactly that we network and knowledge here together through a variety of either one on one conversations, virtual events like this, and then a lot of in person events, as well as we're wrapping those back up small format dinners right now, if you're in a tier one city, don't hesitate to reach out, let us know, we'd love to invite you to one of those, we're gonna do close to 100 in person events next year is kind of our target right now. So I love having people to be part of the network and meet them in person, if you have other people you know, within your organization or friends that you think would benefit them, just let them know, we don't sell anything here. We're just a giant networking group. And that's how, through those conversations that we get the topics for calls when the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this. And so a couple housekeeping items we get started number one, any point in time you have a question. We want this to be as educational informational as possible, drop the questions in the chat question section, or email them to me Aaron Aaron@BWGconnect.com And that includes next, you know, an hour after the call today, tomorrow, next week. Anytime you have a question in digital space, don't ever hesitate to reach out, we've got close to 10,000 brands who participate in the network, we usually can get you an answer in under a day. If you're looking for any service providers, we've got a shortlist provided by the network as a whole the top recommended service providers out there. And that's everything from Amazon, to retail media to direct to consumer shipping, you know, paid media performance, marketing, whatever it might be, don't hesitate to just, you know, reach out, we can get you an answer or recommendation pretty quickly. The last thing is, we're starting here a few minutes after the hour, and just you know, we're gonna wrap up before the end of the hour, as well as maybe, you know, probably give you four to five minutes to get on to next meeting without being late. So with that, I'm going to kind of kick off the conversation on influencer marketing, you know, really, really took off for the past couple years huge focus on, you know, branded sites straight to consumer sites using influencers to drive traffic to their own site. And now, you know, his interesting spin on what's happening right now is they're seeing the power of the influencer. A lot of times they're becoming affiliates. And we got some great friends, great partners, supporters the network over at Perpetua. They have been for a few years now just all around great wicked, smart people. And they've got some knowledge in this space. So we asked them to jump on a line today kind of share what they're seeing across the board. But also answer any questions we can throw at them. So you know, Patrick, I'll kind of kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Perpetua. That'd be awesome. And then we can kind of, you know, jump into the material here someday.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 3:03

Awesome. Thanks for the intro. So nice to meet everyone be this webinar. I'm Patrick, I head up the partnership team here at Perpetua and specifically looking at new business verticals. So partnering with new marketplaces, some of you may have you joined my previous talks on target media, Walmart, media, etc. But also now looking at other avenues that we can drive traffic to our retailers on behalf of brands, and really amplify and grow outside of the world of just sponsored advertising or display advertising. And I'll be it we're very early on in this influencer marketing space, we've only been experimenting around for four to five months. But some of the results that we're seeing are really, really interesting. And we are really looking forward to continue to exploring how we can use influencer marketing to drive traffic and sales on retail platforms. So with that said, Why do marketers really like retail ads, and specifically the sponsored ads that exist within retailers. So I've shared this on pretty much every one of my decks. But here you'll see that like sponsored ads on retailers are so successful, because they're such low funnel, they really match purchase intent with the actual ad. So here, like when someone goes to Amazon or Walmart or Target and searches a keyword, you know, they're there to buy coffee, and sponsored ads give you the ability to just go and display your ad right at the top of the page when someone's searching to buy something. This is really, really powerful. We just got some new metrics and that say, over 30% of sponsored sales come within the first three minutes of a click, and over 70% of sponsored sales come within the first seven 70% of sponsored sales come within the first hour of a click. So it's like no wonder that like, advertisers really love sponsored advertising. It's really, you know, efficient You get really great attribution. And it's just you've seen the growth of it over the last three to five years. Influencer Marketing historically hasn't had really great attribution. So typically, it's a lot upper a lot higher funnel. Definitely an awareness play trying to build a brand. Really, really tough to tie back attribution. You know, people began to use attribution links dying out to DTC sites, but seeing how influencers can drive growth on retailers has really been a black box. So sure, it's really great driving like unplanned purchases and impulse purchases. You know, you had really great content, people who post on Instagram, link in bio, send them to DTC site and sure, you could get some attribution. But as everyone knows, like not everyone is going to buy DTC something like I think there was a stat that was circulating about a year ago, or something like over 70% of product searches beginning on Amazon. So even if you're out there producing really great influencer content with really great creators, if you're not thinking about how sales are being driven on not just your disease that are not just through that attributed link, you're going to be missing out on the full picture. And you're definitely be undervaluing what influencer, marketing has to offer, specifically, specifically in the realm of retailers. So how are we beginning to close the loop between influencers and retail purchases, there's a few distinct ways that we're doing it. But first off, like everyone knows that, like, you know, sure, it's an awareness play, but as the world and as more and more people are beginning to spend time on social media channels, I think tick tock has over an average of one and a half hours of screen time per day per user, which is a astronomical amount of time. The world is also changing. So like one touch buying is becoming available through all of these platforms. So it's really creating something that we are stealing this term from one of our sister companies, called Community commerce, where, you know, buying the buying experience now lives in the middle of Amazon content, as well as the community that you're building. So the days are gone, where, you know, buying is a separate thing than your community, which is separate than your creators, it's all one, and it's only continuing to become easier and quicker to buy. Additionally, we heard that said of over 70% of sales, product searches come on Amazon, over 80% of purchases have been influenced by a social media post in one way or another, whether it be you know, a product review, or someone organically having your product within their posts or stores. So it's really, really important that, you know, you're thinking about how the community and how people are perceiving your products and brands on on these social channels is affecting their purchasing behavior. So obviously, we now know, and it's been obvious that there's huge potential for these platforms. Again, I'm going to focus on tick tock because that's where we focused a lot of our time. But it is the perfect opportunity to get your product in organic position to show customers and potential customers. Exactly. The feel and and atmosphere around your brand. So now to the meat of of the presentation. How do we actually measure? How do we actually measure measure success with influencers and specifically measuring success on retailers? It's really

Aaron Conant 8:51

quick. A quick question that comes in is, you know, what percentage are companies are using influencers in this way right now?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 9:00

I would say that there's a high percentage of companies using influencers. But a very low percentage of companies are looking at it in the way that we're about to get to. I think a lot of users today, a lot of users of influencer marketing traditionally view it as like a brand building really, really upper funnel tactic. But if you can narrow down the scope of the campaign and really focus on maybe one retailer to drive traffic to, it becomes very easy for you to isolate out the performance of those influencers and determine downstream traffic. So we'll get into a couple of the nuances of how we approach it. But I would say for the most part of all the brands that we've worked with, not all of them had been running influencer campaigns, but none of them have been measuring attribution, the way that we've been measuring it, and to being thinking about exactly how, how retailers are going to be grown through this and Winter world.

Aaron Conant 10:02

Awesome. So just a reminder that you have questions or, you know, comments just drop in the chat or the question section. Okay. Perfect.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 10:13

So something that none of the social media managers that we had spoken to had a really, really good understanding of is this flywheel that exists on retailers. So all all retailers, so Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc, have an algorithm that that is somewhat determined by sales velocity for where to show your products on a given search results page. So again, if we went back to that coffee example, if you went to coffee, where your product is displayed, whether it's page one, page two, page three, page four is all determined by sales, velocity, and really impressions, conversions, traffic and ranking. So influencer marketing has a really good opportunity to kickstart and add fuel to this algorithm, and really, in turn affect the entire performance of your product and brand on a given retailer. So using this, and thinking about how your influencer campaigns are going to affect this flywheel is kind of the first step of where we thought to begin looking for downstream effects of our influencer campaigns. To tying back attribution, so all of these retailers, or most of these retailers now offer the ability to apply attribution tags to links. So the same way where you have an attribution tag to your DTC site. Now we're able to create tags on these things on these links that are driving traffic back to the retailer to able to say, hey, this influencer, selling this amount on on Amazon. So we can say by influencer, exactly how many click throughs are getting views add to carts, etc. So it's tying back the entire conversion funnel here. So as we were mentioning, like traditional metrics that we were told, we're important for our brands, who are like likes, followers, impressions, comments and tags. But again, not really thinking about the downstream importance. We defined some new metrics that we think are important to be tracking when you're running influencer campaigns. So the first is search frequency rank. So across retailers their system called Search frequency rank, and it will tell you of the top 2 million terms. What is the most searched term? And what is all the way down to what is the 2 million top search term. So the closer you are to one, one being the most search term on that platform, to millions being the demand search term, tracking how those are trending over time. So once you start your campaign, what typically you'll see if you're running a successful campaign, is that you're going to get more searches on the product category that you're searching. So this was actually a foot peel mask. I don't know how many people follow tick tock about a year ago, it went really viral. So you actually saw a foot peel mask was a you know, relatively low search frequency rank. All of a sudden, it started spiking, as that influencer campaign began trending. So we saw that football mass probably was gaining millions and millions of searches per week, in terms of frequency, and then the actual brand. So the brand search terms had never been in the top 2 million, so they're quote unquote, unranked. After we began running the campaign, we actually saw that the branded searches made it into the top 2 million, meaning that we've gained a massive amount of volume to take it from somewhere from you know, in the depths and depths of searches that exist within these retailers, to now people are specifically searching our brand. So keeping an eye on this is a really, really good indicator that sure maybe if you still drive those influencer campaigns to your DTC site, are you tracking this? And are you seeing that downstream effect or halo effect of people going onto retailers and actually searching for your product?

Aaron Conant 14:09

You real quick a question comes in, you know, the tracker for the campaigns and app or software. Alright, are you tracking?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 14:18

Yeah, so this is actually publicly available for most brands, I think almost all brands on Amazon and a sample or a section of brands on other retailers. So this is public data. So you can our software has a tracking ability where you can just see over time how search terms are performing. But if you go to brand analytics, and equivalent sections on other retailers, you'll be able to just search whatever keywords you want. So if you you know if you search your brand name and it doesn't appear it's unranked and then if you see it appear will become ranked. And other category terms typically will make it in the top 2 million so you can just keep like a day are a weekly data point to see how it's trending relative to your campaign.

Aaron Conant 15:04

Awesome, thanks. Sweet.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 15:13

Another great downstream effect is tracking your organic rank. So again, this was like a metric that not all influencer marketing managers were familiar with. But as I mentioned on that flywheel, how, you know, retailers rank your product is really determined by impression sales, and click through rate. So we did we determined beforehand launching an influencer campaign, maybe one to five separate keywords that we want to be tracking. And we actually pull with hourly frequency over the course of that campaign to determine how your product is trending. Again, this should be fairly correlated with search frequency. But it is really, really important to be tracking because this is really how people are going to find your product. It's one thing to get more searches. But it's another thing to be higher up and earlier on in the customers browse. Something like 85% of sales come on the first page. So going from page A to page one is incredible for anyone and even going from bottom of page, which they call bottom search to the top of search as magnitudes in terms of sales volume. So really keeping an eye on hey, if we're running a really good influencer campaign, we should be seeing these other downstream effects as well. So your product should begin to appear more organically across all of your search terms. And then three, these are further downstream effects that are, again, less, less easy to specifically quantify. But again, increases in reviews. Typically, if you run a really good influencer campaign, and you're not just gonna see the purchases on the DC, but you're gonna begin to see higher purchase volume across all of your retailers. And thus, you should be able to begin to see more reviews across all of your pages. Again, this feeds into that algorithm that helps you rank higher to his badges. a surprising amount of time, once we launch an influencer campaign, we see the increase of percentage of one badges. So if you're launching a new product, maybe having like the the new badge, or becoming Amazon choice on an important keyword. So we see that really good influencer campaigns will come with these other downstream effects. And then to reduce their last reducing your A costs on your sponsored ads. So again, something that wasn't common knowledge with influencer marketing necessarily, was that Amazon's algorithm isn't entire Amazon's bidding engine is an entirely based on just bid and cost per click, but the expected return. So if you have a higher conversion rate, you'll actually be able to get the same keywords for cheaper. So what we saw with this one person that we ran a campaign for was the increase in volume and traffic from the influencer campaigns lead to much better conversion on the retailer's and thus drop the overall a cost of their other ads on the platform by over 50 by almost 50%. So again, things that you wouldn't have traditionally thought about all really important to success of the brand, and really helps justify influencer budgets. Because, you know, it just provides more value across the entire funnel. And not only exclusive to influencer campaigns.

Aaron Conant 18:32

No, I mean, it's neat. You could, I mean, I'm thinking new product launch. Right?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 18:36

Yeah. For use cases that we will go into, around us when we when we find

Aaron Conant 18:43

couple more questions that just come in, you know, how does it track it? Is it by code? And then the other one is how do you know which influencers sold and which one did not? So are you able to track influencers? How do you or is that are you just looking at it goes up or down? But I know there's a lot of focus on, you know, rewarding those influencers that are working and then you know, pairing out those that aren't.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 19:08

Yeah, so, you can track by influencer. So, you can create specific attribution tags, and each attribution tag those to one influencer. So you can send people directly from directly from you know, Lincoln bio and Tik Tok account linking bio on Instagram, to an Amazon page on page etc and get the buy influencer tracking. But what we found is that isn't necessarily indicative of like the true performance. What we saw and what that search frequency result shows is that people go and actually search the product. So they don't just click in bio there may be on their tick tock and then they go to Amazon and search for peel mask. It's not that they're clicking on the specific link within the within the actual image influencers profile, which is why traditionally, like you haven't really looked at these metrics that you look at the link, you say, okay this influencer sold this influencer so that, but there's a whole another array of effects that aren't tracked by those links, which is what we began to track here. And can we attribute like the badge to a certain influencer? Probably not. And it might often be the case or like the influencer has the most sales in the link might not be the one that actually drove the most awareness or most sales on retailers. So doing by an influencer by influencer tracking is obviously good, it's good data to have, but isn't necessarily going to tell the whole story. And because of that, we kind of have to just take the whole story at a high level, which is a bit unfortunate. But as long as you're tracking all of these metrics and all these downstream effects, you can tell binary is it working? Is it not working? So short answer Sure. You can track them by influencer. Long answer might not tell the whole story. And it's definitely something that we don't take as, as the end all be all have a campaign.

Aaron Conant 21:11

Awesome. Speed.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 21:14

Yeah, setting up for success. How we structure our campaigns, when we when our brands want to run influencer campaigns. So first thing first, just as you mentioned, like choosing the right product at the right time. So product launch, obviously amazing. As I just mentioned, you know really good for kickstarting reviews, helps you get badges really quickly, we have a lot of great case studies with product launch, it works really well. And to is refreshing products. So you know products may be you know, started off really well really hot, you guys have a great photo market, but things have began to fall off, maybe it competitors have entered the market, etc. I really good for jumpstarting product products that have stagnated. Additionally, before holiday season, and so if you launch and you know, you can increase your rank really quickly, before holidays, it's gonna pay magnitudes better than during the normal time, it's really, really important to have that presence, have the chair voice unimportant keywords going into holiday season. And then lastly is ranking. So ranking is a big, big metric that we look at for success. And obviously, you don't want to if you're already ranked number one, I wouldn't suggest, you know, if you're ranked number one on a bunch of keywords, I wouldn't suggest you run a run an influencer campaign. I think it's better for products that don't have a strong ranking. But if your hero product is maybe, for example, we have someone that is like really good for protein shakes, but not as good for meal replacement shakes, which is another really high volume keyword, we can try our best to get influencers through the creative reef to target that type of search behavior with the goal of ranking on that other keyword. So yeah, for the most part, stay away from heroes unless there's something that you've struggled to be ranking with, maybe because people don't associate your product with that search result.

Aaron Conant 23:11

So the question that comes in around tat product categories? Right? Can you a little deep dive in that? Are there any that works better than others? Or is this you know, across the board you're seeing I mean, everybody's, you know, looking at the variety of different paid media outlets, and this is one of them, in a sense, you know, where do the dollars go? How much do we spend, what's working, what's not in there trying to weed out? You know, again, things that don't work? Is there any particular categories you see this over indexing on? Or is this just at the beginning, and there's not enough data?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 23:48

Um, I would say that it's at the beginning. And like, we've seen success with almost every category, where we haven't seen success is like, overall like product quality. So like, we've worked with a couple brands where maybe the product wasn't as strong as we had hoped. So when the influencers receive the product, they're less inclined to give truthful like Honest, honest reviews, and even so much other like influencers don't post or like opt out of the campaign. So everyone likes to think like their product is really good. And most products are but I would say making sure that what you're going to send to influencers is is good and aligns with their customer base and their and their followers. is important, but I'd say for the most part CPG has done really well. Electronics have done really well. And skincare and beauty have crushed it. We have seen success in other places, but of our of our clients that have been running for champions, we over index on on those three categories.

Aaron Conant 25:02

Awesome. Yeah, wait.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 25:07

Another thing to do is leverage Amazon audience insights to tell you what influencers to connect with. This is only like a snapshot of all of the data that you can get orange would be your brand. Blue is actually competitors brands. So you can look at this data and really, really go deep on who your core customer is, specifically on retailers. And then there's a really great tools that exist that we use, that gives you the same demographic data for an influencer. So it becomes really, really easy to match their buying buying personnel, from a retailer with influencers and the influencers that will actually match who's buying your products, and even more, so you can find influencers that may be more so match your competitor, buying behavior so that you can try to get your products in with the demographic of your competitor. And so definitely recommend anyone who's running influencer campaigns use this data, I'm sure you probably have your own demographic data from other other sources DTC. Oftentimes, we find that there are differences between the PQ by directory retailer with DTC so use this data, it's really awesome, really comprehensive and updates every week. So for the most part, you're not going to see massive differences. But maybe going into holiday season, you'll begin to see different trends that emerge within this dataset. And then last is actually have like influencers buy directly from the retailer. When we first started, we were sending influencers products directly. You know, it took a lot to get the shipping all sorted out this and that, it's really easy to just have the influencer buy from the retailer and get either same day pickup next day delivery, etc. It saves a lot of headache, and actually just helped kickstart the momentum because people are buying on that retailer. And then two, typically you'll see within the content, people will say I just got this from Amazon, I just bought this from Walmart, etc. It just kind of primed the the followers to know where they can get get your product. So I don't know how many people will take off. But there was a whole like got it from Target trend, which kind of inspired us to start thinking about doing this. And we've seen really, really good performance from that. So just have the influencers go get it easily. And then you can always reimburse them for the product that they purchased. Cool. So how we set up campaigns. So we've gone in depth now into like all of the different metrics that we look at our logic behind these campaigns, how we've built our product to do campaigns is as follows. So we've actually built a network of influencers who have opted into the Perpetua ad network. We offer global support, so across four countries, and then we support influencers from all of these different platforms. Using that network, we actually have influencers opt in to the campaign. So we have our brands select a product, we have our brands select certain keywords that they want us to track. And we have brands fill out a creative read, using the demographic data from retailers we find within our network the influencers that will most match those products. We have influencers then notified saying hey Brand X is running an influencer campaign, we have a per influencer fee. For just can say that looks good to me, I'm going to opt in influencer opts in buys from whatever retailer that they want, or brands can recommend where to buy from from certain retailers, they'll get their product, they'll begin to review it great post great content will not only suck in all of the traditional influencer marketing metrics to look at will pull in all the you know, the likes, the comments, etc, will also pull in all that other attribution data. So within the same screen, you're gonna see all the content that's created all the influencers who are in your campaign and their performance, as well as directly in that same view, looking at how organic rank is trending, looking at how search frequency is trending, looking at increases in reviews, etc. So you can see the downstream effects all in one spot from that influencer campaign. Additionally, additionally, you're going to get all of the creative license to any of the creative content. So what we're beginning to see brands do is create sponsor brand video campaigns using user generated content. So we find the top you know three five different reviews or funny posts that have been created and we We take that content and we put it into another ad, where it's going to be displayed throughout those search results pages. If you have followers looking, they can immediately see the brands that the influencers that they love. And then people who are just searching generally are going to see all of the people that support and, and peer review your product, which we've seen really great performance, but I wanted to share results from one case study. So here was a smart home product, obviously a very competitive industry, typically dominated by nest, which is I think, now owned by Google, as well as Ecobee. We were able to launch within six weeks, we're able to generate over 40 reviews, though, from page 12. to page one, we won the new release badge. We had a ton of really great content to use for other collateral DSP campaigns, sponsored brand, video campaigns, etc. And now, this client is going on a continual campaign for influencers so that instead of just running at once, there's just an indefinite campaign for influencers can always opt in, so long as they meet the brand criteria and the end audience demographics, other downstream results, you can see. So that rank going from you know, typically trending somewhere around 200 to 250, all the way down to page one, we forecast out what that is in terms of incremental, incremental sales. So going from page to page one is actually worth about 570,000 organic sales over time, over that year. So really, really great. Great story shows the power even in such a competitive market, and for a high price product. Yeah, that is that's it.

Aaron Conant 31:48

Awesome. So a great time to just drop in some more questions here into the chat or the q&a as a whole couple ones that come up then is how long does a program you know, take to get started? How long then before you see results? And then the next question that comes in is around compensation as a whole. So love to hear your thoughts kind of on those.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 32:12

Yeah, definitely. So to get started, typically takes about, you know, a couple business days to brief the brand, come up with a good product, a good creative brief, as well as determine what keywords we think are important, and what keywords we want to like, have the influencers use within their content. We help with that we help forecast which keywords we think one will be able to rank on. And to have really good sales potential, you obviously want to be ranking on keywords where you, you know, going from page two to page one is going to make that much of a difference. Once we have that kind of analyzed and come up with, we then create our campaign, typically within the first call at 10 to 14 days, we'll have about 50 influencers opted in, we recommend 50 as the minimum in terms of compensation, we give a flat fee of $150 per influencer. So the influencer sees that as like the, like the reward for the campaign. And then it's incumbent upon them, plus the product cost. So as I mentioned, we get our influencers to buy from a retailer. So you're responsible for the 150 Plus reimbursing them the cost of the product that they bought from from said retailer.

Aaron Conant 33:30

He said all managed through a dashboard, then

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 33:33

it's all through a dashboard. So one click one click influencer creation, similar to all of our other things, we wanted to make it distill all of the hard parts into really, really easy to use software.

Aaron Conant 33:48

So it's different than like an affiliate program where you're, you're paying them to convert by via converted product.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 33:56

Yep, it's different. They get a flat fee upfront in exchange for the posting and the content.

Aaron Conant 34:08

Yeah, and so just another reminder, others you have questions drop into the chat or drop them in the q&a, and we can we can tackle those as we get them. How much of this do you see tackling portions of the paid media budget? I mean, there's a good chunk of cash that goes to you know, Amazon pay media as it is I know Walmart's trying to ramp it up they're stubbing their toe a little bit on their the way they auction out their PPC bids. You know, we've had a lot of calls on retail media as a whole is a massive push. There's estimates of 80 Plus, you know, retail media partners that are you know, retail outlets will be asking for paid media budgets, where do you see now this part fitting in?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 34:53

Yeah, so I've what we've seen from the brands we've been working with is that they take it out of like their retailers specific budget, whether would be like their Amazon budget or their Walmart budget, I actually see it as being like their future of being incremental dollars. As I, as I mentioned, you see, like, a halo effect of making your sponsored ads better by running these types of campaigns. So I see like the same way people view DSP as like, hey, we'll do some brand building campaigns. And you look for the down funnel effect, I think people will begin to open up other dollars, why we've seen our brands not be able to get like why they've segmented out of the Amazon bucket or retailer X bucket is because typically like the influencer budgets live separately from the retailer budgets. And we've been working exclusively with like the retail teams for brands, because we've been focusing on the sponsored ads and DSP platform. So I think, in the future, there's going to be a merging of these two teams. And hopefully, hopefully, there's a merging because I think there's a lot of value to be added. One in terms of justifying influencer campaigns and saying, Hey, not only are we getting these directly attributed sales, but we can begin to give some attribution to these Halo effects. And to like retailer, retail teams will want it because it just makes your sponsored ads better and more cost effective. So hopefully, in the future, we'll see a lot more cross collab in terms of one campaign setup, where retail data is informing influencer campaigns, and to attribution for both teams to be able to take credit for the results that it's driving.

Aaron Conant 36:36

Awesome. Are there other things that you guys regularly get asked or other key insights in on where the industry is go? I mean, I agree with you, you know, from a paid media standpoint, retail media dollars, you know, this, this whole push to, you know, the unit channel environment, the hey, we're going to view everything as a silo and allocate dollars the silo I think is, you know, rapidly, you know, going away, I mean, they are each individual channels, and you're always gonna have, you know, the Walmart merchandising dollars wanted to drive traffic to Walmart and Amazon and, you know, target and Kroger or whoever else it might be. But, you know, this is it's an influencer campaign, and it's just not driving the direct consumer side is driving to a retailer. Other key trends that you guys are seeing across the board on on paid media, you know, whether it's this influencer piece. Yeah. Yeah, definitely a question that comes in that I want to make sure I get to as well.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 37:34

Yeah, I mean, just quickly on that, um, there's, I think we're giving a talk with you guys, in a month or so. But like the push to real time, a lot of retailers are increasing the data availability, within their ads, specifically sponsored ads, to a point where we're going to have really, really high fidelity, hourly data for sponsored ads across every retailer, meaning you're gonna you know, day parting has always been a theory but you'll be able we'll be able to build an algorithm so that I can update the bid perfectly every hour of every day, which means like bidding on the sponsored ads will eventually become like, you won't be able to really find that much more efficiency through like to like people find new keywords like eventually you're gonna have all your keywords, you're going to be bidding perfectly at all times of the day, people are going to need to think outside the box on how to drive and how to get an edge. So that's going to come from like listings, influencers, editorials, editorials is like that, you know, if Life magazine sponsors your product, Amazon and other retailers are actually going to show that throughout the search results page. So there are all of these now ancillary things that are going to put you above and beyond assuming that like keyword bidding becomes like basically optimized to the to the best extent across across all brands.

Aaron Conant 38:57

So the next question that comes in is just kind of out you know, quality of content is as a whole says Do you have any type of control of the content received with subpar? Are you able to ask the influencers to reshoot or withhold payment if I'm happy with the end content? Or for you Oh, are you feel it does not represent your brand?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 39:19

Yeah, so we can definitely ask the influencers to take down the content. Being a product company long term, we want our product to be able to have like one touch accept or reject content. And just because we're trying to move fast in such a new space, currently, it's like either you like the content it stays up or we tell the the the influencer please remove the content. But for the time being, there's only so much quality and control as binary like influencer, keep that up or Hey, take that down. But future iteration of our software we will definitely have no brand approved or declined. content

Aaron Conant 40:02

that the next question is what is the test and learn look like? Right? I mean, I mean, every I think everybody's getting to the fact that, hey, we have to a B test, you know, as rapidly as possible. But, you know, is there like a test and learn that you normally do and you can prove out results? And then, you know,

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 40:25

yeah, so typically, we recommend starting with like, the minimum amount of influencers, what one product that you feel is like, either new to launch or has historically been struggling. And let us show you the power of influencer marketing. And typically, once people find that, not only do they just turn on always on campaigns, meaning they just have it on for that product, but we'll begin to see them go across their entire product stream. So long as you know, the the audiences for the products are different. So typically, we'll see a let's turn it on for these 135 10 products, so much as they actually have unique audiences that we can be targeting. And so yeah, we typically recommend, let's just do one product, bomb out of influencers, show you performance, and then allow that to justify budgets across the board for for other products within the catalog, and even other retailers.

Aaron Conant 41:25

Awesome. Let me see. If anybody else has any questions, feel free to drop in the q&a section right now or in the chat. And I mean, I don't see any others that are coming in right now. Always love giving people to get your time back here. You know, are there other top things that you'd recommend, or, you know, any key takeaways for people that dialed in today, I mean, you guys are great friends, partners, supporters of the network and a ton of brands in it. So always appreciate you jumping on, you know, sharing some of these new things that are coming down the pipe and new ways to drive business as a whole. You know, if anybody wants a follow up conversation, 100% worth putting some time on the calendar. You know, just heard about this program through a few different brands and the crushing it, it's, you know, something worth at least trying out investigating, you know, and more than happy to put you in touch with Patrick and the Perpetua team. But if you have any other questions, drop them to the chat or the q&a right now. But you know, a practical way to get over to you. Key takeaways here are kind of last thoughts as we wrap it up.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 42:24

Yeah, I think last thoughts going into q4, I would say definitely experiment with it. If your brand is already running influencer campaigns, go into your retailer data, and look and see if you can see any of those results. Maybe you you saw one of your posts go viral or something, you started the campaign, go and look at the data for yourself. And then talk with your influencer teams, like take your data that you're seeing on retailers and give that to your influencer marketing team say, hey, you know, these are our top search terms on Amazon. These are our top search terms on Walmart, how does that influence the content that we're asking influencers to create? And how can we use this to maybe better drive a unified approach for product discovery for our brand. So you don't need to use us? You don't need to do software, the data is all there already. So take a look and have some fun with it. Everyone's just experimenting and exploring. So there's never a bad time to dive in.

Aaron Conant 43:24

Yeah, one last question comes in here. If you had to choose a platform, which one would it be? Tick tock, Instagram, Facebook.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 43:32

I would go hard tick tock. There's some data that I didn't have just enough time to put in about tick tock that we've seen, I think for product discovery product buying tick tock as buying afar, being the best. And I think it's due to their algorithm. Instagram has algorithms based around like likes and comments. But tick tock algorithms is based on like, review time. So it's really good at making sure that people who will like that video will see that video. So based on that, we just see that the reach is really good. And the conversion seems to be higher as well.

Aaron Conant 44:10

No, I think from the influencer standpoint, you're dead on I mean, I'm hearing it from brands, you know, I'll talk to 30 plus a week and the the, the tick tock of product discovery is through the roof, the tough part that they struggle with is, you know, you can't create an ad for it. Right, you have to use an influencer, I haven't go viral in some way, shape or form. And so they're struggling to try to figure out how do we maximize the best and, you know, using an influencer affiliates. I think a lot of influencers will become affiliates over time, but they'll completely agree with you. When it goes viral. It goes viral, and just huge, huge returns on it. And so with that, I mean, they don't have any other questions that have come in. Oh, one last one. What about Amazon life?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith 45:00

Yes, that is good. We just haven't done enough exploring just yet. But it's something that is, is definitely on our roadmap to discover. I think it's still in its infancy. And I think there's more immediate value through these other platforms. But we have our eye on it. And we're working closely with Amazon, on building out an awesome product for it. Awesome,

Aaron Conant 45:24

love it. Well, if Eric, thanks again for your time today, thanks for always being open and sharing and being such great friends and partners, supporters of the network. And once again, anybody want to follow up conversation, he needs to learn a little bit more. They're partnered with a ton of brands and come highly recommended from throughout the network. More than happy to connect you with the team over there. It's worth giving a shot. Also, if you're looking for any other type of service providers, anything from help with Amazon, Amazon, paid media, drop shipping, performance, marketing, direct mail, whatever it might be. Don't ever hesitate to reach out we've got a shortlist of top people. We're more than happy to shoot over to you. Perpetua has to be one of those. So you know, encourage everybody to follow up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday. Have a great rest of the week. Everybody take care. Stay safe and look forward to having you in the future but awesome, everybody. Take care now.

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