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Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep 69. Turn Your Content into Cash: Evan Wray Talks Mavely x Later, Monetization, and Affiliate Marketing
00:51:00
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- [00:00]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
All right, what's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator, Powered by Stan, the podcast that helps you turn your passion into profit and build a business doing what you love. I am your host, Kaitlyn Rhodes, and today I have a powerhouse guest joining us, and I'm super duper excited for this. I've actually never got to meet Evan until today, but today I have Evan Ray on the podcast. He is the. The CEO and co founder of Mavely. So we're going to dive down the rabbit hole of what Mabley brings, what's happened, how he built this business. If you are new to creating content, you want to start making money with Instagram or TikTok or affiliate marketing. We're going to talk about all the things. Mavely brings a huge network of creators to the table. They've driven more than $1 billion in gross merchandise volume across 1400 brands, including Nike, Lululemon, Macy's. It's really amazing. I can't wait to talk about the story. So, Evan, let's just get into it. I first want you to just obviously introduce yourself, tell us about you, where you came from, how did this happen? How do you drive $1 billion?
- [01:16]
Evan Ray
Yeah. Awesome. Well, first of all, Caitlin, thank you so much for having me on. I'm a huge fan of yours. I know your audience is all about, like, how do you make money on social, how do you profit with your business here? So it's perfect for what we're doing. So thanks for having me on. Yeah. One billion. That's a crazy number. And I haven't. It's continuing to climb, which is fun. But yeah. So a quick background for your listeners is I'm Evan Ray. I'm one of the co founders of Mavely. And at Mavely, we really have scaled, like you said, to 120,000 creators, and we're all about how do we help creators make more money in the least amount of time? So that's everything from campaigns to affiliate links to tools that we have, like our My Shop to drive interaction and engagement and ultimately sales for brands. And then we have a bunch of fun bonuses and referral programs and everything. But the whole idea with Mavli is how do you make more money in the least amount of time? So excited to talk to you here today.
- [02:16]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Love that. Okay, well, let's back it up a little bit. Like, how did you even get here? Did you. Did you already. Did you always know you were entrepreneur? Did you do all the grunt work growing up? You know, working? I feel Like a bunch of entrepreneurs come from making coffee. So tell us your idea. What, Where, Where'd you come from?
- [02:36]
Evan Ray
That's super funny. So actually, so I got to. I've got. So I'll give you like the. So I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. So it's south. Yeah, southwestern part of Ohio. I didn't grow up in New York or L A or any of the big cities. And my first job was. What was my. My very first job was working at my dad's architecture firm. So he had a small, like, you know, five, six person firm downtown where he did historical renovation. So I was like, I saw that firsthand. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to basically wake up every day and build something. And he that maybe it's the creative mind. I think entrepreneurship's pretty creative endeavor and so is architects. Being an architect. Right. So it was. Maybe that's where I got the seed of entrepreneurship was right there. At least, at least I hope it was. And then first job, I can't. I had two and I. One was actually a waiter at our local. It was like an assisted living facility. So me and I played football through high school and into college. And so me and a bunch of the football guys were actually waiters for all of these assisted living folks in their restaurants, which is just super fun, cool way to interact with people. And then after that I just got. I was mowing lawns across our local hospital as like the, the lawn care guys. So I would say those both qualify as like more grunt work. Right? Like, like, and then, and then going.
- [04:05]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Up, if you're in the service industry and you're a waiter or a waitress, I mean, that is one of the hardest jobs. Right?
- [04:11]
Evan Ray
It's 100% right. And you can. What I found, and it's sort of similar in. In entrepreneurship and leadership too, is like, honestly, like you don't know what anyone's day is coming into it. Right. So sometimes they take it out on you, sometimes you can change it with a smile or a nice comment. And it's so. It's a pretty. It's a pretty neat background to have. I'm very, very happy that I had that experience. But. But yeah, as it relates to Mavely. So it's really cool. Is so Mavely is actually my second company with the same co. And which is. Which is really cool. Our first company we founded right after college. I actually went to New York right after college and it was an emoji marketing company called Swift Media. I don't know if anyone has heard of it.
- [04:55]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I was doing my research. Okay, tell me about this.
- [04:58]
Evan Ray
Long story short is if you've ever seen a branded emoji or a branded sticker, our company brought that to the United States. And so we work with Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and Disney and all these mega companies to let you to download and send emojis to your friends. We actually started in college football and then end up in the NFL and all this other stuff. So that's where we started and that's how we kind of cut our teeth on figuring out how to grow a business. And lucky enough, we sold that in 2015 to a public company. And then after working there for a little bit, we wanted to see like, hey, what do we want to do next? Like we're having waking up every day working with our best friends, building something cool is, you know, I don't think you should ever do anything other than that is my opinion. But so we started to think about where's the world going and what, what's happening. And this was in 20, 20, 18 or so. And what was happening was you had the, the mega influencers, right? You had the really big time, you know, more, I would say more fashion and beauty focused influencers that had really, really started to blow up. Brands are starting to take them seriously. But at the same time, you're seeing like this, everyone and their brother starting to think about becoming an influencer, think about creating content. But it hadn't really scaled and brands hadn't really tapped into yet. So that was like one side of what we were seeing. And then the other thing we were seeing was all these channels were getting really expensive for brands. So like Facebook ads were getting really expensive and Google Ads were getting really expensive and. And they were all trying to figure out, how do we have a new channel to drive sales? How do we have a new channel to acquire customers. So Sean and I were sitting there and we had another third co founder at the time, Peggy. And we were sitting there thinking about how do we do something in this space? It feels early, it feels really big. And what we landed on was actually testing, working with a lot of moms to drive sales through whatever channel they had. And the thing we were trying to prove was you don't just have to be a 5 million follower influencer to have influence. Right? You could actually do it on a smaller scale. And so we started testing it, started iterating a whole bunch and over time that those moms turned into frankly moms and dads. And grandmas and kids and nieces, nephews and everything. So it turned into this whole community of, well, we've now coined, like everyday influencers. And these are people that have. Some have very, very large followings. We have creators that have millions and millions of followers on Mavely and some that have like, you know, a thousand. Right. And anywhere in between. And that's really what ultimately like the wave that started to happen to allow anyone who has a social account that's brand, a brand fit to make money off of their influence and then allow brands to tap in at scale to their biggest advocates in the world. So that's a little bit of the walk there, as we found in Mavely.
- [08:03]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I want to reiterate that he said everyday influencers, which I love because we've come to this point in our lives with social media. Like, we've got grandmas on social, we've got little kids on social. It doesn't matter your age. You can start whenever. And he also said that they have people with millions of followers and thousands of followers or maybe even a thousand followers. So that's one thing I want to hit home. There are so many moms, there's so many people listening to this podcast. But I do have a big. A chunk of my audience is mothers out there. And the biggest thing they say to me is, well, I don't have enough followers to start doing.
- [08:41]
Evan Ray
Yep.
- [08:42]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Evan, do you know what your. I mean, would you, if you took a stab at it, do you know, like the lowest amount of followers that someone's had before they made their first dollar?
- [08:53]
Evan Ray
Oh, man, I don't know. So, so I'll tell you. How about I say story, I'll do a story. I don't know if I know the exact follower count, but we've definitely had folks that started. We actually have had a decent amount of teachers who. That started. Yeah. And they started just sharing different things for back to school. I think one of the things that's neat is teachers. I think right there with the service industry, I think teachers are incredible because it's a hard job. And now with, you know, with parents and with kids, it's even. It's harder job. But we, we've had a few teachers that have started actually sharing different things that they're buying for back to school for their classrooms. And like, this is teachers taking money out of their own pockets and like, in, like buying this for their kids because they care so much about their education. And what, what happened was more and more teachers started following these individuals to find like, you know, the new trend for back to school or I'm about to spend, you know, you know, buy 30 notebooks and here's a good place to get it for a little cheaper because you're buying it out of your own pocket. So we've seen that happen a few different times. And what's really cool is, you know, one teacher, she actually was able to grow that so much that she ultimately stopped her teaching job and then focused on empowering teachers at scale across, all across the United States to be able to have like more resources for their, for their classroom. So that's like one example of someone who just started by testing and testing and testing, you know, nights, weekends kind of thing, and then ultimately was able to, you know, focus on it full time because that's where she got a lot of passion of empowering more teachers. So, so yeah, it's, it's been all shapes and sizes. The, the biggest thing for us at Mavely, and I'll talk about it now, the combination with later in a second, but the biggest thing for us is that we truly believe that the entire way of social interactions, the entire social economy, social commerce, the influencer economy, creator economy, whatever you want to call it, it's going towards people based recommendations, people based commerce. So our goal is to really do what Uber did for anyone with a social or with a car. We want to do for anyone with a social account.
- [11:10]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Right.
- [11:11]
Evan Ray
Which is what we're really excited about. Rolling out.
- [11:14]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I love that. Before you talk about later and all of that, there's some people that get on here and they're like, I don't really understand though how it works. Like, what do you mean? You know, they're sharing these brands that they like, but how are they getting paid for that? Can you kind of put that in simple terms for people that don't understand how this all works?
- [11:33]
Evan Ray
Yeah, absolutely. So basically the way it works is you join Mavely as a, as a creator, as an everyday influencer and then once you've gone through the onboarding process, you can see now, well, actually well over 1400 brands, I think we're almost up to 1700 brands that you, you likely know most of them. Maybe there's some new ones that you don't know. And so with those, you can actually go to the brand's website, find the favorite product, create a link for that product, and then you can post on your social. So think your Instagram stories, whatever it is, and then if I'm a follower of yours, And I see that link out there and I click on it and buy something. What Mavly's built is we have all these relationships with all the retailers and brands and we've struck all these deals with the retailers and brands that every time one of our creators or influencers drives a sale for that brand, that brand pays Mavely and we do a revenue share with the influencers and we do a large, most of this revenue share goes out to the influencers and we keep a small bit for making that connection. And the idea here is that as an influencer you can start with a one off sale, a pair of shoes that you really like, that you just got and then over time you can actually share more and more content. We've got tools that allow you to build your own storefront on Mavely to have entire looks, entire collages. It doesn't have to be fashion oriented, right. It can be like we said, back to school items. And then as we see more and more activity, we have an entire sales team that all day, every day is working with brands to do campaigns. So what we like to do and then, so we can come to you as a, as a creator that's starting to drive sales and then give you a flat fee campaign. So what we're doing over time is we're allowing creators to make money from their commissionable links, make money from campaigns, refer a friend and make money off some of their sales for a short amount of time. And then we even have like different gamification and fun like bonuses that happen. So it's really about how do we enable creators to make money on these different channels on social frankly, as, as and they can spend as much or as little time as they want. Right. So there's no cost, you don't have to pay anything to join, it's just, you know, try it. If you love it, we'd love to have you. And if you don't like it, you know, we still wish you the best of luck.
- [13:56]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah, it's like the easiest way to get started guys. If, if you haven't done it before, like you said, you don't have to pay to get started. I actually did a. I can't remember when I signed up for Mavely. It was sometime last year. But then I challenged myself to make a hundred bucks. So all I did, guys, was I shared stuff in my stories. I don't think I even put any dedicated reels out there. So I only shared links to people that were already following me in my story. Showing off my favorite shoes and stuff like that. And I made 100 bucks, like, that week. And I was like, heck, yeah, I'm going shopping.
- [14:27]
Evan Ray
Love it. Love it.
- [14:29]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
To get started, there's. There's really nothing stopping you. So tell us about the acquisition with later and what that means. Some people don't even know what Leader is, so make sure you do a little bit of explaining there too. But for sure, this is very exciting, by the way, for all of you, for these two powerful brands to get together. This is. This is crazy.
- [14:51]
Evan Ray
Yeah, we're really excited. So basically, Mavely grew. Oh, man. For like five years. So, like, we found in early 2019 officially, and then we continue to grow, grow, grow, kind of all those numbers. Caitlin, you said earlier around a billion in GMV and 120,000 creators and stuff like that. And then we actually started by partnering with Later. So Later's a really cool company leader in the creator space and the influencer space. But before Mavely, they offered two products. So they had Later Social, which is like Link in Bio. If anyone's used Link in Bio. If not, you should. And I can put you in the right direction on this, but that's like the Social scheduling and Link in Bio tool. And then they also have Later Influence, which is really like a brand interface for finding, reaching out to and running campaigns for creators. So they had these two businesses. They're growing like wildfire as well. And Mavely, what it represented was the creator side, right? So we've always. Mavly has always built Creator first. We've been very creator focused. So I got to know one of the founders of later, and then also the team that was running the company, and it ultimately just became like we were the creator side, they were the brand side. So it made sense to team up. But we didn't do it. We didn't just go in blindly. Right? So we actually test. They tested our technology, they tested our creator experience, we tested their experience, we tested their Link in Bio, all their scheduling, and they're in the. The campaigns that they offer as well. And we ultimately decided, hey, this makes a lot of sense. So we ultimately came together. What's really neat about it is this now represents one of the largest creator platforms in the world, and it's across both brands and creators, and we have an entire tool set for marketers to be able to schedule posts, to be able to run campaigns, to be able to listen, you know, socially to what's going on, what's the chatter happening online around your brand and then on the creator side now with Mavely, there's the ability to tap into those creators and run campaigns and run affiliate links and then have your storefront and everything like that. So it really is this really cool mesh that's happened. And frankly, I think we're just getting started still. I look at this whole creator ecosystem, I think I look at the work you're doing, Caitlin, your audience, I think we're probably in the second, maybe third inning of this entire space and where it's headed. But couldn't be more excited about what 2025 and beyond means with like the later MAVLI acquisition.
- [17:26]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Is there anything that you could tease us, like what's something you're excited about this year with this acquisition?
- [17:32]
Evan Ray
Yeah. So let me see what I can, I can tease a little bit. I'll tease it a little bit. So basically there are very few players that have at scale that work with creators and world class brands. Right. You know, Mavely's one of Maven later now are one of like two, maybe three brands like @ real scale. And I'm talking like billions of dollars in GMV scale and I'm talking, you know, thousands of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of and millions of creators. Right. So, and so to me, where I think the entire market is going 2025 and beyond is brands are starting to realize that influencer and creator is not a fad. Right. It's actually a permanent channel and it's a permanent channel to engage audiences all across the funnel. Top of funnel awareness, middle of funnel, like comments and likes and engagements and then bottom of funnel sales and what later and mavenly coming together all under the later banner now represents is, you know, scale of data, scale of influencers, scale of brands as this becomes a real channel. So I think we fast forward here, you know, a year or two and paid creator or paid influencer is as big as paid social and is as big as paid search. Right. So it's like again your audience thinking about the opportunity you all have here is it is literally one of the biggest shifts in media in our lifetime that's happening right now. I hope that between later and maybe we can power that, but it's going to be an incredible time here over the next several years.
- [19:14]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
It sounds like it's going to, y'all are going to make it easier for people to connect. I think that's one of the biggest hardships of, I mean if we want to call it a hardship, but just finding those, those partnerships, those collabs and stuff like that.
- [19:31]
Evan Ray
So that will, it's got, it's got a lot of friction in it right now.
- [19:33]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
It does, it does. And why do you think that? Like when you say friction, what exactly do you mean?
- [19:39]
Evan Ray
Well, I think it's just. I think there's a couple things. One, a lot of brands are still new to working with creators. So they don't really. There's not like a, there's not like a standard body of. This is how you work with a creator or this is the standard terms for a creator. Right. They're starting to get there. But there's not like a standard way to work with a creator is 1, 2. I think a lot of brands are because they're learning, they don't really know. It's one thing to work with a creator, it's another thing to like determine what success is with a creator. Right. So I'm sure a lot of your audience has worked with a brand and they want really cool awareness. And then you do that post and then they're like well, I need some sales. Well, hold on. That wasn't the goal. So I think. So there's. Determining what is success is another thing. And then the third thing is creators are people. Right. And so there's always a human element in that and then there's a human element as you scale even more. So it's one thing for a brand to do a collaboration with four or five creators. That's actually pretty simple. It's a harder thing to do it with four or five thousand creators at scale. So all these things are converging which add I would say friction to it. At the same time it's huge opportunities technology like what later and Mavely are building. The whole point is to like create a. We actually say it internally like create a frictionless experience for our creators and brands matching and then how can we use data to serve up to a creator that you know, if you're a, if you're back to that example, if you're a teacher that's looking for more like school related things or toys or, or whatever it is, we don't want to serve you up a brand that doesn't make any sense for you, that just wastes time and it's going to be the wrong back and forth and likewise to the brand. Right. If they want someone who's really focused on back to school because it's a Crayola campaign, we don't want to serve them up someone who only posts about high end beauty products. Right. It needs to be the right fit. So we talk a lot about how can we enable giving the right brands the right creators to push the right content at the right time to drive the right outcome. And it's like aligning all of that is a little hard, but that's again, where the value of players, like, you know, hopefully, like later in Mavli can do for the, for the larger ecosystem.
- [22:05]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
For the ecosystem, yeah. I'm excited about that because I, I'm a part of a few different, like, influencer marketing platforms, but my problem is they'll send me stuff that doesn't make sense for my audience. So you're right.
- [22:19]
Evan Ray
Yep.
- [22:20]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I can't just market any product or my audience is going to be like, who do you think you are? Or we're not here for that. So that makes a ton of sense.
- [22:28]
Evan Ray
And audiences are smarter than they've ever been. So if you have, I always use this example. It's like if you have one, one day the creators, like, drink Coca Cola, and the next day they're like, drink Pepsi. Like, you probably don't drink soda, and you sure as heck don't drink either one of those because you just got paid. So audiences are really savvy and I think they, they tend to see through things very quickly. So that's again, one of the other, just general feedback to creators as they're building is like, make sure you're, you're, you're truly promoting things that are authentic to you and, you know, obviously disclose you're getting paid for it. But, but, but don't you have to say yes to everything? Right. Pick something that works for you.
- [23:10]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
You can't, or you will get called out. You will get canceled, too. Like I've done, I haven't done anything. I did post about a company one time on my stories, and I had so much negative feedback about it. I was like, I'm never touching that brand again. So you learn. But yeah, you can't, you can't trick these people. They see you every day and they're learning from you and they're trusting you. So you, you can't, you gotta be.
- [23:34]
Evan Ray
Smart about that stuff. The key word there is trust. Right. And that's that, that's also, for what it's worth, what the brands are trying to tap into that. They're trying to borrow the trust that you've built over years with your audience. And that's a very, you know, it's a delicate relationship. Right. And that's an, it's an important relationship. So, yeah, I couldn't. Couldn't agree with you more.
- [23:55]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah. And later, guys, if you haven't ever checked out their blog, I look at it like weekly. They have some really good resources on that stuff too. Um, let's see, when it comes to. Let's talk about creating content for these people, and they're like, okay, you've talked me into it. I should get started. What type of content tends to convert the best when it comes to this affiliate marketing?
- [24:20]
Evan Ray
Yeah, it's a great question. So I would say there's no silver bullet or you'd see everyone doing the exact same type of content. But I'll give you a few examples. So I think one big thing that is. So frequency of posting helps generally, right? And then. But one thing a lot of people don't actually do is I always say, like, in life you need to ask for the cookie, right? So whatever. Are you trying to get a promotion? Are you trying to get a brand deal? Are you trying to get Whatever, just go, just ask for it and see what it is. So one thing that we see that actually massively increases conversion is just simply putting a call to action in your story or in your reel or in your whatever it is like saying, shop my link here. Something that simple is surprisingly, a lot of people don't do that. And it's a very, very easy thing to do. The other thing we see now is optimizing your bios to really focus on what you're interested in and what you like and what you want to ultimately promote helps you get surfaced faster and these algorithms, right? So I think, again, a lot of people will put a lot of effort into their content, but not a ton into their bio. And like, how do they optimize that? And then the third thing that we've seen work really well are we've got a My Shop, which is like a creator storefront where you can start to curate the different collections, the different lists that are working for you. And why that's important is, you know, someone might miss a story, right? Or someone might. Might miss whatever it is a real. Because they're quick, you know, they're gone fairly fast. My shop gives you a destination to come back to over and over again for these folks. So I would say those are like some quick hitters. One last thing we've seen that's starting to work really well is collections based, like collages and orientations around, like, key events. So think about, okay, hey, fourth of July is coming up. Like, what can I do? How can I create A collage. How can I create a collection? How can I get brands to be sponsors of this holistic package? Right, so it's not a one off post but it's, you know, Caitlin's 4th of July must haves and get creative in that element. So I think the tent pole related content works really well too, 100%.
- [26:31]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
And your my Shop functionality is so cool. It makes it easy for people to find things too. They're not having to search through and you can kind of customize it to yourself. But Evan's completely right with your bio. I do have a free profile audit bio checklist that I'll put in the show notes here. But he's right. These algorithms are reading what words you're putting in there so that they can serve your profile to the right people. So if you know that you're going to start sharing like for me example, I'm mostly like entrepreneurship social media. So I'm sharing more like social media gear or what am I wearing to work today or stuff like that. So you need to kind of decide who do you want to serve, what are you going to be known for and then put those words in there which will help you make more money.
- [27:17]
Evan Ray
I couldn't agree with you more. Just a piggyback on that real quick. Caitlin is so one of the things that was a big, I would say almost like an aha moment for you know, Mavely and then ultimately now the larger journal, the larger journey with later is we ended up. So when TikTok like really first started hitting and you'd be driving down the street and you see everyone like dance on the, on the sidewalk and making their first TikTok videos. What that actually started to do was they started to gain a ton of users and as a result all the other social networks had to start changing their algorithms. So they started looking at things like you just mentioned, how is your bio composed and everything. But they also started to deprioritize followers and reprioritize things like frequency of posts, the engagements in a short span of time on the post. So that was another. We call it the TikTok effect internally at Mavely that help like jumpstart this entire ecosystem of anyone can be a creator. So I think listening to your content, like listening to the later blogs content of like how do you optimize your bio, your content, your brand partnerships, your call to actions, it's never going to be that one silver bullet, but it's going to be this iterative approach that there's a Lot of great resources like the podcast we're on right here to help do that.
- [28:34]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Amen. Yes, yes. Yeah, they all just inner workings. They all work together. Um, okay, so you gave good examples on what we can do to be successful. Is there when people start getting into the groove of it or maybe they're even just getting started with it. What are some mistakes? What are like top three mistakes? If you had to name off three that you see people do and what would you say to do instead?
- [28:56]
Evan Ray
Yeah, I think so. I think the first just mistake is people want to be perfect on their first one. Right. So that. And there's a lot of pressure that comes with, you know, putting yourself out there for the first time. Right. And so I think that I would say that's like probably the biggest mistake is like wanting to be perfect, overthinking it, like working, you know, hours on the perfect pieces of content and then posting it and it gets zero reaction. Like no sales, no engagement, whatever it is. And, and then like you do do a one off post and it goes viral. Right. Like so, so I would, I would say just kind of just do it. Right? Just go for it and see what happens and learn. So I would say that's the, that's the first one is like that, that dynamic around the first. Yeah. The first push. The other one that I think is underutilized. I think underutilized by most people, but very utilized by like really, really good top performers is make an authentic effort to engage with your followers in your community. The reason for that is one, it's like free input on like what's resonating and what's not. Right? And like, like, I'm sure people say, hey, you know, Caitlin, I really love that talk track that you had, you know, with xyz. Can you do that again? Right? Or. And it. So it gives you content ideas and is one. The second thing, and probably the more important thing is it allows you to come back with more content and say, hey audience, I heard you.
- [30:26]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yes.
- [30:27]
Evan Ray
And here's how you're helping me create content, how you're influencing me so that I can deliver value for you. So like just creating this back and forth interaction with folks is like really critical. So I'd say like, just go, go for it. Go post it. Create the back and forth interaction with folks. And then the last thing is I would. You definitely want to. I don't know, when you start to try and monetize things, I think it's fine to be like not fine, but you should be Open upfront, honest with your audience around. Hey, this is a paid partnership. Hey, this is a collaboration. Hey, this is. But not just that, but like, why are you doing it? Like, what's the why behind the conversation? What's the why behind the monetization? So for example, are you wearing and posting about these, these shoes because they paid you, right? Or are you wearing and posting about these shoes because you actually went on a three mile run and they were some of the best shoes you ever wore, right? And it's so it's that why which is really important. And a lot of people don't hit on. So those would be like my three. If I had to boil it down.
- [31:33]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yes. I think out of all of. Well, I loved all of those. Engagement is so like literally everyone skips the engagement part. They'll be like, I'm just being and nothing's happening. I'm like, are you replying back to your comments? Are you replying to people in stories? You know, all the things that lets the algorithm know too that someone's home and they'll continue to show off your content. So Evan's got a very big point there.
- [31:56]
Evan Ray
No 100%. And we see people do like they do polls, right? They do, they do surveys, they engage in comments, they then they then go into DMs or things like, you know, link DM or manychat. Like there's, there's all kinds of tools to also help make that like a little more approachable too, as a creator. And that's one of the things that we're actually doing at Mavely. It's a newer initiative for us, but we call it Mavely Integrations. The ability for us to strike partnerships with people like Link DM or people like Bitly or people like, I don't know who else we have. We've got some other big ones coming down the pipe around content creation and making it easier for creators and influencers to, you know, respond to DMS or to have, you know, deep linking and tracking, like different things like that that just, you know, help make your life easier.
- [32:44]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
When someone signs up for Mavely, do you guys, do y'all suggest doing, signing up for DM Automation?
- [32:51]
Evan Ray
Yeah, we definitely do. We would recommend it. Yeah, it's, it's. I think it's part of our onboarding experience or part of our follow up experience. I don't know exactly where it lives. I should. But yeah, no, for sure. I think it's, there's the DM Automation though is pretty cool. Because you can make it keywords based. So it does. So you can have keywords based that are sending you a shoppable link, but then you can still have that personal touch of interaction right to your point, which you can't lose. Like that's critical. Critical, critical to have.
- [33:20]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah. And I read there was a study about if you don't respond in a certain amount of time, people will go to the next person. So having that DM automation setup is really nice because you're always home even when you're not. And I used to tell people don't worry about DM automation until you've got this many followers. But now I'm just like, no, like sign up for it when you can. It will just take off so much pressure from you and gets the conversation going. And then like Evan said, you can always go in there and put in your own personalization and replies to those too. What industries or niches are you seeing thrive right now with affiliate marketing?
- [33:54]
Evan Ray
Yeah, well, I think what's, it's cool. So I think the general big players, right? So like beauty fashion is just has been around for a long time. I would say it's the first real influencer kind of market or beachhead if you will. But we are seeing toys, electronics, kids apparel, like yeah, like home and lifestyle are continuing to accelerate, but I would say a lot more of these. Yeah, if you want to call mom oriented or family oriented categories are really starting to pick up as people. One, a lot of the first influencers are shifting into their life stages. Right. Of having kids and like houses and stuff like that. But second is like at the end of the day people don't just want a recommendation on like a high fashion dress to wear, but they also want like what are things that make my everyday life easier. Right. Or that, you know, easier or more affordable or have a nice taste to it or whatever it is. So we're seeing that a lot. And then the other thing that I'm really bullish about is we are starting to see, you know, with LinkedIn introducing vertical video with their creators and like making a big push around if you want to call it like B2B creators again I still think we're like inning, you know, 2 maybe, maybe into 3 of creators as a channel creators is a way to reach customers. So we actually think there's going to be a lot of these business influencers and not just big time CEO influencers. But you know, we've, we've got members of our team here who have launched Mavely social and they focus on how to become a great, you know, social media brand. On social media, we've got people who have launched our ambassador programs like how to, how to run and scale ambassador programs. Like we've got all these, these different subject matter experts are starting to create content. And naturally what happens with that is brands and softwares want to sell to that audience. You're creating content. So that's something that it hasn't, I would say it's just starting to pick up. So if there's anyone in the audience or your listener audience that's thinking about like B2B LinkedIn content creation, I'd say go for it. It's still like a blue ocean, more so than anything. And then, but yeah, all those other categories I mentioned, it's not just fashion and beauty. It's really going across the full breadth of specifically consumer products.
- [36:22]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Very true. You're the second person to say blue ocean to me in the past two weeks. Blue ocean. That's so funny.
- [36:29]
Evan Ray
I think the whole industry is a blue ocean still.
- [36:31]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
So maybe that's why that is so wild. Okay, let's get into growth and trends that people can look out for. For. How do you see affiliate marketing evolving? I know you keep saying we're in like the second inning.
- [36:45]
Evan Ray
Yep.
- [36:46]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
You think it's going to blow up?
- [36:47]
Evan Ray
Yeah, I think it's in the process of blowing up. Right. So like Mavely, we're, we're, you know, record month after record month with our, with our brand, with our brand partners and our creators. We've, we've paid out tens of millions to creators annually. It's. And we'll see with the combination of later, I think it gets a lot bigger, a lot faster. So I would say that the space is here to stay. What I look at is just affiliate marketing and creator marketing generally evolving is, I think it's going to become more sophisticated, it's going to be more data oriented. So I would say that the more that your, like the audiences can and the creators can start to think about how do I really engage my audience? Because there's going to be, you know, more requirements from brands to show performance. There's going to be, I would say, more data just generally available. So how can you look at that and determine what's the right trend for me to post or what's the right time for me to post stuff like that. So I think, I think we're going to see this shift of creator and influencer and affiliate marketing going from kind of early like early innings, like just kind of a startup industry to moving into just a more mature, more data driven industry. And we're also going to see some of the biggest brands in the world start to tap into it. So we've traditionally seen a lot of the E commerce brands tap into it. A lot of the D2C brands, I call them, like, you know, the awesome Instagram brands have really tapped into creator and influencer. I believe strongly that we're going to start seeing the mega CPG brands. So think like the biggest brand budgets in the entire world of like P and G and Unilever and you know, Kraft and Nestle, like these really, really big brands I believe are going to start tapping creators, start tapping influencers. And with that's going to come an extra layer of brand safety, an extra layer of requirement on data, an extra layer of following certain guidelines, but still doing in a way that's fun and creative and relatable to audiences. So that's what I view. I think we're about to see like this watershed moment of brands and performance budgets coming into creator and the creators and influencers that, you know, lean in there, that you have an awesome media kit that are fast to engage, that are using the right technical tools, wink, wink, Mavely and later, that are responding quickly on their DMs, that are engaging their audiences, that are building trust, those are the creators that are going to benefit like wildly over the next five, 10 years.
- [39:25]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I love that, that, I love that. If someone's listening and feeling a little overwhelmed about, you know, the affiliate marketing landscape that you're talking about, what's the first step that they should take today to get started with all of this?
- [39:38]
Evan Ray
I got, I said just create your first piece of content. Just go for it. Right.
- [39:43]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
And first sign up for Mavely.
- [39:45]
Evan Ray
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sign up for Maverick. You're giving me the plug there. I love it.
- [39:52]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Requirements when you're setting it up. I don't believe that there you don't have to have a certain amount of followers.
- [39:57]
Evan Ray
No, yeah, no, no follower count limitations or anything like that. Obviously you need to be brand safe. Right. Which is, which is critical. But yeah, no follower count, no limitation like that. So I would say definitely go sign up for Mavely, start to create your first pieces of content and then get your ask quickly feedback, like run polls, run surveys, ask feedback, having that back and forth conversation. And in startups we always talk about like everyone wants to go to, you know, whatever, $100 million in revenue like that, right. Or Everyone wants to go to a million followers like that. Right. Reality is, you need to get your first, like, one super passionate customer, your first 10 super passionate customers, then your first 100, because they'll tell people about your product, or in an influencer's case, they'll tell people to follow you. So I would say definitely sign up for Mavely. Create your first pieces of content. Pick any brand and add a link to any brand that you're really passionate about. And just create a link, add it in there, see what happens. Right. Just maybe you make a sale, maybe you don't, but you'll learn and then start to engage with the audience and just get comfortable with that back and forth. And you don't have to be right the first time. I can't tell you how many times I've started something and failed and then learned and then restarted it. Right. It's kind of like, yeah, yeah, you got to have swings at the. At the plate. I don't even. I'm not even a baseball fan, but I'm using these references. But you got to have as many swings as you can.
- [41:25]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah. One thing I'll note too, on there is when he's talking about polls, I'm assuming you're talking about the polls on stories, correct?
- [41:33]
Evan Ray
Yep, exactly.
- [41:34]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
And they have them on reels now, too. But I will agree with Evan there. There's even been times where I'll be like, okay, I'm going to bring a course back. Which course would you rather have? And I'll think, I know, but you never know. You'll put those polls in and you'll learn. Oh, wait, actually, they want me to share more about this and that. So when you're trying to decide, like, okay, do you want to know what I'm packing for vacation, or do you want to know what I'm using for everyday organization at home? Like, that's where you can figure out where to start as far as promoting your links.
- [42:04]
Evan Ray
100%. And we actually, it's just funny, even early on, we've had. We've actually had creators that will do, like a. Like a little gift card or something. Like, they'll run a contest and then they'll. They'll give out a gift card for. For whatever it is for. Like, participate in my survey to tell me, like, what you're looking for. Like, you know, gifts for your kid's birthday or whatever it is. And I'll. The coolest answer. Or I'll pick one of the answers randomly to get a gift card and it's like a way to like jumpstart some of that engagement, which is. I've seen a few people do that with a lot of success and I've seen a lot of people just do kind of the organic back and forth as well.
- [42:41]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yes, I love that. Okay, before we close up, I want to know, I know you kind of told us about the teacher success story, but is there any other success stories that pop out to you that someone could, they might hear it and be like, oh my gosh, he's talking about me. I really just need to get started. Like, is there anyone out there that did something and they were successful with it? What was their, what did they, what did they promote?
- [43:03]
Evan Ray
Yeah, yeah. So we've, I mean there's so many. I'm trying so, so we had, we had one creator and I got, I won't know, I won't name names just because I'm, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share those or not. But. And I want to respect their privacy. But we have one creator who just started where she was actually going on like a Disney vacation with her kids and her family and she started posting about it and she, she got, it was, it was something like she, she found a cool hotel or she found a cool ride or something like that. And her community started asking, a very small community started asking her like, oh, wow, how'd you find that? Or where'd you get that? Or help me understand that a little bit more. So she started having more conversations. More conversations. She was doing this all organically. So she wasn't using affiliate links. She wasn't doing brand collaborations. She wasn't doing anything. She found Mavely. She signed up for Mavely and then we introduced her to the concept of affiliate linking and brand campaigns. And so she started including links to things like here's where I got my Disney cruise or here's where I got. Here's how I did my, my family's trip and this is the hotel I stayed at. And so she focused initially on travel and then she started to expand it to more like home goods and home environments all around her kids. Fast forward to today. And she has, I mean she gets, she started from zero followers a couple years ago. She's been with mainly for about three years or so. Fast forward to today. She's got 500,000 plus followers. She's wildly successful. Again, I'm not going to share earnings, but wildly successful on Mavly. It's her full time job. She's actually Got team members now that are actually helping her. So she's built a company out of it. And it's just been really cool to see. We have these, we call them advisory councils, but the whole idea is to get our team input from creators of, like, what's working, what's not. What do you love about Mavely? What do you hate about Mavely? What do we need to change? And it's cool to hear that, you know, she's one of the, you know, my favorite stories to say, like, mavely changed my life and this is how it did. And this is. This is why it's so important. And those are just fun stories. And I just love that example of something that wasn't even started as a, you know, career, wasn't even started as a way to monetize. And fast forward three or four years, and she's built this, like, incredible business on the back of all of her effort and her time and her team's time.
- [45:31]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I love that. That's what this. That's why I made this podcast. Because there are people out there that are stuck at these nine to five jobs or they don't have a job and they're so unhappy. And it's literally like, if you just start utilizing social media and posting about the things you love, there is ways to monetize on that. And I just, I want to scream it from the rooftops. I hope everyone knows that.
- [45:52]
Evan Ray
I love it. I love it. Well, and what you're doing too, is so I was like a shout out for you, Caitlin, and is because I think it's really, it's really neat to see what people like yourself are doing and building these audiences, because we talk a lot about, like, what's the ripple people are creating in, like, the world. And so we think a lot about, like, if you come to work at Mavely or now Mavely and later, you're, you're one team member that's part of one company, but we're interacting with hundreds of thousands or ultimately millions of influencers which are interacting with a billion people, right? Like, so, like, that's a pretty cool ripple. And you have the same one here, right, as you're interacting with your entire audience. And you're hopefully empowering and like, you know, enabling them to be successful, to then interact with literally like tens, hundreds of millions or a billion people. So it's a pretty cool ripple you're creating here, too.
- [46:41]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Oh, so freaking cool. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, where can listeners connect with Mavely and stay updated. Where's the best place to go for that?
- [46:49]
Evan Ray
Yeah, for sure. So I would say check out join mavely.com it's our website. You go on there, you can sign up or it's even easier to download Mavely in the App Store.
- [46:58]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Okay.
- [46:59]
Evan Ray
So super quick and easy.
- [47:01]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
I'll put a link in the show notes too for us so that they can easily access that.
- [47:05]
Evan Ray
I always say go to the App Store. It's, you know, 99% of our users are on mobile anyway, so it's a fun experience. And then Also check out later.com as well for all the, like the link in bio tools, the scheduling tools, all those elements. So again, we're early days and the two businesses coming together. But you're going to see that walk start to happen more and more as these come together. But we're already cross pollinating campaign opportunities and affiliate opportunities and earnings opportunities even in the first hundred days here.
- [47:35]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Do you guys see any in person events happening in the future?
- [47:38]
Evan Ray
Yeah. Oh, for sure. So we have, you can actually check this out on our website, but we could put a link in it too. So we do Mavely meetups and now it's Mavely and later meetups all across the country. So we just finished one last week in Miami. I think there's one.
- [47:57]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah, I'm very close to Miami. You gotta tell me next time they're in Florida.
- [48:01]
Evan Ray
Oh, shoot. Okay. It would have been awesome to have you. No, it was. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. We'll make, we'll make another event happen down there. So but we've, but we've had them in like, you know, Chicago, Louisiana, New York, but also Nashville and Dallas and Miami and Atlanta and Kansas City. So like we're, we want, we're trying to hit the whole, the whole country and our entire team. Well, Alexa, you know, our entire team is, is, is driving hard on the event side. And that's like a, that's a critical piece of this because one of the things we found just through talking to a lot of creators is, and maybe you see this too, Caitlin, with your audience, but sometimes it can get lonely just creating content without having that community interaction. So a big point of Mavely and later meetups is all about how do we connect creators. Some brands come too, but mainly how do we connect creators to each other and how do we frankly create friendships, mentors, advisors, whatever you want to call it, but community around the creators. Because I think more and more people are becoming creators and it can get lonely if you don't have a community to interact with. Say this has worked really well and I'm struggling with this. Have you done it before? So that's the whole idea there. And definitely recommend it. There are virtual ones and in person. I'm biased. The in person ones are awesome.
- [49:23]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Yeah, I got to do that. It is super duper lonely. I have my social media agency and so, like my employees come in twice a week, but other than that I'm by myself and I would just love to talk with someone who has the same stuff that's going on with that influencer marketing. What's your final words of advice for creators looking to turn their social media into a revenue stream?
- [49:44]
Evan Ray
So final advice is just go out there, start posting and I would just say ask for the cookie. In life generally, and that means you ask your followers to click on your link. Ask the brand for the brand. Deal. Ask for that collaboration. Reach out to someone you admire on social and ask for the digital coffee that you have. I think there's just so many cool ways to connect and interact and learn right now. And I would just say go and ask for the cookie. That's the biggest thing.
- [50:18]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Love that. Ask for the cookie. All right. This was amazing. You were amazing. I think this was super duper helpful. Evan, I'm so grateful for you being on here. Thank you so much.
- [50:28]
Evan Ray
Well, thank you so much for having me, Caitlin. It's really cool what you've done. Your listeners are very, very lucky.
- [50:34]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Thank you. All right, Evan, how can people connect with you if they want to learn more about who you are as a CEO and all the things.
- [50:41]
Evan Ray
Yeah. So you heard about how to connect with Mavely and later and you could just shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. I really engage a lot there on the creator side, on the industry side. I actually think, Caitlin, that's how you and I first connected, which is crazy. So, yeah, just check out Evan Rae on LinkedIn.
- [50:59]
Kaitlyn Rhodes
Okay. Awesome. You were great.