← Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
How Brands Turn Customers Into Their Best Marketers | Luke Yarnton
00:28:33
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Luke Yarnton
I'm gonna find the biggest influencer that was in my segment or my sector and I'm gonna get them to post about me once with some big splash Instagram post and then we're done and then I move on to the next one. Whereas now if you go down that follow account tree, these micro influencers and nano influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences. So that's where a lot of brands are shifting towards that activation.
- [01:28]
Ryan Alford (Intro/Outro)
You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford.
- [01:48]
Ryan Alford
What's up guys? Welcome to Right about now. We're always talking about how to get your business right today. This isn't about last year. Next year. This is about what works right about now. That's why we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics because it gets kicked around so much. You see it, it's a buzzword, but it is becoming the here, the now and how brands, marketers, business people, coaches, whoever you are, need to be thinking about leveraging influencer marketing to grow their business and to grow the awareness of whatever they're doing. That's why. Hey, we go to the source. Luke Darrington, he is one of the founders of the Rave. What's up Luke?
- [02:24]
Luke Yarnton
Hey, how's it going? Excited to be here today, Ryan.
- [02:26]
Ryan Alford
Me too, man. Get a lot of requests and looking at your stuff. I'm On a soapbox here recently with influencer marketing, with, internally and externally with my companies about how to leverage it. You know, this will be an education course for me. I think I know most of it, but I don't know it all. Our audience can learn a lot from it. I know you're a firm believer in it, right?
- [02:45]
Luke Yarnton
Absolutely. It's a very quickly changing space at the moment as well. What it means to be an influencer and how to capture that and the ways to capture changing it week by week. And so I'm excited to dive deep on that with you today, Ryan. I think it's going to be a fun chat.
- [02:56]
Ryan Alford
What has been the change at its core? When you hear influencer marketing, okay, someone who has a big following is promoting a product or service and like that's it. But that's not wrong. But it's evolved into a lot more than that. Why don't you kind of start down that path?
- [03:11]
Luke Yarnton
For us, if we look in the rear vision mirror 10 years in the past and 10 years ago, the default approach to influencer marketing was I'm going to find the biggest influencer that was in my segment or my sector and I'm going to get them to post about me once with some big splash Instagram post and then we're done and then I move on to the next one. Whereas now if you go down that follow account tree, these micro influencers and nano influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences. So that's where a lot of brands are shifting towards that activation. And rather than a one and done approach where it's I want this micro influencer or nano influencer to post about me just one time and then we'll move on to the next one. It's more about creating this always on Ambassador army, where you've got a group of people who are really closely aligned with your brand. Ideally they're genuine users of the brand and they're trying to talk about you as much as possible. It becomes part of their content and you build a really close relationship with that influencer which then gets sort of passed on through that connection with the really engaged audience.
- [04:11]
Ryan Alford
The micro influencer. I hear a lot though. Now we got the nano influencer. How many followers does the nano influencer have versus the micro influencer?
- [04:21]
Luke Yarnton
There's no scientific, agreed consensus on what, how to classify them. But we say nano is sort of, we're saying between 2,500 and 10,000 and then 10,000 to 50,000 is where we'd probably call that micro. So those are the bands that we like to operate in, but we like me personally and you'll see this come through throughout the chat today. I'm a big fan of the nano and the Micro. I love that small end of the influencer spectrum. I think that's where a lot of the opportunity and the low hanging fruit is today. And I time and time again see so many of these businesses that we engage with burning hours and burning cash, sort of chasing the Instagram DMS of these bigger influences that end up in these campaigns that turn out to be absolute duds. So I think we'll, we'll lean into that nano and micro end of the scale.
- [05:04]
Ryan Alford
Today I'm out. I got 200 something. I've been building it for 15 years. Eight years were the number one show. I needed to slow down. I'm becoming irrelevant because my following is growing.
- [05:14]
Luke Yarnton
Who knew there are still uses for these larger influences in specific cases. But it's not the only influencers you should care about have more than 100,000 followers anymore. It's about finding the right fit for your brand for whatever you're trying to achieve with your influencer marketing.
- [05:27]
Ryan Alford
Over time, everything gets improved. You learn from the targeting and gets more targeted. That's what we're doing instead of painting with a wide brush or getting Kardashian to talk about something that may or may not be that related. And it's great to get the reach, but how much frequency are you getting and how much relevancy are you getting to the audience? So that's what we're going for right through Covid time.
- [05:48]
Luke Yarnton
I tried my hand at being an influencer. I produced. My area of media was I was producing a bunch of slow motion coffee videos. I'm not sure if you've seen them on your TikTok feed or Instagram feed set to some music. There'd be like a sexy espresso pulled into a cup. We'd see the coffee coming out really relaxing. I got like a couple of thousand followers on my TikTok and was like pretty active on Reddit as well. But in that time, even with such small influence, I generated probably more than $10,000 worth of transactions for the brands and equipment that I was using because people would reach out and say, oh my God, what is that grinder? It's such a cool grinder. Or that is a beautiful machine, I want that machine. And so I'd send them to the direction of where I bought it. From, but I didn't have enough followers that any brand would want to give me the time of day to have a conversation. I didn't get to monetize that in any way, shape or form. I didn't get any free shit. I was just me plotting away with my iPhone 13 making some pretty average content and now that's completely change. People would now take a little bit more notice about what I'm doing and try to activate that in a way that's beneficial to their brand. Like if I had one of the coffee brands I was talking about in my low quality coffee videos come to me and say, hey, would love to partner, I would do that in an instant.
- [06:59]
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- [07:01]
Ryan Alford
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- [07:02]
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- [07:39]
Ryan Alford
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- [07:41]
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- [10:27]
Ryan Alford
As a content creator myself having this show, but even outside of this, for brands and otherwise, have we lost the appreciation for amazingly produced high end content because now everything's on the phone and everybody likes organic. Is there appetite still for influencers or people that produce content sharing really well produced stuff?
- [10:48]
Luke Yarnton
I think the question is not to the quality of the content the way I view it is is it still authentic? You can find really highly produced, really authentic content and you can find low quality, authentic content. The reason people, at least we're going through this wave at the moment of a content shot on an iPhone and the way that their friends and family would produce it. Because this is how me as an audience, I'm used to consuming media for my friends. It feels a little bit more authentic and I feel a connection. But the style of content comes in waves. We'll see it change time and time again. A bunch of the creators that I follow still produce really high quality, polished content that resonates with me and I love it. James Hoffman is a coffee creator. I'm obviously weirdly obsessed with coffee. His content is so well polished but still deeply authentic and I trust that dude and his recommendations more than I trust anyone else in the space. And I love that it's polished and it's high quality but I also consume a bunch of content that is just some dude selfie style video walking down the street and I'm like, cool, I can jive with this as well. This is fun.
- [11:47]
Ryan Alford
It's the authenticity that makes sense. So you paint that brush across it. The cringy stuff is just okay. The 21 year old in a high polished Ferrari video. It just screams inauthentic.
- [12:01]
Luke Yarnton
Exactly.
- [12:01]
Ryan Alford
Yeah, I think that's kind of what we're saying a little bit now. That's an extreme example. I love it. And being a content creator and owning an agency and working on large brands in the past, I love high produced, high end content. That storytelling obviously has a narrative and things like that. And I'm like, I just hope we haven't lost the appreciation of that on some level.
- [12:20]
Luke Yarnton
A short term hack and you see a lot of these bigger brands doing it now. They want to be trusted. Making it look like something that your friend might produce, whether that's a long term strategy or not. We'll check back in 12 months from now and have a look at that.
- [12:31]
Ryan Alford
How do I build an ambassador army? How is this done?
- [12:35]
Luke Yarnton
That's something that I've spent a lot of time in energy trying to unpack and work out how to do it time and time again. That's the main way that we at the rave help businesses unlock goals. There's a couple of key steps to building an ambassador army. And by ambassador army we mean a group of ambassadors that will talk about a brand that they love time and time again and ideally can have some positive outcome. So typically what that means is let's find a bunch of these sort of micro creators or creators, influencers or even just everyday shoppers that have the ability to impact sales or whatever outcome you want, whether that's clicks or transactions, and do that consistently. The way we typically work with brands is we break it down into three key steps. First of all, you need to make sure you've got the right people coming in the top of the funnel. The easiest way we do that is that we've got a piece of technology that can go through a brand's email list or be actively monitoring the at checkout. And every single time we see a customer profile that we can match against an influencer profile. So we've got access to about 15 million creator and influencer profiles around the world. As soon as we see an exact match, we flag that and we update the SCRM or update a notification channel for them saying, hey, this influencer here, this guy ryan, he's got 250k followers. He just purchased some socks. Maybe you want to reach out to him. First things first, let's go through all of the previous people who've shopped and identify who has this outsized chance to be a great influencer and ambassador for your brand.
- [13:54]
Ryan Alford
I love that because I'm a consumer like everybody else. I have a big following. We've been blessed to have a good show, loyal listeners and all that. We have influence. And there's stuff that I buy, like everybody else, grocery store and all that. And I don't go, man, I should be paid to buy this. No, but there are a handful of things that I buy. Then I'm like, I should not be buying this because. Not because I earned it, but I did build audience and have influence. This brand should be paying me to buy this or buy it for me. And then I should be promoting it because I'm a firm believer in it. And it's like right down their demo. I love that. But I'm like, man, we need more people discovering these things.
- [14:26]
Luke Yarnton
You've touched on an interesting point there as well, Ryan, where it's like, obviously we've talked about authenticity and trust. That's also super valid from the creator's perspective as well. They want their audience to trust them and listen to what they have to say. So they would much rather promote a brand that they genuinely love and have to feign love for some brand that has been hammering their Instagram DMs for a while. This is why we're saying the influencers and ambassadors you should be looking to build into this army are people who already fricking know and love you. Don't go chasing the people who've never heard of your brand before that might be interested and might not. First, we'll build the cohort of people that we think a great fit for providing your brand. They're the Ambassador Army. The next step, and this is where a lot of people get stuck, is that the natural inclination is how do I get them to love me and join the Ambassador army and participate always and forever and will be in love.
- [15:12]
Ryan Alford
It's great if you got a list already and you can farm that through. But what if I don't have that list? What if I'm a startup or early phase and we don't have a 20,000 person list to vet out those people?
- [15:25]
Luke Yarnton
In that case, what I would recommend is let's monitor it in real time so every single time a transaction comes through, we'll make sure that we're not missing a single opportunity of someone who might have a small influence to post about you and even the small community you do have. Simply putting an ask out there saying, hey, saw you made a purchase from us. We're trying to build an ambassador army. Here's what's in it for you. Here's what's in it for us. Be transparent around sort of how it cuts both ways. If there's any chance you're interested, let me know. Opt in. There'll be some benefits. In our experience, some of the biggest influences we've on border on to the platform are not traditional influencers. One of the brands we work with is a brand called Half Day and they have carry on bags for airplanes. There's one guy in there who's done more than $150,000 worth of sales for Half Day and he's an ex military guy that's a part of one of these big ex military WhatsApp groups and just posted in the WhatsApp group or the Facebook group saying hey, this bag here is great for when I'm traveling with my uniform because it doesn't crinkle up the uniform and I don't have to iron it. And by the way, if anyone wants it, here's my referral link where I get $20 every time someone purchases it. That's just gone. Absolutely not. The amount of trans he's generated for this brand is phenomenal. And he's not a traditional influencer. He's never posted like a thirst trap selfie in his life, but have tapped into this unique ability to reach out to his audience.
- [16:37]
Ryan Alford
Is your whole premise around just purely people that have already are buying or just bought is sort of building that army of those existing customers. Is there any amount of yours that's prospecting influencers, whatever it might be, we
- [16:49]
Luke Yarnton
can help brands out with that. That's a skill that we do have. But what we're trying to do is help people realize and where we're the best at. What we do is helping people find a low hanging fruit or the golden goose lives within their customer list. That's where the most overlooked value is when it comes to prospecting and outreach. Let's say you're a business that has very few customers and no budget for influencer marketing. The places I would start is spend a lot of time on Reddit and find there'll be some voices in Reddit that have a lot of reach happen to those people if they have some sort of expertise around your space. Jump into the hashtags and TikTok and the folks you want will have less than 7,500 followers because those are the ones who are going to get a likelihood of some response from and they have that high engagement. And you're not going to piss away hours and hours and hours trying to get someone on board who's then going to want to charge you $5,000 for a single post. You want those young, hungry creators that are willing to believe in what you're doing. Those are the ones who you want to be connecting with if you're early on the journey.
- [17:45]
Ryan Alford
I love the community thing and the power. I've been late to the game on this. I've known it, I think I've counseled people. But like myself, I'm a practitioner. I have teams and we do stuff. But like I'm a practitioner. The Facebook group, Reddit thing, all that stuff is gold mine. You've got these conversation groups and things that are happening and they're not talking directly about your product, they're having conversations about things, topics in your area. It's like a growth manager, but really it's almost like audience finding. It's almost like this balance of managing what you have is kind of community manager. Finding and nurturing and building and discovering community is kind of like the secret sauce.
- [18:23]
Luke Yarnton
Fostering a community is such an important part of longevity success. Now like you can see that once you've got a group of people who want to listen to what you have to say and want to engage with you, that is forever asset that you can tap into in a million different ways and it creates so much value. Once you've got that critical mass, it then can go on and grow itself and you don't actually have to be monitoring it and putting as much time and effort into it. Ideally you can get these sort of folks who exist within that community themselves that the type of people who can then go on and be the champions of the community out of love alone.
- [18:54]
Ryan Alford
I love it. We help build with step one. We help them build their army. Either existing, some prospecting, but really mining what's there now what the next step is.
- [19:11]
Luke Yarnton
We only want to get them to do one thing and that one thing varies, brand to brand. What you don't want to do is try and onboard them to be part of the ambassador army straight away that you get a lot of friction there, you get a lot of drop off, the timing might not be right and then you'll burn a lot of opportunities. The key thing here is once you've got them to do one simple task for you, the likelihood of them doing a subsequent task is significantly higher. There's Athleisure brand we're working with called Form. They blew up a couple of years ago because Taylor Swift was seen wearing one of their sports bras. They do posture correcting Athleisure wear and they do it really well. They're growing at a rapid pace for them. What we do is we've got this automation set up, plus we're doing the retrospective mining and we say, hey, saw you made a purchase from us. Love your content, by the way. If you just want to post a picture of you in anything from form on your Instagram story, we'll refund your most recent order. It's not a big ask. It's pretty easy. We're not asking them to sell out. No affiliate links. If you can post about our brand and just show that we're relevant, that first ask and then we'll keep our promise of giving you a refund. That's the first offer. That's a really easy offer for a creator of any size, whether it's 2,500 followers or 50,000 followers. I was probably going to post about this anyway. Now I might post about it a little bit quicker and I don't have to tag them or do anything like gross like that. It's just showing that this is a brand that I wear, that I paid organically for. Brilliant. What that also does is it builds a little bit of trust. We've come to an agreement that you're going to post about us and then we'll give you a refund. The refund hits the account. Magic moment, a little bit of delight. And then following that. So that's when we get to stage three, which is now you've got a group of influencers or ambassadors, creators that love the brand. Second point is they've actually done something for you once and then once they've done a single task view, that's when they become part of this closed group of ambassador army. And that's when you can sort of foster that community. And every single time there's a new drop, anytime there's something interesting happening, they get updated, they feel part of the brand and you can do a bunch of low lift, simple tasks that make them feel engaged and make them feel loved and make them feel heard. It can be as simple as we're planning the summer season outfits. Which color do you guys prefer? And purely just involving them in that question makes them feel a little bit more interested when the summer Season comes around, then you can engage that customer base again and say 50% discount for all of you in the Ambassador army. This is the color that you helped us select. Go ahead, buy it, post about it, blah, blah, blah, refunds, everyone's happy. And then all of a sudden, through very little effort, you've got a group of 200 odd micro creators consistently posting about this brand that they feel connected to for very little cost.
- [21:35]
Ryan Alford
You have data like the average. If they do that, one thing that they join the AR me, so to
- [21:41]
Luke Yarnton
speak, varies a lot, segment to segment. Certain brands that have more like social currency. And by social currency I mean people want to naturally talk about it. Obviously they get higher cut through than something that's significantly less interesting. For every 10,000 shoppers, we know that about 200 to 250 of them have more than 2,500 followers. And then obviously of those some of them are going to be duds. It'll be like some auto garage that has a high following count or it'll be a dog account. So let's say that the real amount is going to be 200 per 10,000 customers. Ideally we'll be able to convince to join the group. 30 to 50 of those is a good outcome. They've got noisy inboxes, it's hard, but generally speaking, if you can catch them with a good serendipitous message, right person, right time, and all you need is for one of those to turn into a powerhouse for you to get really, really incredible outcomes. If you can get three of them, it's happy days. Ten of them, your brand's going to the moon.
- [22:31]
Ryan Alford
What industries does this work best for?
- [22:33]
Luke Yarnton
We're still relatively new on the journey at the moment. We've got maybe just over 200 brands using the platform at the moment. I need to check the numbers, but it's still relatively new. We're skewing more towards E comm at the moment, so we're seeing a lot proof coming out in the E commerce space. We're dipping our toes into ticketing and we're dipping our toes into SaaS apps. At the moment we haven't found a segment where it very clearly doesn't work. What we are finding is that if the average age of the customer is above 40, the likelihood of us discovering an influencer is slightly lower. But that specific customer base are significantly more receptive to these micro influencer and nano influencer people. So the impact is higher. So it's a little bit more of a grind. But once you do unlock Those customers, they provide a significantly better impact because the number number of creators or influencers that people over the age of 40 are following is significantly lower than say someone in the Gen Z cohort who's going to be aware of 200 or 300 creators posting consistently. Whereas like my parents probably know of four influences or like five maybe talk
- [23:31]
Ryan Alford
all the time about performance marketing versus brand marketing, the marketing that's driving a sale today or as fast as possible at the bottom of the funnel versus building brand over time. We all need outcomes and you need business outcomes. Believe it or not, no matter what these performance marketers have tried to tell us you to actually create awareness and intent before they buy, which there is a funnel or a cycle that is still there. It doesn't one ad or one influence or whatever insert ad like object doesn't always drive a sale that day. And so I'm building to a question here Luke is I see this as beneficial both for the top and the bottom of the funnel.
- [24:07]
Luke Yarnton
There is a performance element to this. Often it is paired with affiliate based marketing. We've got a fully fleshed out affiliate marketing tool and ours is built around this idea that affiliate and influencer marketing will be completely Democrat within 10 years. I'm speaking often sat opposite. There'll be a brand marketer, a head of influence and a performance marketer. When I'm having sort of these higher level discussions with a bigger brand and the performance marketer's approach is what is the right give and the get to make this work. When it comes to affiliate marketing, for example, they're consistently doing how much can we afford to give away as a discount for a referred shopper and how much can we give away as a commission to that affiliate creator or influencer for making that? And it's gotta be a right balance for certain brands. That discount that's attached to an affiliate link is a really effective lever to get people purchasing for other brands. They'll rather have like a super low or even just 0% discount, but they'll heavily incentivize the affiliate or the influencer for posting about it. So they might go up to 30% commission. The performance marketer is thinking how do I optimize this? How do we a b test this? And how do I make sure that we get as high a conversion rate for a standard shopper that's arrived to the site on their own?
- [25:20]
Ryan Alford
I need more listeners to all my podcasts. So how do we use this to get more listeners of different shows of different types?
- [25:29]
Luke Yarnton
If you've got a subscriber list of the people who sign up for your newsletters that within 45 minutes I've canvassed that entire subscriber list. I've worked out of the people who subscribe to your updates and have more than 2,500 followers. That's a very easy process to do. Then you've built them into a small cohort. You can reach out to them and say, hey, notice you're a listener, big fan of your content. I'm having 15 minute interviews with a bunch of people to decide what sort of content I should be putting out in the coming seasons. If you're interested in sitting down for a chat, let's chat. Like that sort of approach, direct outreach from the founder works really well across the board. That's one way to engage them. The other one is if you can throw up a cheeky little Instagram story of you at a coffee shop that shows that you're listening to one of my podcasts, throw you a 50 Uber Eats gift card or something as simple as that. That's usually enough to get things moving. And then once you found these people who are a fan, then you build them into that Ambassador army. That's a pretty low lift, easy for you to cut through and at least discover who that follows you is one of those creators. And look, maybe even going through that process, you'll find some interesting people to sit across the table from you and actually have a conversation with. They might be doing some cool shit themselves.
- [26:34]
Ryan Alford
Ideally, the outcomes for me would just be more trial of the show. And if we're doing our job, it translates to more subscribers at some percentage level. But being able to track if we build the Ambassador army for any given podcast, then track tracking the downloads that they drive for individual episodes. And those are the sort of sales for this approach.
- [26:56]
Luke Yarnton
They get their own unique link with a specific utm. You can see who's actually effective at driving traffic to your site and who's not. Honestly, that's one of the biggest hacks we've found as well. This is like a little secret that I'll share with the audience.
- [27:07]
Ryan Alford
Oh yes, I like secrets for the show, Luke. I like it.
- [27:10]
Luke Yarnton
A lot of these micro influencers and sort of nano influencers, they are natively very competitive. They like to win. They're often very metric. If you can have a sneak a little bit of a leaderboard in there or some sort of competitive element to it, that's a good way to get a squeeze a little bit of extra juice out of it. Let's say that they'll get a little bit more excited about it. Whoever can drive the most clicks to the site. Transparent leaderboard. By the end of the month, you get something that is of the appropriate value.
- [27:34]
Ryan Alford
That's what I need. The Now Army. Who's driving the most downloads or audience for the show and they get the winning badge. I'll creatively come up with that. We'll have merch and everything else. You know, I can make it cool like album art. Like yeah.
- [27:49]
Luke Yarnton
They can get one of those big wristling belts that sat in front of you right now.
- [27:53]
Ryan Alford
We'll send them a belt just like this.
- [27:55]
Luke Yarnton
Now Champion of the world.
- [27:56]
Ryan Alford
The Now Army. I like it. See, you know, whenever someone overtakes me as the number one marketing and business show, they can come get the belt. Now I'm 652 6. You might have to wrestle me for it, but the numbers back it up. I'm liking it and we're brainstorming here selfishly, but it applies to anybody. Business is the point. You can use influencers community and again gamifying it a bit, which I like. People love that.
- [28:20]
Luke Yarnton
It's also such a human thing to want to be a part of a community. You want to be involved in something. You want to be collaborative and co create something with your peers. If you just provide that structure for them and provide a little bit of incentive to get them moving. It is just something native to human nature that people want to be a part of something.
- [28:36]
Ryan Alford
Influencer marketing. It's the now version of. Of spokesperson. Back in the day and even now brands use spokespersons. I mean if you watch the super bowl, every ad has a celebrity in it and you had spokesperson marketing. So you have Michael Jordan or you have Michael Phelps if you're a swimmer, like whatever it might be, Olympian actor Tom Cruise and they're the spokesperson for the brand. Influencer marketing is like the evolution of that on some level. But then it's the more authentic version because it's everyday people.
- [29:04]
Luke Yarnton
At least when I was in college and you learned a little about marketing, there was always that saying that they keep bringing out which is your brand is what they say about you when you're not in the room. I think that's a Jeff Bezos quote. Brands are starting to realize that gone are the days where they have absolute control of what people are saying about the brand and they can put words in Michael Jordan's mouth, sort of assert who they are as a brand. It's changed now in that the amount of media and the access to media has been a complete paradigm shift from when that spokesperson style of marketing was proper and present. So now people are talking about your brand whether you like it or not. But the key now is not to control what people are saying about it. As a brand, you just need to make sure your product is solid and does what it says on the box. And then what you do is try and make people talk about it as much as possible. You just want to be top of mind. You want to be the brand that's getting discussed. And if you've built the right product and you can facilitate getting people talking about it at scale, that's how you win in 2025.
- [29:54]
Ryan Alford
As we close out here, where you see the company evolving to anything on the horizon, we're talking about what's working now, where this whole influencer market craze is going and all those things. And then some of the calls to action of where to find you guys.
- [30:08]
Luke Yarnton
Where we see at least the direction to which we're building is that I'm a firm believer that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing is going to be completely democratized and decentralized within the next 10 years. And by that, gone are the days of brands picking influencers who are going to represent them. And instead the opportunity should be available for anyone who wants to promote a brand to be able to participate in the rewards that go alongside that. So that's why we're building in this space here, we're building A, a tool that can analyze influencers in real time, and B, a really, really simple tool that any single customer, whether they have a following or not, to refer a friend, family, follower, and get a Venmo Reward or a PayPal reward for doing so in a way that's completely seamless. So we believe that gone are the days of traditional influencer and affiliate marketing. And in a world where search is changing, advertising on meta and traditional platforms is becoming more difficult. We see no reason that relying on customers who know and love your brand, that should be a very meaningful growth channel for every brand going forward. A smart place for brands to start investing the time and energy. So that's the direction we're building and we're going to keep going that direction to the floor and continue to unlock a bunch of benefit for the brands that we like to work with. If you're interested, obviously you can find me the rave co find me on LinkedIn. Luke Yarnton y A R N T O N Like a ton of yarn and maybe in the show notes here.
- [31:22]
Ryan Alford
Yes we will have it of course in the show notes. It's fascinating. Think as you were talking about it, removing sort of the boundaries and the stages of it. Now it's both the democratization we're making purchase decisions every day and allowing and empowering consumers to sort of get just commission immediately from the word of mouth that they're naturally doing anyway and unlocking that in a very easy way. Because even now the affiliate stuff, I don't do many affiliate deals with our sponsors because it's just a pain in the ass to keep up with. I'd rather have a low fee, leverage the audience if I believe in the product. But if we can bring down the walls that are the complexities, the more this really takes off.
- [31:59]
Luke Yarnton
Exactly. I think the key is making it seamless, making it easy, making it transparent. And I think this is the way that you can engage people at scale.
- [32:05]
Ryan Alford
Removing friction from influence, influencer marketing and everything else in this whole realm. Luke, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I really appreciate it.
- [32:14]
Luke Yarnton
Ryan. This has been super fun. It's been a blast.
- [32:16]
Ryan Alford
Hey guys, you know to find me Ryan is right.com we'll find all the highlight clips, the full episode and the links to the rave. Everything that all of Luke's personal profiles, all that will be in the show notes and on the website. You want to find us on Instagram right about now show it's got that blue check at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Shoot me a dm. We're building that now, army. We'll see you next time. Right about now, here's the truth.
- [32:41]
Ryan Alford (Intro/Outro)
Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea, make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram Ryan Alford and watch or listen to every episode@ryanisright.com this is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.
- [33:19]
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