← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Micro Influence, Major Impact With Ross Barefoot
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- [00:00]
A
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. We've been talking a lot about all the changes online and how all the search traffic has just kind of left the website and gone all throughout the Internet. And with the rise of LLMs, there's a lot of need for your name to be talked about and mentioned on social media on other platforms. The LLMs are scouring the Internet to find this stuff. And one of the things that when you think about SEO and you think about the expanding sphere of influence, of relevancy engineering, let's call it, to get your brand out there, you need to have people be talking about you in communities. You need to have influencers in the rise of social media. And so William Gasner with Stack Influence is somebody I wanted to bring on and kind of break it down. I know we've talked about influencer marketing before and it was like a nice to have. It was a different kind of strategy. I think it's becoming more of a must have today. So William, welcome to the show.
- [01:30]
B
Thanks for having me on, Matthew.
- [01:32]
A
Awesome. I am so excited to get into this because there's just a lot of differencing opinions on influencer marketing, even though it's been around for a long time and you spent a lot of time building stack influence and building a two sided marketplace which is incredibly difficult. So I want, I want to give you kudos for that and, and you know, okay, there's all these influencers out there. Right. And the first thing that the feedback I got when people started like getting into influencers was just because you have a big audience. Right. Doesn't mean the engagement levels there. Yes, well, doesn't mean the real. That's another one like component. There's now tools out there to kind of check into that. But, but you don't necessarily need to have a big audience if you have a really engaged like focus, right?
- [02:32]
B
Absolutely.
- [02:32]
A
So I don't know, just like break it down for me, I guess. Let's peel it back and say what is most topical as you look at the space right now and what's happening in influencer market. And then we can maybe go back and, and do the basics, I guess.
- [02:47]
C
Cool.
- [02:48]
B
Yeah, sounds like a plan. So, so first and foremost I want to bring up what you briefly mentioned regarding how influencers used to Be kind of a nice to have. And they're evolving into a must have and a big on the SEO kind of showing up even on Google realm. Google just this past month has, has started to analyze social posts to actually show up in search results. And LLMs are now analyzing social posts to actually and associate to your brand to rank you within answers within these AI kind of search or result agents. And so it's becoming more and more critical to always have kind of this always on social media promotion presence because if you don't, you're, you're really losing to a lot of the competition who is actually investing in these channels now taking a step back to the influencer realm. So when most people think of influencers, they think of celebrities, Kardashians, millions of followers, right? And, and that's how it started, right? It's like, and it was kind of a no brainer, right? Is that find someone who has a huge, huge following, give them a product, they're going to promote it, you're going to make a huge amount of money, right? And to a point you just brought up, things have incrementally changed over time. The first big thing is engagement rate, which was that the algorithms, it used to be the fact that if you posted on a Monday and everyone that followed you was on social media for the next like 48 hours, pretty much every single person would see your post. And what happened is people's social feeds started getting filled up with content that they didn't necessarily care about. Maybe you followed Kim Kardashian, but you didn't, you followed her because she was on a show and you love that show. But then she kept posting content and you're like, I don't really care about this content. And now your social feeds filled up with Kim Kardashian's posts and you leave Instagram because you're like, this is not intriguing or interesting, right? And so the algorithms, the first big change, which is a few years ago that they made was, yeah, TikTok was a huge one. TikTok spearheaded a massive amount of change and Instagram followed suit. But the real big thing was like we're only going to show content to people who actually care, right? The real engaged people. And so maybe only 10% honestly now for like what they call mega influencers or celebrity influencers, 1% of their audience usually engages very, very small percentage and sometimes lower than that. And so you're posting and you're only getting, and maybe you're paying this person hundreds of thousands of dollars to A post. And because they have these millions of followers and it looks amazing, it's this kind of great metric, but it really, at the end of the day kind of vanity and maybe only a very small percentage of those people actually see that content. Whereas someone could have literally 10,000 followers, maybe 100,000 followers versus 10 million. And because they produce content that their audience loves, a larger portion of that audience comparatively is going to see that engage and engagement correlates with conversion.
- [05:50]
C
Right.
- [05:53]
B
And I can dive deeper into those. There's a secondary change that was very massive TikTok speared that has shifted the entire influencer realm. But that was kind of the big one. Any, any thoughts on that? Thanks for chiming on.
- [06:04]
A
Yeah. You know the thing that I started thinking about when you were talking is how depending on how influential the influencer is that that you pick, they're really like a temporary or short term spokesperson for your brand.
- [06:22]
B
Absolute.
- [06:23]
A
So, you know, I've done a, I've done a few interviews with people and the thing that I took away from it was if you get them to do a post, it's not, and this is, goes the same when you make, when you pay like a bunch of money for a videography company to make a video for you. Right. Like you have the video, but what do you do with it after that? Right. So it's the repurposing of it, it's the using it on different channels like that person that people know identify with key characteristics of your brand. And so you're trying to make that association and then, and then after they post it, you're wanting to reshare it, you're wanting to take screenshots of it, you're wanting to move it here, there, and I guess negotiate making sure that for X period of time you can reuse maybe the name, image and likeness in a way that helps boost what you're doing. Because that one post, or repost or share whatever they did tweet that they did is not going to reach a massive amount of people and impact in that way. It's got to be, it's got to be syndicated out in a way where, where people find it and you got to use that piece as like a high authority piece that you're gonna, you know, again, repurpose and, and, and that's like the value. Now, you know, you also talked about the LLMs and you know, the way I look at the LLMs is they're looking all across the website like a really intelligent human, right?
- [07:58]
B
Absolutely.
- [07:59]
A
So a really well Thought like thoughtful person that's trying to make a decision and comparison and all this kind of stuff is going to go through those chain like, like that customer journey to identify what's the right fit, right? So they're automatically like mimicking humans and doing these things. So they're going to go to social media, they're gonna, you know, go to review sites, they're going to read blogs, they're going to go to high authority sites and they're going to aggregate that information and they're going to synthesize it and make a decision. Now you know, you can have that person go do that for you and serve up those things. And now if you're talking about information architecture of like where it is across line, like a line, I can't talk today, apologies, I'm on vacation, guys. But like Reddit, right? Like if it's posted on Reddit, it can be scraped, it can be indexed and, and that information is public and people are engaging or talking about it, even though people might not see it. That is relevant. Just like a Twitter post, it is relevant if someone is making a statement. I see it in pitch decks all the time. Someone, they're quoting people on Twitter because Twitter, it's, because it's a public statement. Right? Like, so how you got to think about this is how is your brand showing up everywhere and are people talking about you? I would love to even get into if we have time later in this podcast to talk about how a influencer could help create engagement. Like maybe through, like if they posted a certain question that. Because we do this with podcasting. So I run a podcasting network as well and we, we carry the conversation in a certain direction based upon what the sponsors like to see. Right. We're not actively promoting it, but we're, we're saying, hey, here's a kind of a public forum of information that we want to make sure to get out there and we want it to go in a certain direction. I, I feel like maybe as an advanced strategy you could use influencers to help spur that conversation or to talk about something you have an interest. But I haven't totally seen that. I've really just seen the two dimensional, you know, influencer mentions your brand or, or retweet something. But, but I'm not in the space as deep as you, so those are kind of my just initial thoughts as you started talking.
- [10:34]
B
Yeah, no, those are all really great points to bring up. Let me pick a few of them.
- [10:40]
A
Yeah.
- [10:40]
B
And respond. So the first thing of just not Just looking at the social promotion, but looking at the content that's generated, which now the industry calls UGC or user generated content. A lot of people perceive influencers as like a pure performance marketing play, right? Like instead of running ads, I'm going to run influencer marketing. And there are absolute similarities. You're driving awareness that leads to sales. That obviously is a goal for any brand that's promoting online. But the cool thing about influencers is it's kind of killing multiple boards, one stone. Like you're not just getting this promotion, but you're actually driving this awareness. It's helping with SEO as we discussed because at least recently that LLMs, Google's actually analyzing these things and then you're also getting this really, really valuable piece of content that exactly as you said it. Like you should be running ads with that you should be doing, using it in marketing material. You should be incorporating into your website as kind of a social proof. And that's what people actually resonate with these days because they want to see like real authentic customers showing use case not to say that you shouldn't have professional photography to make your brand very clean and professional, but you also want to show real things because now people know, especially with AI image generation that like there's a lot of fake stuff out there, right? And how, how do I trust this product is actually good? And seeing a real person actually utilize it is one of the best ways. Now on a secondary note, and kind of what I was going to also mention previously about a big thing that how social networks have changed in the past few years and TikTok really spearheaded this, is that besides just now changing how the algorithms feed in content to certain people based off engagement, one of the biggest things in that TikTok realized was hey, if this piece of content that someone promotes like a huge portion of their audience love it, why should we restrain that content only to the people who are following them? Maybe we should show it to other people right outside of their follower base. Because if it's. And then maybe we show it to like a hundred people outside their follower base at first and if those people engage, will show it to a thousand and maybe ten thousand, maybe a million, right? And that's going to keep people on the social platforms, which is their goal because now their feed gets filled up with not just things that maybe they thought they were interested in, but kind of these recommendations of new content that are really other people are engaging with. And what it's done is it's opened this doorway to kind of we call democratize the social landscape.
- [13:11]
C
Right?
- [13:12]
B
Taking the power away from these celebrities with millions of followers and enabling someone who literally could have a hundred followers, like brand new social account to get posts that go viral. And it happens all the time. And so what now? The strategy we've found works the best for brands. What we actually built stack influence around is what the industry calls nano or micro influencers. These like smaller creators, less than a hundred thousand followers who. And as opposed to basically putting all your eggs in one basket, you have a limited marketing budget, as opposed to hiring a Kardashian or some celebrity, why not take that marketing budget, spread it across a hundred or a thousand smaller people, right, who you might not have to pay that much money or much smaller amount than that larger celebrity. Some people are willing to do stuff just even in exchange for a product, which is actually what stack influence, we kind of built the model around as well and what people call product seating and basically diversify your risk. You're going to get a huge, much larger amount of content. You're going to increase that SEO potential and you're going to kind of increase the odds that your content potentially can go viral. You get that more awareness because you put that content in the hands of a hundred people, maybe three of them go viral, whereas you work with five people with a million followers. Like maybe none of them go viral, right? Your odds are lower. Even though they have this kind of higher follower base and they look sexier, you could say so those have been really big changes. And where I recommend brands now invest their money is like diversify risk, work with a lot more creators with smaller budgets on a per influencer basis and generate a huge amount of content which you right now need to run ads and kind of marketing material. Like having three pieces of content is. Or having 30 pieces of content is better than having three, you know?
- [15:01]
A
Yeah. So you said a couple things that I wanted to piggyback on. One is you talked a lot about in the beginning that how the algorithm works and the audition period. There really is an audition period of like how well people engage with this content. I think even some of the Data I saw 30% of the time on social media platforms are looking at the comments, right? Of where, where, where what, what is going on. Like two people could say, right? And if an influencer says it, that you know, has some kind of association, if he posts the exact same thing, it could go viral based upon how many people are following him. And so there's again these development of, of strategies and, and also to your point, you could create just an awesome piece of content and your core network could engage it, could then share it to more people, people like that and show it to other people and it, and it goes viral. Like I think there's a lot of mystique behind well the math or the algorithms of how these, these platforms work. But today that information's out there so you can understand it. And, and that's what Mr. Beast did, right? Like he just tested YouTube and he tested and he tested and you know, of course reality shows and game shows are, are what, you know, like Americans like and you know, so that's kind of why he went in that direction. But if people like something else, he would have gone in that direction, right?
- [16:36]
B
Absolutely.
- [16:37]
A
And, and I think that to your point, you got to be testing stuff out there and seeing what's work. And even if someone looks great on paper, you don't want to put all your eggs in basket. You want to, you want to test them out and see how they do against your audience. Because I really feel like it's a layering strategy with your brand. All these different components make up your brand and to bring in the flavor of a micro influencer or a mid sized influencer could really help. But having these champions out there, I mean I see it in crypto like, I mean, right, like you just see it in crypto that someone has a product and they get it out to all these different people and then everybody gives their honest take of whatever they think. And okay, there might be some shady like here's some tokens and whatever that's going on. But, but for the most part I think people are sharing what they think and then people are daisy chaining that information and it's proliferating out there. Same goes if you have a product, right? You have E Commerce product, you want to get some trials out there, you need going back to Google and eat like expertise, authority, trust and experience. They added experience because of the AI. If you've tried the product, you're holding the product, you're using the product. If they say something, it should have more weight to it, right? And, and so I mean reviews are so big and, and product trials are, are really where, where it goes. I, I, I, I shared with you in kind of the pre interview. I'm going to bring a buddy on that that started Turtle Box. It's a big like waterproof speaker, right, that has all kinds of partnerships and associations with fishing brands and you know, line extension. Like they have not done anything traditional, right. Like they rank for their name, they don't rank for any unbranded terms. There's no SEO involved. But they built the right relationships and they place their product in the right hands. That people identified that, that that fish or that are on the water or whatever and it, and it carried through that user generated content and partnerships like a life of its own. Right. So I think that how I see influencers going is it helps you kind of kickstart a natural phenomenon that maybe you're trying to create. You know. Now I, I think that you could seed a lot of stuff for free products and, and over time. But, but, but I, I, I don't know. You tell me. I feel like the goal is to kind of create a movement, right?
- [19:26]
B
Absolutely.
- [19:26]
A
Create a community behind your product. And a lot of people kind of follow the leader. You know, they, they don't want to be the first one to go. And so if you can get people out there or people they know that trust it, they're more willing to give it a try, make their own honest assessment. And, and really now a lot of people do things very publicly online. So when you say influencer, micro influencer, like there's a lot of people like on Facebook. I did this test. This is funny, William. I don't, I didn't really use Facebook but like, like I think Facebook's going to come back into vogue. I think it's a centralized hub and, and so I said hey, I'm going to do a challenge. Anybody want to do it with me? I gonna post for every day, just one post. Not even like crazy video or anything. Just I'm gonna just post one time a day. And I don't have this huge audience or anything like that on Facebook, like on LinkedIn or anything. And, and I'm like, these are like family, friends, let's see what happens. So I did it. 30 days I had, we would, it was like 328 views over a 28 day period. And then the next 28 day period over that 30 day kind of launch, 19,000 impressions organically. Just static posting once a day.
- [20:43]
B
Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [20:45]
A
So like we all are democratized through social media. We have a massive amount of reach that a lot of companies and brands would, would die to have. And now you all these people and these micro influencers, or maybe just a little bit more intentional or, or a little bit more engaged online and are posting and have this huge network and reach because of it, which I think is absolutely amazing.
- [21:15]
B
A hundred percent to add on to that. So one thing That I find works really well with product seating. And you'd think, like, why would I just give a free product away? Why don't I just pay someone?
- [21:26]
C
Right?
- [21:27]
B
But people deserve to get paid. And I'll start with that, right? You need to get paid for your work. But you can incentivize people through additional channels, like affiliate commissions, right? If they make sales, they get commissions. If they do certain content or they, you give them, someone gives you rights to the content, you pay them incrementally.
- [21:44]
C
Right?
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B
But when you find someone who's willing to just put in a bunch of effort to promote a product in exchange for just that product, it means they actually like it, right?
- [21:52]
A
Yeah.
- [21:53]
B
As opposed to if I pay you a thousand bucks, you might promote really any product, but then throw it away after the promotion, you might not really care. And at the end of the day, what's now really breaking through the noise is authenticity, right? Like, is this a real testimonial and consumers can pick up on it like that? Like, you know, and this is where honestly the celebrities, a lot of them have died off because, you know, like when Kim Kardashian is promoting something, like she's getting paid a huge amount of money for it, does she actually care about that product? You know what I mean? Does she actually.
- [22:19]
A
Unless it's her. Unless it's hers, right? She's got some kind of licensing deal.
- [22:23]
B
And then there's even bias there.
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A
But.
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B
And not to say celebrities aren't valuable at all, right? But I think going back to actually something that you said, which is you want to test a lot to figure out where your through line is, right? And that's where product seeding or smaller creators are fantastic for that. Because you can. Every product works differently. Some products, maybe it's an unboxing that is really what consumers love. Maybe you have to actually show it and demonstrate it in use. Maybe just a static post of at the beach with utilizing the product is how it's going to perform well, right? So you want to test a bunch of different things and then once you align or figure out what is what works for my brand or for my product, then going up tier and paying kind of these larger people who are very niche or very good at this specific thing that you've tested out and then kind of having this overall strategy or portfolio with these different things. And the last thing I'll also say is, and you brought this up previous kind of statement or question was, is it valuable to have kind of like some through line or some messaging that's not just, hey, here's the product and.
- [23:34]
C
Look at me, right?
- [23:36]
B
Like, and getting people to actually engage with the brand, right? And that is absolutely important and something that is more of a recent trend that people are realizing is very, very valuable and necessary to do. And the reason for two things is one, people on social media now we're bombarded by content. It's only going to get worse. With AI, you have to have inspirational things, you have to have educational content, you have to have things that people that bring you in.
- [24:03]
C
Right.
- [24:03]
B
You need to have a good hook and people lose interest within the first three seconds. And so you kind of got to have these different layers to have a through line and the brand needs to come up with that. You want to give people creativity, to come up with a unique idea, but still direct them of like this is the message we're trying to get across, right. And then also try to impart some sort of way that people actually engage or share this content. Because sharing now has become kind of that a really important thing that the algorithm does to push it forward. It's a natural signal that like if someone's sharing this, obviously it's better than them just clicking like on it, right? It means that they're actually pushing it forward with their audience. So a lot of people will push forward like comments and shares, like share this with your friend or comment here to get a white paper or to get all my tips and tricks for this or to get a coupon code.
- [24:57]
C
Right.
- [24:57]
B
And then you can create automations in the DM funnels based off that. But that is something that I absolutely recommend people implement from day one to test how things are working. Because you just increase your likelihood that that content that people are pushing forward is going to have a potential chance to go viral. And then the last thing also value to these smaller creators is like they're way more engaged with the people who are following them or maybe just see their content like they have time, they love it. They're trying to build the social following. So when someone comments or DMs them, they're much more likely to like respond to that versus like a celebrity who is super busy and gets all these different dms every day. Like they're not responding to your brand inquiries.
- [25:40]
C
Right.
- [25:41]
B
So that's another really big advantage to working with these smaller creators is that they're just also more likely to help you kind of build that brand and be a real important advocate in the long run.
- [25:53]
A
I love that. Okay, I have two things that came up when you were, when you were talking. One is I would love for you to. If someone's going, okay, I believe it, like you got me. Okay. How does someone develop a go to market strategy and how should they incorporate influencers in that strategy? Like you know, at the beginning, middle, end all, how should they look at it and then maybe share a couple case studies of maybe smaller brands or e commerce brands that you know, hadn't done it before and then started to use it and it just blew up. I would love to hear a little bit of success stories.
- [26:38]
B
Absolutely. So few different ways you can go about this depending on whether you have zero marketing budget. And this is actually a beautiful thing about influencers. Like you can get started with nothing, right? Or if you're kind of a growing brand or you're an enterprise, right? Like I mean as an ode, Unilever just took 50%. They just announced this past year 50% of every single all of their entire advertising marketing budget and pushing it towards influencers. So if they're doing it, obviously it works, right? But let's just take someone, no marketing budget. Just starting out, right? When you're just starting out, you should have a website, you should have a social media profile and you better have product, right to sell, right? So you have all those three things if you don't figure your stuff out and get those locked down. But once you have those, you can start DMing people on social media, right? And there's also a lot of free online tools like Facebook has their own influencer network, TikTok has their own influencer network. You can utilize these to search for different niches. Look at your competitors, right? Or people who are tangential to your market, right? Like maybe you are selling a yoga mat. Look at a yoga fashion company and who the types of people they're working at with, right? Start searching. A lot of these social networks have search functionality that's based off hashtags. As an example, right? Again, you're selling this yoga mat. Search for hashtag yogi, hashtag meditation, hashtag doggy down, right downwards. Different things that are related to your industry. And then downward dog is what the word I was actually trying to get her. Um, and basically start finding profiles and then this takes time, right? But start DMing people. If you can get their email address, email them and negotiate with them first. Before you do this, come up with some sort of brief, right? Like what's your brand about? What kind of maybe incentives you want to offer someone? Maybe it's an affiliate commission. You give them 10 20% of sales, huge amount of awesome softwares out there to automate that commission. You could do it manually, hypothetically, and then start offering people, hey, loved your brand. Would you like, if you find alignment, would you like me to send you the product for free?
- [28:50]
C
Right.
- [28:52]
B
And that's you're gonna get first off, it's gonna take time. These are the downsides to the system. Some people might steal your product, you send it to them, they don't do anything for you. You have to track everything, you have to confirm they actually post on time.
- [29:05]
C
Right.
- [29:06]
B
So there are some hiccups along that way but, but you really can get started with nothing. And you can start getting feedback about your product right away. Like people are going to tell you if the product sucks, which is very valuable. You're going to get some content to now start incorporating to your website, building out your social profile if you start running ads and you're going to just get the product in the hands of people who might actually use it. Word of mouth marketing, brand awareness, sales. So it's like this bundle of benefits that's going to also help you create a foundation for all these other marketing tactics that you may want to pursue in the future. Now if you have some marketing budget to spend. The second thing, there's now a huge amount of softwares out there that can help you automate a lot of this stuff, right. Databases of influencers. Now you don't have to manually search for hashtags or things. You can use these softwares to search for people, you can use them to pay them out, to track kind of the progress, to confirm posts.
- [30:01]
C
Right.
- [30:03]
B
So tapping into those, some are cheaper, some are very expensive, depending on what you're looking for. And then the third kind of option is using kind of a full automated system which is actually what we do at Stack Influence. You come to us, you set your targets. I want a hundred people, this is my focus. And we have a dedicated community of about 600,000 people who are going to, we're going to tap into for you and do all of the heavy lifting for you. Agencies also can do that for you as well. Might cost an arm and a leg because they don't have that dedicated community. They might be using another software but still saves you a lot of time, right. And a lot of the headaches. Now that's kind of, I would say the different strategies to go out. Some people use VAs, some people use software, some people use agencies, some people use platforms. But overall, absolutely fantastic strategy. And going to some I am A little biased on that, but I also, by the way, a little background, used to be a nine figure E commerce seller myself. I ran a digital marketing agency for about 10 years. Like I've been in the trenches with this. The reason I built Stack Influence with my two co founders was because we faced a huge amount of pitfalls and realized how valuable it was to not only promote our own products but also our clients. And so we realized, hey, there's a lot, this is a valuable strategy. There's a lot of technology that could be built to support this and it's only growing, it's only becoming more powerful and there's a lot of factors there. I'll give you some results too, but.
- [31:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, no, just so you just made me think of something. So what do you think of the rise of AI influencers? Tell me. Because I'm seeing AI influencer agencies, like certainly there's certain industries that it's moving faster than others, but there's a lot of accounts out there that are not real people, like at all. What is your thought on that emerging market?
- [31:59]
B
Absolutely. We've been looking at it very closely. We've considered building our own AI stuff, right? But the reality that we've come to, and you'll see this if you see anyone using AI influencers or incorporating kind of like AI Personas in their posts, at the end of the day, people value authenticity, right? Like that's what they want. They want real, truthful like testimonials and portrayals of their brand or product. And AI is like the opposite of that, right? It's like totally fake. And so as much as it is actually it's, it's working right now in some capacities as like a novelty factor, right? You're like, you see these posts and you're like, oh my God, that is a fake person. But it looks so real and it's like creative, right? Like I've been seeing some actually professional almost videos done with AI and it's like, that is awesome, right? Like, and it's really effective. You can produce this like ad that might have cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in like 20 minutes, right? And like I think those are going to be very powerful and I think it's going to incorporate into a lot of like, think the super bowl ad style stuff. But as far as like the ugc, like real person, if you see these posts when they go live again, most people look at the comments. If you go to the comments, everyone who comments and anyone listening, like go check this out next Time you see an AI video, every single person says, like, fake AI, like AI, get out of here. Like, and they end up. It actually backfires on you as a brand. Like, it decreases your trust, right? Even if the message is really authentic. And I think that's only going to progress even more because the AI technologies are getting better and more people are utilizing them. It's easier. So it's like, I think it will be utilized in certain ways that is powerful. Like editing, as an example, right? You film a video of yourself talking and then you're utilizing AI softwares to edit that and cut it together and make some animations on it, some captions for it. Like, that is powerful. That saves you time, that enhances the video. That's still authentic, but like a pure AI avatar. I think some of them are going to be really successful and there's a vanity to it, but I think that it's not going to replace normal people, right? Just because people feel like it's fake and untrustworthy.
- [34:21]
A
And then, and then, William, I had another question. So Gary Vanderchuck's talking a lot about, like, the live QVC style, like live shopping, I guess. What are you, what are you seeing around that? Like, have you been digging into that a little bit?
- [34:38]
B
Absolutely. That's, I believe, only going to get more. Were more impactful and more popular, especially in the U.S. so like, as an example, I'm not gonna remember the exact stat, but like in the Asian market, specifically China, like, live shopping is like, equates for like 20% or 30%, some crazy metric of like every single E commerce sale. It's like astronomical and it's like 20 times what the US like, they're, they're light years ahead on that. And I think a big part of it is like, everyone lives on their phone. There's these unified apps that kind of connect everyone consistently and that's where people live. But there's a lot of push towards this market. I think there's only going to be more evolution, not only on the social networks, but also on the E commerce platforms. As an example, Amazon launched Amazon Live, right? Incorporates with their influencers. They've failed a few times in their kind of influencer programs. Like they had what was called the Inspire app. They just. Yeah, they just shut it down. They had tried another app previously, but they've still kept Amazon Live going, right? And you see TikTok also coming out with a lot of consistent live features. It's only going to be more powerful. I think there's going to be more partnerships between the social and e commerce networks that are going to happen. And, and we had this like the US was on the forefront of this with qvc, right? And QVC is trying to get into the social realm right now. They're having a bit of trouble. I think there's still a lot of kinks to work out, but I do think that that is the merging of e commerce and social networks is a big future. One last example here is an app called Flip Shop. It's now become trending to become one of the top apps. At one point it was like on the top 10 in the App Store for time being when like TikTok was potentially getting banned. Hasn't taken over yet. But it's like imagine Amazon combined with TikTok, right? Instead of leaving a review, you leave like a TikTok video. So it's like social shopping combined and live combined with, with the shopping marketplaces. And again I think a lot of other platforms are going to follow suit on that.
- [36:47]
A
You know it's interesting, Google just did their kind of launch where they're moving everything towards YouTube, right, and AI search and they're trying to own like the whole funnel, right? Like you search for it, you find the product you want and you buy it. And they have a lot of that technology. I can see totally why they want to include the social posts and stuff like on there. Because if that helps sell a product, right, you have that product review from that influencer that gets indexed because it has a bunch of fall, you know, that person has a bunch of followers that post show something off. They can show that in search and then they can say buy here, right? They can get, they can capture that sale. So like I, I, I mean when you get the big money and the algorithms behind this where it a lot where it's a win, win, win, things move. Like we always see that when they launch a new tool like the LIVE tools that, that kind of rolled out on all the platforms, they would really push it. And, and I, I think this next evolution's gonna be kind of like this live shopping component and the, the E commerce and the influencers play, play right into that. Man, there's so much noise out there right now. Like every time I open up my social app I'm like, oh my gosh, I've missed so much stuff. And there's all kinds of stuff that is happening and, and these feeds are customized for you. Can you share with us some of the success stories that you've seen so somebody can help Go. Okay, I think I want to do this. How would I put something like that together again with all this noise? Is it not just going to get swallowed up in the sea of, you know, attention or you know, what are, what are the best ways to when you share those stories of how they broke through? Yeah, yeah.
- [38:48]
B
So few different success stories. I'll share three on different kind of realms of influencer value. So the first just naturally on social media, right? And you could say performance marketing is how to brand did 100 influencers. I may seem like a lot, but if you're just sending out free products, it's actually pretty affordable. 20 of those influencers, 20% ended up. And by the way, these influencers have an average of about 3,000 followers. Twenty of them got over a million hits, right? And that correlated with them literally having a brand new product launch to starting to do 5,000 sales a month consistently, right? And then they built up about, I think 30 of them became these longer term affiliates for them. So not everyone was interested in it or wasn't the right fit. But now they built up this community that's like now consistently promoting. They compensated them with a free product once and then they've incentivized them. And now these people are like for months doing consistent promotions because they're getting paid for it, for what the results that they actually drive. And that brand now has doubled down and they utilize a platform like ours to consistently build up that community. And that's a really great tactic brands should implement is like don't just rely on the one platform. Build out. If you're paying for something, start bringing people almost in house, right? And like work with them, maybe create a discord around them slack channels like, like engage with them, right? Like those are real dedicated like loving customers who love your product enough to actually consistently work for you to promote it. And if you do that, it's exponential growth. Second big case study success story is taking aside, they had some good results for the social posts, but it wasn't like astronomical results. But then they got all this content and they used one piece of content, decreased their ad cost by five times and it's now consistently the best performing ad, right? And they utilize a tactic also called whitelisting in this where they like got the influencers permission to run an ad through their own profile. So and this is something that like pitfall people give up sometimes on influencers too fast. They're like, I want to test this out, let's do three of them, right? And then they don't like drive too many sales and they never even utilize the content, right? And it's like you just lost out on all this potential, right? Like, first off, give more people a chance. Maybe you missed the mark on who you reached out to. Maybe you didn't align them properly. Maybe you picked the wrong people. And then you didn't also test that content and see how valuable that was. And so as this example, like they didn't do, they got some awareness, they got a few sales, it didn't provide a big ROI for them on the promotional side. But then this content, like in the long term has provided. I don't even know what the actual metric of ROI is, but like 5x improved overall conversion rates and decreased those costs as a result. And so another amazing study of just like how one piece of that influencer puzzle can actually really be beneficial. And the last success story I'll tell is on an Amazon marketplace, right? So again, influencer marketing works across the board whether you are providing a SaaS product or an E commerce product, right? But a lot of our clients, so at Stack Influence, we focus on E commerce brands and a lot of them are selling on marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Sephora, etc. There's an extra advantage to marketplace growth combined with influencers. And the reason behind that is marketplaces like Amazon, excuse me, are like a search engine, like Google, right? If someone searches for, let's say going back to my yoga mat example, yoga mats, right? There's 45 listings on the first page of Amazon. If you're not shown there, you're not. 80% of people don't buy, right? And I think the top like 5 listings or 10 listings control like 80% of the sales. There's.
- [42:48]
C
Right?
- [42:49]
B
So like if you're not shown, and there might be hundreds, if not thousands of pages for yoga mats on Amazon, right? So sometimes people say, like, I launch a brand and it's the same thing for Google. Like, I'm gonna put up a website, I'm gonna make a huge amount of sales, right? And it's like, no, you have to like optimize for SEO. You might have to run some ads. You gotta do some influencer marketing. Same thing with Amazon. They're like Amazon controls 50% of every e commerce sale in the US like, I'm gonna make a listing. It's like you're on page 5000. Like no one sees your product. So how do you get their algorithm to actually show you? And a bit different from Google. Obviously keywords are important, but Amazon's most important metric to show you are, does your product sell? Right, like what are the sales metrics? Do people click, do people add to the cart, do they leave a review? Like what are these metrics that are worthy for you to be at the top when someone searches?
- [43:37]
C
Right?
- [43:37]
B
Because if they put you there and you don't sell, Amazon just lost money because it's a limited amount of space and they're getting big commissions from these every single sale that happens, right. So they want to be sure that when they show you you're going to be a high performing product. Now going back influencer, fantastic for this because when you first launch, Amazon's never showing you like there's no chance, they have no data on you and it takes a while for them to collect data. They might show you on page like five, maybe page one for like 30 seconds. See if anyone buys, push you back down, right? Because they're trying to see what this data is. Now if you can run what's called external traffic campaigns, an ad from Google going to Amazon, a Facebook ad, an influencer marketing campaign, an email promotion that goes to Amazon, right? Give Amazon data, it needs to determine where to place you.
- [44:25]
C
Right?
- [44:25]
B
And if you can show them, hey, out of 10 people who go to my listing, five of them buy like, Amazon's gonna very quickly start pushing you up in the ranks. And we've seen influencers work fantastic for this if you do it in a good controlled manner. Because engagement levels like conversions are very high.
- [44:42]
C
Right.
- [44:43]
B
The people who click from the influencer promotion, it's trusted, so a high portion of them go to the listing and convert. You might not get a huge amount. Yeah. Any questions about that?
- [44:54]
A
So I've interviewed some Amazon experts and they've talked about the external campaigns that you kind of need to warm up your profile a little bit before, before you like drive a massive amount of traffic to that. Can you just speak to that from your experience and your angle on what that actually means and how that might be differing with influencers?
- [45:18]
B
Yeah. So in terms of warming up, that is accurate. I don't think you need to go through a massive warm up phase, but you do need to do a few things. So like you need to make sure that your listing is properly optimized.
- [45:30]
C
Right?
- [45:32]
B
So meaning like you do have to have good keywords, like and like optimize for the keywords people are searching, otherwise you could drive a whole amount of like traffic there. Amazon's not going to know where to position you.
- [45:42]
C
Right.
- [45:43]
B
The second thing is you need Actually good content, right? Like you get on the first page if your competitors have way better content than you, including professional content. And like you have a bad price point, like they're not going to click it and buy you.
- [45:55]
C
Right.
- [45:56]
B
And if you don't, once you're there, if you don't make sales, you're going to get dropped down very quickly. Last thing is reviews. So like Amazon has, reviews are very strict. You can't require incentivize reviews. Like, it's a hard thing to solve, right? And until you get sales, right, you're not getting reviews. Amazon does have something called the vine program, which I recommend everyone does. When you're first launching on Amazon, it's a way to syndicate, send some free products out and you can get up to about 30 reviews on your listing to start off with. So recommend you do all of those things right away. But once those are in place, like you're confident your keywords are there, you're confident you got a good product with photos, videos, price point, you did a Vine program, you got some initial reviews. I recommend actually implementing external traffic as soon as possible because it's just going to take longer. We see insane results and it's actually the best results I've ever seen from an influencer campaign. Because not only did they get the social promotions, they got the content they can repurpose.
- [46:54]
A
They.
- [46:54]
B
I've literally seen 13x growth on an influencer promotion before through Amazon because they went from page 10 to page 1. Their product was good, they stayed. Their influencer campaign stops. They now have all of these eyeballs and so they're making a thousand sales a month. It was like about 100 sales a month and they went to 1300. And then influencers stopped promoting. Their sales did not stop because now they were. They were visible to all of these thousands of people, tens of thousands of people who are actually searching for that keyword they're now showing up for. And they had a good product to, to. To actually push forward.
- [47:29]
C
Right?
- [47:30]
B
So that's the power there. But I do actually, I don't think that you need to. I mean, don't invest like tens of thousands of dollars into an ad campaign like day one on your Amazon listing, right? Like incrementally go. There's also other strategies of like maybe starting higher in a price point and then incrementally dropping to where you want to be.
- [47:52]
C
Right.
- [47:52]
B
Like doing certain promotions. Turning on. My strategy for people is like do external traffic first, then turn on Amazon ppc, which is a game you kind of have to play once the influencer campaign and that external traffic kind of subsides. You got to kind of play Amazon's game there. But that's the formula that I see really, really successful for the brands that utilize our platform for that.
- [48:13]
A
I love it. I. I think that that's a great like unknown secret of Internet marketing right there is how to, how to seed your campaign, how to impact influencers to get that listing up and then you add your paid ads. Right. Like because you do have to kind of play some of these platforms game to. To get shown you know they're not as gangsters Yelp but you know like and Yelp's done way better. Okay. I have a Yelp rep and I like them and but Yelp they, they actually when they started they were recruiting at my high school and people didn't even know what it was. And you know, so I've kind of followed that, that, that Brandon in particular but awesome. Is there anything William that that we haven't covered if there's anything else you'd like to share as well as where to follow you to hear kind of some more of these strategies and success stories and then we'll definitely link to Stack Influence in the show notes.
- [49:13]
B
Awesome. Last really quick tip because I've just heard some insane stories and we're not doing this just yet but just as like a advice to people in the realm if you're an E commerce seller, listening is TikTok shop. So TikTok shop has created this amazing funnel with influencers, affiliates and then what are called whitelisting on t TikTok they're called spark ads. So like utilizing influencers profile to run ads. It's amazing. Turnwheel system. I just heard a case study about a brand one of our clients but is utilizing some other system to do this. We're actually building out features to optimize this. But basically went from 0 to 40 million in less than six months. They are an established brand. So they had some brand awareness already.
- [49:55]
C
Right.
- [49:55]
B
But like that is and they out of their mouth like the fastest they've ever seen them grow on any platform. And I mean that's an absolutely insane growth. And all they did was seed out products to influencers and at like a rate of hundreds per month.
- [50:12]
C
Right.
- [50:12]
B
Like so decent scale.
- [50:14]
C
Right.
- [50:14]
B
Not every brand can do that but like you could do this with 10amonth.
- [50:19]
C
Right.
- [50:19]
B
And like still have good success rates. You seed out products you get, give them all affiliate kind of commissions. You pick the best people who have generated the best sales. So kind of they get your brand the best, get permissions to run ads with them, feed them into TikTok's ad algorithm, let the algorithm literally put the budget towards whichever is performing best and as it scales up and hits your cocks and your price points and your margins, keep funding it until it goes over. And it's like that was just the formula they did to go zeros 40 million in six months.
- [50:55]
A
So I have a friend that's on the TikTok chop tame and I've been trying to get her on the podcast but she like, she can't do it. I might be able to get her in like a private mastermind or something like that. TikTok's pretty crazy. Like they can't, they don't even have email addresses. They like only do everything in chat and it like disappears. It's a little, it's a little creepy of maybe what's going on there but, but TikTok shop is absolutely crushing it and I appreciate you mentioning that. William, where are you active on social media? How do people find you, follow you and you know, anything else you want to share about stackinfluence.com It's a great platform. You can all go there and check it out and get started and get access to this huge network of influencers that William and his teams built up.
- [51:49]
B
Absolutely, yeah. So if anyone listening is E commerce brand. That's our main focus. High level Stack Influence. We connect E commerce brands to micro nano influencers and automate the collaborations at scale. Very simple. You want to reach out to us, find us on social, we're at at Stack Influence basically on every single social platform. Best way go to stock influence.com you want to talk with one of our influencer experts which we try to do to gauge where you're at in your influencer world. Top right hand corner. You can click a call, book a call with us very easily. Feel free to connect personally with me on LinkedIn @William Gasner. And yeah we'd love to work with anyone who's interested or always happy to just provide advice in the influencer realm. And thanks for having me on the podcast, Matthew.
- [52:34]
A
Awesome. Well guys, if you got some value in this please please like share, follow. We really appreciate it. All those engagements help the algorithm. We, we are, we're trying to grow. So anything you can do if you, if you got value out of this, totally appreciate that. Until the next time everybody, my name is Matt Bertram. This is the Unknown secrets of Internet Marketing. Bye bye for now. Sam.