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Social Media Decoded
From Side Hustle to 7-Figure Success: How Micro Influencers Drive eCommerce Sales with William Gasner of Stack Influence
00:26:26
In this episode, Michelle Thames sits down with William Gasner, CMO of Stack Influence, to explore how micro and nano influencers can help eCommerce brands skyrocket sales through smart product seeding and influencer strategies. William shares his journey from handmade goods to 7-figure success and practical tips for brands selling on their websites and major marketplaces.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:22]
William
But it's not so competitive. Like as an example, supplements on Amazon. Like it's so hard to break into that industry. Amazing margins and really easy to produce a product. But there's so much noise there that you really, really have to be optimized to kind of break through that. So that's basically my advice for emerging brands.
- [01:44]
Michelle Thames
Hey hey. Welcome to the Social Media Decoded Podcast, the Go to podcast for entrepreneurs and business owners who want to grow their brand, increase visibility and make more money without the overwhelm. I'm your host, Michelle Thames, marketing strateg business coach and the person who's here to give you the real no fluff strategies to help you succeed online. Each week I bring you expert insights, actionable tips, and real talk about what's actually working in social media and digital marketing. Whether you're just starting or scaling the six figures, you're in the right place. So grab your coffee or matcha if you're like me. And let's dive into today's episode. All right now you guys, today's guest is coming in hot with the goods. Okay, I'm talking to William, the CMO of Stack Influence, a leader in the influencer marketing space, helping e commerce brands scale using micro and nano influencers. And you all know I love influencers. Right, the influencer space. So William is a six time founder, seven figure E Comm seller and has been featured in places like for Forbes, Business Insider and Wired. So you already know today's episode is going to be good. And y', all, he started by selling cutting boards at farmer's markets and is now a major force in influencer marketing. So if you want to know how to leverage creators to move product, not just the hype, this is the episode for you. Let's get into it. William, welcome to the show.
- [03:14]
William
Thank you for having me on.
- [03:15]
Michelle Thames
Michelle, thank you for being here. So I am super excited about your story. Your background is super inspiring. So from handmade products to million doll e commerce brands, take us back to where it all started. So you've built multiple businesses and gone viral along the way. What are some pivotal moments that led you to influencer marketing?
- [03:35]
William
Great question. So as you mentioned, my first business was making handmade cutting boards selling at farmers markets and art fairs. Was inspired to do that from my father who is a woodworker and architect and kind of got my brother and I into making handmade goods. And then that led me to launch a few other honestly handmade good products like jewelry. But then as the online world became more enticing to really expand those products beyond the physical fairs to the e commerce world, started understanding and learning how to launch my own websites, market companies online. And that led me to not only actually start a web development and marketing agency myself, but but launch a few other e commerce brands from teeth whitening products to toys which multiple times as you mentioned went viral. And that's those products that were actually more scalable than something handmade in a garage enabled me to actually make six figures and really scale this up. But along that journey of how did I actually make so much money selling products online? One of the best strategies my partners and I utilized was influencer marketing and kind of dove very deep into the gambit of variety of different types of influencers. Right from the mega celebrity influencers to nano and micro everyday average creators. And along that journey started to realize that the smaller creators, as much as they don't get so much clout or hype surrounding them, were our most effective marketing tactics. Sometimes working with creators with hundreds of thousands millions of followers, panned out to not be the best promotion honestly. And it was really as social media changed and it wasn't so following almost became more somewhat of a vanity metric. It's still important. Following that has engaged following and content that is really curated and well done is what we began to focus on is the content is king. And so if you found smaller creators that produce really, really good content and scaled them out as opposed to putting kind of all your eggs in one basket with a massive creator, became a really effective strategy for us and really helped us one of the pivotal things that helped us grow our e commerce brands. But the problems we faced internally were how to find enough people who are those good content creators who are willing to do things at a cost effective manner. And then also once we found them, managing them, making sure people posted on time, followed guideline guardrails and then also analyzing all the results was absolutely a nightmare. And so we started to build out kind of internal strategies ourself to help optimize that process. And that was really the birth of stock influence in 2018 to where it kind of rolled out into its own business in itself.
- [06:19]
Michelle Thames
Love that you said something pivotal. Micro and nano influencers are it, right? Because a celebrity could have 3 million followers and not even sell a stick of gum.
- [06:29]
William
Exactly.
- [06:29]
Michelle Thames
It's really interesting that you, you know, focus on micro nano influencers. I myself being a micro influencer, I definitely love that because we built community, right. And so I think it's important, especially this day and age, you know, a celebrity can say anything, but those influencers who have really built communities can really help you scale your business. So I love that. And that leads us into the talk and the rise of the micro and nano influencers in E Comm. Now again, a lot of brands chase the celebrity endorsements, but why do you feel that micro and nano influencers are actually winning right now?
- [07:04]
William
So variety of different factors, but the main thing is there's actually two big things I would say. The first is authenticity and trust. At the end of the day, as consumers, as social media users, we're now bombarded by so much content out there. And when it used to be the fact when you saw a celebrity promoting a product, they had such huge reach and you're like, oh my God, what is this? This is amazing, right? This is a new brand I haven't heard of. And it was seemed authentic and trustworthy. But as the influencer and creator world evolved, we now realize people are getting paid tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Kardashians sometimes get paid multimillion dollar deals to promote products, right. And when you know that kind of money incentive and not to say people shouldn't get paid, but when, you know, huge bucks are behind a promotion, it becomes less trustworthy. Where micro and nano Influencers thrive even when they're getting paid a decent amount of money. They're not going to promote any product under the sun, right? If I give you $100,000, you might promote anything. But if you're getting paid a few thousand bucks or a few hundred dollars and you're doing something for a product you actually care about, it's more authentic. And it goes back to what you just mentioned, which is really important of community, right? Like micro nano, influencers have built an engaged community, not only of friends, family, people they know, but of people who are actually really passionate about what content they're producing. And that leads to more engagement, which leads to better conversions. And it all really roots in that trust and authenticity. The last thing I will say that really spearheaded a massive rise in the micro nano world was how social media platforms have changed over the past few years. And as I mentioned previously, like, it used to be the fact that follower base was kind of the gold standard, right? Like if you had a million followers and you post on social media on Monday, and pretty much majority of your followers were on social, during the next few days, most of them would see your content. And there were two big things that social platforms changed. The first was they only now show content to people who actually care out of your follower base. And it makes total sense because the social media platform's goal is to keep people on the platforms, right? Not leaving. And as people started to follow a huge amount of accounts, they start their feeds started to get filled up with stuff they might not really care about. And so they realized, like, the better algorithm is to show them content that they truly are interested in, that they're truly engaged with. And so I'm now really, first off, leveled the playing field to where you can have a million followers and you might get a thousand likes on a post, and you could have 3,000 followers and get also a thousand likes on a post, right? So like an engagement is what matters. It's that intent of caring which leads to conversion. So that was the first advent of kind of this shift of power to people who are authentic, people who build communities, people who actually have an engaged following in community. And the second aspect was social platforms realized, hey, if a piece of content is really, truly engaging to an audience, why should that piece of content be subjugated to only those followers? Maybe other people who aren't following them might actually enjoy and engage with this content as well. And so now the algorithms kind of more spearheaded by TikTok, but Instagram reels now follows this YouTube shorts has kind of aspects to this and where if you produce a good piece of content and your followers actually engage with it, they're going to start showing it to some people who aren't following you. And if those people engage, a snowball effect happens where you could literally have a brand new social account, you produce some great content, that content can go viral and it really puts the power back into the everyday average creator. Call it democratizing the social media world or the influencer world. And that's really why brands have now realized, like, hey, why would I spend crazy amounts of money on one creator when I can kind of diversify my risk or even just work with a handful of these smaller creators where just my bang for my buck is going to be more powerful, my community is going to be more impactful, and you're just going to have a more effective marketing campaign.
- [11:06]
Michelle Thames
Oh, you are speaking my language, you all. I hope you have your pins and notepads because William is dropping gems. And you're right, like you could have 3,000 followers and still get a thousand likes on your post. I hear so many people complaining about Instagram right now. And that's what we're going to talk about next. They're complaining, right? Oh, my post only got a thousand views. But I feel if you have a community, right, people are going to engage regardless because the algorithm doesn't really matter. And so I'm so glad that lots of brands are starting to wake up and see, I've worked with a lot of brands who are like, the influencer has to have 100,000 followers, but that doesn't always mean anything. So what do you say to the brands who think that influencer marketing only works on Instagram? Because we know it doesn't. Right. How can they win? Maybe on Amazon, Walmart or on other marketplaces that are out here.
- [11:54]
William
Absolutely. So the amazing thing is that a lot of, as you mentioned, the E commerce platforms were evolving into a social commerce world, right, where everyone kind of has an online Persona and a lot of these platforms are integrating in social capacities to their own platforms. Just taking Amazon as an example, they have this whole new influencer program where you can have your own brand storefront, you can kind of be promoting your own products, other people's products, getting affiliate commissions from that. Those features will get onto different Amazon listings and brand storefronts. And the bottom line with it all is like consumers value social proof. Going back to that, and I'm going to use it a lot. But authenticity, right, Is like you don't Want things that are fake. And it spans across not only the e commerce platforms and social media, but also the online advertising platforms. I there's a crazy amount of studies done on UGC or user generated content, how it outperforms content that's produced in a studio with models. And it's like that's what consumers want to see. They want to see something that's real, that's relatable and that's trustworthy and that's what's going to catch your eye. But yeah, I mean it works across the board and especially on the online marketplaces, which is a big kind of driving force of a lot of our brand growth. And specifically because when you're on an online marketplace, it's a search engine and super competitive. There's as an example, just taking Amazon, the largest 1,3000 new sellers join that marketplace every single day. And so how do you really outperform on your competition to actually get shown? And even if you are shown, let's say on a first page positioning when someone types in a keyword, how do you compete with other products? And maybe a lot of those products are super cheap products, internationally sourced, not really quality made, but they have that low price point. Consumers are now realizing like I'd rather have something that that is authentic, is well made, even if it's three times the price. And if it has that social proof and actually people talking about it online, it's going to sell more, it's going to become a more powerful brand. And it also goes back to community, right? Like one strategy I tell brands all the time is that like you need to build, you might not be an influencer profile, a personal influencer profile, but as a brand you are an influencer, right? And you should be creating a following, base yourself and a community around your brand. And that's if you look across like all the top brands, that's what they've done. Nike, Adidas, Apple, right? It's like it's this community and this following that makes them so powerful. And why you're also seeing these creator brands really just like come out of nowhere and totally dominate. Like prime and Mr. Beast and a bunch of these like they came out of the woodwork like and in six months were these top selling brands. And it's because of the community that they built around it.
- [14:40]
Michelle Thames
I love that because I can't go anywhere, to any store without saying Prime. And so we go and Mr. Beast, his candy bars are like everywhere. And he's created other brands. It's like you're Right, right. They had the community first. So I know that you've worked with a ton of brands through Stack Influence. I want to know what separates the successful ones from the rest.
- [15:00]
William
Great question. So one thing I always advocate to brands before they. So there's two theories of thought when you're pursuing also just influencer marketing in general. I would say influencers are one of the best things to start when you are first launching your brand but you want to get your feet wet before you really start to scale. And then once you're kind of more established is when you kind of put the pedal to the metal. But the bottom line, and I'll go over both of those kind of theories of thought when you're first launching, you might not have a massive marketing budget. You don't have a super maybe polished brand, but you should have product on hand. And what you need to do is in the same way as you should have a website when you first launch your brand, right. You need to have good content and social proof on that website. So investing in influencer marketing hits kind of three main, honestly four I would say main points. The first being just getting some initial awareness out about your product. The second is getting your product in the hands of real consumers who might give you invaluable feedback and also like in real life actually word of mouth marketing and awareness. The third being generating a bunch of content that you can now utilize on your website. Start to build up a social following. If you have any budget to spend on online ads, it's going to help those ads convert better. And the fourth is building up an initial community of advocates, right? Going back to the community, like if you incentivize people with some sales commissions and get them some free stuff, maybe send them things incrementally on an ongoing basis and then reward them for consistently promoting your brand, you can create this kind of army of people who are nonstop promoting your brand and doing it with in the most cost effective manner ever, right? Like you spend a thousand dollars on Google Ads, like you're subjected to a bunch of conversion rates, right? But if that thousand dollars is going just to sales commissions, it's, it's an amazing recurring revenue strategy. And now once you kind of have that foundation going back to your question of like what should you do before you scale is what successful brands on the platform look like is you do want somewhat of a polished brand, right? And it depends on what channels you are pursuing. So if you're just on your ddc, there's, there's similarities across the board. But you want to invest in making your brand interesting and desirable to your consumers, investing in strategies to build that community and reward people as part of that community. And then the last aspect, whether you have a website or you're trying to scale an online marketplace like Amazon is really making sure you're optimizing for a specific targeted audience that's not too competitive while still having people who are actually searching it, right? So, like just take Amazon as an example is like if you launch and you don't have the right keywords in your listing, you're not going to get shown for the right places. And it's a very similar thing for a website, right? Like if you're not optimized, Google's not going to show you in the right places and you want to do a lot of research. And I always advocate like before you, yes, you can pursue some influencer marketing prior to like generate some buzz, get some feedback, build this initial community and get some content. But when you're really trying to again, put the pedal to the metal, like you want to make sure you're moving in the right direction, you have the map outlined for you and that really comes. That is one of the largest factors I see for brands that fail and also really succeed extremely well is when they know their target audience, they know the things that people are actually searching and they're entering into a market that there is desirability for. There's search habits happening, but it's not so competitive. Like as an example, supplements on Amazon. Like, it's so hard to break into that industry. Amazing margins and really easy to produce a product. But there's so much noise there that you really, really have to be optimized to kind of break through that. So that's basically my advice for emerging brands.
- [18:51]
Michelle Thames
Let me guess, you've been showing up on Instagram trying to be consistent, but your stories. Crickets. Here's the thing. Stories sell when you use them, right? So I created a free mini guide called the $200 a day story Strategy to help you start turning views into conversations and conversations into cash. Inside, I give you the exact framework that I've used to sell out offers using just Instagram stories and voice notes. No ads, no pressure. Grab it for free at the link in the show notes or DM me the word story S T O R Y on Instagram. Your content is powerful. Let's make it also profitable. Man, you are giving a masterclass. I hope the brands are listening. I know there are some e commerce brands that listen to this podcast. William is dropping the knowledge. Okay. And you said something that I want to dive deeper into. Social media is noisy, everywhere is noisy. But what do you think are the keys to building an influencer strategy? That number one drives consistent results because that's what they want, right? And not just the one off hype, because I personally hate one off hype.
- [20:04]
William
100%. 100%. And people get trapped in that, right? Like you think that viral video is going to just like transform your brand and it gives you a spotlight for a very short period of time. And it's the same thing for our clients also who are like on e commerce marketplaces is like, Amazon doesn't care that you just drove a thousand sales in a day. They want to see 100 sales every day for 10 days. That's actually better for their algorithm to tell them, hey, this product's desirable as opposed to kind of a one off thing. Obviously going viral is nice, but. And the same thing on the social side as a creator, right? Like I know many people and I see it all the time with our community that like people get viral hits and it doesn't necessarily change their follower base too much, you know what I mean? Maybe they'll get obviously some extra followers, but like do those people actually care about what you're creating or was it just something that kind of was a one off thing that you kind of hit the algorithm at the right time and it was a really short clip and it was enticing. But going back to your advice for the type of content that should be created is it really needs to align with your vision, your mission and kind of your brand image. Right. And across social media. Like people love inspirational, funny, enticing. You want to have obviously hooks there. You want to entice people in very quickly, like first three seconds to really get them to watch. But it's not just about that quick hit, right? It's about actually bringing them back to why does your brand or your profile or you as a creator actually matter? And that's what's going to entice them to continue to follow you as opposed to something that was just funny or inspirational and totally ran random and not really tied to again that vision and that mission. So aligning those things is really key. And when I talk to brands about directing influencers, I love to give our influencers and creators kind of a lot of creative control because you never know what someone's going to come up with. And most of the time creators are smarter than the brands themselves occasionally. And they know their audience and that's really important. But at the same time, you want to give them direction of what is the mission and why as a brand do you exist and how can you kind of direct them or give them those kind of guideline guardrails to push in that direction while still giving them the creative freedom to cater to their own audience. And finding that match is also really key to make sure that you are also as a brand or as a creator, aligned with the brand or creator. Right. Big thing that we do at Stack Influence is the matchmaking because like you might not know the right fit, but as. And sometimes people perceive things completely wrong is that like when you're first starting out, you might not know exactly who your best advocate is for as a brand looking for creators to collaborate with. And so you got to kind of test the water and incrementally learn to what is that right? Target market? What is this creator that's going to really align with me? And that's how you're going to succeed? Yes.
- [22:54]
Michelle Thames
This is so good. And this has been a really great episode and I don't even want to wrap it up, but I know, you know, we do these short episodes here on the social media decoded podcast, but I really want to know this one question. I want to pick your brain here. Where do you see influencer marketing going next? Because it's been around a minute, right, and there's so many changes, but what should our listeners do now so that they can stay ahead for the future?
- [23:18]
William
Absolutely fantastic question. So there's a lot of. I'm going to preface this with that my answer is not necessarily AI, which is like what a lot of people and there's huge amount of hype around is that like AI influencers are going to take over and that it's all going to be artificial content. And the bottom line is that there's going to be a huge bombardment of AI generated content. No question about that. But I think it's going to give a lot more power to the real people on the platform, the authentic people who have built those communities. Again, it goes back to trust, right? Like you're not going to. And you see AI generated content now and every single one of the comments is like fake news and like this is fake AI, right? So there's, there's going to be a. And like all these platforms are investing in this image generation and video generation. Google just released kind of their which is amazing, like talking head video content. But I think it's going to come full Circle and back to really authentic creators. Now the best piece of advice and where I think the creator market is going to evolve into is a lot of synergies across multiple platforms. We kind of already discussed this in this podcast of like how Amazon is now investing in creator solutions. And where I see the influencer marketing or influencer creator world evolving into is one more focus on this democratization, like more power getting put towards the smaller creators. I think the social platforms are going to invest in that more thoroughly. I think we're going to start seeing more brands pop up from smaller creators, not just kind of the Mr. Beasts of the world, and a lot more alignment across a whole bunch of different. Not just social platforms, but e commerce platforms, advertising platforms. A massive thing that we see really working well right now is waitlisting ads as an example. So for those of you listening who don't know what those are, basically a brand utilizing a creator's own social media profile and putting ad spend behind that to drive an ad as opposed to taking content from a creator and using on their own brand's ad. Right. It works wonders and creating incentives around how those ads are performing to give paybacks to those creators. Syndication of different content across a lot of different platforms, a lot of different affiliate integrations, whether it's E commerce marketplaces or DTC websites. So kind of this evolution of social media is now bridging out into kind of the entire online world. Everyone incrementally is going to have a social profile. We're all going to have value, valuable influence, and it's going to be kind of a widespread thing. Where I see it really pushing is again across all of these different channels from ads to E commerce.
- [25:52]
Michelle Thames
This was so good. And that was like the perfect answer, y'.
- [25:57]
William
All.
- [25:57]
Michelle Thames
I hope you were taking notes again. You know, gems get dropped here on the social media decoded podcast and this was so good. William, thank you for, number one, sharing your journey and also giving us the real on what works in E Com and influencer marketing today. I know that this episode has so many gems that people need to re listen. So rewind it, you guys, rewind it and re listen to everything. And if you love this episode, number one, make sure you go follow Stack Influence on Instagram right now and check out stackinfluence.com to see how they're helping brands get real results. Okay? And don't forget to tag me at michellelthames and at the social media decoded pod with your favorite takeaway from this episode. William, thank you so much for being on the show today. This was great and until next time, everyone keep showing up, keep building and remember that your story is your strategy. Alright, that's a wrap on today's episode. I hope you got some valuable insights and real strategies you can apply to your business right now. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to do two quick things. First, take a screenshot, share it on Instagram and tag me ichellellthame so we can keep the conversation going. Second, if you found value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you left a rating and review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Your support helps this show reach more entrepreneurs just like you. Oh and if you want to support the show and fuel my matcha obsession, you can always buy me a coffee at the link in the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time. Keep showing up, keep growing and I'll talk to y' all in the next one Peace.
- [27:48]
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