← The Influence Factor by The Influencer Marketing Factory
The Influence Factor by The Influencer Marketing Factory
Fiverr’s Shift to Performance-Based Marketing w/ Omer Dahan
00:27:50
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Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
A
And what we want to bring and how we want to being perceived outside as the brand that could help you with the more complex tasks and, and not those easy things you could probably, you know, get on any free LLM out there to do for you.
- [00:24]
B
Hey, Omer, welcome to the show. How are you?
- [00:26]
A
I'm good, how about you?
- [00:27]
B
Can't complain. You know, it's end of Q1 as we know. It's always pretty busy for. For influencers, right. Within campaigns that started last year and finishing now and new ones and everything. But I'm very excited to have you on today because, you know, I've been on Fiverr for a long time. I was, you know, using that in 2010 when it was a homepage with, you know, a bunch of different $5 right. Type of services. So I've been in the first era of all that and I got it. I was fascinated by this, you know, gig economy where people were going out there and it was a lot of different services and I do remember using that. And then I saw the evolution, right, and became these massive, right, like marketplace and with professionals and all these reviews and everything. So I want to learn, of course, you know, more about also what you see right on your side in terms of evolution. But before we get started, I always want to, you know, learn a bit more about our guests. And we use this thing called the map. Basically it's divided in three main sections. Right, so the mission is. What is your mission? Right, A purpose when it comes to your job, achievements, anything that you are, like, proud of in the past years and the purpose, so you know why you do what you do.
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A
Yeah, Love this.
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B
Thank you.
- [01:37]
A
So basically a mission, general mission for myself. I always think ahead and think what can be done that we're not doing and, and how can we do it and how can we do it fast to stay ahead of the curve. So basically that's something I'm waking up in the morning and going to bed thinking about it. And yeah, usually that's what's, that's what gets me tick, actually, and the shiftments. So I would say I joined Fiverr a year and three months ago and for me it was a really kind of interesting thing because I used to, like, I've been a freelancer myself before joining Fiverr, started doing something on my own and then the proposal came from Fiverr and I said, yeah, of course, Fiverr, it's a huge brand. Love the platform, like you mentioned, I also used it myself and I was happy to join the team. Initially, I Started to be just their affiliate team manager. And as time moves and like people also change positions internally and left a new one came actually there was an opportunity to also become their partnership manager. And after some time I also became their influencers and creators team manager. So it kind of grew on me as, as the year progresses. And yeah, that's, that's a. Was a huge, huge achievement on my behalf to be able to take all those activities under my wing and you know, to own it basically. So the purpose. Well and I kind of mentioned that. So it's like me thinking ahead all the time and with such an agile ecosystem we're living and what I just told you about my history at Fiverr, I like solving problems. So I always kind of having this in mind especially and specifically when I'm getting new tasks and goals to achieve and then how I can get that and the right way to do it and to be as experimental as I can, that's what gets me really ticked.
- [03:44]
B
That's great to hear. You know, like, I also love problem solving. It's when you love it, it's fun, right? Some people see problem and you already like seeing the solution and even if you don't see that, it's like how many ways I can solve these and bypass the problem. So I love to hear that. And also interesting that you come right from freelancing yourself. Right. Being now on other side and understanding. I think it's important, right for you to see how a freelancer thinks. Right. And how these days creators also do that as well because in addition to brand deals, they might have side gigs, right. Where they do like sell services or they do consulting and so on. So that is, I think it's a very important aspect to know both sides. And you also mentioned affiliate right. So I would love to start with that because we've been seeing a lot of right. Major shift towards now performance based models when it comes to the creator economy. And you know, I'm interested to know a bit more. How do you currently looking at affiliate strategy today? Right, because it's, it's performance driven. Is it a mix of fixed, let's say, you know, a brand deal plus commissions? Are you seeing more creators that are okay instead of working like performance driven? Only tell me a bit like what you're seeing these days.
- [04:53]
A
Actually these days I see a transition from what maybe most of people now is kind of familiar with, with the, you know, upfront payment for any creative that creators are making with no regards to, to actual performance. They're only looking at the. And there is, I think maybe we should focus on, on performance.
- [05:19]
B
What.
- [05:19]
A
What is performance in the term itself? So most conversation I had talking about creatives, the performance was the KPI or, or what to look at at the video level. Like how is the engagement of each video getting? What is the. The view time, how far away they're watching those videos, how's the comments? Like that's. Yeah, that's performance on the video side of things. But for me, coming from affiliates usually, you know, last touch. So it's all about who drives the buyers or the clients over to us and only then getting commission for those sales. Then for me it's the bottom line. Performance, meaning how's the conversion rate, how's the revenue generated from each and every partner we're working with? So for me, performance is that. And this is what I also try to educate people I'm talking with on this matter. Some are also in the same levels as I am. Some are higher up. And my team, it's something that took us actually when I was inheriting that team of creators that we have internally. Then actually I had to do some retraining not just on the term performance, like in general, how to talk with creators in a performance driven way and not like yeah, we pay for inserts and we pay for post rolls and for a long video. It's not just that. So performance, it's. It's bottom line. And performance with affiliates. It's something that I think and maybe people forgotten about that. But I have a theory. So my theory is until Covid, when I used to work with creators, not surprisingly, they were signing up to affiliate programs and taking links from every program they sign up on and then promoted through their videos. And then Covid came. And what happened during COVID time, I'm sure you remember, you were stuck at home and then it was boring. A lot of people started to make videos of themselves. You know, what they're doing to pass the time and how are they, you know, their routines and all that. Then they became, without even maybe planning, they became huge creators and influences of like specific things they did. Like if they have something they made and prepare for themselves for lunch, then they filmed that and then the company said, oh, maybe you will become our influencer. And that exact the exact time. Also what happened, what I refer is the perfect storm is a lot of budgets were pouring to marketing departments and then they had to spend it. So where to spend it when it's easy and high amounts with those creators. Yeah, pay me $5,000, I make a video, a one minute video about your product. Then companies had that money, they spend it with those creators. Those creators grew up, others creator followed more companies had more budgets and it kind of feed itself. And then we ended up with a lot of brands out there that paying upfront payments for videos when it wasn't the case before that, not in that extent currently nowadays I want to say 99% of creators will ask upfront payment for their work, which I can get that. But in the end if this is what you do, then you're not so counting on your performance. Maybe the performance will not be as good. Maybe your audience is so mixed and not targeted. And this is actually what we are here to change. At Fiverr we did this transition, we changed our whole work with the influences from upfront to performance based commissions. At least for the beginning, at least for the first initial creative day making for us.
- [09:41]
B
And you know, so you, you mentioned, right the importance of certain KPIs that are more on the conversion side. Right. So moving away from you know, so called vanity metrics, right that yeah, they, they do tell a story, but not all the story. Right. And you can have, you know, we saw it many times, we can have great, great vanity metrics but then, you know, few clicks or no conversions at all. Right. And so I'm curious when you are evaluating creators to work with, what are, what what makes someone like a strong candidate? It's of course, you know, can see certain metrics at the beginning, but then when it comes to conversions and clicks and so on, it's something that you usually have to ask. Right. That data is not public. Right. So is that something that you ask from like the beginning or do you wait for a first pull off creators based on again the metrics that you can actually see and then ollie, after that you start working on them and then you see the performance or do you ask already from day one the historical data in terms of performance driven, you know, so that you can understand more or less what to expect from certain creators.
- [10:39]
A
Yeah, so that's a great question. And actually we actually doing a combination. So it's a combination of asking obviously what we don't know, we don't know. And it's better asking than guessing. So we do ask if they had any experience with the in the past doing something like that. If they have a video that may be still public and live, we can look at it, see what they made and did there, which brand they worked with, how was the tracking like and asking those questions. You know, not to go to a very deep level of what's your earnings like? But yeah, what's your conversions like? So that's something that we do talk with the influencers before we start. But I would say another thing will be the authenticity. So basically we want to see as the audience is he really kind of, you know, engaging with, with their videos. What they write in the comments is very important. If you see comments that look so natural and you know, having a discussion about what has been presented to them and not just like watching a video after a video they do and sometimes you see videos that are either like kind of forced to be created and then uploaded to this channel, or you see it's like a vanity of so many different brands that those creators were so opportunistic about taking, you know, probably upfront payment from, from a brand just so they will make a video, they upload it even if it's not that relevant to their audience or their, their past videos, not even having any connections to this new one. So looking at that, so it's a part of, like I mentioned asking, talking to the creators about past work they did and performance, but also looking ourselves and gather this data. A good example for that would be for the authenticity of us working with creators is that we work with creators that actually using Fiverr. So we have like Stephen Bartlett and Nas Daily, they started on Fiverr, they got people on Fiverr to help them with their work, with their freelancing, with their channels, with all that. And then we just reached out to them and started to endorse men on working with us because they are our actual buyers and we want our buyers to see what other buyers did with Fiverr. And I think that tells the whole story. Having this kind of creators that working with us, not just like the big ones, even the small ones that we working with, we let them and we actually fund their tries and their orders on Fiverr. So then in the end of that process, they will create a video for us on how that went because we want to hear, you know, an honest feedback and for their audience to see those videos not as sponsored, although they are in some way, and especially if we're not paying up front, then maybe you can set aside the sponsor term because if it will perform well for those creators, if it will convert, it means that people believed in that and they saw it as an honest review and not a paid one. So that's, that's our, our way to wiggle in, into those kind of things. Hi. Ready to elevate your brand at the influencer marketing factor. We've got you covered. We manage influencer campaigns from start to finish. So creator sourcing strategy, legal, shipping, logistics, all of it. We work with Fortune 500 brands in DTC companies worldwide and our campaigns are backed by real ROI analysis. Check us out at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com and have you identified.
- [14:33]
B
So you mentioned a couple of big creators. You also said that smaller ones also works well for you in terms of verticals. Right. Because on Fiverr there is a lot of different services, right. You can go from people recording ASMR videos to SEO services and then passing by graphic design and video editing. There is so much. So in terms of the creators that you work with, have you identified any category like vertical that works better or it's. It's a mix of kind of everyone. Because there is a niche for. For all.
- [15:03]
A
That's a good and hard question. Fiverr, I don't know if you know, but Fiverr has over 800 different categories.
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B
Yeah.
- [15:11]
A
And subcategories for each. So that's actually, it's good and bad because it's allowing us, you know, to, to almost like work with almost any creator out there because we can do almost anything from accounting, SEO, building a website or designing a logo and anything in between. And anything that I haven't mentioned still could work. But I would say that it's also in this time around with AI happening then I would say that we're now focusing on the tasks, the gigs, the work that could be done on Fiverr, which is not those simple things that AI is taking over. We are focusing on things that present a massive opportunity for us, leverage the talent that we have in our community, in our freelancers community, offering a higher tier, a more complex services like vibe coding or AI video creation. And in many of those that we see actually a more demand for on Fiverr and opposed to the simple tasks like, you know, designing a logo for $5. So we actually navigating between those blooming well performing categories on Fiverr and what we want to bring and how we want to being perceived outside as the brand that could help you with the more complex tasks and not those easy things you could probably, you know, get on any free LLM out there to do for you.
- [16:53]
B
Yeah, that's something that we, you know, mentioned also in the past. Right. How you know, you can use AI as a support. Right. As something that can help you without removing you. Right. At the end of the day you can see that a lot of AI output, I mean even if they are getting better by the day, you still need the accurate concept behind. You still need the, the tone of voice, right, of someone that is actually creating that you need sometimes also the, you know, the trust that you put in a person because it's not sometimes just about the output, it's also who is creating, right? Can I trust this person when they're telling me a message or if they send me, you know, a logo, video editor like type of work, okay. I know that I can actually talk with someone and ask for an edit that is going to be on point because it's not just like input output all the time. So I do understand absolutely what you're saying. And again we discuss about how our AI creators, freelancers, right, they can work in a way where they're not replaced, right? But actually they can get support. And something else that I wanted to ask you also is about how these days, right, like 10 years ago, right, influencer marketing was this thing that was limited budget. Let's give it a try. What even is influencer marketing? Is this like a big, you know, just a big badge word. And then five years ago, right, it started to be like, okay, you know, there is serious budget here, but it's still kind of separated from everything else. And these days, right, we're trying to avoid these silos type of marketing where one department works on an affiliate, one works on influencers, one work on paid media, one works on out of door, like out of home and so on. And then what happens is that every message is different. There is no alignment, different KPIs. And now the consumer is confused, right? Because why there is a message, right? When I see a display ad and then when I work with affiliates or see affiliate is different. How are you working at Fiverr to again avoiding these misalignment between different departments and branches when it comes to marketing? And how do you work in the integrated way these days?
- [18:49]
A
So on Fiverr side, we actually made a huge process here just in the past six months to be honest. Since I took the position of managing the creator team basically with the transition from paying upfront for any creation, we now moved on paid and performance basis only. We actually added a few more changes. So we are asking all our creators to allow us to have commercial rights as a default for any creative descending. And that's again without even paying up front for it. We do pay if we deciding on promoting that video, if it looks good and if we do some field test and we see that the videos is Actually performing for us. Then we go and we pay for that creator specifically. And it's actually what brought us together paid team, the paid acquisition team and the affiliate and creators team to combine forces and actually we are now the ones that generating new ads for Fiverr through this channel. But that what we're doing is with current micro and nano creators. We do have another layer which is more on, on the brand side. We have a team that managing all related to brand pr, media, so on and they work with top notch like influencers and creators. They doing productions not, not like a home studio. It's more. They do film. They could go to Serbia for a few days to make a video and then come back and edit and all that. So it's like we having that high brand level quality that we pour a lot of budgets in to create a campaign which is more robust and has an agenda and maybe we want to publish it in you know, very strategic areas. And then we have what we call, or I call for the masses that we go after those small creators that actually willingly to work with Fiverr and they're happy to hear that we want to work with them. We're doing the reach out, we knocking on their DMs, sending them messages and emails after we evaluate and like I explained earlier, we ran through their videos and we found that very relevant to us and we want to offer them to collaborate. So we have those kind of layers and the work is like I said, is combined and then meet in the middle when we then get those creatives to be promoted through the paid, the paid channels.
- [21:29]
B
Yeah, we've been seeing the, you know, the same, the importance of combining them together. Right. First of all, because sometimes you, I mean it's not just because of, you know, bigger reach, but it's also for tracking purposes. Right. Because when it comes to organic videos only these days, of course you can always add, you know, link in bio, but there is also always that, you know, extra step in a way. Right. Because you need to go to the link in bio, click there, maybe there is a redirect, sometimes it doesn't track properly. While with paid media you are basically having the same, you know, concept, the same messaging, the same video that you already know that works well for organic. But now you can track properly. Right. And send people to a specific website. And now you can have an ROI associated to the campaign. And now you can see exactly which influencers of, let's say 10 people that work it. Right. The one that brought the majority. And now you do the Pareto principle, right. The 20 and be like, okay, these are the ones that we want to maybe to renew. And I'm pretty sure that you also might identify some like ambassador, right. That can work with you for one year. Because especially with something like Fiverr, right. You, it's just not, not a one off. There are people that use it every day. There are others that have a, you know, I, I again I use it myself. Like, you know, there are ways where you can have like a recurring right on top of hiring, right. With, with a specific person that every three months. Right. And, and so on. So I understand the importance of again, you know, being able to send traffic and, and truly like you know, track. Right. Because if not as you said, you know, initially, these days vanity metrics can tell just part of the story, but it's not everything anymore, right? Every CMO out there is like, okay, very nice, very good videos, but what is the revenue that is bringing me in that sense?
- [23:04]
A
I completely agree and relate to your summary here. Definitely. I would add another thing on tracking, it's something quite new that we did here and we developed internally. We got rid of coupon codes.
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B
Oh, okay. Why is that?
- [23:21]
A
Yeah, so with with me knowing affiliate marketing and how affiliate works and this ecosystem of a lot of issues that comes with coupons, coupon sites, coupon extensions, basically our coupons and every brand coupons are being scraped and they are being shared around unknowingly and that's actually causing attribution issues. So until now if we provided a coupon as a text to a creator and he mentioned that on his video and he wrote it in his description, we saw like a huge amount of usage. Day after those coupons were published and looking and searching where they are now, we found them on coupon sites that might be working with us through an affiliate link and affiliate platform that we are a part of and they were actually that's their way to acquire and to get attribution of new buyers. They're sending over to Fiverr. But, but they didn't actually contributed nothing. They just piggyback on that intent of that specific user because when he was about to make a purchase, he was running a quick search on is there a coupon for Fiverr? Finding one using it going through that website actually with us being last atribution, we actually commissioning that sale to that coupon site, although the coupon belongs to that creator that we gave a few days ago. So with that coupon leakage, which is a real world problem, to be honest, in our Industry the decision was to cut it off completely and now we transition it to a coupon links. So you need to click on a link to activate your coupon. There is no text anymore. The coupon will be auto populated on checkout for you. You don't need to memorize it, you don't need to remember which video you saw it and go back to copy it. And with that we actually gaining another thing which is tracking and attribution because you click the link and that link is an affiliate link. So we win twice and the creator also wins full transparency, full coverage of his conversions and commissions which this is what we promised. We promised him to be paid through commissions. So we want him to be the one that collecting those commission and not coupon sites who stole his coupon.
- [26:11]
B
It's an interesting point. Yeah, I never thought about that. I mean I know about all these, you know this. Sorry like all these. Yeah. Promo codes website that they. As you said, they scrape everything out there, right. Audio, video, text and they put it out there and they are tricky sometimes to click on a link and redirect you somewhere. It's very shady. Don't know who is getting the commissions and are they still active and yeah, so I understand that. So I think it's definitely a good move. And yeah, always for like why not many brands and company out there do something where you click on something as you said and automatically apply that because I'm not going to remember after I saw the video and what was that one? Was it with a percentage at the end with the exclamation point is only the name of the, you know, the creator. Right. So applying that for me is something of course, you know. But I noticed that not many do that. But Omer, thank you so much for joining me today for you know, sharing your story, your knowledge, you know and also what is happening these days in Fiverr. Right. Again, it's such a, you know, well known brands for creators, influencers and a lot of different categories. So I was you know again very curious and to know what is going on and thank you for sharing that with us.
- [27:19]
A
Thank you for having me. Actually had a blast sharing everything we just did here on Fiverr and yeah we could, you know circle back this 6 months from now to see how it went and we what we achieved. So open to do some more. Thank you very much for the opportunity and yeah, thank you for.
- [27:40]
B
Fantastic. Thank you Amber. This was the influence factor by the influencer marketing factory. And I'll see you in the next episode.