October 6, 2025 • 53 mins
We unpack why influencer marketing is now essential as social posts feed search and AI, and how micro creators, UGC rights, and repurposing drive real ROI. William Gassner of Stack Influence shares playbooks for seeding, scaling on TikTok Shop, and boosting Amazon rankings with external traffic.
• Why Engagement Beats Follower Count
• How UGC Lowers Ad Costs and Fuels SEO
• Briefs, Rights, and Whitelisting Best Practice
• Micro and Nano Influencers For Diversified Reach
• Testing Hooks, Comments and Share Incentives
• Seeding, Affiliates and Long‑Term Creator Programs
• AI Influencers’ Limits and Where AI Helps
• Live Shopping Trends and TikTok Shop Flywheel
• Amazon Listing Setup, Vine Reviews and External Boosts
• Step‑By‑Step Paths From Zero Budget To Platform Scale
Guest Contact Information:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/william-gasner
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing.
Your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential?
Let's get started.
SPEAKER_02 (00:13):
Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of
The Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
I am your host, Matt Bertram.
We've been talking a lot aboutall the changes online and how
all the search traffic has justkind of left the website and
gone all throughout theinternet.
And with the rise of LLMs,there's a lot of need uh for
(00:34):
your name to be uh talked aboutand mentioned on social media,
on other platforms.
Uh, the LLMs are scouring theinternet to find this stuff.
And one of the things that whenyou think about SEO and you
think about the expanding uhsphere of influence of like
relevancy engineering, let'scall it, uh, to get your brand
(00:57):
out there, you need to havepeople be talking about you in
communities.
You need to have influencers inthe rise of social media.
And so um, William Gassner withuh stack influence uh is
somebody I wanted to bring onand kind of break it down.
I know we've talked aboutinfluencer marketing before, and
(01:18):
it was like a nice to have, itwas a different kind of
strategy.
I think it's becoming more of amust-have today.
So um William, welcome to theshow.
Thanks for having me on,Matthew.
Awesome.
I um am so excited to get intothis because there's just um a
lot of differencing opinions oninfluencer marketing, even
(01:42):
though it's been around for along time.
And you spent a lot of timebuilding stack influence and
building a two-sidedmarketplace, which is incredibly
difficult.
So I want to I want to give youkudos for that.
Um, and and you know, okay,there's all these influencers
(02:02):
out there, right?
And the first thing that thefeedback I got when people
started like getting intoinfluencers was just because you
have a big audience, right?
Doesn't mean the engagementlevels there, yes, well, doesn't
mean the real that's another onelike component.
There's now tools out there tokind of uh uh check into that,
(02:23):
but but you don't necessarilyneed to have a big audience if
you have a really engaged likefocus, right?
Absolutely, just like break itdown for me.
I guess what let's let's peel itback and say what is most
topical as you look at the spaceright now and what's happening
in an influencer market, andthen we can maybe go back and do
(02:46):
the basics, I guess.
SPEAKER_03 (02:47):
Cool, yeah, sounds like a plan.
So so first and foremost, I wantto bring up what you briefly
mentioned regarding howinfluencers used to be kind of a
nice to have and they'reevolving into a must-have.
Um, and a big on the SEO kind ofshowing up even on Google realm.
Um, Google just this past monthhas started to um analyze social
(03:11):
posts to actually show up insearch results.
And LLMs are now analyzingsocial posts to actually and
associate to your brand to rankyou within answers within um
these AI kind of search orresult agents.
And so it's becoming more andmore critical to always have
kind of this always-on socialmedia promotion presence.
(03:34):
Um, because if you don't, you'reyou're really losing to a lot of
the competition who is actuallyinvesting in these channels.
Now, taking a step back to theinfluencer realm.
So when most people think ofinfluencers, 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 ano-brainer, right?
(03:56):
Is that find someone who has ahuge, huge following, give them
a product, they're gonna promoteit, you're gonna make a huge
amount of money, right?
And to a point you just broughtup, things have incrementally
changed over time.
The first big thing isengagement, right?
Which was that um thealgorithms, it used to be the
fact that if you posted on aMonday and everyone that
(04:18):
followed you was on social mediafor the next like 48 hours,
pretty much every single personwould see your post.
And what happened is people'ssocial feeds started getting
filled up with content that theydidn't necessarily care about.
Maybe you followed KimKardashian, but you didn't you
followed her because she was ona show and you loved that show,
but then she kept postingcontent and you're like, I don't
really care about this content.
(04:39):
And now your social feed'sfilled up with Kim Kardashian's
posts, and you leave Instagrambecause you're like, this is not
in intriguing or interesting,right?
And so the algorithms, the firstbig change, which is a few years
ago that they made was TikTokwas a huge one.
TikTok spearheaded a massiveamount of change, and Instagram
followed suit.
But the real big thing was like,we're only gonna show content to
(05:02):
people who actually care, right?
Um, the real engaged people.
And so maybe only 10%, honestly,now for like what they call mega
influencers or celebrityinfluencers, 1% of their
audience usually engages.
Very, very small percentage andsometimes lower than that.
And so you're posting and you'reonly getting, and maybe you're
paying this person hundreds ofthousands of dollars to a post,
and because they have thesemillions of followers and it
(05:23):
looks amazing, it's this kind ofgreat metric, but it really at
the end of the day, kind ofvanity.
And maybe only a very smallpercentage of those people
actually see that content.
Whereas someone could haveliterally 10,000 followers,
maybe 100,000 followers versus10 million, and because they
produce content that theiraudience loves, a larger portion
(05:45):
of that audience comparativelyis going to see that engage and
engagement correlates withconversion, right?
Um, and I can dive deeper intothose.
There's a secondary change thatwas very massive TikTok speared
that has shifted the entireinfluencer realm.
But that was kind of the bigone.
Any any thoughts on that?
Like to chime in on?
SPEAKER_02 (06:04):
Yeah, you know, the thing that I started thinking
about when you were talking ishow depending on how influential
the influencer is, yeah, thatthat you pick, they're really
like a temporary or short-termspokesperson for your brand.
Absolutely.
And so, you know, I've done aI've done a a few interviews
(06:26):
with people, and and the thingthat I took away from it was um
if you get them to do a post,it's not, and this is goes the
same when you make when you paylike a bunch of money for a
videography company to make avideo for you, right?
Like you have the video, butwhat do you do with it after
that, right?
So the repurposing of it, it'sthe using it on different
(06:48):
channels, like that person thatpeople know identif identify
with key characteristics of yourbrand.
And so you're trying to makethat association, and then it
and then after they post it,you're wanting to reshare it,
you're wanting to takescreenshots of it, you're
wanting to move it, keep itthere, whatever, and I guess
negotiate, making sure that forX period of time, you can reuse
(07:11):
maybe the name, image, andlikeness in a way that helps
boost what you're doing becausethat one post or repost or share
or whatever they did, tweet thatthey did is not gonna reach a
massive amount of people andimpact in that way.
It's gotta be it's gotta besyndicated out uh in a way where
(07:35):
where people find it, and yougot to use that uh piece as like
a high authority piece thatyou're gonna, you know, again,
repurpose.
Uh, and and and that's like thevalue.
Now, you know, you you alsotalked about the LMs.
And you know, the way I look atthe LLMs is they're looking all
across the website like a reallyintelligent human, right?
(07:58):
So how do they like so a reallyuh well thought, like thoughtful
person that's trying to make adecision and comparison and all
this kind of stuff is gonna gothrough those chain uh like like
that customer journey uh toidentify what's the right fit,
right?
So they're automatically likemimicking humans and doing these
(08:20):
things.
So they're gonna go to socialmedia, they're gonna you know go
to review sites, they're gonnaread blogs, they're gonna go to
high authority sites, andthey're gonna aggregate that
information and they're gonnasynthesize it and make a
decision.
Now, you know, you can have thatperson go do that for you and
serve up uh those things.
And now, if you're talking aboutinformation architecture of like
(08:42):
where it is across line, like aline, I can't talk today.
Apologies, I'm on vacation,guys, but um uh like Reddit,
right?
Like if it's posted on Reddit,it can be scraped, it can be
indexed.
Um, and and that information ispublic and people are engaging
or talking about it, even thoughpeople might not see it, that is
(09:04):
relevant, uh, just like aTwitter post is relevant.
If someone is making astatement, I see it in pitch
text all the time.
Someone they're quoting peopleon Twitter because it Twitter uh
it's because it's a publicstatement, right?
Like, so how you got to thinkabout this is how is your brand
showing up everywhere and arepeople talking about you?
(09:28):
I I would love to even get intoif we have time later in this
podcast to talk about how uhinfluencer could help create
engagement, like maybe throughlike if they posted a certain
question that um, because we dothis with podcasting.
So I run a podcasting network aswell, and we we carry the
(09:48):
conversation in a certaindirection based upon what the
sponsors like to see, right?
We're not actively promoting it,but we're we're we're saying,
hey, here's a um uh kind of apublic forum of information that
we want to make sure to get outthere and we want it to go in a
certain direction.
I I feel like maybe as anadvanced strategy, you could use
(10:11):
influencers to help spur thatconversation or to talk about
something you have an interest,but I haven't totally seen that.
I've really just seen thetwo-dimensional, you know, uh
influencer mentions your brandor or retweet something, but but
I'm not in the space as deep asyou.
So um, those are kind of my justinitial thoughts as you started
(10:33):
talking.
SPEAKER_03 (10:34):
Yeah, no, those are all really great points to bring
up.
Um, let me pick a few of themand respond.
So the first thing of just notjust looking at the social
promotion, but looking at thecontent that's generated, which
now the industry calls UGC oruser-generated content.
A lot of people perceiveinfluencers as like a pure
(10:54):
performance marketing play,right?
Like instead of running ads, I'mgonna run influencer marketing.
And there are absolutesimilarities.
You're driving awareness thatleads to sales.
That obviously is a goal for anybrand that's promoting online.
But the cool thing aboutinfluencers is it's kind of
killing multiple boards with onestone.
Like you're not just gettingthis promotion, but you're
(11:14):
actually driving this awareness.
It's helping with SEO, as wediscussed because at least
recently, that um LLMs, Google'sactually analyzing these things.
And then you're also gettingthis really, really valuable
piece of content that exactly asyou said it, like you should be
running ads with that, youshould be doing using it in
marking material, you should beincorporating it into your um
website as kind of a socialproof.
(11:36):
And that's what people actuallyresonate with these days.
Um, because they want to seelike real authentic customers
showing um use case.
Not to say that you shouldn'thave professional photography to
make your brand very clean andprofessional, but you also want
to show real things because nowpeople know, especially with AI
image generation, that likethere's a lot of fake stuff out
(11:57):
there, right?
And how do I trust this productis actually good?
And seeing a real personactually utilize it is one of
the best ways.
Now, on a secondary note, andkind of what I was gonna also
mention previously about a bigthing that how social networks
have changed in the past fewyears, and TikTok really
spearheaded this, is thatbesides just now changing how
(12:21):
the algorithms feed in contentto certain people based off
engagement, one of the biggestthings in that TikTok realized
was hey, if this piece ofcontent that someone promotes,
like a huge portion of theiraudience love it, why should we
restrain that content only tothe people who are following
them?
Maybe we should show it to otherpeople, right, outside of their
follower base.
Um, because it's if it's andthen maybe we show it to like a
(12:44):
hundred people outside theirfollower base at first.
And if those people engage,we'll show it to a thousand,
then maybe 10,000, maybe amillion, right?
Um, and that's gonna keep peopleon the social platforms, which
is their goal, because now theirfeed gets filled up with not
just things that maybe theythought they were interested in,
but kind of theserecommendations of new content
that are really other people areengaging with.
And it what it's done is it'sopened this doorway to kind of
(13:08):
we call democratize the sociallandscape, right?
Taking the power away from thesecelebrities with millions of
followers and enabling someonewho literally could have a
hundred followers, like brandnew social account, to get posts
that go viral.
And it happens all the time.
And so, what now the strategywe've found works the best for
brands, what we actually builtstack influence around, is what
(13:30):
the industry calls nano or microinfluencers.
These like smaller creators,less than 100,000 followers, um,
who, and as opposed to basicallyputting all your eggs in one
basket, you have a limitedmarketing budget, as opposed to
hiring a Kardashian or somecelebrity.
Why not take that marketingbudget, spread it across a
hundred or a thousand smallerpeople, right?
(13:50):
Who you might not have to paythat much money or much smaller
amount than that largercelebrity.
Um, some people are willing todo stuff just even in exchange
for a product, which is actuallywhat Stack Influence we kind of
built the model around as well,and what people call product
seeding, and basically diversifyyour risk.
You're gonna get a huge, muchlarger amount of content.
(14:13):
You're going to increase thatSEO potential, um, and you're
going to kind of increase theodds that your content
potentially can go viral.
You get that more awareness.
Because you put that content inthe hands of 100 people, maybe
three of them go viral.
Whereas you work with fivepeople with a million followers,
like maybe none of them goviral, right?
Your odds are lower, even thoughthey have this kind of higher
(14:35):
follower base and they looksexier, you could say.
Um, so those have been reallybig changes, and where I
recommend brands now investtheir money is like diversify
risk, work with a lot morecreators with smaller budgets on
a per influencer basis, um, andgenerate a huge amount of
content, which you right nowneed to run ads and kind of
marketing material, like havingthree pieces of content is or
(14:57):
having 30 pieces of content isbetter than having three, you
know?
SPEAKER_02 (15:00):
Yeah.
So you said a couple things thatI wanted to uh uh piggyback on.
Um one is you talked a lot aboutin the beginning that how the
algorithm works and the auditionperiod.
There really is an auditionperiod of like how well people
engage with this content.
Um, I think even some of thedata I saw 30% of the time on
(15:23):
social media platforms arelooking at the comments, right?
Of where where where what whatis going on?
Like two people could say thesame thing, right?
And if an influencer says itthat you know has some kind of
association, if he posts theexact same thing, it could go
viral based upon um how manypeople are following him.
(15:44):
And so that there's again thesedevelopment of of strategies,
and and also to your point, youcould create just an awesome
piece of content and your corenetwork could engage, it could
then share it to more people,people like that, and show it to
other people, and it and it goesviral.
Like, I think there's a lot ofmystique behind well, the math
(16:08):
uh or the algorithms of howthese um these platforms work.
But today that information's outthere, so you can understand it,
and and that's what Mr.
Beast did, right?
Like he just tested YouTube andhe tested and he tested, and you
know, of course, uh realityshows and game shows are what
you know, like Americans like,and you know, so that's kind of
(16:31):
why he went in that direction.
But if people like somethingelse, he would have gone in that
direction, right?
Absolutely.
Um and and I think that to yourpoint, you gotta be testing
stuff out there and seeingwhat's working.
Even if someone looks great onpaper, you don't want to put all
your eggs in basket.
You want to you want to testthem out and see how they do
against your audience because Ireally feel like it's a layering
(16:54):
strategy with your brand.
All these different componentsmake up your brand.
And to bring in the flavor of amicro influencer or a mid-size
influencer could could reallyhelp.
But having these champions outthere, I mean, I I see it in
crypto.
Like, I mean, right?
Like you just see it in cryptothat someone has a product and
(17:15):
they get it out to all thesedifferent people, and then
everybody gives their honesttake of whatever they think.
And okay, there might be someshady, like, here's some tokens
and whatever that's going on.
But but for the most part, Ithink people are sharing what
they think, and then people aredaisy chaining that information
and it's proliferating outthere.
(17:36):
Same goes if you have a product,right?
You have e-commerce product, youwant to get some trials out
there.
You need going back to Googleand eat like expertise,
authority, trust, andexperience.
They added experience because ofthe AI.
If you've tried the product,you're holding the product,
you're using the product.
If they say something, it shouldhave more weight to it, right?
(17:58):
And um, and so I mean, reviewsare so big and and product
trials are are really what wherewhere it goes.
I I I I shared with you in kindof the pre-interview.
Um, I'm gonna bring a buddy onuh that that started Turtle Box,
it's a big um uh uh likewaterproof speaker, right?
(18:21):
That has all kinds ofpartnerships and associations
with fishing brands and um youknow, line extension, like they
have not done anythingtraditional, right?
Like they rank for their name,they don't rank for any
unbranded terms, there's no SEOinvolved, but they built the
right relationships and theyplaced their product in the
(18:43):
right hands that peopleidentified that that that fish
or that are on the water orwhatever, and it and it carried
through that user-generatedcontent uh and partnerships like
a life of its own, right?
So I think that how I seeinfluencers going is it helps
you kind of kick start a naturalphenomenon that maybe you're
(19:06):
trying to create.
Um, you know, now I I think thatyou could seed a lot of stuff
for free products and over time,but but but I I don't know, you
tell me.
I feel like the goal is to kindof create a movement, right?
Absolutely create an immunitybehind your product, and a lot
(19:29):
of people kind of follow theleader, you know, they they
don't want to be the first oneto go, and so if you can get
some people out there or peoplethey know that trust it, they're
more willing to give it a try,make their own honest
assessment, and and really now alot of people do things very
publicly online.
So when you say influencer,micro influencer, like there's a
(19:53):
lot of people like on Facebook.
I did this test.
This is funny, William.
I don't I didn't I didn't reallyuse Facebook, but like like I
think Facebook's gonna come backinto vogue.
I think it's a centralized hub.
And and so I said, Hey, I'mgonna do a challenge.
Anybody want to do it with me?
I'm gonna post for every day,just one post, not even like
crazy video or anything.
(20:13):
Just I'm gonna just post onetime a day, and I don't have
this huge audience or anythinglike that on Facebook, like on
LinkedIn or anything.
And and I'm like, these are likefamily friends, let's see what
happens.
So I did it 30 days.
I had we would it was like 328views over a 28-day period, and
then the next 28-day period overthat 30-day kind of launch,
(20:37):
19,000 impressions organicallyjust static posting once a day,
yeah, right.
Yeah, so like we all aredemocratized through social
media, yeah.
Absolutely have a massive amountof reach that a lot of companies
and brands would uh would die tohave, and now you have just all
(20:57):
these people, and these microinfluencers are maybe uh just a
little bit more intentional or alittle bit more um engaged
online and are posting and andhave this huge network and reach
because of it, which I think isabsolutely amazing.
SPEAKER_03 (21:14):
100% to add on to that.
So, one thing that I find worksreally well at with product
seeding, and you'd think, like,why would I just give a free
product away?
Why don't I just pay someone,right?
But people deserve to get paid.
I'll start with that, right?
You need to get paid for yourwork, but you can incentivize
people through additionalchannels like affiliate
(21:35):
commissions, right?
If they make sales, they getcommissions.
If they do certain content orthey you give them someone gives
you rights to the content, youpay them incrementally, right?
But when you find someone who'swilling to just put in a bunch
of effort to promote a productin exchange for just that
product, it means they actuallylike it, right?
Yeah, um, as opposed to if I payyou a thousand bucks, you might
(21:55):
promote really any product, butthen 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 isauthenticity, right?
Like, is this a realtestimonial?
And consumers can pick up on itlike that.
Like, you know, and this iswhere honestly the celebrities,
a lot of them have died offbecause you know, like when Kim
Kardashian is promotingsomething, like she's getting
paid a huge amount of money forit.
(22:16):
Does she actually care aboutthat product?
You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01 (22:18):
Does she actually unless it's her unless it's
hers, right?
She's got some kind of licensingdeal, like there's even bias
there.
SPEAKER_03 (22:24):
But um, and not to say celebrities aren't valuable
at all, right?
But I think going back toactually something that you
said, which is you want to testa lot to figure out where your
through line is, right?
And that's where product seedingor smaller creators are
fantastic for that, because youcan every product works
differently.
Some products, maybe it's anunboxing that is really what
(22:46):
consumers love.
Maybe you have to actually showit and demonstrate it in use.
Maybe just a static post of atthe beach with utilizing the
product is how it's going toperform well, right?
So you want to test a bunch ofdifferent things.
And then once you align orfigure out what is what works
for my brand or for my product,then going up tier and paying
(23:09):
kind of these larger people whoare very niche or very good at
this specific thing that you'vetested out.
Um, and then kind of having thisoverall um strategy or portfolio
with these different things.
And the last thing I'll also sayis um, and you brought this up
previous kind of statement orquestion was um is it valuable
to have kind of like somethrough line or some um
(23:31):
messaging that's not just, hey,here's the product and look at
me, right?
Like, and getting people toactually engage with the brand,
right?
And that is absolutelyimportant.
And something that is more of arecent trend that people are
realizing is very, very valuableand necessary to do.
Um, and the reason for twothings is one, people on social
(23:52):
media now we're bombarded bycontent.
It's only gonna get worse withAI.
You have to have inspirationalthings, you have to have
educational content, you have tohave things that people taught
like that bring you in, right?
You need to have a good hook andpeople lose interest within the
first three seconds.
And so you kind of got to havethese different layers to have a
through line, and the brandneeds to come up with that.
(24:13):
You want to give peoplecreativity to come up with a
unique idea, but still directthem of like, this is the
message we're trying to getacross, right?
And then also try to impart somesort of way that people actually
engage or share this content.
Um, because sharing now hasbecome kind of that a really
important thing that thealgorithm does to push it
(24:34):
forward.
It's a natural signal that,like, if someone's sharing this,
obviously it's better than themjust clicking like on it, right?
Um, it means that they'reactually pushing it forward with
their audience.
So um a lot of people will pushforward like comments and
shares, like share this withyour friend, or comment here to
get a white paper, or to get allmy tips and tricks for this, or
(24:55):
to get a coupon code, right?
And then you can createautomations in the DM funnels
based off that.
But that is something that Iabsolutely recommend people
implement from day one to testhow things are working because
you just increase yourlikelihood that that content
that people are pushing forwardis going to have a potential
chance to go viral.
(25:16):
And then the last thing alsovalue to these smaller creators
is like they're way more engagedwith the people who are
following them or maybe just seetheir content.
Like they have time, they loveit, they're trying to build this
social following.
So when someone comments or DMsthem, they're much more likely
to like respond to that versuslike a celebrity who's super
busy and gets all thesedifferent DMs every day, like
(25:37):
they're not responding to yourbrand inquiries, right?
So that's another really bigadvantage to working with these
smaller creators, um, is thatthey're just also more likely to
help you kind of build thatbrand and be a real um important
advocate in the long run.
SPEAKER_02 (25:52):
I love that.
Okay, I have two things that uhcame 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 you you got me.
Okay.
How how does someone develop ago-to-market strategy and how
should they incorporate uminfluencers in that strategy?
(26:15):
Like, you know, at thebeginning, middle, end, all how
how should they look at it andthen maybe share a couple case
studies of maybe smaller brandsor e-commerce brands that um,
you know, hadn't done it beforeand then started to use it and
it just blew up.
I would love to hear a littlebit of some success stories.
SPEAKER_03 (26:37):
Absolutely.
So a few different ways you cango about this, depending on
whether you have zero marketingbudget.
And this is actually a beautifulthing about influencers, like
you can get started withnothing, right?
Um, or if you're kind of agrowing brand or you're an
enterprise, right?
Like, I mean, as an ode Unileverjust took 50%, they just
announced this past year, 50% ofevery single one, all of their
(26:59):
entire advertising and marketingbudget and pushing it, pushing
it towards influencers.
So if they're doing it,obviously it works, right?
Um, but let's just take someone,no marketing budget, just
starting out, right?
Um, when you're just startingout, you should have a website,
you should have a social mediaprofile, and you better have a
product, right, to sell, right?
So you have all those threethings.
(27:20):
If you don't figure your stuffout and get those locked down.
Um but once you have those, um,you can start DMing people on
social media, right?
And there's also a lot of freeonline tools, like Facebook has
their own influencer network,TikTok has their own influencer
network.
You can utilize these to searchfor different niches.
Look at your competitors, right?
Or people who are tangential toyour market, right?
(27:41):
Like maybe you are selling ayoga mat.
Look at a yoga fashion companyand who the types of people
they're working at with, right?
Um, start searching.
A lot of these social networkshave search functionality that's
based off hashtags, as anexample, right?
Um, again, you're selling thisyoga mat, search for hashtag
yogi, hashtag meditation,hashtag dog doggy down, right?
(28:06):
Downwards.
Um, different things that arerelated to your industry.
Um, and then downward dog iswhat the word I was actually
trying to get there.
Um, and basically start findingprofiles.
And then this takes time, right?
But start DMing people.
If you can get their emailaddress, email them and
negotiate with them.
First, before you do this, comeup with some sort of brief,
(28:26):
right?
Like, what's your brand about?
What kind of maybe incentivesyou want to offer someone?
Maybe it's an affiliatecommission, you give them 10,
20% of sales, huge amount ofawesome software is out there to
automate that um commission.
You could do it manually,hypothetically.
Um, and then start offeringpeople, hey, loved your brand.
Would you like, if you findalignment, would you like me to
(28:48):
send you the product for free?
Right.
Um, and that's you're gonna getfirst off, it's gonna take time.
These are the downsides to thesystem.
Some people might steal yourproduct, you send it to them,
they don't do anything for you.
Um, you have to trackeverything, you have to confirm
they actually post on time,right?
So there are some hiccups alongthat way, but you really can get
(29:09):
started with nothing.
And you can start gettingfeedback about your product
right away.
Like people are gonna tell youif the product sucks, um, which
is very valuable.
You're gonna get some content tonow start incorporating to your
website, building out yoursocial profile, if you start
running ads, um, and you'regonna just get the product in
the hands of people who mightactually use it, word of mouth
marketing, brand awareness,sales.
(29:30):
So it's like this bundle ofbenefits that's going to also
help you create a foundation forall these other marketing
tactics that you may want topursue in the future.
Now, if you have some marketingbudget to spend, the second
thing, there's now a huge amountof softwares out there that can
help you automate a lot of thisstuff, right?
Databases of influencers.
(29:50):
Now you don't have to manuallysearch for hashtags or things.
You can use these softwares tosearch for people.
Um, you can use them to pay themout to track kind of the
progress to confirm.
Confirmed posts, right?
Um, so tapping into those, someare cheaper, some are very
expensive, depending on whatyou're looking for.
Um, and then the third kind ofoption is using kind of a full
(30:12):
automated system, which isactually what we do at Stack
Influence.
You come to us, you set yourtargets.
Um, I want 100 people, this ismy focus, and we have a
dedicated community of about600,000 people who are going to,
we're gonna tap into for you anddo all of the heavy lifting for
you.
Agencies also can do that foryou as well.
Might cost an arm and a legbecause they don't have that
dedicated community, they mightbe using another software, but
(30:35):
still saves you a lot of time,right?
Um, and a lot of the headaches.
Now that's kind of, I would say,the different strategies to go
out.
Um, some people use VAs, somepeople use software, some people
use agencies, some people useplatforms.
Um, but overall, absolutelyfantastic strategy.
And going to some, I am a littlebiased on that, but I also, by
(30:57):
the way, a little background,used to be a nine-figure
e-commerce seller myself.
I ran a digital marketing agencyfor about 10 years.
Like I've been in the trencheswith this.
The reason I built StackInfluence with my two
co-founders was because we faceda huge amount of pitfalls and
realized how valuable it was tonot only promote our own
products, but also our clients.
Um, and so we realized hey,there's a lot, this is a
(31:19):
valuable strategy.
There's a lot of technology thatcould be built to support this.
Um, and it's only growing, it'sonly becoming more powerful.
And there's a lot of facts aswell.
I'll give you some results too.
SPEAKER_02 (31:31):
But yeah, yeah, no, no, just so you just made me
think of something.
So, what do you think of therise of AI influencers?
Tell me, because I'm seeing AIinfluencer agencies, like
certainly, there's certainindustries that it's moving
faster than others.
Um, but there's a lot ofaccounts out there that are not
(31:54):
real people like at all.
Um, what is your thought on thatemerging market?
SPEAKER_03 (31:59):
Absolutely.
We've been looking at it veryclosely.
We've considered building ourown AI stuff, right?
But the reality that we've cometo, and you'll see this if you
see anyone using AI influencersor incorporating kind of like AI
personas in their posts.
At the end of the day, peoplevalue authenticity, right?
Like that's what they want.
(32:20):
They want real truthful liketestimonials and portrayals of
their brand or product.
And AI is like the opposite ofthat, right?
It's like totally fake.
And so, as much as it isactually, it's it's working
right now in some capacities aslike a novelty factor, right?
You're like, you see these postsand you're like, oh my God, that
(32:42):
is a fake person, but it looksso real and it's like creative,
right?
Like, I've been seeing someactually professional almost
videos done with AI, and it'slike that is awesome, right?
Like, and it's really effective.
You can produce this like adthat might have cost you
hundreds of thousands of dollarsin like 20 minutes, right?
And like I think those are goingto be very powerful, and I think
(33:04):
it's going to incorporate into alot of like think the Super Bowl
ad style stuff.
Um, 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.
You go to the comments, everyonewho comments and anyone
listening, like go check thisout next time you see an AI
video.
(33:24):
Every single person says, like,fake AI, like, AI, get out of
here.
Like, and they end up, itactually backfires on you as a
brand.
Like it decreases your trust,right?
Even if the message is reallyauthentic.
Um, and I think that's onlygoing to progress even more
because the AI technologies aregetting better and more people
are utilizing them.
It's easier.
(33:45):
So it's like, I think it will beutilized in in certain ways that
is powerful, like editing as anexample, right?
You film a video of yourselftalking, and then you're
utilizing AI softwares to editthat and cut it together and
make some animations on it, um,some captions for it.
Like that is powerful.
That saves you time, thatenhances the video that's still
(34:05):
authentic.
Um, but like a pure AI avatar, Ithink some of them are gonna be
really successful and thatthere's a vanity to it.
But I think that it's not gonnareplace normal people, right?
Um, just because people feellike it's fake and
untrustworthy.
SPEAKER_02 (34:21):
And then and then William, I had another question.
So Gary Vanderchuck's talking alot about um like the live QVC
style, yeah, uh like liveshopping, I guess.
What are you what are you seeingaround that?
Like, have you been digging intothat a little bit?
SPEAKER_03 (34:38):
Absolutely.
That's I believe only going toget more um more impactful and
more popular, um, especially inthe US.
So, like, as an example, I I'mnot gonna remember the exact
stat, but like in the Asianmarket, specifically China, like
live shopping is like equatesfor like 20% or 30%, some crazy
(34:58):
metric of like every singlee-commerce sale.
It's like astronomical, and it'slike 20 times what the US, like
they're they're light yearsahead on that.
And I think a big part of it islike everyone lives on their
phone.
There's these unified apps thatkind of connect everyone
consistently.
Um, and that's where peoplelive.
But there's a lot of pushtowards this market.
(35:18):
I think there's only going to bemore evolution, not only on the
social networks, but also on thee-commerce platforms.
As an example, Amazon launchedAmazon Live, right?
Incorporates with theirinfluencers.
Um, they've failed a few timesin their kind of influencer
programs, like they had what wascalled the Inspire app.
They just shut it down.
They had tried another apppreviously, um, but they've
(35:41):
still kept Amazon Live going,right?
And you see TikTok also comingout with a lot of consistent
live features.
Um it's only gonna be morepowerful.
I think there's gonna be morepartnerships between the social
and e-commerce networks that aregoing to happen.
And and we had this, like thethe US was on the forefront of
(36:01):
this with QVC, right?
And QVC is trying to get intothe social realm right now.
They're having a bit of trouble.
Um, I think there's a still alot of kinks to work out, but I
do think that that is themerging of e-commerce and social
networks is is a big future.
One last example here is um anapp called Flip Shop.
It was, it's now become trendingto become one of the top apps.
(36:24):
At one point, it was like on thetop 10 in the app store for a
time being when like TikTok waspotentially getting banned.
Hasn't taken over yet, but it'slike imagine Amazon combined
with TikTok, right?
Instead of leaving a review, youleave like a TikTok video.
So it's like social shoppingcombined and live combined with
um with the shoppingmarketplaces.
And again, I think a lot ofother platforms are gonna follow
(36:46):
suit on that.
SPEAKER_02 (36:47):
You know, it's interesting.
Uh Google just did their kind oflaunch where they're moving
everything towards YouTube,right?
And um AI search, and they'retrying to own like the whole
funnel, right?
Like you search for it, you findthe product you want, and you
buy it, and they have a lot ofthat technology.
(37:08):
I can see totally why they wantto include the social posts and
stuff like on there, because ifthat helps sell a product,
right?
You have that product reviewfrom that influencer that gets
indexed because it has a bunchof followers, you know, that
person has a bunch of followersthat post shows something off,
they can show that in search andthen they can say buy here,
(37:31):
right?
They can get, they can capturethat sale.
So, like I mean, when you getthe big money and the algorithms
behind this, where it a lotwhere it's a win-win-win, um,
things move.
Like we always say that, andthen they launch uh a new tool,
uh like the live tools that thatkind of rolled out on all the
(37:52):
platforms, they would reallypush it.
And and I I think this nextevolution's uh gonna be kind of
like this live shopping uhcomponent, uh, and the the
e-commerce and the influencersplay play right into that.
Man, there's like so much noiseuh out there right now.
Like every time I open up mysocial app, I'm like, oh my
(38:12):
gosh, I missed so much stuff,and there's all kinds of stuff
that uh is happening, and andthese feeds are customized for
you.
Can you share with us some ofthe success stories that you've
done so somebody can help go,okay?
I think I want to do this.
How would I put something likethat together again with all
this noise?
(38:33):
Um, is it not just going to getswallowed up in the sea of uh
you know attention?
Or you know, what are what arethe best ways to when you share
those stories of how they brokethrough?
SPEAKER_03 (38:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So a few different successstories.
I'll share three um on differentkinds of realms of influencer
value.
So the first, just naturally onsocial media, right?
And you could say performancemarketing, um, is had a brand
did a hundred influencers.
That may seem like a lot, but ifyou're just sending out free
(39:07):
products, it's actually prettyaffordable.
Um, 20 of those influencers,20%, ended up, and by the way,
these influencers have anaverage of about 3,000
followers.
20 of them got over a millionhits, right?
And that correlated with themliterally having a brand new
product launch to starting to do5,000 sales a month
(39:28):
consistently, right?
Um, and then they built upabout, I think 30 of them became
these longer-term affiliates forthem.
So not everyone was interestedin it or wasn't the right fit,
but now they built up thiscommunity that's like now
consistently promoting.
They they compensated them witha free product once, um, and
then they've incentivized them.
And now these people are likefor months doing consistent
(39:50):
promotions because they'regetting paid for it for what the
results that they actuallydrive.
And that brand now has doubleddown, and like they utilize a
platform like ours like toconsistently build up that
community.
And that's a really great tacticbrands should implement is like
don't just rely on the oneplatform, build out if you're
paying for something, startbringing people almost in-house,
(40:10):
right?
And like work with them, maybecreate a Discord around them,
Slack channels, like engage withthem, right?
Like those are real dedicated,like loving customers who love
your product enough to actuallyconsistently work for you to
promote it.
Um, and if you do that, it'sexponential growth.
Second big case study um successstory is taking aside, they had
(40:31):
some good results for the socialposts, um, but it wasn't like
astronomical results.
But then they got all thiscontent and they used one piece
of content and decreased theirad cost by five times.
Um, and it's now consistentlythe best performing ad, right?
And they utilize a tactic alsocalled whitelisting in this,
where they like got theinfluencers' permission to run
(40:51):
an ad through their own profile.
Yeah.
Um, so and this is somethingthat like pitfall people give up
sometimes on influencers toofast.
They're like, I want to testthis out.
Let's do three of them, right?
And then they don't like drivetoo many sales and they never
even utilize the content, right?
And it's like you just lost outon all this potential, right?
(41:11):
Like, um, first off, give morepeople a chance.
Maybe you missed the mark on whoyou reached out to, maybe you
didn't align them properly,maybe you picked the wrong
people.
Um, and then you didn't alsotest that content and see how
valuable that was.
And so, as this example, likethey didn't do, they got some
awareness, um, they got a fewsales, it didn't provide a big
ROI for them on the promotionalside.
(41:33):
But then this content, like inthe long term, has provided, I
don't even know what the actualmetric of ROI is, but like 5x
improved overall conversionrates um and and decrease those
costs as a result.
And so um another amazing studyof just like how one piece of
that influencer puzzle canactually really be beneficial.
(41:55):
And the last success story I'lltell is on an Amazon
marketplace, right?
So um again, influencermarketing works across the
board, whether you are providinga SaaS product or an e-commerce
product, right?
Um, but a lot of our clients, soat Stack Influence, we focus on
e-commerce brands.
And a lot of them are selling onmarketplaces like Amazon,
(42:16):
Walmart, Target, Sephora, etcetera.
There's an extra advantage tomarketplace growth combined with
influencers.
And the reason behind that ismarketplaces like Amazon, excuse
me, are like a search enginelike Google, right?
If someone searches for, let'ssay, going back to my yoga mat
example, yoga mats, right?
(42:36):
There's 45 listings on the firstpage of Amazon.
If you're not shown there, um,you're not 80% of people don't
buy, right?
And I think the top like fivelistings or 10 listings control
like 80% of the sales there,right?
So, like if you're not shown,and there might be hundreds, if
not thousands, of pages for yogamats on Amazon, right?
So sometimes people say, like, Ilaunch a brand, and it's the
(42:57):
same thing for Google.
Like, I'm gonna put up awebsite, I'm gonna make a huge
amount of sales, right?
And it's like, no, you have tolike optimize for SEO, you might
have to run some ads, you gottado some influencer marketing.
Same thing with Amazon.
They're like, Amazon controls50% of every e-commerce sale in
the US.
Like, I'm gonna make a listing,and it's like you're on page
5,000, like no one sees yourproduct.
So, how do you get theiralgorithm to actually show you?
(43:18):
And a bit different from Google.
Obviously, keywords areimportant, but um, Amazon's most
important metric to show you aredoes your product sell, right?
Like, what are the salesmetrics?
Do people click?
Do people add it to the cart?
Do they leave a review?
Like, what are these metricsthat are worthy for you to be at
the top when someone searches,right?
Because if they put you thereand you don't sell, Amazon just
(43:39):
lost money because it's alimited amount of space and
they're getting big commissionsfrom these every single sale
that happens, right?
So they want to be sure thatwhen they show you, you're gonna
be a high performing product.
Now, going back, influencerfantastic for this because when
you first launch, Amazon's nevershowing you.
Like there's no chance, theyhave no data on you.
And it takes a while for them tocollect data.
(44:00):
They might show you on page likefive, maybe page one for like 30
seconds.
See if anyone buys, push youback down, right?
So, because they're trying tosee what this data is.
Now, if you can run what'scalled external traffic
campaigns, an ad from Googlegoing to Amazon, a Facebook ad,
an influencer marketingcampaign, an email um promotion
that goes to Amazon, right?
(44:21):
Give Amazon data it needs todetermine where to place you,
right?
And if you can show them, hey,out of 10 people who go to my
listing, five of them buy, likeAmazon's gonna very quickly
start pushing you up in theranks.
And we've seen influencers workfantastic for this if you do it
in a good controlled mannerbecause engagement levels like
conversions are very high,right?
(44:42):
The people who click from theinfluencer promotion, it's
trusted.
So a high portion of them go tothe listing and convert.
You might not get a huge amount.
Um, yeah, any questions aboutthat?
SPEAKER_02 (44:53):
Uh, so I I've interviewed some Amazon experts
and they've talked about uh theexternal campaigns that you kind
of need to warm up your profilea little bit before before you
like drive a massive amount oftraffic to that.
Can you just speak to that fromyour experience and your angle
on what that actually means andhow that might be differing with
(45:16):
influencers?
SPEAKER_03 (45:17):
Yeah.
So in terms of warming up, thatis accurate.
I don't think you need to gothrough a massive warm-up um
phase, but you do need to do afew things.
So, like you need to make surethat your listing is properly
optimized, right?
Um, so meaning like you do haveto have good keywords, like and
like optimize for the keywordspeople are searching.
Otherwise, you could drive awhole amount of like traffic
(45:39):
there.
Amazon's not gonna know where toposition you, right?
Um, the second thing is you needactually good content, right?
Like you get on the first pageif your competitors have way
better content than you, umincluding professional content,
and like you have a bad pricepoint, like they're not gonna
click it and buy you, right?
And if you don't, once you'rethere, if you don't make sales,
um, you're gonna get droppeddown very quickly.
(46:02):
Um, last thing is reviews.
So, like Amazon has reviews arevery strict, you can't require
incentivized reviews, like it'sa hard thing to solve, right?
And until you get sales, right,you're not getting reviews.
Amazon does have somethingcalled the Vine program, which I
recommend everyone does whenyou're first launching an
Amazon.
It's a way to syndicate, sendsome free products out, and you
can get up to about 30 reviewson your listing to start off
(46:23):
with.
So recommend you do all of thosethings right away.
But once those are in place,like you're confident your
keywords are there, you'reconfident you got a good product
with photos, videos, pricepoint.
Um, you did a Vine program, yougot some initial reviews.
I recommend actuallyimplementing external traffic as
soon as possible.
Um, because it's just gonna takelonger.
(46:44):
We see insane results, and it'sactually the best results I've
ever seen from an influencercampaign.
Because not only did they getthe social promotions, they got
the content they can repurpose.
I've literally seen 13x growthon an influencer promotion
before through Amazon becausethey went from page 10 to page
one.
Their product was good, theystayed there.
Influencer campaign stops, theynow have all of these eyeballs.
(47:07):
And so they're making a thousandsales a month.
Um, or it was like about ahundred sales a month, and they
went to 1300.
Um, and then influencers stoppedpromoting.
Their sales did not stop becausenow they were they were visible
to all of these thousands ofpeople, tens of thousands of
people who are actuallysearching for that keyword,
they're now showing up for.
And they had a good product toto actually push forward, right?
(47:29):
So that's the power there.
But I do actually I don't thinkthat you need to.
I mean, don't invest like tensof thousands of dollars into an
ad campaign like day one on yourAmazon listing, right?
Like incrementally go.
There's also other strategies oflike maybe starting higher in a
price point and thenincrementally dropping to where
(47:50):
you want to be, right?
Like doing certain promotions,turning on my strategy for
people is like do externaltraffic first, then turn on
Amazon PPC, which is a game youkind of have to play.
Once the influencer campaign andthat external traffic kind of
subsides, you got to kind ofplay Amazon's game there.
But um, that's the formula thatI see really, really successful
for the brands that utilize ourplatform for that.
SPEAKER_02 (48:12):
I love it.
I I think that that's a great,like, unknown secret of internet
marketing right there is how tohow to seed your campaign, uh,
how to impact influencers to getthat listening up.
And then you add your paid ads,right?
Like, because you do have tokind of play some of these
platforms game to to get shown.
(48:34):
Um, you know, they're not asgangster as Yelp, but you know,
I like I and Yelp's done waybetter.
Okay.
I have a Yelp rep and I likethem.
And uh but but Yelp, uh, theythey actually, when they
started, they were recruiting atmy high school and people didn't
even know what it was.
And um, you know, so I've I'vekind of followed that that that
brand in particular, but umawesome.
(48:56):
Is there anything, William, thatthat we haven't covered?
Uh, if there's anything elseyou'd like to share, as well as
where to follow you, to hearkind of some more of these
strategies and success stories,and then we'll definitely uh
link to Stack Influence uh inthe show notes.
SPEAKER_03 (49:12):
Awesome.
Um, last really quick tip,because I've just heard some
insane stories, and we're notdoing this just yet, but just as
like a advice to people in therealm, if you're any e-commerce
seller listening, um, is TikTokshop.
So TikTok shop has created thisamazing funnel with influencers,
affiliates, and then what arecalled whitelisting on TikTok.
(49:33):
They're called Spark Ads, solike utilizing influencers
profile to run ads.
Um, it's amazing turnwheelsystem.
I just heard a case study abouta brand, one of our clients, but
is utilizing some other systemto do this.
We're actually building outfeatures to optimize this, but
basically went from zero to 40million in less than six months.
They are an established brand,so they had some brand awareness
(49:54):
already, right?
But like that is, and they outof their mouth, like the fastest
they've ever seen them grow onany platform.
And I mean, that's in absolutelyinsane growth.
And all they did was seed outproducts to influencers, um, and
at like a rate of hundreds permonth, right?
Like, so decent scale, right?
Not every brand can do that, butlike you can do this with 10 a
(50:18):
month, right?
And like still have good successrates.
You seed out products, you get agive them all affiliate kind of
um commissions, you pick thebest people who have generated
the best sales, so kind of theyget your brand the best, get
permissions to run ads withthem, feed them into a TikTok's
ad algorithm, let the algorithmliterally put the budget towards
(50:39):
whichever is performing best.
And as it scales up and hitsyour cacks and your price points
and your margins, um, keepfunding it until it goes over.
And it's like that was just theformula they did to go zero 40
million in six months.
SPEAKER_02 (50:54):
So I have a friend that's on the uh TikTok shop
tame, and I've been trying toget her on the podcast, but she
like she can't do it.
Um, I might be able to get herin like a private mastermind or
something like that.
Um, TikTok's pretty crazy, likethey can't, they don't even have
email addresses, they like onlydo everything in chat and it
(51:15):
like disappears.
It's a little, it's a littlecreepy of maybe what's going on
there, but but TikTok shop isabsolutely uh crushing it.
And and I appreciate youmentioning that.
Um, William, where are youactive on social media?
How do people find you, followyou, and um, you know, anything
(51:36):
else you want to share aboutstackinfluence.com.
It's a great platform.
You can all go there and uhcheck it out and and get started
and get access to this hugenetwork of uh influencers that
William and his team has builtup.
SPEAKER_03 (51:49):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So if anyone listening ise-commerce brand, that's our
main focus.
High-level Stack Influence, weconnect e-commerce brands to
micro nano influencers andautomate the collaborations at
scale.
Very simple.
You want to reach out to us,find us on social.
We're at Stack Influence,basically on every single social
platform.
Best way, go toStackInfluids.com.
(52:11):
If you want to talk with one ofour influencer experts, which we
try to do to gauge where you'reat in your influencer world, top
right hand corner, you can clicka call, book a call with us very
easily.
Um, feel free to connectpersonally with me on LinkedIn
at William Gassner.
Um, and yeah, we'd love to workwith anyone who's interested or
always happy to just provideadvice in the influencer realm.
(52:31):
And thanks for having me on thepodcast, Matthew.
SPEAKER_02 (52:34):
Awesome.
Well, guys, if you got somevalue in this, please like,
share, follow.
We really appreciated all thoseuh inner engagements, help uh
the algorithm.
Uh we we are uh we're trying togrow.
So uh anything you can do if youif you got value out of this, uh
totally appreciate that.
Uh until the next time,everybody.
(52:55):
My name is Matt Bertram.
This is the unknown secrets ofinternet marketing.
Bye bye for now.
This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing.
Your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential?
Let's get started.
SPEAKER_02 (00:13):
Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of
The Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
I am your host, Matt Bertram.
We've been talking a lot aboutall the changes online and how
all the search traffic has justkind of left the website and
gone all throughout theinternet.
And with the rise of LLMs,there's a lot of need uh for
(00:34):
your name to be uh talked aboutand mentioned on social media,
on other platforms.
Uh, the LLMs are scouring theinternet to find this stuff.
And one of the things that whenyou think about SEO and you
think about the expanding uhsphere of influence of like
relevancy engineering, let'scall it, uh, to get your brand
(00:57):
out there, you need to havepeople be talking about you in
communities.
You need to have influencers inthe rise of social media.
And so um, William Gassner withuh stack influence uh is
somebody I wanted to bring onand kind of break it down.
I know we've talked aboutinfluencer marketing before, and
(01:18):
it was like a nice to have, itwas a different kind of
strategy.
I think it's becoming more of amust-have today.
So um William, welcome to theshow.
Thanks for having me on,Matthew.
Awesome.
I um am so excited to get intothis because there's just um a
lot of differencing opinions oninfluencer marketing, even
(01:42):
though it's been around for along time.
And you spent a lot of timebuilding stack influence and
building a two-sidedmarketplace, which is incredibly
difficult.
So I want to I want to give youkudos for that.
Um, and and you know, okay,there's all these influencers
(02:02):
out there, right?
And the first thing that thefeedback I got when people
started like getting intoinfluencers was just because you
have a big audience, right?
Doesn't mean the engagementlevels there, yes, well, doesn't
mean the real that's another onelike component.
There's now tools out there tokind of uh uh check into that,
(02:23):
but but you don't necessarilyneed to have a big audience if
you have a really engaged likefocus, right?
Absolutely, just like break itdown for me.
I guess what let's let's peel itback and say what is most
topical as you look at the spaceright now and what's happening
in an influencer market, andthen we can maybe go back and do
(02:46):
the basics, I guess.
SPEAKER_03 (02:47):
Cool, yeah, sounds like a plan.
So so first and foremost, I wantto bring up what you briefly
mentioned regarding howinfluencers used to be kind of a
nice to have and they'reevolving into a must-have.
Um, and a big on the SEO kind ofshowing up even on Google realm.
Um, Google just this past monthhas started to um analyze social
(03:11):
posts to actually show up insearch results.
And LLMs are now analyzingsocial posts to actually and
associate to your brand to rankyou within answers within um
these AI kind of search orresult agents.
And so it's becoming more andmore critical to always have
kind of this always-on socialmedia promotion presence.
(03:34):
Um, because if you don't, you'reyou're really losing to a lot of
the competition who is actuallyinvesting in these channels.
Now, taking a step back to theinfluencer realm.
So when most people think ofinfluencers, 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 ano-brainer, right?
(03:56):
Is that find someone who has ahuge, huge following, give them
a product, they're gonna promoteit, you're gonna make a huge
amount of money, right?
And to a point you just broughtup, things have incrementally
changed over time.
The first big thing isengagement, right?
Which was that um thealgorithms, it used to be the
fact that if you posted on aMonday and everyone that
(04:18):
followed you was on social mediafor the next like 48 hours,
pretty much every single personwould see your post.
And what happened is people'ssocial feeds started getting
filled up with content that theydidn't necessarily care about.
Maybe you followed KimKardashian, but you didn't you
followed her because she was ona show and you loved that show,
but then she kept postingcontent and you're like, I don't
really care about this content.
(04:39):
And now your social feed'sfilled up with Kim Kardashian's
posts, and you leave Instagrambecause you're like, this is not
in intriguing or interesting,right?
And so the algorithms, the firstbig change, which is a few years
ago that they made was TikTokwas a huge one.
TikTok spearheaded a massiveamount of change, and Instagram
followed suit.
But the real big thing was like,we're only gonna show content to
(05:02):
people who actually care, right?
Um, the real engaged people.
And so maybe only 10%, honestly,now for like what they call mega
influencers or celebrityinfluencers, 1% of their
audience usually engages.
Very, very small percentage andsometimes lower than that.
And so you're posting and you'reonly getting, and maybe you're
paying this person hundreds ofthousands of dollars to a post,
and because they have thesemillions of followers and it
(05:23):
looks amazing, it's this kind ofgreat metric, but it really at
the end of the day, kind ofvanity.
And maybe only a very smallpercentage of those people
actually see that content.
Whereas someone could haveliterally 10,000 followers,
maybe 100,000 followers versus10 million, and because they
produce content that theiraudience loves, a larger portion
(05:45):
of that audience comparativelyis going to see that engage and
engagement correlates withconversion, right?
Um, and I can dive deeper intothose.
There's a secondary change thatwas very massive TikTok speared
that has shifted the entireinfluencer realm.
But that was kind of the bigone.
Any any thoughts on that?
Like to chime in on?
SPEAKER_02 (06:04):
Yeah, you know, the thing that I started thinking
about when you were talking ishow depending on how influential
the influencer is, yeah, thatthat you pick, they're really
like a temporary or short-termspokesperson for your brand.
Absolutely.
And so, you know, I've done aI've done a a few interviews
(06:26):
with people, and and the thingthat I took away from it was um
if you get them to do a post,it's not, and this is goes the
same when you make when you paylike a bunch of money for a
videography company to make avideo for you, right?
Like you have the video, butwhat do you do with it after
that, right?
So the repurposing of it, it'sthe using it on different
(06:48):
channels, like that person thatpeople know identif identify
with key characteristics of yourbrand.
And so you're trying to makethat association, and then it
and then after they post it,you're wanting to reshare it,
you're wanting to takescreenshots of it, you're
wanting to move it, keep itthere, whatever, and I guess
negotiate, making sure that forX period of time, you can reuse
(07:11):
maybe the name, image, andlikeness in a way that helps
boost what you're doing becausethat one post or repost or share
or whatever they did, tweet thatthey did is not gonna reach a
massive amount of people andimpact in that way.
It's gotta be it's gotta besyndicated out uh in a way where
(07:35):
where people find it, and yougot to use that uh piece as like
a high authority piece thatyou're gonna, you know, again,
repurpose.
Uh, and and and that's like thevalue.
Now, you know, you you alsotalked about the LMs.
And you know, the way I look atthe LLMs is they're looking all
across the website like a reallyintelligent human, right?
(07:58):
So how do they like so a reallyuh well thought, like thoughtful
person that's trying to make adecision and comparison and all
this kind of stuff is gonna gothrough those chain uh like like
that customer journey uh toidentify what's the right fit,
right?
So they're automatically likemimicking humans and doing these
(08:20):
things.
So they're gonna go to socialmedia, they're gonna you know go
to review sites, they're gonnaread blogs, they're gonna go to
high authority sites, andthey're gonna aggregate that
information and they're gonnasynthesize it and make a
decision.
Now, you know, you can have thatperson go do that for you and
serve up uh those things.
And now, if you're talking aboutinformation architecture of like
(08:42):
where it is across line, like aline, I can't talk today.
Apologies, I'm on vacation,guys, but um uh like Reddit,
right?
Like if it's posted on Reddit,it can be scraped, it can be
indexed.
Um, and and that information ispublic and people are engaging
or talking about it, even thoughpeople might not see it, that is
(09:04):
relevant, uh, just like aTwitter post is relevant.
If someone is making astatement, I see it in pitch
text all the time.
Someone they're quoting peopleon Twitter because it Twitter uh
it's because it's a publicstatement, right?
Like, so how you got to thinkabout this is how is your brand
showing up everywhere and arepeople talking about you?
(09:28):
I I would love to even get intoif we have time later in this
podcast to talk about how uhinfluencer could help create
engagement, like maybe throughlike if they posted a certain
question that um, because we dothis with podcasting.
So I run a podcasting network aswell, and we we carry the
(09:48):
conversation in a certaindirection based upon what the
sponsors like to see, right?
We're not actively promoting it,but we're we're we're saying,
hey, here's a um uh kind of apublic forum of information that
we want to make sure to get outthere and we want it to go in a
certain direction.
I I feel like maybe as anadvanced strategy, you could use
(10:11):
influencers to help spur thatconversation or to talk about
something you have an interest,but I haven't totally seen that.
I've really just seen thetwo-dimensional, you know, uh
influencer mentions your brandor or retweet something, but but
I'm not in the space as deep asyou.
So um, those are kind of my justinitial thoughts as you started
(10:33):
talking.
SPEAKER_03 (10:34):
Yeah, no, those are all really great points to bring
up.
Um, let me pick a few of themand respond.
So the first thing of just notjust looking at the social
promotion, but looking at thecontent that's generated, which
now the industry calls UGC oruser-generated content.
A lot of people perceiveinfluencers as like a pure
(10:54):
performance marketing play,right?
Like instead of running ads, I'mgonna run influencer marketing.
And there are absolutesimilarities.
You're driving awareness thatleads to sales.
That obviously is a goal for anybrand that's promoting online.
But the cool thing aboutinfluencers is it's kind of
killing multiple boards with onestone.
Like you're not just gettingthis promotion, but you're
(11:14):
actually driving this awareness.
It's helping with SEO, as wediscussed because at least
recently, that um LLMs, Google'sactually analyzing these things.
And then you're also gettingthis really, really valuable
piece of content that exactly asyou said it, like you should be
running ads with that, youshould be doing using it in
marking material, you should beincorporating it into your um
website as kind of a socialproof.
(11:36):
And that's what people actuallyresonate with these days.
Um, because they want to seelike real authentic customers
showing um use case.
Not to say that you shouldn'thave professional photography to
make your brand very clean andprofessional, but you also want
to show real things because nowpeople know, especially with AI
image generation, that likethere's a lot of fake stuff out
(11:57):
there, right?
And how do I trust this productis actually good?
And seeing a real personactually utilize it is one of
the best ways.
Now, on a secondary note, andkind of what I was gonna also
mention previously about a bigthing that how social networks
have changed in the past fewyears, and TikTok really
spearheaded this, is thatbesides just now changing how
(12:21):
the algorithms feed in contentto certain people based off
engagement, one of the biggestthings in that TikTok realized
was hey, if this piece ofcontent that someone promotes,
like a huge portion of theiraudience love it, why should we
restrain that content only tothe people who are following
them?
Maybe we should show it to otherpeople, right, outside of their
follower base.
Um, because it's if it's andthen maybe we show it to like a
(12:44):
hundred people outside theirfollower base at first.
And if those people engage,we'll show it to a thousand,
then maybe 10,000, maybe amillion, right?
Um, and that's gonna keep peopleon the social platforms, which
is their goal, because now theirfeed gets filled up with not
just things that maybe theythought they were interested in,
but kind of theserecommendations of new content
that are really other people areengaging with.
And it what it's done is it'sopened this doorway to kind of
(13:08):
we call democratize the sociallandscape, right?
Taking the power away from thesecelebrities with millions of
followers and enabling someonewho literally could have a
hundred followers, like brandnew social account, to get posts
that go viral.
And it happens all the time.
And so, what now the strategywe've found works the best for
brands, what we actually builtstack influence around, is what
(13:30):
the industry calls nano or microinfluencers.
These like smaller creators,less than 100,000 followers, um,
who, and as opposed to basicallyputting all your eggs in one
basket, you have a limitedmarketing budget, as opposed to
hiring a Kardashian or somecelebrity.
Why not take that marketingbudget, spread it across a
hundred or a thousand smallerpeople, right?
(13:50):
Who you might not have to paythat much money or much smaller
amount than that largercelebrity.
Um, some people are willing todo stuff just even in exchange
for a product, which is actuallywhat Stack Influence we kind of
built the model around as well,and what people call product
seeding, and basically diversifyyour risk.
You're gonna get a huge, muchlarger amount of content.
(14:13):
You're going to increase thatSEO potential, um, and you're
going to kind of increase theodds that your content
potentially can go viral.
You get that more awareness.
Because you put that content inthe hands of 100 people, maybe
three of them go viral.
Whereas you work with fivepeople with a million followers,
like maybe none of them goviral, right?
Your odds are lower, even thoughthey have this kind of higher
(14:35):
follower base and they looksexier, you could say.
Um, so those have been reallybig changes, and where I
recommend brands now investtheir money is like diversify
risk, work with a lot morecreators with smaller budgets on
a per influencer basis, um, andgenerate a huge amount of
content, which you right nowneed to run ads and kind of
marketing material, like havingthree pieces of content is or
(14:57):
having 30 pieces of content isbetter than having three, you
know?
SPEAKER_02 (15:00):
Yeah.
So you said a couple things thatI wanted to uh uh piggyback on.
Um one is you talked a lot aboutin the beginning that how the
algorithm works and the auditionperiod.
There really is an auditionperiod of like how well people
engage with this content.
Um, I think even some of thedata I saw 30% of the time on
(15:23):
social media platforms arelooking at the comments, right?
Of where where where what whatis going on?
Like two people could say thesame thing, right?
And if an influencer says itthat you know has some kind of
association, if he posts theexact same thing, it could go
viral based upon um how manypeople are following him.
(15:44):
And so that there's again thesedevelopment of of strategies,
and and also to your point, youcould create just an awesome
piece of content and your corenetwork could engage, it could
then share it to more people,people like that, and show it to
other people, and it and it goesviral.
Like, I think there's a lot ofmystique behind well, the math
(16:08):
uh or the algorithms of howthese um these platforms work.
But today that information's outthere, so you can understand it,
and and that's what Mr.
Beast did, right?
Like he just tested YouTube andhe tested and he tested, and you
know, of course, uh realityshows and game shows are what
you know, like Americans like,and you know, so that's kind of
(16:31):
why he went in that direction.
But if people like somethingelse, he would have gone in that
direction, right?
Absolutely.
Um and and I think that to yourpoint, you gotta be testing
stuff out there and seeingwhat's working.
Even if someone looks great onpaper, you don't want to put all
your eggs in basket.
You want to you want to testthem out and see how they do
against your audience because Ireally feel like it's a layering
(16:54):
strategy with your brand.
All these different componentsmake up your brand.
And to bring in the flavor of amicro influencer or a mid-size
influencer could could reallyhelp.
But having these champions outthere, I mean, I I see it in
crypto.
Like, I mean, right?
Like you just see it in cryptothat someone has a product and
(17:15):
they get it out to all thesedifferent people, and then
everybody gives their honesttake of whatever they think.
And okay, there might be someshady, like, here's some tokens
and whatever that's going on.
But but for the most part, Ithink people are sharing what
they think, and then people aredaisy chaining that information
and it's proliferating outthere.
(17:36):
Same goes if you have a product,right?
You have e-commerce product, youwant to get some trials out
there.
You need going back to Googleand eat like expertise,
authority, trust, andexperience.
They added experience because ofthe AI.
If you've tried the product,you're holding the product,
you're using the product.
If they say something, it shouldhave more weight to it, right?
(17:58):
And um, and so I mean, reviewsare so big and and product
trials are are really what wherewhere it goes.
I I I I shared with you in kindof the pre-interview.
Um, I'm gonna bring a buddy onuh that that started Turtle Box,
it's a big um uh uh likewaterproof speaker, right?
(18:21):
That has all kinds ofpartnerships and associations
with fishing brands and um youknow, line extension, like they
have not done anythingtraditional, right?
Like they rank for their name,they don't rank for any
unbranded terms, there's no SEOinvolved, but they built the
right relationships and theyplaced their product in the
(18:43):
right hands that peopleidentified that that that fish
or that are on the water orwhatever, and it and it carried
through that user-generatedcontent uh and partnerships like
a life of its own, right?
So I think that how I seeinfluencers going is it helps
you kind of kick start a naturalphenomenon that maybe you're
(19:06):
trying to create.
Um, you know, now I I think thatyou could seed a lot of stuff
for free products and over time,but but but I I don't know, you
tell me.
I feel like the goal is to kindof create a movement, right?
Absolutely create an immunitybehind your product, and a lot
(19:29):
of people kind of follow theleader, you know, they they
don't want to be the first oneto go, and so if you can get
some people out there or peoplethey know that trust it, they're
more willing to give it a try,make their own honest
assessment, and and really now alot of people do things very
publicly online.
So when you say influencer,micro influencer, like there's a
(19:53):
lot of people like on Facebook.
I did this test.
This is funny, William.
I don't I didn't I didn't reallyuse Facebook, but like like I
think Facebook's gonna come backinto vogue.
I think it's a centralized hub.
And and so I said, Hey, I'mgonna do a challenge.
Anybody want to do it with me?
I'm gonna post for every day,just one post, not even like
crazy video or anything.
(20:13):
Just I'm gonna just post onetime a day, and I don't have
this huge audience or anythinglike that on Facebook, like on
LinkedIn or anything.
And and I'm like, these are likefamily friends, let's see what
happens.
So I did it 30 days.
I had we would it was like 328views over a 28-day period, and
then the next 28-day period overthat 30-day kind of launch,
(20:37):
19,000 impressions organicallyjust static posting once a day,
yeah, right.
Yeah, so like we all aredemocratized through social
media, yeah.
Absolutely have a massive amountof reach that a lot of companies
and brands would uh would die tohave, and now you have just all
(20:57):
these people, and these microinfluencers are maybe uh just a
little bit more intentional or alittle bit more um engaged
online and are posting and andhave this huge network and reach
because of it, which I think isabsolutely amazing.
SPEAKER_03 (21:14):
100% to add on to that.
So, one thing that I find worksreally well at with product
seeding, and you'd think, like,why would I just give a free
product away?
Why don't I just pay someone,right?
But people deserve to get paid.
I'll start with that, right?
You need to get paid for yourwork, but you can incentivize
people through additionalchannels like affiliate
(21:35):
commissions, right?
If they make sales, they getcommissions.
If they do certain content orthey you give them someone gives
you rights to the content, youpay them incrementally, right?
But when you find someone who'swilling to just put in a bunch
of effort to promote a productin exchange for just that
product, it means they actuallylike it, right?
Yeah, um, as opposed to if I payyou a thousand bucks, you might
(21:55):
promote really any product, butthen 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 isauthenticity, right?
Like, is this a realtestimonial?
And consumers can pick up on itlike that.
Like, you know, and this iswhere honestly the celebrities,
a lot of them have died offbecause you know, like when Kim
Kardashian is promotingsomething, like she's getting
paid a huge amount of money forit.
(22:16):
Does she actually care aboutthat product?
You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01 (22:18):
Does she actually unless it's her unless it's
hers, right?
She's got some kind of licensingdeal, like there's even bias
there.
SPEAKER_03 (22:24):
But um, and not to say celebrities aren't valuable
at all, right?
But I think going back toactually something that you
said, which is you want to testa lot to figure out where your
through line is, right?
And that's where product seedingor smaller creators are
fantastic for that, because youcan every product works
differently.
Some products, maybe it's anunboxing that is really what
(22:46):
consumers love.
Maybe you have to actually showit and demonstrate it in use.
Maybe just a static post of atthe beach with utilizing the
product is how it's going toperform well, right?
So you want to test a bunch ofdifferent things.
And then once you align orfigure out what is what works
for my brand or for my product,then going up tier and paying
(23:09):
kind of these larger people whoare very niche or very good at
this specific thing that you'vetested out.
Um, and then kind of having thisoverall um strategy or portfolio
with these different things.
And the last thing I'll also sayis um, and you brought this up
previous kind of statement orquestion was um is it valuable
to have kind of like somethrough line or some um
(23:31):
messaging that's not just, hey,here's the product and look at
me, right?
Like, and getting people toactually engage with the brand,
right?
And that is absolutelyimportant.
And something that is more of arecent trend that people are
realizing is very, very valuableand necessary to do.
Um, and the reason for twothings is one, people on social
(23:52):
media now we're bombarded bycontent.
It's only gonna get worse withAI.
You have to have inspirationalthings, you have to have
educational content, you have tohave things that people taught
like that bring you in, right?
You need to have a good hook andpeople lose interest within the
first three seconds.
And so you kind of got to havethese different layers to have a
through line, and the brandneeds to come up with that.
(24:13):
You want to give peoplecreativity to come up with a
unique idea, but still directthem of like, this is the
message we're trying to getacross, right?
And then also try to impart somesort of way that people actually
engage or share this content.
Um, because sharing now hasbecome kind of that a really
important thing that thealgorithm does to push it
(24:34):
forward.
It's a natural signal that,like, if someone's sharing this,
obviously it's better than themjust clicking like on it, right?
Um, it means that they'reactually pushing it forward with
their audience.
So um a lot of people will pushforward like comments and
shares, like share this withyour friend, or comment here to
get a white paper, or to get allmy tips and tricks for this, or
(24:55):
to get a coupon code, right?
And then you can createautomations in the DM funnels
based off that.
But that is something that Iabsolutely recommend people
implement from day one to testhow things are working because
you just increase yourlikelihood that that content
that people are pushing forwardis going to have a potential
chance to go viral.
(25:16):
And then the last thing alsovalue to these smaller creators
is like they're way more engagedwith the people who are
following them or maybe just seetheir content.
Like they have time, they loveit, they're trying to build this
social following.
So when someone comments or DMsthem, they're much more likely
to like respond to that versuslike a celebrity who's super
busy and gets all thesedifferent DMs every day, like
(25:37):
they're not responding to yourbrand inquiries, right?
So that's another really bigadvantage to working with these
smaller creators, um, is thatthey're just also more likely to
help you kind of build thatbrand and be a real um important
advocate in the long run.
SPEAKER_02 (25:52):
I love that.
Okay, I have two things that uhcame 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 you you got me.
Okay.
How how does someone develop ago-to-market strategy and how
should they incorporate uminfluencers in that strategy?
(26:15):
Like, you know, at thebeginning, middle, end, all how
how should they look at it andthen maybe share a couple case
studies of maybe smaller brandsor e-commerce brands that um,
you know, hadn't done it beforeand then started to use it and
it just blew up.
I would love to hear a littlebit of some success stories.
SPEAKER_03 (26:37):
Absolutely.
So a few different ways you cango about this, depending on
whether you have zero marketingbudget.
And this is actually a beautifulthing about influencers, like
you can get started withnothing, right?
Um, or if you're kind of agrowing brand or you're an
enterprise, right?
Like, I mean, as an ode Unileverjust took 50%, they just
announced this past year, 50% ofevery single one, all of their
(26:59):
entire advertising and marketingbudget and pushing it, pushing
it towards influencers.
So if they're doing it,obviously it works, right?
Um, but let's just take someone,no marketing budget, just
starting out, right?
Um, when you're just startingout, you should have a website,
you should have a social mediaprofile, and you better have a
product, right, to sell, right?
So you have all those threethings.
(27:20):
If you don't figure your stuffout and get those locked down.
Um but once you have those, um,you can start DMing people on
social media, right?
And there's also a lot of freeonline tools, like Facebook has
their own influencer network,TikTok has their own influencer
network.
You can utilize these to searchfor different niches.
Look at your competitors, right?
Or people who are tangential toyour market, right?
(27:41):
Like maybe you are selling ayoga mat.
Look at a yoga fashion companyand who the types of people
they're working at with, right?
Um, start searching.
A lot of these social networkshave search functionality that's
based off hashtags, as anexample, right?
Um, again, you're selling thisyoga mat, search for hashtag
yogi, hashtag meditation,hashtag dog doggy down, right?
(28:06):
Downwards.
Um, different things that arerelated to your industry.
Um, and then downward dog iswhat the word I was actually
trying to get there.
Um, and basically start findingprofiles.
And then this takes time, right?
But start DMing people.
If you can get their emailaddress, email them and
negotiate with them.
First, before you do this, comeup with some sort of brief,
(28:26):
right?
Like, what's your brand about?
What kind of maybe incentivesyou want to offer someone?
Maybe it's an affiliatecommission, you give them 10,
20% of sales, huge amount ofawesome software is out there to
automate that um commission.
You could do it manually,hypothetically.
Um, and then start offeringpeople, hey, loved your brand.
Would you like, if you findalignment, would you like me to
(28:48):
send you the product for free?
Right.
Um, and that's you're gonna getfirst off, it's gonna take time.
These are the downsides to thesystem.
Some people might steal yourproduct, you send it to them,
they don't do anything for you.
Um, you have to trackeverything, you have to confirm
they actually post on time,right?
So there are some hiccups alongthat way, but you really can get
(29:09):
started with nothing.
And you can start gettingfeedback about your product
right away.
Like people are gonna tell youif the product sucks, um, which
is very valuable.
You're gonna get some content tonow start incorporating to your
website, building out yoursocial profile, if you start
running ads, um, and you'regonna just get the product in
the hands of people who mightactually use it, word of mouth
marketing, brand awareness,sales.
(29:30):
So it's like this bundle ofbenefits that's going to also
help you create a foundation forall these other marketing
tactics that you may want topursue in the future.
Now, if you have some marketingbudget to spend, the second
thing, there's now a huge amountof softwares out there that can
help you automate a lot of thisstuff, right?
Databases of influencers.
(29:50):
Now you don't have to manuallysearch for hashtags or things.
You can use these softwares tosearch for people.
Um, you can use them to pay themout to track kind of the
progress to confirm.
Confirmed posts, right?
Um, so tapping into those, someare cheaper, some are very
expensive, depending on whatyou're looking for.
Um, and then the third kind ofoption is using kind of a full
(30:12):
automated system, which isactually what we do at Stack
Influence.
You come to us, you set yourtargets.
Um, I want 100 people, this ismy focus, and we have a
dedicated community of about600,000 people who are going to,
we're gonna tap into for you anddo all of the heavy lifting for
you.
Agencies also can do that foryou as well.
Might cost an arm and a legbecause they don't have that
dedicated community, they mightbe using another software, but
(30:35):
still saves you a lot of time,right?
Um, and a lot of the headaches.
Now that's kind of, I would say,the different strategies to go
out.
Um, some people use VAs, somepeople use software, some people
use agencies, some people useplatforms.
Um, but overall, absolutelyfantastic strategy.
And going to some, I am a littlebiased on that, but I also, by
(30:57):
the way, a little background,used to be a nine-figure
e-commerce seller myself.
I ran a digital marketing agencyfor about 10 years.
Like I've been in the trencheswith this.
The reason I built StackInfluence with my two
co-founders was because we faceda huge amount of pitfalls and
realized how valuable it was tonot only promote our own
products, but also our clients.
Um, and so we realized hey,there's a lot, this is a
(31:19):
valuable strategy.
There's a lot of technology thatcould be built to support this.
Um, and it's only growing, it'sonly becoming more powerful.
And there's a lot of facts aswell.
I'll give you some results too.
SPEAKER_02 (31:31):
But yeah, yeah, no, no, just so you just made me
think of something.
So, what do you think of therise of AI influencers?
Tell me, because I'm seeing AIinfluencer agencies, like
certainly, there's certainindustries that it's moving
faster than others.
Um, but there's a lot ofaccounts out there that are not
(31:54):
real people like at all.
Um, what is your thought on thatemerging market?
SPEAKER_03 (31:59):
Absolutely.
We've been looking at it veryclosely.
We've considered building ourown AI stuff, right?
But the reality that we've cometo, and you'll see this if you
see anyone using AI influencersor incorporating kind of like AI
personas in their posts.
At the end of the day, peoplevalue authenticity, right?
Like that's what they want.
(32:20):
They want real truthful liketestimonials and portrayals of
their brand or product.
And AI is like the opposite ofthat, right?
It's like totally fake.
And so, as much as it isactually, it's it's working
right now in some capacities aslike a novelty factor, right?
You're like, you see these postsand you're like, oh my God, that
(32:42):
is a fake person, but it looksso real and it's like creative,
right?
Like, I've been seeing someactually professional almost
videos done with AI, and it'slike that is awesome, right?
Like, and it's really effective.
You can produce this like adthat might have cost you
hundreds of thousands of dollarsin like 20 minutes, right?
And like I think those are goingto be very powerful, and I think
(33:04):
it's going to incorporate into alot of like think the Super Bowl
ad style stuff.
Um, 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.
You go to the comments, everyonewho comments and anyone
listening, like go check thisout next time you see an AI
video.
(33:24):
Every single person says, like,fake AI, like, AI, get out of
here.
Like, and they end up, itactually backfires on you as a
brand.
Like it decreases your trust,right?
Even if the message is reallyauthentic.
Um, and I think that's onlygoing to progress even more
because the AI technologies aregetting better and more people
are utilizing them.
It's easier.
(33:45):
So it's like, I think it will beutilized in in certain ways that
is powerful, like editing as anexample, right?
You film a video of yourselftalking, and then you're
utilizing AI softwares to editthat and cut it together and
make some animations on it, um,some captions for it.
Like that is powerful.
That saves you time, thatenhances the video that's still
(34:05):
authentic.
Um, but like a pure AI avatar, Ithink some of them are gonna be
really successful and thatthere's a vanity to it.
But I think that it's not gonnareplace normal people, right?
Um, just because people feellike it's fake and
untrustworthy.
SPEAKER_02 (34:21):
And then and then William, I had another question.
So Gary Vanderchuck's talking alot about um like the live QVC
style, yeah, uh like liveshopping, I guess.
What are you what are you seeingaround that?
Like, have you been digging intothat a little bit?
SPEAKER_03 (34:38):
Absolutely.
That's I believe only going toget more um more impactful and
more popular, um, especially inthe US.
So, like, as an example, I I'mnot gonna remember the exact
stat, but like in the Asianmarket, specifically China, like
live shopping is like equatesfor like 20% or 30%, some crazy
(34:58):
metric of like every singlee-commerce sale.
It's like astronomical, and it'slike 20 times what the US, like
they're they're light yearsahead on that.
And I think a big part of it islike everyone lives on their
phone.
There's these unified apps thatkind of connect everyone
consistently.
Um, and that's where peoplelive.
But there's a lot of pushtowards this market.
(35:18):
I think there's only going to bemore evolution, not only on the
social networks, but also on thee-commerce platforms.
As an example, Amazon launchedAmazon Live, right?
Incorporates with theirinfluencers.
Um, they've failed a few timesin their kind of influencer
programs, like they had what wascalled the Inspire app.
They just shut it down.
They had tried another apppreviously, um, but they've
(35:41):
still kept Amazon Live going,right?
And you see TikTok also comingout with a lot of consistent
live features.
Um it's only gonna be morepowerful.
I think there's gonna be morepartnerships between the social
and e-commerce networks that aregoing to happen.
And and we had this, like thethe US was on the forefront of
(36:01):
this with QVC, right?
And QVC is trying to get intothe social realm right now.
They're having a bit of trouble.
Um, I think there's a still alot of kinks to work out, but I
do think that that is themerging of e-commerce and social
networks is is a big future.
One last example here is um anapp called Flip Shop.
It was, it's now become trendingto become one of the top apps.
(36:24):
At one point, it was like on thetop 10 in the app store for a
time being when like TikTok waspotentially getting banned.
Hasn't taken over yet, but it'slike imagine Amazon combined
with TikTok, right?
Instead of leaving a review, youleave like a TikTok video.
So it's like social shoppingcombined and live combined with
um with the shoppingmarketplaces.
And again, I think a lot ofother platforms are gonna follow
(36:46):
suit on that.
SPEAKER_02 (36:47):
You know, it's interesting.
Uh Google just did their kind oflaunch where they're moving
everything towards YouTube,right?
And um AI search, and they'retrying to own like the whole
funnel, right?
Like you search for it, you findthe product you want, and you
buy it, and they have a lot ofthat technology.
(37:08):
I can see totally why they wantto include the social posts and
stuff like on there, because ifthat helps sell a product,
right?
You have that product reviewfrom that influencer that gets
indexed because it has a bunchof followers, you know, that
person has a bunch of followersthat post shows something off,
they can show that in search andthen they can say buy here,
(37:31):
right?
They can get, they can capturethat sale.
So, like I mean, when you getthe big money and the algorithms
behind this, where it a lotwhere it's a win-win-win, um,
things move.
Like we always say that, andthen they launch uh a new tool,
uh like the live tools that thatkind of rolled out on all the
(37:52):
platforms, they would reallypush it.
And and I I think this nextevolution's uh gonna be kind of
like this live shopping uhcomponent, uh, and the the
e-commerce and the influencersplay play right into that.
Man, there's like so much noiseuh out there right now.
Like every time I open up mysocial app, I'm like, oh my
(38:12):
gosh, I missed so much stuff,and there's all kinds of stuff
that uh is happening, and andthese feeds are customized for
you.
Can you share with us some ofthe success stories that you've
done so somebody can help go,okay?
I think I want to do this.
How would I put something likethat together again with all
this noise?
(38:33):
Um, is it not just going to getswallowed up in the sea of uh
you know attention?
Or you know, what are what arethe best ways to when you share
those stories of how they brokethrough?
SPEAKER_03 (38:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So a few different successstories.
I'll share three um on differentkinds of realms of influencer
value.
So the first, just naturally onsocial media, right?
And you could say performancemarketing, um, is had a brand
did a hundred influencers.
That may seem like a lot, but ifyou're just sending out free
(39:07):
products, it's actually prettyaffordable.
Um, 20 of those influencers,20%, ended up, and by the way,
these influencers have anaverage of about 3,000
followers.
20 of them got over a millionhits, right?
And that correlated with themliterally having a brand new
product launch to starting to do5,000 sales a month
(39:28):
consistently, right?
Um, and then they built upabout, I think 30 of them became
these longer-term affiliates forthem.
So not everyone was interestedin it or wasn't the right fit,
but now they built up thiscommunity that's like now
consistently promoting.
They they compensated them witha free product once, um, and
then they've incentivized them.
And now these people are likefor months doing consistent
(39:50):
promotions because they'regetting paid for it for what the
results that they actuallydrive.
And that brand now has doubleddown, and like they utilize a
platform like ours like toconsistently build up that
community.
And that's a really great tacticbrands should implement is like
don't just rely on the oneplatform, build out if you're
paying for something, startbringing people almost in-house,
(40:10):
right?
And like work with them, maybecreate a Discord around them,
Slack channels, like engage withthem, right?
Like those are real dedicated,like loving customers who love
your product enough to actuallyconsistently work for you to
promote it.
Um, and if you do that, it'sexponential growth.
Second big case study um successstory is taking aside, they had
(40:31):
some good results for the socialposts, um, but it wasn't like
astronomical results.
But then they got all thiscontent and they used one piece
of content and decreased theirad cost by five times.
Um, and it's now consistentlythe best performing ad, right?
And they utilize a tactic alsocalled whitelisting in this,
where they like got theinfluencers' permission to run
(40:51):
an ad through their own profile.
Yeah.
Um, so and this is somethingthat like pitfall people give up
sometimes on influencers toofast.
They're like, I want to testthis out.
Let's do three of them, right?
And then they don't like drivetoo many sales and they never
even utilize the content, right?
And it's like you just lost outon all this potential, right?
(41:11):
Like, um, first off, give morepeople a chance.
Maybe you missed the mark on whoyou reached out to, maybe you
didn't align them properly,maybe you picked the wrong
people.
Um, and then you didn't alsotest that content and see how
valuable that was.
And so, as this example, likethey didn't do, they got some
awareness, um, they got a fewsales, it didn't provide a big
ROI for them on the promotionalside.
(41:33):
But then this content, like inthe long term, has provided, I
don't even know what the actualmetric of ROI is, but like 5x
improved overall conversionrates um and and decrease those
costs as a result.
And so um another amazing studyof just like how one piece of
that influencer puzzle canactually really be beneficial.
(41:55):
And the last success story I'lltell is on an Amazon
marketplace, right?
So um again, influencermarketing works across the
board, whether you are providinga SaaS product or an e-commerce
product, right?
Um, but a lot of our clients, soat Stack Influence, we focus on
e-commerce brands.
And a lot of them are selling onmarketplaces like Amazon,
(42:16):
Walmart, Target, Sephora, etcetera.
There's an extra advantage tomarketplace growth combined with
influencers.
And the reason behind that ismarketplaces like Amazon, excuse
me, are like a search enginelike Google, right?
If someone searches for, let'ssay, going back to my yoga mat
example, yoga mats, right?
(42:36):
There's 45 listings on the firstpage of Amazon.
If you're not shown there, um,you're not 80% of people don't
buy, right?
And I think the top like fivelistings or 10 listings control
like 80% of the sales there,right?
So, like if you're not shown,and there might be hundreds, if
not thousands, of pages for yogamats on Amazon, right?
So sometimes people say, like, Ilaunch a brand, and it's the
(42:57):
same thing for Google.
Like, I'm gonna put up awebsite, I'm gonna make a huge
amount of sales, right?
And it's like, no, you have tolike optimize for SEO, you might
have to run some ads, you gottado some influencer marketing.
Same thing with Amazon.
They're like, Amazon controls50% of every e-commerce sale in
the US.
Like, I'm gonna make a listing,and it's like you're on page
5,000, like no one sees yourproduct.
So, how do you get theiralgorithm to actually show you?
(43:18):
And a bit different from Google.
Obviously, keywords areimportant, but um, Amazon's most
important metric to show you aredoes your product sell, right?
Like, what are the salesmetrics?
Do people click?
Do people add it to the cart?
Do they leave a review?
Like, what are these metricsthat are worthy for you to be at
the top when someone searches,right?
Because if they put you thereand you don't sell, Amazon just
(43:39):
lost money because it's alimited amount of space and
they're getting big commissionsfrom these every single sale
that happens, right?
So they want to be sure thatwhen they show you, you're gonna
be a high performing product.
Now, going back, influencerfantastic for this because when
you first launch, Amazon's nevershowing you.
Like there's no chance, theyhave no data on you.
And it takes a while for them tocollect data.
(44:00):
They might show you on page likefive, maybe page one for like 30
seconds.
See if anyone buys, push youback down, right?
So, because they're trying tosee what this data is.
Now, if you can run what'scalled external traffic
campaigns, an ad from Googlegoing to Amazon, a Facebook ad,
an influencer marketingcampaign, an email um promotion
that goes to Amazon, right?
(44:21):
Give Amazon data it needs todetermine where to place you,
right?
And if you can show them, hey,out of 10 people who go to my
listing, five of them buy, likeAmazon's gonna very quickly
start pushing you up in theranks.
And we've seen influencers workfantastic for this if you do it
in a good controlled mannerbecause engagement levels like
conversions are very high,right?
(44:42):
The people who click from theinfluencer promotion, it's
trusted.
So a high portion of them go tothe listing and convert.
You might not get a huge amount.
Um, yeah, any questions aboutthat?
SPEAKER_02 (44:53):
Uh, so I I've interviewed some Amazon experts
and they've talked about uh theexternal campaigns that you kind
of need to warm up your profilea little bit before before you
like drive a massive amount oftraffic to that.
Can you just speak to that fromyour experience and your angle
on what that actually means andhow that might be differing with
(45:16):
influencers?
SPEAKER_03 (45:17):
Yeah.
So in terms of warming up, thatis accurate.
I don't think you need to gothrough a massive warm-up um
phase, but you do need to do afew things.
So, like you need to make surethat your listing is properly
optimized, right?
Um, so meaning like you do haveto have good keywords, like and
like optimize for the keywordspeople are searching.
Otherwise, you could drive awhole amount of like traffic
(45:39):
there.
Amazon's not gonna know where toposition you, right?
Um, the second thing is you needactually good content, right?
Like you get on the first pageif your competitors have way
better content than you, umincluding professional content,
and like you have a bad pricepoint, like they're not gonna
click it and buy you, right?
And if you don't, once you'rethere, if you don't make sales,
um, you're gonna get droppeddown very quickly.
(46:02):
Um, last thing is reviews.
So, like Amazon has reviews arevery strict, you can't require
incentivized reviews, like it'sa hard thing to solve, right?
And until you get sales, right,you're not getting reviews.
Amazon does have somethingcalled the Vine program, which I
recommend everyone does whenyou're first launching an
Amazon.
It's a way to syndicate, sendsome free products out, and you
can get up to about 30 reviewson your listing to start off
(46:23):
with.
So recommend you do all of thosethings right away.
But once those are in place,like you're confident your
keywords are there, you'reconfident you got a good product
with photos, videos, pricepoint.
Um, you did a Vine program, yougot some initial reviews.
I recommend actuallyimplementing external traffic as
soon as possible.
Um, because it's just gonna takelonger.
(46:44):
We see insane results, and it'sactually the best results I've
ever seen from an influencercampaign.
Because not only did they getthe social promotions, they got
the content they can repurpose.
I've literally seen 13x growthon an influencer promotion
before through Amazon becausethey went from page 10 to page
one.
Their product was good, theystayed there.
Influencer campaign stops, theynow have all of these eyeballs.
(47:07):
And so they're making a thousandsales a month.
Um, or it was like about ahundred sales a month, and they
went to 1300.
Um, and then influencers stoppedpromoting.
Their sales did not stop becausenow they were they were visible
to all of these thousands ofpeople, tens of thousands of
people who are actuallysearching for that keyword,
they're now showing up for.
And they had a good product toto actually push forward, right?
(47:29):
So that's the power there.
But I do actually I don't thinkthat you need to.
I mean, don't invest like tensof thousands of dollars into an
ad campaign like day one on yourAmazon listing, right?
Like incrementally go.
There's also other strategies oflike maybe starting higher in a
price point and thenincrementally dropping to where
(47:50):
you want to be, right?
Like doing certain promotions,turning on my strategy for
people is like do externaltraffic first, then turn on
Amazon PPC, which is a game youkind of have to play.
Once the influencer campaign andthat external traffic kind of
subsides, you got to kind ofplay Amazon's game there.
But um, that's the formula thatI see really, really successful
for the brands that utilize ourplatform for that.
SPEAKER_02 (48:12):
I love it.
I I think that that's a great,like, unknown secret of internet
marketing right there is how tohow to seed your campaign, uh,
how to impact influencers to getthat listening up.
And then you add your paid ads,right?
Like, because you do have tokind of play some of these
platforms game to to get shown.
(48:34):
Um, you know, they're not asgangster as Yelp, but you know,
I like I and Yelp's done waybetter.
Okay.
I have a Yelp rep and I likethem.
And uh but but Yelp, uh, theythey actually, when they
started, they were recruiting atmy high school and people didn't
even know what it was.
And um, you know, so I've I'vekind of followed that that that
brand in particular, but umawesome.
(48:56):
Is there anything, William, thatthat we haven't covered?
Uh, if there's anything elseyou'd like to share, as well as
where to follow you, to hearkind of some more of these
strategies and success stories,and then we'll definitely uh
link to Stack Influence uh inthe show notes.
SPEAKER_03 (49:12):
Awesome.
Um, last really quick tip,because I've just heard some
insane stories, and we're notdoing this just yet, but just as
like a advice to people in therealm, if you're any e-commerce
seller listening, um, is TikTokshop.
So TikTok shop has created thisamazing funnel with influencers,
affiliates, and then what arecalled whitelisting on TikTok.
(49:33):
They're called Spark Ads, solike utilizing influencers
profile to run ads.
Um, it's amazing turnwheelsystem.
I just heard a case study abouta brand, one of our clients, but
is utilizing some other systemto do this.
We're actually building outfeatures to optimize this, but
basically went from zero to 40million in less than six months.
They are an established brand,so they had some brand awareness
(49:54):
already, right?
But like that is, and they outof their mouth, like the fastest
they've ever seen them grow onany platform.
And I mean, that's in absolutelyinsane growth.
And all they did was seed outproducts to influencers, um, and
at like a rate of hundreds permonth, right?
Like, so decent scale, right?
Not every brand can do that, butlike you can do this with 10 a
(50:18):
month, right?
And like still have good successrates.
You seed out products, you get agive them all affiliate kind of
um commissions, you pick thebest people who have generated
the best sales, so kind of theyget your brand the best, get
permissions to run ads withthem, feed them into a TikTok's
ad algorithm, let the algorithmliterally put the budget towards
(50:39):
whichever is performing best.
And as it scales up and hitsyour cacks and your price points
and your margins, um, keepfunding it until it goes over.
And it's like that was just theformula they did to go zero 40
million in six months.
SPEAKER_02 (50:54):
So I have a friend that's on the uh TikTok shop
tame, and I've been trying toget her on the podcast, but she
like she can't do it.
Um, I might be able to get herin like a private mastermind or
something like that.
Um, TikTok's pretty crazy, likethey can't, they don't even have
email addresses, they like onlydo everything in chat and it
(51:15):
like disappears.
It's a little, it's a littlecreepy of maybe what's going on
there, but but TikTok shop isabsolutely uh crushing it.
And and I appreciate youmentioning that.
Um, William, where are youactive on social media?
How do people find you, followyou, and um, you know, anything
(51:36):
else you want to share aboutstackinfluence.com.
It's a great platform.
You can all go there and uhcheck it out and and get started
and get access to this hugenetwork of uh influencers that
William and his team has builtup.
SPEAKER_03 (51:49):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So if anyone listening ise-commerce brand, that's our
main focus.
High-level Stack Influence, weconnect e-commerce brands to
micro nano influencers andautomate the collaborations at
scale.
Very simple.
You want to reach out to us,find us on social.
We're at Stack Influence,basically on every single social
platform.
Best way, go toStackInfluids.com.
(52:11):
If you want to talk with one ofour influencer experts, which we
try to do to gauge where you'reat in your influencer world, top
right hand corner, you can clicka call, book a call with us very
easily.
Um, feel free to connectpersonally with me on LinkedIn
at William Gassner.
Um, and yeah, we'd love to workwith anyone who's interested or
always happy to just provideadvice in the influencer realm.
(52:31):
And thanks for having me on thepodcast, Matthew.
SPEAKER_02 (52:34):
Awesome.
Well, guys, if you got somevalue in this, please like,
share, follow.
We really appreciated all thoseuh inner engagements, help uh
the algorithm.
Uh we we are uh we're trying togrow.
So uh anything you can do if youif you got value out of this, uh
totally appreciate that.
Uh until the next time,everybody.
(52:55):
My name is Matt Bertram.
This is the unknown secrets ofinternet marketing.
Bye bye for now.
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