The Seeding Strategy That Scales: Influencer Marketing with Stack Influence | EP. #193 - The E-Comm Show

Episode Transcript
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William Gasner (00:03):
The hardest thing about influencers is
dealing with these smallercreators, because finding a
celebrity, you're gonna pay 10sof 1000s of dollars to do a
collaboration like not toodifficult, right?

Andrew Maff (01:06):
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of
the Ecomm show. As usual, I amyour host, Andrew Maff, and
today Iam joined by the amazingWilliam Gasner, who is the CMO
over at Stack Influence.
William, how you doing, buddy?
You ready for a good show?

Fantastic. And thanks for having me on. Andrew,

Yeah, no worries. I appreciate you joining us. So
obviously, Stack Influence. Sowe're talking influencer
marketing, talking UGC stuff,which is basically feels like
90% of E commerce marketingnowadays. So very interested to
hear everything you have to say.
But I always like to start these

of Stack Influence. I'm also one of the
off relatively stereotypically,kind of give you the floor. Tell
us a bit about your background,about stack influence. We'll
take it from there,co founders. My background is
actually in E commerce. SoE commerce seller for about 20
years, and sold varietydifferent products, from cutting
boards and jewelry to teethwhitening products and toys, and
during that journey, used a hugeamount of influencer marketing

(02:05):
to scale up those e commercebrands, as you previously
mentioned as well. It's a hottopic within the E commerce
world, but it was extremelyeffective for us, especially in
the smaller creator realm. Sonano, micro influencers, for
those of you who don't knowthose terms, basically social
media users who are willing todo product promotions with less

(02:25):
than 100,000 followers. And onthat journey, basically started
to hit some roadblocks in termsof, how do we scale out this,
and how do we automatemanagement, or deal with kind of
the day-to-day logistics ofaccomplishing scaled micro
influencer collaborations. Andso during that journey, we

(02:47):
started to build out a bunch ofinternal tools to help with that
process, and that snowballed in2008 into its own business, and
the rest is history, and that'show stack influence basically
came to fruition.

Wow. So you've been at it for we're coming up on 20
years, so little over 15 yearsat this point, you said 2008

2018 sorry,

18. Oh, okay, so almost still,

yeah, it's been a while. It's been a long
journey.

So tell me a little bit about the platform and the
process, because I know ifyou're doing this, obviously,
we'll probably talk about iteventually, but obviously pretty
highly recommended for almostevery e commerce brand to use
some type of influencermarketing, UGC, whether it's
through social aspects or it'sthrough their email or even on

(03:39):
product pages or onmarketplaces, you name it, but
doing it, doing it like, from amanual process, is it's a pain
in the ass, right? Like you'reyou're just, you're just
scraping you're looking athashtags, you're reaching out to
people. You're trying toremember who you reached out to.
You're following up with them.
Like, it's a bit of a process.

(04:00):
And then to do that at scale isobviously a nightmare. So what
tell me about the platform andthe process and kind of how
brands use it,

Absolutely and all the points you just brought
up, are the reasons we actuallybuilt Stack Influence to solve
them. So taking a quick stepback, the hardest thing about
influencers is dealing withthese smaller creators, because
finding a celebrity, you'regonna pay 10s of 1000s of
dollars to do a collaborationlike not too difficult, right?

(04:31):
If you're gonna pay a hugeamount of money, but if you're
dealing with smaller creators,especially what our platform
actually specializes in isproduct seeding, so product
compensation collaborations,basically sending someone a free
product in exchange for themcreating content posting on
social media. In order to makethat tactic effective, you need
to work with a lot of people andall the things you just said,

(04:53):
scraping reaching out, managinglogistics, making sure people
post on time, making sure peopledon't steal your product. Like
it's an absolute nightmare. Andso we set out to solve really
three main objectives with stackinfluence. The first is, how do
you effectively do productseeding? So get getting people

(05:14):
to do a collaboration just for afree product and not steal your
product, actually do itproperly. The second thing was,
how do you find enough people atany given time to scale up, and
not just and when I say scalelike, hundreds or 1000s of
collaborations a month. And thenthe third was, okay, you found
all these people, you gotconvinced them to do something
for a free product. How do youmanage those logistics, like,

(05:36):
how do you get them product? Howdo you make sure they post on
time, etc? And so that's reallywhat the Stack Influence
platform solves. A brand cansign up for the system. They set
a goal. Maybe they want 500influencers. Maybe they want
5000 they set a timeframe theywant to accomplish. They upload
some product info and someposting guidelines of what
they're trying to do. And thenfrom there, the platform handles

(05:57):
every single thing else. Theysit back, relax. They have a
tracking dashboard so they canmonitor the flow of everything.
And then how we charge isliterally only pay for results.
You only pay when someonecompletes a post, and to pay as
you go system. So you can set agoal of 5 million influencers,

So is it like, you know, once a brand obviously
submits this campaign, then, isyour platform automatically
doing the outreach, or is itmore of like a you've already
got a community of creators thatyou work with?

Great question.
So the latter is we built thiscommunity with about 600,000
people. That was a really bigkey to doing this effectively,
the majority of other influencerplatforms out there, and what we
used to utilize, when we wererunning our own e commerce
brands are just a database ofpeople. It's like people tout
like, we have 30 million peoplein our database, but like, and

(07:00):
then you pay this big monthlyfee for those systems, but then
you're cold, outreaching toeveryone. Like, less than a
percent of people even respondto you. A very much smaller
percentage end up actually doinganything with you. So to scale
it becomes using just a databaseis really difficult. And so what
we set out to do, and it tookus, really almost seven years to
build up this large dedicatedcommunity is and we did a lot of

(07:22):
cold outreach ourselves, right?
And advertising campaigns, etc.
But we wanted to build a systemwhere influencers actually apply
to join a community. They'revetted, right? So we make sure
that they have brand friendlycontent that they post
frequently enough that they havegood engagement, etc, etc. We
want all of those logistics. Sotake all of that extra bandwidth

(07:45):
away from the brand, and oncethey're accepted, now they're
engaging with kind of a shoppingmarketplace where they get to
choose products that they'reactually interested in, and we
cater the products obviously tothem. We want the match to be
proper, not only on the brandside, but also on the influencer
side, right? So really, we are amarketplace platform. We're not

(08:07):
necessarily like a SaaS or justa random database, and that's
how we can accomplish thesereally scalable campaigns like
and do hundreds or 1000s. If wewere just cold emailing people
like, we'd never be able toaccomplish our brand's goals,
our clients goals,

yeah, what, um? You got any interesting examples,
like, so that I'm not being toovague, like, one of our favorite
ways to do this type of stuff isespecially for, like, big
product launches or big sales,and where, hey, we're going to
get it into a ton of influencershands, but then we're going to
ask them to post all around thesame general time, just to kind

(08:43):
of get that, that big push goingthrough absolutely any what's
kind of, is there an approachyou guys suggest anything that,
like, kind of stands out oflike, oh yeah, we worked with
this one brand, and they crushedit doing this strategy. Like,
what have you seen that works?

Another great question. So to your point,
product launches are probablythe best value prop for
influencers across the board,regardless of how much your
channel you're on, bottom lineis like before. Once your
product is brand new, no onereally knows about it. You need
to generate some initialawareness. Just getting your
product in the hands of peoplewho actually want it is valuable

(09:17):
for product feedback. You'regenerating a huge amount of
content. Another advantage toour system is like UGC or user
generated content that'sproduced by the influencers, we
get full rights to brands torepurpose so if you're building
up your ad campaigns, yoursocial media promotions, your
marketing material around thatnew launch, obviously super
valuable. But another reallyspecific use case that we see a

(09:39):
huge amount of success frombrands implementing on our
system is for E commerce,marketplace growth. So think
Amazon, Walmart, Target,Sephora, the reason why those
platforms really thrive, andI've literally seen 14x like
ROI, from brands implementinginfluencer campaigns on a

(10:00):
marketplace, and the bottom linebehind it is a marketplace is a
search engine at the end of theday, but different from like the
Googles of the world, Amazon,for example, is ranking you or
positioning you based off of howyour sales are performing.
Obviously, they take intoaccount also, like how well it's
optimized, what keywords you'reputting content, etc. But the

(10:21):
biggest thing is, Amazon wantsthe listings on the first page
to be very high converting. Theywant good sales. They want good
reviews, etc. Now the beautifulthing of influencers is their
trusted promotion, so theyconvert at a really high level.
And if you can drive thattraffic to a marketplace like
Amazon, especially for a newproduct launch, and then
increase your visibility withinthe marketplace. Let's say you

(10:44):
go from page 100 to page one,like, all of a sudden, you might
have 1000s of new people seeingyour product, and you're now
taking advantage of that massivedemand that Amazon holds, right
like they control, like almost50% of E commerce sales online
in the at least in the US. Soit's a really amazing tactic,

(11:05):
because it's like, not only areyou getting all the normal
benefits from influencermarketing of just awareness,
sales, content, et cetera, butlike, we've seen that 14x ROI
from simply, like, you went frompage 100 to page one, and then
all of a sudden you had 1000s ofpeople seeing your product and
buying your product and buyingyour product. And now if you
convert at that new kind of youcould say threshold, like, your

(11:25):
sales don't stop. And you canstop the influencer campaign,
hypothetically, but you're nowkind of maintaining that
position as long as you'reconverting at that so really
good use case for influencers,for those who are playing in the
online marketplace world.

Yeah, I find that, like a lot of brands feel that
because they're working withinfluencers, and nine times out
of 10, it's you're finding therelationship. You're starting
the relationship. The posts aregoing on social media that it's
just meant for social media, butlike, we've seen it work really
well, like, to your point tomarketplaces, not only, like
adding that content to your ownwebsite or even leveraging it

(11:59):
in, like email marketing, likepretty much, it's an asset that
you now have that you canleverage elsewhere. Because
obviously the big benefit beingbrands when they make really
nice, fancy ads, sure they lookgreat, but you're coming off
kind of bias, especially ifyou're a newer brand or it's a
new product. People, of course,are knowing that you're going to
say it's the best and blah blah.
So using someone else's voicecan really help kind of expand

(12:22):
that a little bit better. Isthere any element of this, like,
because you mentioned it, itkind of caters to the micro side
and mostly on the seeding side.
Do you do anything from like, alarger influencer perspective,
or is it pretty focused onmostly seeding.

It's pretty it's actually all focused on seeding.
We that was the main solution wewanted to solve for what we are
now doing is implementing a lotof different integrations to
take relationships further. Soby the way, there are some
larger creators on our platform,people with hundreds of 1000s of
followers, yeah. But what wefound is, like the seeding

(13:01):
approach, if you can findsomeone who's willing to do
something for just a product, itmeans that they're not biased to
your point of, kind of like acurated ad, right? Like they
actually need to really wantthat product in order to spend a
bunch of effort creatingcontent, posting it, to do this.
And so we find just the contentsway more trustworthy and much
more authentic, and so itconverts better. But then

(13:22):
obviously we want to pay peoplefor their work, right? And so
what we found is kind of feedingpeople through a funnel to
reward them for certain actionsthey take, whether they become
an affiliate for the brand andnow start making ongoing
commissions, they'll get kind ofgamified cash bonuses for
certain types of content thatthey produce, right so
leveraging these differentrelationships we're building out

(13:44):
right now integrations into adplatforms, for those of you who
know what white listing is, iskind of like utilizing an
influencer's own social mediaprofile to run ads through
giving influencers commissionson that ad spend so that they're
rewarded for producing contentthat actually converts well on
ads. So that's really also wherewe see the ecosystem going, is

(14:05):
like in that social shoppingrealm, but really rewarding
influencers for creatingpositive content, getting them
in the door for something theyactually desire. Because you pay
someone hundreds or 1000s ofdollars, they'll promote
anything, right? But like thatmight not be a very trustworthy
and authentic post. So yeah,that's kind of where we see it
moving, and why we decided toreally just simply focus on that

(14:29):
solution for product seeding.

Okay, is there? How does the price element work?
Right? Because I know someseeding you're just giving them,
or pretty much all seeding,you're really just giving them
product. But is there anyelement of this where the
influencer is also paid on topof it, or is it just your own?
It's just product placement.

There is absolute elements. So we have
certain gamification features,again, to give them cash bonuses
based off of actions they take.
Right? They produce a highquality video content. They're.
Getting maybe a few 100 bucks,right? So, and we'll gamify
that, we can actuallyincorporate that into our
pricing model, and don't pushthat also on the brands, but
brands, and we wanted to makethis is like nowadays, you could

(15:12):
have 100 different influencersthat all kind of have very
similar esthetics, followerranges, engagements, and every
other person is going to tellyou a different price, so we
wanted to standardize it, right?
It's like you join the stackinfluence community. Your main
incentive is you're going to getfree products fundamentally, and
then if you perform really well,you'll get cash bonuses, right?

(15:35):
And then potentially you cancreate a longer term
relationship with these brandswhere you're getting actually
big incentives and commissionstructures to continue promoting
in the long run. So that'sbasically how it works, and we
simply charge brands a flat feeper successful post. That's the
Pay As You Go system. So ourfees are pretty affordable. They
range between 20 to 40 bucks perperson who completes a post. But

(15:58):
if you don't get a post youdon't pay.

Okay, interesting.
What? What do you see is likethe biggest mistake that a lot
of brands make with influencers,

I would say, giving up too early. Um,
different influencers work indifferent ways, and it's a hit
or miss system, right? Like, andthat's a beautiful thing about
this micro and nano world islike, you don't have to put all
your eggs in one basket, like,if you're dealing with
celebrities, you only can, orlike people with hundreds of
millions of followers, you canonly work with so many of them,

(16:33):
right? With a certain marketingbudget. And if those promotions
don't work, which a lot of timesthey may not like, you just
wasted a whole bunch of money,right? Whereas, if you're
scaling out hundreds or 1000s ofthese smaller creators, like you
can afford to have a bunch ofthem actually be kind of duds,
and as long as the majorityactually work, which is what we

(16:53):
see. And that's the big mistakeI see, is like brands think,
like, Okay, I'm going to testout influencer marketing. I want
to start with five right? Andthen they get, like, one kind of
okay result, and four maybe notso. And sometimes they get it's
all great, right? But then othertimes it's not so that. And then
they kind of just give up, andit's like, you got to, actually,
you got to test out what type ofbriefs are going to work, what

(17:16):
type of demographics are goingto work for you. Timing is
important, and so people cut itoff too early. And it really,
it's important to let it scaleout, because social media has
changed dramatically in the pastfew years, where it's like, it's
less also about follower range,it's more about content you
create and like, sometimes youcan have someone, literally,

(17:37):
with like, 500 followers, whogets posts that do millions of
views. They're not going to dothat every time, right? So why
you kind of got to spread outthose promotions and test it
over a bit of a longer timeframe.

Yeah, and so if so, let's say I sign up, I launch a
campaign, I get a bunch of microinfluencers that sign up to
basically do the campaign. Do Iget to decide if the if they're
like, Hey, I have a Tiktok andan Instagram like, how does that
work, where I can kind of pick aplatform, or is it all of them?

(18:08):
Like, how does that work?

Good question.
So right now, actually, ourplatform is mainly focused on
Instagram. We find it to bereally effective for these types
of seating campaigns. We arebuilding out capabilities for
Tiktok, Youtube, Snapchat. Sothose are coming online soon.
And basically what it will be isthat like you can select,
because some people only want aYouTube video or YouTube creator
to produce content, depending onwhat you use. And then

(18:32):
absolutely like, maybe you wantsomeone to not only post to
Instagram, but Instagram YouTubeand Tiktok. So right now, we
give that kind of up to thebrand. Their initial incentive
is to create an Instagram feedpost, and then once that post is
done, you can kind ofincentivize the influencer to
repost that to other socialplatforms, create longer term

(18:55):
relationships within theplatform, to syndicate that
content, maybe the same contentor different content across
other platforms. So it's kind oflike a secondary step at the
moment, but as a new productfeature that we are planning and
in the process of developing islike that, fully integrated all
the social platforms so that youcan pick and choose what you

(19:15):
want.

Beautiful is it? Is there certain brands that you
see, it tends to work better forversus others. So like to give
you an example. I'm justthinking of everyone we work
with, and I know I've got acouple brands on the beauty side
that it's fantastic forinfluencers, like, that's their
bread and butter, but it's likeon the skincare side, so they

(19:38):
kind of want, like, Hey, can youdo like a video in the beginning
of the month, maybe mid month,into the end of the month, like
that type of stuff where it getsa little convoluted. Is it
better as just kind of one offvideos, and then maybe you just
kind of like to your point ofhaving these additional stuff
with influencers, working it outwith them that way?

Absolutely.
Yeah. So depending on theproduct and. A really good
example of like skincare is youwant to implement different
strategies, because, like youmay not you want skincare as an
example, or acne cream, right?
Like you want to showcasedifferent results over time,
right? Whereas other productsmight be conveyed, they have
beautiful packaging, and youwant to actually just showcase

(20:17):
the unboxing of it. And to yourpoint, not every product
actually works really well, atleast for scalable micro nano
collaborations like skincare,beauty products work fantastic.
In that realm, athletes, footcream, no one wants to go on
social media, right? Like, it'slike there are nuances to

(20:39):
certain products that, like,yes, you may be able to find a
handful of people who arewilling. Who are willing to do
it, but like, it's not going tobe a long term, scalable
solution for them. Yeah. Andthen the last thing to note is,
like, the influencer communityis predominantly female. It's
skewed female. So like, femalefocused products do perform well
or better than male focusedproducts Overall, I'd say that

(21:02):
again, no males are willing todo promotions. But if you're
really looking to implementthese strategies in like, the
hundreds, 1000s, in quicktimeframes, the kind of more
female focused beauty, fashion,fitness products really work the
best what we found.

Over the past, like, Man, I would probably say
five or six years, at leastthis, this industry of, you
know, curated UGC platforms orinfluencer platforms, like,
they've really, it's gotten intoa crowded space, which I know
you probably know better than Ido, what, uh, we won't say any
of their names. What, um, whatwould you say is, like, kind of

(21:40):
the bigger differentiator ofstack influence versus the
others,

Absolutely. So one of the largest
differentiators is that we builtthis really dedicated, engaged
community. There's only, like, afew other platforms that have
done that, and it was theinfluencer. Kind of software
space was really easy to getinto, because, like, you could
just scrape social media andthen just have a huge database
and put together, like an emailoutreach tool, and you're like,

(22:07):
I have an influencer marketingtool, right? And like, kind of
everyone and their mother didthat, but again, it just what
it's not effective for scalingout. Still takes an entire team
to accomplish what our platformcan do in like a day, right? And
so that dedicated community, andthen really just focusing on
solving that product seedingsystem, and really thinking

(22:29):
about it deeply, coming from ourown experience with it. So as an
example, and to my knowledge,we're the only platform that
does this. Is that the normalway to go about seating is you
get someone's interest in socialmedia, you get their shipping
address, you send them theproduct. The issue with that is
that like 50% of the time,someone just like doesn't do

(22:50):
what you ask them to do. Theysteal your product. They don't
do it. We shifted a model tokind of like an E commerce
shopping model, where forinfluencers who collaborate with
our products, they actually haveto become a real consumer before
they can actually participate inthe campaign. What I mean by
that is like they have to shellout their own money to go buy a

(23:12):
product, and then once theycomplete a post, is when we
reward them with cash back fortheir collaboration, and then
those extra bonuses that wespoke about, and that's how we
can actually guarantee like thatpay as you go, system where a
brand only pays for things theyget and decreases inventory
loss. So that's another bigdifferentiator. Is like, one is

(23:33):
scale. Two is automation. Threeis like a pay as you go, simple
system. And to my knowledge, noone has yet solved that, and
that's why we've really focusedin this niche, and now are
really expanding across a lotmore integrations and different
types of collaborations, etc.
But took us seven years toreally, like, flesh that out and
make it really good product. Youknow, I mean very much product

(23:54):
focused company.

That is awesome, William, I really appreciate
your time. I don't want to takeup too much more. I know you're
super busy. I know you're superbusy over there. I'd love to
give you the floor let everyoneknow where they can find out
more about you, and, of course,more about Stack Influence.

Absolutely, appreciate for having me on as
well. Um, best way to find us isgo to stackinfluence.com top
right, you can click sign up.
It'll prompt you to speak withone of our influencer experts.
They're very accustomed to everysingle e commerce marketplace,
so they'll guide you throughbest recommendations. Feel free
to find me on LinkedIn, WilliamGasner, and you can find us also

(24:30):
on basically every single socialplatform @stackinfluence.

Beautiful, William, thank you so much for being on
the show. Obviously, everyonethat tuned in. Thank you as
well. Please make sure you dothe usual thing, rate, review,
subscribe all that fun stuff,whichever podcast platform you
prefer, or head over to theEcommshow.com to check out all
of our previous episodes. But asusual, thank you all for joining
us, and we'll see you all nexttime. Have a good one!

Narrator (24:55):
Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm show. Head over
to Ecommshow.com to subscribe onyour favorite podcast platform
or on the BlueTusker YouTubechannel. The Ecomm Show is
brought to you by BlueTusker, afull service digital marketing
company specifically for Ecommerce sellers looking to
accelerate their growth. Go tobluetuskr.com now for more

(25:17):
information, make sure to tunein next week for another amazing
episode of the Ecomm Show!

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The Seeding Strategy That Scales: Influencer Marketing with Stack Influence | EP. #193

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