Ultimate Guide to Working With Micro-Influencers: Deals, Payments & Pitfalls

Join Rob Cosman as he chats with William Gasner, the CMO and co-founder of Stack Influence, about the evolving world of influencer marketing. Discover how micro and nano influencers are reshaping e-commerce strategies, the challenges of influencer collaborations, and why you should be using influencer marketing for your ecommerce products even as part of the launch! Whether you're an aspiring influencer or a brand looking to leverage social media as a DIY or looking for a managed service, this episode is packed with insights and practical advice to help you navigate the influencer landscape effectively.

We dig into costs, how not to get scammed, how to find good invluencers and how to track success.  This was packed with nuggets including how to lower your amazon referral fee to only 5% on infludencer sales!

Takeaways
-Influencer marketing has evolved significantly over the years.
-Micro-influencers can provide better engagement than celebrities.
-Finding the right influencers requires research and creativity.
-Measuring ROI in influencer marketing can be complex but essential.
-Avoiding scams in influencer marketing is crucial for brands.
-E-commerce platforms like Amazon benefit greatly from influencer marketing.
-Becoming an influencer requires passion and niche focus.
-PR can enhance brand visibility and credibility.
-Testing different strategies is key to success in influencer marketing.
-Building long-term relationships with influencers can yield significant benefits.
Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode:
https://www.stackinfluence.com/ – Influencer Platform

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Transcript

0:17

Hi everyone, it's Rob Cosman coming from, selling from the beach. And today I've got William Gassner from Stack Influence, influence. my gosh, I can't believe I messed that up. Stack influence, because we're going to talk all things influencers and clearly I can't talk about influence, but William's going to come on. He's going to talk about influencers for your e-commerce brands, what we can do to uh utilize them, what we can do to become an influencer. And I get a lot of questions to pepper you with, man. So thanks for coming. Thanks for having me on, Rob. Okay, so just give me the quick 30 seconds, you know, intro, who are you and your company and a little bit of your past because your past is awesome. I also want to ask you a bunch of stuff about getting on the Forbes ah because I creeped your LinkedIn. We talked a bit before and I'm like, I'm asking about that too. So just give us a quick intro, Absolutely. So my name is William Gassner. I currently have the chief marketing officer and co-founder of Stack Influence. Super high level pitch of Stack Influence. We can dive deeper later on, but ah we are a micro influencer marketing platform catering to e-commerce sellers and helping them automate and scale up influencer collaborations. but how I got into the world of influencer marketing, going back now, almost 15 years was being an e-commerce seller myself. So the seven figure e-commerce seller sold variety of different products from toys and jewelry to cutting boards and teeth whitening products. Um, and on that journey also dabbled in web development and marketing, which really got me into the influencer space. Um, but utilized a huge amount of different influencer. tactics, platforms, types of influencers, which we can also discuss uh for my own e-commerce brands. And during that process, realized that the platforms were really difficult to use. They were expensive. was cost an arm and a leg to negotiate with different types of influencers. It was a full-time job to even find people, right? uh And there was really no ways to do it in an effective and cost effective manner. So my business partners who were selling e-commerce products with me at the time, we decided to start building out kind of internal automation systems to just streamline the process because we found influencer marketing to be one of the best ways to not only scale up our own kind of D to C Shopify e-commerce websites, but also scale on e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. started to build out these tools to not only source influencers, but to get them product to make sure they post on time to kind of negotiate kind of deals the whole nine yards and started to build a lot of technology for it. And it kind of all of sudden a few of our connections in the e-commerce world heard about what we were doing. We're like, can we get access to the software is the processes you've built out? And we started kind of feeding it out and we quickly realized that this was a kind of potential business in its own. And that slowly transitioned and snowballed in seven years ago now uh into stock influence and being, we're now a venture backed business scaling up to almost six million in ARR and yeah, off to the races. have so many questions and like the frustration because I've never used an influencer. My sister-in-law manages some and I get a little bit of, she manages pretty high level and I get a little taste of that and I can only imagine and trying to. bring it down to a smaller brand, as you just said, like messaging them and convincing them to sell your stuff. And then what are they going to post and how many times, just the logistical nightmare of it all. So I want to kind of understand that and how it works. So let's just take it as a perspective that, know, Amazon commerce, e-commerce brand, what are we going to do? How are we going to approach influencer? So taking it from thousand feet in the air, right? A lot of people, when they think about influencers, they think of the Kardashians, the celebrities of the world, right? People with millions of followers. And that's really how influencing started. Honestly, influencing is as old as written word and PR, right? Someone with a large amount of reach promotes a product or name drops a product and it reaches a large audience and then people buy. But in the era of social media, it really started with these celebrities because people had access to millions of followers and so the natural inclination was if I get them a product, ah I can make a whole bunch of sales. Now, what has happened over the past few years, the landscapes changed dramatically. First thing that's happened is that people have started to lose trust in larger... people realize that when the Kardashians promoting a product that they literally are getting paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to do a promotion, right? uh And not only that, it's because they're getting paid a huge amount of money, it loses out on kind of that authenticity, that trust. And the second big change was how social platforms have changed. So... social platforms, used to be the case that if I post on social media on a Monday and I had hundred thousand followers per set and majority of my followers are on social media, most people would see actually my post. And what happened is that social media platforms realized people start seeing posts they don't really care about. They might've followed a Kardashian because they were in the news, et cetera, but they don't necessarily like everything they're posting, right? And so to a platform like Instagram, right? If someone's feed gets filled up with content, Even if it's people they're following, but they might not care about, they're going to leave the platform. And that's not what Instagram wants. And so what that algorithms changed was that now when you're on social media, you're only really going to be shown content um from followers who you truly engage with things that you actually look at and spend time on. You like you comment, you share, right? If you have, you're following someone and you have never really paused on their posts for a while or ever liked it in like a few months. Instagram's going to stop showing that to you. And so it shifted this visibility from people's posts from like sometimes 90, 80 % when you posted something of your follower base, seeing it now down to 10, 5%, right? And so it really made this kind of follower based thing, which people still focus on heavily, but turn it into more of a vanity metric where it's like, I'd rather work with someone with 10,000 followers and where 90 % of their audience is engaged. than someone with 100,000 followers and 1 % of their audience gauge. It's the same equation, right? You're reaching the same amount of people. But the engagement obviously means that people actually care and trust and are interested. Now, the final thing that happened in social media, and TikTok really spearheaded this, was that social media platforms realized, let's say there's a piece of content that some specific person's follower-based engagement was through the roof. people loved it who are following them. Why should that follower base be the only ones who actually see that piece of content? Maybe if we show this to people who aren't following them, that other people might like it, right? And so it opened this gateway to where you could have technically a brand new social account, 100 followers, 20 followers, right? And if you produce some really engaging content, you get millions of views on that if people really engage with it, right? And... What this did is it put more value towards these smaller creators. And so the terms came out what are called nano or micro influencers. uh The larger creators people call macro or mega. And these smaller creators now have all of this power because if they can produce good content, they can have as much reach and engagement as a celebrity, but they also are kind of an average person. So they're going to be more trusted. They're going to be more authentic with their posts. And when people comment or slide into their DMs, they're probably going to respond, right? Like, Kardashian's not responding to anyone who slides into their DMs. They probably have a 20-person social media team, and they don't even respond. uh So it basically, we call it democratized, kind of the influencer or social media landscape. And it made really anyone with a social profile to become a potential influencer for your brand. And this is where we decided to hone in with stock influence, because this is where we saw a huge amount of value selling e-commerce products ourselves. It was like, I'd rather work with a hundred people who are willing to do promotions in exchange for simply just giving them a product or a small monetary fee, than take a bet on paying a celebrity like five, $10,000 that might be totally hit or miss. Maybe it drives a great amount of sales, maybe it does nothing, right? But I'd rather diversify my risk across a lot more smaller creators. Obviously some of them are not gonna work out. But as long as kind of the majority do, I'm to get a fantastic ROI and basically get the best bang for my buck. And so that's where I always recommend e-commerce brands focus on is um not to say that celebrities don't work at all, right? Or larger creators. Like you find the right person in the right niche with the right audience. It absolutely can be a great marketing tactic, but you're going to get again, a much better bang for your buck working with these smaller creators, scaling them up. and diversifying your risk, not putting all your eggs in one basket. uh I can dive into any of those topics further, but that's kind of a lay of the land of the current influencer world. I oh got that. Now we're going to come down to the micros and where we need to be. So how does a brand actually go and find these people? What does it cost? uh What can I expect for an ROI? How am I paying them? How are they making money? And then how am I going to make money? And how is it trackable? Absolutely. Great questions. So answer the first one about finding people to promote your brand. And then I'll go into kind of value ROI tracking, et cetera. um So first and foremost, the very basic way you're starting out, you got zero marketing budget, right? um Start DMing people on social media, right? You can search on social media through hashtags. You can look at competitors, right? See who's collaborating with them. You can go after your own customers, right? Like identify... have a... Usually, you should have a huge email list unless you're only an Amazon seller and Amazon keeps all of their data. But basically start emailing people and saying, would any of you have social media profile? Create a simple form, have them submit the form, get some more data on what social profiles they have, what some past posts are, vet them. um If you're doing it... again, completely manual. You want to come up with some sort of influencer brief. like information about your brand so you can convey things properly. Maybe I always recommend giving creators a lot of control in the sense of like, let them be creative. That's what they're good at. But also you want to give them guardrails. So maybe you're selling a supplement product. You can't have them say that this cures cancer, right? uh So give them guardrails, give them... kind of ideas, maybe you know that an unboxing for your product works really, really well because you spend a whole bunch of money on beautiful unboxing experience. Other people might not care about the box at all. You want to show the product in actual use. Maybe a photo works really well for one brand. Maybe a video works well for another. So you want to kind of test the waters also to see what works, what doesn't. Create this kind of brief and then you want to also figure out how you want to pay them. Now at Stack Influence, We figured out a way to convince people to do promotions in exchange for just products, which the industry calls product seeding. It's the most cost-effective way, naturally. You're giving someone a product in exchange for a post. Now that's becoming harder and harder to do as time goes on. People also absolutely deserve to get paid for their work, right? It's not a totally straightforward thing to take good quality content, post on your social media account, promote it, et cetera. And so you want to compensate people. So going rate normally is about $10 for every thousand followers they have. That's shifting a lot now. That's kind of out the window because now influencers realize like the follower base is kind of a vanity metric. What if I have a thousand followers but my average view count on my posts is 20,000, I should be valued way more. I shouldn't be getting $10 for a post. I should be getting hundreds of dollars, right? So you wanna figure out what you're gonna realize quickly is that... Different people, even with very similar follower base and metrics, charge different things. Ideally, you kind of figure out what your going rate is for the different types of promotions. If you can convince people to do it for a product, fantastic. It's going to be the most efficient way. Now making sure they don't steal the product is another kind of nightmare, which we have some solutions for, but that's something to take into consideration. Naturally, you might lose some inventory by shipping things out. But one of the other best ways is to incentivize them based off of results. So simple things is setting up affiliate funnels, right? You get 10%, you get 20 % for every sale you drive, right? um Other ways to kind of go about it is, hey, I'll give you a free product or maybe a baseline fee of X amount of money. But if you drive 10,000 views for me or a hundred thousand views, I'm going to give you different tiers of extra monetary bonuses, right? So incentivize for results. So there's different ways you can slice it. Um, we find again, we at stack influence do a mixture of product seating and incentivize monetary commissions. Um, but you're going to run into people who naturally are like, I want five grand upfront. And sometimes people scam you too. So it's a different landscape doing it yourself. You quickly find it takes a lot of effort, but it's absolutely possible. Like if you are again, brand new, starting out, got zero marketing budget. Influencers are one of the best ways to just start getting the word out about your brand. And you can do it manually. And like, there's not many other marketing channels that you can do that, right? SEO takes months to actually build things up. Google ads, Facebook ads, et cetera, like take huge marketing budgets. So influencers provide a great way to start to get some traction about your brand, uh which leads me into how to track things and what value you get. And so one beautiful thing about influencers in general is it's not, some people perceive it as a pure replacement. to PPC, to ads, right? It's like, and that makes sense. It's like, you want to spend money, you want to spend a dollar and get $3, right? um But, and influencers do that, but the cool thing about them is that you get this whole package of value as well. You're not only getting awareness, which drives sales, like an actual ad, but you're getting actual things that you're actually boosting up now your SEO, because now Google and the LLM models. are scraping social media accounts and feeding that in to their platforms to determine how much, in essence, brand reputation do you have online. So there's a big now SEO play here and GEO play, new term for the AI search modules. uh But then also, you're getting what we call social proof. When someone searches your brand or goes to your Instagram account, If they go to your tag section, they're going to see all these real people who are utilizing your product, like authentic, true testimonials. um You can then take that and put that on your website, right? And show, and not to say that your website should be filled with kind of authentic, what the industry calls UGC, user generated content, but you want professional photography. You want to look like a clean brand, but you also want this combination of like real people utilizing your product. You want it to be accessible, right? And there's a lot of studies that show like, just incorporating some of this type of authentic influencer content on a site, like dramatically increases your website conversion rates. Not only that, if you can get permission from the influencers, we do this at Stack Influence to automate it, but if you can get them permission to get rates to use the content elsewhere, besides using on your website, and you have the marketing budget to scale up, you can start utilizing this on ads. Many studies show and we've... seen very similar results on our platform that authentic UGC ad content can even increase conversions by up to 5x on ads, compared to professional photography, like, and professional videos. like you're spending thousands of dollars, in a studio with models and someone in their living room taking a video on an iPhone is increasing your conversion by 5x. It's real because we're now bombarded by ads and all this kind of, and it's only getting worse with AI, right? It's like perfectly curated content. People want real things, right? They want authenticity. And I think it's only going to become more powerful. that's not AI generated and somebody that used it and I can see their response and their excitement and their enthusiasm, right? Like, that's what completes it. okay, we've got this, we can do it on our own, we can approach them, do a mix of compensation, free product. How do I avoid getting scammed? Because you also, want, well, I'll let you continue, but I want to come back and avoid the scamming. Okay, that's a great, great question. So just to finish off two other things, if you are, you have some marketing budget, you're ready to scale, right? um You can start building out an internal team, but I do recommend utilizing softwares, right? We're at a technology age, utilize technology. um Besides doing it yourself, there's really three options. You have an agency, which is also... can help you automate things, but it's going to cost an arm and a leg because they're doing a lot of different manual things, right? You have what we call CRM softwares, which is honestly what the majority of the influencer landscape is flooded with, which is basically you pay a big monthly fee, you get access to a database of influencers, you can filter through them, but you're still left negotiating with them on price, reaching out, finding the right people, getting them product, making sure they follow their requirements and making sure they don't scam you. There's no insurance there as well. And then the last basically option, which is where we play uh as Stack Influence is a marketplace software. So, and what I mean by that is a software that's actually doesn't just have a database of random email accounts or social accounts for you to outreach to has a dedicated community of people. So at Stack Influence, we've built up about 600,000 people who are part of a platform, understand how our process works. There's no negotiation needed. and enables us to actually achieve thousands of collaborations a month on a per-brand basis. So, and prevent a lot of the scamming because we have kind of guardrails as part of the community. We'll quickly, not everyone gets accepted. They go through vigorous vetting process and then we quickly kick people off if they become bad actors, right? And provide insurance to brands to make sure if someone does scam, they're not held liable, right? Now, ways to prevent scamming from happening. Difficult, and now there's different tools to do, but absolutely possible. uh And there's a variety of different things that people do to scam. One is people have fake followers, right? Now, again, going back what I said before, follower base has somewhat become a vanity metric, right? You don't want to necessarily just look at follower base. You want to look at engagement metrics. You want to look at view counts on their social posts. You want to see kind of these deeper metrics because that's what matter these days. And if someone has, there's ways to somewhat fake that a little bit now, but it's much, much harder than just buying a bunch of followers. So if you have no software, that's what I would, my tactic I would take, but utilizing softwares like Stack Influence, which we actually have AI modules that go through profiles to actually make sure they don't have fake followers, right? There's ways to actually identify things to prevent that. It's the first thing where you kind of get scammed. The second thing is get it, making sure someone does what they say they're going to do. Right now, product seating is a difficult thing, right? Because, and I'll explain also if you're paying someone, the best thing is to somewhat compensate them after they have completed their requirements. Right? And the product seating world, it's hard because the normal way to do it is you find someone on social media, they're interested in doing a promotion. You get their shipping address, you send them the product. 20 to 50 % of the time, they don't do anything for you. How we shifted that model at Stack Influence is we only work with people who have become real consumers of a brand. So whether they already have the product or we get them to go buy the product before they collaborate with the brand and monetarily reward them once they complete the successful post. So as an example, you're selling a $50 product. Let's say the influencer doesn't have the product. ah We're like, great, you want to do a collaboration? I'm not going to pay you anything. Go buy the product with your own money. Once you complete the posts, I'll reimburse you for your expenses and then pay you monetarily for what results you drive for us. Now, if they don't do anything for me, not only did I not lose inventory, but I just made a free sale, right? So we call it influencer insurance, fantastic process, hard to convince people. will say it took us years to naturally you just bring this up to someone like go buy my product, right? They're like, how do I know that you're not going to scam me? Right? Like, am I going to get my money back? So you to create layers of trust, right? And that takes time, but that's one way to ensure product seeding. And then the same way, if you're just negotiating a flat fee, a lot of people want money upfront, try to pay them after they complete their posts, right? Maybe use, there's some systems that you can put money into escrow. There's actually an initial company we were starting called Stack Escrow uh to prevent that. That was actually one of our first ideas before starting Stack Influence. uh And then also if you create a model that is just purely based off of results, like affiliate systems, et cetera, it's like you're not paying them anything until they drive results for you. And so those are the ways to kind of get around the scams. But utilizing, there's a lot now technologies, including Stack Influence that can really help you along the way ah to figuring out who's the right people to work with. ah Are they going to screw me over? And uh am I going to get good results from it? Okay, so those ones you're gonna drive to your own webpage, you've got your own affiliate links or some sort of a discount code where somebody can put in. How would we approach it for like Amazon, Walmart, where they control the customer, you don't see them? How do I measure that? How do do that? So a lot of our clients right now scale up on marketplaces like Amazon because actually influencer marketing is one of the best tactics to break through the noise on Amazon. Right now, I think the stats like 3000 new sellers join Amazon every day. Like it's the most competitive marketplace out there, but validly so in the sense that think in the U S they control almost 50 % of every e-commerce sale in the whole market, right? So, but to break through is difficult. same at the end of the day, Amazon is a search engine. Similar to Google, when someone searches a keyword, 75 % of people don't go past the first page. There's now, I think 45 listings on the first page. Half of those are sponsored content. to like, without playing the PPC game on Amazon, if you want to grow organically to break through the noise is very hard, right? Now there's two things that Amazon sellers utilize influencers for. One is just trying to drive new sales, right? Similar to PPC, um which for those of you listening who don't know what an attribution link is, if you're ever doing any influencer marketing, absolutely use attribution links. New program by Amazon, Amazon actually now incentivizes um these links. So what they call external traffic, sales that come from an influencer campaign, from an email marketing campaign, from an ad campaign off Amazon to Amazon. by giving you up to 10 % savings in their transaction fees. Huge amount of savings. So utilize those. It also provides you a way to actually track conversions from those links. So you can have visibility into that offline influencer traffic. So two things, you do have to be part of the brand registry on Amazon, meaning that you have to sell in the US, you have to have a copyright. But once you are part of the brand registry, you'll see there's kind of a very simple program. Google it if you can't figure out where to do it. ah You apply to get an attribution link. Secondarily, you should apply to what's called the brand referral bonus program. The brand referral bonus ties in that extra 10 % savings to your attribution link. And that's where the brand registry requirement comes in. But it's pretty simple to set up. Once you're in the uh attribution link section, it'll list all your products. quickly click, copy link, create unique codes and then utilize those as opposed to just driving someone generically to your listing. ah Amazon's transaction fee. Yes. five, that's exactly right. Yes, yes. It's amazing. It's amazing. And you might ask like, why would Amazon do this? Right? And the reason behind it is two factor. One is people realize Amazon fees are getting crazy. And it's also kind of a bidding war to the bottom. Like your margins are slim on Amazon and it sucks because the competition's fierce. So when you're running like an influencer campaign or meta ads campaign, you're like, why would I drive this Amazon when I can drive it to my website, right? And not get hit with 15%. So they're like, we'll just give you some savings, right? Cause we want that traffic. We want those sales. That's the first thing. The second thing is sales data and conversion rate metrics on a listing on Amazon are the most valuable thing that Amazon has. And the reason being is with Amazon being as competitive as is, Like, so going back to a search topic, any given search topic might have hundreds of pages of results, if not thousands, right? And again, the majority of traffic and sales happen just on that first page. uh Amazon, when a new listing launches, Amazon calls it the cold start problem, which means that Amazon has no data about how this product is going to perform, which is a problem for them because if the product is really, really good, maybe it's the best product ever. It's a new innovation. It's cheaper than everything else. Like it's just a fantastic product. It really deserves to be on the first page and a top selling product. Right? How does Amazon know that? And is it worthwhile for them to give that product a chance on the first page? Probably not, because if it sucks, Amazon's gonna lose a huge amount of revenue from that, right? Like every space or you could sell, say shelf space on that first page is extremely, extremely valuable. And so it's a risk for them to show you, but it's also a risk for them not to show you because again, if it's really good, then they could be losing out on more revenue because like you might be taking up a huge amount. You might be creating more awareness, right? Like sometimes there's the top search. on Amazon for any given product is the brand name, right? It's like brand focused and that's what everyone's competing against. So how does Amazon solve this cold star problem? They need to get data. They need to get sales data, right? Like they want to know how this listing is going to convert when it's shown to people. And naturally, if you have two identical listings, each are doing a hundred sales, each are the same price, each are the same product, right? But one listing gets out of 10 sales, five. are out of 10 views, five sales, 50 % conversion. Listing B gets two sales out of 10, 20 % conversion. Amazon obviously like the 50 % conversion, that deserves to be at the top, right? But it needs to get a lot of sales data. It's not gonna just do it off 10 piece of data. They might need hundreds. They need statistical significance. So again, to get that statistical significance, they need to show you. And so what they will first do, and if you, any Amazon sellers listening, who utilize some like Amazon Analytics or Walmart Analytics softwares that show you ranking like Helium 10, Jungle Scout, Kipa, you're going to see when you first launch, like your ranking going up and down, right? And it's like huge waves. What that's doing is Amazon's just testing you. They might put you on the first page for like a very low volume keyword that a few people search, right? Maybe a low risk to them to put you there. Put you there for a few hours, see how you convert, see if anyone clicks in, see if anyone buys, take you off, right? They want to slowly, but this process takes time. Now, why does Amazon love external traffic? If you drive off Amazon traffic, now you're giving Amazon the data it needs to determine where to place you, but without Amazon having to risk putting you or ranking you in a top spot where they could be losing money, right? It's like giving them test data. And that's why they're also giving this incentive. It's like drive as much test data as possible and why influencer campaigns also Besides for Amazon's incentives are an amazing value prop for Amazon sellers and marketplace sellers because influencers naturally are high converting trustworthy sales. And so, and they converted a really high rate, uh even if it's low volume. But if you can drive those sales to Amazon, uh which we've seen in our campaigns, like I've seen 14 X uh improvement in recurring revenue on Amazon because all of a sudden a listing was doing like a hundred sales a month. And. It was like slowly getting shown, it had these huge waves in ranking, right? Like every other day, maybe Amazon was showing them for some keyword that was doing decently well. And then all of sudden we ran a campaign from all the traffic to Amazon. It proved to Amazon, hey, this product is actually really desirable. Like it's converting really well. All of a sudden they got the Amazon gave them a chance to put them to a really high volume keyword, improve their category BSR. And when they got there. because Amazon usually doesn't even give you a chance, but when they got there, they proved themselves. Like they got that visibility, people started buying, and all of a sudden their sales went from 100 to 1400 in a matter of like a month and a half. And then because they were converting, they stayed there. Our campaign ends, we're not driving any more traffic, but they're now still making 1400. And that's going up because now they're getting more sales data. They're at that higher positioning. They're proving themselves over and over again. Now there are risks there, right? Like not every time you might get to that high position if your product... isn't very good. Amazon's not going to keep you there forever. But if you're confident in a product, influencer marketing can have this amazing extra ROI for Amazon sellers because you're getting all the same benefits. You're still getting sales. You're still getting social proof. You're still getting content. You're still improving your ads. You're still building up potential long-term affiliate relationships. But you're also getting this improvement in search positioning within a marketplace and kit, which can lead to dramatic recurring revenue benefits. So I can use the attribution links. I get those. How else can I try to track it? Do I give them like a unique coupon code? Do I just kind of hope that they get there? Absolutely. So two different ways. Coupon codes absolutely work, right? Create unique coupon codes per influencer as incentive for people to buy. A third thing is that you can tap into people who are part of Amazon's own influencer program. So a few years ago, it's not brand new, but it's been around for a few years. It's not also super old. Amazon came out with an influencer program. It's basically an extension to their affiliate program. The biggest difference is that when you're part of the Amazon influencer program, you get what's called a storefront. So it's kind of like your own little page that you can list products that you recommend. You have a little profile about yourself uh and smart idea from them because now a lot of influencers link that kind of storefront in their bio on their social accounts, et cetera. They always push people here. uh when you tap into people who are part of that program, usually they will have their own link to track sales directly to them. Now, it used to be the case, and think Amazon's gone back and forth with this, you used to be able to combine attribution links and the brand referral bonus with influencer attribution or affiliate influencer links, right? So you'd get savings of 10%. The influencer also gets... the affiliate commission, which Amazon's all paying out. ah Amazon came out, it was like last year, they were like, you can't do double-dipping anymore, right? This is too much money we're paying out. But I think they recently, I haven't double-checked this totally like in the last few months, but I'm pretty sure they just brought it back so you can now double-dip again because people stopped utilizing all these tactics, right? They want to incentivize it. ah But the bottom line is that also can be a fantastic way to at least track individual, prevent you from having to manually create a million different attribution links or a million different coupon codes for each individual person you work with and kind of tap into each individual person who has their own profile, has their own affiliate links to share. And some people value that more than even getting the 10 % kickback, right? They're like, at least I can activate people who now I know all these sales came from this one person, right? So how much would you say of a coupon do you need to offer to make it seem like, you know, 5 % to me is trash, 10%, I don't know. What is the threshold for that? And what should I be budgeting? Like if I'm going through my cogs and I'm figuring out my ad spend and what I'm going to do, what's a reasonable budget to say, OK, I'm going to get my influencer channel, I'm going to end up paying them X number of dollars? it before. Yeah. It's cool if I do. So answer your first question about coupon. I usually recommend brands do 20%. We find that it increases click to conversion, has it great. Obviously the more you go, the more incentive there is, but there is incentives that drop off like difference between 20 and 30. We haven't seen much of a difference. Difference between 10 to 20, there has been a dramatic increase. Now, not every brand can offer some people's margins are 20%. So it's like, ah it depends on what you can offer. Any incentive is better than nothing is the bottom line. But to your point, like 5 % is not very enticing. ah 10 % on the edge, 20 % is actually a decent promotion, right? So that's what I would normally where we see in the same thing, actually with commission rates. So Amazon pays out baseline commissions, but you can create structures to where you incentivize influencers at a higher rate to drive sales. Usually the baseline's 10 % that they get, but like always usually recommend going up to 20 % as an extra little incentive for them to continue pushing you in the long run. Cause that's another kind of something I missed diving a bit deeper into, but another huge value that some people don't actually see in influencers is that like you can build this army of people who are consistently promoting for you in the long run, right? It's like. people think of it as a one-off thing. It's like, no, like if you find people who work, incentivize them to keep promoting you consistently. You got a hundred people, a thousand people doing this. you might not even have to spend anything on PPC, right? Like you have this army of people who are consistently promoting you, creating content, et cetera. it's like an entire marketing team at your disposal. ah But going back, what was the second question? besides the coupon code. Yes, budgeting. So budget varies depending on what your growth is. If you are an Amazon seller, what I actually recommend ah is setting. So if you have a specific, let's say you have a specific monthly budget, right? ah And you're launching a new product. determined I want to spend X amount on this new product launch on a per month basis. My actual recommendation is the first month. spend the entire budget on influencers, right? Then switch it because it's going to give you that external data you need to, this is specifically for like marketplace sellers, by the way, for Amazon sellers, give you the specific data you need to actually start showing up and then quickly switch it to either 50, 50 or like 70, 30, 70 % PPC, 30 % influencer. Because once you get there, now... run PPC, you gotta play the PPC game on Amazon. It's an unfortunate uh reality to it. But if you can drive some initial growth, like everything else is gonna work better, right? Like you're gonna get initial sales, maybe some of those consumers actually potentially leave reviews. ah You're going to kind of just get the ball rolling, right? And so if you just start, some people just start PPC off day one, it's like you have no reviews on your listing, you have no sales data, like you're no ranking anywhere, you have no. You're gonna also even with initial influencers, like they're gonna tell you if the product is bad, like they're gonna not want it. So you're gonna do some market research, right? So like that's where I usually recommend it. But overall I'm that it's between a brands do it between like 20 to 50 % of their budget of influencer marketing. Unilever just came out this year and said they're taking literally 50 % of their entire marketing budget towards purely influencers. So that's one of the largest CPG. companies in the world and that's what they're doing is 50%. Some people, if you're truly getting all of the value, it's absolutely worth 50 % of your budget and 50 % of PPC. Because you're just getting a plethora of extra stuff from it. It's not only supplementing the same thing that PPC is doing, but it's also, again, getting you content, getting you affiliates, et cetera. But you also need the resources to take advantage of those things. We've had clients who do campaigns, they've had great results with sales and Amazon growth. but like I see that they didn't even download a single piece of content, right? Which we give them full rights to utilize on ads, marketing materials. Like you're losing out on this huge other aspect. And maybe that's why you're not spending all of your budget or 50 % of your budget on it because you're not seeing those extra values, right? And content now is king in these days. Like meta ads, you need to, in order to even scale it up, you need consistent content. Like you need to break through the noise on those. So that's basically my recommendations. On the Amazon seller, if you're an e-commerce seller, I'd probably recommend a very similar thing. ah Probably 20 to 50%, maybe not spending all of it, your budget right away. But some people, sometimes that is not a bad strategy because if you're brand new launching out, it's the time that you need to get, again, information about your brand from product research. You want to develop a bunch of content you can use on marketing and advertising ah assets. And you want to just kind of get some initial brand awareness. So starting heavy. with ad spend, breaking it down, but always having some in the mix is usually what I see working the best. How would you start your launch with a bunch of influencers and get a bunch of user generated content and use that generated content for my meta ads or whatever else on my website? What's the minimum would you say to play to do that? Is two grand, is it five grand, is it even ten grand? So at Stack Influence, this is what we've found to be the best for uh promotions, is at least 100 influencers. Like, if you're launching a new product, ah you need to diversify your risk enough and drive enough external traffic sales and get enough content to really like... Because there's going to be some that suck and drive nothing for you, right? ah And you want to also test what's working, what's not. And so we found that at least 100 is like... And for some people it's like, that's crazy. Like I want to start with five, right? And it's like, do that, right? But more often than not, see like sometimes you pick the five wrong people and then you're like, influencer doesn't work for me. And it's like, you just didn't test long enough. Like uh I've seen sometimes people do a hundred and like they only get a handful of good people, but like those five good people like worked insanely well. It was like three X ROI on sales on the entire campaign. One of those pieces of content drove down their ad sales by 2X. It was just like they got value after value, even though a large majority, and that's not the common case. Usually the majority are really good for you, but that's just an example. It's like you want to start off by testing. On our platform, that costs with all fees set and done on average between like three to four grand. So if you're doing it yourself, then you should be able to also, I would say, maybe you're gonna actually, honestly, it's gonna take a lot of manual effort. You may end up spending much more money than that, because every other person is gonna negotiate something. But we try to keep it simple. We charge a flat fee per post, ah no risk system you pay when you get the completed post, and try to keep costs low, which is how we could do it with technology and having an actual community. But yeah, that's where I would probably budget out as a new seller. But then some sellers like, out the gate, do 2000 influencers and spend like 50 grand on a new product launch. Like if you're confident, the risk there is like specifically speaking to Amazon sellers, ah how well is your product gonna perform? Like if you're confident in your new product launch and you know that like we've already tested this in other channels, this is gonna do well. It's similar to the other products I do. It's gonna perform well when it starts ranking. Like I... I'd put a huge amount of fuel under the fire. Like, cause, but the risk when you have no data on how somebody is going to perform, you could spend 50, a hundred grand on a product, get it up to high positioning, and then it just doesn't convert. You don't know your competition well enough. You don't know the product enough. And then you drop right back down. And then it's like, it's not like you lost all value out of that. You just didn't get the full value of that increased search presence and stickiness is what we like to call it. Obviously you still got content. You still got. sales, you still got awareness and all the other benefits. ah But I always try to get clients to get the best bang for their buck. So if you don't know data, you don't know how your product is going to perform, I usually recommend doing like tiered approaches. So like start off with a hundred, a few hundred, and then see where you fall, see how you perform at those new positions, and then increase scale as time goes on. Which is what you also naturally are going to do if you are doing influencer promotions for... let's say hero products or products that do thousands of sales a month, right? Like if you generate a few hundred sales when you're doing 10,000 sales a month on Amazon, that's not going to convince Amazon to show you to more people, to drop in the bucket, right? Like what we normally see is like you want to drive enough sales that are high converting from external traffic sources to compensate 20 to 50 % of your current monthly sales volume. That's the sweet spot. And that's enough to convince kind of Amazon to really push you further. So that's where I see if you're just a website e-commerce seller, ah then still should start out with at least a hundred just to test the waters. ah But some people also, it's kind of a similar actually equation of like, some people are confident, they start off, I mean, we had a client that's doing 20,000 influencer promotions a month, right? Like they're pushing heavy, cross a bunch of products, but like each product few thousand a month, like totally gung ho, right? And those are scales that like that's impossible for you to do yourself, right? Like you need a unit of platform like stock influence to accomplish it. even at 100, I couldn't imagine trying to manage 100. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't even imagine. Okay, so speaking of herding cats, I wanna flip it the other way. I wanna become an influencer. How do I make a bunch of money? What kind of content do I need? How do I, you let's go the other way. Sounds like a plan. So as an influencer, just starting out, my recommendations are one, pick a niche, right? um Focus, don't just create content about a million different things. Focus on something that you are passionate about and you actually have some domain expertise in, right? You don't have to be an expert. um But I actually want to reframe the word influencer. I think influencer has kind of a negative connotation, even though anyone promoting a product is per se an influencer. But when people hear it, they think of kind of like, I'm going to make a quick, I'm going to like make a lot of money off that. Or it's like, they're a sellout, right? There's like somewhat of a potential disgust when people are thinking of influencers in a weird way. Um, but true influences, influence is true passion. So my mission is to reframe influencers and real influencers into passion promoters, right? Like if you are interested in technology, right? Like. You do podcasting as a passion and you know the best, honestly, maybe you're not the best podcast, you're not Joe Rogan, but you know what kind of headwear to buy, what mics to buy, et cetera, right? uh If I were a mic company and to give you a free mic and you're going to promote my mic, you are actually, again, you might not be the most masterful person in the space, but people trust you because they listen to your podcasts. So. In the same thing with if you're a runner, Or you like to read fiction books, right? When you want a good book, who do usually do? You search on Amazon, you search for things, but maybe you have a friend who loves certain fiction novels, you ask them for recommendation. Word of mouth marketing, which is the oldest form of marketing, the most effective form of marketing, is really what true influencers should be, right? And that comes down to people who are passionate about something. And so that's what works best. for e-commerce brands to find people who passionate about the products that they work with. But on the influencer side, it's like, that's what you should focus on. Like, focus on what you're passionate about. If you like going to the gym, create some gym content. If you like running, create some running content, right? And then that's gonna also attract a specific audience to you initially, and it's gonna make you more valuable to potential sponsorships who wanna get in front of that audience, right? If you spread yourself too thin, you're valued to no one. So that's the first piece of advice. The second is focus on content. Right? People get concerned I don't have a million followers off the bat. Right? It's like going back to how social media has changed is like hone how your audience responds to different pieces of content and test and test and test. Right? Like focus on different hooks, focus on creating different types of content. Maybe they're carousels. Maybe they are static posts. Maybe they're videos. Maybe they're reels. Maybe they're TikTok posts. Maybe they're stories. Right? And Craft different types, create different hooks, create different styles of editing, right? uh And test, test, test, test, test. ah And once you hone in on a few different types of content that work, double down on those, right? Because again, the content is what's going to break you through. And that's what's going to make you into a more valuable person in this day and age as an actual influencer or passion for Voter. ah So, and then as far as getting brand deals, right? ah which is kind of the last step is you can start DMing people who kind of fit your audience. If you've crafted a good curated niche profile, maybe people are going to respond to you. Harder to get in the door that way. uh Secondarily, there's Facebook groups you can be a part of that people kind of post up opportunities, Reddit threads, uh or join a platform and communities like Stack Influence. uh Beautiful thing about Stack Influence, again, you have to get vetted to join, but we try to make it... one of the lowest barrier of entries into the influencer space because we figured out ways to really make it work and streamline the process for e-commerce brands ah so that on the influencer side, like it's very straightforward, right? And you just get access to a huge amount of brand deals. ah So we like to call ourselves kind of the gateway to the influencer world because we try to streamline it as much as possible for influencers to quickly create. good brand relationships and prove themselves to the brand. And that's one of the most important things, right? Because in the same way that Amazon is trying to prove a listing, a brand should try to test out a lot of different influencers. Maybe someone that they didn't think was going to be a great influencer at all, they came through the Stack Influence platform because we're doing things at scale. And all of a sudden they drove amazing awareness and sales. And it's like, we just identified one of the best marketers for that brand. And that influencer now created this long-term relationship, which we don't have. we encourage actually to allow the influencer to create a relationship with that brand outside the platform in the long-term, because we think that's conducive. The influence is gonna come back to us for more deals. We don't want like to prevent them from going away from us, right? Also difficult thing to do in general. But yeah, that's basically how I'd get going as an influencer in 2025. So what do you see, give me an example, something you've seen in the last couple weeks and you're like, damn, that worked really well. Is somebody on a platform, is one platform really spiking? Is it the way they're approaching it? Is it unboxing? Just give me an example off the top of your head that, oh, that was good. Absolutely. So something that is working, this is, so I'll give you two things of one influencer example, and then one thing that brands have actually been doing recently with some content that we've been seeing insane results. And we're actually building out automation features as we speak that we're about to launch. But um in terms of influencers, um really honing in on unique hooks is the key. And then secondarily is creating some sort of value prop that is requires people to comment in order to receive. Right. So what I mean by that is like, you are promoting uh some sort of tips and tricks for uh like how you do your morning running routine, like the best things to make your smoothie with. Right. And then in the video or in the caption, you say, comment smoothie to get my full smoothie recipe. Right. Now, why that works really well is that the algorithms also have recently prioritized people. At the end of the day, the social platforms want connect to connect people more. Right. And so if people share and comment, it's actually the largest signal for that post to get more visibility, more than someone liking. a post or just viewing it, right? Those are rudimentary signals, still valuable, but if someone's sharing it or commenting and responding to comments, it like can really, really spike viewership and the ability for that post to go much further. So creating those funnels in there. There's also software is one that comes to mind is called many chats that you can automate responses to any one who comments in a post. So if they comment in smoothie, uh it's going to automatically send the DM so you don't have to manually. respond to those people. But those types of contents we've been seeing working really well and including in some of our influencer briefs, push more people to do that. ah On the brand side, something that besides our classical value props of driving a lot of Amazon growth, getting some UGC content and just overall brand awareness and sales. ah One thing sellers have been doing right now are implementing what are called partnership ads or spark ads on TikTok. ah Another term people go use is called whitelisting ads. So what this is, is that an influencer gives you permission and usually in the form of a little code to run ads, utilizing their own social profile. Um, little confusing, but to try to break it down very simply is like normally when you're running an ad, even if you took an it pieces of, of influencers content, when a consumer sees that ad, right? They're going to see a video or image. And they're going to see your brand name and brand profile at the top. Right. Now a whitelisting ad, what that is, is it's an ad still under a brand's account. But when a consumer sees the ad, instead of it saying, let's say, stock influence at the top, it says Molly Jones. Right. And it looks more authentic. It's like a real person, but you as the brand are the one who's funding that ad. Right. um And it just goes back to authenticity and trust. Right? It's like we're bombarded by a million things. People have a great filter, but they stop to see things that are real. And so these whitelisting ads are this kind of authentic, trustworthy form of online advertising. And we've been seeing insane results with brands who are utilizing this right now. We don't even have an automation for it. Like brands are just reaching out to get these codes. Um, one brand just recently, like this week told us that they've they normally see, um, to, 2X ROAS on their ad spend. First time ever they've seen three and a half X from a piece of content that they were like, in my opinion, this content like was not quality. Like they didn't think it was that great that they're like, they gave me the code, I'm gonna test it. You know what I mean? And they were like, I spent thousands of dollars on a photo shoot and that's all my ads. And they're like fantastic, beautifully done curated ads. And this one kind of like iPhone video is outperforming everyone and not only outperforming them like. giving them ROAS that they've never even experienced over years of running advertisements on Meta. ah So it's something that we're actually building now an automation system into to where we can now automatically get these codes from influencers to, and then connect them automatically to your ad account. So you really don't have to do all that manual effort. Also figure out what content should be good for different types of ad formats, and then automatically syndicating it into your ad account. And all you gotta do is let the algorithm. determine which one works the best. that's been something that we're pretty excited about uh really feeling. still pay the influencer then to basically use their account to show my ads that I fund. Exactly right, yeah. you can, on our platform, we're getting rights to the content. So ah what we are planning to possibly do is do some sort of revenue share a bit in the same way as like an affiliate thing. So it's like, if influencer drives a huge amount of growth through your ad account, it works really well. Let's give them a little kickback, right? Incentivize them to create better content for you and for more people to join your platform and do things at a low rate. for like product seating. So that's the potential of the system of like, yeah, maybe you get celebrity influencers who are willing to actually do something for free for you with the guarantee that you're gonna run an ad with it so that they get some kickback because your ad spend is a decent high volume in the same way as the affiliate system works, right? So those are models that you can play around with. At the moment, ah we're just giving, we're just asking people for codes after they get a free product. So it's pretty cheap, right? But not everyone does that. They're not incentivized necessarily. Usually at the moment we get about 50 % of people giving us the codes. It's a manual effort that they have to do. Okay. Influencers, this has been fantastic. I've taken up a ton of your time. want to ask you now about the whole Forbes and getting featured. We're switching gears and I see that you're on a Forbes advisory council and you've got featured in some of them. So I want to switch gears here and I want to ask a bit more about that because everybody wants to be featured on Forbes, but can you really get featured? Are they all just like sponsored ads that I've just bought my way in? know, can you tell us a little bit about that and your experience? because that was pretty unique and that jumped out and I'm like, okay, I want to talk about that. Absolutely. um So been doing PR for a long time. My advice for PR in general, right, is like shoot your shot. um When we first started Sack Influence, we were like really a very small platform. um Cold reached out on LinkedIn and DM'd like a reporter at Business Insider and uh Literally she got back me right away. Like out of 10 people, this doesn't happen as you scale, but like 10, one out of 10 people I reached out to, to just see if anyone was interested in writing an article about us. She took it up within a day, wrote an entire article about us. Next thing we know we had Tiffany and co, Calvin and Klein reaching out to us like way too early on. We were not ready for this. uh But like. What that taught me, and I've now implemented this strategy, is like, some people don't believe that they're ready for PR, or they're ready to get featured on Forbes, et cetera. It's like, you don't know, if you're reaching out to a journalist, and this is the strategy here, is like, find people who writing similar articles about your niche, right? Find who the journalist is, don't just reach out to Forbespress at Forbes.com. Like, find the specific journalist, try to find their email, connect with them on LinkedIn, and write something valuable for them. You're doing their job. for them, right? And if it's enticing enough, like they're gonna wanna talk to you, right? Like it's a cool, interesting article. So come up with something creative, reach out to them directly and shoot your shot, right? uh I try to write prompts, at least pitches, right? um To them, to at least like, here's a bunch of different ideas of different potential articles you could be like, and I, let's jump on a call and I'll go deeper into this, right? Some people are like, give me, here's a bunch of questions on that or give me a full breakdown. I'm not writing a full article, right? And sending it to them, but like I'm giving them prompts, ideas for potential things that could be enticing for them to write. Now becoming a Forbes advisor, that program, to be honest, is like a little, so was part of it, looks great on LinkedIn, right? I got featured in like 40 different Forbes articles. ah I submitted a few Forbes articles myself. that I completely wrote myself, which is fantastic. They don't publish every single one, uh but they'll assign you an editor, et cetera. uh Kind of a scammy organization, I will say. It's actually run, like I try to be unbiased with these things. uh It's like, it's run by not even Forbes themselves. And Business Insider has the same thing. There's a bunch of these. It's like a company that's licensed out their trademark. They still have publishing capabilities onto the website. But you'll see articles come under like, this is kind of sponsored, or like, it's part of the advisory council, et cetera. uh You pay to be part of it. You have to apply to join. So the company that you're applying, you have to be a thought leader in the space. So you have to actually prove that you're making more than a million dollars a year. You have to actually have some online presence. So they don't accept just any random Joe into it just because you're paying money. So you got to get accepted. ah but then you do pay like a yearly fee to be a part of the community. They give you a lot of extra perks too. So it's not like necessarily scam, but like, it's like you get access to all these different discounts. You get access to be part of different communities. And then you get access to contributing to existing articles that are being written and um actually then submitting your own articles that you have to go through editing process. So cool system, absolutely. Great for recognition and PR. Like you look at my LinkedIn, you're like, that's awesome. He's like a writer for Forbes, but I will say unbiasedly, like there is fees that go associated. They didn't just reach out to me to get a part of it. ah but they have been like, they love my articles. so like, and then that can transition into somewhat of a full-time content contribution side of things. uh But I will say like, don't trust every single article written by Forbes. ah Some of them, they prevent you from being truly biased. Like you can't just blatantly promote your product in there. They won't approve that. So there's guardrails, right? ah But it was a genius move by them because then they now have like a million different content writers to submit articles to. ah And there's actually an article recently that came out that like they were destroying Google with SEO because they were producing so much content. And Google actually like downgraded them because they realized that it wasn't all like perfectly curated good content that is valuable as somewhat sponsors things, you know what mean? ah But it's not like I'm paying to just be featured there. It's like you paid me part of the community. That's it. awesome. I love the fact that you just went, you found someone, you DM'd her, gave her some ideas. Hey, here you go, I'm ready to engage, I'm ready to help you. Let's create something together that works. as you said, it's true. uh I mean, I've gotten so much. I've gotten featured in Forbes organically that way. Wired Magazine, Business Insider, Glossy, like huge, huge publications over the years that just by DMing someone, giving them some value, you're doing their job for them again. Not every person is going to take you up on that, but like I've had someone who I reached out to like three times and they were in the space. They were writing an article at that time. I reached out the right time, right. ah write article and then they had half article about me. You know what mean? So fantastic, obviously promotion becoming more and more valuable now. Obviously it's valuable for SEO, but the LLMs and GEO is really taking those larger publications into account for that domain reputation. So PR is a move that I recommend everyone do, but don't be afraid to do it. It's the bottom line, shoot your shot. Absolutely, man. going to put that on my to-do list now. uh Man, this has been really, really good, giving me a great insight, kind of the influencers. Man, there's just so much. unknown and people don't know and that's why I love just kind of going through it and you told me you're like yeah three grand okay it's pretty reasonable for a lot of brands you don't need 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars necessarily and don't wait do it now do it as part of your launch right you know like and and feel free to jump back and forth it's funny I talked to this I had a client and he has this tool it's a garden tool uh doesn't do any PPCs, it's all Instagram because people don't know they eat it until they steal it. He's like, no one's going to look for a garden holder. And I saw it and I was like, I don't need that, my dad does. And I'm gonna buy one for him, but you're not necessarily searching for it. I thought that, you know, there's definitely different avenues that this is a really good. Any final thoughts, advice for both sides, either if you want to be an influencer or I want to hire them. Yeah, that's a really just follow up on your comment and then I'll follow up with the last piece of advice. But it's a really good point about products that don't have any search presence, like especially if you're on Amazon, like it's a great, some value, great problem to have in the sense that like you don't have really any competition, but the downside is, is if no one's searching your product, no one's gonna find you. So you're not, you can rank as much as you want. You're not ranking anywhere. uh And so you have to create that awareness. have to create that type of funnel. so influencers and social media are fantastic way, obviously, to do that and create that initial awareness. And we have a lot of brands actually utilizing us for that tactic, just to get the word out, just to increase, besides increasing their ranking or search presence on for existing keywords, developing their awareness for their own brand and desire for more people to search. certain keywords in the space, right? Maybe during seasons that might be slow, you know? But my last piece of advice as a brand is to not give up too early, right? Test, test, test, because influencers, there's an influencer for everyone. And it's literally one of the best strategies. I am a little biased here, but like just... trying to be unbiased as an own e-commerce seller, like it enabled us to scale to seven figures and without that we would not have gotten there. It was instrumental in everything we did from the awareness to the content to the marketing assets to the ads. uh It was what made us into successful e-commerce sellers and what led us to create Stack Influencer in general because we believed in the market enough. And then my advice for an influencer is also to not think that you are not valuable when you don't have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, right? ah You are valuable. Brands can be working with you. Focus on your content, focus on your niche, and don't give up, right? Keep putting in the work, and incrementally you're going to scale, and brands are gonna value you, and all of a sudden, this could be your full-time job. Yeah, and I love the fact you told me can start on your platform and then cut bigger longer term deals and make boatloads of cash and have long term relationships with that ongoing, your favorite microphone, your favorite whatever, right? Because it's always out. think that's what you want. William, thank you so much, man. This has been fantastic. Great chatting with you. Where can people find you if they want to connect? Go, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, William Gassner, G-A-S-N-E-R. um Also, you can find Stack Influence on basically any social channel, at Stack Influence. And then the best way is just to go to stockinfluence.com. um If you are either a brand or an influencer, top right hand corner, sign up, it's gonna direct you to either sign up as an influencer and apply to the platform. Or if you're a brand, it's gonna prompt you to chat with one of our influencer experts. Um, so it'll ask you to book a call. We want to get on a call because for every brand, you have a different growth strategy, have a different e-commerce platform you want to focus on. We want to figure out what your growth desires are, what's going to work best for you, how we're going to cater our platform to work for you. Um, because the beautiful thing about our system is it does not require an ounce of effort to utilize. You set your goals, whether you want a hundred people a month or at that 10,000 people a month. and you upload your product info and you sit back, relax. The platform tracks everything for you. It gets people product, makes sure they post on time, analyze all the final social posts and you get to monitor everything as it progresses, easily access all your content. And then the only extra thing if you want to do manually is create those longer-term relationships off platform with those influencers. Awesome. And that's fantastic. I have one question on that again. Where do they get, where do I need to have my products? Just put them on Amazon or on my website. Do I have to send so many of them to you? And you fulfill it? You have to have, so right now only e-commerce sellers, if anyone, I don't know if anyone listening is like a SaaS or app developer at the moment, something that we are planning to build that capabilities for, but you can only run campaigns if you have a physical product at the moment. You have to have the product sold in some sort of e-commerce store, but we work with every single e-commerce store, whether you're selling on... Amazon, Walmart, Target, Sephora, TikTok Shop, your own Shopify website, WooCommerce, you name it. uh As long as it's sold online, you have inventory, uh we can run a campaign with you. So that's the only baseline requirements. There are a few other nuances. uh Just to quickly list them off for any of you listening is we deal with, because we're dealing with product seeding and smaller creators, we cap. product price, more expensive products are harder for us to actually do in scale and obviously just more expensive in a inventory sense. So products to work on our platform have to be between 15 to $100. And the last thing is that not every product niche does work for our community. That doesn't mean that you're not influencer marketing doesn't work for you. You may be able to find people, but how our vetting process has worked is products and These niches are also more difficult to do in foot care marketing, like medical products or things that have to do with a medical condition, difficult, right? Beauty products, one of the top performing things in that beauty niche or like skincare niche is athlete's foot cream. No one wants to go on social media and talk about foot fungus, right? so it's like, maybe there are people who will do that. Obviously there are, right? The people who talk about sex toys, they're talking about everything, right? My foot fungus again, guys. I'm back. And someone's going to do that, but we are a platform for scale, right? It's like, if you want to just test the water, which honestly, feel free to do like with 5, 10 influencers, just to see how the process works, what it takes to do something. I recommend people do that. If you want to come to us for actual growth, right? Hundreds, two thousands of collaborations. ah We want to be able to scale and not every product niche can scale. The other thing is like, if your product requires some other thing to work, that's uncommon. Right? Like an iPhone case for an iPhone. That works. You have to have an iPhone, but a lot of people have iPhones. um But some like hubcap for a specific version of your Tesla car, like a bunch of people have Teslas, but like, am I going to find hundreds of people at one given time who have a desire for that, that not only have a Tesla product, but like are looking to create content about that actually like um new hubcaps for their Tesla. Right? Like it's like, There's a lot of variables there. So uh yeah, there are some nuances. And that's another reason to book a call with us. We're going to look at, you're going to submit a product to us. We're going to make sure it fits. We're not going to waste your time if the product's not a good fit for us. uh We've worked with tens of thousands of brands over the years. if we have never worked with a brand, we'll test it out. But uh once it doesn't work, we don't want to waste anyone's time until we know that like, Maybe we, and we survey influencers about products all the time to make sure like, hey guys, are you interested in this niche and this product to see what we believe we can scale and what can work well. ah So those are the nuances to the different brands that can actually join. Awesome man. This has been great. William again thank you so much. StackInfluence.com. Appreciate it buddy. This has been fantastic. Right back at you. Great chatting with you,