How Sending Free Products To Micro-influencers Can Scale Your Ecommerce Brand — William Gasner | Why Micro Influencers Matter, How To Find Influencers, What Compensation Models Work, How To Manage Influencers, How Influencers Boost Marketplace Ranks #388

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In this episode, we explore how sending free products to micro influencers can effectively scale your eCommerce brand.

William Gasner, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Stack Influence, shares his expertise on why brands are shifting from celebrity endorsements to micro influencers. 

William explains how to find the right influencers, compensation models that work, and strategies for leveraging influencer marketing to improve marketplace visibility and drive authentic engagement.

If you're looking to automate and scale micro-influencer marketing sign up for Stack Influence at stackinfluence.com.

Topics discussed in this episode:

- Why micro influencers matter. 
- How to find influencers. 
- What compensation models work. 
- How to manage influencers. 
- How trust affects marketing. 
- How marketplaces reward visibility. 
- Why Amazon ranking matters. 
- What Stack Influence offers. 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://stackinfluence.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stackinfluence/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-gasner
X/Twitter: https://x.com/stackinfluence

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Transcript

[00:00:00] This episode is sponsored by Brevo. Time to take your marketing to the next level. Brevo is the all-in-one marketing platform that helps you connect with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp and automation, all from one easy to use platform. Keep your customer data organized, personalize every message and drive real engagement effortlessly.

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Hey there. Welcome to the e-Commerce Coffee Break. I'm your host Claus Lauter, and you're listening to the podcast that helps you become a smarter [00:00:40] online seller. In today's episode, we talk about how sending free products to micro influencers can scale your eCommerce brand. Now, as always, have a guest with me today.

It's William Gasner. He is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Stack Influence. He's a six time founder, a seven figure e-commerce seller, and has been featured in leading publications like Forbes Business [00:01:00] Insider, wired for his thoughts on influence on e-commerce industry. So he has a vast background when it comes to influencer marketing, and I would like to welcome into the show.

Hi William, how are you today? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Claus. Influencer marketing has changed a lot in the past, and, um, instead of paying big celebrities, it had shifted to micro influencers. [00:01:20] Let me know why brands are moving away from, from celebrities and what's the advantage of working with micro influencers.

Absolutely. So influencer marketing, as you mentioned, really started with celebrity promotions and, um, not for. Any unknown reason, right? You as a celebrity, you have a large reach. [00:01:40] Um, so you promote a product, getting visibility or awareness across a huge amount of people and sell a lot of stuff. Um, what has shifted is two things.

One is trust, and two is social platforms, algorithms. So in the, in the trust side of things. [00:02:00] Now consumers realize quite well that celebrities are getting paid a lot of money to do promotions for products. Um, and obviously there's Federal Trade Commission disclosures. You have to say that it's a sponsored, it's an ad.

It can't just be, um, kind of an unknown promotion, but that reality of getting paid a lot of [00:02:20] money, people or consumers now understand that. If you're promoting a product and getting paid thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars, it's not a very trustworthy or authentic type of promotion, right?

Um, you might not really care about the product. You're doing something for money. And so because of that lack [00:02:40] of potential trust, those sales have diminished, right? Obviously, you'll still drive a whole bunch of sales. There's still some clout you could say, um, that comes from a celebrity utilizing a product, but.

It became a bit more skeptical as far as should I actually trust this celebrity with this product promotion. [00:03:00] Um, the second big issue with the larger celebrities, and I'll, and I'll dive into why Micros are actually becoming much more effective, but the other secondary issue is social media platform algorithms have changed quite a bit.

It used to be the fact that if you had a million followers and every single one of those million followers was on [00:03:20] social media. The few days after you posted something, pretty much everyone would see it or at least a majority. Um, now what has happened is that only followers who are highly engaged with a profile will end up seeing content that is posted by a profile.

Um, and the reason social platforms changed is that [00:03:40] accounts started following all these different people. Um, and maybe you followed someone 'cause your friends were following it, or you saw them on TV or some for some reason, um, but you didn't really care that much about their content. And so your feed started getting filled up with all this content you didn't really care about.

And then you left Instagram or you left TikTok and they didn't like that. Obviously they want you to [00:04:00] stay kind of glued to those platforms. Um, and so what they realized was. We only wanna show content to users or consumers that they actually are truly engaged with. Mm-hmm. And so if a consumer is not engaged with a profile, they're really not gonna see a lot of the content that's produced by them.

Um, and then [00:04:20] secondarily, what shifted is that someone, if you do produce really, really high quality content, that is extremely engaging. Not only your followers may see it, but also people outside of your follower base. And so you can have like a hundred followers these days and have a post that actually gets millions of views.

It goes viral if you produce enough content. [00:04:40] So there's been this big shift from follower base celebrityhood, to honestly content curation and quality of content that is kind of king now. Um, and that has directed this shift towards what industry calls nano or micro influencers. Mm-hmm. And for those of you who don't.[00:05:00] 

Know what those types of people are. Usually the common definition is a nano influencer, someone with less than 10,000 followers. A micro is less than a hundred thousand followers, and two reasons why they've become much more effective or much more popular for types of product promotions is going back to very similar reasons I [00:05:20] mentioned of why celebrity.

Um. Kind of promotions have been diminishing is, first off, trust is when you have a smaller audience. It's people who really, really care, right? Mm-hmm. Um, you don't have this kind of celebrity power. You, you're following someone because you actually really like their content. You either know them, you might be friends, family, a close acquaintance.

[00:05:40] Um, and so when you post as a smaller influencer or social media user. Your engagement levels, people look at your profile more. They take action on your profile. They like, they comment, they share at a much higher percentage base than a lot of the celebrities now. And that engagement metric correlates to sales, which is at the end of the [00:06:00] day.

Mm-hmm. A main reason people are collaborating with influencers. And then the second thing, as I mentioned is the social platforms are now really catered to those creators that create really good content, high engaged content. And now they're not only even their content's not only reaching a larger percentage of their audience, but it's also going beyond [00:06:20] their audience and kind of getting that celebrity reach.

Um, and they're cheaper. You don't always have to pay thousands of dollars. It's more cost effective. Right? And you can spread a marketing budget out across. A variety of different, smaller accounts diversify your risk as opposed to putting kind of all your eggs in one basket. [00:06:40] That was a mouthful, but, uh, no, I think that was a very, a very good overview of what the situation is and I think many of our listeners can relate to that.

And me included, I probably follow very few celebrities on social media, uh, but a lot of smaller influences that are dealing with topics that I'm interested in, so I'm engaging absolutely. So it makes [00:07:00] perfect sense. Now, obviously for Brandon, you said you can get further with your marketing budget because you can involve more influencers in your marketing strategy.

I think before we go into the next step, the first step I think is finding them. That's obviously an issue because Absolutely. How do you find them as a brand? What's your approach there? Yeah, so [00:07:20] two biggest challenges with micro nano influencers is exactly what you said. Finding the right people for you, um, because not everyone's gonna be the right fit.

And the second thing is really scaling because. Unlike a celebrity, you do wanna aggregate that smaller follower base. Each person. Not every person's gonna create some content that [00:07:40] goes viral. And so if you're subjugated to a smaller follower base, you wanna aggregate those smaller follower bases mm-hmm.

So that you can potentially get a much larger reach. Now finding people becomes a challenge, um, if you have no marketing budget. Right. Um, strategies simply are to. Use [00:08:00] hashtags or, um, kind of certain topic searches on Instagram, figure out things. Let's say you're selling, um, a beauty product. You might want to be searching certain tags, say it's makeup, specifically around makeup tutorials, people who are creating these types of content and using tags to [00:08:20] identify themself as this type of creator, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, and then decent amount of manual effort here. And this becomes a challenge. This is actually one of the biggest reasons we built stock influence, was to help with this. Scaling and management side to these types of collaborations. Um, but again, going [00:08:40] back to if you're having to do it yourself, figuring out a good process to, um, create an influencer brief, you want to make sure that someone is following kind of your guidelines as a brand.

Um, talking about your product in the right way, educating an influencer on what you're, you're saying, um, figuring out a way [00:09:00] to make sure that that person actually, I. Successfully completes a proper collaboration for you. Mm-hmm. And if you're sending them a product or paying them in a small amount that they don't just kind of ghost you after you send the product.

Um, and then also just making sure that you're tracking actually results, getting rights to utilize maybe the content that they're [00:09:20] creating, um, et cetera. So a lot of different technologies out there, I mean. Doing it in a very bootstrapped way. You can use systems kind of like Airtable or spreadsheets to really track these things.

Um, use some automated, uh, there's one software called ManyChat, like automated DM systems or email outreach [00:09:40] systems. If you can compile a list, use a VA to hire. Um, but it does become a very difficult thing to really scale and manage in a decent amount of time. Um, and that is one thing that our system.

Completely solid for, we've, we've built a system and a community of about 600,000 influencers. So you can actually scale up to hundreds or [00:10:00] thousands of collaborations a month as a brand and every single thing is automated for you while still giving the brand control over, as I mentioned, curating specific content guidelines, what their goals are, what their timeframes are, um, and allowing them to kind of track everything as it progresses.

Download [00:10:20] content, assets. Create further term, longer term relationships with influencers as affiliate or ambassadors. Um, but yeah, that's basically, I can go deeper into any of those topics, but that's the longer short of it. And now a quick break to thank the sponsors of today's episode. Are you looking to take your business marketing to the next level?

Meet Brevo, the All-in-One [00:10:40] marketing and CRM platform designed to help you connect with customers, drive engagement, and grow your business. With Brevo, you can manage all your customer interactions in one place. Nurture leads through their build in CRM. Reach them through email and SM. S and Goose.

Retention with powerful automations effortlessly create personalized multi-channel campaigns that ensure every single customer gets the right [00:11:00] message at the right time. And that's not all Brevo offers. AI driven personalization, advanced analytics, seamless integrations and more. Giving you everything you need to market smarter, not harder.

Get started for free. Or use code ECB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head over to [00:11:20] Brevo.com/ecb and take your marketing further with Brevo. You will find the link in the show notes. So with the influencers, obviously you need to pay them in some kind of way.

Um, what are ways to do so? Absolutely. So variety of different ways to compensate influencers for their collaborations. Um, at Stack Influence, [00:11:40] we actually have what the industry calls a product seeding model. So it's product compensation in exchange for a social post. That obviously is the cheapest way to go about it.

Uh, we find it to be the most also authentic way in the sense that if you're doing something for money, you might not care about a product. If you're doing it for a product itself, you [00:12:00] obviously, it's kind of like. You being a real consumer, giving an authentic testimonial. Right? Right. Um, but it does limit the types of people who are going to collaborate with you, right?

Because not everyone's gonna do something just for a simple free product. And people do also absolutely deserve to get paid for their time. Um, and in stack influence. We also have monetary. [00:12:20] Kind of bonus structures to, um, compensate influencers for certain actions. They take what their mm-hmm. Type of content, they create the results of their social posts, et cetera.

Now, the second most common way to pay someone is just a simple flat fee, right? Um, depending on your social follower base, usually the industry going [00:12:40] rate is about $10 for every thousand followers you have. Um, so got 10,000 followers, get paid a hundred bucks, right? Um. Third common way is affiliate commissions.

So you give someone a tracking link, um, that's unique to [00:13:00] that individual and a certain, and negotiate a certain percentage of sales that they drive. So no upfront payments. Um, but if they drive a sale using that link from that social promotion, you give them 10% of that sale or 20% of that sale. Mm-hmm. Um.

We like to do even our [00:13:20] fundamental negotiation is just for a product, but we actually will incorporate all three aspects, right? So if they do certain actions, as I mentioned, they're gonna get some monetary extra payments. They also can create a longer term relationship once that initial collaboration is done, and if they've done pretty well to join some sort of [00:13:40] affiliate program, whether that is on someone's website, a Shopify website, or that's through an online marketplace like Amazon, I.

Um, and I highly recommend kind of doing a combination of all three, right? Um, influencers will love it. Don't just do a one-off promotion if a, some, if you find someone who's really good for your brand and [00:14:00] fits your kind of niche. Um, creating longer term partnerships with people is really the name of the game now.

Um, having someone consistently promote over time. And so, so yeah. The last I would say is, uh, um, kind of getting. Certain, almost being like sponsored by, uh, um, classic [00:14:20] sponsorship, like a lot of athletes are by a brand, right? Mm-hmm. You're not only getting a lot of free product perks, but you might even be getting a salary from that.

That's kind of a, a more evolved version of influencers. But, um, but yeah. Okay. No, that makes sense. And I have heard about one example of a, a bigger DTC [00:14:40] brand where exactly that happened. They had like a, uh, they started as an affiliate, um, influencer, and the guy has become a full-time employee of the company because he's so good as an influencer.

Absolutely. So you talked about also the different platforms, Amazon, Walmart, target, and how does that work if you're selling on these um, platforms? [00:15:00] Absolutely. Um. So influencers work really, really well for online marketplaces, and the reason being is that an online e-commerce marketplace at the end of the day is basically a search engine.

Um, and so simple stat here, um, let's just take Amazon because it's the, the largest [00:15:20] in the BA batch, about 2,500 new Amazon sellers join Amazon every single day. Jeez, insane. There's now millions of obviously, sellers on the platform. Um, also when someone, for those of you who shop on Amazon, which I assume most people do, um, when you [00:15:40] search for something about 75% of people don't go past the first page.

There's 42 listings on the first page of Amazon on average. Um, now. If you are not as a seller and you have a listing on Amazon, if you're not shown for when someone searches for something on that first page listing, right? You're only, [00:16:00] and that drop off rapidly drops off after the second, third page, right?

Like, you now pass the first page, you have 25% of the audience to even take advantage of. If you're on the 10th page, you might, no one may be seeing your product, right? Um, and there's, for any given search term. There's sometimes thousands of pages, [00:16:20] and so it becomes very difficult to get visibility, and that's kind of the gold standard on the marketplace.

Otherwise, if you're not getting any visibility, these marketplaces sometimes aren't cheap. They're taking a decent cut of your margin, right? Um, and so if you have no visibility, you're not taking advantage of kind of all of that awareness and that shopping presence. Um, so the name of the game is [00:16:40] how do you show up in the same way as when you optimize a website.

Um, for a search presence, you want to basically rank and how do you, how do people actually find you? Now, there's something on marketplaces, which they call the Cold Start problem. Um, the Cold Start problem is that when you launch, it's a risk for [00:17:00] Amazon or Walmart or Target to show you on a first page because if your product isn't very good, um, and they show you and you don't make consumers, don't buy your product.

They just lost out a whole bunch of money, right? Mm-hmm. Um, there's a limited amount of listings on that page. Um, they want those top listings to be the bestselling products and best converting out [00:17:20] of thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of products. Now, there's also a secondary risk, which is that.

If you have a really, really good product that might be better than every single product in your category and they don't show you, they're now potentially losing out on sales as well. So there's this, uh, [00:17:40] and that's what they call this cold star problem is like. How do you figure out what products are good and what products aren't and what Amazon does initially, and what pretty much all the algorithm marketplaces will do is they'll test you, right?

Mm-hmm. So you launch a product, they'll show you maybe on a first page or a top page for a few hours, and then they'll drop [00:18:00] you back down and like see how consumers relate to the product. Because what they're trying to get is data from. Consumers, like when someone comes to your, do people click into your listing?

When they click into your listing, what do they do? Do they add the product to the cart? Do they buy the product? Um, how do they interact with your listing? How long do they spend on the page? [00:18:20] Right? They're obviously tracking an insane amount of metrics, including most likely where your mouse is actually, um, moving, right?

Where you're hovering over things. Now, going back to why influencer marketing can be really, really effective, is, um. Any external traffic sale that comes from off Amazon [00:18:40] to a marketplace listing and drives an actual conversion there is giving that marketplace the data it needs to determine where to place you.

Mm-hmm. Right. It's giving that very valuable click-through rate data, sales data. You name it. And if you can provide that very fast to the algorithm, the algorithm's gonna take notice and say, [00:19:00] wow, you, these products are really high converting. Um, they just started generating a whole bunch of sales. They could perform as well when we put them at this higher position within a keyword.

Okay? You name it. And influencers are fantastic for that because they're a trusted audience, right? Like, um, so they convert at a higher rate than kind of normal [00:19:20] ads. You can drive a lot of traffic. And so. It becomes a very effective way to not only just simply drive sales, get awareness for your bread, but also kind of become a top listing within one of these marketplaces.

Mm-hmm. Which just gains you a huge amount of consumer visibility and can make you, I. A crazy amount of ROI as well. [00:19:40] Yeah, I think there was a masterclass on what's happening on these platforms, so thank you for that. And I learned something. So I think it's very important to understand that obviously somebody who goes through a, uh, a platform like Amazon, they come with a buyer's intent.

So they're most likely they go there to buy something. And now as a brand, if you can really. Promote your [00:20:00] product through info and some marketing on Amazon, that's a synergy effect. Now everyone wins. Um, I have never seen it from this view, but it's, it's, it's really interesting and obviously it totally makes sense.

Now, want go back a little bit to how to deal with micro influencers as a brand. Most of them might be not marketing professionals that might do this as a side [00:20:20] hustle. Um, how do you deal with them? What are the most, um, mistakes do you see from influencers and how you fix these? Great question. Great question.

Um, it becomes difficult to deal with sometimes micro influencers who sometimes call it herding cats 'cause it's just they're all over the place. As you mentioned, not every single person's a [00:20:40] professional. Some of these, a lot of these people are doing it as a part-time hustle gig. I. Um, so one of the biggest difficulties is actually getting people to nail the kind of brand brief you could say.

Mm-hmm. So like what you're trying, how you're trying to convey your brand creates some quality content. And a second thing people actually, in the product seeding world, so [00:21:00] going back to exchanging just a product for a post, one issue that people actually face quite often is getting someone to post in general and not actually stealing a product.

Sometimes a lot of time it's not malicious. When people do that, when you simply ship a product to someone and say, Hey, this is what I want you to post. This is what I want you to do. Since it's not their full-time gig, [00:21:20] sometimes they forget they did it or life becomes busy, they have a full-time job and, and then you just not never end up getting anything and you're chasing after them consistently.

So one roundabout way we actually solve this is, um, get our influencers. And this is something a brand can do themself. It becomes difficult to. Create [00:21:40] trust in this process, but, um, we get our influencers to actually purchase our client's products or become a real consumer of a brand, um, whether that's from a website or some other online, um, presence before they actually collaborate with the brand.

So instead of simply getting someone's interest and then getting their address and sending the [00:22:00] product, we're like, great, you want to collaborate with this brand? Um, here's a link to their website. Go buy their product with your own money. And then once you successfully, here's the influencer posting guidelines.

If you successfully follow all of these things, um, submit that final social post to our platform. We make [00:22:20] sure you did everything correctly. I'll send you your money back for your expenses so you got the product for free, okay? But there is some skin in the game, right? Um, and that becomes a very effective process.

Again, convincing someone to trust you that. You're actually going to send that money back is a difficult thing in that process. However, if you're a trusted brand, [00:22:40] people will go along with this and it really solves a lot of these issues with people ghosting you with people not following the exact guidelines that you want and making sure that you're educating the right way.

Um, the last thing I'll say is just. Really giving people direction because you'd be surprised, like some of these people are extremely, extremely creative and [00:23:00] they'll, and I, and I also do recommend giving them decent creative control. Um, because you, you never know what someone's gonna actually produce, but still pushing them in that right direction, giving them some example content of what's worked for you in the past.

Um, some ideas for certain tags that you'd like to use, some talking points or different kind of, [00:23:20] uh, either video or image prompts. Those while still kind of giving a little bit of open creativity for them to customize that stuff. That is also very key to making sure the content that's getting produced in the post that's going live.

Is conducive to your niche, your brand, your image, your aesthetic. Now most of our listeners are in the [00:23:40] e-commerce game. They're either merchants, online sellers, or work for DTC companies. As marketers, what steps do they need to follow to get started with stack influence? Absolutely. So go to stack influence.com.

We have a very simple signup form. We prefer jumping on a quick call with someone on our team so we can discuss your growth goals, what your objectives are, what [00:24:00] products you're launching, what products you already have that might you wanna push up extra growth for. And then very simply, all you do on our platform is you set a goal for how many, on a per product basis, how many influencers you'd like to achieve.

And how many influencers you'd like to achieve in what timeframe. So setting kind of a, what we call a campaign [00:24:20] timeframe goal. Once that's done, you're gonna upload your product info to the platform. So brand details, product info, posting guidelines. We actually will assign every single brand a dedicated manager team to actually help you with this.

So kind of best practices, et cetera. We're gonna build out custom landing pages, and then once all of that's [00:24:40] done, we get you access to a tracking system. If we're gonna be able to monitor the whole campaign, once you approve how everything looks, we go live, it's very quick setup. Um, usually can get live.

As long as you give us content and upload all that stuff in about three days, but very simple to sign up Again, check out stack info.com and uh, yeah, we'd love to help you if [00:25:00] you're at that stage of scaling and need some help with automating and want to invest in a way that you don't have to pay every single influencer and negotiate fees, um, and do it on a product compensation basis.

Especially we have some, as I mentioned, unique aspects in the online marketplace world like Amazon, et cetera. We'd love to talk to you. [00:25:20] Can you share some success stories or case studies? You don't need to name the brands that have effectively worked with you. Absolutely. So brand, very recently, I, uh, was, it was in a very, it was in a baby niche, right?

We helped them about 13 x there, recurring revenue. Um, and this is specifically on [00:25:40] Amazon. Um, so like absurd, ROI, right? But the simple. Reality behind that was due to that fact of higher visibility with the marketplace because it's also like a new-ish launch product. They were doing about 50, a hundred sales per month, um, and then 13 x that due to the fact that [00:26:00] they just increased visibility across a variety of top keywords across their category positioning, and now all of a sudden just had all these new eyeballs on their product and sales started flooding in.

The beautiful thing about doing that on a marketplace is that when our campaign ends, as long as your product we call being [00:26:20] sticky, as long as your product performs at that new position, right? You have a good price point. You're competitive, good, what they call a plus content like images, descriptions, et cetera.

Our campaign may end, but your sales are not gonna end as long as you're con now converting on those new consumers. And that's an amazing thing to see because [00:26:40] it's like. Very different from investing in performance marketing like Amazon ads, Facebook, mar ads, TikTok, you name it, you shut off those ads, those benefits stop.

Right? Um, investing in influencing, it's very much a long-term. Lots of long-term benefits there. You're, especially in the online marketplaces, [00:27:00] and also creating those longer term relationships as affiliates or ambassadors with these influencers themself. And that's another. Um, kind of use case that we've seen some really good results from is like someone worked with only even a hundred influencers and they found two people who have now provided them with a very big ROI in the long-term fashion, right?

Like two out of a [00:27:20] hundred. Very small percentage, but just those two people were fantastic in the long run for them, and now they're driving like a huge amount of sales and paid for our campaign. Like tenfold. So yeah, those are some simple results. We have a lot of different case studies on our website.

Feel free to also reach out to myself. [00:27:40] My email isWilliam@stackinfluence.com. I'm always happy to share some, uh, success results too. Okay. 13 times more revenue. I mean, that's, that's sort of a champagne problem because you need to be prepared to deal with that. Yes. Um, who's your perfect customers? Are there specific industries or niche that you use to [00:28:00] work more with than others?

Absolutely not every, before I go into the ideal ones, not every, there's some niches that actually do not work for our platform and I. You can, I would say there are people out there that'll promote any product, but if you're trying to do something at scale with smaller influencers, um, it becomes difficult.

So as [00:28:20] a very simple example, beauty products work fantastic for our platform. By the way, the influencer industry is pretty skewed female. So female-centric products are more focused. Products usually are able to scale more than male focused products, but it across the board, beauty products work really well now.

Athletes foot [00:28:40] cream. It doesn't work that well because people are very skeptical to go on social media and say, check out my foot fungus. This is beautiful. Right. Uh, so there are some nuances, right? Like medical conditions, medical condition related products can be very difficult. Our platform also only focuses on e-commerce, [00:29:00] physical goods at the moment.

Mm-hmm. Not to say that digital goods can't be promoted, but that's just our unique angle. And then as far as things that work really, really well. As I mentioned, beauty, fitness, fashion, products, food, consumables, home and goods, those are our kind of top niches. Um, but we work with a wide spectrum [00:29:20] from very niche things to like pets and specific pets, um, to kids products.

You name it. So, um, influencer marketing spans pretty much most industries, but again, there are some nuances to, uh, certain things that don't work so well. If it's not social, we, we like to call it, uh, [00:29:40] dinner table friendly, right? So, um, if you're with people who let's, and not like dinner table where you're with your closest friends and you have no filter, um, but.

If you're with some people who you've just met for the first time, right? What are topics that you might be open to discussing and things [00:30:00] that you might be more skeptical about? Um, don't always have the ability to scale. On social. I think listeners that have specific products that are a little bit more need, a little bit more explanation, they're aware of that.

And other than that, I would just advise, it's like there's only one way to find out. So yeah, absolutely. There's products that surprise us completely, like [00:30:20] it's like, I don't know how this is gonna work, and then it, I actually performs really, really well. So, uh, you will. So, um, you gotta sometimes throw it out there and see what works shouldn't stop you.

How does your pricing structure work? So we have a pretty simple pricing structure. It's a flat fee per successful social posts. So it's a pay as you go system. Again, you set a goal. Let's say your goal [00:30:40] is 300 influencers. You're gonna pay on a weekly basis based off of how many people complete a post. Um, so let's say the first week five people post, you would pay us a flat fee per person.

And that fee ranges. Mm-hmm. From about $25 to $45, depending on a few variety of factors, what category you are, how niche you are, [00:31:00] how much you're scaling, um, or committing to over time. And yeah, pretty simple. So, um, you pay as a flat fee. There's no monthly fees, there's no kind of crazy retainer payments that you have to send us.

And, uh, pay as you go system. Try to keep it No risk. I like that it's very straightforward. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything that you wanna [00:31:20] share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? I think we covered a lot. Um, yeah, again, if you wanna feel free to reach out to my personal email, um, or check out our website and you can book a call directly with our team.

But this is a great conversation and, uh, look forward to helping some of you on your influencer journey. And if stack influence you feel like isn't the right fit for you right [00:31:40] now, or you have a very, very low marketing budget, highly recommend you invest in influencers. In this day and age, they're uh, they're a fantastic tactic, amazing for new product launches.

It's not just about promotion, but it's also a big amount of brand building is the last kind of, I would say, tidbit I'll leave everyone with, is that you can generate a huge amount of content, [00:32:00] social proof on a website, on online marketplace listings, on social media is invaluable these days. Consumers want to see other people like them.

Using your products. They perform better on online ads, so mm-hmm. There's huge amount of aspects that some people think of influencer marketing as just, uh, [00:32:20] side by side to, uh, Facebook ad, right? Like, I'm gonna take my only budget to a Facebook ad I'm putting towards this. There is comparison there, absolutely.

But also see the other side to investing in influencer marketing, to also build up kind of a plethora of content for you of longer term relationships. [00:32:40] As people who might be promoting you for affiliate commissions or ambassadorships. Um, and it's really kind of this package of benefits that, uh, every single brand eats these days.

Totally would agree, and I think that was a masterclass in influencer marketing. I think listeners need to listen at least twice to this episode to [00:33:00] get all the golden nuggets out of it. But I think it's, it's a must have in your toolbox as a marketeer. And, uh, there's so much opportunities in there and I think it's just a growing part of marketing overall.

I will put the links in the show notes as always, then you just click away. I hope a lot of people will reach out directly to you and, um, thanks for your time today and hope to talk to you [00:33:20] soon again. Thanks for having me on. Claus, before you leave, don't forget to visit the sponsor of today's episode.

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