Revolutionizing Influencer and Affiliate Marketing with Lily Comba - 80

Lily Comba, Head of Agency Partnerships at Superfiliate and CEO of Superbloom, joins Brandon Amoroso in the D2Z podcast for an enlightening conversation that uncovers the dynamic world of influencer and affiliate marketing. 

In this episode, Lily shares her extensive background in influencer and affiliate marketing, including her pioneering work with Thrive Market on influencer collaborations. She discusses the challenges posed by outdated tracking methods and underscores the pivotal role technology plays in optimizing influencer and affiliate programs.

Lily's journey takes an intriguing turn as she discovers Superfiliate, a platform poised to revolutionize referral and loyalty programs. She highlights how this platform streamlines processes, offers data-driven insights, and enhances the overall customer experience. Brandon and Lily delve into the significance of a sister agency like Superbloom in supporting brands to unlock the full potential of tech solutions like Superfiliate.

The conversation also explores the evolving influencer landscape, the importance of upholding the integrity of influencer marketing, and the role agencies play in providing consulting and formal support to brands navigating the creator economy. Lily's passion for optimizing influencer marketing shines through, making this episode an invaluable resource for marketers and entrepreneurs seeking to elevate their strategies.

Tune in for a profound discussion on influencer and affiliate marketing, the transformative power of technology, and the ongoing importance of preserving the essence of influencer marketing in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency, electric. Today I'm talking with Lily Komba, head of agency partnerships at Superfiliate and also the CEO of Superbloom, which is Superfiliate's sister agency. So really excited to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:41

So before we hop into some of the things we want to chat about today, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:48

Yes, I am, just to your intro, head of agency partnerships at Superfiliate and then CEO of Superbloom, which is Superfiliate's sister agency focused on optimizing influencer and affiliate programs, and that is my specific area of expertise. I've been doing influencer and affiliate marketing for about probably eight or nine years. At this point Got my start at Thrive Market, learning really much the foundation for influencer marketing. They were some of the first in the space to actually work with influencers and to partner with them in really big ways to scale the business, so I was very fortunate for that experience. And then, in Q4 of 2020, seed Health hired me to scale and oversee their program, and that's exactly what I did, so left Seed in June of this year to launch Superbloom, and now we're hoping to bring our channel expertise to others in the space.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Awesome. So what's that process been like having to start an agency from the ground up?

Speaker 2: 1:53

I was fortunate enough to have worked with a bunch of agencies at my time at Seed and some of the best agencies and relationships made really great friends by working through our agency partners and so kind of got a good lay of the land of like oh, these are some of the nuts and bolts of being a good agency and being a good partner to the brands that you're supporting.

Speaker 2: 2:18

But I think that what we've learned so far in the last three and a half months that already feel like three and a half years is that we have a very we're very different in how we actually approach our business and in the type of support that we offer, and I think, the reason being all of those years of having in-house experience I was never on an agency before launching an agency, and so there's obviously been some growing pains as to how do you organize yourself as an, how do you serve each and every one of your clients, how do you keep your brain from not feeling like a bowl of spaghetti noodles when you're trying to keep everything straight. So it's been a lot, a lot of learning these last few months, but we've also had a few wins and it's been it's been really exciting to see the traction that we're getting and the support that we've been able to provide so far.

Speaker 1: 3:10

Yeah, well, I mean, I didn't have any agency background either, which is like a blessing in the curse, because there are certain things that we didn't do, that was a good thing, and then there were other things that I sort of didn't want to do, because I thought I knew better and I didn't, and so that was a growing process, for sure.

Speaker 2: 3:31

Oh my gosh, yeah, it's things that I had. No, no, I had no idea I would have to like think through oh yeah, we need to make sure we're really good about invoicing our clients because we need to get paid. Like those, even those like very important details, I'm like oh yeah, I forget. The biggest thing that I've learned is you forget that you're building a brand outside of supporting the brands that you're working with. So, you know, I'm keep forgetting, like oh, there's super bloom decks that we need to make and case studies that we should write, versus like, just getting in the weeds with our clients. It's so easy to just forget you know the actual business that you're building because we're so focused on supporting our actual brands, which you know important. It's better to have this scenario than the off, than the reverse.

Speaker 1: 4:19

There's definitely the reverse, where you know great marketing for the agency but not necessarily great marketing for the terrible marketers.

Speaker 2: 4:27

You're at least helping me, Brandon.

Speaker 1: 4:32

But you know, going into super affiliate, I guess for those that are listening, I think. Referral programs, you know they've been around for for a while.

Speaker 2: 4:45

And.

Speaker 1: 4:47

I remember going on to Shopify websites in like 2018 or 2019 and everybody had the little widget in the bottom left corner to like earn 100 points or whatever. Yeah, which nobody actually did. You know, like maybe one to 2% of customers would ever engage with it and a bunch of brands that sort of slapped it up there as if it was going to be some magical. You know, customer acquisition and retention play Both the referral and the loyalty. So I guess what excites you the most about you know, super fillet. I've obviously already, you know, had the Kool-Aid and we use it with most of our clients. But I guess, give everybody listening the, the, the spiel.

Speaker 2: 5:25

Yeah, and it's funny, I won't like. I'm like I don't know, not a great salesperson and my the best way that I like to describe super fillet is my spirit, how I learned about it in the first place. So about a year ago, in 20, like mid 2020, when I was managing and overseeing seeds influencer program with the amazing team that I had at the time, everything we were doing was either like our affiliate program was in a very, very old, outdated software I won't name it and our influencer program was all in Google sheets, even the tracking. So you know, even to gauge an influencers performance, we just did a cold CPA, cpa division. How much did we pay them? How many code redemptions did we see? But even that process required downloading a report from our backend, uploading it to a Google sheet, and then we had queries, pivot tables, v lookups all to kind of like chug out and churn out the success of that partnership, how many code redemptions that this person received. It was very outdated. So our tech stack to dot exist. We were, we were set for such a streamlined program. We were not optimizing ourselves ourselves.

Speaker 2: 6:41

So I had a friend who was like hey, have you heard of super fill yet?

Speaker 2: 6:45

And I was like no, what is that? Met with Andy and Anders and was blown away by what they were doing for brands to optimize the front end strategy for creators and referral program. So, like the landing page experience, making sure that if you whether you're a customer or someone with 200 followers or 200 million followers, you get a customized landing page, which is huge for a performance driven strategy. But then the back end insights and analytics is what really sold me. I was like I can see unique visitors, time spent on page, how many times the coupon was used, what the actual revenue was, regardless of just like cold hard code. It was like state of the art reporting, which for me it being a data nerd was a huge, the biggest thing that was missing for our team. And so what winded up happening was we kept talking with super fill yet and then realize that seed wasn't on Shopify which is the current hurdle for some brands interested in in pursuing or working with super fill.

Speaker 2: 7:42

Yet is. You want to be on Shopify? So seed was on something called recurly, so I couldn't. Actually. I was so Bob. I was so sold on the platform and absolutely loved Andy and Anders the two nicest guys you will ever have the pleasure of working with and I was like crap, we can't work, we can't even use it. So, anyway, fast forward to earlier this year, so January 2023.

Speaker 2: 8:06

I realized that my time at seed was coming to an end for various reasons and was putting out the idea of being a consultant Full time. But this revisited the. And then the same friend that introduced me to Andy and Anders. Like you should talk to them because they're actually looking to build out their sister agency. So, anyway, fast forward to July of this year.

Speaker 2: 8:27

I am now using super fill yet with the brands that we're supporting on the agency, and it has made my life as an influencer marketer a million and 10 times easier, Because you can not only keep your referral and loyalty program in super fill, yet so can your affiliate program, so can your influencer program, and you can have like 30 different affiliate programs if you wanted to get super, super niche and super categorical on your program. It's just, it's the best and I can't. I'm coming at this from like a customer standpoint, like I was a customer first who was so in love with their product that I'm like help you. Yeah, I want to work for you full time, like let me help help the brands that are using super fill yet to optimize their, their strategy.

Speaker 1: 9:15

No, I think that's a that's a great transition. You know getting the brand side experience and then you know when you're talking and working with the brands that are onboarding. Now you're in a much better position to be able to support them through their own process and journey.

Speaker 2: 9:28

Yeah, I got I mean right time, right place such a lucky personal career opportunity. But now I'm just really motivated and really excited to get super fill it in the hands of more marketers, because I believe so strongly and how it will optimize how you use your time. Truly about all, about like working smarter, not harder.

Speaker 1: 9:50

I really like the concept of having the you know the sister agency, because you know apps don't run themselves. You know most of the solutions that you would use on, you know, shopify storefront. They require you know somewhat of a plan and execution strategy around them and a lot of times I'll log into a store and they'll have like 5060 apps. Maybe they're actually leveraging like five of them.

Speaker 2: 10:18

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:20

And so I think, from a tech platform standpoint, I've been seeing more and more of that sort of gets spun up where it's. Maybe it's not an agency, maybe it's like an internal professional services group, like that's what Electric is now for the most part at drinks is acting as that conduit to help migrate merchants over. We still work with other agencies as well, but sometimes they're just has to be an internal stakeholder, or brands expect that there's going to be somebody internal to be able to support them, and then, from a platform standpoint, you obviously want the best results for your customers and sometimes they're just not going to do what they need to do in order to generate an ROI from the product.

Speaker 2: 11:00

Yeah, and it's like, and it's some brands don't realize that they don't know how to unlock it themselves and it does take an agency to kind of support them and build out their strategy and build out their programs, for them to realize the benefit of just additional perspective.

Speaker 2: 11:19

And on the agency side, like, yes, we have traditional retainer clients but we're also offering, just like, hourly consulting, because what we realize is there are a lot of brands that are early, early, early in the creator economy and the in the creator space that just have questions that no one's been able to answer before. And we, you know, we don't want to gouge people, we just want to make sure we a big motivating factor for the agency is to up level the influencer and affiliate landscape and just make sure that it's maintaining its integrity. And if we can do that by helping, by advising brands in a more casual capacity but then supporting them in a more formal capacity, that's our goal. We just want to make sure that influencer marketing kind of maintains its heart, its heart and soul. And you know, and I think that's important from an agency is to go above and beyond and just be able to show up for your clients in the ways that they really, really need you to.

Speaker 1: 12:26

And how do you go about? You know, like quantifying ROI, because I feel like influencers one of those channels that's, you know, gotten a bad rep in some instances where you just have these like fixed contracts and who really knows what happens after that.

Speaker 2: 12:44

You're like fingers crossed.

Speaker 1: 12:45

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:46

There is always inherent risk in booking with an influencer, whether you're paying them $250 or $250,000. There's always going to be inherent risk, but the methodology that I have refined over the last eight, nine years helps you reduce that risk significantly, because there's a whole host of data and criteria that you can ask from an influencer before you even get to the contracting phase. And that is arguably the most important step in the onboarding process of an influencer and it's how you can estimate and predict or forecast potential return and potential revenue. And those stats are different per platform you Instagram to YouTube, to TikTok, to email newsletter, to blog, to podcasts there are so many different insights and analytics that you can ask for to understand this creator's community and I've said this a couple of times before it's like what you're doing in these early stages is assessing whether or not an influencer has an audience or a community. You wanna work with someone who has a community, and so the metrics that you can ask for, like Instagram, for instance, get their demographic information age, gender, location Make sure that age is like, perfectly aligned with your ideal customer profile. Gender make sure that that's also aligned with the creator him, her or themselves. And then location If you're a business that can only ship within the US, make sure that they have a majority US following. That seems really basic, but it also like this information.

Speaker 2: 14:22

A lot of brands don't realize that you can ask for it and get screenshots. Don't trust a media kit. You can get story views. You can get link clicks, sticker taps and then you basically gauge what their engagement is and if their engagement is on the higher end. So basically anything above 10%. Nowadays, with all of the changes happening to the algorithm, it's a little bit harder to get some views on your stories. But you wanna assess, like, how invested are the people that follow in that? Like, how are invested are they in this influencer's life? That all of that data helps you understand what the potential ROAS or CPA will be. After the creator has obviously gone live with their content. They have a customized landing page link and you can track performance and see how well they did.

Speaker 2: 15:06

Some of our brands are on a hard CPA. They just wanna see $100 CPA or a $58 CPA, whatever it may be. And some brands look at ROAS. So what's the revenue return on this partner? Did they break even? Were they a half point ROAS? Were they two X ROAS. So we adapt to clients goals and KPIs. But then we also have a lot of clients that are like you tell us, what should we expect? How much should we spend on month one and influencer testing and what is that anticipated return? How does that differ from month three, month six?

Speaker 1: 15:39

So how to gauge revenue yeah. Yeah. Do you prefer micro influencers or larger ones, or does it depend?

Speaker 2: 15:48

It depends. We have a client right now that is looking to only invest $10,000 a month on influencers, which is on the low end, so we basically approach that accordingly. We're not gonna have. We could easily be like we're gonna give you one influencer who charges $10,000 for an Instagram story and they might hit a one and a half or a two X ROAS, but that's not much of an influencer launch.

Speaker 2: 16:13

This brand is looking to launch into influencers and if you work with one, it might give you some cold hard cash, but it's also like not much of a moment. So what we've done instead is we've looked at more mid to lower tier in terms of engagement and follower size creators. That might be $1,000 to work with them, $750 to work with them, but even that approach is customizable. Like at seeds program, when we were spending $1.6 million a month on influencers, yeah, we had the flexibility to work with someone on Instagram stories who charged $25,000 for three frames. Like, we had that level of understanding that in order to see big numbers, you do have to invest a good budget into influencers to really see your return.

Speaker 2: 17:01

And I think a lot of brands kind of get stuck in this flow of only working with micro tier creators because the price point is more approachable. But that's also where, like, a really good agency like Superbloom can help you understand that disconnect. Be like why are the micro creators kind of they're okay, we're too scared to spend money. How can we spend that money in a way that we feel really confident that it's going to see a return for us?

Speaker 1: 17:30

Yeah, that makes sense. You sort of can't have like one foot in, one foot out. You either have to do it or don't do it. Yeah, and it's scary, you get it, but I think like yeah, I mean, does it make more sense, though, to still have fewer but go deeper in relationships than just sort of spraying the whole infield?

Speaker 2: 17:49

You nailed it. Yeah, I like that. I'm wearing my charger sweatshirt making a football reference, love it. Yeah, our approach is very quality over quantity, but then again, if you're spending almost $2 million, you've also got the quantity play. But we, it's the and I'll say this over and over and over again the quality of your influencer program is a reflection of the quality of the relationships you have with every talent manager or talent directly, and so the healthier those relationships are. When you take a more quality over quantity approach, you can spend more time with each creator or spend more time with each talent manager optimizing a campaign and supporting them and showing up for them. If they have an event, you sponsor it and you show up. Things like that. It's really really, at the end of the day, this is marketing to the human experience and you get to work with people. How do you support your friends and family? Basically the same way that you should be supporting your influencers do, because we're just people at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 18:58

And when it comes to the actual sourcing of the influencers, how are you typically going through that process with a brand?

Speaker 2: 19:08

So one of the unique things about Super Bloom is because of the years of experience that we've had in this industry, we really have developed a collective of creators that we go to. It's just shy of 100 people at this point that we've worked with, that we have really close relationships with and we don't represent them directly. It's more so like these are tier one, top revenue driving creators that we trust from all. You know all they check out, they check all the boxes and we usually, when we bring on a new brand, we start with that collective and we say, hey, so-and-so brand is now working with us. If you are interested, please send your proposals and let's work on this together. Let's make this a very amicable relationship. We can work on the brief together, the campaign together, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 19:57

We always start with the collective that we're building out, but then if the brand has a specific interest in working with athletes, we just do a lot.

Speaker 2: 20:08

We take it the old school way. The only tech-supported side of things is super affiliate, because we really just do the manual route. We find the key opinion. If we have to source within a new cohort or a newer cohort to us, like athletes, for instance, we start with the key opinion leaders within that space. We see who's following them, who they're interacting with, and while that does sound like it takes a lot of time, it doesn't, because you kind of have to know what to look for and where to look for those potential partners, and it does help. I think sourcing tools are very helpful when you're just starting out with an influencer program, but you get to a certain point where your email once you just start emailing talent managers, your email gets out and then they all come and find you. That's kind of the point where we're at right now with the agency is, people know that SuperBloom exists and so they're just offering their rosters of talent to us, and that's how we learn about more creators and book more campaigns Got it.

Speaker 1: 21:10

Ok, that makes sense. Well, I guess, if you have one tip or trick for brands, who's looking to get started with Influencer? And also, where's the line between Influencer and affiliate and creator there's so many terms Is there really a difference or is it all muddled together?

Speaker 2: 21:32

now it's a little muddled, but there is still a big distinction, like creator, I would say, applies to affiliate influencer. Everyone's a creator. You're creating content, you're creating a community, et cetera. Everyone's a creator. Affiliate are the typically either publishers, like Hearst, for example, condé Nast, like those are publisher publishing houses, and then also the more micro creators are affiliates, and that basically means they're open to a commission-based model versus requiring an upfront fee.

Speaker 2: 22:05

And the days of putting all of your eggs in the affiliate basket, I believe, is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, because even the micro creators are now charging upfront fees, and that's what I mean by influencer. They charge an upfront fee. They probably have a talent manager. That's an influencer. Affiliates are influential, but they're not at that stage yet where they require, basically a talent manager. But even we see it now. I think within the last six months to a year, the affiliate landscape has changed so drastically that, unless you have a very competitive and desirable commission amount, you're going to have a hard time recruiting for your affiliate program. And so what you need instead, or in conjunction with your current strategy, is a voice of reason within the influencer space to coach you on how do we negotiate an upfront deal? What do we do with the affiliate and upfront deal. What do we look for? What do we book? So on and so forth, because that truly feels like the direction that the industry is taking, regardless of your size of a creator.

Speaker 1: 23:12

OK, and then one tip or trick. Tip or trick or a brand, you have one thing to do.

Speaker 2: 23:19

Well, the trick would be to use Superfiliate, because you might as well set yourself up for success, and that's the only sales point I'll make today.

Speaker 2: 23:29

The tip Stop being so afraid. It, honestly, is the one channel and I don't control is like the wrong word. It's the one channel that you can have a lot of control over, because it's all about the relationship with the influencer. So you book a really good contract and then you work collaboratively with them on their campaign and on their execution and the talking points and what they say and where they say it and how they say it.

Speaker 2: 24:06

The nature of the channel is so collaborative that, yes, it might be really scary to spend $20,000 on influencer marketing, but you have to understand that it's not just another ad set on meta, it's not just another retargeting or a pre-roll ad on YouTube. You are working with a person and so the quality of your influencer program is a reflection of the quality of those relationships, and you can control how you treat people and you can control how you show up for them and you can control what resources you give them to succeed. It's like hiring a new person to your team. When you work with a new influencer, treat them like they're a part of your team. I think that's my tip Be less afraid of these upfront fees and also just be a good person. I think that's it.

Speaker 1: 25:02

Yeah, I think people overcomplicate things too many times, and I think the same when you're building out a retention program for a brand. It's like how would you want to be treated or how would you want your experience to be as a loyal customer of a company, and then, more often than not, half of the strategy and half of the plan changes when they put on that hat. Some things have just gotten completely out of whack in points-based loyalty programs, for example. I don't like it all because they make no sense. They're so confusing. He has this point-based program. It has 100 points worth of dollars. It has a worth of $100. It's so confusing. There's a lot of friction. It gets really confusing.

Speaker 2: 25:43

There's a lot of friction too.

Speaker 1: 25:45

Do you have to log in and then apply it, versus it just happening automatically? Yeah, I agree, there's some stuff like that that is on my list of pet peeves.

Speaker 2: 26:00

I'm sure we could have a whole separate discussion about pet peeves.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Pet peeves. Yeah, A long list I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Before we hop off, where can folks find you in SuperFilliot online?

Speaker 2: 26:20

Superfilliotcom, trysuperbloomcom. We're working on getting superbloomcom, but for now it's trysuperbloom. Linkedin great place. Do you have me on Instagram? Just Google me. Google Superfiliot. Andy and Anders love just educating people about the space, similar to what I do, Even if you're not interested in purchasing anything or working with us in a formal capacity. We love advising because if it helps you move the needle with your brand, it's been a good day for us.

Speaker 1: 26:59

I love that. Well, thank you for coming on, as always for everybody listening. This is Brandon Emeroso. You can find me at BrandonEmerosocom or ElectrarchMarketingcom. We will see you next time.