Building Trust: Why Your Best Influencers Are Already Your Customers

Discover the future of influencer marketing with Luke Yarnton, founder of Influencer Radar, as he discusses with host Peter Woolfolk how brands are finding their most authentic advocates within their existing customer base.

The marketing landscape is shifting dramatically away from traditional paid endorsements toward genuine customer advocacy. Yarnton's groundbreaking technology identifies customers who already have significant social media followings at the moment they make a purchase, allowing brands to transform existing customers into powerful brand ambassadors.

What makes this approach particularly effective is its foundation in authenticity. These aren't hired spokespeople reading scripted testimonials—they're genuine customers who've spent their own money on products they value. Yarnton shares a fascinating psychological insight: offering to refund a purchase in exchange for content converts at rates 1000 times higher than offering the same amount as a direct payment for posts.

Trust in traditional advertising continues to decline, while word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family, and smaller influencers remain highly valued. Yeoman notes an inverse relationship between follower count and perceived trustworthiness—as an influencer's audience grows larger, audience trust typically decreases. This makes micro and nano influencers particularly valuable for authentic marketing.

Brands can implement this strategy through simple notification systems alerting them when influencers make purchases, automated email offers exchanging refunds for content, or "surprise and delight" campaigns sending personalized gifts to customer-influencers. Each approach taps into the powerful combination of authentic product experience and established audience trust.

This shift represents a broader transition toward decentralized marketing, where brands empower thousands of individual creators to share products in their own authentic voice rather than tightly controlling messaging. As consumers grow increasingly skilled at identifying inauthentic content, brands that embrace real customer voices will build stronger, more meaningful connections with their audiences.

Ready to transform your existing customers into your most powerful marketing force? Visit theraveco.co or email luke@theraveco.co to learn how Influencer Radar can revolutionize your influencer strategy with authenticity at its core.

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• 12:48 [Ad] Real Talk About Marketing
• 13:36 (Cont.) Building Trust: Why Your Best Influencers Are Already Your Customers

Transcript

Announcer: 0:36

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, Peter Woolfolk.

Peter Woolfolk: 0:56

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to our listeners all across America and around the world. Now, apple has ranked this podcast among the top 1% of podcasts worldwide and recently Feedspot listed this podcast as number 13 on its top 70 best public relations podcasts in the United States. So thank you to all of our guests and listeners for your continued support and if you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review. Question for my audience have you paid close attention to influence the marketers these days? How many are simply people who say what you pay them to say and not much more? How much would your credibility factor multiply if your organization used actual customers speaking from real experience with your product or service? Well, that scenario is now here and it's doing very well.

Peter Woolfolk: 1:49

Influencer marketing is changing with influencer radar. They spot influential customers the moment they buy. It focuses on existing customers as the real game changers, rather than the so-called big names. Imagine harnessing that hidden potential in an audience to transform them into advocates of their favorite brands. It's a topic that's not just timely but could also increase the believability factor of your forward-thinking company. Now, my guest today is the founder of the Rave, the creator of Influential Radar. They engage influencers from within Friar's customer bases and pivots them towards authenticity and genuine connections. So joining me today from Mexico City, Mexico is, is Luke Yarnton. Luke, welcome to the podcast.

Luke Yarnton: 2:42

Peter, I'm so excited to be here. I was listening to one of your podcasts earlier today when you were speaking with Amber about merchandise for brands, and I think of all the podcasts I've been on lately, your voice is by far the most enchanting and leathery. It's sort of like I'm speaking on a late-night radio kind of DJ-type situation. So excited to be here, excited to get into the deep conversations about influencer marketing with someone who's obviously well-experienced in the space and knows what he's talking about.

Peter Woolfolk: 3:14

Well, you know, that's the thing that intrigued me when your office sent me an invitation to have you on here, because I'd never heard about this before. And it makes perfect sense, you know, using customers to speak on what they like. So, basically, how did you? What caused you to create this? What did you see that you thought was missing, that led to your creating Influencer Radar?

Luke Yarnton: 3:39

Yeah, look, there's a couple of different factors that have come in to that have fueled us to get us to the point that we're at now. I think one of them, one of the key ones, is that we built I built a referral and affiliate platform. So with a referral and affiliate platform, the metrics you care about is who's sharing their unique referral links, or referral affiliate links, to their friends, family and followers and how many clicks are they getting, and consistently, time and time again. What would get the merchants or the businesses that use our referral and affiliate technology excited was seeing that a micro influencer or a nano influencer was sharing their product organically. They somehow happened upon a referral link by themselves and they're sharing with their audience, and they would go wild. That's so exciting for them.

Luke Yarnton: 4:27

So then I took a step back and said what are some ways that we could streamline, uh, getting to this end point of having, uh, someone who cares about your brand, who's also a micro-influencer or an an-influencer sharing about it and I come from a technology background, so I'm sort of well-versed in the judo that is technology and I said, look, based on what I know from this referral and affiliate platform, we're consuming a bunch of information when this is happening.

Luke Yarnton: 4:59

So every single time a customer makes a transaction at one of the businesses we work with, we get that customer profile, so we get the email address, we get there all these other details and in a previous world I did a lot of work in e-commerce, so I know from an e-commerce perspective what it's like to partner with an influencer or a creator, and I know what these influencer databases look like and the details that exist in those databases. So by that logic, I said it should be pretty easy if I have the information that exists on one side, which is here's everything you need to know about creators and influences, and here's some information that I own that's on my side, which is email address, name, delivery details, blah, blah, blah. It should be pretty easy just to match one against the other and I should automatically be able to find, based on all of these influencer databases around the world, who's actually an influencer, who's buying from me so what or what?

Peter Woolfolk: 6:00

or? I guess the best question is once you have that information about this particular influencer, how do you get them to become an influencer for the organization that wants that information or wants them to be an influencer?

Luke Yarnton: 6:16

yeah, that's a really good question, peter, and look, the right approach for that varies depending on different businesses and the seat that I'm sitting in here. Now. I get to see some businesses doing some pretty cool stuff in terms of how they're planning to activate the influencers who live within their customer base.

Luke Yarnton: 6:37

So maybe let me speak just three or four different versions of that. The most basic version that we're seeing that is popular and really easy to set up is we integrate our technology into the stores, right, and the moment that an influencer makes a purchase, we create a notification that goes to the influencer manager or someone in the marketing team that says hey, this person just made a purchase from you. Maybe you want to to reach out to them and and see if they're interested in being a partner with you. And they can go through the list. Every day there's maybe 10 new influences that made a purchase.

Luke Yarnton: 7:13

And just to give you an idea on volume, we see, for every 10,000 customers that make a purchase, 200 of them have more than 2,500 followers on either Instagram, tiktok, youtube or Twitter X. So the easiest way is we just send them a notification saying maybe you want to reach out to this person and then they can, via Instagram, dm or something can, reach out to them and say, hey, so you made a purchase, any chance you'd be interested in collaborating in the future? That's the low lift, easy way to integrate something can can reach out to them and say, hey, so you made a purchase, any chance you'd be interested in collaborating in the future. That's the the low lift, easy way to integrate. Let's go to level two. Level two is such that we set up some email automations so customer makes a purchase if they're identified as an influencer. We create an email flow off the back of that. That happens automatically and that email flow says and the email that they receive varies depending on the follow account that they have and the most successful email we have gets delivered.

Luke Yarnton: 8:13

We organize it to be delivered about 48 hours after the purchase and it says, hey, we see you purchased, we love your content and to acknowledge that you made a purchase from us, we'd love to refund your order completely if you're happy just to feature our product that you just purchased in your instagram story or in some way over the next week or two and for most people who've purchased with their own money, you're not putting too much pressure on them to brand it or post it in a certain type of way, shape or form. It's purely just. If you can just feature us in any way you want, happy to refund that that purchase completely free of charge.

Peter Woolfolk: 8:48

Wait, I just, I just want to make sure I understand for you. If they agree to be a um an influencer for you, the companies will then give them their money back in exchange for doing that exactly so.

Luke Yarnton: 9:04

So this is weird. We've sampled by accident across this weird phenomenon, phenomenon which is um. Refunds of purchase tend to be held in a different regard to cash for posting. So, for example, if you were to reach out to an influencer and say I'm going to give you a hundred dollars for an Instagram post, most of them will tell you no, go away, not interested. That's well below my market rate.

Luke Yarnton: 9:28

But if they've spent a hundred dollars on a product and you offer to refund the full price of that product, so it's a hundred dollars in exchange for them featuring you in a post, the conversion rate is a thousand times higher than the previous situation.

Luke Yarnton: 9:43

You're saying I want to give you 100 to post about me for some reason, and look, I'm sure some, uh, consumer psychologist is going to be able to tell me the exact reason why that occurs. I I'm not sure about myself, but it seems to change the logic if it's a refund versus a net payment. So offering that refund say hey, so we purchased, here's a refund. All you need to do is just feature it in some way over the next two weeks. Would love to go through that process with you.

Peter Woolfolk: 10:12

Well, you know, it makes a lot of sense to me. It does simply because I purchased without knowing anything about being an influencer. I purchased it because I needed it or wanted it or I like it. Exactly.

Announcer: 10:23

So now.

Peter Woolfolk: 10:25

I have no problem speaking up to say that I like it and enjoy it, and the bonus, of course is that I'm going to?

Luke Yarnton: 10:32

get paid You're going to give me my money back for saying that I like something that I was going to pay for?

Luke Yarnton: 10:37

anyway, Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly exactly, um, and the key thing is, once you like you, it's the start of a partnership side, of a relationship. So, while getting one simple post to a uh an instagram account now might seem insignificant, the idea is, once you've got them to do something, once the likelihood of you being able to to get into post multiple times or to actually build a relationship and for them to be invested in an advocate of your brand significantly increases. Um, the third, third, third, third layer, the third version, the third uh option that I I was talking about and this is my favorite at the moment. I think this is like really cool, um, is that we work with a lot of brands who just do these. We call them surprise and delight campaigns. Where they'll they'll go through on a quarterly basis. Look at everyone who's purchased from them in the last quarter, find all of the influences in there, plus all the influences who purchased from them previously, and they'll just see in something what, to the average person, might seem small and insignificant, but from a brand that they already know and care about, a handwritten note with something for free and the. The unfair advantage and the key benefit here is these brands know the size, they know the delivery address, they know the details, the order details of these influencers and creators, because they've gone through and made a purchase in the past. So it might cost a couple of thousand dollars, but you've just sent out a bunch of really exciting uh activation content to these creators, uh and, and I think that's a really interesting and innovative way to sort of make the most out of these creator partners that exist within your database.

Peter Woolfolk: 13:02

Now let me ask you is there any way that, once the organization brings this person on as an influencer, is there any way to measure their productivity? In other words, did they post something nice about, whatever it was, the product that they bought, and can then the merchant track the results of that posting?

Luke Yarnton: 13:28

So I've got a couple of answers to that question For me.

Luke Yarnton: 13:34

Obviously, I'm from the world of referral and affiliate marketing, and when it comes to referral and affiliate marketing and when it comes to referral and affiliate marketing, we're laser.

Luke Yarnton: 13:42

It's, everything is fully attributable and and fully visual. So I believe that trying to encourage your creators to post a specific link that's unique to them, that allows you to track exactly how many clicks they're getting and what the engagement of those customers looks like when you get to the website, is the the the key is is probably the best practice and the healthiest way to go about that process. Um, in saying that, I I think it's also true that the way we consider these engagements and relationships with creators and influencers is changing, and by this I mean, I think we're shifting towards this decentralized marketing world, and by that I mean it used to be that the brand makes all of the decisions around what the brand looks like and what people say about the brand and the font and everything we're. Now we're starting to see that decentralized, where the brand is actually being represented by thousands of different creators and influencers who all speak about the brand in their own way, shape or form.

Luke Yarnton: 14:47

So putting pressure on these creators and influencers for a style of language or a type of performance that you're looking for. I'm not sure if that's going to be the winning formula going forward, and the decentralized approach should be we're going to reward you if you can make transactions, but you have freedom to achieve those transactions in any way, shape or form you see fit. We'll just make the best damn product we possibly can and let you, the creator, do what you do best, which is finding an engaged audience and telling them about our product in a way that makes sense to you and makes sense to them well, you know, I'm certainly on board with that, because when information comes from somebody that you know and trust and have seen around for a long time, uh, the believability factor is so much higher you know, as compared to an advertisement on TV or online or from somebody you don't know.

Peter Woolfolk: 15:45

So that believability factor well, I've been knowing you for a long time. If it's good for you, it's good enough for me, sort of thing I think holds up a lot better or worth a lot more than the fact that you paid somebody I don't know a couple hundred dollars to say that it's good.

Luke Yarnton: 16:00

Exactly.

Luke Yarnton: 16:01

And look, I think you're speaking to a very interesting trend that's happening at the moment, where there's some good charts out there on the internet that I suppose the folks listening to this can have a look at afterwards, and it shows the trust in different forms of media over time and you'll see that the trust in traditional advertising is falling.

Luke Yarnton: 16:21

The trust in traditional media is falling dramatically. Even the trust in like traditional influencer marketing, which is you partnering with an influencer with 1 million or 2 million followers. The trust in them is falling significantly. Where the trust remains is with word of mouth from friends and friends and family and co-workers. That's still super high, and with the. There's a sort of a converse relationship when it does come to Instagram influencers or or TikTok influencers or YouTubers, where, as the follower count increases, the level of trust in them decreases. So you want to occupy that as many as you can towards the bottom of the. The smaller the better. You want to build an army of these sort of smaller high trust influencers and ambassadors that are going to carry your brand to the next level.

Peter Woolfolk: 17:14

Well, I mean I can certainly understand that, because if people can see that you, your how would I put it? Your remarks about this have been influenced about how much you got paid, not how much you value it or how much you use it or how much it benefits you as compared to well, I've been using it for years the fact that they gave me a couple of dollars or refunded it, I mean didn't make that much difference to me because I was going to buy it anyway. I mean I can certainly understand the difference and it does make sense to me and I can understand the value to the employer or the person wanting it. It stands out and the believability factor is far much higher. So I can certainly understand why those ratios are what they are, because of how it's done.

Luke Yarnton: 18:07

Yeah, and look, I think, further to that point. Consumers are wising up to this idea of authenticity and they can tell when someone's being inauthentic, when they're talking about a brand that they don't actually know and love, which I think this is why it is so critical If you can find a creator who actually spent their own hard-earned cash to buy your product or to experience your service or to go to your event. If they spent their money and they're going to be talking about it, they were genuinely excited to make that purchase.

Luke Yarnton: 18:36

And so being able to capture those people when the time is right. That's one of the best sort of marketing or PR assets you can have in 2025.

Peter Woolfolk: 18:45

Well, you know, the other thing too is this sort of intersexual interlocks with storytelling, Because when people are looking for storytelling, it's the authenticity. I mean it's been shown that the more authentic and honest that you are about it, the more believable you are and the more attraction you get.

Luke Yarnton: 19:04

So I mean, from what I'm hearing now, these two things actually go together 100% and look, I think, to that point as well when it comes to storytelling. If I'm a creator with 3,000 or 4,000 followers and they're engaged and they love my content with 3,000 or 4,000 followers and they're engaged and they love my content, I don't want to risk sort of like breaking their trust or telling them a story that they're not interested in, about a product that I don't even love, as a small sort of like that 3,000, 4,000 follower count influence. I want to be telling them genuine things that I love, that I know they're going to care about, that I trust completely because that relationship I have with them is so important and I'm not going to risk that on some cheap paid endorsement from some brand I've never heard of.

Peter Woolfolk: 19:52

Well, you know, it also obviously depends on who you bring on board, because there are some people that care more about how much money they make and so, you know, just prostitute themselves to say if that's what you want me to say, then that's what I'll say. That's a huge difference from somebody saying hey look, I said it because I believe in it. I've been using it for years and I wouldn't do it if I didn't believe in it. Those are two different things, and the believability factor and whoever brought you on board adds to their credibility because you brought on somebody. That also believes it.

Luke Yarnton: 20:26

yeah, look, I think that's a short-sighted approach where, if you're just going to sell out to whoever wants to pay the most money, people are going to start realizing that it's not genuine and it's not real. And look, the same applies to these brands who are starting to get ai influencers, like fake avatars that are talking about the brand pretending to be an influencer Again, short-sighted approach. It's not real, it's not genuine. People are going to see through that.

Peter Woolfolk: 20:48

Well, you know, and these are the things that I think, as you point out earlier, consumers are catching on to this. Now you know what I mean. Ai is going to get to the point that if it's misused, it's going to damage your product or your service, because people can see through some of these things. Maybe you might get them on the beginning, because they don't know any better, but once they find out that you've tried to pull the wool over their eyes, you're going to lose a lot, not only to them as a customer, but they're going to tell their friends and neighbors about it too, and so the wheels really begin to come off after that look, I think that's one of the most insulting things you can do as a brand is to try and pull the wool over your customers eyes and give them a fake endorsement or like a fake story about a product.

Luke Yarnton: 21:33

If you're a good brand that makes a good product or a good service or a good experience, you should have no trouble finding people to tell that story to the world. That's the way the world works. Now is that these snippets exist on on social media. You should have no trouble, and what what we're doing is just for these good brands, that that make good products and and tell good stories. We help them find the people that are happy to tell that story. Um plus, they've got a big old microphone so they can tell a lot of people because they already have this built-in reach that exists when they made that purchase.

Peter Woolfolk: 22:09

Now, how wide has your influencer radar gone now? Where is it? Is it in the US? Is it in Mexico? Is it in Europe? Just how far has it gone thus far?

Luke Yarnton: 22:20

Yeah, we're still pretty early on the journey. We're only working with just over 100 brands, so far. The biggest brand we're working with is a big secondary ticketing marketplace called Event Ticket Center. I think they're one of the top five ticketing platforms in the US.

Luke Yarnton: 22:37

We're working with a bunch of interesting e-commerce stores the likes of some of them you might have heard of in the Shopify space, sort of around that enterprise scale level. One of them's Form. One of them's a nice yoga company called Stacked. There's a bunch of them that exist in that space but we're sort of rapidly ramping up and our bread and butter is in e-commerce but we're looking to grow beyond that. So anyone that has a customer list of 10 000 customers or more can usually see pretty good value in what we're doing here so how does uh the the company or organization and employers you, how do they go about paying for this?

Peter Woolfolk: 23:19

that is, uh, do you charge? How do you decide how much an influencer should get for coming on and being part of your influencer radar?

Luke Yarnton: 23:33

Yeah, look. So our influencer radar works sort of independent of these dollar amounts that exchange right. So we work with brands and the price we charge brands depends on the volume of the emails that we're analyzing on their behalf.

Luke Yarnton: 23:47

So it tends to be like a set monthly fee for us to be consistently analyzing every email that comes through the platform and telling them who's an influencer and who's not when it comes for the brand finding the right price to pay that influencer for that, that content. Um, we've got some strong suggestions, but there's a bunch of different factors that come into play around like uh, what is the value of the product? Can they refund the entire value of the product or not? Uh, can they? Uh, is it something that has a lot of social currency or is it something that doesn't have a lot of social currency?

Luke Yarnton: 24:21

If it doesn't, if it's not something naturally interesting for people to talk about, you have to turn the price up a little bit to make them more likely to want to post about it. And and there's a few different ways that you can sort of put that together and then, obviously, to that previous point around the way we price, we can also do massive retrospective looks. So just this week we've onboarded a business that has just over a million customers in the email database.

Luke Yarnton: 24:48

So we've gone through that entire customer list and found a cohort of thousands of creators that have purchased over the last four or five years. They now have a really engaged email list of all the creators that ever purchased from them, where they're exclusively getting creator offers.

Peter Woolfolk: 25:06

Okay, well, luke, let me say this you have been great in letting us know about Influencer Radar. If someone wants to get more information about it, how would they reach you?

Luke Yarnton: 25:21

Yeah, look, you can visit us at theraveco. That's our website therave T-H-E-R-A-V-E dot C-O. Feel free to email me directly, luke, at theraveco, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I imagine my LinkedIn profile is going to be attached to the show notes of this podcast.

Peter Woolfolk: 25:39

Well, let me say this I think our listeners are really going to appreciate this, because when I got the information about what you did, I said, wow, this is spectacular, and this is the kind of thing that I like to bring to my audience, because they like to hear this kind of stuff as something new and more important, something they can possibly use. That's the most important part about this thing. So I want to thank you again for reaching out and for coming on and being a guest on the Public Relations Review podcast.

Luke Yarnton: 26:10

Look, peter, I'm so happy to be here. Look, if anyone's even slightly interested in hearing more, feel free to reach out to me directly. Look, the technology is still super new and we're still working out what the right direction is to take it, what features we need to add. So if anyone feels strongly or has any ideas, don't be a stranger Jump into my inbox and let's sit down and have a conversation not dissimilar to the conversation I've had with Peter right here.

Peter Woolfolk: 26:33

Well, let me say again thank you to Luke Yarland. He is the founder of the Influencer Radar and if you've enjoyed it, we certainly suggest that you reach out to him and get more information as to how it can benefit you. And, of course, if you, the listener, have enjoyed the podcast, we certainly like to get a review from you, and you can do that by going right to our website. But also, let me say, please share this information with you and your colleagues and join us for the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast.

Announcer: 27:04

This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for joining us.