Creating Organic Flywheel with Influencer Platforms

Tim Jordan.m4a Hey everybody, Tim Jordan here, and I am at the second Market Masters event thrown by Kevin King. And I've been asked to share something that should be impactful and useful for kind of all of you, all of you listening. This is really important for the biggest sellers to the smallest sellers. When I think back over the last six months to all the different conversations I've had with big brands, small brands, agencies, whoever it is, there's a common theme that keeps being discussed, and it's influencers. Influencers. It's a hot topic. It's a buzzword. Everybody wants to talk about influencer marketing. But at the last Market Masters I was at, I was challenged because I heard people talking about influencers in one context or another context, or this platform, or not that platform. But then 10 minutes later, it's that platform, but not this platform. I got super, super overwhelmed and confused, and I thought, 'I want to figure this out for my own brands.' And then maybe I can help others kind of distill this down to something that makes sense so we can start using things appropriately. Because if we use influencer marketing in the wrong way, we get frustrated and think, 'oh, influencer marketing doesn't work.' But if we're using a kitchen knife in the wrong context, it'd be really easy to say kitchen knives aren't important. No, let's use the tools for the right reasons. That way we can use them for success. So I'm going to talk specifically in this session about influencer platforms. And influencer platforms, I'm going to specifically focus on as opposed to just influencer marketing, are kind of easy to use for most people. It's like a marketplace, right? Amazon's a marketplace where a lot of things are in one place. There's a lot of utilities and functions built into the marketplace and the platform that are valuable as opposed to a bunch of different retail stores or a bunch of different websites. If that analogy sticks, I hope it does. Kind of explaining why influencer platforms are something I want to focus on. Not they're the only way to use influencers, but I think you get my point. So, a little bit of setup. First, we know that there are some very specific factors to ranking and getting juice specifically on Amazon. And a lot of those are things that we know about sales, volume, and velocity, listing optimization. The new one over the past maybe year that's been really, really proven out through a lot of data is high-value external traffic. High value, meaning high relevancy. You don't want to bring a ton of people to a listing and not convert that messes you up. So having highly relevant audiences for your product is important, can be difficult, and I think influencer platforms help. I recently had a conversation with one of the VPs of Alibaba. com and he made this comment. He said, what we're finding out in the context of like manufacturers advertising to brands in the US is that to globalize, you have to localize. So localize to globalize, meaning we have to have like the eyes and ears in the correct way with the correct messaging. In the place that we want to be, to find success. And I thought, man, that applies to everything, like my brand, my physical products. How do I localize my offer, my message, my value proposition to the region or to the avatar or to the actual specific buyer that would be interested in my product? Because otherwise, the messaging isn't going to land. I'm not going to have any authority or trust in my messaging, which is you should buy my product. Unless I'm speaking to you. I'm speaking to them in the way that they want to be spoken to in the messaging that they need to hear with authority that's local. Right. So I think the influencers are a really valuable way to do that. So going back to external traffic, there are a lot of specifically there are a lot of people that ask, well, hey, if we're going to use external traffic, you know, presumably by reaching out to these local audiences in these these specific avatars that we want to target. Like, why is that important? Why is that something we want to do? Well, it starts with a few things. One, Amazon wants to be the main shopping destination. So they're now incentivizing us to bring traffic from off of Amazon to Amazon. And they're doing that through ranking. They're also doing that through right now in the US, at least the brand referral bonus. They're giving us extra commission to do that. The attribution program makes this so much easier. You should be able to not track this stuff. And now you can with the attribution program. The 10 percent gross sales thing is really awesome. And then the increased organic ranking. There's a ton of examples, data-driven examples of that helping. But now I'm going to confuse a little bit maybe and say influencer traffic is not just influencers on social media. Instead of saying influencers, let's say influential traffic. OK, influential traffic is important. SEO, organic social media, PPC, email marketing, social influencer marketing, informational content marketing like blogs, videos, guides, quizzes, etc. Even marketplace internal content, what you put on Amazon or Walmart or in TikTok shop specifically. There's online communities, there's affiliate referral traffic, right? So we think about influencers, start thinking broader about influential traffic. Messages that are landing within the avatar and the communities and to the prospective buyer for your product and how to get that there. Some of my favorite influential traffic sources specific to Amazon. I love existing audiences that are owned largely by influencers, right? Someone's Instagram account that's an influencer, even a micro nano influencer. They have an audience, right? And that audience usually shares a commonality, a common theme, common interest. Paid social ads are a great influence traffic source. You can target specific people for specific things. You can optimize all of that. Paid search ads. When you think about paid search ads, people are already looking for something. If somebody comes to Google, and types, what's the best cat water bowl, right? Well, we know things about them. They probably own a cat. They probably want their cat to have water and they're probably interested in buying a cat water bowl, right? So the PPC engine, the ads engine allows us to optimize into an influential audience that we can target by paying for that exposure through our ads. Paid DSP ads are super, super, super important. DSP specifically or Amazon has gotten extremely popular. They've gotten extremely good in the past couple years by opening up different phases of the funnel. It's not just awareness, top-level funnel exposure. Now, you get middle of the funnel, you get bottom of the funnel, conversion-specific traffic now through DSP. My fifth on the list of favorites is native videos and reviews. And that is either on social media, it's on your website. It could be on your Amazon storefront or listing, right? Think about reviews as influential messaging, right? People are coming to look at your reviews. They're going to look at your product on Amazon and read your reviews. They're obviously a potential buyer. I don't read reviews for products I don't want to buy. And if that traffic source is optimized by having a better product so we get more five-star views, that's going to create influence that drives success. All right. So now let's talk specifically about influencer platforms. We used to say influencer marketing, we think about agencies. I didn't know what that meant, hire an agency. Well, I didn't know if they were going out and trying to hire an influencer to create content for me. I didn't have to use. I didn't know if it meant we're trying to get these free nano influencers to promote our product because we sent them some free samples and they needed content. Anyways, I didn't know it didn't make any sense. So going back to what I said about doing all this research after the last marketing Master's event, I decided that I was going to hyper-focus on all the influencer platforms that a lot of us have heard of some. We've got it and figure out what does what where you plug in what what is where like, like help me understand that and what I determine is that most influencer platforms specific to e-commerce, whether it's Amazon or, you know, DTC and Shopify, whatever can be distilled down to three main categories. The first one is commission sales. Second one is paid creator matching. The third one is UGC production. Now, there are some like little nuances. There's maybe a little overlap, but bear with me. This is actually a pretty good list. I've spoken with, I've had over 60 hours of meetings with from the founders of platforms to. A lot of actual influencers themselves, a lot of content creators, a lot of just marketing experts in general and came to this. So type one, the commission based selling the way this works is it's a platform where me as a brand owner would list my product as available to the other half of the platform, which is content creators. And I say I'm making this little oversimplified, but I say, hey, here's my product. If you will sell this product, you'll get X commission. I can help name that commission, right? And then there are content creators say, hey, I have an audience. I want to monetize that audience. Maybe I can sell a product. They can come to the marketplace from the other side as a creator and see what products are available for them should be easy to convert and worth their time, specific to their audience, right? And worth their time, meaning how easy it's going to be to sell. How interesting of a product is this for my audience? What is my commission going to be? How much money can I make for as little amount of effort as possible, right? So then we have that flywheel. And if you look at the Amazon marketplace, the more products and the more categories and the more offers plus more influencers and content creators like we get this flywheel that works really, really well and spins that up. Now, one thing about one tip about that. Sorry for the typo there-for these influencer platforms is: make sure that you're giving them assets. So if I have a product that's similar to a lot of other products and an influencer that has a large audience or a small but relevant audience is thinking about selling my product versus somebody else, give them the assets that they need to make their job easier. If they look at a product, say, well, that's cool, but I got to go out and get photography and I got to write all this copy and I got to figure out what the USP is and I need to research this product versus their competitors. That's a lot of time. They might skip over. You can go to the next one. If you give all that stuff to them, which all the major influencer platforms for type one have the ability to load those assets, take the time and do that. It makes it easier. And then, of course, the middle point here is greater compensation. Most Amazon associate sellers — sorry, most Amazon associate sellers are used to getting paid one, two, three percent commission. Now you can get now they can get offers for 20, 25, 30 percent commission, which is still cheaper for me as a brand owner to give them that than pay PPC on specific keywords. And they're more heavily incentivized to sell my product. The second type is paid creator matching platforms. Now, what this does is it connects me with creators that are going to create the content and sell this product, not for commission, not specifically for any incentive, except I pay them. So when you think of like big influencers, a deal where, you know, I don't really know women's designer brands, but say Dior or Prada wants to work with a really large, you know, Kim Kardashian. It's that type of deal. We're going to say, hey, we want to use you in this campaign and we want you to share these messages. Kim Kardashian, we want you to post on your Instagram. You using our handbag. That's what this is. So, this type helps us match our product with a creator that we can then pay just to create content and share it on their platforms. The key point shared on their platforms to their audience, which is very valuable. And the third point here are new platforms that are popping up that are like free sample types of this, where basically we can offer to send free samples to a creator. The creators come on, say, hey, I want to create cool content that are product reviews, whatever. Let me find someone that will send me a free product. We send them a free product and maybe that's the payment. We just give them free products and they talk about it if it's cool. Usually much smaller influencer audience sizes, but still super valuable because it's scalable. The third type is a UGC platform, user generated content platform. Now, on type two, I told you that we would use a platform to match us with a creator to share to their audience because their audience is probably super valuable. But this type is we need someone to create content. And give us that content. We own the content. So if you want to run Facebook ads for your new widget, but you need 20 videos of 20 different people reviewing this product or using this product, you would use type three platform to go out and say, 'Hey, create some content, create some posts, create some graphics, create some videos of these different types of format and content type that you can then own the IP for. And you can use them for running ads on TikTok or doing this or putting it on your website or making YouTube videos, whatever. So it's like hiring actors.' Again, the difference between type one and type two is type or I'm sorry, type two and type three; type two and type three. They would share to their audience type three. I would have to create or share to my own audience, but using their authority. So here are some of the most common platforms that I've played with and use of each type. I'm not going to specifically endorse any of these. I'm not telling you you should or shouldn't use them. If you have a bad experience with one of these in the future, don't say, oh, Tim told me to use them. I'm telling you, these are some of the most common ones. And have had some of the most well-known success through the community in general. And I've talked to a lot of people and a lot of these have a little bit of overlap into a different type. So, for example, join brands there at the bottom is type three. It was originally and kind of foundationally a UGC creation platform. However, they now have features that bleed into type one where they have affiliate-based commission. Right. So look at all of them individually and understand that there's probably a core function. There's an original function with maybe some overlapping things. But what's cool about this is you don't have to look at this list and say, well, should I use type one, two or three? Think of it holistically. I talked about a flywheel. Right. How can we add some force multipliers in our business to get a larger impact or larger effect by like touching a lot of different points? This is one of the ways. Start thinking about a UGC creation platform. Right. If I'm going to get somebody else to make their content or make content for me, how can I then use that somewhere else? And that's the flywheel effect. If we are just doing one thing to create one, I don't know, one piece of energy, you know, a little bit of input, a little bit of output, a little bit of input, a little bit of output. Wouldn't it be cool if we could say two little pieces of input for three pieces of output? That's the force multiplier. And when we start to identify, hey, this general term of, oh, influencer marketing or influencer platforms, doesn't work, we have to start segregating and dividing these. One is we can break some of those misconceptions of, well, this doesn't work. And I've heard people a lot say, well, I tried to use an influencer platform and it sucked. I say, well, tell me about it. Well, they were hoping for a type three result with a type one platform or they wanted a type one result on a type one platform, but they weren't adding the assets to help those creators be incentivized to push their product because they didn't know how that worked. Right. So understand all this. When you understand that and you start putting it together, you can have flywheels. Now, do not take this as a roadmap for your specific product. I just want to get the juices flowing. But this is an example that I whipped up of just like how some of these marketplaces and influencer platforms can work together. So, for example, if we took a look at the top left, let's say we start with Levanta. Levanta is type one. It's commission based. I say, hey, Levanta creators, here's my product. I'm going to incentivize you through commissions to sell my product. Well, instead of that just being a one-to-one output, right, we think of it as like, well, if they send people to my listing and they don't buy, well, they didn't buy. But what if you're integrating that with something like a Pixel Me solution or a DSP solution? Even if that audience comes to my listing and doesn't buy right away, I can capture them as a segmented audience type because I know the traffic source that they came from. Right. So, a Levanta commission-based creator who has a specific avatar type in their audience since traffic. Well, now I've captured that even if they don't convert and buy, I can retarget them through another source. I can retarget them on Meta or Google ads with hyper-focused advertising because I've built that audience type. And I can use a join brands UGC created piece of content to then target them on Facebook video ads, knowing that instead of just sending that video ad out into the giant wonderful world of all of the Facebook users with maybe it's slightly segmented audience. Now I'm starting to build a custom audience because that traffic from Levanta was essentially free because I was only going to pay him commission. It didn't convert. Right. And then you can start wrapping all these things around. Let's say we start with a joint brands UGC type created content. Well, then that creates material force that we can use with Amazon DSP video ads, Facebook, Meta and throw it over on TikTok. Now that TikTok traffic doesn't really come well to Amazon easily as we speak, but take that to TikTok shop. Right. So one output, which is how I'm going to hire this creator to create this piece of content can be used in three different ways or four different ways. And that Facebook video ad that you run that maybe doesn't convert immediately on Facebook or on Amazon. Now I've captured that audience twice because I picked them up first on the video ad. They clicked on the button. They went to my Amazon listing. Oh, hyper focus. And that creates a flywheel that lets us start creating even better segmented and lookalike audiences through Amazon DSP. So quit thinking about like one plus one equals two. When you understand all these different influential traffic types and influencer platform types that you can use leverage, you start doing math like one plus one can equal seven. And it lowers your overall cost of advertising. It increases your organic rank because you're driving external traffic to wherever you're going, whether it's Amazon, Google, Shopify, it all works the same. So again, this is just a basic example to get you used to flying. So that's my conclusion. Drive external traffic to Amazon. There's a lot of reasons to do that. And now you can actually track that. And it's much more effective with optimization engines and things like that. Influencers are key. If you use them correctly and if you're using the right audience and if you are communicating and enabling them through the correct assets correctly. If you do all this, you can start to build a strong flywheel, which allows you to leverage one action into multiple results. And then remember that external traffic still isn't only influencers. It's not just social media folks. It can be Google search. It can be internal Amazon content. It can be things like press publications, right? What I'm telling you isn't like super relevant to today. It's general tried and true business principles. You just need to understand that a lot of those are still the same principles. There's just a few different tools that we can use now to make that work more efficiently. But start thinking them in a holistic approach. Hope this is helpful. Thanks for listening, and hope to see you on the next one.