EP #306] [ENG] - Why influencers are a must in 2025 to scale brands - William Gasner

EP #306] [ENG] - Why influencers are a must in 2025 to scale brands - William Gasner Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where I relate to Amazon FBA parallel e-commerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy and today we bring another special guest. His name is William Gasner and he's the co-founder and CMO of Stack Influence which is one of the top platforms out there when it comes to automating the collaboration between brands and influencers and we know that that's been a hot topic especially in 2025 with Everything going on in terms of how competitive some marketplaces are getting, specifically Amazon. Like CPC is getting more expensive than ever and brands are really looking for a way to diversify where they can find traffic to essentially bring that back to the brand and convert that into revenue. And that's where I think solutions such as Stack Influence is definitely making a huge impact. And of course, under the conversation with William, we're going to be discussing why you should be using influencer marketing and what are some of the strategies that are working The best in 2025. So William, pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing? Speaker 1: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on, Vincenzo. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. A pleasure to have you. Very excited about today's conversation. As I'm saying, influencer marketing is something that every single time I go to events or I'm talking, you know, with clients, it's a topic that keeps coming back. Like people is very keen to figure out how to do it properly. And I'm sure today we're going to be discussing, you know, what are some of those elements that can make I influence a strategy successful. So I guess before we dive into that, maybe let's start with a quick intro about you, the company, and then let's dive deeper into the topic. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. So my name is William Gasner. I am the chief marketing officer and co-founder of StackInfluence. Very high level what StackInfluence does is it connects ecommerce brands to micro influencers, so smaller creators on social media. And helps those ecommerce brands scale up collaborations. So I think hundreds to thousands of collaborations a month while also automating the entire process from A to Z for a brand. So you can sit back, relax, set your targets and focus on what's important, growing your ecommerce brand, you know. Speaker 2: Love it, love it. Speaker 1: Good. Speaker 2: So I guess let's start with, you know, the conversation around influencer marketing. I think the first question a lot of people ask me, I'm not sure you can answer this better than me, is why go down the route of using influencers when it comes to scaling a brand? Like, what are some of the other value and benefits you get with going down that route? Absolutely. Speaker 1: So another little backstory on myself. I'm a seven figure seller, ecommerce seller as well. I've been selling since 2008. I understand the pain. I understand all of the pain points, especially on Amazon, which isn't always very nice to the seller side of the platform. So I tried all of the tactics myself and the reason why my co-founders and I started Stack Influence was to solve some big pain points that we were experiencing when utilizing influencers and why we also started a company around it, why we use influencers in general. So going back to your question, the value that it provides is multifaceted. When you're an ecommerce seller, the first thing you think about like to try to get the word out is like, let's run some ad campaigns. But PPC is jacking up these days. It's more competitive than ever. I think the stat is about, especially on Amazon, like 3,000 new sellers join Amazon every single day. So it's really hard. So why influencers are valuable. And when people think of influence, they think of it just a replacement to online ads, right? Like PPC. And that totally makes sense. You want to drive up sales and that is an absolute value of it. But there's also a plethora of other different value props that influencers provide. So it's not just about a social promotion that, which is the essence of it, right? A social promotion going out to a whole bunch of followers and then They're going to see that, they're going to take that advice, and then they're going to buy. But in addition to that, There's a huge amount of brand awareness and brand trust that comes from influencers. Influencer promotions, unlike ads, are an authentic and trustworthy promotion, right? It's something kind of, we like to call it word of mouth marketing at scale, right? Like the most effective marketing tactic in the history of the world has been word of mouth. Is you trusting some advice from someone you know, your friend, your family, your close acquaintance, or someone you, again, just really trust in your life. And so, Some people undervalue that, but it's an extremely powerful tactic to really start spreading your brand, whether you're a seller just starting out or a seller really trying to scale. Secondary thing is a lot about brand building. So influencers provide content, right? That's what they're actually promoting on social media. So that is in the form of an image or a video or even a testimonial in their caption on a social post. Now that content, if you can get the influencer to give you rights to, is extremely valuable for building your brand. Some stats say, and we've seen this personally with our own brands and our own clients, utilizing influencer content, which the industry calls UGC, or user generated content, can increase conversions on just running an ad with it by five times, more than professional photography. So, or that's a comparison to professional photography. So think like, You pay all this money with models and a perfect white backdrop studio and. Amazing camera equipment, right? And then you're getting this kind of piece of content that's filmed on an iPhone. It's converting five times more, right? And why is that the case? And it comes back to where consumers are now bombarded by ads. We're bombarded by kind of like artificially generated content, especially now with AI tools really popping up. And it's only going to get worse. And so people seek authenticity. They seek things that they can trust. And content generated from real customers, from influencers who actually have a true authentic perception of a product or a brand, just convert better overall. So utilizing that content for your ads, your social media, and then also incorporating it into your website or your Amazon listing. There's a new Amazon feature called Amazon Posts, which we can dive into deeper. But it just gives your product and your brand social proof. Here are real people utilizing the product that your consumers can truthfully relate to. And so that's another really big benefit. And then the final thing that influences provide is not just a one-off promotion, but ongoing benefits. So those ongoing benefits can be in the form of longer term, what they call ambassador or affiliate relationships, people like promoting across multiple channels, getting rewards in the form of product or commissions for driving kind of extra content, extra sales for you. And also, and we can, Really dive deep into this, but dramatic benefits on the Amazon side of things, especially in terms of external traffic, which correlates with increased search position across categories, keywords, pages that can have long lasting effects on organic growth and make you less reliant on PPC. So that was a lot of information, but that's a very high level overview of the value these information provide. Speaker 2: No, I think something that is definitely one of the main benefits that I would like to go deeper a little bit is definitely the part where You know, the trust on some of these, what we call, you know, real leaders within these micro-initiates is huge because it's not the same somebody looking at a traditional ad and try to convey if it makes sense or not to trust this brand by then seeing the person that you trust because you follow on social media, you see their lifestyle and everything to tell you, oh, actually by me using this product, it has brought this impact in my life because this YNZ, right? So it definitely creates a huge difference in terms of the trust. And how people perceive your brand, which I feel is something that sometimes you struggle to create on platforms such as Amazon, where you can only put a few images, you know, an A plus video and you're very limited when it comes to creating that connection. So I guess the next thing. I want to ask you is how do we actually make sure we find the right ones when it comes to that? Because as we understand, there are so many influencers out there. Sometimes the reality is that there's also a lot of scam in terms of, you know, some of them are not legit. Some of them they engage and it's not real. So sometimes it can be difficult and challenging to make sure you work with people that can actually impact your business. So what is your take on that? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really great question and a really important thing for brands to consider and think about deeply before pursuing influencer marketing. Not every influencer has equal value by any means. And for those of you who have never done influencer marketing, there's a variety of different types of influencers. When most people hear the word influencer, they think of the celebrities of the world, people with millions of followers, the Kardashians, et cetera. Now, influencer marketing has changed a lot in the past decade. And going back to trust, And you made some really good points. Some people say they have a million followers, but a huge amount of them are fake followers. Their engagement levels are skewed. And they're really actually not truthfully authentic. Like even when a profile has a huge follower base, which now has become more of a bit of a vanity metric, They may be actually less trustworthy than even in sometimes an ad, because people now know that like, like when Kim Kardashian posts about a product, like, you know, she's getting paid, possibly like millions of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to actually promote that. And that destroys that kind of trust layer, right? All influencer promotions do need some sort of disclosure, and that is important for a consumer base. And there's Federal Trade Commission guidelines and regulations around that. But when you know it's too much paid, it's less trustworthy, naturally, right? And so what has happened? With the market and with people pursuing influencer marketing as a tactic is people have gone down the stream, you could say, to the long tail of the social media network. When I say long tail, the 90% of social media users who pretty much have less than 100,000 followers. And a lot of people, when you're thinking of influencers, you're like, those aren't influencers. How do they have influence? Think of someone maybe with 5,000 followers. Would that person ever drive me any sales? And the reality is, is social platforms have dramatically changed in the past few years. And those people can now be the best advocates for your brand. And the reason being is when you have a tighter knit follower base, and you're a smaller follower count, you're usually not only is it a mixture of like, really, really trustworthy people like friends, family, close acquaintances, etc. But if you have 5000 followers, like those, there's going to be people who just are really passionate about whatever content you're producing, right? And to grow a follower base as a small person, you kind of got to Pick a vertical and stick with it, right? Like you got to be niche and that works really well with let's say you're a fitness influencer. You got 5,000 followers. You're a great fit for some fitness brand, right? Maybe it's a yoga mat. Maybe it's a protein powder. And so not only can you speak to that because you have some passion or expertise in that, right, but your audience who's following you just overwhelmingly is more engaged. And if you're creative, right, and creativity is where the social platforms have really shifted to. So when I say follower base has almost become a vanity metric, it used to be the case where you had a million followers, you post on social media, If most of those people are on social media that week that you posted, majority of them would see it. Now it's like sometimes less than 1% of people see content that you produce. Social media platforms only show content to people who are engaged with your audience. And they do that because they don't want people to leave the social platform. If they're just showing random content that people don't care about to everyone, people are going to get bored with their feed, right? And so they only want to be really showing you really engaged content. Now, What has been a huge evolution, TikTok kind of speared it, Instagram followed suit with Reels, is that now if you produce good content, it can go beyond your follower base. So you literally could have You can start a TikTok account, have 200 followers, and get a post that gets millions of views. And that's unprecedented. And it's opened this gateway. It's democratized the social and influencer space quite dramatically to where anyone can have massive influence. You can be a tiny, tiny average social media user who just created an account and have more power than some celebrity who's been around for the last 20 years. And so now where the tactic has really moved and the best strategy to implement is kind of work with more niche targeted creators. Don't care as much about follower base. Try to be as cost effective as possible and diverse your risk across a lot more creators. Instead of working with two or three and putting all your eggs in one basket, spread it out across a huge amount, dozens. Some of brands on our platform do hundreds or thousands, right? Which is, you can think crazy numbers, but you can really scale up this tactic and And it can replace a lot of your online advertisement initiatives as well, like beating out CPAs and CPLs of Facebook, Google, you name it, the billion dollar companies. Speaker 2: I agree. Yeah, so and I think something that I get asked a lot, and just to piggyback on what you just mentioned, it's true that You know, people really are getting kind of burned out from the very high production kind of ads. Like they're really starting to understand that this is sometimes just to pitch and sell you something. So people are, you know, getting more attracted towards the content that looks more natural and embedded into a more normal way when it comes to I am showcasing how the product can add value to you, right? And I guess when it comes to that, that also means that the timeliness associated with how you can get return on investment are also shifting, you know, because before sometimes it would be more instant gratification. You would pay for a post for one of big influencers and you get results instantly. But now this is something that is longer game because you need to create that kind of warming the audience, creating that kind of ambassador feeling. So when it comes to that, People I'm sure asking you like, how long does it take to really see the results? So what is your take on that? Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's also really another good point. People try influencer marketing and then think it's a total bust and like wasn't worth their money because they didn't see instant results right away. And that absolutely can happen, right? Like sometimes a post goes viral and you just Crazy sales, huge ROI right off the bat. But it's not always the case. And sometimes the benefits are a bit more longer term. It takes time now. Like as I talked about content incrementally going viral, that content will only start spreading outside of your follower base as your follower base and a few people start to engage. So the more people who engage over time, sometimes, and this is especially true on like TikTok and Reels is like, You'll see a post that didn't get that crazy engagement for the first two days, and then by day nine, it started to actually go viral. There was a snowball effect. More people engaged, more people were watching, and then the algorithm started feeding it to more social profiles. Don't always think something's a total loss right off the bat when you don't see instant results. It's not exactly like performance marketing, right? Even though there are absolute correlations there. Now that's the first thing to think about. The second thing is longer term relationships with influencers. Because again, sometimes content hits, sometimes it doesn't. And so if you can create a longer term relationship where you work with them once, see how their content was, see how it performed, maybe it wasn't a huge success for you. Maybe they didn't drive a crazy amount of sales or any sales at all. Don't give up necessarily on that person if you think that they have potential. Send them another product. Give them potential rewards for creating future things, whether it's affiliate commissions, etc. And I've seen influencers not drive me anything for the first two collaborations. And by the third collaboration, they were one of the best performers out of the entire batch I've worked with. So sometimes it can take time. And then also there's a huge amount of halo effects from these things. So whether the halo effects come from the extra word of mouth marketing and the brand awareness that comes along, like we've seen our Google traffic drive dramatically up and the same thing on Amazon side, like organic traffic really improve as a correlation after these promotions were going out. Um, and it wasn't like an instant thing. It was like, wow, where is all of this awareness going? It's like, yeah, last month we ran this huge campaign and now it's kind of snowballing, right? Basically, the bottom line, and to answer your question more specifically, usually I would be analyzing social collaborations about a one to two month time or the influencer promotions, one to two month time out after you do the initial campaign, you could say, to see actually the long lasting effects from it and then kind of make an analysis. And that's especially true On Amazon, which we can dive deeper into if you'd like on how influencers can really improve organic search positioning across your categories, your keywords, your page positioning, and how the long lasting effects from that can can really drive massive ROI for you. Speaker 2: Cool, cool. And I guess the other question I wanted to ask you is, I mean, some of these influencers over time could potentially become ambassadors, which is rather than working on a single thing kind of approach, they could potentially be on a monthly return or something like that. Is that something you'd recommend to explore or you'd rather work with as many influencers as possible? Speaker 1: I absolutely recommend creating longer term relationships with people, right? Like start building up, work with a huge amount of new people. Absolutely. Like pursue that tactic, but don't just leave people in the dust after the first collaboration. I highly recommend turning them into ambassadors or affiliates and working in the long run. There's dozens upon dozens of studies that have shown that Consumers who see products and brands more than once, their conversion rates increase dramatically. So getting the same influencer to keep showing your product to consumers, not just on a one-off, but like promoting on multiple social platforms, possibly doing different forms of social posts, whether it's a feed real post of a video to a story that kind of is a daily type thing. Those can have really long lasting and extremely impactful effects on your brand. And then if you're creating these longer term relationships and creating structures to incentivize people to consistently promote, you're basically forming this kind of like marketing army under your brand, right? Who's like always advocating for you. And it's not just this like one off thing, right? Like PPC, like you run a Amazon ad campaign, you run a Facebook ad campaign, you shut that off, your sales stop, right? If you can build up this community of influencers, you run a one campaign, you build up these kind of incentive structures, and then you're off to the races. You can keep maintaining sales growth in a very long-term fashion from this one initial push. And then if you want to scale that up, keep getting more people. Speaker 2: Awesome. Cool. And I guess in terms of budget allocation, that's another question I get a lot. It's like, you know, how much budget should I allocate for this to work? Like a couple of hundred dollars, thousands of dollars, because depending on the size of the brand, you know, this could create a big impact on the cash flow operation. So as you show your rule of thumb when it comes to defining budgets for this, yeah. Speaker 1: A hundred percent. Budgets can totally vary. And my recommendation, it depends on what your growth strategy is, what stage of growth your products are in. Whether they're new product launches or existing listings and what platforms are really actually trying to push, whether it's your website or Amazon or Walmart, etc. Now, a study announcement just came out like literally a month ago saying that Unilever, as an example, is pushing 50% of their entire marketing and ad budget to influencer marketing. So one of the largest CPG brands out there is announcing that this is working well for them, right? So that's the power of something A massive brand and something slightly extreme of like, I'm going to push majority of it, right? I always recommend brands at least dedicate 20% to 25% of their budget towards influencer marketing, because it's going to strengthen all of their other channels. So it's not only going to be a good marketing and performance marketing arm for you, but it's also going to generate that content that can now improve all of your online added paid performance. Channels as well, while also increasing, as we talked about, like your conversion rates on your listing by strengthening that social proof conversion rates on your website, you name it. Now, if you're just starting out, you have no marketing budget, right? Influencers also can be really effective because if you have product, which I hope that you do when you're first launching your brand, you can send free product out to people, right? You don't need a single dime. And a lot of people, it may take a bit to convince people to do that. That's what stock influencers actually specialize in is what they call product seeding. We're a product in exchange for a post. And we have about 600,000 people are willing to do this every single day. So you could find some people on your own to do that. But yeah, trading product for posts, like you get the word out, it's like free, in essence, promotion. Obviously, you're paying with your products to do that. Now, if you're trying to scale, let's go a little deeper. My recommendation, so our minimum budget is actually $3,000 on Stack Influence. Stack Influence is a platform for people who are kind of getting serious about influencer marketing and ready to scale. We still work with brands just kind of starting out, but you need that minimum budget to actually get started. If you're just trying to like, you've never done it, you want to work with three people, go do it yourself. You know what I mean? It's not worth paying a platform at that point. But once you're trying to get into the hundreds or thousands of collaborations, Stack Influence is a fantastic platform. There's other platforms out there and I recommend utilizing some sort of platform because otherwise you're going to need a 10 person team to manage that type of thing. Recommendations for Amazon specifically is and why a lot of our clients actually use our system for e-commerce. And I know there's a lot of Amazon sellers listening. So e-commerce marketplace growth is a big specialty of ours. That minimum budget of ours usually gets you around three, a hundred influencers, right? And a hundred is kind of the minimum we find to be truly effective, at least in diversifying your risk and getting overall great ROI when driving up Amazon growth, because you need the key on Amazon. And this is the same thing for Walmart, Target, any other online marketplace. And my question to you is you need enough external traffic sales to give signals to the marketplaces algorithm that your product is desirable. And as an ode to this and why this works, Amazon in the past year or so released what they call attribution links and the brand referral bonus program. They literally are giving you 10% savings for you driving external traffic to a listing. Why would they do that? Right? And the reason is, is that external traffic signals give Amazon the data it needs to determine where to place you within the marketplace. And it's a big problem Amazon faces. And they just released actually a new patent of their algorithm. They call it the Cold Start Problem. And any of you can Google Cold Start Problem Amazon Patent. It goes very, very deep into this. It's a little confusing to understand, but very high level of what this means is that when Amazon, and again, we talked about how competitive things are, 3,000 new sellers join Amazon every day. Some of those sellers might be selling 10 products. There could be like 30,000 products that get added to the marketplace. And only 75% of people or 25% of people, sorry, go past the first page. 75% of people stick to the first page when they search for something. There's thousands of pages for any certain given keyword, right? So there's only so much room at the top, you could say. And how does Amazon determine when you first launch a product? You could have the best product ever. It could be like a totally multi-million dollar product that is fantastic. Amazon wants that product to be at the top. Because they're going to make a huge amount of commissions off of that product performance. But how does Amazon figure out how? If that is valuable to put up there, because if your product isn't very good and they place you there and you do not convert, right, they just lost out on a huge amount of revenue because someone else who was better could have been there, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So that's what they, when they say the cold star problem, it's like, it's getting your engine revving, right? Like, it's like, where do we go? Right. And where do we place you? And so what Amazon needs, and this is what this new patent kind of describes, they do two things. One is they look at other comparable products. In the marketplace, so like similar keywords, how other products perform, like is this niche and is this a similar product doing really well in the marketplace? Maybe this other one could perform better, right? So that's a big signal if you're, but now if you're in a competitive market, there's a lot of these different products so they might not place you, right? The second thing though, is if you can provide Amazon with data of how your product potentially could perform if they placed you. And so what that data is, is like, Click-through rate, right? Like people come into your listing. Not only click-through, what's your conversion rate? Do people add the product to the cart? Do they favorite it? Do they put it on their wishlist? Do they buy? Do they potentially leave a review? All these metrics. I mean, Amazon's tracking everything from where your cursor is moving on the page. So they want to figure out all those metrics to determine where to place you and why they've incentivized this external traffic is because it gives the data that Amazon needs to determine. Now why influencer marketing is fantastic and why you need to drive enough of these sales for this to be effective is you want to give there's only if you give Amazon data like 10 sales, right? It's not going to be enough for that to convince them that this is a good product. But if you can go into the hundreds of sales, possibly thousands of sales, which you can do with a larger influencer campaign. It gives Amazon absolutely the data it needs and you can turn a new product launch into like on track to doing six figures within like two months. Like I've seen insane results on the Amazon side just from giving that data because all of a sudden you hit to a first page for some keyword. It might not be a huge search keyword but like even something that gets a few hundred, a few thousand like hits a month can really be driving you a massive amount of growth and then all of a sudden You now have all these new eyeballs, sales are flooding in, your influencer campaign is done, but those sales are, it's a snowball effect and a cycle, right, where now more sales come in, more data for Amazon, more Amazon pushes you up, and you're kind of off to the races. And less reliant on PPC, which bid rates are now kind of out of control. Speaker 2: Very important. Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think this is a perfect place to conclude because I think what you just described is effectively the game when it comes to succeeding on Amazon moving forward. You have to figure out a way to I'm here to help you diversify your traffic sources. I'm not 100% on PPC because of how expensive it's getting. But beyond that, it's like actually building a brand. I think most Amazon sellers really struggle to build a brand. They don't really have a brand. And that's why now they're seeing the negative side of that, like they are not able to keep up with, you know, some brands that did that. They have the awareness, they have the reputation and now the only thing you had was pretty much PPC and now it's getting expensive and that's struggling. Absolutely. Speaker 1: Diversify that risk, you know, across everything. Don't be so reliant is the key to success. Speaker 2: I know. Cool. So I think it's been a pleasure to have you, William, and I'm sure this is, you know, we're just only scratching the surface. I'm sure a lot of people want to reach out to you, want to have a deeper conversation, want to explore your services. So tell us how people can find you and get in contact with your team. Speaker 1: Absolutely. So for any ecommerce sellers listening, especially if you're on Amazon or Walmart or Target, we'd love to work with you, especially if you're at the Check out our website. It is stackinfluence.com. You can quickly sign up. You can jump on a call with one of our team members. They all are Amazon and Ecommerce masters, so they'll consult you through the process, give you best practices. Everything in our system is automated, and we actually assign you dedicated managers to work you through. So if you've never done this before, we're going to hold your hand throughout the whole process. So yeah, again, that's stackinfluence.com. I'm always happy to actually personally Answer any questions you may have. So if you want to shoot me an email at William at StackInfluence.com, I'd be happy to chat with you. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And then if you want to follow, we're basically on every single social platform at StackInfluence. Unknown Speaker: Awesome. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. It's been a pleasure. I'm going to put all the information down below. Other than that, yeah, let's keep in touch and hopefully we see each other soon. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on, Vincenzo. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. Have a good one. Bye bye. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Ecomcy.