EP #371] [ENG] - How to leverage influencers to scale your brand awareness - Justin Willhite

EP #371] [ENG] - How to leverage influencers to scale your brand awareness - Justin Willhite Speaker 1: 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 eCommerce, the place where everything related to Amazon FBA, private label, and eCommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of eCommerce, and today we bring another special guest. His name is Justin Wilhite, and he's founder and CEO of Wilhite Strategy Group, where they specialize on everything that has to do with, essentially, influencer marketing. And that's why I wanted to bring Justin today because influencer marketing is something that is in everybody's mouth. Everybody's talking about how do I actually maximize influencer marketing? How do I even find my first influence? How do I make sure that they're right influences? More importantly, in which platform I should leverage influencer marketing as a strategy. So that's what today's conversation is going to be all about. Justin, pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing? Thank you for being here. I'm happy. I'm excited to be here. Speaker 1: I love talking about influencer marketing. So anytime somebody says, hey, want to come on a podcast and talk about stuff? I'm like, absolutely, let's do it. So I'm excited to talk about this. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. I appreciate it. So I guess just give us a bit more introduction about yourself in case somebody doesn't know you. And then, of course, we can go from there. Speaker 1: Yeah. So a quick back story. You know, you may you may have remembered me from potentially previous episodes and other podcasts around. You know, I've done a lot of video production stuff in the past. I'm an influencer myself. I'm an Amazon Platinum Influencer. So I've been doing influencer videos, a couple thousand of those a year across Amazon. Previously, up until the October of last year, I was the Senior Influencer Marketing Manager globally for Twitch. Which is owned by Amazon, the largest live streaming platform on the planet. So I know influencer marketing kind of backwards and forwards on some of the highest levels from that perspective. And I got laid off during some Amazon layoffs back in October and decided to start my own influencer marketing agency because that's just really what I know how to do really, really well. And so I started my own influencer agency called Willhite Strategy Group. Not the most creative name, but it works. And so now I'm out here helping smaller D2C and CPG brands work with influencers. Speaker 2: Awesome. Cool, man. Thank you for that intro. Appreciate it. I guess, I mean, even your background, like coming from, you know, a company such as Twitch, I'm sure you have seen the whole kind of influencer kind of ecosystem being created because Twitch has been one of the pioneers when it comes to that. So I'm sure today you're going to be sharing, you know, a lot of insights combined with what you guys are doing also in-house with your company. So I guess I want to start with the first question, which is, you know, who should actually be looking into this? Because I think a lot of the concerns I get when it comes to influencer marketing is everybody thinks that, you know, it could be for them. But the reality is sometimes for certain products, certain categories, it might not be the right fit. So I'm sure there's some kind of filtering in place that you recommend for your clients and brands. So let's start with that. Like, how do I make sure this could potentially be the route I should take with my brand and my products? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think the big thing with influencer marketing is, you know, I wouldn't put a limit on it. I don't know that there isn't a product that can be marketed through influencer marketing. I think everyone can come to the table and play with it. I think obviously, depending on the product that you have, it can determine the ease at which a creator can make engaging content, right? Speaker 2: Like a fridge compared to a phone case. Speaker 1: If you sell like USB-C cables, I mean, you know, how exciting can the video be? How viral are we looking at potentially here? Probably not super high, but I think for the most part, and I imagine that the people that we're talking to here likely are people that have, you know, more, maybe more unique products, right? And I think when you look at it from that perspective, you know, There's a lot of opportunity. And I think actually, you know what? What just came to me, I think here's a good filter, right? If your product is made for literally, like if your customer, if you're like, who would use my product? And it's like a USB-C cable, that's literally anyone on the planet who has an electronic, right? So that's really hard to do because you're Any creator technically, you know what I mean? Like you can't narrow that down or niche it down. And that's the way is that's typically how influencer marketing works. You do want to find specific creators if you can to talk about a product that aligns with their community because that's what you're going after them for. You're trying to figure out You know, here's you, you've got your products, your brand, and then here's your customer. Who's the person in the middle that's talking to them? So if you've got a product like a supplement, right? Okay, well, now we've just cut down who's potentially willing to talk about your product in a really, you know, creative way. And who they're talking to is a very specific type of person looking for that specific. So I think if that makes sense, I think the nature of your product will determine I wouldn't say the success rate, but the more likely success rate of an influencer marketing campaign, because you can identify more specifically a creator who's speaking to the audience you're trying to reach, if that makes sense. So I think if you're abroad, if everyone can use it, if you're selling table napkins, It's gonna be tough, right? And then you got to think of the content as well, right? I mean, how interesting can table napkins be? I mean, some creators out there can make anything interesting. But you got to find those ones specifically. So it's a little bit more difficult. Speaker 2: Yeah, I actually think this is something that people should even consider when doing the pro research or launching a brand because I always say like, people ask me, what is one of the tips you would give me to guarantee success when it comes to ecommerce? And I would say, make sure your product can be as likeable and as enjoyable as possible when it comes to social commerce or social media, because if you make a product that's fun to watch or fun to use and all of that, If the product is a good product, your journey is going to be so much easier compared to a boring product, just a commodity, right? And you explained that very easily. It's like the more kind of, I guess, unique it is on camera, the easier your influencer journey is going to be, right? Speaker 1: For sure. No, I mean, yeah. And I mean, obviously I wouldn't shy away from selling it. I mean, sell anything you want, right? I mean, you definitely, there's money to be made no matter what you sell. But I think that's right. I think if you look at a product and you say, man, like, If someone were to make content out of this, I mean, ask ChatGPT, right? Here's the product that I'm thinking about selling. How could I even expect, like, what kind of videos could I make that would be fun and engaging? Because you got to think about Especially because influencer marketing is social media, right? And social media these days, the videos have to do something. They have to entertain somebody. So they have to be funny or cool, right? They have to teach somebody or they have to hit them emotionally or in a way that's important. Those are like the three things. That's the content that people are looking for on social media, right? If it doesn't do any of those three things, which most ads don't, right? Most ads are like, you know, like this is just trying to tell me something. But if it's funny and it's an ad, people really don't care. If it's a funny ad, man, they're more interested. You know what I mean? So that's what I would say is you almost should run it through that filter of like, hey, ChatGPT, I'm thinking about selling this product on Amazon. What could be a funny video or what could be a sad video or a cute video that I could make about this product that would resonate on social media? And if it's like, I don't know. You might be in trouble a little bit there, you know. It could save you a lot of time and effort, for sure. Speaker 2: Cool. Now, let's start with the foundation of all this, which is, I guess, figuring out also how we can embed this within our existing strategy, because I feel a lot of people, when they come to the point of experiencing or starting to think about what to do with influencer marketing, To some extent, they're already allocating budget for traditional advertising or email marketing. Now influencer marketing becomes an extra kind of layer on the overall strategy. And the first question that pops to the mind is like the budget, right? It's like, how much budget should I allocate for this? How much time is it going to take? I know this is a question that's going to be heavily impacted by the type of product and the category. But from your experience, like, is there some kind of guidelines you usually give to your consumers? Like you should allocate this minimum, you should allocate at least three to six months. Like, what is your advice on those two fronts there? Speaker 1: So there's actually a lot here. And this is, I think this is one of the mysterious places that people struggle with understanding the full ROI of influencer marketing. I think traditionally, if you look back over the last, you know, however many years influencer marketing has been out there, People expect that I pay creator, creator makes content, I make more back in sales than I paid creator, right? That's the ROI that everyone is expecting it to be because that's what traditional marketing is designed to be, right? I run ad, it costs me this much and then I should be making more in sales. That's the point of ads. Influencer marketing, in my opinion, one, it doesn't Most times doesn't work that way, right? That's very, very hard to do unless you get the unicorn that the video goes viral and you got a really good product, but it's pretty rare to do that, right? Even you have to even look at the highest possible levels, right? Look at the Kim Kardashian like commercials, right? That's influencer marketing. That's exactly what it is. But on the highest possible level, they're paying her millions of dollars to make an ad. Is that one ad? Coming out net positive? Absolutely not, right? There's no way. So if they can't even make that happen, why are they doing it, right? It's content, right? It's content, it's data, it's tracking, there's more to it. So what I would say is if you're running traditional marketing, right, and you're making assets and you're making videos on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff, the perfect thing to be using for ads Is UGC content, right? We know that UGC content and ads is like gold. So if you were reaching out to a creator and you're saying, hey, I want to pay you, you know, $100 and I want to send you my product to make a video. Make sure you're getting a contract and make sure you get some rights to some of that content. Maybe not the whole video, right? Because that can balloon the cost quite a bit. But say, hey, if I pay you $100 and I give you the product and you make a video, can I use just a 15-second snippet from that video of my choosing? That's a very wasteful blast, right? I'm not going to use the whole thing. And then if you get like four or five different creators and you get 15-second snippets, You've got like six or seven ads and you've got pieces of content that you can repurpose over and over again that are real, right? Real UGC ads. You get those moments where they're like, I love this thing, right? And that becomes, that's an ad, right? And that's, so I think if you kind of spin your methodology, your thought process into looking at it from that perspective, like the total ROI, not just the sales return, because again, that's going to be really hard to one hard to track, especially on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, like tracking conversions. And how do I know if it's actually working? You need to kind of come at it from a whole, I think there's more to it. There's more to the deal than I think people are kind of going after. And I think trying to get some of that content access is one of the biggest ROIs you could possibly get out of influencer marketing for sure. Speaker 2: So on that note, I think now that we have understand, you know, the kind of the foundation, how to start figuring out like how this could be embedded within a strategy. I think the next layer that comes after understanding what you just mentioned, which is essentially everything around the budget, the timelines and all of that and what is the potential impact. It's how do we actually start looking in the first place for those potential influencers that can actually be impactful because just as you mentioned, you could fall very easy in the trap of paying some of these influencers $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 because they seem to be the, you know, the eminence on that industry. And then you actually see that not necessarily you might receive the return On investment because maybe you didn't really understand the audience in depth or maybe their engagement is not as high as you thought. So how do you make sure you safeguard yourself from the shiny object of what an influencer might give you from facing but actually seeing if the back end of that influence is going to be what you actually need. Speaker 1: So I think that kind of goes back to the topic I just kind of mentioned is if I were a brand and I were looking at doing influencer marketing, I would go into every influencer conversation expecting to spend more than I make on return sales. That's just going to save you a whole bunch of stress and anxiety, right? If you know that I'm going to pay this creator X amount, right? I'm not going to make more than that back in converted sales. It almost is never. It's very rarely going to happen. I think the bigger thing is I sell coffee, right? And this creator is big. They talk about coffee all the time. They're a coffee review channel. They're the perfect person to talk about my product. That's what you're looking for. That's what you're paying for. So if I can make, have them make a review and I'm going to pay him a thousand dollars. Great. Right. In that contract, Hey, can I use parts of your video in some ads? Right. Because now you've got one of the foremost voices in the coffee space talking about your product and you can throw that into it. Unknown Speaker: It's gold. Speaker 1: Right. That's the that's the mindset shift that I think a lot of these brands have to think about. And then secondarily is it's not about the bigger creators anymore. I don't think. Right. Going for the people that have eight million, 10 million, 15 million views, like you're going to pay so much for them to even look at you. Right. It's it's. Spend it spend, you know, take that whole budget, give $25 to 150 micro creators and capture content, right? You see what I mean? Like it shifts what you're what you're going after. If you have the mindset of ROI, right? If you're looking at it from like, What are all the ways that I can capitalize on this as opposed to I pay big creator, they talk about my product, bunch of people like it, but nobody buys anything. That's empty. That's really an empty transaction, right? Unless that person is somebody that you want to make content with, right? And that they're allowing you to use their content. That's what I think is really the big thing here. You know what I mean? I think There's a lot of opportunity there. And secondarily to that, the other thing that you have to consider is the way that social media channels now, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube are operating is it's, it's less, you know, there's, there's algorithms that these big creators know how to kind of manipulate, but you'll, sometimes you'll be on TikTok and you'll see a video that's got like 6 million views and you'll go to the guy's channel and he's posted three videos. And he's got 500 followers, right? That tells you that any of these micro creators that cost you not even a fraction of a percentage of a fraction of the amount of a big creator can truly go viral, right? So you're kind of going at this twofold. One, the more content I can have being generated, the more opportunity is to be seen. I don't have to pay one creator who's either going to flop or, you know, flop or win. I don't know. And I can probably get access to a lot more of that content than I would from that one creator. And now I've got, I can pass all that information off to my ads team. You know, for agencies, like if you just got a whole folder full of a bunch of cliffs about people talking about their product, Oh, an ad agency's like, dude, this is amazing. Like we can make a thousand ads of this, you know? So I think there's, I think it's just, there's a lot of, a lot of ways to think about it. But I think the micro creator, their cost savings, a lot of them will do it for just free product, right? You know, you just send me a product. I want to make content because they're trying to grow their channels as well. So they just want to get free product. You may not even have to pay them anything extra. So it's a lot of value there and a lot of, a lot of different ways to look at it. But I think, Don't expect creators to make more sales than you paid them. That's going to set you up for a lot of heartbreak. Speaker 2: That's actually a good one. It's similar. I mean, just to give another example, it's similar when people come to me even for Amazon things, they come with this expectation that within three, six months, they're going to meet a multimillion dollar brand. In most cases, it's like, no, it doesn't work like that. It has certain expectations, certain timelines, and if we influence our marketing, the same thing. You need to understand The name of the game and more importantly how you can align your expectations and how you can define success. I think success really from an influencer point of view is your brand becoming an authority because you are in essentially on the mouth of the top influencers for your specific niche and everybody's mentioning your brand, everybody's recommending your product and then eventually that's going to create a level of familiarity that's going to allow you to control certain market share in terms of opinions and other things, you know. So that's really why you need to have. Speaker 1: And the other benefit to, like I was saying with the micro creator content, right? So if I pay one big creator to make one video, right? Pay them $2,000 to make one video. That's one piece of content out in the world about your product, right? But now if I took that $2,000 and I paid, you know, 25 small micro creators who are going to post a video on TikTok, their Instagram and their YouTube channels, right? Because that's just, they're just trying to get their word out there. And then someone goes on one of your clients pages and they find a product. They're like, oh, this looks kind of cool. Everybody's searching for their, like, they're shopping on Amazon, but they're looking on TikTok and Instagram and Googling, like, what, you know, I want to, tell me about this product. If you've got 40 pieces of content that you paid $2,000 for, the chances of one of them finding one of those, so you have to look at that like, they call it the marketing halo, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, the flywheel effect. Speaker 1: The flywheel effect, right? So that's another part of this ROI conversion is how much content can I make for as little as possible, right? That's the other thing, because again, that video, that microcreator, it may have gotten a hundred views, right? But tomorrow, if, you know, some lady is looking for this thing and she searches for it and then all of a sudden TikTok's like, hey, here's a video about it. Speaker 2: Maybe in TikTok AI as well, like AI. Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got 501 views, but that one view just converted a sale. Okay, but that's a win, right? And then you got to think that stuff is evergreen, it's out there and it's working for you then at that point 24-7, 365. So it's not as linear as people think. There's a lot of creative ways that you've got to look at this and that's the only way that you're going to be able to, if you're going to get into the influencer game, You gotta find a comfortable way to look at it so you can stomach it because like I said, you're not gonna get those sales back from that perspective. But over the course of a year, you probably will, right? You're probably gonna net out ROI significantly higher if you're doing it kind of the right way and paying attention. And then once you kind of open the door with these creators, It's so easy to go back to them again. Hey, we just launched a new product. Can you make a video? Oh, yeah, totally. I love that last one. You know what I mean? Now you've got your roster. You've got your people. You can make content a lot quicker and easier. You've broken down that initial barrier of discovery and communication. There's so much to it. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And I think, of course, The thing that is gonna is touch points. That's what you're creating. The more touch points you can put out there, as I was briefly just saying, especially with AI, the more repetition you put that AI can then refer back because we're seeing even that people going to AI for comparing a product, a brand. AI VCs that you've been mentioned by all these people, even if views are not a lot, that's going to give you reputation in the eyes of AI and you're going to be more recommended and things like that. So it's a snowball effect. Exactly. Speaker 1: And that's the same thing. And then that's the same thing with Amazon is right now they are putting a high level of authority on external traffic drivers. So if somebody comes directly from TikTok or Instagram or YouTube straight to your Amazon listing, That's a huge indicator to them. From an algorithm perspective, a search results perspective, they love it. That's like gold to Amazon as far as like, okay, people are coming from somewhere to see this product. This is a good product. You know what I mean? So that's the other thing. There's so many different avenues to it, but influencers can be really powerful, but just in a lot of different ways. Speaker 2: Cool. So I guess now to conclude and start bringing this to a full closure, the last question I get a lot and I'm keen to hear your take is which platform, if I have to choose one, is being the most impactful right now? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it Facebook? Is it Twitch? Is it X? Like, what are you saying? Speaker 1: So that's a tough one because two of those, so you've got TikTok and Instagram. Um, are naturally difficult when it comes to Amazon sellers. And the reason being is because TikTok. Has their own shop, right? If you're selling on TikTok shop, that's a much easier scenario, right? That's a very linear transaction. You find a creator that's on TikTok. They put the little orange basket down there. If they want to buy the product, you click to buy it, right? You can see everything. The problem is that if you're not selling on TikTok, and I'm not saying that you should or should not. That's not the world I operate in. I know that TikTok shop comes with its own level of difficulty. But what I'm saying is because links inside of content Don't aren't clickable right on TikTok and Instagram. So if somebody makes a video and says, hey, you know, the link is in the description. It sounds really stupid, but it's not easy for people to get that link and go where they need to go, right? Or they have to go into the link in the description, then they gotta find the link and that's where the conversion rates drop, right? Because there's friction. YouTube is a little bit easier because links inside of long form YouTube videos are clickable. They can click that, they go straight to your Amazon, but you know, it works. But YouTube Shorts copied Instagram and TikTok and they're not clickable links. It's hard to say. So the hard part and the reason why it's difficult to say is because if you can't click a link from TikTok and go straight to an Amazon listing, it's really difficult to track where that came from, right? On the Amazon side, it just looks like they showed up out of nowhere, right? They just arrived. So attribution is really tough. TikTok has, I think, probably the most virality opportunity, right? So because of all this content and, you know, there's a chance that you're going to get more virality, you're going to get more viewership, people are going to learn about your product and then go seek it. You know, so there's a lot of opportunity there. I think there's a lot of creators making a lot of content on TikTok, probably more than the other two platforms currently. So I would say For just straight impact across the board, TikTok's probably the most generative. That's going to be the one where you're probably going to find the most creators content in your niche, right? The most open to making content and then posting it across multiple channels. It's really hard to say. I don't think YouTube, I love YouTube. I think YouTube's great. You definitely should be looking across all three of them though. I think if you're going to do an influencer campaign, look across all three of them. The other thing to do is when you're looking at a creator, there's a good chance they probably post across all three anyway. If you find a creator who's only posting content on TikTok, Okay, kind of exciting. If you find a creator who's posting on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and they post all their videos across all three, that's gold, right? Now you basically just got them to do one video, but technically three on three different platforms that show in three different areas of search and all that kind of stuff. So I would say lead with TikTok. Try and find creators that are making content on TikTok. Go micro is probably I'd start micro, say, you know, go that route. And then look at creators, make sure they kind of match what you like. And then just see if they have multiple channels, you know, look at their link tree in their description and see what they've got going on. And when you're talking to them, ask them, where are you? And they're like, Oh, I'll post it on all three of them. Sweet. Run with it. Speaker 2: Awesome. Cool. That's great, man. I think, I mean, the amount of insight and strategy shared there was awesome, so I appreciate that. So I'm sure, you know, after all this conversation, a lot of people are thinking, I need to jump into this wagon. I need to start doing influencer marketing. So tell us how people can reach out and work with you when it comes to that. Speaker 1: Yeah, so you can go to willhitestrategy.com or just, you know, or you can find me on LinkedIn, Justin Willhite on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me directly. I'm always happy to chat there. We do everything end-to-end. We help with the creation of the campaign. We do outreach. We'll find creators that work specifically for your brands. We manage all the outreach, the conversation back and forth. Once they're like, yeah, let's do it, we send you an email with the shipping information. You end up sending that out there and then we help Make sure all that gets connected, all the creator receives the product, they make the content. Once they create the content, we track it all, get client dashboards, we have the whole thing. So we are literally, it's an end-to-end plug-and-play. Yeah, literally, it's a plug-and-play type of thing is what we've designed this to be. And the other thing that I was talking to you a little bit about before we jumped on the call is My goal is to help the smaller brands that have been trying to figure out how to get into this and can't really figure it out because large agencies are too expensive. They don't have the time to manage it themselves. So I'm trying to service those types of people. So if you've got a smaller brand, CPG, D2C, reach out in chat. I mean, I'd love to just talk to you. I can talk to you, walk you through the process. I don't do hard sells. I'm not a hard sell kind of guy. So if it works for you and it's great, I just love talking about it, clearly. I'm like super peppy about it. Be prepared for a long call. If we get on a call, I'll definitely help you break it open. And if nothing else, you'll have some direction and kind of know where to get started on your own. But we're always here if you need help. Speaker 2: Awesome, Justin. So I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Hopefully I see you soon at upcoming events. I'm going to make sure to put all the information down below so people can find you. Yeah. See you in the next one, man. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: 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. Speaker 2: Want more? Speaker 1: Visit our website at www.ecomc.com where you can get your first consultation for free. Or find us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at ecomc.