Why Giving Stuff Away Leads to More Sales with Influencer Seeding

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
all of this week's notes and links can be found at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
we are on episode already can you believe it man it just goes by so quick
so this week do you want to know the secret source to getting more sales well
of course you do now according to cody it is as simple as giving stuff away for
free and so we're going to show you how to do it yes we are well not me but cody's going to show you how to do it so
don't go anywhere hey there are you a business owner here at oregon digital we know firsthand that
running an ecommerce business can be really hard work as the online space gets more
competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve we totally get it so we want to help you
succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing customer service and even coaching and
consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
thanks for joining us on the ecommerce podcast it is great that you are here genuinely
great so thank you for joining us appreciate you being part of the ecommerce podcast family tuning in and
listening to the show we're here simply to help you grow your e-commerce and
digital business what we want to do it's what we want to do and to do that we have a mixture of fab sponsors who we
think are going to help you but also we have truly amazing guests who are experts in their own field with stories
and insights and i get to dig into it yes i get to ask them all kinds of amazing questions that we can use to
help us start adapt and grow online and today is no exception because i get to
talk to the all-around good egg which is cody and cody got his start in the industry
by working at calo i think i'm pronouncing that right q-a-l-o
and they are brands that created the silicon wedding ring now some of you
kenai viewers may notice that i actually wear silicon wedding rings yes i do and i have actually purchased some of those
products so i was especially excited to talk to uh cody on this one because
i purchased the products i was really really sold in but what he's doing now what cody is
doing now he is the co-ceo at kinship which is an agency that is paving the way for the future of influencer
marketing over the course of five years he has built out a robust influencer program all through the foundation of
seeding whilst also working with household names such as lebron james and
dale earnhardt jr so he knows what he's talking about it's the bottom line so i was really keen to
dig into this here is my interview with cody so cody thank you for joining me here on
Interview
the ecommerce podcast great to connect great to chat you i have to be honest with you it looks like you're in a very
bright sunny room uh which is contrasting a lot to our my slightly darker room
what's going on there yeah i'm in orange county california so the other side of the world from you not
but thanks for having me oh no it's great great you could join us appreciate it i just love technology now
and the fact that we've just got so used to just having conversations with people halfway around the world not even thinking twice about seriously that's so
true it's crazy isn't it yeah it's crazy and in fact we get slightly annoyed if
it's a little bit glitchy what's going on exactly exactly yeah
i don't i don't it's just it's just funny isn't it as sort of our expectations now of technology certainly
following the pandemic um but yeah are you are you a native uh orange county california dude are you
are you an importer i am i am born and raised so i haven't left these parts
quite yet like it's definitely it's definitely not how expensive it is that's keeping me
here that's for sure so that's crazy maybe it's a weather yeah
you know it probably is a destination yeah yeah i always have a fascination
when i talk to guests you know about and i'm curious to know where they live mostly because i get slightly envious
about the weather as i as you would living in the uk you talk to other people around the world
which is great um and part of you feels you know slightly smoke that you're english the other part of you goes we've got really
crap weather so you know it's one of those
it's one of those so listen the title of today's uh podcast is why giving stuff
What is Influencer Seeding
away leads to more sales that's what we're going to get into um the whole uh
uh when we when we did our pre-call and regulars to the show no we'll know that we do a pre-call we always have a
conversation a separate call before we recall the podcast um so that we can figure out so i can
understand you know what we're going to talk about and so on and so forth and you came up uh with a phrase i'd not
heard before in that call which i really want to get into and that was influencer seeding right
and this was this was a i thought it was a really great phrase and um i you know
so i'm looking forward to getting into that a little bit more so can we start maybe there and maybe that's a big place
to start but influence the seeding what what is it and why should i care
it's a great question um influencer seating all that means is sending out product for free to
influencers that's how we typically define it
why you should care is it's the best way to start and facilitate relationships with
influencers so if you actually and for those listening want to build a community around your brand which of
brand owners that i talk to care about community care about um leveraging influencers starting
relationships with influencers don't know necessarily how to go about it they see a lot of pay for posts they see a
lot of you know transactional things happening they see their competitors killing it there's so much noise
we just say start with sending your product out for free start with getting it in your hands so
you're an influencer matt i'm gonna give you my hat products and you're either gonna love it
you're gonna kind of dig it and it's okay or you don't really like it a lot um
but most of the time even in just our outreach message we can we can understand and based on you just saying
yes i'd love to receive this you're probably interested in it um it's not just because it's free but
you actually are digging the product um so you got to start there because
and please cut me off because i can just keep going down to rabbit hole with us um you got to start there because i
think you want genuine advocacy um but a lot of people
what drives them down to advocacy with influencers is money and a contract
and it just doesn't make sense because if you compare to your customers
it's actually illegal to pay pay the money to leave a review but we think it's that right
yeah and we think it's different with influencers oh well i'll just pay you for a review or a post on it that's very
cheap that's such a good point actually so um yeah it just doesn't make sense when we
actually think about it and it takes a little bit longer but the rewards are are greater
Why Giving Stuff Away Leads to More Sales
so this um this idea then behind influencer marketing and influence succeeding by
giving um in effect uh hence the type of the show why given stuff away leads to more sales right it's like we're giving
our stuff away but when and this is an important point you raised um
we're not giving it away for free we're not giving it up as man we are going away we're not giving it away
willy nilly i don't know if that phrase but we're not just sort of randomly
throwing this out to people it the the thing that you said and it was just a small phrase that i wrote down
that that struck me is um you're going to influences and if they say yes to
your product then you are sending them your product you're not just blindingly
sending this out at least that's what i picked yeah is that right yeah and i don't even back up a step further you're
targeting the right influencers it's not just if i continue with the hat brand and i'm
happy to fall in it's a running hat that's athletic wear i'm not just sending it to
the stay-at-home mom or you know just anybody willy-nilly i guess you could say
um but yeah you're you're targeting the right influencers based on who your brand is who your customer is and who
the influencers that influence those customers um so yeah i would say like
it becomes that much more important on who you're actually looking to send that product to because
like you're saying if you're going to send it out you want it to be people that you'd be proud that they actually represent your brand they wear your
product otherwise why are you even outreaching to them yeah exactly exactly
Building an Online Community
and i think um the other thing you mentioned cody was that the people that you talk to want to
build an online community it's become it's become like the buzz term and everyone wants to i need an online
community that's what we need to build the online community and then when you actually talk to people about what that means it's like yeah yeah i want to
build it but i don't want all of that you're nailing kong you just give me the
community if i give you money can you give it to me and it's like no no it doesn't quite work like that so um
so we start off by choosing our influencers right um it's what you said
um so how how would you go about doing that yeah um and you know
does that change if i'm just starting out versus if i'm well established or are the principals
the same i'd say they're generally the same i mean startups you should have a good
idea of what your customer will be or who they will be even though you don't necessarily have a ton of data around it
compared to someone who's been in business for years but generally it is the same you're finding influencers that
would represent that customer um you know so if i have a running stock brand then i'm
gonna find running influencers that would impact my potential customer that
would be runners um same sort of thing so i think you can go a little bit more broad uh
you know two to three different personas um that would represent that customer but essentially it's just yeah it's that
you know we could go example by example in terms of trying to find the right influencers
um in terms of other things that in in identification
so that's kind of like the persona piece like the qualitative metric and how you kind of fill those buckets of people
secondly is just around certain products if you have different you know most stores don't have one sku
product so if there's a variety of different products and they kind of represent a
little bit different personas then you could find different influencers that around those products but
we we definitely recommend starting with micro influencers in terms of identifying micro influencers how we
define it if you google right now micro influencers you're going to get a million different definitions out there
well this was actually going to be one of my questions to you i mean we're talking about influence of course the obvious question here is
what what what the heck is an influence how do i how do i do how do i know how do i find someone on instagram and go
you're an influencer you're not what i mean how do i know yeah how do you define it yeah the easy
the easy answer is just someone who has a social media following that has even significance but even that is kind
of going down now too like i would say minimum of a thousand influencers um
you know those are typically called nano influencers but we focus on between five and k and
that's our definition five to k of following and that's our definition our very broad
range of micro influencers um but yeah that's really interesting that
somebody with a hundred and fifty thousand followers is now classed as a micro influencer
so i mean it's it i'm just i'm just trying to picture the guy that's got followers going
i've worked so hard to get just a bloody micro influencer when will i when will i emerge where will i just
be an influencer you know that's a good point um but yeah to answer your question that's
just kind of i would i would easily define an influencer as someone who has social media following
but to kind of go on a macro basis it's just kind of the no definition of anybody who
has influence that person doesn't doesn't necessarily have to have a social media following
they could just be a non-competing brand in your same industry that knows a ton
of different people that knows a lot of different people that you would if you could get them your product they would tell a lot of different people about it
but they might have yeah no social media um so
yeah no that's that's um i mean i you see that all the time actually in the podcast world don't you
Outreach
you um they might not have a social media following but they've got listeners on a podcast channel so they might get sponsored somewhere they're
clusters and influence right so i i it comes down to outreach isn't it who you can reach and and
i guess do you do it on the basis of then if i go to instagram and i'm looking for you know a guy that's gonna
wear my athletic sports hat um i'm looking i i i understand the
persona and i can go to their account and i can see how many people are following them
am i looking at other things like how active they are are they promoting other brands are they
um are they engaged or is there is there some kind of website that i can go to
and put there you you know they're sort of handled their username in and it comes back with
some kind of report what else am i looking for here yeah great questions there's a lot there
um so one i'd be looking at an active profile so you kind of
mentioned that that buzz word um that active profile means like
they haven't their last post wasn't in or you know even a couple of months
ago like i just want to be confident that you're active on the platform that you're posting consistently
um every few days or so um i want to see a minimum engagement rate
of at least one percent so that's the combination of likes and comments divided by follower account
um or the reverse follower account divided by a combination of likes and comments
uh i want to see you know fake followers i definitely want to eliminate that so extremely high
or low uh engagement rate compared to your follower account so
followers and on their post they get likes and zero comments red flag
or the reverse you know followers and they're getting likes on a photo like you're like
so um either or there um
as far as discovery there's a lot of tools out there i mean type in influencer marketing discovery tool
you're going to get flooded with different software
there's free ones that people listening could use at their disposal though one of which is instagram itself i mean go
to any influencer profile if you're not already following them you can hit a little button on the drop down
arrow you can hit a drop down arrow and it populates algorithm picked influencers that are all similar to that
profile long before long before all these softwares were available this is like
back in the day when i was internally at a at a brand that's where i did all my influencer
discovery because that was kind of the only option for at least that i discovered okay so it was just hours of
free influence or discovery all based on algorithm um so similar hashtags similar posts
similar things in their bio um tick tock creator marketplace so
google that creator marketplace you can sign up um so those are some of the free tools and
then you know if there's paid tools i have recommendations on those as well
what we use as an agency is called tagger it's expensive but um if you can
it sounds expensive it's expensive yeah there's a there's a brand called i don't think you're
familiar with the brand called stella stella are twice a it's a lager beer which they sell here in the
uk and um their tagline which i think is probably one of the best taglines ever is stella artois reassuringly expensive
uh i just thought it was brilliant it just sold so many problems they know what they are
yeah yeah exactly it's just reassuringly expensive so don't be surprised
and so that's tiger isn't it tiger reassuringly expensive tiger expensive
that's expensive that's it just expensive yeah yeah brilliant
What is an Influencer
so that i mean that's uh cody that's super helpful i'm starting to i'm starting to build a picture now in my head of what an influencer is
um so i'm you know in terms of you know they're
being active their follow account their brand fit and so on and so forth
how do you um how do you reach out to these guys um do you just message them on instagram
is it because i i don't know i'd i'd be i think i'd be afraid of just be coming across as a little weird or stalky you
know i get messages all the time on instagram i got one today actually just before i came down here i was checking instagram some fella sent me a message
saying matt it took me two hours to prepare this for you click this link to see more and i'm just like yeah no no no
just delete right and so that's where they get all of your credit card information
yeah yeah yeah exactly and so i i just don't know um so yeah is there a is there a strategy
um sort of a broad break strategy here that you could use to to reach out to these folks
yeah so you touched on a couple things there with like how to actually get a hold of these people and then once you
identify the contact information what does that message look like
um so not a spammy click a link here so that that's definitely for sure
but um how to get there i mean that goes into some of the tools that i mentioned
like the contact information is listed within those free tools a lot of these influencers they're
you know they want to be contacted so they're not making it difficult um on instagram itself you can dm
anybody you can go on and dm um lebron james right now
um so but a lot of these influencers will list their email and and like a contact
button or anything like that that would be my recommendation just because when you're talking about instagram specifically there is going to be
limitations on how many dms you can send out so they protect the privacy and all that
stuff so you're going to have limitations there um you know tick tock credit marketplace
that's kind of self-explanatory there's you know you can build out campaigns invite influencers stuff like that but
as far as outreach i mean this goes back to our philosophy of seeding so that message looks simply hey matt you
know we think you're a great friend fit we love the content you consistently put out we'd love to send you our product no
strings attached and all that no strings attached means is we have no expectations for you to do
anything with our product such as post in return for us sending you the product
so that that messaging completely aligns with our belief system and philosophy of
building relationships on giving and not asking which is seating
so what most brands do is hey matt they finally get a hold of you matt's never heard of my brand before
and then i say my first impression of my brand to you is will you post
three times it's like bro i've never heard of you before
um yeah i don't i've never seen your product on an ad like anything you know so which is most brands obviously this
isn't like nike outreaching or anything like that so yeah and you know what i i understand
ECommerce Companies
why they would do that as well so i'm thinking about sure some of the e-commerce companies i've got you're you're sending out
in effect some product which is worth bucks bucks whatever it is you know you're sending and it's a reasonable
value by the time you've paid the shipping in your head you're kind of it's very hard i think for the
for the entrepreneur who is you know fighting for every diamond dollar
sure here just have this no strings attached jeremy and so i can understand
why in their head they're going no no we we need three posts we need your inside leg measurement you know we want to know
your grandma's maiden name i mean there's i get why they would want extra information
but what i'm understanding or what i'm hearing from you cody is actually whilst that makes sense from a from just a pure
surface level it just doesn't work is that right yeah yeah yeah and i i mean i think you got
to think about influence marketing is more human than every other marketing channel like it's not like going to your facebook ad account dashboard
and just putting in your credit card information putting on a photo building on an ad and then just pressing go like
you're not dealing with a machine you're dealing with a human and so people are missing that you know it's like oh
machine matt who posts consistently for brands uh here's like what i want like
why can't you just do that i'm awesome like here's my product like sure does that work does some
influencers not care and they'll just take it like obviously like that's why the market that we have but i would just
say you're settling when you can have so much more you can have this actual relationship
um there's compounding value once you start actually start getting this product out there you
have you can build a brand on people with your product um consistently
posting about it rather than just settling for one you know like they're it's just short-term versus long-term
right um and we'll get into our process too like there's definitely a short-term roi
i think just the initial message is it just has to be relationship first
because then like i i want ugc i want organic posting i want you know rights for ad campaigns
like i want all these things too i'm not different i'm just saying like there's a proper way to start the relationship
like what's the best approach to building a long-term value with this influencer
where most brands do get on the phone with me and say yeah i want to online community like we've been saying
and you know i want all these influencers posting about me consistently it's like well great your behavior has to match that belief system
what most people do is exactly what you're describing you know because they get caught up and
this is costing me money i need direct roi now um yeah but that will come like it's
just there's a little bit of patience um so and a little bit of faith as well
generally right but that's all marketing right like there's always inherent risk with you know turning on ads like you're
not going to get a conversion right away on facebook ad account dashboard you trust that system you trust that process
like you got to trust this process as well this one yeah that's very very good uh we are
going to get into this in a whole lot more detail in just a few minutes but in the meantime let's hear from this week's
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[Music]
hey there are you a business owner here at oregon digital we know firsthand that
running an ecommerce business can be really hard work as the online space gets more
competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve we totally get it so we want to help you
succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing customer service and even coaching and
consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
cody um before the before the sponsor break um you you use this phrase um compounding
value uh which i thought was such a wonderful phrase that by giving your products away and the key phrase here
was no strings attached um you're compounding value by building relationship uh with people and and we
said at the start we're not giving it away willy-nilly we are in fact very targeted in that should be the show
title man giving giving products away willy-nilly that's a better show and you know what
there's going to be so many people going what the heck does that mean um
it is funny isn't it they're different we speak the same language but there are so many phrases like so many differences
yeah it's it's hysterical really um and so yeah you talked about this short term versus long-term thinking uh and and
Follow Up
this was your sort of um your your philosophy so
i'm i'm there i'm i've i've reached out to fred who's you know fred do you want to
i just want to send you my hat bro no strings attached and he says yes he gives me a shipping
address he sends it out do i um is that it is there some kind of
follow-up mechanism what's your process i guess here yeah well to deal with it might be helpful to just
our process now we're an agency so we can do this at scale on behalf of brands so we're reaching out to influencers
in a month for a brand internally for like the solo person that i was managing influencer
marketing on my brand that like i understand that that takes six months for most people and to even just
identify influencers so like let's scale this down to just against me to be fair yeah let's scale this down but just
the process still remains of just like identification outreach sending them the product
and then there is a communication flow that i would definitely recommend as far as follow-up like after you know that
they've received the product um you can send a message that hey how are
you liking the product um we send that three days after they've received the product um
regardless of if they've posted or not so we're going to get into our expectations of just
we see free organic posting going live from our seating efforts of people
that we send product to will post for free without us even asking so that's a benchmark that i think brands should
have internally is okay i mean that's that's higher than i thought it would be to be fair
yeah yeah and that when those influencers are posting they're posting on average two to three
assets each so they might be throwing up three stories they might post those three
three assets over a period of time depending on your product and using it consistently
[Music] so there is a follow-up flow um and so our process goes from identification
communication sending out the product um tracking organic posting we use software
for that and i can go into and tell you exactly what that is when we see post go live we reach out
for content rights which is important since we started the relationship the right way like we've been talking about
a lot of these influencers are giving us rights to use the content for free again so free posts and free writes
and then leveraging that content within paid and then we're sending out an nps survey to all the influencers so that's
kind of like our az process to address your specific question on
just communication flow like i sent it to fred and then i just wait like what do i do
if you're doing on a one by one basis there's nothing wrong with following up especially if you haven't seen them post
you know they got the product maybe three days prior it could be a a little
elbow nudged to basically say like hey how are you liking the product without asking for it again but it might if they
love it it might encourage them to post regardless they could give you great
product feedback and they could be asking for a discount code because they loved it so much and
to share with their followers so that's some of that compounding value um
yeah so and or if they have posted already you can reach out for content rights stuff like that so
that's kind of a lot there but yeah yeah no it's that but that's useful can i um
i've got all that written down okay let me just assure you dear listener and viewer that we're going to come back and circle on some of these points
um so if i if i go back right i've got um my my list of influences i that i
want to reach out to um how many of those influencers maybe
How Many Influencers
this is a really inane question how long is the price of strange i mean but how many of those do you expect
to go sure send me your free product so that's okay
so it's just now we're starting to work the numbers aren't we so if to get people to say yes i need to contact
out of those people that say yes of them will put some kind of content upon their feed
without too much drama these are the sort of general benchmarks um well
yeah we'll post on average two to three times each so this is how a brand our brands are ending up with a minimum of
to unique assets from influencers that are not just
ugc generation but they're also posted on their feeds stories
whatever platform that we outreach to them and then you know we're getting that those assets
to be leveraged within paid so you're getting paid and organic combination yeah
okay so the um you then the
the or the that don't post for free do a portion of those reach out and say
this is great can we come to some kind of arrangement ordeal um
some of which are just never going to get in touch with you again i appreciate i don't know what is it about half maybe
um so what happens to the other sort of if that makes sense yeah so we're sending
out and i would recommend this we send out a survey to all the influencers that do
receive product regardless if they've posted or not so all let's just say so that includes those people
um of an mps survey basically and how likely you recommend this to a friend but we do have a question there as well
if we wanted to work with you officially because we're communicating on behalf of the brand
how interested would you be in this and we see on average to percent of people are saying yes i'd be interested
in this regardless of if they've posted or not and so when they they say you know yes
through on that scale then they drop their handle so just
super valuable in addition to any other feedback um things of that nature so
your direct question of like what happens with those well a lot of those could have not posted but they've
filled out that survey and basically said like yes i would love to work with you um
and now the brand has those relationships in-house to be able to follow up with them directly and say yes
okay let's work together you know because some of these brands that are approaching us as well already maybe have an affiliate program that they've
kind of dabbled with they don't have time to actually import these people like recruit people to their affiliate
program um well now like our services our seating
campaigns have served as sort of top of funnel if you will and so we're funneling all those people into
their affiliate program um so again that was kind of a lot there
but like with those people that's what i would say is like there's incredible data that's coming back
regardless of yeah you know because you have feedback of them posting sure you know those for sure love you but then
there's other people that maybe didn't decide to post but they filled out that survey and
they're like yeah man like i love the product i loved it um i would love to work with you this is how many people i
told about it you know this i would purchase the product on my own like all this you know and you can use that
data to determine if this person's a big advocate of you yeah that's really and
again just touching on something that you said that i the rabbit hole keeps growing
we're just going further and further down um uh you mentioned affiliate program right
and how clients come to you and they've they've not really done the affiliate thing they've kind of dabbled and you're using this in effect to put them in the
top of funnel of your affiliate program i'm just thinking um if i'm reaching out to micro influencers
and i'm selling an average price product i'm not selling you know like a lamborghini or something where there's huge profit margins but it's just an a
typical product like a hat or a t-shirt or um a food supplement or headphones
whatever it is right i've sent you the product for free you love it you try it um and they fill in the server and say
listen we would love to work with you further on this um
How to Work with Influencers
i hear stories which means everybody hears stories of kim kardashian saying
if you want to me to post an instagram post it's million trillion pounds
that's what i mean or whatever the the latest figure is and so you're gonna so again that the
guy who was who was apoplectic because he's had send the product out for free and not had any you know
uh agreement um gets this yeah can we work back further what sort of um
i think rules is a wrong wrong phrase what sort of principles what sort of ideas are we should i be thinking about
as an entrepreneur when working with these micro influencers you know is it a fixed price thing is it come join my
affiliate program what do you think about that yeah yeah the short answer is it really
depends on what the entrepreneur wants like what you guys are wanting to do internally
i always say okay you know seating has lended you to a pool of people that have proven to be genuine advocates of now of
you now do with it what you want so for some people that's an affiliate program some
people that's a ugc you know pool of people that create consistent ugc on a month month basis that you leverage
within paid others it's an ambassador drop down menu
on their website etc etc i would recommend in terms of contracts
uh in terms of now it gets to the point of like actually working with these influencers i would
one i would see how that content's performing within paid uh see who's performing best and then
actually contract these people i think getting them onto an affiliate program is
is kind of why not um so giving them a discount code giving
them a commission if they want to continue to post and it's a good motivation for them to continue to post
um and then i would contract them for consistent monthly ugc
um and we get this opening deepening the rabbit hole
but uh we can get into indoors yeah it is it is uh you know things that included in the
contract and stuff like that so yeah well well we will come back to contracts because you've mentioned about
getting contract rights and and stuff like that as well so some of maybe some of the key things we need to think about there right
um but i i just want to close the circle a little bit if i can because again you've mentioned it a
couple of times about using um the ugc which is user generated content for
those that might be thinking what the heck is ugc it's this is the content that the inflow has created that they
that they post on social media you've mentioned about using that in paid media just briefly explain what you
mean by that yeah um for those that might not understand what that means
essentially just the content that they've created turning that and actually turning those
into ads within facebook and instagram advertising that's what i mean by that
yeah so you're taking their content their images maybe their testimonial their story and that actually is your ad
UGC vs Paid Media
which says click here to find out more about what fred thinks about hats or whatever and
um and you know and actually that becomes quite it's quite an interesting form of
paid media isn't it because it's very different to the here's my hat by it you're actually going here's what fred
thinks about my hat why don't you find out more right um and actually
it has quite it's quite interesting results when you do the two different types of marketing sort of measure them
alongside each other i don't know if you found anything sort of correlation between the two but i
i find that um ugc advertising is great on instagram in terms
especially if the photography is done well i mean it interrupts people quite nicely
um so yeah i don't know if you've got any anecdotal evidence on that or any thoughts yeah i mean especially video
content um is high performing and and i would say that the ugc
on the dashboard on facebook we definitely see a significant well let's
just break it down like these these networks are human and human creation networks you know they're meant to be
just friends interacting with their friends so when you see [Music] a product on a white background versus
matt you know when you're trolling on the feed talking about a product that he loves that's just more native to the feed that's all that that means you're
used to seeing that type of content it is more and there's a lot of data around this which i don't
have memorized off the top of my head but a lot of data around even when it's clearly an ad
but it's a human talking to a human they're just a significant difference and people just flat out are filling out
stats and surveys and basically saying yeah that doesn't make it i know it's an ad but it doesn't make a difference to
me um yeah so yeah i think it just speaks to the power of that these are human human
networks at the end of the day and so the more human that you can make it the better it'll be and that's why ugc works
incredibly well yeah and i the thing i love about your philosophy
here or your uh your principles your methodology whatever language you know resonates but the thing i love about it
is it's you're you're completing the circle you're you're saying right we're going to go we're going to go find these influencers
we're going to reach out and we're going to build a relationship with them and we're going to keep this process going you know we're going to we're then
going to use that content and it's not you're you're using it in multiple ways you're making the reward bigger i guess
for that initial effort at the start on you with the with what you're talking about rather than just let me contact
this person they said yes they said no they put a nice picture up i've liked it said thanks very much and that's it
you're actually you're actually making dual use of what's going on which i think is which is actually remarkably clever
um and remarkably simple all at the same time which these things usually are on you
Making Your Life Easier
you just actually making your life easier by maximizing what you're getting from from your
from your customers from your influencers from the people you connected with is that right yeah i think i'm gonna start using you on our
uh bd calls because of just the way that you put things differences between uk
and uh the state side use of the english english language
yeah it's funny i i completely not related to anything maybe i used to live in the states for a little while
and um and every day i would go out and i would you
would inevitably end up talking to somebody or where are you from your accent and then they would say to you
things like say this what does this sound like you know and just give you words to say all the time say this say
like a puppet yeah yeah yeah like yeah just like i'm a remote controller just play pool
it was just really funny terrible america but one of the things no no no i figured this out right that
actually if um my son my eldest son is thinking of
going to the states in the summer for an internship right and i said to him uh
when before he goes uh this summer i said listen here's the thing right in fact i also said this to some
friends of mine who have just literally moved out last week they moved out to the states i said to their kids i took him aside and said this is what's going
to happen when you're in the states you are going to walk into a shop or a takeout you know you're going to go into
whatever mcdonald's or whatever your favorite restaurant is and you're going to go in there and you're going to go
and ask for your food in the strongest english accent you can
possibly do right just just go overboard and say well hello
it's beautiful day isn't it and and just go crazy with it because
you'll get more stuff that's right i always it was either free
or they gave me extra and so i didn't mind the five minutes conversation i didn't mind saying liverpool because there was always it
was always the reason for the word that's so funny it was just great but
yeah you know these things that uh they do right anyway let's get back to the to the
right yeah the rabbit let's get back down there so you've mentioned a few times about
Contracts
contracts contract rights contract with them to produce content on a regular basis
and everyone is instantly scared at this point because contracts equals litigation right and it's just like and
it equals lawyers and let's just be fair i have some good friends who are lawyers they won't mind me saying this
they're not the cheapest people on the plane to employ are they really and so you've got to be committed to the to the
cause and things start going down the contractual route so what are some of the tips and hints you've got here that are going to help us
yeah i mean let's just type back into seating right like those those litigations those uh
contract disputes a lot of those things are alleviated if you start the relationship the right way
right you know like just on a transactional basis if it doesn't go right if they
post without your approval or if they use the wrong copy and then you want to sue them which i wouldn't recommend
um you know it's gonna go yeah it's just yeah it's just a bad luck
but two things i i recommend with contracts is just one when it gets to that point because to be
clear i'm not anti-contract with influencers when it gets to that point though
you definitely want to have content approvals so rounds of approval so
they're going to produce three videos one image you want to have approvals on that content so when they shoot the
videos you send it over okay they said my brand name wrong they said
nikki not nike we need to redo the video um and then usage rights
um when it gets to that point as far as contracts like you just gotta at least have or content perpetuity
in terms of usage rights and that that means that you're leveraging that content in other
places whether on your website facebook instagram advertising etc etc
the organic post that you're contracting them for is not enough you just got to be able to you know diversify your
portfolio if you will not just put it all in one stock um so those are the two things that i would
recommend that's super helpful i like that you the the organic stuff content is is not
enough and so you want to be able to use it in other places and repurpose that content and to do that
you're going to need to you're going to have a need to contract with them which basically says that you've got their permission to do that without incurring
an extra cost or whatever you know the the contracts arrangements are i remember you know we've worked with
several brands over the years and just some of the stuff you know around
Scripting
photographs and what you can do with them and what you can't do with them and it just it's incredible and so um i
guess how tightly do you want to control that because it's the purpose of influencer marketing to let them have
their voice and it comes across as them being authentic versus me scripting and controlling just
yeah is there a bit of ebb and flow there yeah absolutely um definitely send them like a creative
brief so all that means it's just like kind of a one-cheater of hey here's some talking points here's some example
scenes but it's all meant to be inspiration we found that influencers do want guidelines they just don't want like
exact word for word scripting so i would never recommend like matt you must say this word for word
um it's not gonna sound natural it's gonna sound scripted it's going to sound exactly like what you produced
so but they also want to be like guided so there's certain talking points about
your product or brand and then if you have example scenes that you're hoping that they kind of do or
match then putting those in there as well
yeah that's awesome have you got um
Influencer Marketing Examples
have you got and people maybe that i could go follow on
instagram or brands that i could go follow on tick tock or whatever that are doing influencer marketing well so i can
sort of start to see the kind of things that they're getting jeremy is have you got any
examples yeah um one that comes to mind is gym shark i mean that's a
that they've i mean they're obviously very very big now um they work with lots of
influencers but again tying it back to seeding that's how they started that's how ben francis
started just getting the product out to fitness influencers at a fitness show
so that's how it started but i still think that they do influence
marketing well um yeah they're almost like the pioneers of it but there was a they were the the
first company that i heard that that had made a killing out of doing influence in marketing well and it's the one with you
know most people talk about isn't a gym shock and definitely worth following if you don't do so already just from the
lessons um that you can get from their influencer program but um yeah anybody
else not only come to mind um obviously the brands we work with uh
obviously obviously just go to yeah just yeah and just and just um just look at all the cases
exactly yeah absolutely no well i guess um
as we as we're sort of closing here on this cody i want to appreciate i've got a much clearer understanding now of you
know influence marketing the kind of things i should be looking at um what kind of things i should be doing
if i'm listening to you going this is great it sounds all a bit daunting and a bit
scary what can what should i start doing today what's manageable today um
bringing it right back what what could i do what actions could i start taking today to start me off on the right process
identifying influencers um i think you could hire a va you could
hire an intern you could hire somebody to basically go out and find a list
and then you have inventory you can outreach
and say exactly the message that i proposed of sending out a message no strings attached and
getting addresses and just start collecting data um [Music] if you reach out to information you
should expect at least six to say yes i made the product and you should expect at least two of them to post for free
now that doesn't sound like grandiose compared to influencers but as you do it at scale those benchmarks should
continue to be the minimum expectation you obviously want to shoot for more
when you're sending out your your free product sending out the gift um i'm just thinking how do i decide
what do i send do i send my best product or do i send mine great question um do i is there like a do i send a hundred
bucks worth a product or bucks worth of product if i've got a range yeah what what is there a limit there or no limits
or wrong phrase is there a principle is there a guiding principle yeah i would think primarily whatever
whatever product you want content around so that's the long-term vision right like
because you're gonna expect some posts go live around your product um
so that's kind of that's one piece of it and then secondly i would just think
about like what actual what is the the hero product that i know people are
gonna love and it's gonna actually fit the influencer um so those are kind of the two ways
that i would think about it um yeah i wouldn't necessarily like
basically as much as you can afford um like we have a seating budget calculator like that takes into your
cogs and shipping and all that stuff and times that by the amount of influencers that you're you want to send that
product to that's kind of your seating budget um for one brand that has worth of cogs
like that's probably one a month versus like the cog company that can send out a lot more whatever's going to
be impressive to the influencer um send as much as you can but
obviously one is completely fine yeah and make most of your budget i'm
Would it work
just thinking actually for one of the brands that we look after online that we that we do we've got some new products coming out
and i guess um would it work if i got a list of my customers for example
went through those figured out who was more influency than the jeremy and look to
their their sort of their social media um send them the free product and say
listen this is a new product coming out no strings attached to you but we'd love to know what you think um
would that work to your customers yeah absolutely
i i think tying it back to influencers as well is that the more that you see the more that people
like this kind of goes into the follow-up like once you actually start working with these influencers
consistently is including them on your seating roster so like when you do have new product launches like you got an
army of people in saying like hey this is a new product i used to do this all the time at the
brand i was working on these were our top these are our top we sent it to all top
and because they're such massive fans and they've worked with us consistently of them would just throw it up and
say like look at caleb's new product new you know stuff like that so that's definitely something that i would
recommend yeah that's awesome that's awesome
so um i think there's a whole stack load of ideas right there isn't there uh and
hopefully there's enough to wet your whistle as they say and um and get you excited about
uh about the whole idea of influencer market influence succeeding
cody just how can people reach you how can people
How can people reach you
get hold because i'm i'm thinking right i i own an ecommerce point i'm like i get excited by this kind of thing and
then the other part of me goes i've got resource to think about now i've got to do this i've got to do that
and so this is um this is where it's a beautiful thing that you're an agency because i'll just pick up the phone and go cody listen let's let's do a deal
right now people may want to reach out to you either to talk to you about your agency work or even just to ask you any
questions about some of the things that you said today what's the best way for people to do that yeah i'm at codywoodik
on twitter and instagram that's where i put out content so um in addition to everything that we
talked about so that's shoot me a dm um our agency website is kinship kynship.co
um there's a lot of call to actions to get on a call or reach out so
um those would be the ways to get a hold and then we can have a conversation and see
kind of what next steps will be yeah no fantastic and we will of course
link to cody and all of his uh various methodologies for reaching him uh cody
listen thank you so much for being with us on the show we're we're going to have to get you back but at some point no
doubt to figure out what's new and what's happening of course but it's been a real treat real privilege and thank you for being
so valuable in what you've shared thank you matt it's been a it's been a fun time
well a huge thanks to my very special guest cody uh great conversation great
interview great insight great principles but what did you think did you get lots of notes as well of course you did of
course you did but i appreciate for some of you it's not always that straightforward to take good notes so you can get them for free
including the links including the transcript from today's show at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
you can check that out and of course if that is not enough and why would it
be when there's so much to learn about e-commerce we have another fantastic guest next week again furykawa
how to capture zero party data to effectively personalize its scale
sounds interesting doesn't it what is zero poly data how can i gather it how can i effectively do it well my conversation with gain is going to
reveal all here is an excerpt
so these these platforms that track customer data are no longer available
it's incumbent on brands to build that relationship to capture that data themselves and i think that that is
becoming a uh a defensive mode and a competitive advantage for those brands that have it
and once you do have it then you can create campaigns you can create tighter
segmentation to improve the relevance and the timeliness of who you're sending
and what messages and offers you're sending
i am looking forward again to this one he's such a cool guy again genuinely cool guy you just you sit down and talk
to him go you're cool he's cool you're definitely gonna want to listen to it uh he's uh he's such a
cool guy so to make sure you get that episode coming into your inbox make sure you like and subscribe the uh
to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from whether it's apple whether it's google whether it's now amazon
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would appreciate if you could give the show a rating wherever you get your podcast from i know every podcaster says can you rate
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rating because it really helps us it helps us grow it helps us get the sponsors which means it's going to help you because we can keep delivering the
content it's win-win win-win all around it just works all around so genuinely appreciate that as i said at the start
of the show the notes and links from today's conversation with cody are available online for free
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash that's it from me thank you so much for
listening i do come back like i say next week my conversation again is going to be amazing no doubt you're not going to
want to miss it so have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world uh bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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