Leveraging Micro-influencers to Scale Your Product Sales
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Josh Durham, owner of Aligned Growth Management, an agency dedicated to helping brands source and develop relationships with influencers, joins the podcast to chat on finding micro-influencers, how to properly vet them and the pay structures that have worked for their clients.
The conversation also shifts to discussing brand spending, KPIs, and the challenges of measuring ROI.
Key takeaways:
The core metrics influencer marketing focuses on
How to properly negotiate influencer rates
Why agency revenue models for influencer marketing include fixed retainers and increased rates for larger campaigns.
Why it's so important to set KPIs before diving into influencer marketing
If you'd like to connect with Josh and the Aligned Growth Management team, you can find them here.
If you'd like to learn more about the Founders Community or want to become a member you can do so here.
Full Transcript:
Tris Dyer (00:00.123)
we saw just kind of checklist, just make sure your phone's off, make sure you're off. But like, you know, you're not getting text and shit in the middle of it. All that kind of stuff. You know, standard podcasty stuff and any background noise to get rid of that as well. I mean, all this stuff anyway. So as I said at the top there, if you think of something you're halfway through a thought and you're like, shit, I want to say that again. Just put your hand up. I can hit Mark and then it'll just cut it out. And.
Josh Durham (00:00.142)
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Durham (00:07.598)
Yeah, yeah, I just wanted you not to stir.
Tris Dyer (00:28.379)
One of the questions is like, I'm going to introduce yourself and say, Josh here from, you know, and don't tell me like, is there something that you want to be like, this is, you know, we did this many ads or, you know, this many people saw our stuff last year or whatever. Anything that you kind of say is the main thing. Like what's your elevator kind of line for intro.
Josh Durham (00:48.75)
Our elevator line is that, I guess, our typical client, we sign about a hundred influencers in the first 90 days working together. It is kind of our average across our clients. So that's one. The other thing I was going to say too, at the end, just as a resource, we just put out this like free guide. It's like a 33 page PDF guide that I wrote that basically is five lessons on.
Edwin @ Snappic (00:57.114)
Whoa.
Josh Durham (01:17.614)
influencer marketing and there's case studies from Joe Roe, like working with Joe Rogan, Tony Hawk and some other larger creators. And so anyways, that's just like at the end, just as a resource, we'd love to link that in the show notes. But yeah, I think that's the only two items.
Tris Dyer (01:27.131)
No.
Tris Dyer (01:32.091)
Okay. We can absolutely put that. How many inflows in the first 90 days?
Josh Durham (01:37.614)
100 influencers in the first 90 days.
Tris Dyer (01:41.083)
And that's your on average. Okay, grand. So, okay. So I'm going to introduce you. Is it not Durham or Durham?
Josh Durham (01:50.35)
Durham.
Tris Dyer (01:51.611)
Durham, okay, go on. Sorry. Some people get picky over that, so I'm like, okay, I'll just make sure. Okay, cool. So I don't know if you've listened to any of these podcasts. Yeah, yeah, Ireland just being weird, to be honest. Okay, cool. I don't know if you've listened to the podcast before. I do the intro, we go through all the questions, and then what we do is at the end, we'll do an outro, but we can talk in the middle of it, because I've got a marker here, which I can just mark to say, like, cut this part out.
Josh Durham (01:53.006)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (01:57.006)
It's okay. I'll just talk that up to a cultural difference. I'm just kidding.
No, just kidding.
Tris Dyer (02:21.467)
All right. OK, cool. You ready? OK, cool. Hey, guys, welcome to the Foxwell Founders Forum with me, Tris, Edwin and Josh Durham here from... Fuck, we'll start that again. We haven't done this in a couple of weeks. OK, right. Hey, guys, welcome to the Foxwell Founders Forum with me, Tris, Edwin and Josh here from The Aligned Growth. These guys...
Josh Durham (02:22.67)
Sweet.
Josh Durham (02:38.606)
Hi Rusty.
Tris Dyer (02:48.443)
really know what it's talking about when it comes to scaling social media influencers for your DTC brands. So much so, every time they start with a new brand, you know, there's so much that happens with it with new influencers. There's so much to sign and learn. But what they do say is on average, they sign about 100 new influencers for your brand in the first 90 days of working with you on average, which blows me away. So if it's not worth it, if it's something you need to know about influencer marketing.
and Josh doesn't know it, it's not worth knowing. All right, so Edwin, it is up with the first question.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:20.538)
So, micro -influencers, 190 days, you've done a lot. Tell me, what is your process for finding these micro -influencers?
Josh Durham (03:31.598)
Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. But yeah, in terms of finding influencers, you know, the first thing that we do is we really build out the foundation of your program. So we'd like to have a solid tech stack to where we have a centralized application software that we can manage all those influencer partnerships in one place. So instead of like sending one off DMs and getting lost in those inboxes and getting super hairy, basically what my team does is we...
Edwin @ Snappic (03:41.722)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:54.33)
Okay. I hate that. Yeah.
Josh Durham (04:00.014)
build that out. Like we, we use a tool called aspire for all of our influencer tools or our clients. And then basically my team will go source about 200 influencers a week on behalf of the client. And so typically like out of that 200, we'll, we'll source them on a SaaS tool. So another great tool that you're probably familiar with, if you're in the Fox well community is story clash. And it's really the best sourcing tool that we've found to date.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:03.546)
Okay. Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:25.146)
Okay.
Josh Durham (04:28.686)
And, basically like my team will be going through story clash and based off the criteria that we set with the brand of like, who's a good fit for the brand. Who's a great fit for this campaign. We will go source about 200 every single week. And so the size followings for that range between 10 ,000 followers up to a hundred thousand followers in terms of just like product gifting. So that would like what we would consider a micro creator. And so out of that 200, we typically get opt -in rates that very.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:52.058)
Okay.
Josh Durham (04:57.198)
So if we reach out to 220 opt in, up to 40 % opt in rates, just depending on the product value and how well known the brand is. So that's a little bit about kind of our process for sourcing.
Edwin @ Snappic (05:00.314)
Yeah, or that's...
Yeah. Whoa, that's very high.
Tris Dyer (05:08.187)
Wow.
Edwin @ Snappic (05:13.434)
And, and the spire software, what is, is that your CRM? Is that a CRM that like sequences the DMS or what, what is, tell me more about that. Cause I've, I've never used a spire.
Tris Dyer (05:13.595)
So.
Josh Durham (05:24.622)
Yeah, so Aspire is, it's like an all -in influencer tool. They also have sourcing capabilities, but really it's like what we use it for is like a centralized application. That way we can filter through applicants based off their socials, based off their content that they're making. And then it also processes orders through Shopify once we accept them in there. So you can import all your Shopify products into Aspire. The creator can then select what product they want. And then you can also manage.
you know, anything from whitelisting to payments to affiliate links to discount codes to track sales. So it's kind of like an all in one solution.
Tris Dyer (06:01.083)
Nice, nice. So you're talking about track sales there. That's going to bring us beautifully onto the point, I suppose. You know, 100 in the first 90 days. That's a lot of a lot of people talking about your brand. A lot of people getting it out there. How do you how do you track the efficiency? I mean, there's got to be a very difficult, very, very difficult to track, like how you're making your money back from all those people.
Josh Durham (06:23.79)
Yeah, for sure. So I think in terms of efficiency, like how we like to think about it is, you know, for number one is like, I'm kind of a, I'm a former paid social guy turn into a brand marketer is kind of how I like to say it. You know, I was in -house, I ran my own brand for five years as a weighted blanket company. And then I was in -house at a brand called Groove Life. And, you know, I was managing about seven figures a month in paid social. And so.
Tris Dyer (06:36.443)
One of us.
Edwin @ Snappic (06:37.626)
Hahaha!
Tris Dyer (06:43.899)
Nice.
Josh Durham (06:50.83)
you know, diving into influencer has been kind of like my, what I've been really diving into the last like three to four years. And so in terms of like efficiency, how we think about influencer is a great channel to generate cheap attention and cheap content. So really it's attention and a content channel that helps feed the rest of the channel. So like, I'm not here to tell you that influencer is going to be your biggest revenue driver in 2024. I think that.
we're just very realistic that paid social is going to be the bread and butter for any brand. And so if you don't have paid social and search and shopping and email figured out, then you probably don't need to come to us to figure out influencer. But once you do figure those out, then all of a sudden we get you five to 10 new pieces of content a week that you can use in paid social. You can use that across organic social. And then we have, you know, maybe a real pops off on Instagram or.
Tris Dyer (07:25.051)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (07:47.086)
a post pops off on TikTok and you get all this new organic reach that fills up the top of funnel that then comes into your retargeting buckets, comes into your email list and just helps efficiency from there. So this is much more of an attention and content generating channel than a direct response on spending a dollar and getting $5 back. So that's kind of how we think about it.
Edwin @ Snappic (08:09.498)
And so what are the KPIs that you are, that you're reporting back to the customer? Is it just, is it likes comments? Is it impressions? Like, is it that sort of metric or what, what KPIs are you reporting back to your clients?
Josh Durham (08:23.982)
Yeah. So on a weekly basis, we're reporting back. Here's how many creators we reached out to. Here's how many applied. Here's how much product was sent. And here's all the posts that were posted organically across Instagram and Tik Tok primarily. And then we upload all that content into Google drive folder of like, Hey, here's all the content that you have creative rights to that you can deploy now across assets. And then from a monthly and a quarterly perspective, we're reporting on the total organic reach. We're also calculating CPMs.
Edwin @ Snappic (08:36.698)
Okay.
Josh Durham (08:53.422)
And so we'll take, if we're just doing product gifting, we'll actually take a function of your cost of goods sold and blend that into a CPM metric. And so, your Facebook ads, depending on the brand might be anywhere from $20 CPM up to $60 CPM. So if we can get $20 CPMs or below, we just really considered that a win of like, Hey, we got really cheap eyeballs here for really just the cost of product. And really, at the end of the day, there's going to be ad blindness regardless.
Tris Dyer (09:16.603)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Josh Durham (09:22.702)
Like especially on TikTok, if you're scrolling TikTok and you see an ad, you kind of know it immediately, right? And you keep going past it. But if an influencer is actually coming and one of your favorite creators is like posting about a product and it's more entertaining and engaging than a typical ad, then they just entered a consideration phase. And we did that for a really cheap attention. And so that's, those are the kinds of things that we report on is really,
Edwin @ Snappic (09:28.506)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (09:28.539)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (09:45.307)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (09:49.486)
the organic reach, the CPMs is kind of like the leading metric for top of funnel. And then of course, all the content that you get from that, that you can leverage across all your channels.
Tris Dyer (09:54.203)
Mm -hmm.
Tris Dyer (09:58.875)
Nice, nice. So realistically, people need to be considering when they're starting with influencer marketing, they need to think a little bit more about, you know, product gifts, but also then the cost of investing in this. Do you do you come to put like, say, for example, someone's coming to you and they're, they're not quite ready. What does that somebody what does that somebody look like? What threshold do they need to hit themselves, you're saying they need to have paid social figured out, they need to kind of get ready, like what what?
threshold that they need to hit to come and say work with an agency on influencer marketing? Is there a small amount?
Josh Durham (10:29.742)
Yeah, for sure. So we kind of have two different buckets of clients. The first bucket of the earliest brands that we're willing to take on are doing between $1 million a year and $5 million a year. And so if you fall into that bucket and you have paid social going, you're generating consistent revenue and you have your email flow set up, search shopping, like I said earlier, and all of that is figured out, then what we can do is we can basically, we've been training teams in -house.
So we'll take your social media manager, for example, and we'll basically bolt on our influencer playbook inside of their business. So instead of my team managing it, we'll actually just work on training that person in -house so that they have all the tools and resources that they need to actually execute the same playbook that we do for our more established brands. And so that's one, like that's kind of the range of our first bucket. The second bucket is you need to be doing about $6 million a year to work with us on a done for you.
Tris Dyer (11:14.619)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (11:29.198)
engagement where my team does basically everything from outreach negotiation with large creators to sponsoring YouTube channels. So, you know, just like larger engagements with where there's my where there's maybe product gifting first, which we like to use as the base of every program. But really what we want to do is eventually have a paid budget where we're sponsoring creators because we want to roadmap for those influencers to get sponsored. So those clients are typically in the eight figures.
a lot of times, but we started at, you know, six million a year.
Tris Dyer (12:05.243)
I was going to say, I'm not too sure who wants to ask next. I'm actually really interested in it. So you mentioned there something just specifically about how you're, you know, you're giving gifts, but for the people that you're in the done for you, you also have this idea of you're sponsoring them as well. So is it like you're sponsoring them and who, which audiences are you going after? Are you going broad with those with influencers or? Because.
Josh Durham (12:07.534)
haha
Tris Dyer (12:29.435)
We've seen that we've seen on our side that when we get influencers in, they give us their audiences, they allow us to promote them to their own audiences, but they also allow us to promote them within the page that we have. How do you manage that relationship between the, where you're sponsoring it, where the ad budget goes, all that stuff?
Josh Durham (12:47.63)
Yeah. So number one is we want to use influencer as part of the brand's constant calendar. So a lot of people treat influencer like this. It's this thing on this Island on its own and it's, it's treated as its own channel. But really what we want to do is we want to include those creators into larger moments throughout the year. So let's say like one of our clients, pop sockets, we, you know, they're in target. And so a lot of times we will actually be sponsoring creators to go into target.
Tris Dyer (13:00.091)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (13:17.934)
to just drive demand from social into like retail locations. And you'd be surprised, like I've talked to a lot of brands who are in Walmart and want like the buyers of Walmart want to see brands that are actually investing into influencer. Cause they're seeing how well, you know, Kim K is doing, they're seeing how well Mr. Beast is doing. So they want the brands to be invested into influencer marketing. And so basically like,
Tris Dyer (13:26.395)
Christmas.
Josh Durham (13:47.278)
In terms of that, we'll basically just negotiate on a CPM basis where we average their last 10 videos, put that into a CPM that we're willing to pay, and then we'll negotiate from there in terms of deliverables. But I don't know, does that, does that answer your question?
Tris Dyer (13:57.435)
Mm -hmm.
Tris Dyer (14:02.203)
Gotcha. Yeah, kind of. So you touched on something there specifically around what you're getting them to do, which we can come to in a minute. But one more, what I'm asking is when you're paying somebody, you pay them on a CPM basis, do you run any ads behind those or do the brands run that themselves?
Josh Durham (14:19.918)
Yeah. So typically the brand, we, we don't run any paid socials. We work with a lot of paid social teams who we will, yes, well, white lists will either a, you know, get content for them that they can leverage into paid social. We might actually set up a white listing agreement where they're running ads through that influencers page. Maybe they're retargeting that audience, on Instagram or on tick -tock. but yes, that's, those are all things that.
Tris Dyer (14:26.363)
Hmm.
Tris Dyer (14:42.33)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (14:44.942)
We help assist other paid social teams. So we're not competitive with those paid social teams. We're really trying to help those paid social teams just get more efficient with their ad spend and really to be an asset to them as well.
Tris Dyer (14:49.531)
I get ya.
Tris Dyer (14:56.859)
Gotcha.
Edwin @ Snappic (14:56.922)
And so when you're guys, when they're going out, they're sourcing the micro influencers to begin with, what are the criteria that they're, they're going after, right? Because like sometimes you have influencers that they have larger follower accounts, but maybe the engagement isn't so much there. And so what are the benchmarks that you're looking for?
Josh Durham (15:17.326)
Yeah. Wow. That's a really good question. I would say that we like following count really doesn't matter in terms of like the actual deliverable, like in terms of like the rate.
Edwin @ Snappic (15:26.938)
Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Can we repeat that? Because that is, I cannot tell you how many clients I wish knew this.
Josh Durham (15:35.058)
I'll say it again. The, so the follower count doesn't matter when it comes to the deliverables. So we care more about the content that's getting posted and the reach that the content is getting. Whereas, cause if you look at, there's a lot of Tik TOK creators that might have a million followers on Tik TOK and we've seen it where posts are only getting 5 ,000 views per video. So it's really.
Edwin @ Snappic (15:43.514)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (15:51.61)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:01.754)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (16:02.459)
Wow. Why is that? Is that...
Josh Durham (16:04.142)
They might've had one video that, yeah, mainly because one video popped off, got a ton of followers and maybe it wasn't relevant to the rest of their content. So they had this large following, but they don't have a ton of reach, on their like everyday content. And so we're looking at that everyday reach and using that as our benchmark for rates, not following. So.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:26.906)
And so what's the benchmark reach that you, that you want. And like, because I guess it's, it's a correlation between the cost of goods sold, right. And then also the reach. And so tell me like, what's, what's the calculation there.
Josh Durham (16:35.63)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (16:41.422)
Yeah. So it's all CPM based. So like if we have, and just to say like with the larger creators, we are using it for, we are using like a paid budget. This isn't so outside of cost of goods sold, like we might be gifting and calculating CPM for product gifting, but for a sponsored post, we're actually getting like a paid budget. So at a minimum, a brand might give us five to $10 ,000 on like as a first, when they're first starting out with sponsoring.
Edwin @ Snappic (17:03.898)
Okay.
Josh Durham (17:11.406)
influencers. And so we'll take that five to $10 ,000. And let's say we spread $5 ,000 across five creators. And so a thousand dollars per post for five creators. And so we'll look at basically go after creators between a hundred thousand and 500 ,000 followers, just as our first kind of initial look. And then we dive deeper into their content. And we basically tried to calculate like how many impressions would we get for $20 CPMs?
$4 ,000. And so we'll look at that and basically make a first offer that's lower than what we want. And then they come back, they negotiate back and forth until we find a reasonable rate that we know is going to get like good attention and cheap eyeballs. And one of the things that you can do in those contracts is actually have a minimum view threshold in that contract to where if one post doesn't generate like the views that you want,
Tris Dyer (17:40.347)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (18:09.134)
Basically, they can make another post to generate enough views that would meet that threshold for the contract. So that's just a quick little tip.
Tris Dyer (18:16.763)
That makes sense. Makes sense. So what I'm hearing from you though is that you're not going after one person with what like, you're not spreading too thin and going one post from 20 people. It's four people with five posts, or five people, four posts, so you have kind of a repeated content.
Josh Durham (18:30.286)
Yeah. Yeah. Especially when the, we, when we want more control over the content, that's when you have a more of a paid budget to execute that. So if there's a new product launch coming up, if you're launching into sprouts or target or Walmart, and you want them to actually physically go into a location, then you probably need a paid budget versus sending a free product.
Tris Dyer (18:39.835)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (18:59.502)
and kind of giving them light guidelines, right? And so I think that's an important note is if you want more control over that content, having a paid budget with these larger creators is really gonna help that content quality go up. But at the end of the day, we wanna let the creator create and be creative, but we'll at least have a say about that content before it gets posted.
Tris Dyer (19:02.555)
Gotcha.
Edwin @ Snappic (19:21.818)
For the agency owners that are listening that want to sort of incorporate Influencer, I always like to ask the money question, right? So let's say the brand gives you $10 ,000 to activate. Where are you making the money? Is it from that 10 ,000 and then it's the difference between what you pay out the Influencer and then what you take home? Or is it just purely the retainer? Where like, because...
because we put in the work, we got to make the money. And so where are you making the money or where are the gotchas at the beginning when you were doing this and now you're like, like, yeah.
Josh Durham (19:54.734)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (20:02.766)
The caches. Yeah. So how we like to think of ourselves is like you think about influencer management, like large influencers have a management team, right? Where they're taking a cut of the budget, but we're really influencer management for the D to C brand. So the brand is our client, not the influencer. And so how we treat it is just as a fixed retainer where we're there, where their management team, it's just upfront. We have a three months minimum contract on a retainer basis.
Edwin @ Snappic (20:10.362)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (20:19.898)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (20:25.85)
Okay.
Josh Durham (20:32.878)
And then it's typically month to month after that. And so we don't take a percentage of the rate, but our rate does go up when we move from, you know, just strictly product gifting to larger campaigns where we might be spending, like we are about to be working with a large brand that's at retail that they want to spend half a million dollars this year, just on influencer. And so, we don't take a percentage of that. We just have a set fixed rate. It doesn't even depend on the brand size. It's just.
What our rate is and so yeah, that's how we make money.
Tris Dyer (21:06.011)
Nice, nice. And so you talk there about half a million, half us, great way to pay for points. What, you know, you've got, you come back. you're joking me.
Edwin @ Snappic (21:07.802)
Sure.
Edwin @ Snappic (21:13.402)
Trust me, I'm not gonna trust you.
Josh Durham (21:15.054)
I think we might have lost dress.
Edwin @ Snappic (21:16.474)
I think we might have lost Tris. We should record like some awesome stuff though, like while he's frozen like this. he's back. We were about to record like some wild stuff while your screen was frozen. It was gonna make for a great...
Josh Durham (21:21.87)
Yeah, yeah, there you go. he's back.
Tris Dyer (21:25.435)
Is that my back? Shit. Can you hear me? Okay. Weird, weird, weird.
Josh Durham (21:28.91)
Your vacuum.
Tris Dyer (21:33.915)
Yeah, yeah, we will jump straight back in because actually, I'm really I'm really interested. You talk there about because I got everything there. We talked there about how like a brand wants to spend half a million on influencers. Like how does a brand, first of all, get to that number and kind of say, I'm going to spend half a million versus quarter of a million versus then, you know, from that, do they come to you with a KPI and say, we just want X many influencers or what what is the KPIs from a brand's point of view or what should they be?
versus what they currently are when they say, I want to spend half a million.
Josh Durham (22:07.886)
Yeah, for sure. Well, it definitely depends on the brand. And the brand I just mentioned is an extremely large company that's like well into the nine figures, if not a billion dollar brand. And so that is a very rare case where brands like we want to spend this much money on influencers. Like actually, another creative agency brought us in to that contract. And, you know, they had kind of set some some thoughts of like, hey, we want to sign two mega influencers.
Tris Dyer (22:37.691)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (22:37.839)
six mid tier creators and then signed some micro influencers. And we were like, you could be way more efficient with that ad spend. Right. And so we kind of chalked it up where we, how, how to be more efficient. So number one is like on the week. So one of the things that we really love to do is just like increasing the volume of partnerships and the volume of content that's getting posted.
Tris Dyer (22:46.715)
Yeah.
How? Tell us how.
Tris Dyer (22:54.363)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (23:06.094)
by creators to just give your chance, like a higher chance of, you know, basically getting a ton of organic reach and going viral on Instagram and TikTok. So we're playing the lottery of what content is gonna perform well on Instagram and TikTok. And so we wanna sign a bunch of creators between the 10 ,000 and a 100 ,000 kind of following range. And so basically that's kind of the base. So for them, you know, we basically said, hey, you know, you said you could sign maybe,
You know, 50 influencers we feel like for this budget, we could actually sign up to 200 creators over this timeframe. And we might be able to do it on product gifting, but we also could do it on a paper post engagement based off the product. And then for the mid tier, one of the things that was important to them is that they didn't want to just do one -off partnerships. And so one of the things that we did was we broke up half of the budget for three months engagements.
Tris Dyer (23:59.035)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (23:59.054)
where that creator is posting every month, like one to two deliverables a month for three months. And it brings down the total rate because it's a longer term engagement. And so a lot of creators want consistent income versus one -off payments. And so that really incentivizes them to bring their total cost per post down so that it's fair for the brand.
Tris Dyer (24:16.347)
Gotcha.
Josh Durham (24:26.19)
And then the other half of that budget for the mid tier creators, we basically said, Hey, we also want to make sure that we leave room for things like Q4, things for product launches at retail, things that are trending on social that we could also take that budget for and make, and make sure that we take advantage of so that we don't want to just, you know, if we're deploying a budget for the year, we don't want to just spend it all at one, one time. We want to be able to like use that for creative purposes throughout the year.
Tris Dyer (24:55.547)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (24:55.566)
And then the mega creators, you know, those are, we basically said we could sign up to six creators for that same budget and actually put them on six month commitments, for those creators. So anyways, it's all dependent on the brand. There's no, there's like some of these things that we've talked about, which is like CPM having, which is like cheap attention, having a ton of volume of creators, making sure that the content is a part of the total marketing strategy.
Tris Dyer (25:09.691)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (25:24.046)
not living on an island. Like these are some of the principles that we use as an agency, but it's all dependent on what the brand needs and we can deploy that for the brand and kind of configure that within our framework.
Edwin @ Snappic (25:37.754)
And what are some of the common gotchas that, you know, that you come across when you work with brands and this is their first sort of activation with you, right? They're not super experienced. What are things that, that are totally normal to you that when they see it, they sort of get creeped out or like their spidey senses go off.
Josh Durham (25:56.014)
Yeah. there's fighting senses go up. I think, I mean, I think that the most challenging part of influencer is just like kind of what we've already talked about, which is like measuring the return, right? Because I think that influencer in 2024 is not the same as influencer marketing was in 2015. And so like we've been working with a nine figure brand recently who used to spend 500 K a month.
Tris Dyer (26:10.107)
Hmm.
Edwin @ Snappic (26:10.202)
Thanks, guys.
Josh Durham (26:24.046)
on influencer marketing back in 2016. And they were getting a direct return just on discount codes and affiliate links where they'd spend a dollar on influencer and make five to $6 back. And so, yeah, yeah. Like it was, yeah, they weren't even running paid social. It was all primarily built on influencer. And so, but in 2024, you know, people aren't like scrolling and then going to the link in bio. Like if I'm on the for you page on
Tris Dyer (26:35.419)
Well...
Edwin @ Snappic (26:36.418)
Those were the days. They were the days.
Josh Durham (26:53.678)
Instagram or on Tik Tok, I'm scrolling content. My brain is dead and I'm not clicking the profile and remembering a discount code, but I will remember as an entertaining piece of content around a product. And I might search that on Instagram, go to the brand page, click that link in bio, or I might go to Google and I might convert on a brand search. And I, I promise you, I've never like, I never remember a discount code or use that creator's affiliate link.
Tris Dyer (27:03.355)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (27:13.723)
Hmm.
Edwin @ Snappic (27:22.458)
ever.
Josh Durham (27:22.51)
but brands for some reason expect that you're still going to do that to track revenue. And it just, it doesn't happen as much as it used to like in 2015. I'm not saying it doesn't, but I think that's the hard expectation that brands need to understand is that user behavior has changed. And so the discount code and affiliate link, that's not going to work. But what we can do is we can measure top of funnel and then we can also look at post purchase surveys. So we have brands where we have
Tris Dyer (27:49.723)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (27:51.694)
like the post purchase survey attributes seven figures in revenue annually just to influence your marketing, but you won't find that from a discount code or from an affiliate link. So I think that's just one other bottom of funnel measurement that you can use for revenue generation. But anyways, I think that's the challenge with this service and just as an agency.
Edwin @ Snappic (27:59.802)
Boom.
Tris Dyer (28:03.099)
Makes sense.
Tris Dyer (28:17.659)
Nice. Nice. It makes a ton of sense. I mean, look, one of the things that, you know, as a boy, I always dreamed of being an influencer, come up with this idea of, of, you know, posting about my day. And then, you know, I think real, I was going to say, you know, real life took over then, but you know, what is a, what is a micro influencer? How does one become a micro influencer? Like is it, I've got 700 followers on it on TikTok, I think. So am I a micro influencer or do I need a few more for that?
Josh Durham (28:24.174)
haha
Edwin @ Snappic (28:26.554)
I want to be an F1 driver.
Josh Durham (28:30.222)
No.
Josh Durham (28:44.878)
Whoa, you're blowing up. No, I would say you're like a micro micro influencer. No, I was kidding. No, I would say, no.
Tris Dyer (28:51.963)
Edwin @ Snappic (28:57.178)
We have a brand that sells micro cookies, Triss, that I could send you now that you're a micro influencer.
Tris Dyer (29:00.699)
thank you. I don't need any more cookies, bro.
Josh Durham (29:03.766)
All 700 followers. You got to make sure that your post reaches all 700 of them. You might have to boost it.
Tris Dyer (29:10.651)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. What? What kind of where are we talking about? Like when when someone gets to like 1000 5000? Where are they getting to become a micro influencer? Yeah. Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (29:13.466)
You
Josh Durham (29:15.598)
No, but
Josh Durham (29:22.99)
Typically 10 ,000 followers is typically where we start. Yeah. 10 ,000 followers on TikTok or on Instagram.
Tris Dyer (29:28.347)
And then there's the, you talked about reach and stuff as well in the middle of that. So it's not like just 10 ,000 away you go. It's like how many people are actually reaching you. Do you do when you're onboarding an influencer then into your or micro -influence into your kind of your, your platform, do you find then that people kind of have to give you a detail of, of like how many their last reach was, how like how it's going and all that kind of stuff. Or how do you engage with these people on an ongoing basis? Cause you obviously don't just turn up one day and be like,
X brand wants to do this, you have a relationship with them in the initial sense, right?
Josh Durham (29:59.886)
no, honestly, no. Like, no. So I think.
Edwin @ Snappic (30:02.042)
Josh is the boss. He's just the boss. He shows up. He's like, bro, we doing it?
Tris Dyer (30:02.267)
Okay, we're gonna miss.
Tris Dyer (30:10.683)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (30:10.934)
No, so I would say that we're, you know, we're starting the relationship off with offering free products for someone that has 10 ,000 followers, right? And so we want to make sure that their content is quality, but someone who has 10 ,000 followers, maybe they had a couple of posts pop off and maybe they're getting a little bit of reach, but really like the value of that creator is that we're getting the content in that can be repurposed across other channels, right? And so we're at least getting content. It's coming through.
Tris Dyer (30:19.151)
Hmm. Nice.
Josh Durham (30:40.27)
Maybe they can be a part of an edit for the paid social team. Maybe they can be reposted on the brands, Instagram or TikTok. But no, we're not like, because we're doing such a high volume of influencers, we're not like every influencer we're sending an outreach email to and they're getting an application link so they can apply into the program. And then from there, that's when we would start building a relationship is if that content is doing really well. So,
Tris Dyer (31:09.563)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (31:10.126)
We see where sent free product they've posted and that content all of a sudden gets half a million views or for some reason that content just looks really great from a paid social perspective. Then maybe we put them on a three month contract for whitelisting. We might like have a more in -depth relationship there, but really for that it's a high volume of partnerships. And so for us to be able to build a relationship with all 200 influencers that we're sourcing for each brand per week.
Just isn't going to happen. And so it's really after they've provided deliverables and have posted that content
Tris Dyer (31:37.691)
Hmm.
Tris Dyer (31:44.251)
Gotcha, gotcha. So you're not really, I mean, when you're going through the people who you're offering it to, it's based on the way that they've entered themselves into the platform rather than you going saying, these 200 people are going to be very similar to this brand. You're kind of finding that the type of influencers they flag themselves as.
Josh Durham (31:46.126)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (32:02.126)
Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's all based off their content. What's about following? Following is just kind of like the first thing and then just kind of observing their content from there and then reaching out based off. Yeah. If they're a good fit for the brand.
Tris Dyer (32:05.498)
Yeah. That's what yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (32:17.178)
What's the biggest surprise that you've ever come across? Like you you activated and you started the campaign and you're like, what the F is happening here? Like all your charts just started going like anti gravity.
Tris Dyer (32:17.179)
Makes tons of sense.
Josh Durham (32:28.814)
man. That's a good question. Trying to think. Well, so one thing, one thing that was really interesting was sponsoring the Joe Rogan podcast in 2020. So one of the things that we did was during 2020, Rogan was still on a, he was still on just like Apple podcast. He wasn't on Spotify yet. It was before his Spotify deal.
Edwin @ Snappic (32:33.722)
Story time.
Edwin @ Snappic (32:43.514)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (32:56.09)
Okay. Okay.
Josh Durham (32:58.062)
And so a lot of people listen to podcasts while they drive, right? And so in 2020 people are in lockdowns or whatever. And so they're not driving. And so his listenership went way down during 2020. So the CPMs were cheap. Like basically it was cheaper to advertise on his podcast. And so one of the things that we did was we sponsored his podcast and then leverage that content onto a paid social. And basically he had our product.
Edwin @ Snappic (33:01.498)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (33:20.667)
Hmm... Rice.
Edwin @ Snappic (33:21.21)
What?
Josh Durham (33:27.15)
He loved our product. He talked about the product on his podcast, but we didn't have an actual video of him talking about it. And so we basically overlaid that sound bite onto a video of Joe Rogan wearing our product and then put that into paid social. And it took off at a 6X ROAS the first day. I think we were spending close to $5 ,000 to $10 ,000 a day.
Tris Dyer (33:33.563)
Hmm.
Tris Dyer (33:51.163)
So fun.
Josh Durham (33:56.526)
at one point on that ad. So yeah.
Tris Dyer (33:57.083)
Decent. Love that.
Edwin @ Snappic (33:58.49)
So now you are on the company Christmas card. You are forever on the...
Josh Durham (34:03.086)
Yeah, no. And I, and I'll say that wasn't all me. Like I was just a part of the team that did that. I didn't put that, that whole thing together. but it was a really fun campaign. The other one too, that really opened my eyes to influencer marketing is I shared this case study on Twitter a couple of years ago was I had a client who did like, basically cocktail mixes and it was for a margarita. And this influencer made this post about it on her stories. And like, we saw a ton of revenue come in like.
Edwin @ Snappic (34:24.346)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (34:31.726)
that day, like 10 ,000, like they're usually at three K a day and they were, they sold like maybe 20 K that day, like when she put that story up. So then we took that, got the creative rights for that, plugged that in for, before Cinco de Mayo. And it, we went from like three K a day to like nine K to 10 K a day, like, like in just.
Edwin @ Snappic (34:39.578)
Wow. Wow.
Tris Dyer (34:58.107)
right there.
Josh Durham (34:59.022)
like a day and then ran out of inventory within like two weeks. Like literally having started from like a million dollar run rate to, you know, maybe doing 80 K a month to selling maybe, I don't even remember. It was probably like 300 K just that month on just because of that one post that we leverage from an influencer posting. So I would say those are some, some fun rocket ship moments for sure. from, from influencers posting.
Edwin @ Snappic (35:03.898)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (35:18.075)
Wow.
Edwin @ Snappic (35:18.394)
See you in a mile.
Tris Dyer (35:21.851)
So it's that, so this is one of the other big ones that's coming out of this. It's like, if you're gonna start doing influencer marketing like this, expect the unexpected in terms of that jump, not just from what you're doing, but also your infantry management. Because if you run out of stuff, it's a moment thing, it's gonna have it right now, right?
Josh Durham (35:36.046)
Mm -hmm.
Josh Durham (35:41.39)
Sorry Tris, you were cutting out for me there. Could you...
Tris Dyer (35:44.891)
Okay, we'll go again. Yeah. Sorry. So what I'm saying is that like, you know, obviously you've got to expect the unexpected from this and there's like a little bit of, you know, make sure your infantry is in stock because this is you got to be in in the moment, right? So if you're running out of running out of stock after things going viral, that's the worst case scenario. So what, you know, do you warn people before you start? Is that something that they should have in stock and be really like high up on stock?
Josh Durham (36:04.11)
Yeah.
Josh Durham (36:11.438)
That is really funny. No, I should though. I should be like, get ready. We're going to sell out of all your inventory. That'd be a great way to kick it off. It actually is pretty interesting. Like before we started recording, I was mentioning that I have an eight month old daughter in like one of the things that my wife has actually been following along with on Instagram is the formula that we use is a,
Tris Dyer (36:19.515)
Ha ha.
Josh Durham (36:39.278)
is a goat milk based formula. It's like basically the closest thing to breast milk. And this product is now sold out of every target and Walmart in America. Like they can't keep up with demand right now. And she, my wife bought it from an influencer because the influencers like, you know, my wife is super into holistic health and wellness. This is a health and wellness creator who talks about.
Edwin @ Snappic (36:41.786)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (37:04.475)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (37:07.118)
you know, the formula that she uses for her baby and that's why my wife bought it. And so, I don't know, it's just like really interesting to see those kinds of macro trends. Like even with you think about like the Stanley mugs and, just like that whole case study of, of all the creators really pushing that and it going viral and then, you know, not being able to find the color way that you want. so I don't know, there's something to that, but yeah, I should start warning them about their inventory, before we start working together, but I want to make sure that we have.
Tris Dyer (37:18.139)
Hmm.
Josh Durham (37:36.782)
proper expectations in place.
Tris Dyer (37:38.843)
For sure, for sure. Okay, Edwin, do you want to wrap?
Edwin @ Snappic (37:41.818)
Yeah. So, so I'm going to wrap. so I'm going to outro. I'll do a little spiel. I will warn you, I am like quick on the outro. So I will basically, I will just say like, this is Edwin and then Tris, that's your signal to be like, I'm Tris. And then as soon as Tris and then be like, I'm Josh. And then I say, I'll see you next time. But I'm, I'm sort of quick on the, on the drop off. So for, for warning that. All right.
Josh Durham (37:51.95)
Okay.
Tris Dyer (37:58.139)
Yeah, Andres.
Josh Durham (38:06.67)
Okay, I'll be following. All right.
Tris Dyer (38:06.843)
Cool.
Edwin @ Snappic (38:10.234)
Alright guys, we had an amazing episode. Josh told us everything we need to know about micro influencers, the gotchas, what you have to know. I'm Edwin.
Tris Dyer (38:20.347)
I'm Tris.
Josh Durham (38:21.742)
I'm Josh.
Edwin @ Snappic (38:22.97)
See you next time.
Tris Dyer (38:23.771)
See you next time, guys.