"Influencers" Outreaching to Brands are Doing it Wrong
I currently find myself as a sort of gatekeeper for a popular consumer brand; receiving about one to two inquiries from so-called influencers looking to work with us. Most of the time, these messages go something like this: “Hello, I love your products and would love to do something with you. Thank you.” Almost always those type of messages go in the trash. I’m a busy guy so I don’t have the time to track down a reason for why we would want to work with you in return.
On the occasion I click through to check out the social profiles, here is out it goes.
The number of followers the influencer has is just in the four-figures and there is no sign the person uses our product. Deleted.
Four-figure followers, but he or she actually uses the product. However the quality of their posts are too low to bother with. Delete
Four-figure followers, uses the product and the quality go the posts are really great. Honestly this is pretty much a white whale; people consistently posting great content are going to have strong following. However, finding someone in the category can be an opportunity of “getting in on the ground floor” in terms of economically creating interesting content together. Follow-up and see what they might be like to work with.
Six to seven figures of followers, but no sign they use the product. Ugh, they’re just looking for a pay cheque and probably have an agent. I say ‘ugh’ because these types of influencers can just be a pain to work with, however thats not to say they’re not worth it. Working with this level of influencers can be great for a outreach campaign to target customers. Reach out and get an idea of their rates and their process for negotiating; then adding them to a list for future campaign plans.
The messages from influencers pretty much guaranteed to get a response layout he or she is a fan of the brand and uses the products, what kind of engagement they have and specifically what they are interested in working on with the brand. Even better yet, these messages should show example(s) of their work and what we can expect.
I’m working with an influencer right now that did just those things. She demonstrated being an brand fan, showed an example of a video she had already done and requested an interest of making a video for another product in our lineup. The video example was fantastic and although her follower numbers were low, it was obvious her video editing skills were promising. We immediately send of the product she was interested in and waited to see the results. Again, the resulting video was a strong showing; easily worth our investment of time and product.
I can tell you know, she is at the top of our list for future plans and I’m looking forward to seeing the relationship grow and develop. The experience also sets the bar for the messages I receive daily from ‘influencers’ reaching out. Those one-line messages are filling up my trash can.
Ecommerce Lessons Learned Building Thresherman.ca
Build an audience before launch.
This one was really hard for me; how do you get people's attention before you have anything to show off?! But I see new brands doing it all the time, and it makes the world of difference. I think this is one of the situations I needed to have recognized my limitations and found someone with the right skills for the task.
As you're developing your concept; researching the competition and suppliers is front and centre. As you're finding these targets, research how they launched. Or if it's a new brand, study how they're building their audience and learn from it.
Beware of getting caught up in the details, have a story and tell it.
At this stage of the business, everything is a detail and requires attention. But dont get caught up in figuring out how best to manage the accounting for example and lose site of building your brand story. After the first six months I realized I had spent too much time figure out the mechanics of the business and wasn't writing the story. In my mind I have a great brand story to tell, but I had completely lost sight of it in the marketing. Which means my audience has no idea what the brand is about and less of a reason to connect with Thresherman and share the site with their networks.
Keep your costs low to maintain efficiency. Plan to scale up is easier than over building.
Its so easy to jump in the deep-end and go gangbusters buying equipment and supplies to set up the office. I know it can make it feel like you're accomplishing so much, and gosh darn't a real business has a laser printer!
I made the mistake early on committing to a long-term contract that seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. Ultimately however it was way too soon and costly waiting out the terms to cancel.
Don't focus on competitors. Do your own thing.
Ok, its very important to know what your competitors are doing and steal the good ideas. Just don't lose sight of what your own brand. Start out with your own strategy and tactics, and then compare and contrast against your competitor's approach and adjust as needed. I think it can be far too distracting to start by looking at the competition and taking ideas from them to start your plan, you run the convenient risk of just flat out looking like the competition. Being a copy cat means you're already in second place.
I've certainly borrowed ideas from the competitors, and at times I've worried if I copied ideas instead of adapted them to the brand. We're all busy people and taking a short cut might be easy, but in the end the gains won't be as good as they could be.
Podcasts with great ideas and conversations.
Meetups with other entreprenuers is a great way to exchange ideas and think about your business from another person's perspective. Finding a good group may not always be easy or convenient, especially while working a full-time job, so as a good substitute I've found several ecommerce podcasts to do much the same.
Although you're not sharing your businesses specifics with other people for comment and evaluation, you can hear others sharing their startup stories. I've learned to keep my notebook nearby while I'm listening as I'm always jotting down new ideas to investigate later.
Here's my list of recommended podcasts to try out:
Some Great Reads of the Week
Business folks like to say, "everything is marketing" or "everything is customer service". Well here's an article from Marketing Magazine with "The case to move customer service online." In smaller companies in particular, it may be necessary for the marketing team to assist the customer service team getting online and building those digital support channels. It has often been part of my marketing plan to boost customer service online; happy customers are repeat customers! Now its nice to have some stats to back it up.
If you are not following the Buffer Blog, go do it right now. Seriously, I'll wait.
Speaking of Buffer, their latest post "How We Doubled Email Signups in 30 Days" is a nice read and break down of their process. It also happens to be timely for a project I'm working on.
Who else can't wait to try out Promoted Pins on Pinterest? TechCrunch has the lead "Pinterest Expands Self-Serve Promoted Pins Platform to More Businesses". I'm still waiting for the invite, but at least its coming soon.
Best of the Week
It was a short and stressful week, so I didn't get a chance to read as much as I'd like but here are the gems I did manage to review. How do you find time to read?
* If you haven't heard, Google Analytics has rolled out Enhanced Ecommerce Analytics. Dive deeper into your site's performance | http://goo.gl/BjPuAC
* On a side note, I'm getting really tired of reading articles portraying themselves as offering deep insights into marketing on Facebook or Twitter, when all they do is cover the basics.
* Fliptop has posted an ebook about predictive lead scoring. Download it and learn how to send just the best leads to your sales team. | http://bit.ly/PLS_guide
* I miss having a standing desk, so this list of excercises to make up for all the sitting is worth printing out and posting at your desk | Art of Manliness http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/05/undo-the-damage-of-sitting/
* Long read - FRESHLY PRESSED: Harry Holly Helped Make the the Fast Food Hamburger Possible | https://thedistance.com/hollymatic
Best of the Week
Like any good marketer, I read a lot. I like to stay on top of the latest news, product launches, reviews, how-to's, case studies and more to help me perform better at my job. As you can imagine I see a lot of content junk and hopefully a few gems every week. I figured I'd start to share some of those gems here.
The jury might still be out on Google+, but if its part of your marketing mix, here are 11 Ways to Get More Followers for Your Google+ Business Page via SocialMediaExaminer.
I unfortunately get dragged into the conversation about website content being above the fold, here's 3 Reasons Why Online Content Can Leave 'Above the Fold' Behind by the Content Marketing Institute.
Oh I really liked this read; having this set up would make the job of marketing so much easier in larger organizations. The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers from the First Round Review.
As a B2B marketer by day, LinkedIn's purchase of Bizo has me all sorts of intrigued for what is to come. MarketingProfs lists out Three Ways it Affects You.
LinkedIn Introduces Language Preference Targeting For Company Pages
LinkedIn Introduces Language Preference Targeting For Company Pages
LinkedIn launched two new capabilities to its service this week designed to help global brands with audiences in multiple locations around the word enhance their social media efforts with more local content and conversation on LinkedIn. The two new capabilities LinkedIn is launching are language preference targeting and the personalized page feed.
According to LinkedIn’s announcement, 67% of…
10 mobile marketing statistics to help justify your budget
Good stats! Mostly, as the title says, for proving the value of a mobile advertisign investments but interesting nonetheless.
This Generic Brand Video Is The Greatest Thing About The Absolute Worst In Advertising
Stock footage brand Dissolve puts its product to good use to call out lazy marketers peddling empty ideas.
It’s just perfect. Everything is in there. The scientists with beakers, synonyms for progress, powerful rushing water, a baby, a blue-collar guy with dirt on his face, time-lapse footage of a city at night. Since the dawn of time, these have been the images used by marketers who just didn’t quite manage to have an actual idea. The images, when combined with a solemn voiceover, form the basis of one of the most enduring, and enduringly bad, ad templates—the old “shoot-the-brief montage.” Recently, it seems as though more and more advertisers are reaching for this chestnut, so this parody comes at a particularly good time.
More> Co.Create
Oh boy…