0:00 Hello, everybody. Welcome to day two. I think some of you just watched a lot of the awards presentation, and some of you are coming in for the first session of the day to talk about influencer marketing. 0:12 This should be a fun one. This is this is a passion point for me. It's industry I've worked in for, I didn't even realize, fifteen years now. So we've got a big presentation here that we're gonna go through in a very short amount of time. 0:27 So for those of you that don't know me, hello. My name is Jack Appleby. I've worked in this space for a long, long time now. I started in social media strategy, which then moved on to influencer and content creator strategy. 0:39 Worked with brands like Microsoft, Beats by Dre, Verizon to build their overall presences through a lot of my agency jobs. 0:47 And my very first gig was for DC Comics and Warner Brothers, where I worked with them on a superhero campaign and didn't realize at the time that securing someone like Stan Lee from Marvel to comments in a video about DC superheroes was gonna be the way that I could grow an influencer marketing campaign. 1:05 But here we are now. It's a big part of what I do for a living. I also now write a newsletter called Future Social that goes out to seventy thousand marketers totally free. Would love if you subscribe to that. 1:14 But you may have seen that this is only a fifteen minute keynote, influencer marketing is a very heavy topic that I could go on for days about. So what we built today is the lightning round. 1:25 I'm gonna go through about eight different concepts that I'm seeing. Some of which are huge strategic plays that are happening in influencer marketing, some of which are very, very tactical that you can initiate right now just a little tweak of your brief. 1:36 These are all meant as provocations and things to get you started thinking about different ways to do your creative partnerships with your brands. But I know part of the title of this was why do brands need creators? 1:48 So we can just get this out of the way right now. It's because people hate brands. And I'm mostly kidding. Don't be wrong. I'm being a little facetious here. 1:56 But there are so many fantastic stats out there now that really explain why influencer marketing continues to work no matter what industry you're in. 2:06 I'm now a full time content creator in the b to b space, where I write about social strategy, platforms, b to b SaaS stuff. And, like, that is my full time job now because influencer marketing is everywhere. 2:18 And for a consumer, it is the new word-of-mouth. Like, we develop real parasocial relationships with the influencer we like, and we take their recommendations as each one of these statistics here speaks to. 2:30 So let's get to the meat of this whole thing. And I'll say quickly before we jump in, if you have any questions, please feel free to use the question feature. I'm gonna do my best to answer a handful at the end, or you can also come to my LinkedIn after this and we'll talk about it more. 2:43 So if you're an influencer marketing talk, you probably know your base level that you should probably hire creators to make your creator content. But something that's starting to happen now is hiring creators to make your brand's content. 2:55 And the screenshots I have here are from one of my favorite influencer campaigns of the last year. This is for Adobe's account through an agency called Cavel. 3:03 They hired a content creator to build this sign campaign, where you see on the left hand side, it's one of those typical pull tab signs you might see at a coffee shop or on a street post. 3:14 They took those signs and then redesigned them within Photoshop to make something beautiful and gorgeous that would actually catch your attention. And this video went very viral for a brand, millions and millions of views. 3:26 But what's interesting here, that content creator made that and they posted it on the Adobe account. Then they posted it on that creator's account. 3:35 And then they posted it again six months later on the Adobe account once more. All three times went viral. And it's because they hired a content creator who knows the space and understands the product to make content that's true and native to TikTok. 3:50 So instead of training a social media manager to learn video content, or an old school advertising creative to learn about short form, let's just hire content creators to make content for your brand. 4:01 And then you can also use their audiences there to push it out. It's a double whammy. And then the next best thing here, if you wanna go even a little further, internal influencers are starting to become a thing. 4:13 You might remember HQ Trivia had Scott Rogowski as their host who became a legit Internet celebrity because of that. Or if we look at this mustachio molded man here, this is John Deere's chief TikTok officer. 4:27 Yes. That is his actual title. And what John Deere did that's so fascinating for them is they hired a guy who is now the face of their TikTok and the official content creator for them. 4:38 He makes everything. There's no assets that he's not part of that are on their accounts. So functionally, they give this man a salary to be a spokesperson and a content creator. 4:50 We see all these new platforms emerging. We know short form vertical video is so important to your brand success. Why not bring someone in actually on the budget to continually do this for your brands? 5:01 And let's keep getting bigger and bigger here. So this is actually a friend of mine. Her name is Dara Denney. She's a YouTuber who makes content about creative performance marketing. 5:10 There's a company called Motion that she had done several brand deals with, and it proved really successful for both her and to drive actual new users to Motion's analytics platform. 5:21 So what deal did they strike together? A long term year long partnership where they bought a significant amount of her inventory upfront. 5:30 And they actually gave her a job title as chief evangelist. These are assets from Motion's website. They booked out Dara to do multiple speaking events. 5:39 They bought a bunch of her YouTube contents. And now she is one of the faces of this brand. You might know a feastable or like a mister beast type of brand where the creators are making that product. 5:50 There's no reason you can't do something like this where you bring in a creator to be someone that represents your product in all of your different touch points. So those are all big. 5:58 How do we incorporate influencers inside of our brands? But let's talk a little bit about the different ways we can be using influencers in the more traditional brand partnerships, starting with real time influencer marketing. 6:09 So I'm sure you heard of real time content. That's your social media manager is constantly reacting to trends, or what's happening, or who won whatever Oscar. That is now starting to apply to influencer marketing. 6:20 Because we're seeing so many content creators go viral out of nowhere. You remember the guy who does the, cucumber videos? You've seen him on TikTok. 6:29 Millions and millions and millions of views. He came out of nowhere, and a bunch of brands quickly tried to partner with him to get content while he was still big and hot. 6:38 The example I have up here, so this is a couple who's no longer together, Tyler and Gabby. Tyler on the right is six foot nine, Gabby on the left is six two. 6:47 They make content about being tall. They ended up dating and their meet cute did thirty three million views on Tik Tok. And they both grew millions of followers as a result of that. 6:56 So the UPS store hit them up and said, hey, we know you have a long distance relationship. We actually wanna do a partnership with you, where you will ship each other gifts using our service. 7:08 And on Tyler's channel on the right, he packaged up these things and said, hey, go to see Gabby's channel to see what I've shipped her from the UPS store. And then she did a delivery unboxing. 7:17 So really cool interactive content that's only made possible if you're ready to initiate an influencer budget on a dime, which means you gotta have that slush fund available, not just for your campaign budgets. 7:28 Something I really loved about that last campaign that also applies to this one is collaboration between content creators. So you might know that YouTubers love to get each other's content. 7:39 It's the best way to grow. What Hyundai did here is they took two content creators. One of whom is on the left, Chef Reactions. He mostly makes fun of bad cooking content. 7:49 And then Omari on the right is one of the biggest TikTokers, period. That car is made out of chocolate, believe it or not. What Hyundai did was Chef Reactions often looks up to Amari's content. 8:01 So they brought them both into a campaign. They had Chef Reactions react to this car video. And the screenshot you're seeing here is a TikTok duet. 8:11 They sponsored the duet, which had never been done before. And anyone could do that. That's not a special feature. Then to top the whole thing off, they actually flew Chef Reactions out to meet his idol, Amari, where they did collaborative content there. 8:24 And you get the whole, again, meet cute moment. So I encourage you as a brand, bring in multiple creators and work them together, not just individual briefs. 8:33 It's the one plus one equals three situation. I know we're going fast. Again, feel free to leave comments here, and then give me a shout on LinkedIn if you have other questions about this. 8:42 But quickly, how do we pay if how we pay influencers is about to change drastically. They don't need brand deals exclusively anymore because they're building their products. 8:52 And Lionel Messi may have just set a brand new standard for this. If you're not familiar, what it's up to get Messi to America was a rev share and ownership stake in a major league soccer team, and a rev share deal with Apple for Apple TV who was a partner in the streaming service for MLS, and a rev share deal with Adidas who makes all of the kits for the Miami team that he plays for. 9:16 So instead of doing one off brand deals where you're appearing once their audience, if you wanna get an influencer fully bought into your company, look at what rev share looks like. 9:25 Look what equity looks like. Secure them for longer periods of time where they're incentivized to continue to make content well outside of their contracts. 9:33 You'd be amazed how many of their followers they can bring on over to your brand. A great way that you can learn more about creators internally though, is to hire creators as consultants. 9:43 What I mean by this is, not only can they consult on your creator campaigns to make sure you're doing even better work, but having them consult on products pre release is a great way to make sure that you're gonna actually win with your intended audience. 9:55 I got my start in video game marketing, and what we used to do a lot was we bring in creators to test the games, maybe even a year before they released, to get their feedback on it. 10:05 So So they would actually have influence on the product we're building. And then when the game released, their influencer content could say, oh, I helped them test this level, or I give them this piece of feedback, or this type of weapon is in the game like I suggested. 10:18 So bringing people in as consultants can really increase the value of their influencer content and give you insights that you just can't get as a marketer. And finally, and then we'll have three minutes to questions. 10:28 I know we're going fast. I don't think I've exhaled once during this whole conversation. We need to start having always on influencer budgets. 10:37 What I mean by that is traditionally, influencer budgets are activated on the campaign basis. Your product you have a new product for your brand. Your product has a new feature. 10:46 We then activate twenty k, fifty k, a hundred k of budget to push that one message. That's great. You should continue doing that, but you should also have always on budget. 10:56 So year round, creators are talking about your brand. If you're only doing when you have something new, you're actually missing how valuable your product is as a whole, and you're not getting the consistent touch points that you need. 11:07 Because one off influencer stuff is a tough way to convert. So I'd encourage you to section off part of your budget to not be tied to campaigns. 11:15 Because maybe it goes towards those real time moments I mentioned earlier. Maybe it goes towards your top level messaging that you use just on your website as a hero asset. 11:24 Make sure you're actually doing marketing with influencers away from your campaigns. So that is the lightning round of influencer marketing. I got about a minute left to answer questions. 11:34 For all these concepts, I've written full essays on them. So if you find me on LinkedIn under my goofy Jack Appleby name, that is my real name, you will find full essays on a lot of these concepts. 11:45 But with the last two minutes that I have here, I wanna talk through some of the questions that we got. And please feel free to keep dropping questions in. 11:54 So Paige asked, what is the best way to find influencers to work with that aren't over budgets? There's a lot of great ways to do this. 12:02 The first and foremost, keep on scrolling and looking through the hashtags, and then the keywords that is related to your industry. And get very specific. TikTok search is incredible now. 12:13 So is Instagram. So go in there with the specific keywords that you wanna touch on and see who's there. I'd also encourage you to start trying an influencer marketing platform, where there are marketplaces that have many, many influencers available to you where you set in a brief, and you can actually then bring to life the campaigns through recommended influencers. 12:31 I think if there's any more questions, if there aren't, I hope you learned something from this. I know we went very very fast. Again, please visit me on my LinkedIn, and you can get the full essay versions as well as the video examples. 12:43 It's tough to show you a video in the middle of one of these sessions. But you'll see all that content. You'll get full essays on that, and then you'll also see a link to my newsletter. 12:51 So you can get one of these essays a week in your inbox. It's totally free. And yeah. That that's the lightning round of influencer marketing. 13:01 So I hope you learned something. I hope you enjoyed it, and can't wait to talk to you guys in the future online.
