The Seeding Strategy That Scales: Influencer Marketing with Stack Influence | EP. #193

William Gasner 00:03
The hardest thing about influencers is dealing with these smaller creators, because finding a celebrity, you're gonna pay 10s of 1000s of dollars to do a collaboration like not too difficult, right?

Andrew Maff 01:06
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Ecomm show. As usual, I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today Iam joined by the amazing William Gasner, who is the CMO over at Stack Influence. William, how you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show?

William Gasner 01:18
Fantastic. And thanks for having me on. Andrew,

Andrew Maff 01:21
Yeah, no worries. I appreciate you joining us. So obviously, Stack Influence. So we're talking influencer marketing, talking UGC stuff, which is basically feels like 90% of E commerce marketing nowadays. So very interested to hear everything you have to say. But I always like to start these off relatively stereotypically, kind of give you the floor. Tell us a bit about your background, about stack influence. We'll take it from there,

William Gasner 01:41
Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of Stack Influence. I'm also one of the co founders. My background is actually in E commerce. So was an E commerce seller for about 20 years, and sold variety different products, from cutting boards and jewelry to teeth whitening products and toys, and during that journey, used a huge amount of influencer marketing to scale up those e commerce brands, as you previously mentioned as well. It's a hot topic within the E commerce world, but it was extremely effective for us, especially in the smaller creator realm. So nano, micro influencers, for those of you who don't know those terms, basically social media users who are willing to do product promotions with less than 100,000 followers. And on that journey, basically started to hit some roadblocks in terms of, how do we scale out this, and how do we automate management, or deal with kind of the day-to-day logistics of accomplishing scaled micro influencer collaborations. And so during that journey, we started to build out a bunch of internal tools to help with that process, and that snowballed in 2008 into its own business, and the rest is history, and that's how stack influence basically came to fruition.

Andrew Maff 03:02
Wow. So you've been at it for we're coming up on 20 years, so little over 15 years at this point, you said 2008?

William Gasner 03:09
2018 sorry,

Andrew Maff 03:11
18. Oh, okay, so almost still,

William Gasner 03:13
yeah, it's been a while. It's been a long journey.

Andrew Maff 03:18
So tell me a little bit about the platform and the process, because I know if you're doing this, obviously, we'll probably talk about it eventually, but obviously pretty highly recommended for almost every e commerce brand to use some type of influencer marketing, UGC, whether it's through social aspects or it's through their email or even on product pages or on marketplaces, you name it, but doing it, doing it like, from a manual process, is it's a pain in the ass, right? Like you're you're just, you're just scraping you're looking at hashtags, you're reaching out to people. You're trying to remember who you reached out to. You're following up with them. Like, it's a bit of a process. And then to do that at scale is obviously a nightmare. So what tell me about the platform and the process and kind of how brands use it,

William Gasner 04:08
Absolutely and all the points you just brought up, are the reasons we actually built Stack Influence to solve them. So taking a quick step back, the hardest thing about influencers is dealing with these smaller creators, because finding a celebrity, you're gonna pay 10s of 1000s of dollars to do a collaboration like not too difficult, right? If you're gonna pay a huge amount of money, but if you're dealing with smaller creators, especially what our platform actually specializes in is product seeding, so product compensation collaborations, basically sending someone a free product in exchange for them creating content posting on social media. In order to make that tactic effective, you need to work with a lot of people and all the things you just said, scraping reaching out, managing logistics, making sure people post on time, making sure people don't steal your product. Like it's an absolute nightmare. And so we set out to solve really three main objectives with stack influence. The first is, how do you effectively do product seeding? So getting people to do a collaboration just for a free product and not steal your product, actually do it properly. The second thing was, how do you find enough people at any given time to scale up, and not just and when I say scale like, hundreds or 1000s of collaborations a month. And then the third was, okay, you found all these people, you got convinced them to do something for a free product. How do you manage those logistics, like, how do you get them product? How do you make sure they post on time, etc? And so that's really what the Stack Influence platform solves. A brand can sign up for the system. They set a goal. Maybe they want 500 influencers. Maybe they want 5000 they set a timeframe they want to accomplish. They upload some product info and some posting guidelines of what they're trying to do. And then from there, the platform handles every single thing else. They sit back, relax. They have a tracking dashboard so they can monitor the flow of everything. And then how we charge is literally only pay for results. You only pay when someone completes a post, and to pay as you go system. So you can set a goal of 5 million influencers, and maybe we only accomplish 5000 but you will only ever pay for 5000 so yeah, it's basically in a nutshell. I can dive deeper into more logistics, if you'd like.

Andrew Maff 06:21
So is it like, you know, once a brand obviously submits this campaign, then, is your platform automatically doing the outreach, or is it more of like a you've already got a community of creators that you work with?

William Gasner 06:37
Great question. So the latter is we built this community with about 600,000 people. That was a really big key to doing this effectively, the majority of other influencer platforms out there, and what we used to utilize, when we were running our own e commerce brands are just a database of people. It's like people tout like, we have 30 million people in our database, but like, and then you pay this big monthly fee for those systems, but then you're cold, outreaching to everyone. Like, less than a percent of people even respond to you. A very much smaller percentage end up actually doing anything with you. So to scale it becomes using just a database is really difficult. And so what we set out to do, and it took us, really almost seven years to build up this large dedicated community is and we did a lot of cold outreach ourselves, right? And advertising campaigns, etc. But we wanted to build a system where influencers actually apply to join a community. They're vetted, right? So we make sure that they have brand friendly content that they post frequently enough that they have good engagement, etc, etc. We want all of those logistics. So take all of that extra bandwidth away from the brand, and once they're accepted, now they're engaging with kind of a shopping marketplace where they get to choose products that they're actually interested in, and we cater the products obviously to them. We want the match to be proper, not only on the brand side, but also on the influencer side, right? So really, we are a marketplace platform. We're not necessarily like a SaaS or just a random database, and that's how we can accomplish these really scalable campaigns like and do hundreds or 1000s. If we were just cold emailing people like, we'd never be able to accomplish our brand's goals, our clients goals,

Andrew Maff 08:22
yeah, what, um? You got any interesting examples, like, so that I'm not being too vague, like, one of our favorite ways to do this type of stuff is especially for, like, big product launches or big sales, and where, hey, we're going to get it into a ton of influencers hands, but then we're going to ask them to post all around the same general time, just to kind of get that, that big push going through absolutely any what's kind of, is there an approach you guys suggest anything that, like, kind of stands out of like, oh yeah, we worked with this one brand, and they crushed it doing this strategy. Like, what have you seen that works?

William Gasner 08:56
Another great question. So to your point, product launches are probably the best value prop for influencers across the board, regardless of how much your channel you're on, bottom line is like before. Once your product is brand new, no one really knows about it. You need to generate some initial awareness. Just getting your product in the hands of people who actually want it is valuable for product feedback. You're generating a huge amount of content. Another advantage to our system is like UGC or user generated content that's produced by the influencers, we get full rights to brands to repurpose so if you're building up your ad campaigns, your social media promotions, your marketing material around that new launch, obviously super valuable. But another really specific use case that we see a huge amount of success from brands implementing on our system is for E commerce, marketplace growth. So think Amazon, Walmart, Target, Sephora, the reason why those platforms really thrive, and I've literally seen 14x like ROI, from brands implementing influencer campaigns on a marketplace, and the bottom line behind it is a marketplace is a search engine at the end of the day, but different from like the Googles of the world, Amazon, for example, is ranking you or positioning you based off of how your sales are performing. Obviously, they take into account also, like how well it's optimized, what keywords you're putting content, etc. But the biggest thing is, Amazon wants the listings on the first page to be very high converting. They want good sales. They want good reviews, etc. Now the beautiful thing of influencers is their trusted promotion, so they convert at a really high level. And if you can drive that traffic to a marketplace like Amazon, especially for a new product launch, and then increase your visibility within the marketplace. Let's say you go from page 100 to page one, like, all of a sudden, you might have 1000s of new people seeing your product, and you're now taking advantage of that massive demand that Amazon holds, right like they control, like almost 50% of E commerce sales online in the at least in the US. So it's a really amazing tactic, because it's like, not only are you getting all the normal benefits from influencer marketing of just awareness, sales, content, et cetera, but like, we've seen that 14x ROI from simply, like, you went from page 100 to page one, and then all of a sudden you had 1000s of people seeing your product and buying your product and buying your product. And now if you convert at that new kind of you could say threshold, like, your sales don't stop. And you can stop the influencer campaign, hypothetically, but you're now kind of maintaining that position as long as you're converting at that so really good use case for influencers, for those who are playing in the online marketplace world.

Andrew Maff 11:38
Yeah, I find that, like a lot of brands feel that because they're working with influencers, and nine times out of 10, it's you're finding the relationship. You're starting the relationship. The posts are going on social media that it's just meant for social media, but like, we've seen it work really well, like, to your point to marketplaces, not only, like adding that content to your own website or even leveraging it in, like email marketing, like pretty much, it's an asset that you now have that you can leverage elsewhere. Because obviously the big benefit being brands when they make really nice, fancy ads, sure they look great, but you're coming off kind of bias, especially if you're a newer brand or it's a new product. People, of course, are knowing that you're going to say it's the best and blah blah. So using someone else's voice can really help kind of expand that a little bit better. Is there any element of this, like, because you mentioned it, it kind of caters to the micro side and mostly on the seeding side. Do you do anything from like, a larger influencer perspective, or is it pretty focused on mostly seeding.

William Gasner 12:40
It's pretty it's actually all focused on seeding. We that was the main solution we wanted to solve for what we are now doing is implementing a lot of different integrations to take relationships further. So by the way, there are some larger creators on our platform, people with hundreds of 1000s of followers, yeah. But what we found is, like the seeding approach, if you can find someone who's willing to do something for just a product, it means that they're not biased to your point of, kind of like a curated ad, right? Like they actually need to really want that product in order to spend a bunch of effort creating content, posting it, to do this. And so we find just the contents way more trustworthy and much more authentic, and so it converts better. But then obviously we want to pay people for their work, right? And so what we found is kind of feeding people through a funnel to reward them for certain actions they take, whether they become an affiliate for the brand and now start making ongoing commissions, they'll get kind of gamified cash bonuses for certain types of content that they produce, right so leveraging these different relationships we're building out right now integrations into ad platforms, for those of you who know what white listing is, is kind of like utilizing an influencer's own social media profile to run ads through giving influencers commissions on that ad spend so that they're rewarded for producing content that actually converts well on ads. So that's really also where we see the ecosystem going, is like in that social shopping realm, but really rewarding influencers for creating positive content, getting them in the door for something they actually desire. Because you pay someone hundreds or 1000s of dollars, they'll promote anything, right? But like that might not be a very trustworthy and authentic post. So yeah, that's kind of where we see it moving, and why we decided to really just simply focus on that solution for product seeding.

Andrew Maff 14:31
Okay, is there? How does the price element work? Right? Because I know some seeding you're just giving them, or pretty much all seeding, you're really just giving them product. But is there any element of this where the influencer is also paid on top of it, or is it just your own? It's just product placement.

William Gasner 14:50
There is absolute elements. So we have certain gamification features, again, to give them cash bonuses based off of actions they take. Right? They produce a high quality video content. They're. Getting maybe a few 100 bucks, right? So, and we'll gamify that, we can actually incorporate that into our pricing model, and don't push that also on the brands, but brands, and we wanted to make this is like nowadays, you could have 100 different influencers that all kind of have very similar esthetics, follower ranges, engagements, and every other person is going to tell you a different price, so we wanted to standardize it, right? It's like you join the stack influence community. Your main incentive is you're going to get free products fundamentally, and then if you perform really well, you'll get cash bonuses, right? And then potentially you can create a longer term relationship with these brands where you're getting actually big incentives and commission structures to continue promoting in the long run. So that's basically how it works, and we simply charge brands a flat fee per successful post. That's the Pay As You Go system. So our fees are pretty affordable. They range between 20 to 40 bucks per person who completes a post. But if you don't get a post you don't pay.

Andrew Maff 16:02
Okay, interesting. What? What do you see is like the biggest mistake that a lot of brands make with influencers,

William Gasner 16:10
I would say, giving up too early. Um, different influencers work in different ways, and it's a hit or miss system, right? Like, and that's a beautiful thing about this micro and nano world is like, you don't have to put all your eggs in one basket, like, if you're dealing with celebrities, you only can, or like people with hundreds of millions of followers, you can only work with so many of them, right? With a certain marketing budget. And if those promotions don't work, which a lot of times they may not like, you just wasted a whole bunch of money, right? Whereas, if you're scaling out hundreds or 1000s of these smaller creators, like you can afford to have a bunch of them actually be kind of duds, and as long as the majority actually work, which is what we see. And that's the big mistake I see, is like brands think, like, Okay, I'm going to test out influencer marketing. I want to start with five right? And then they get, like, one kind of okay result, and four maybe not so. And sometimes they get it's all great, right? But then other times it's not so that. And then they kind of just give up, and it's like, you got to, actually, you got to test out what type of briefs are going to work, what type of demographics are going to work for you. Timing is important, and so people cut it off too early. And it really, it's important to let it scale out, because social media has changed dramatically in the past few years, where it's like, it's less also about follower range, it's more about content you create and like, sometimes you can have someone, literally, with like, 500 followers, who gets posts that do millions of views. They're not going to do that every time, right? So why you kind of got to spread out those promotions and test it over a bit of a longer time frame.

Andrew Maff 17:48
Yeah, and so if so, let's say I sign up, I launch a campaign, I get a bunch of micro influencers that sign up to basically do the campaign. Do I get to decide if they're like, Hey, I have a Tiktok and an Instagram like, how does that work, where I can kind of pick a platform, or is it all of them? Like, how does that work?

William Gasner 18:09
Good question. So right now, actually, our platform is mainly focused on Instagram. We find it to be really effective for these types of seating campaigns. We are building out capabilities for Tiktok, Youtube, Snapchat. So those are coming online soon. And basically what it will be is that like you can select, because some people only want a YouTube video or YouTube creator to produce content, depending on what you use. And then absolutely like, maybe you want someone to not only post to Instagram, but Instagram YouTube and Tiktok. So right now, we give that kind of up to the brand. Their initial incentive is to create an Instagram feed post, and then once that post is done, you can kind of incentivize the influencer to repost that to other social platforms, create longer term relationships within the platform, to syndicate that content, maybe the same content or different content across other platforms. So it's kind of like a secondary step at the moment, but as a new product feature that we are planning and in the process of developing is like that, fully integrated all the social platforms so that you can pick and choose what you want.

Andrew Maff 19:17
Beautiful is it? Is there certain brands that you see, it tends to work better for versus others. So like to give you an example. I'm just thinking of everyone we work with, and I know I've got a couple brands on the beauty side that it's fantastic for influencers, like, that's their bread and butter, but it's like on the skincare side, so they kind of want, like, Hey, can you do like a video in the beginning of the month, maybe mid month, into the end of the month, like that type of stuff where it gets a little convoluted. Is it better as just kind of one off videos, and then maybe you just kind of like to your point of having these additional stuff with influencers, working it out with them that way?

William Gasner 19:56
Absolutely. Yeah. So depending on the product and. A really good example of like skincare is you want to implement different strategies, because, like you may not you want skincare as an example, or acne cream, right? Like you want to showcase different results over time, right? Whereas other products might be conveyed, they have beautiful packaging, and you want to actually just showcase the unboxing of it. And to your point, not every product actually works really well, at least for scalable micro nano collaborations like skincare, beauty products work fantastic. In that realm, athletes, foot cream, no one wants to go on social media, right? Like, it's like there are nuances to certain products that, like, yes, you may be able to find a handful of people who are willing. Who are willing to do it, but like, it's not going to be a long term, scalable solution for them. Yeah. And then the last thing to note is, like, the influencer community is predominantly female. It's skewed female. So like, female focused products do perform well or better than male focused products Overall, I'd say that again, no males are willing to do promotions. But if you're really looking to implement these strategies in like, the hundreds, 1000s, in quick timeframes, the kind of more female focused beauty, fashion, fitness products really work the best what we found.

Andrew Maff 21:19
Over the past, like, Man, I would probably say five or six years, at least this, this industry of, you know, curated UGC platforms or influencer platforms, like, they've really, it's gotten into a crowded space, which I know you probably know better than I do, what, uh, we won't say any of their names. What, um, what would you say is, like, kind of the bigger differentiator of stack influence versus the others,

William Gasner 21:44
Absolutely. So one of the largest differentiators is that we built this really dedicated, engaged community. There's only, like, a few other platforms that have done that, and it was the influencer. Kind of software space was really easy to get into, because, like, you could just scrape social media and then just have a huge database and put together, like an email outreach tool, and you're like, I have an influencer marketing tool, right? And like, kind of everyone and their mother did that, but again, it just what it's not effective for scaling out. Still takes an entire team to accomplish what our platform can do in like a day, right? And so that dedicated community, and then really just focusing on solving that product seeding system, and really thinking about it deeply, coming from our own experience with it. So as an example, and to my knowledge, we're the only platform that does this. Is that the normal way to go about seating is you get someone's interest in social media, you get their shipping address, you send them the product. The issue with that is that like 50% of the time, someone just like doesn't do what you ask them to do. They steal your product. They don't do it. We shifted a model to kind of like an E commerce shopping model, where for influencers who collaborate with our products, they actually have to become a real consumer before they can actually participate in the campaign. What I mean by that is like they have to shell out their own money to go buy a product, and then once they complete a post, is when we reward them with cash back for their collaboration, and then those extra bonuses that we spoke about, and that's how we can actually guarantee like that pay as you go, system where a brand only pays for things they get and decreases inventory loss. So that's another big differentiator. Is like, one is scale. Two is automation. Three is like a pay as you go, simple system. And to my knowledge, no one has yet solved that, and that's why we've really focused in this niche, and now are really expanding across a lot more integrations and different types of collaborations, etc. But took us seven years to really, like, flesh that out and make it really good product. You know, I mean very much product focused company.

Andrew Maff 23:57
That is awesome, William, I really appreciate your time. I don't want to take up too much more. I know you're super busy. I know you're super busy over there. I'd love to give you the floor let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Stack Influence.

William Gasner 24:09
Absolutely, appreciate for having me on as well. Um, best way to find us is go to stackinfluence.com top right, you can click sign up. It'll prompt you to speak with one of our influencer experts. They're very accustomed to every single e commerce marketplace, so they'll guide you through best recommendations. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn, William Gasner, and you can find us also on basically every single social platform @stackinfluence.

Andrew Maff 24:35
Beautiful, William, thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the Ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 24:55
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