How Brands Are Building Creator Armies Right Now (Live from Social Commerce Summit NYC)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nick.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34Nik:Here's the problem with most TV platforms. You only get access to about 20 % of the inventory, which is the programmatic slice. And you can't measure it the same way that you measure meta. Tatari fixed both. Direct publisher buys across linear and streaming, and next day attribution against CAC and ROAS, which is why 400 plus DTC brands like Manscaped, Tecovas, and Chime all run Tatari as a TV performance channel. You should see how they do it. Check out nik.co slash T-A-T-A-R-I. That's nik.co slash Tatari. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. You know, I spent the last week in New York at Social Commerce Summit and Hudson, who found a comfort, his mastermind, he brought together like six, 700 people at the convene center in lower Manhattan.

1:25Nik:And it was sweet. The last time I'd been there was for one of the meta performance summits or the meta disruptor summits, one of those. So it was nice to go back there. It's a beautiful venue. And, you know, the entire room was basically just talking about one thing. And that is, how do you build leverage with an army of creators? You know, whether it was Bloom, whether it was Greg from, I think it was Raw Nutrition, whether it was Physician's Choice, you know, they all look at their creator network as they're not just creators, you know, creating ad content. They're retail sales force, right?

2:07Nik:They're going in and taking content inside retail stores. They're going in and doing demos inside retail stores as well. You know, they have different shifts when it comes to live on TikTok or Instagram or wherever else they're going live, maybe whatnot. And overall, like this army of creators is basically, you know, it becomes their army, their digital army. And it's a very powerful thing because you're not buying, you're not continuing to just buy ad space, right? Once these are your creators and when you get to the scale that some of these brands are at, you are now signing exclusivity agreements with creators.

2:42Nik:So this is basically your army. Anyways, the whole week just had me fascinated because when I first started working in DTC, which was 2017, you know, social commerce was really like cracking the code on Facebook ads. And now social commerce is cracking the code on creators and live and how you fit into culture. and there was a really interesting parallel that I felt was right which is that creators represent microcultures in our world of you know shopping and commerce and the more microcultures you can represent the more chance you have to for somebody to find your brand your product you know what you're offering more relatable and so anyways this talk I gave with a buddy of mine Dylan Ander.

3:32Nik:He's been on the podcast before kind of as a GEO expert, but he was moderating this talk. And, um, and I just kind of talked about some past experiences working with creators, whether they're on the paid side or on the actual creator side, you know, more like affiliate side. So anyways, enjoy the episode and, uh, let me know what you think. DM me on Twitter. If you've got any questions, you want to chat anything further on creators and I'll see you next week. This guest here clearly needs no introduction. How are you doing today, Nick? Doing well. Excited to be here. How are you guys doing? still asleep huh amazing we're gonna need some crowd interaction here so i do love that that's amazing awesome so nick let's just kind of jump right into it um so what i wanted to ask you first is you're looking at you know 20 25 brand accounts a week right now what's working in social commerce like we're not here for theories guys we're here for like this is what's actually going on so you guys can literally go on laptops right after this and truly make it actionable so what's working right now for all the accounts that you're seeing?

4:31Nik:Yeah, well, you know, what used to mean winning in social commerce was basically winning on Facebook ads, right? And every good marketer knows that means segmenting or performance marketing where you're segmenting, you know, consumer personas and angles and hooks. And you're testing all of that. And, you know, when you when you're browsing for a pillow, and you finally see an ad that says that this pillow is going to take away shoulder pain for side sleepers, that's the one that gets you to click in today's environment, right now in my opinion personas map right to culture and creators create or operate within micro cultures and every angle that you test as a performance marketer is basically you know equated to creators within micro cultures so i think that as a brand if you're trying to play in the world of culture you can't do that unless you're being like an awkward advertiser in that space.

5:24Nik:You know, if you've ever gone to Snapchat or Reddit as a consumer and use the apps and you see any ads in there, it feels really awkward, right? So that's kind of what that's brands trying to play in this space of culture where everybody's hanging out and chilling. So I think that the winning brands have really just industrialized creator content, right? They took all these flowery Instagram pictures and things that were, you know, ambiguously paid for. So, you know, an influencer charges 5 ,000 for this and 1 ,000 for that. And they created a real infrastructure around it where creators are now being paid on commission payouts or based on sales, they're driving or engagement.

6:04Nik:And the best brands are immersing themselves in these microcultures by way of creators. It's the only vehicle to get in there. And the last thing I'll say here is that the best brands, whether it's a cannabis company, a beverage company, a restaurant, a hotel chain, the best brands are content machines. They're content companies. And they happen to do something else really, really well. I love it. I think that today, like every company in the world is a media company. But something interesting you said was industrializing creators. Yeah. Tell me more. So, you know, before you have you used to have creators, you have influencers, you've got, you know, people who will film stuff at a low cost.

6:46Nik:there's just, there was just kind of a, there was no, there's no set way to approach it, right? In the last two, three years, there's now a set way to approach how you build a creator army, how you compensate this creator army, how you, you know, how do you compensate them for sales or for subscriptions or all these different things. So what I mean by that is like, things have now been snapped into place, there's now an infrastructure to go in, you know, you can use a platform like tribe now, and actually make this whole thing happen. It's not just okay, we're going to try to build this here and then see how we recruit creators and see what they'll you know what they'll take for payment and all of that amazing i love it um so let's kill some sacred cows here right there's a lot of misnomers here in marketing um two years ago right a lot of things in influencer marketing and social commerce worked what is not working anymore that people are just wasting dollars on and where you want them to divert their time and attention to yeah i mean I would say, you know, sending an influencer product and hoping them to post on stories, not working.

7:48Nik:Paying 25 grand for, you know, an Instagram post where somebody's hosting, holding your beverage or beauty product, also not working. You know, nine years ago, I ran probably one of the first whitelisted ads on Facebook when I worked at a company called Hint Water, which is a flavored water brand. And I saw the most successful CPA I'd ever seen when doing this. And, you know, this was in 2017. So no one was doing whitelisted ads or let alone, you know, figuring out how you take influencers and run them on paid. And, you know, after I worked with this girl, her name was Sarah Dietschy. She's a YouTuber that was based here.

8:29Nik:After I worked with her, I thought, oh, this is amazing. Creators are, you know, they're the next wave. I'm going to work with every possible creator I can. And what I really learned was that there was actually a very specific type of creator that worked really well to drive sales as your ad creative. And those were YouTubers and podcasters. And specifically out of YouTubers, they were vloggers. And the reason is because they're so good at being able to just talk to a camera. And you as the viewer on the other side, you feel like you're being talked to one-on-one. It doesn't feel like they're talking one to many.

9:03Nik:And that kind of parallel of creators who are really good at talking to a camera is exactly what's working today when you think about creator marketing. They're basically everyday people who are just really comfortable speaking to a camera as if they're talking to a friend. And today that happens first organically and then it moves into the world of paid. But back then it was only paid. So organic was not really as big of a thing. The audience today doesn't really matter because what you're looking for is a good talking face. that you can use as content. And if the content is good and valuable in the sense that it helps somebody out in some way, then the algorithm will serve it out to who it's supposed to go to.

9:45Nik:I also think that in terms of what is working now, brands who basically find creators organically, set up shop with them and then move them into the paid world, that works the best. We see that with, we've all heard of the Hudson method with how comfort has scaled their creator marketing. and then you try to understand okay why is this creator working so well you know why is this dietician or why is this chiropractor working so well to talk about you know a supplement that might alleviate knee pain and it's because they're bringing credibility and they're actually creating a micro persona on the screen that is then relatable to somebody as a consumer and you know I call this persona mapping and persona maxing which is basically what you want to do is you know know if you ask any of the brands that are doing crazy amount of creative marketing what they'll tell you is that what they're trying to create is a mirror between their consumers and you know their brand and your brand when you when you think about it in a store or on a website really speaks in one way but when you have 4 000 different creators that look like 4 000 completely different humans and they're talking about 4 000 different angles as to why this product is great you're basically creating a mirror so that somebody in the you know as a consumer is going to see this and feel like this product is now for them.

11:03So yeah. Amazing. One thing you touched on that I don't think a lot of people in the audience may know about, the Hudson method. We have the pleasure of knowing Hudson. Why don't you guys, why don't you give a little rundown for the crew here on what the Hudson method truly is? Because I think it's just the number one method of social commerce, I would say myself. And it's the greatest case study we have right now and the true, you know, performance D2C marketing right now.

11:27Nik:Yeah, the Hudson method is essentially it was uh created by um hudson who founded comfort and it's essentially this concept of you know you're not now paying influencers to post your product and tag you you are basically exclusively working with creators where they are only working with your brand they're not working with any other brand and they get paid off of a commission so um you know his his business is so big some people are making a million dollars a month just selling hoodies and sweatpants. But for many others, this essentially means, you know, how do you create a center where you're hosting creators?

12:04Nik:A lot of times this is happening on Discord. And then how do you recruit creators in? And once they're recruited in, then how do you maintain them either with incentives, with ongoing, you know, communication, engagement and things like that. But essentially what it does is, you know, you think about the middle of the funnel where consumers are now problem aware, maybe not solution aware, but now they know they need to fix this problem. Maybe they've heard about your brand. You know, the Hudson method completely floods the middle of the funnel. Anytime somebody goes to look up the product, there's videos, they're talking about tons of different angles.

12:35Nik:So the Hudson method is not only an amazing vehicle to, you know, make creator marketing possible, but it is a phenomenal way of championing social proof as a brand as well. I love it. One other thing just to toss in that I love about it is the exclusivity. It's not like you're just, you know, getting that one creator. You're actually taking market share of the attention, right? So it's like if they're working with 25 brands, like Nick was saying before, it's not very useful for you to be one of 25. Maybe they have an affiliate link. They don't care about you so much. But if you're like keeping them on retainer and they're in the comments helping you, like their team, your brand.

13:14So it just goes so much further. sure so uh nick you've worked with like feastables chamberlain what i may like uh i don't know lemmy right uh i've also had the pleasure of investing alongside you uh you always talk about the moat right like i'm sure you guys know what like a tech moat is you know a distribution moat where like your company needs like an unfair advantage against something else and i've heard you say over and over again for brands to know like uh you know with celebrity brands or already having distribution. How do you view that?

13:48Nik:So, I mean, I still think if you're, if you're trying to launch a celebrity brand, the celebrity is not your Hail Mary, you know, it's not going to save you. Regardless of any celebrity you have, you still need to have a phenomenal product, a really good team, you know, really good operations, really good economics, and really good distribution. You know, Feastables wouldn't have worked if it wasn't in Walmart nationwide. Lemmy wouldn't have worked if they didn't have phenomenal operations and manufacturing at the same time. And most brands, most celebrity brands die quickly because they just don't have what it takes to be a good business from the get-go.

14:25Nik:And, you know, their hope is that some white-labeled product from a manufacturer plus a celebrity is going to get them freedom. But, you know, I've been a part of brands and helped launch brands that have completely flopped. I did barcode with Kyle Kuzma and Wemby. Boo. You know, that flopped. I did give beauty with Gwen Stefani. We had a huge launch in Sephora. We were in the front of every Sephora window. You know, three months later, that's getting shut down. Cali Rosa tequila with Adam Levine from Maroon 5. You know, there was nothing really special other than it was pink colored. And then I did a candy brand with one of the biggest streamers.

14:59Nik:And, you know, I think the reason is like most celebrity brands don't even have a reason to exist. Like, why is a gamer who's sitting in his boxers for eight hours a day on live stream? What gives him the right to make a candy company? You know, what gives the singer a random right to have a tequila company or JLo to have a tequila company when she doesn't even drink? And so, you know, I think that when you when you launch with a celebrity, a lot of times people are relying on the spike that comes, the awareness, the distribution. But, you know, that only lasts That lasts a month if you're really good.

15:32Nik:If you've got a crazy YouTube brand or a podcaster-led brand, that'll last a month. Otherwise, it lasts two to three days at most. Your first day is big. Your second day is half of the first. Your third day is half of the second. Your fourth day is pretty much quiet. No one cares anymore. And so you have to have a good product. You have to have good unit economics, good operations, good retention. And if you look at the other brands that we talked about, Lemmy or POV Beauty or Real Actives, these brands would all do well whether or not they had a celebrity the celebrity basically gave them that extra step and that extra advantage so when lemmy decides that they want to go test uh a target rollout they're now doing a nationwide rollout they're not starting in three stores in new york and then getting to new york city and then getting to new york state and then a small region and then half the country and then the full country so um so yeah and i think today like the other ideal setup that a lot of brands are finding is where these celebrities are becoming true partners.

16:30Nik:So they're buying into the business with, you know, they're buying real equity, getting into the business at the series A level, maybe, you know, they're becoming a board member, they're becoming a real ambassador. And, you know, they're not just getting paid for a post, they're actually becoming a true partner. And from the consumer standpoint, consumers see and feel that completely differently as well. Amazing. So to people in the crowd here that may have a brand um do you recommend investing into celebrity endorsements working with you know influencers that have that much uh reach and gravitas i think it's it's uh you know i think about it like this if you've got if you've got an image in google docs and you stretch it from the corner right if it's a low quality image it gets blurry real fast if you got a low quality image as your brand right you don't have the economics the operations the product the taste the formulation the shelf stability all of these things if you don't have that figured out you got a low quality image and adding a celebrity to stretch it is just going to make you you know a blurry looking image in front of everybody if you've got something that's really good and has the ability to operate adding a celebrity gets you into the rooms you could have never gotten into before it accelerates your ability to maybe you know get on different channels or get in front of different people.

17:46Nik:And it only acts as like an accelerant. Amazing. I mentioned it earlier, but here's to Kovas on what changed when their brand moved TV advertising to Tatari. Today we see TV really as a full funnel approach for our entire marketing campaigns. We're driving that awareness with TV, but we're also monitoring that traffic to our website, that latent traffic to our stores. And we're seeing also that efficiency that we get in our lower funnel channels when we have a healthy TV spend in place. Tatari helps us look at things like incremental reach and unique visits and sessions and just new customer acquisition overall.

18:24Nik:Want the same? Head to nick.co slash tatari. That's n-i-k dot c-o slash t-a-t-a-r-i. Another one I love to ask, right? So aside from the celebrity side, let's lean into the realistic brands, you know, maybe in here that's doing maybe three, 5 million, maybe 10 million a year, right? Call it, you know, that 5 million are doing about three,$400 ,000 a month. You don't have unlimited budget. A lot of your ad dollars are probably going into either influencer, going straight into ads. That's, you know, what's winning right now that, you know, most really aren't, right? Like, there's so many channels that people want to focus on.

19:11A lot of people are saying omni-channel, I want to do everything. But there's the old tale of like a million dollars a month on one channel on one product, right? So you can go that route. But what's winning right now when people are looking at, there's so many ways to make money online, right? Where should people in this range that aren't like nine-figure companies, like, where should they be focusing?

19:30Nik:So for me, I think basically parallel path two things. And of course, this depends like if there's restrictions, but I would parallel path the whole creator strategy because I think that is a way to brute force your way into generating awareness at the top of the funnel in the middle of the funnel and social proof. And awareness and social proof, if you have a good product is pretty much all you need. You just need constant awareness and constant social proof. At the same time, I would also focus on trying to crack the code with paid funnels. so you know if you're selling a uh a skin supplement to clear up your skin you know not only would i try to crack the code with creators but at the same time i would try to see okay what is the best landing page offer you know messaging angles uh static ad headlines i can test and try to crack that funnel at the same time the beauty is that these two work in tandem so as you start to crack angles that work with ads you bring those over to the to the creator world and start feeding those to creators and vice versa.

20:29Nik:As you start, you know, creators are going to take your product and they're going to say what they want about it. And those videos, those angles, those hooks all become great to do on the paid side as well. Now, when you find something that works, you got to go to the next level too. So if you find out that, you know, this sleep supplement angle is that, you know, it has some sort of ingredient or whatever it may be. Now you go the next level and say, okay, how do we build a landing page out of this? How do we build the seven reasons listicle behind this? How do we now take the creator video that's doing well and run that on meta and Instagram and TikTok as an ad and send that to a landing page where the creator's face is now on the landing page?

21:08Nik:Maybe the bundle has the creator's name attached to it as well. So it's really just about like, in my opinion, again, awareness and social proof. If you feel like, in my opinion, I feel like I can do that best personally with the creator strategy and the paid funnels. If you can do that elsewhere, where maybe you have connections into other YouTubers and your advantage is you can go get 25 YouTubers to start talking about the product, then I would go that way. But yeah, I would basically focus on that. The other thing is you wanna really figure out how can you make your product TikTok shoppable?

21:40Nik:Meaning that if you've got a skin supplement that's selling for$85 on your website on a monthly subscription, that's not gonna work on TikTok. It's just not gonna work. It's not what the consumers are there for. so you need to figure out what is your merchandised version of your product that you're selling for tiktok shop and then you have to figure out what is that pricing sweet spot right every product on tiktok has a sweet spot you cannot sell that supplement for 85 but you might be able to sell it for 39 in a different way um and so you have to find that sweet spot once you find that then you can take advantage of the creators amazing nick you are one of the greatest thought leaders in this space.

22:20I look up to you as a marketer. Appreciate you. I'm sure everyone appreciates you out there. Thanks so much, brother.

22:26Nik:Thank you. Okay, now the fifth question was actually not asked live because we ran out of time. We were on a short schedule, but I wanted to record it separately and get it in there because I feel like it's the most tactical one. So the question is 12 months from now, what will everybody wish they had started today? And what can they start doing Monday morning? Well, you know, I think that 12 months from now, everything gets really cheap about the funnel, right? Whether you're building ads, you're scripting, you know, commercials or creator scripts, you're building out landing pages, whether it's design, development, you know, ongoing optimization and CRO, AI is going to write the creative, it's going to code the pages, you know, at this point, 12 months from now, we don't know if you're going to still be visiting the website, you might be just using a chat agent to shop, right?

23:18Nik:And so in my opinion, what matters or what will matter, and honestly, what matters today, if you think about this answer, even 12 months back, is who has the most content out there, right? Content in the upper funnel, that is driving awareness, content in the middle of the funnel, which is arguably the hardest place to have content, right? But this is where customers can then look up the content, see your product, see how it comes. They can see reviews. They can understand that, you know, in these micro personas created amongst all their creators, like why is the workaholic guy in New York, you know, why does he benefit from this product compared to the mom who's got two kids that come after school and want this as a snack compared to the gym bro in, you know, Kentucky, who's using this as his pre-workout before his 5 a.m.

24:06Nik:workout in the morning. And then the last pieces, the content at the bottom of the funnel. So, you know, you actually see somebody with the same pain point that you have, that you've been waiting to convert on. And this now gets you over the finish line. So, you know, when it comes to Monday morning, I would say, you know, start focusing and thinking about what is your creator army? What is your leverage for the next 12 months when it comes to content? And, you know, if you want like tactical next steps, I would say jump on Yuka, you know, explore that platform, jump on Tribe, explore that platform, jump into TikTok shop, you know, on the affiliate side and start to understand what that's looking like for your landscape or for your vertical and, you know, kind of go from there, right?

24:50Nik:The other thing you can do is if you're already whitelisting with creators today, see what you can do to extend that funnel experience. So if you have, you know, Justin Johnson, who is a, you know, food creator, and the recipe that he made for your ramen is really good, you know, build a landing page or build a bundle behind that and extend Justin Johnson's presence throughout the funnel all the way until the end. So that is, you know, social commerce is really just how well you represent yourself in culture. And I hope that that came through in this talk. If you've got any questions, if you want to chat anything creator, shoot me a DM on Twitter.

25:32Nik:And yeah, happy to chat all things creator. But that is this week's episode. I hope you had a great experience listening to it and hopefully got one or two nuggets out of it. And I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.