The ROI of creators is… 0?, and Brand trust: Why human attention beats algorithms

0:00Neil, did you know the ROI of creators is zero? no what do you mean by that okay so i was reading a thread this is interesting so um this person on threads this first time sharing something from threads uh rebel media i'm a social media manager for 18 hotels and restaurants in germany sri lanka maldives and thailand i got back from a hotelier's conference a few weeks ago where collaborations with influencers and creators was a hot topic let me tell you guys some key points and then before you come for me saying i I don't work with the right people, quote unquote. Please remember that I've been doing this for over six years and I'm successful at my job because I know what I'm talking about.

0:38So this gets like 3 ,100 likes on it and then like 1 ,000 comments. So she's like, okay. Number one, the ROI of creators and influencers posting us on their stories is zero. People genuinely just don't check things people promote anymore unless it's a very, very established long-term travel content creator. Even then, it's not what it used to be. And by the way, she starts off with like, none of the hotels I manage work with creators anymore. So they're done working with creators, right? This is just hotels. Number two, we do not have the marketing budgets to let people stay in$400 a night rooms and pay them ridiculous amounts they asked for on top of that for a couple of pictures.

1:11Three, we prefer to pay local photographers who understand our brand slash we have worked with before a fair price for 100 pics from a day of shooting. So just because you have 100 ,000 followers, that does not mean you have influence over them. Final thing, number five, many of my fellow social media managers in the hospitality industry feel the same. Instagram algorithms are so picky and it just isn't the way it used to be anymore. The other week in one of our hotels, we had nine guests with over a million followers each. So let's say nine million potential viewers. We got a total of 11 followers and no extra room sales slash DMs slash website clicks.

1:44And yes, they were in the travel niche. At our last marketing meeting, this is the last part, at our last marketing meeting for one of the hotel groups, we decided that no one gets to save for free in exchange for anything anymore. The most someone who fits our criteria in target market will get is a press rate slash discounted rate. I disagree and agree. Go on. We've done a lot of tests with influencers in all spaces, including travel. The ROI of creators is there. You cannot pay them the way you used to. We're finding when you pay influencers a ton of money to promote, you usually are not ROI positive when you look at the LTV of a customer.

2:24when you work with micro or nano influencers and you do a rev share deal we're finding that to be extremely profitable you drive revenue you get paid you don't drive revenue you get paid so performance based performance based we're finding it to work really well and the smaller influencers will push really hard and they'll do it because they don't have millions of followers yeah i think to this gal's point the old way it was like dude you can stay at the maldives for free it's like 30 grand do that or what and then we'll also give you like another like 20 50 grand or something like that, right?

2:53That doesn't work anymore because they're just throwing money at the problem before. And it was this perceived value that was just never there. But to Neil's point with the micro influencers, they have more, um, they, they have more engagement with their audience and they have more affinity with their audience too. And if it performs great, if not, then you get nothing. So that's a good deal. Dude, it's funny because double is a co-founder of there's like a bug on my microphone. Double was a co-founder of, I think it's like discover earth or one of those instagram social profiles and uh his partners eventually ended up getting him out and i i forgot how much he got paid but it was really really cheap like i'm not talking about like 20 grand or anything it was much lower so call it like 10 grand or five grand i don't know what the number was but it was really tiny he did tell me and i looked at that and i was like looking at what they're posting and i was like dude you guys don't know what you have when you have an account with millions of followers, you should easily be able to make a hundred to$200 ,000 a year in pure profit, just from affiliate commissions.

3:53If you know what you're doing, most people don't know what they're doing, but I'm like, you guys make zero from this account. And I'm like, this is terrible. And I was having this conversation with Double and another friend like, oh, do you think I can get some free hotel stays and travel because Double Electra? And I'm like, no, I'm like, people do not do that anymore. It's too hard to pan out a ROI of you staying at a place for a week. Cause that doesn't cost 400 a night, including food and taxes and cleaning and all this kind of stuff. Maybe their costs on it is three,$4 ,000 tack and air for maybe$5 ,000.

4:29It's hard for them to generate a ROI from that. But instead, if you can promote some products or venues and get paid an affiliate commission, you can do deals all day long. Right. Yep. It's interesting. I mean, the thing you said, the reality is most people just don't know what they're doing. Yes. And let's be fair to you. Come on. We're still figuring things out as we go, as we go along. But for the most, the vast majority of people, they don't know what they're doing, nor do they want to figure out what to do. Right. We're just, it just takes a little more effort to be informed. We figured out the basics.

5:00I think we're, you and I are trying to figure things out now is how to continually grow and grow stages different because you always have different problems. Some years are good. Some years are bad. It's harder to grow when you're at scale. But yeah, no, when you're starting off, we have the basics down because we've done it so many times and just people make mistakes. And when I was in that conversation, they're like, oh, so should we just promote these places where people can travel and they can spend all time? I'm like, it won't work. But what can work is you go find the venues that have a lot of empty space that are amazing.

5:33They're just not filling up. They just do crazy, ridiculous offers and you promote them. And people are like, wow, I can go on this trip for one third of the cost, what it normally would because you're making some money versus no money, assuming that hotel can still make it profitable. They can run promos like that with influencers. That would do better than just check out this hotel that I went to in the Maldives. And look, I can stay in a hotel room under the water. Well, yeah, no crap is not going to work. 99.9999 % of people can't afford to stay in that hotel room. Forget a week, not even one night.

6:05Dude, that trip is like, you're probably paying like 50 grand at least. For a week, probably even more, including flights and everything. It's at least 50, if not significantly more. Yeah. And that's where I think a lot of these resorts and hotels get it wrong. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas.

6:37The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future.

7:07So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Yeah, let's talk about brand trust. I was reading an interesting article on AdAge on why human attention beats algorithms. And it's when you look at marketers, we all try to optimize for algorithms, right? Like, oh, I want to rank on top of the Google algorithm. I used to be more sold that way, less these days. And I still get messages from Skype, like guy in the UK, dude, I got this hack. It beats Google's algorithm. Check this out. And it took me no joke, almost two weeks to respond. And it wasn't because I felt the guy was full of it or anything like that.

7:46Really smart dude. He's an amazing technical SEO. I just knew that anytime someone says they have something that beats the algorithm, it's really short sighted. And his trick was really short, short sighted, which they in she was mine. Yeah, sure. I knew him. And it was impersonating quote unquote, Google and clicking on the listing to drive it up and just maximizing the click through again, short sighted. But when I see these markers trying to fight for algorithms. It's just like, why not go where the attention is? And the attention could be influencers, the attention could be a new platform that's up and coming, that is craving users, or even LinkedIn, they're craving content.

8:31If you give content to LinkedIn, you tend to do better than most other networks out there. And I just don't know why people don't go to where the attention is, because if you go to where the attention is in the places that are craving attention, you're more likely to do better and social networks ebb and flow and sometimes organic reach is very strong you want to take advantage and strike the iron when it's hot right um strike when the iron's hot and so i think a lot of people like maybe the old the old us we'd be very focused on blogging and seo but if you just continue to do that you'd be stuck in a pigeonhole and you wouldn't be taking advantage of organic social right now whether it's on you know short form content or youtube or linkedin or whatever or even even x or threads right thread threads does pretty well sometimes too.

9:13And so marketing 101 is where are your people hanging out? And then how do you bring people to the point of sale? That's all marketing is at the end of the day. Yep. On one side note, it just hit me. I know this is a little backtracking. We were talking about the call her daddy podcast, right? She didn't really get a hundred and something million dollars for a three plus year deal. What it probably is, is, Hey, how much were you making from ads what can we actually make from ads yeah all right we're gonna bring you over we're gonna pay this lump sum one is for some brand exposure marketing for cirrus do we have a ton of ad we have a week to pull it out then we can recuperate probably all our incentives yeah hopefully plus some exactly yep and we should back a second too so we talked about so where we did land after the first chat was one to 20 you should have someone that's involved right um for for like a CEO, you know, running a company and getting out of their way.

10:09But I do believe to your point, because we didn't finish the discussion here, that if a company is bigger, we're talking, you're doing hundreds of millions a year. They've done, they've been there, done that. You can probably leave them alone more. And they should be telling you what to do. And then you are sharing some of your guidance with them on like your opinions, right? Like that's what works out well. So, you know, I do think, I do agree with you. Like it does depend on the stage of the company. The Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts.

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11:10This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing this for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Yeah. And I also agree that a founder working with a CEO, if you pass them over the range, working together is better than them just letting them run the ship. And it's not that you can't let them go and just do their thing. But at the beginning, there's a lot of stuff that you can transfer over that someone may not know.

11:52And yes, it is really hard to find a good CEO, no matter what stage of a company you're at. Like the guy who's now at Starbucks did the Doritos taco and caused them to explode. Did that do well? Extremely well. Did you buy one? No, I don't really go to Taco Bell. It used to be Neil's favorite restaurant. He even had an infographic on his about page showing it's his favorite restaurant. But times have changed. And remember when we met up originally back in the day our meeting was at Taco Bell. Yeah, I got like, I remember what I got. I think I got two gorditas and like something. and then you got some soft meal.

12:26It wasn't a lot of food. Dude, it's funny. I've been craving Taco Bell for the last three days. I just never ordered it. Why don't you just get it? It's so unhealthy. Why don't you just get tacos from Erwan? It's not the same. Oh, well. It's nostalgic. You can get it. We call it a cheat day. You can have a cheat day. Yeah, I don't want to. You know what I've been using? I've been using My Body Tutor. Did I tell you about this? No. So what they do is I record my food every day And then basically there's a tutor in there saying, hey, like, why are you eating this? You should be eating this. So I basically record my workouts, all my food and everything.

12:59And then I tell them what the goal is. And every day I get feedback on it. And it's been pretty good. So right now, like it shows right on progress for the goals. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates.

13:29We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. green like rice so singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside dude speaking of body and goals i had an instagram post the other day on my daily routine yeah yeah and i don't really log into social media that often but one of my buddies albert he's like dude you get hate too i'm like what are you talking about i'm like i know i get hate but what are you talking about um and even you when i get people's talking a lot of shit about me online usually send me the link or someone sends me a link and that's how I learn about it.

14:21And we've been through a few instances of this. Remember someone sent you a message and then I didn't get to it within 24 hours responding to them on LinkedIn and then they blasted and then I told them I'm sorry. And then I also showed them other areas previously we gave them credit for and then they just ignored it. They didn't care. But the message they sent me originally was really nice but then once they got the quote unquote spread and the reach and the love they're like oh they say fame changes you yeah yeah but recently people are like dude this guy's even bad advice he doesn't know anything about working out and i'm like oh i'm not trying to tell people how to work out or how to get buff i don't have a six pack nor am i trying i'm pretty skinny i'm a hundred and call it 30 pounds 31 pounds yeah for being five nine height yeah for five nine yeah like if i wanted a six pack in three to six months i genuinely think i could get one it's more so diet i just choose not to um and funny enough i have the opposite problem of once every two or three weeks i chow down on a ton of unhealthy food like ice cream or whatever to gain back my weight to get back to 130 because on a normal week i usually lose weight and then i have to eat unhealthy to gain it back that's when i'll do like the taco bell but um what i was getting at is it's funny with social media dude it's just i always forget it's so easy to just get so much hate and then he's like what are you gonna do with it i'm like ignore it who gives a crap yeah and a lot of people if you look at marketing agencies or peer agencies they'll tell you oh embrace the negativity respond to it try to get more reach yeah uh leverage it more i found the best thing to do in marketing when you get hate is to just purely ignore it and just move on I think it makes sense because we have our businesses to operate.

16:11The more you engage with that, there's another chance to get canceled. But you know who does this really well? The video I got, and we're going to pause for a second after this, but Vivian too. 6.6 million views on that one. She was responding to all the comments for people getting married. And one of the comments was like, she'll never get married. Like, look at that big-ass rock on my brain. Right? So she's just responding to all the hate comments. and then it caused more. Backtrack on this. What is the video that got 6.2 million? The way it started was like, if you want a traditional woman, then be a traditional man.

16:45So it started that way, right? And then like, basically what happened in the comments is the men started fighting the women back and forth. The men were like, nobody wants a woman that's like with that attitude. You were saying this on a podcast? I was saying it. So I asked her the question and then she's like - Oh, you're interviewing someone. I'm interviewing her. And then she's just like, no, like if you want, you're not a traditional woman, then like you got to provide, you got to bring it, right? Like don't expect me to like work and then ask me to do things that you're not willing to do, which is fair, right?

17:10But the men really hated it and the women really loved it. And so the engagement just kept going. And then she fanned the flames even more by responding to the comments that were negative against her. This is, was this your rich? Your rich BFF. BFF. Yeah, yeah. Always mess up the BFF part. But he was saying that if you want a traditional wife, you should provide. Yeah. and don't expect the women. Yeah. And let me go do my thing and I'll cover the family. She does really well though. And it's fair. Anyway, please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency to join the agency accelerator.

17:45Agency Owners Association. All right. Talk to you later. Bye.