Turning Followers into Brand Ambassadors with Luke Yarnton

0:0010 years ago, the default approach to influencer marketing was I'm going to find the biggest influencer that kind of is in my segment or my sector. And I'm going to get them to post about me once with some big splash Instagram post. And then we're done. And then I move on to the next one. Whereas now, if you go down that follow account tree, these micro-influencers and nano-influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences. So that's where a lot of brands are shifting towards that activation. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

0:37We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about how to get your business right today. This isn't about last year. Next year, this is about what works. right about now. That's why we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, because it gets kicked around so much. You see it, it's a buzzword, but it is becoming the here, the now, and how brands, marketers, business people, coaches, whoever you are, need to be thinking about leveraging influencer marketing to grow their business and to grow the awareness of whatever they're doing.

1:29That's why, hey, we'll go to the source. Luke Yarnton, he is one of the founders of The Rave. What's up, Luke? Hey, how's it going? Excited to be here today, Ryan. Me too, man. Selfishly, I was like, you know, we get asked, we get a lot of requests, and I was looking at your stuff. And, you know, I'm on a soapbox here recently with, you know, with influence of marketing, both internally and externally with my companies about how to leverage it. And I'm like, you know, this will be an education course for me. I think I know most of it, but I don't know it all. and I think our audience can learn a lot from it.

2:05I know you're a firm believer in it, right? Absolutely. It's a very quickly changing space at the moment as well. What it means to be an influencer and how to capture that and the ways to capture changing it week by week. And so I'm excited to dive deep on that with you today, Ryan. I think it's going to be a fun chat. Yeah, man. And let's start right there. I mean, what has been the change? I think at its core, when you hear influencer marketing, it's like, okay, someone who has a big following is promoting a product or service and like, that's it. But that's not wrong, but it's evolved into a lot more than that.

2:41So why don't you kind of start down that path for us? Yeah, I think a good place to start is if we look in the rear vision mirror 10 years in the past and 10 years ago, the default approach to influencer marketing was I'm going to find the biggest influencer that kind of is in my segment or my sector and I'm going to get into post about me once with some big splash Instagram post and then we're done and then I move on to the next one and maybe they would have three or four influences on their roster throughout the year super high touch and it's purely just they want to be associated with this person who has a big following because you can get a bunch of reach that's changed a lot now so it's changed for for a bunch of reasons one of the the key reasons that it's changing now, there's sort of this inverse relationship with trust in follower count now.

3:27So as follower count increases, trust decreases. So a lot of that's probably been eroded away by the fact people realized that in 2015, people were just getting paid bucket loads of cash to post about some brand that they've never actually used or sort of experienced. And people can see through that pretty clearly. Whereas now, if you go down that follower count tree, these micro influencers and nano influencers tend to be the ones who have that high level of trust and high level of credibility within their audiences. So that's where a lot of brands are shifting towards that activation. And rather than a one and done approach where it's, I want this micro influencer or nano influencer to post about me just one time, and then we'll move on to the next one.

4:09It's more about creating this always on ambassador army, where you've got a group of people who are are really closely aligned with your brand. Ideally, they're genuine users of the brand and they're trying to talk about you as much as possible. It becomes part of their content and you build a really close relationship with that influencer, which then gets sort of passed on through that connection with their really engaged audience. Yeah. And the micro-influencer I hear a lot though. Now we got the nano-influencer. We got all of them. I mean, how many followers does the nano influencer have versus the micro influencer so at least for us and there's no scientific agreed consensus on how to classify them but we say nano is sort of we're saying between 2 500 and 10 000 and then 10 000 to 50 000 is where we'd probably call that micro okay so those are the bands that we like to operate in but we like me personally and you'll see this come through throughout the chat today.

5:09I'm a big fan of the nano and the micro. I love that small end of the influencer spectrum. I think that's where a lot of the opportunity and the low-hanging fruit is today. And time and time again, see so many of these businesses that we engage with burning hours and burning cash, sort of chasing the Instagram DMs of these bigger influencers that end up in these campaigns that turn out to be absolute duds. So I think we'll lean into that that nano and micro end of the scale today. Yeah. That means I'm out, you know, I'm in the, I got 200 something. I guess I'm like, you know, but I've been building it for 15 years, eight years for the number one show.

5:46Like I needed, I needed to slow down. I'm becoming irrelevant because my following is growing. Who knew? Yeah. It's a horses for courses approach, right? Where, where being, there are still uses for these larger influences in specific cases, but it's not the only influencers you should care about have more than a hundred thousand followers anymore it's about finding the right fit for your brand for whatever you're trying to achieve with your influencer marketing well over time everything gets improved and you know like you learn like from the from the targeting and gets more targeted right so i mean that's what we're doing instead of painting with a wide brush or you know getting a i don't know a kardashian to talk about something that may or may not be that related.

6:30And it's great to get the reach. Exactly. But how much frequency are you getting? And how much relevancy are you getting to the audience? So that's what we're going for, right? Exactly. I can tell like a personal story here that sort of gives some relevance to this as well. And this is one of the origin stories of what we're doing. Why are we doing what we do now? Is that like through COVID time, I tried my hand at being an influencer. My area of media was I was producing a bunch of slow motion coffee videos. I'm not sure if you've seen them on your TikTok feed or Instagram feed, set to some music.

7:02There'd be like a sexy espresso pulled into a cup. We'd see the coffee coming out, really relaxing. I got like a couple of thousand followers on my TikTok and was like pretty active on Reddit as well. But in that time, even with such a small influence, I generated probably more than$10 ,000 worth of transactions for the brands and the equipment that I was using because people would reach out and say, Oh my God, what is that grinder? It's such a cool grinder. Or that is a beautiful machine. I want that machine. And so I'd send them to the direction of where I bought it from. But I didn't have enough followers that any brand would want to give me the time of day to have a conversation.

7:38So I didn't get to monetize that in any way, shape or form. I didn't get any free shit. I was just me plodding away with my iPhone 13, making some pretty average content. And now that's completely changed, right? Where people would now take a little bit more notice about what I'm doing and try to activate that in a way that's beneficial to their brand. Have we lost the appreciation for amazingly produced high-end content? Because now, you know, everything's on the phone and everybody likes organic. But like, is there appetite still for influencers or people that produce content sharing like really well-produced stuff?

8:14I think the question is not to the quality of the content. At least the way I view it is, is it still authentic? you can find really highly produced really authentic content and you can find low quality authentic content i think the reason people at least we're going through this wave at the moment of content shot on an iphone and the way that their friends and family would produce it because this is how me as an audience i'm used to consuming media from my friends it feels a little bit more authentic and i feel a better connection but the style of content comes in waves right we'll see it change time and time again.

8:49It's the authenticity that makes the difference. That makes sense. So you paint that brush across it. And that's probably back to like, if it's just, you know, when you think back to the, I don't know, what I think of is the cringy stuff is just, okay. The 21 year old in a high polished Ferrari, you know, like video that's like, it just screams, I don't know, inauthentic. Exactly. I think that's kind of what we're saying a little bit. No, that's an extreme example. But I don't know. I just I love it. And like being a content creator and owning an agency and working on large brands in the past.

9:28I love just high produced, high end content that storytelling, you know, obviously has a narrative and things like that. And I'm like, I just hope we haven't lost the appreciation of that on some level. I think it's a short term hack is that like you see a lot of these. bigger brands doing it now they want to be trusted and to sort of tap into that authenticity and making it look like something that your friend might produce can at least for now give that illusion whether that's a long-term strategy or not we'll check back in 12 months from now and have a look at that how do i build an ambassador army you know like how do we how is this done excellent question so that that's something that i've spent a lot of time and energy trying to unpack and work out how to do it time and time again.

10:09That's the main way that we at The Rave help businesses unlock goals. There's a couple of key steps to building an ambassador army. And by ambassador army, we mean a group of ambassadors that will talk about a brand that they love time and time again, and ideally can have some positive outcome. So typically what that means is let's find a bunch of these sort of micro creators or creators, influencers, or even just everyday shoppers that have the ability to impact sales or whatever outcome you want, whether that's clicks or transactions, and do that consistently. The way we typically work with brands is we break it down into three key steps.

10:47So first of all, you need to make sure you've got the right people coming in the top of the funnel. And the way we do that, or the easiest way we do that, is that we've got a piece of technology that can go through a brand's email list or be actively monitoring their checkout. And every single time we see a customer profile that we can match against an influencer profile. So we've got access to about 15 million creator and influencer profiles around the world. As soon as we see an exact match, we flag that and we update the CRM or update a notification channel for them saying, hey, this influencer here, this guy Ryan, he's got 250k followers.

11:22He just purchased some socks. Maybe you want to reach out to him. So first things first, let's go through all of the previous people have shopped and identify who has this outsized chance to be a great influencer and ambassador for your brand. And I love that because I oftentimes, there are certain things, look, I'm a consumer like everybody else. I have a big following. We've been blessed to have a good show with loyal listeners and all that. So we have influence. And there's stuff that I buy like everybody else, the grocery store and all that. And I don't go, man, I should be paid to buy this.

11:54No. But there are a handful of things that I buy that I'm like, I should not be buying this because – not because I earned it, but I did build an audience and have influence. This brand should be paying me to buy this or buying it for me, and then I should be promoting it because I'm a firm believer in it. It's like right down their demo. So I love that, but I'm like, man, we need more people discovering these things, right? Exactly. But you've touched on an interesting point there as well, Ryan, where it's like, obviously, we've talked about authenticity and trust. That's also super valid from the creator's perspective as well.

12:29They want their audience to trust them and listen to what they have to say. So they would much rather promote a brand that they genuinely love than have to like feign love for some brand that has been like hammering their Instagram DMs for a while. So this is why we're saying the influencers and ambassadors you should be looking to build into this army are people who already freaking know and love you. Don't go chasing these people who've never heard of your brand before that might be interested and might not. So first, we'll build the cohort of people that we think are a great fit for promoting your brand.

13:02They're the ambassador army. The next step, and this is where a lot of people get stuck, is the natural inclination is how do I get them to love me and join the ambassador army and participate always and forever and will be in love? Well, let me ask a question because I think this is a key distinction back for step one. What if I don't have that list? What if I'm a startup or early phase and we don't have a 20 ,000 person list to vet out those people? In that case, what I would recommend is let's monitor it in real time. So every single time a transaction comes through, we'll make sure that we're not missing a single opportunity of someone who might have a small influence to post about you.

13:40And even the small community you do have, simply putting an ask out there saying, hey, so you made a purchase from us. We're trying to build an ambassador army. Here's what's in it for you. Here's what's in it for us. Be transparent around sort of how it cuts both ways. If there's any chance you're interested, let me know. Opt in. There'll be some benefits. Do you help people if, again, it's great if monitoring sales, but is your whole premise around just purely people that have already are buying or just bought is sort of, you know, building that army of those existing customers? Is there any amount of yours that's prospecting influencers, whatever it might be?

14:16Yeah, look, we can help brands out with that. That's a skill that we do have. But we're eagerly, what we're trying to do is help people realize and where we're the best at what we do is helping people find the low hanging fruit or the golden goose that lives within their customer list. I think that's where the most overlooked value is. But if it does come to prospecting, you're hidden super fans that also have influence. Exactly. But look, when it comes to prospecting and outreach, let's say you're a business that has very few customers and no budget for influencer marketing. The places I would start is spend a lot of time on Reddit and find there'll be some voices in Reddit that have a lot of reach.

14:56Tap into those people. If they have some sort of expertise around your space, jump into the hashtags and TikTok, jumped into the hashtags and in an Instagram and the folks you want will have less than 7 ,500 followers because those are the ones who are going to get a likelihood of of some response from and they have that high engagement and you're not going to piss away hours and hours and hours trying to to get someone on board who's then going to want to charge you five thousand dollars for a single post you want those young hungry creators that are willing to believe in what you're doing those Those are the ones who you want to be connecting with if you're early on the journey.

15:31I love the community thing and the power. And I've been late to the game on this. I've known it. I think I've counseled people. But myself, I'm a practitioner. I have teams and we do stuff. The Facebook group, Reddit thing, all that stuff is goldmine. Exactly. You've got these conversation groups and things that are happening. And even if they're not talking directly about your product, they're having conversations about things, topics in your area. And like the next hire that I would probably make is it's like a growth manager, but really it's almost like audience finding community manager, audience or community finding.

16:13There's a there's a there's a there's a balance of like because it's almost like this balance of managing what you have is kind of community manager. finding and nurturing and building and discovering community is kind of like the secret sauce. Fostering a community is such an important part of longevity success now. Like you can see that once you've got a group of people who want to listen to what you have to say and want to engage with you, that is a forever asset that you can tap into in a million different ways and it creates so much value. And the other benefit is it can sort of, once you've got that critical mass, it then can go on and grow itself.

16:53And you don't actually have to be monitoring it and putting as much time and effort into it. Ideally, you can get these sort of folks who exist within that community themselves, the type of people who can then go on and be the champions of the community out of love alone. Yes. I love it. I love it. So talk to me. Okay. We helped build with step one. We help them build their army, either existing, some prospecting, but really mining what's there. Sure. Now what? So the next step is we only want to get them to do one thing. And that one thing varies brand to brand. What you don't want to do is try and onboard them to be part of the ambassador army straight away.

17:34That you get a lot of friction there, you get a lot of drop off, timing might not be right, and then you'll burn a lot of opportunity. So the key thing here is once you've got them to do one simple task for you, the likelihood of them doing a subsequent task is significantly higher. So typically what we'll do, I'll give you a real life example. There's a athleisure brand we're working with called Form. They blew up a couple of years ago because Taylor Swift was seen wearing one of their sports bras. They do posture correcting athleisure wear and they do it really well. They're growing at a rapid pace.

18:06so then what we do is we've got this automation set up plus we're doing the retrospective mining and we say hey so you made a purchase from us love your content um by the way if you just want to like this is a really low lift ask if you just want to post a picture of you and anything from form on your instagram story we'll refund your most recent order um it's it's not a big ask it's pretty easy we're not asking them for to sell out no affiliate links no anything it's probably just if you can post about our brand and just show that we're relevant that first ask and then we'll we'll keep our promise of giving you a refund that that's the first offer so that's a really easy offer for a creator of any size whether it's 2 500 followers or 50 000 followers they're like yeah i was probably gonna post about this anyway now i might post about it a little bit quicker and i don't have to tag them or do anything like gross like that it's just showing that this is a brand that I wear that I paid organically for brilliant but then what that also does is it builds a little bit of trust right so we've come to an agreement that you're gonna post about us and then we'll give you a refund the refund hits the account magic moment a little bit of delight and then following that so that's when we get to stage three which is now you've got a group of influencers or ambassadors uh creators that love the brand second point is they've actually done something for you once and then once they've done a single task for you that's when they become part of this closed group of ambassador i mean that's when you can sort of foster that community and every single time there's a new drop anytime there's something interesting happening they get updated they feel part of the brand and then all of a sudden through very little effort you've got a group of 200 odd micro creators consistently posting about this brand that they feel connected to for very little cost i love it the first step is always the best because you get them to do that one thing i mean it's low ask like you said yeah then they're in and there's some connection and then you build from there i mean what's the percentage of like i don't know do you have data like the average that could if they do that one thing like that they but that they join the army so to speak yeah so it varies a lot segment to segment certain brands that have more like social currency and by social currency i mean people want to naturally talk about it obviously they get higher cut through than something that's significantly less interesting so for every 10 000 shoppers we know that about 200 to 250 of them have more than 2 500 followers and then obviously of those some of them are going to be duds it'll be like some auto garage that has a high following count or it'll be a dog account.

20:52So let's say that the real amount is going to be 200 per 10 ,000 customers. Ideally, we'll be able to convince to join the group. 30 to 50 of those is a good outcome. They've got noisy inboxes. It's hard. But generally speaking, if you can catch them with a good serendipitous message, right person, right time. And all you need is for one of those to turn into a powerhouse for you to get really, really incredible outcomes. What industries does this work best for? We're still relatively new on the journey at the moment. We've got less than maybe just over 200 brands using the platform at the moment.

21:25I need to check the numbers, but it's still relatively no. We're skewing more towards e-com at the moment. So we're seeing a lot of proof coming out in the e-com space and we're dipping our toes into ticketing and we're dipping our toes into SaaS apps at the moment. We haven't found a segment where it very clearly doesn't work. What we are finding is that if the average age of the customer is above 40, the likelihood of us discovering an influencer is slightly lower. But that specific customer base are significantly more receptive to these micro-influencer and nano-influencer people. So the impact is higher.

22:00So it's a little bit more of a grind. But once you do unlock those customers, they provide a significantly better impact. because the number of creators or influencers that people over the age of 40 are following is significantly lower than, say, someone in the Gen Z cohort who's going to be aware of 200 or 300 creators posting consistently, whereas my parents probably know of four influencers or five maybe. It's interesting because I talk all the time about performance marketing versus brand marketing. You know, like the marketing that's driving a sale today or as fast as possible at the bottom of the funnel versus building brand over time.

22:39And, you know, we all need outcomes and you need business outcomes. But you do, you know, believe it or not, no matter what these performance marketers have tried to tell us, you have to actually create awareness and intent before they buy, which there is a funnel or a cycle that is still there. where it doesn't one ad or one influence or whatever, insert ad like object doesn't always drive a sale that day. And so I'm building to a question here, Luke, is I see this as beneficial both for the top and the bottom of the funnel. So that's an interesting point. I'm very often speaking to performance marketers when we're discussing our technology stack.

23:19There is a performance element to this where often it is paired with affiliate-based marketing. We've got a fully fleshed out affiliate marketing tool And ours is built around this idea that affiliate and influencer marketing will be completely democratized within 10 years. So I'm speaking often set opposite. There'll be a brand marketer, a head of influence and a performance marketer when I'm having sort of these higher level discussions with a bigger brand. And the performance marketer's approach is what is the right give and the get to make this work? So when it comes to affiliate marketing, for example, they're consistently doing how much can we afford to give away as a discount for a referred shopper?

23:59And how much can we give away as a commission to that affiliate creator or influencer for making that? And it's got to be a right balance, right? Where for certain brands, that discount that's attached to an affiliate link is a really effective lever to get people purchasing. For other brands, they'll rather have like a super low or even just 0 % discount, but they'll heavily incentivize the affiliate or the influencer for posting about it. So they might go up to 30 % commission. And so the performance marketer is thinking, how do I optimize this? How do we A-B test this? And how do I make sure that we get as high a conversion rate for a referred shopper versus a standard shopper that's arrived to the site on their own?

24:39Yeah. Because I mean, ideally, you know, the outcomes for me would just be, you know, more trial of the show. And if we're doing our job, it translates to more subscribers at some percentage level. But being able to track, you know, if we build the ambassador army for any given podcast, then tracking the downloads that they drive for individual episodes. And those are the sort of sales for this approach. exactly look you can shoot them all that can be done they get their own unique link with a specific utm you can see who's actually effective at driving traffic to your site and who's not yes the now in a way honestly that's one of the biggest hacks we've found as well this is like a little secret that i'll share with the audience oh yes i like secrets for the show luke i like it a lot of these at least at least what i've found so far a lot of these micro influences and sort of nano influences they are natively very competitive people they like to win they like to they're often very metric obsessed so if you can have a sneak a little bit of a leaderboard in there or some sort of um competitive element to it that's a good way to get a squeeze a little bit of extra juice out of it let's say that i'll get a little bit more excited about it whoever can drive the most clicks to the site transparent leaderboard by the end of the month you get a is something that is of the appropriate value.

26:03The now army. That's what I need, the now army. And who's driving the most downloads or audience for the show, and they get the winning badge. Exactly. I'll creatively come up with that. We'll have merch and everything else. You know, I can make it cool, like Alomart. Yeah, they can get one of those big wrestling belts that's set in front of you right now. Oh, hey, we'll send them a belt just like this, custom. The now army. I like it. See? There you go. I mean, you got it. But see, I did say whenever someone overtakes me as the number one marketing and business show, they can come get the belt.

26:42Now I'm 65260. You might have to wrestle me for it. But the numbers back it up as I drop my sponsor drink. But yes, it's fun. I'm liking it. I'm liking it. And we're brainstorming here selfishly. But it applies to any business is the point. you can use influencers community and again gamifying it a bit which i like people love that but it's also such a human thing to want to be a part of a community you want to be involved in something you want to be collaborative and co-create something with your peers if you just provide that structure for them and provide a little bit of incentive to get them moving it is just something native to human nature that people want to be a part of something yes influencer marketing is like, it's the now version of, you know, spokesperson, you know, like back in the day and even now brands use spokespersons.

27:35I mean, if you watch the Superbowl, every ad has a celebrity in it and you had spokesperson marketing. So you have Michael Jordan or you have Michael Phelps, if you're a swimmer, like whatever it might be, Olympian, uh, actor, Tom Cruise, and they're the spokesperson for the brand. Influencer marketing is like the evolution of that on some level but then it's the more authentic version because it's everyday people right absolutely yeah look i think at least when i was in in college and you learned a little about marketing there was always that saying that they keep bringing out which is um your brand is what they say about you when you're not in the room i think that's a jeff bezos quote um and i think brands are starting to realize that gone are the days where they have absolute control of what people are saying about the brand and they can put words in Michael Jordan's mouth to assert who they are as a brand.

28:24It's changed now and that the amount of media and the access to media has been a complete paradigm shift from when that spokesperson style of marketing was proper and present. So now people are talking about your brand whether you like it or not. But the key now is not to control what people are saying about it. As a brand, you just need to make sure your product is solid and does what it says on the box. And then what you do is try and make people talk about it as much as possible. You just want to be top of mind. You want to be the brand that's getting discussed. And if you've built the right product and you can facilitate getting people talking about it at scale, that's how you win in 2025.