516: Why You Shouldn’t Pay Influencers in 2024 | Gretta van Riel

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. If you had to start from scratch and build a million dollar brand as quickly as you possibly could overnight, partner with an influencer as your co-founder. You do the marketing and business side. All they've got to do is turn up and post the product and you unlock that sort of automatic audience that way. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you've launched too late. If you can hack something together and get it out there, you're going to create so many more learnings just by having something live and by taking action, then you're going to create thinking and planning.

1:21It did very much feel like an overnight success. But to me, at the same time, because it felt unbelievable, it was quite scary too. I always thought if it grew this quickly, it could fail this quickly as well.

1:36Before we dive in, I want to extend a warm invitation to join our thriving founder community. It's the perfect place to discover more insightful interviews aimed at helping you build, grow, and scale your business. So don't forget to hit subscribe. Your support means the absolute world to us. Thank you so much for subscribing. Let's get stuck in today's discussion. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. We've got Greta here today and she's going to talk to us about everything influencer marketing.

2:16She knows this space incredibly well. She's generated tens of millions of followers through all social platforms and really knows how to turn audiences into brands. And yeah, Greta, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Nate. Thanks for having me. Exciting to be back. So you know what? I'm going to ask you a different question. It's not going to be how did you get your job? It's going to be, can you describe the first 60 days of your first business SMT? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Keyword in a nutshell, scrappy. Day one, wherever you count that from, I'd count it from the day I made my website, which I then launched that night.

3:03So we'll call that day one because that was the day where we first got a sale as well. I googled how to create an online store Shopify came up didn't know what the word e-commerce was just wanted to know how to charge people money for my product because I'd been making it for them for free and I felt it was awkward to be like hey could you actually transfer me for that because it's actually getting expensive to make it for everyone for free um so I'd started making this like detox tea by hand which we were calling a tea talks it was just a um program me and my friends would do and then me and my colleagues at work would do um I guess just to like do a bit of a cleanse after a big weekend uh I was 22 at the time and um the reason I know I talk about this a bit that I had 24 in the bank when I first started was because I'd been making this product by hand for people and I didn't really know how to charge them so I googled how to create an online store made a website in a day I think the longest thing the thing that took me the longest was making like an ingredients and effects table um and got the website live and basically launched and made four sales overnight well I was like cool that's great that'll that'll pay at least you know for the tea to make you know the next little batch of orders and I was doing kind of like a pre-sale model and we kept doing that pre-sale model probably for the first like 30 days ish I would take the orders during the week and then I would fulfill them on the weekend so definitely a pre-sale I didn't know that was called a pre-sale model it was just that I didn't have the money to buy the tea or the ingredients yet and I didn't have the time to fill the orders until the weekend because I was working full-time still at that time so I was still working full-time for probably around the first like month of the brand that it's done to grow really quickly so I went from you know making a thousand dollars in a day when our first ever influencer posted that was like our biggest day of sales to date so I kind of realized that you know the more we grew our social following and the more we could collaborate with like people that had a social following the more our sales would grow.

5:23So then I started making like my weekly wage in a day. Then I made my monthly wage in a day and I quit my job and went all in on the business. So the next kind of month after that was just getting everything kind of set up to scale. So I say scale, it was scaling. It was going really well. We, you know, within the first six months did 600 ,000 US dollars in a single month. We were growing from there. We did not have systems in place to scale really. We were still picking and packing the orders by hand. That's why I say it was scrappy. Like we were still picking and packing the orders by hand when we were doing between 20 and 30 ,000 units of product a month.

6:09So it was crazy. We were running like a fully fledged logistics operation out of my house. I'd moved out of home by that point. That was about a couple of months in because my mum just got sick of having the tea all over her house all the time. So that was sort of what my first 60 days looked like. Do you miss those early days? In some ways it was so exciting, but then in other ways I feel very sorry for my little 22 year old self dealing with a lot of that stress, I think, because I didn't know a lot about business. Every time I'd discover something, it was like discovering fire, which was incredible, but it was risky at the same time.

6:51So all those little losses would affect me so much. I remember crying when labels misprinted because then it meant that they were my shipping labels and I couldn't get down to the post office in time and ship those orders out that day. And I knew that the effect that that would have on customer service at the scale that we're already at. And I was trying to do the customer service while also doing the marketing while also managing, you know, a team of, I didn't even know how many people would have been picking and packing like 10 ish from my house. And it was just pretty relentless, but it was really exciting and the growth was really exciting.

7:26And that feeling is, yeah, that was just unbelievable. So I wouldn't change it by any means. And I think like those little stresses, you know, starting to build up more of a resilience towards stress over time so that when the big things started to happen, maybe they didn't hit me as hard. I probably cried the same amount losing a million dollars of tea in a day as I did misprinting those labels. So there you go. It's funny. I've been doing a few interviews at the moment for this summer and stuff like that. And one thing that keeps coming up is people say, I don't really remember the hard times when I look back I only remember the good times but if I actually went back it was there were some really hard times but I miss them in like fondly yeah yeah no it's an interesting it's an interesting way to reflect for sure I think yeah I think just it was just an unbelievable situation and like it did very much feel like an overnight success somewhat that brand because it did start and grow so quickly too.

8:32So it was just, it felt unbelievable. But to me at the same time, because it felt unbelievable, it was quite scary too. I always thought, you know, if it grew this quickly, it could, you know, kind of like fail this quickly as well. So I was always worried about, you know, something happening and having to close the business down overnight. And that was exactly why I ended up founding multiple other e-commerce brands, because I kind of realized that the system and processes and the experience that, you know, I was like learning from was repeatable. And so I went about that and repeated it so that, you know, even if something did happen, that it would be fine.

9:13And it did and it was all good. Yeah. So talk to me about influencer marketing, because that's been kind of like a staple play within each of your businesses that you've launched in the e-com space and you're so brilliant at it you know you're really really good at branding coming up with a product finding a way to put a different spin on it I love you know how you've looked at that and changing the dimensions it's really really clever but then at the other side you're really good at creating demand and trying to I guess grow that business for someone that's watching this right now or listening to this right now, how should early stage founders approach the creating demand side and using influencer marketing?

10:01Is it too, is it worth it to do it in the early stages? What is your take? Definitely worth it. I think like where a lot of the success of my brands has come from, not Skinny Me Tea because that was like the first brand and I started, you know, like 100 followers on Instagram or something when we first launched that brand. But the other brands, and like you said earlier, were that sort of like audience first, product, second approach, which I'd like sometimes refer to as market product fit. So having a market and finding a product for that market as opposed to the other way around. And I think, you know, not every brand is able to, you know, focus their resources on building, you know, a large audience before they launch.

10:50The best way and the easiest way is to tap into other people's large audiences and leverage those on your brand's behalf when you launch. So I think that's where like the beauty of influencer marketing lies. It's not just that they're skilled content creators. It's also that they do have that audience's attention and also trust at the end of the day. And they can leverage that attention and trust on your brand's behalf to create results and that's why the results are so strong in that space um I got asked the question the other day if you had to start from scratch and build a million dollar brand as quickly as you possibly could overnight what would you do and I basically just said I the fastest way like if you want to say fastest for a million dollar e-commerce brand would be to partner with an influencer as your co-founder and launch like an influencer co-founder brand whereby you do the marketing and sort of business side for them all they've got to do is turn up and post the product and you unlock that sort of like automatic audience that way so influencer marketing is yeah just still such a powerful tool increasingly so in fact like I would say for one of our clients for how influencers were generated over$10 million in attributed revenue just through influencers as a channel for them.

12:15And that's all been in the last two to three years as well. So that shows the power of the market as a whole. Yeah. So how do people get started, right? Like that's the thing. So from a pre-launch perspective or a post-launch perspective, and I know we talk like you talk a lot about like micro influences macro influences what is the difference like talk us through how would you get started how would you do this yeah there's kind of a couple of different approaches that you can take you can take a tiered approach or you can take a micro influences at scale sort of approach I would usually suggest the micro at scale approach if you're on more of a budget if you're bootstrapping if this is your first business if you're starting sort of like from scratch, I would probably recommend micro and nano influencers at scale.

13:10If you are, you know, in a place where you're launching a product under an existing brand, you've got some budget or, you know, you've got some funding behind you with the brand that you're launching, then I would look at more of a tiered approach. And what I mean by a tiered approach is having, you know, say one macro influencer that's quite general, maybe three mid-tier influencers in three different niches so that you're able to test those different niches. Say you're launching a cookware brand, you might want to test the mum niche. You might want to test the foodie kind of niche, and you might want to test the busy working professional niche as well.

13:53Like, you know, teachers, nurses, people that are posting about their everyday life in that way. We find that niche works really well as a whole across the board. I think it's just a really authentic way to share kind of your everyday. So they're the three niches I'd probably test for a brand like that. And so three mid-tier influences across there. And then you might look at something like, you know, 15 micro influences and 20 nano influences for example and in terms of like the scale of influence and what i mean by this and nano is kind of like from maybe around 2 000 to 5 000 followers a mid a micro is like 5 000 to 50 000 a mid-tier we would classify as like 50 000 to 300 000 and a macro is above 300 000 followers.

14:51So that is what I would call a tiered approach. The micros at scale approach is where you can really kind of test the audience at scale, you know, like test, I guess, which different niches and channels are working best for your brand as well. They're the main two things that we always test at high. Your niches, so like, yeah, the different kind of like, I guess, customer avatars that that influencer represents. And then also your channel. So that might be like Instagram versus TikTok, for example. So a micro is at scale, which we kind of often include nano's in. I would call at scale anything over like 25 collaborations in a month.

15:34I would be targeting for a launch campaign around 30 collaborations. Hey Founder Fam, I want to take a quick break from the show to tell you about something we're really excited about, our Black Friday offer. Because this Black Friday deal is different. If you're listening right now, chances are that you want to start a business of your own or you want to scale up your existing business. And if you've ever said, I'll start one day or maybe I need more help one day, Founder Plus was built to help you make it happen. We have a 43-step program with over 600 lessons taught by real multi-million dollar e-commerce founders to help you start and scale your own e-commerce brand and for this week only you can join founder plus for just$299 a year it's normally$499 and you can lock in that price for life that's$200 off every single year backed by our 90-day money-back guarantee picture this with the help of founder plus you could be running your own black friday sale this time next year or you could be smashing it out of the park, smashing all-time records.

16:37So don't miss out. This deal closes soon. Start building your business today at founder.com forward slash plus. That's P-L-U-S or click the link in the show notes. All right, now let's jump back in the show. I think like one of the key things though, just quickly to flag there because 30 does, you know, it is a sizable number. It's great because you are going to create like, you know, a big enough splash with the campaign. you're going to be able to find some top performing influencers that then you can re-collaborate with ongoing so say you find 10 out of those 30 that worked really well for your brand you can put them on two to three month retainers for your brand and that's where you really start to see sort of the compounding effect of influencer marketing then say from that point you collaborate with 20 to 30 influencers ongoing and you're always finding 10 5 to 10 new top performers a month, you're adding five to 10 into that group that are going to, you know, consistently drive results over time while you're also testing the others at the same time.

17:39So we're always testing new collaborations and then focusing in on our brief collaborations. And when we're testing new collaborations, the best way to kind of go about that is a product for post campaign. So just seeing who is willing to accept your product in return for gifting. and the best way to do that is through stories now on Instagram. So just stories only, a lot more influencers of a lot higher quality are much more likely to accept your product just in return for gifting, just for stories. If you try to do a feed post in return for product for post, depending on like really depends on the retail value of your product as well.

18:19But if you do try to do that, you'll just get, you may get some people by it. you'll need to do a lot more outreach to convert them into like a send out or a collaboration, but the quality will be lower. You can get really high quality people still just for gifting with stories. And at the end of the day, we find stories the best way to test conversions as well, because the two main metrics that we're tracking for are conversions through their personalized discount code. So say it's Greta10 for$10 off and 20 people use that code, you can track the sales for your brand. And the other best metric is that cost per click.

19:00So cost per sticker tap in the stories. And we ask for those insights after the campaign. So we'd be aiming for under like a$2 cost per click basically to then re-collaborate with that influencer a lot of the time. I mean, again, of course, depends on the product price and the conversion through from your website as well. But under a$2 cost per click is pretty good in this space because it's not the same cost. I mean, it's not the same type of click or quality of click as a Facebook ad, for example. Like you might be like, oh, I get like a 50 cent cost per click on Facebook. But yes those people uh you know an entirely cold audience and the influencers audience are much more you know warmed up they trust this influencer they've already seen and had that recommendation on behalf of your brand and clicks through the website that lead is worth more four times more than a facebook lead yep yep makes sense and when it comes to uh influencers versus creators what is the difference is there a difference is is like people aren't called influencers anymore they're called creators is that's just that that's just the cool term now so to me a creator is somebody who you know whether they're an influencer or not creates content on your brand's behalf it just submits it directly to your brand without needing to post through to social um but an influencer is someone that has the audience as well as the content creation side yep got you and that's how we do yep and so if you were starting you'd look at a a tiered approach and well no actually you said if you were starting you would look at a micro approach right a nano and micro approach 25 to 30 for your pre-launch and do gifting stories only if and but if you could you try and get feed posts if you could but probably unlikely what's if you can Yeah.

21:01It's better leading in with stories though, than asking for a feed post and then seeing, you know, if they really love the product and they've done a good job. The other thing, I mean, then they might post to feed. The other thing you can do is once you see that that story converted instantly on the spot, you can then pay them to do a feed post as well. They've already got your product that already worked as a story. It's just a great kind of introduction piece before, you know, adding that paid element to the campaign. Yeah. And then the next question is how do you identify? How are you identifying like really solid influences with the highest chance that their post will generate into great, not only just great content, because that's a lesson that I've learned from you as well.

21:44It's not just about making the money straight away. It's about the content that you get and actually reposting that content, resharing that content, using that content and ads. but how do you identify? From a content perspective and also a conversions perspective, it's somebody who is quite familiar with direct-to-camera selling. So they might go, you know, they might do a lot of like just storytelling in their stories, like on Instagram, for example, direct-to-camera, you know, with their face in the frame, speaking to the camera, persuading their audience to take a certain action. So like that is a big one when it comes to like the content sort of side, you can go through their highlights and see whether they do that.

22:28You can see whether any of their feed posts are along those lines as well. That's that content and conversion sort of piece. But the three things that we sort of look for are like our three R's. So reach, relevancy and relationship. So reach would be their, they're, you know, they're following, like I spoke about before, the different tiers of influences. And nano and micro influences often have like a much higher engagement rate than mid-tier or macro influences at the end of the day. Their relevancy is what I was speaking about. And also with that niche based approach, like how relevant they are to your brand, how aligned they are to your brand, how, you know, much of their audience is your target audience.

23:13If you're ever paying for collaboration there's a couple of things that I would be asking of influencers I would be asking for sticker taps in recent story collaborations for example on paid partnerships not just general sticker taps because of course like a paid partnership you might get less than you know just a general sticker tap and I would be asking for their audience breakdown in terms of location especially um gender as well like it's yeah gender and location because if you're only selling to australia for example and the majority of their influence the influencers followers are based in the uk that's kind of useless to your brand as well so they're a couple of like kind of key metrics that i'd be looking for there yeah and the best way you think it's just a coupon code standard coupon code or affiliate tracking link?

24:10Like how do you, yeah. We do a blend. We do, we do like UTM tracking links. So either by Google analytics or like a, you know, link tracking site like Bitly. We do the individualized discount codes. Doesn't always have to be a discount. If your brand doesn't usually discount, it might be free shipping. It might be a free gift with purchase. It doesn't have to just be a discount code. It's just an incentive to use that code so that you're able to attribute that sale. Another thing then, yeah, that we do is that cost per click analysis through their insights after the campaign for tracking. And then another really good one is post-purchase surveys.

24:54So just having a Shopify app installed where it pops up and says, how did you find out about us? And they can select the way that they heard like Facebook ad, whatever else the hard thing in the post-purchase surveys that you need to remember is they may not attribute it to an influencer they might be like oh yeah i saw your ad back then but then you know it's difficult because they might have had multiple touch points and they don't know where to attribute it in that touch point yep okay and then what about negotiation what's your take there right how do you negotiate with influencers sometimes i guess they might have an inflated sense of worth or value like how do you work out all that side of things yeah of course I mean like the key kind of levers in negotiation are like what you're asking for and what they're you know charging for that of course so like what you're asking for in terms of like deliverables like you might have asked for a lot in terms of deliverables you might have gone in pretty hard and been like I want you know one to two feed posts and I want three story sets like the easiest way to start to get that down then is of course you know reducing the deliverables as well the other thing is just going back and saying we you know we don't have the budget for that right now would you be comfortable with this um that works a lot of the time uh influences of course like are used to brands going back to them with a lower amount i think a lot of the time they do you know add 30 to 50 percent on top of what their usual kind of rates would be because they know a brand going to try to talk them down.

26:31So say they quoted$1 ,000, I'd be hoping to get that for between $500 to$700. Yeah. Okay. And then that's great. And then last question around just influencer marketing. Do you have any crazy stories or what's the best story that you could share with us on like a successful influencer partnership? Can you give us an example? Yeah. So for one of our clients, we generated a million dollars in attributed revenue in a single month and that was through twitch streamers actually on twitch so gamers as well so we sent out to i think it was 300 um micro twitch influences in a single month and we got a million dollars in attributed revenue from those 300 send outs so they were all gifted wow that's crazy can Can you tell us, like give us an indication of what the product was?

27:26The product was in the wearable space. Okay. Okay. So it's like loungewear or something, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Awesome. That's crazy. All right. So we have to work towards wrapping up. We're going to move to the hot seat round. Rapid fire questions and answers. Let's go. This is going to be easy for you. What e-commerce tools do you use daily in your business? Yeah. So, I mean, in Hay, for example, because we've spoken a lot about influencer marketing across the board, the two tools that we would use the most would be a tool called Mighty Scout for campaign tracking. So basically, say you're sending out to those 30 influencers and you want a tool that can automatically pull in any time that they post on your brand's behalf.

28:14You'd go through and say you'd tag the influencers names like Greta, Nathan, whoever. and anytime that they post on your brand it will automatically pull that post into the platform and track the key metrics of the post so kind of like the estimated reach of that post the engagements on that post um you know like how many comments how many likes that sort of side and you've always got that content there as well to be able to download on your brand's behalf the other main tool that we use um and i know you've used this in the past nate with healthish I believe, is Woodpecker. So that's a tool that you can send out to influencers and you can set up automatic follow-ups and it will continue following up with them via email until they respond to your email.

29:03So it's kind of like usually used in like cold calls and sales, but we use it for influencers. Yeah, that's a good one. What's the biggest challenge you're facing when it comes to influencer marketing right now or the e-commerce space? Yeah, I mean, I think the influencer marketing wise rate inflation is a difficult one because a lot of creators and a lot of really small creators, a lot of the time are seeing the content that's, you know, around creative rights and things on platforms like TikTok. And they think that's necessarily applicable to them at the very start of their journey. When you're first starting out in any industry, it's like how you need to go and do an internship at a brand to potentially get into, you know, the marketing space as a whole.

29:45once you finish uni. You need like your foot in the door there. That's the same with influencers. They don't have, you know, any past brand results to be able to show and they're trying to charge, we got back rates the other day,$1 ,800 for 1 ,800 followers. And we're like, we're not able, you know, to do anything near that. We could do X. And they were like, no, no, this is my full-time job. And we're like, okay, we'll have to keep moving on. So yeah, there's greater expectations. And then there's, you know, sometimes some sort of like inflated sense of worth in that, like that's just not going to be commercially viable for a brand.

30:27All right. So last question, what is the best piece of advice that you would give to people hoping to start an e-commerce business or the one thing you wish you knew before you started? Yeah. I mean, I really love this quote by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. amongst other things, that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you've launched too late. I think like that was the beauty of like my starting journey. We did start so scrappy. I had, I didn't even have a logo. I kind of typed out SMT on Microsoft Word and put like a little love heart and like we barely had a website.

31:07I scraped it together in one day. It was definitely embarrassing. So, I mean, I think a lot of the time people get very much in their own head thinking they've got to have this perfect logo, this perfect website, like this perfect packaging and branding experience. But like, if you can hack something together and get it out there, you're going to create so many more learnings just by having something live and by taking action, then you're going to create like thinking and planning. Yeah, I love that. And look, we've all been there, right? We've all started from somewhere. And I think that is such a true quote like when i first started founder the first uh magazine edition on the front cover we had a super superman photo it wasn't even a successful person so there you go so thank you so much gretta it was an absolute pleasure i reckon this has probably been our 15th interview we've done together maybe yeah easily i would say always a pleasure thank you so much thanks nate as always perfect if you love this episode make sure to check out my interview with Emma Greed on how solving a problem she was so passionate about led to the creation of Skims and Good American.

32:15And so I do think it's so much of it starts with like addressing things that bother you, that you find, you know, you've got to create a solution for because, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to be passionate enough and sometimes crazy enough to go round and round and round to actually solve a problem.