How Brands Can Win with Unique Content w/ Dmitri Cherner (Future Influence)

0:00I'm an influencer marketer who thinks influencers are important to brand growth, but from a content generation standpoint, I look at influencer and content creators as like the creative tip of the sphere.

0:16Hey, Dimitri, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing great, Alessandro. Really excited to be here. Absolutely. We're talking about, you know, today ROI and how to, you know, get started with influencer marketing and how to get the best out of it, how to optimize it. We're going to go into like, you know, teaching tricks and so on. So quite excited to talk with you about everything that is influencer marketing. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a bit more about yourself? We use the thing called MAP. So basically it's dividing three different, like, you know, sort of categories. There is the initial.

0:45So what do you aim to achieve with what you do? The achievements. So anything that you're really proud that you can show with us could be professionally or like just in your personal life. And then the purpose. So why do you do what you do? I've been in influencer marketing for over 10 years now. Started back when influencer marketing wasn't a term and really just, you know, working with brands and clients, I'm helping them understand really what working with influencers and at the time, mostly YouTubers really was all about. From a purpose standpoint, I really obsess with partnerships. I think that they can really drive a business forward and they're able to not only introduce your brand to new audiences, but creatively lead the pack.

1:26I think if brands are doing partnerships well, it can really stand out and drive those ROI results that everyone is looking for. And I think influencers is really the culmination of that. You're working with these partners that have these established audiences, but are ultra creative. And if you can find those right partnership balances with them, then you're really generating awareness and generating sales, but aligning your brand with a message and with a creative that allows you to, like I said, lead the pack, like get, get to the front. Fantastic. And, uh, you know, when it comes to any achievements or anything that you were like very proud of, it could be again in, uh, you said like 10 years and being diesel.

2:07So anything that you can show with AZA? So I was at the agency side for the first five years, I was running campaigns for Coca-Cola and Walmart, Wendy's, Samsung, these, these really, you know, blue chip brands really proud to for the work done on those and then i went over to the brand side built influencer programs for ruggable quince one skin proud of the fact that i could you know work across very unique verticals like that from interior design home decor to fashion apparel to skincare and also really established these programs that were scalable and effective in their goals so i'm very operational by nature i like to think through the workflows and all the different steps of how we build those programs.

2:49And so you said like, you know, 10 years, right? Plus, stuff like that, right? And they find marketing, not even call like that. I totally get you. I've been like kind of in a safe situation. Like it was getting like that name before it was word of mouth. They were like blockers, right? And everything. Definitely a different world. So let me ask you this. You know, many times sometimes brands these days, they have these sort of myths that they put$1 in and the same day they want to see$7 out, right? Thanks to influencer marketing. But we all know that it's not just that, you know, it's not programmatic, right?

3:20That it can track everything the same day. The user is totally different. So for any brands out there that might be either skeptical or a bit, you know, still they're trying to understand influencer marketing. Why don't you go a bit through like, you know, what is happening these days? How can you really still get the best out of it with influencer rates that are going up? The market is more saturated than ever. And again, a lot of brands are expecting a direct, ROI or ARS on a campaign? And sometimes that doesn't happen the same day. Maybe sometimes you see three months from that moment. So how would you approach that?

3:53Yeah. I've been having a lot of conversations recently with CMOs and CEOs and founders, and just generally brand leaders about better establishing expectations as it relates to influencer marketing. I think when I first started the program at Ruggable in 2019, I was able to generate a lot of product exchange collabs. At that time, people were just more willing to do things in exchange for product. I think it wasn't as mature of a market. And in 2024, you can still do those partnerships, but they're much fewer and far between. And they're mostly with the nano and micro creators that won't really move at all.

4:31So what I have kind of started to educate on the strategy of influencers, really building around influencer marketing being an investment channel, just like partnerships and more broadly, like this is a thing that requires unique outreach, response, communication, negotiation, contracting, ideally unique creative briefs, and then approving the content, seeing it go live, tracking those results. none of that is programmatic you know all of these things they can get they can be streamlined and they can be made more efficient and there are platforms that help to do that but because there's no standardization in influencer marketing you could reach out to five people with the exact same reach and engagement in the same category and get five different completely completely different rates and so you need someone with the experience being able to do that math of saying like all What makes sense for us?

5:30What are we willing to pay based on our CPA goals, based on the ROI that we're aiming for? And not only that, but if you're entering a market now as a brand and saying, we want to develop an influencer strategy, no one has heard of you before. so you shouldn't expect some influencers to talk about your brand and suddenly see this huge skyrocket in sales what you should expect is people as they're scrolling to go view that content and go oh that's kind of interesting maybe i'll check it out and then they continue on scrolling and so then trying to just better establish the expectation that like it's an investment channel what i say is a minimum of six months investment with an always-on program before you can expect to see results start to compound, where six months in market, now you've started to get your brand name out there.

6:23People have started to see your partnerships. You're focusing on only one or maybe two verticals. And now people know who you are. So then as your program continues, you start to get more sales and your program starts to become more effective. The way I counterbalance that investment, because obviously nobody wants to hear, way I have to pay influencers and like develop this program and hire somebody to do it or hire an agency to do it for six months or I'm expecting to see like positive ROI results is through content licensing. So we, we largely know that UGC influencer content outperforms everything else on paid social.

7:00So what I am kind of using as an analogy is this, these kind of like balancing scales of an investment in influencer marketing, which is heavy and long-term and really more top of funnel at the start with something that's a lot more scalable, programmatic. You can easily ramp up a piece of content and create an asset that does really well and use that as attribution for investment of the influencer channel. That way you can really say it's worth it to invest in influencers because we know that that channel works. We know it can drive good business results for us. And we know that we want to be relevant in the social zeitgeist of what people care about, which is on these platforms.

7:52But we want to see business results. So how do we get these assets, this content into our paid social or paid media funnel, as well as obviously on the site, in your retention, email and SMS, using these testimonials and reviews on PDPs to really say like, all right, we're seeing increased conversion. We're seeing better performance in our paid media. Now we're comfortable continuing to invest in the channel that originally sourced that content influencer while also still trying to drive business results through the organic posting of these influencers so that's my pitch these days essentially is like you have to invest it will take time you will not see media results the way that you can see media results is through the content licensing of those partnerships i'm also curious to know what you think about the type of content that these days might work because uh we already said that before right like people are and i'm a bit tired right now you know to see a lot of influencer promoted posts that there is a lot of plug of like you know products within the new tiktok shop like you know clickable badges and everything so how do you make a content for an influencer that you don't want to skip and something actually that can either be watched multiple times or something that is going to bring you to an action like are you noticing any videos are working better these days for for brands so yeah i think it really depends on the category obviously with my experience in home decor and interior design, I think everyone sees this, a lot of different types of beautiful aesthetics and the content there is really around showing how styling something or adding this piece can change the overall look of your home.

9:33And there's a link in my bio or like link to my LTK store or something that makes that purchasing process really easily. And so it's, it's very much like envisioning this thing in your home that could spruce it out in the parenting category that goes absolutely bonkers like anything every myself as a parent i'm constantly looking at ways that would like you make the tantrums a little bit less or toys that my kids would be obsessed with or things that make traveling with kids a little bit easier and the solutions there are a thousand fold, but it's the influencer content that again, really shows from an envisioning standpoint, here's how this can make your life a little bit easier.

10:18So really tying it to the results, I think creatively is, is what is often missed. It's like you see in beauty and skincare. I think a lot was like, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, or like working with a lot of influencers, if you're a new product to market and you're working, you're trying to see if they can incorporate the product in their regiment or whatever, they end up just going with a lot of like skincare routines, morning routine, nighttime routine. And that content is like so oversaturated. Like nobody cares about your nighttime routine anymore. And so I nixed it.

10:50I was like, we're not doing routines anymore. That's not standing out. I'm sorry. You're going to have to be more creative. Ultimately, I think it's kind of twofold. The first is show the results of this thing. How does it actually like solve the problem? And then two, that envisioning aesthetic of like, if something is on your body in the form of clothes or in your home form of a rug or a planter or a couch or something, really showing how it can like upscale or like drive towards what you would ideally want in your own home or in your own life, I think is the content that's really standing out.

11:28Hello! Is your brand ready to amplify its reach? Well, the Influencer Marketing Factory is here to do just that. We are a global influencer marketing agency helping brands ignite their growth from influencer identification to campaign strategy, handling legalities and agreements to managing shipping and logistics. We have it all covered. We work with hundreds of brands across different verticals from Fortune 500 companies to DTC brands. And we don't just stop there. With detailed ROI analysis, we help brands like yours measure success, transforming impressions into actionable conversions. You can find us at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com or just search the Influencer Marketing Factory on Google.

12:09Fantastic. Thank you for that, Ian. Especially when it's something that's very relatable, as I said before, if you have a family, you're like, hey, this is helping me and I'll also help you out and everything. I know that a lot of these videos are very authentic because it's kind of bad word in our world these days, but it's something that you can relate absolutely to. And sometimes I notice that some of those videos that are not really polished, they work so well because it's like okay like you know i'm seeing that you're telling me like you know part of your story there's also my story somehow i relate with you yeah you know just because you know again as you said maybe if these things can help me somehow for my day let's try you know and a lot of items on on tiktok shops and instagram they're not that expensive so many times you just put it in the cart you buy you know like maybe ten dollars twenty dollars so it's that easy right especially with the heavy carry formation already there frictionless experience.

12:59So I understand you on that. I also could ask you something else. So we talk about the content, but I want to do a step back when we talk about how to find also influencers and why we shouldn't expect necessarily sales from all of them, right? And I saw one of your posts on LinkedIn that is this key strategy, the four-lane highway of influencer and creator value. Can you tell me a bit more like what it is, first of all, and how can that be applied for brands? It was originally developed because we were working with a lot of different, we were testing a lot of different influencers across different verticals, across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and our goal is performance.

13:41So ultimately, if they didn't drive the ROI that we were looking for, the CPA that we were looking for, we just moved on. But what I was noticing was like, there was a lot of really great partners, people that actually were obsessed with the brand who spoke well about the brand and whose content was really strong that didn't necessarily drive sales in their organic content. And so again, from a partnership standpoint, I was thinking, you know, if we're choosing to partner to somebody, it's for a reason. Either they align with our audience or they match our aesthetic, or we think that, you know, obviously they can drive sales.

14:14However, if they don't drive the sales you're looking for to then toss them in the trash and move on, I think is wasted effort. I think a lot about efficiency and workflow and to find new influencers and constantly be testing them is a large lift, it's a high lift. So if we can find a way to continue working with those tested influencers in more unique and different capacities, then we can take better advantage of all the different ways that these answers provide value. So very much like how do we get as much juice out of the squeeze as possible? And so the four lane highway that I kind of developed was like everyone that goes through our testing funnel partnerships gets largely majority judged from a performance standpoint.

15:02If they drive the performance we're looking for, fantastic. Let's continue working with you on a performance basis. this, let's extend the link to the partnership and then talk about different things, the product or brand that we didn't originally talk about in the first go. So it could be a secondary product. It could be more features and benefits. It could be a new product launch, lots of different stuff. The next one is content. So if somebody doesn't necessarily drive great results in organic channels, but we feel like it couldn't work in paid media, they would then go into the content lane.

15:37And so from there, we think about how do we approach a more specific visual that we're wanting to achieve that we think could do really well in paid media. And that obviously is driven by a lot of AP testing on paid media. But we often, like with Ruggable specifically, we would be getting content back. And so much of the time, like 90 % of the time, we'd be like, oh, I wish the angle was a little bit higher. Or like, I wish that they had just scooted over a little bit because that chair is kind of ugly and it's ruining the shop or like whatever you know so we started working with creators much more structured and specific you know we would start to we actually developed an entire program had dedicated like employees to this program we called it the influencer production program because that's really how we thought it was like influencers are outsourced production studio so we're going to send them a specific design that is doing well that we want to you know run ads with or something we're going to put ask them to put it in this room We're going to shoot it from that angle.

16:37We want the style this way and be really specific with our wants and needs so that we could generate a lot more assets at scale than a traditional photo shoot and then get those in the hands of our acquisition team and our branding team, our e-com team, and start to test them all anywhere we could. And that drove a ton of success from how it was going organically, which was really well, to then doing a much more structured approach was leaps and bounds better from a performance standpoint. Now, after that was our awareness lane, which is essentially if we can find people that didn't necessarily drive great performance, their content wasn't standout or really exceptional, but they had a high reach at a low cost.

17:23So like the CPMs made sense, then they would become our awareness partners. And so we would use them for tentpole moments, sales announcements, new product launches, and really just trying to get a lot of buzz, generate a lot of interest, get a lot of awareness on this specific thing that typically we would just create a lot of graphic design assets for and balance with paid media or other like raw marketing channels. And so that was that lane, essentially. It was just like, we can get a large, a bigger megaphone for a relatively low cost. And that's what these ambassadors are for. And then the last one is basically affiliate.

18:06So they didn't drive great performance. Their content wasn't exceptional. They didn't have super high reach, but they love the brand. Brand loyalists, essentially. So let's put a commission link in their hands. Let's continue to gamify and incentivize them. Let's think about different rewards we can offer for these types of programs. And it was essentially an ambassador program. Like you didn't drive really any of the core things that we're looking for, but you love the brand. We want to have a relationship with you. You have an audience. So how do we continue to maintain the relationship? How do we continue to incentivize you to share that commission link as your audience grows and builds and you or your content diversifies, you are able to still take advantage of that from a business, but more importantly, keep a strong relationship with the people that are watching you the most.

18:58Those brand loyalists who are actually opening your brand emails after they purchase and who are really excited about new launches and are having higher LTV. It just doesn't make any sense to ignore that group of people when they are so, so important to your continued business growth, like foundational status. You need all of them, right? So this was very insightful. Yeah. Because too many times, you know, you read about influencers or creators, but then you don't really go in detail about, okay, this was more like not for brand awareness. This was for like, again, the concept and behind using like non-loyal funds, because they are the ones, as you said, they might not be professionals, but they love your brand.

19:41They're already doing something for free. and they are actually really authentic about that, you know, because they can love it or hate it and they're not paid for that, right? So they're going to, you really should read like, know those feedback from those people because they're the ones that are really not with your brand. And so we covered, right? The type of impressors, right? We covered before the type of content that couldn't work. Let's say that now a brand marketer, writer is listening. Okay, I understand now there are like different type of impressors that, you know, depending on what I want to achieve, I can either use some of those or a mix of them.

20:13I understand now the type of content that should work, the rate side, the new share, like we cover all of that. What else, which other advice would you give to brands that want to kickstart their influencer marketing? Is there anything that works for you? I know that like some brands are working these days on gamification, some others are with affiliate marketing. What do you like usually to recommend? I know that it depends by the industry, but overall. The advice I would have is just because of the stage that influencers usually brought, and it's typically at a little bit of a later stage once your paid social channels are stood up, once your retention strategy is stood up, once you have production, whether that's via in-house or from an agency, then I'm like, all right, cool.

20:55Now let's be relevant on social. And I think it's backwards. A lot of brands are doing it a very old fashioned way. And there's there's some brands that did this successfully. And those are the brands that you hear about as being the success stories on TikTok, for example, like the people who are investing and ceding to TikTokers in 2018 and 2019. And then by 2021, everyone's like, wow, I can't believe they've built this really amazing brand and their social strategy is so on point. It's because they were investing in that channel before anybody was paying attention. And so not just from, I'm an influencer marketer who thinks influencers are important to brand growth, but from a content generation standpoint, I look at influencer and content creators as like the creative tip of the sphere.

21:45It's the thing that you should first go with to drive the most effective results at scale. And yes, it does require manual resources. It does require somebody with strength in negotiation and understanding what content works and what doesn't and what you want your brain to focus on. Because it might be your core bestselling product. It might be new product launches. It might be awareness. It might be performance. It might be DTC. It might be retail. But influencers have a flexibility to drive results in all of those aspects. And so I really look at that as being the best advice I could give is like, stop going with this really traditional route of like, I have a brand, I have a product now I'm online.

22:32Now I need to get professional photos made and then I can start to run those. And then finally like, okay, we keep hearing about influencers becoming more mainstream. Now let's have somebody like start to do that. And by the way, I mentioned this recently on LinkedIn as well. Like I'm just going to hire one person and I'm going to expect them to like manage partnerships, manage a platform, work with organic social, get content licensing. It's becoming finally a bit more common on organic social that one person cannot effectively manage Instagram and TikTok and your Facebook, you know, like all of these things.

23:08And so it's very much the same from influencer as well. You need the resources to be able to do this and do it well, simply because every influencer is different. Every email you have is going to be unique. You know, you can templatize your outreach email and that's pretty much it. But like the results speak for themselves. We know how much better this content performs than in paid media, how much better it improves conversion rates on you. Still, it's being thought of as like the secondary thing instead of the primary. I know. And I also know what I mean when I say that it's like, no time consuming and everything, because we know that the same many brands come to us, maybe.

23:45And they realize after a while that they can't do that in-house, you know, scaling up a program can be time consuming. You need to know how to negotiate privacy. You need to know everything about the scope of work and the latest things about the algorithm, how to manage paid ads, how to manage relationships with influencers. What about, you know, the agent that is like not managing someone? So I totally understand that. And why a lot of brands, I think that a few years ago, we were like, we can do it in the house. And then they're arising. I need an agency, I need a consultant, I need someone that, and if you want to do it in the house, it's not anymore one person.

24:17It's like a team of people. So yeah, and with that said, last question for you that I ask everyone on the podcast when it comes to the first marketing, how do you envision the future of it? I really think that it comes down largely to creative differentiation. You know, I think the future of the creator economy is going to continue to diversify. It's going to continue to splinter as it becomes more mainstream. And because it's so saturated and generally there's a lot of influencer achieve where like people know what a sponsored post is at this point. They know that they're probably not going to be interested in this.

24:55Keep on scrolling. And like the thing that stops somebody scrolling is good creative. It's actually something that, again, gets back to what we were talking about, like solving a problem in your life or giving you the opportunity to envision something that you want to aspire. And so ultimately that as has been the case on TV and radio and the podcast and like every other channel throughout time, as they get more mature and more saturated, the thing that stands out will be creative. And so I think there will come a time where, like I said, with the skincare routines, you know, for beauty brands, like nobody, beauty brands should be interested in the skincare routine more because it's not going to move the needle.

25:36It's not going to get creative. That will get anybody to be like, oh, wow, this is a sponsored post about a nighttime skincare routine. And I definitely think this is authentic, even though it's sponsored, like it's all gone. It's done. So don't do that anymore. Start to actually test and take risks and think about what will actually get people to stop scrolling. That's really the biggest thing. And I hope really as the creator economy continues to go is that more brands are thinking about this from a creative element and saying like, yes, creator, influencer, we want to give you the flexibility to do what works best for your audience.

26:15but also don't just do the same thing as everybody. Give me something that I can get excited about, that I can get excited about working with you on an ongoing basis about. It just works better for both sides. So I hope and envision that that's where we continue to evolve because these people are super creative. I think just sometimes that brands can be a little too restrictive or they might be having a lot going on in their lives. And they're like, I'm just going to put in the basic, basic and just get this done. and it's to the detriment of everyone in the industry. I agree. I think that after these years of sort of copy-pasting each other's either style, formats, challenges, and so on, I think that we're still going to go more to the critic side again, you know, where you want to create something that's unique because as you correctly said, there is so much competition that once you watch 10 videos about the same thing, you might just crawl away.

27:10So it totally makes sense. Dimitri, thank you so much for, you know, sharing all your knowledge with us. I can see that you've been there for a long time in the industry and you've great changing. So thank you for sharing everything with us today. Yeah, it's been a pleasure and thank you so much for having me. Of course. This was the Infest Factor by the Infest and Marketing Factory and I'll see you next week.