Right About Now with Ryan Alford - How Brands Turn Customers Into Their Best Marketers | Luke Yarnton

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Luke Yarnton joins Ryan Alford to discuss why the future of influencer marketing belongs to customers—not celebrities. As co-founder of The Rave, Luke shares how brands are identifying influential customers already purchasing their products and turning them into long-term ambassadors through authentic relationships and community building.  Ryan and Luke explore how micro and nano influencers outperform traditional celebrity campaigns, why trust matters more than follower count, and how affiliate marketing, referrals, and customer communities are reshaping brand growth. The conversation also covers practical strategies businesses can use to activate existing customers and create sustainable word-of-mouth marketing.  Topics Covered The evolution of influencer marketing Ambassador marketing Customer advocacy Micro and nano influencers Affiliate marketing Community building Referral strategies Authentic brand partnerships Customer acquisition Ryan Alford and Luke Yarnton discuss modern marketing

I'm going to find the biggest influencer that 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. Whereas now, if you go down that follow account tree, these micro-influences and nano-influences 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.

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewrite. It 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. 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 influence or marketing to grow their business and to grow the awareness of whatever they're doing. That's why, hey, we go to the source. Luke, Jarnton, 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. We get a lot of requests and I was looking at your stuff. I'm on a soapbox here recently.

with influencer marketing, both internally and externally with my companies, about how to leverage it. You know, this will be an education course for me. I think I know most of it, but I don't know at all. Your audience can learn a lot from it. I 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, right? I think it's going to be a fun chat. What has been the change? At its core when you hear influencer marketing. 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. Why don't you kind of start down that path for us? 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 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. Whereas now if you go down that follow account tree, these micro-influences and nano-influences 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. It's more about creating this always on Ambassador Army, where you've got a group of people who 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. The micro-influencer I hear a lot, though.

Now we got the nano-influencer. Yeah. How many followers does the nano-influencer have versus the micro-influencer? There's no scientific agreed consensus on what, how to classify them. But we say, nano is sort of, we're saying between 2,500, 10,000 and then 10,000 to 50,000 is where we'd probably call that micro. 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,

I'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 I 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 influences that end up in these campaigns that turn out to be absolute duds. So, and we'll lean into that nano and micro end of the scale today. I'm out.

I got 200 and something. I've built it for 15 years. Eight years were the number one show. I needed to slow down. I'm becoming irrelevant because my following is growing. Who knew? There are still uses for these larger influences in specific cases, but it's not the only influences you should care about have more than 100,000 followers anymore.

It's about finding the right fit for your brand for whatever you're trying to achieve with your influencer market. Well, over time, everything gets improved. You learn from the targeting and gets more targeted. That's what we're doing instead of painting with a wide brush or getting Kardashian to talk about something that may or may not be that related. And it's great to get to reach, 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? Through COVID time, I tried my hand being an influencer. I produced 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 Peter and Serum feed. Set to some music. There'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. 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. 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. Like, if I had one of the coffee brands I was talking about in my low quality coffee videos come to me and say, hey, would love to partner. I would do that in an instant. If you're like me, you probably spend a lot of time paying attention to what's happening in the world. Markets, business, crypto, interest rates, sports, politics, all of it. I'm always looking

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