Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: Influencer Marketing with Popular Pays

Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, if there is a hidden gem among marketers these days, it's got to be the role of influencer marketing. These creators earn thousands of followers who will take their advice. That's gold for a marketer looking to introduce their brand to a new group. But finding those creators, negotiating with them, getting approvals, tracking the results — until now, that's all been a mess of spreadsheets and to-do lists and, let's face it, dropped balls. There is a better way, of course, and some services are starting to emerge to make that

Starting point is 00:00:34 process easier. Today, in this paid partnership, we are exploring the influencer marketing space with Popular Pays, a full-service influencer marketing platform that takes brands from finding the right creators right through to seeing how your campaigns performed. If you want to check it out while you're listening, just go to popularpays.com slash podcast. Corbett Drummy is a co-founder of Popular Pays, and he joins me now from his office in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Hello. Hey, Todd. So your parent company, I noticed, has some good pedigree. It is the company behind the Facetune app, which is incredibly popular. Yes. Yeah. So Popular Pays actually started over 10 years ago in Chicago as a small tech startup. But two years ago, we were acquired by Lightrix, who makes this suite of content creation services and apps. But the most popular one that people know of under that umbrella is Facetune.

Starting point is 00:01:28 And it's been great being a small startup joining this much larger organization with all this product engineering and marketing resources. But yeah, we're hoping to become another really valued app and platform underneath the Lighttricks wing. You know, after we started talking about this deal and then I noticed that FacTune was in your family, I kicked myself because as a mid-50s guy

Starting point is 00:01:49 with a TikTok account, I'm like, why didn't I just negotiate like a lifetime account for FaceTune? So I'm still interested if we can put that together. But we'll see where the interview goes and maybe we'll give you one after. Fair enough. So I want to talk about the influencer marketing space

Starting point is 00:02:04 for marketers, just generally speaking. You're so deep into it. There's a ton of advice out there, some good, some brands. But can we talk about the format, first of all? Why the interest from so many brands in short form video? Yeah, short form video is really wild in the fact that it seems like in our space, every couple of years, a new format takes over. And each one is more engaging than the last. And the most recent of which is short form video in our space, which, you know, really took off with TikTok, especially during the pandemic. We saw it as early as Vine. But I think the big difference is with AI and algorithms that serve as the very best content,

Starting point is 00:02:46 it has just become like the most addicting content format. So it's been a learning curve for folks. And but now it's been dominating most of the platform and a lot of the and definitely is a lot of the work we do. But yeah, it's it is just a new beast in the sense that it's not, you know, it's not followers based, it's really it's really content driven and interest based sense that it's not, you know, it's not followers based. It's really, it's really content driven and interest based. So it's been different for brands to adopt. And, but when they do, they see a lot of good results from it. And is it, is it just Gen Z or Gen Z as Americans would say that is sort of picking it up? I mean, definitely it starts there. It's just like a long time ago with Facebook,

Starting point is 00:03:23 it started with college students and these, these networks go through these cycles of the early adopters, usually younger folks that have some more time on their hands, things like that. And then eventually it trickles up all the way to, you know, folks in the middle and then the parents of the generation, current generation. But what's been really interesting is TikTok with its algorithm, content finds the right audience. And even like anyone who joins, who looks at Reels or TikTok, with its algorithm, content finds the right audience. And even like anyone who joins, who looks at Reels or TikTok, they tend to find content they like. And it has been really fast growing with, for example, even the baby boomer generation. There's like 50% more folks in that demographic on the platform than there was like two years ago.

Starting point is 00:04:04 So it's like really rapidly growing amongst that demographic. So it's not just Gen Z's, it's kind of everyone now. You know, we cover on the show a lot of stuff around the creator economy, influencer marketing, and sometimes it feels that like every other marketing, all like all of your competitors are diving deep into influencer marketing. Give me a fact check on this. Like how widespread really is the use of influencer marketing in ad campaigns? It is almost, I feel like it's almost universal, especially with B2C companies. It's funny because when we started this a decade ago, we had to convince people on why they should try it. And influencer marketing was this weird, you know, experimental line item. I think at the time the industry was $1 billion and we thought that was big,

Starting point is 00:04:45 but today it's about like 24 billion. So it's just grown to this point where almost every B2C company uses it as a very primary channel, almost as if like 10 years ago, you'd have, you know, TV and digital, et cetera. And then now it's, you know, you have your paid social, but an organic social, but influencer marketing is just as big of a focus for most B2C companies, I'd say. Corbett, without using the phrase, it depends, tell me how much it costs to hire an influencer on average. Don't do it.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Don't do it. I was trying to think of some synonyms for depends. It varies. So the most specific I can do is to kind of go through the typical things you see in the platform. So let's just say you're producing, whether it's static assets like a photo or videos, you know, driving it up would be if you're working with a creator who's also posting and not just giving you the content. And if they're a big influencer, that starts to drive the cost up a lot. But if it's just content, it can be really, really efficient. And one of the things that you could do to lower the cost of that average price would be if you have a product to give, gifting the product can be a really great way to make that even more efficient. I would say even if you have like this cool product

Starting point is 00:06:09 that's about, you know, $100, like some normal consumer product, I would still offer a small payment just because, you know, even if you're just bootstrapping and getting started, just because that additional incentive at the end of a gig can be a good forcing function for someone to actually, you know, prioritize that task, complete it, and then get that payment at the end. But if you just, you know, some brands get by with just product gifting only, it's possible too. But yeah, I'd say typically a couple thousand for a video and a couple hundred for photos. You know, I hadn't considered the distinction until you mentioned it of a creator or an influencer posting it on their own page versus

Starting point is 00:06:42 them just creating the asset for you and sending you the asset and then not actually posting it on their page. Is there a name for that? Does that happen a lot? I mean, we just, on our platform, they're classified as content-only gigs. And honestly, I think it's about like 40% of our work. So it's a surprising amount. And it's grown over the years.

Starting point is 00:07:02 I would say brands use it typically for two major purposes. One is for populating their own feeds. So for example, I got to feed my feed on Instagram or my website. And then another one is these assets can be really good kernels to build ad units off of. So I think my favorite content strategy for any brand is to hire a couple dozen, you know, creators and influencers for producing kind of regular social media content. You can repurpose that in your own feed, their posts, active influencer marketing, but then you can take the ones that do pretty well and kind of cut them up into different ad

Starting point is 00:07:39 variations. And that way you kind of in one process you're fulfilling your organic content requirements you're getting some influence in marketing and then you're cutting down some good assets for boosting as paid ad units so it's a really like full cycle it can be a full cycle process to like solve content for you i guess i shouldn't be surprised because you know i remember like 15 years ago when user generated content became kind of a thing and there were entire sass platforms that erupted for marketers that were, I mean, they were more contest based, you know, it was sort of like, you know, post something to Instagram with this hashtag. And then by doing so, you have given us permission to use those assets in our, so I guess it just sort of evolved.

Starting point is 00:08:16 So I want to talk about the platform that you folks have in just a second. But I just want to get to the nitty gritty of, from a marketer's point of view, from a, from a brand manager's point of view. So I hire someone, I get the assets from them. What do I get in terms of rights to use those assets? It's a, it's an important thing to talk about too. On our platform, when you are working with creators, you can specify that in the, there's like a default setting, but you can specify rights language in the brief when creators were, are applying to it. And I'd say typically the average thing we see is brands are giving or getting, you know, let's call it like 12 months of, of rights to use it in social and digital formats. So I could use it on my Instagram feed,

Starting point is 00:08:59 on my website as a paid ad unit. Some brands ask for rights in perpetuity or even rights, like we've had brands use content. Some major brands use content on everywhere from, you know, Superbowl commercials to Amazon storefronts, like everywhere, billboards on Times Square. And so you can use these assets anywhere, but the more rights you ask for, the more creators will charge. And I would still, one thing I would really encourage brands to think about is the half-life on social is so short. Like we're talking minutes on TikTok and hours on Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest and things are longer, but it's so short that you don't really need rights forever. It's not like you have to take these assets down once they're posted, but you, in terms of, you're not going to take something that's five years old and repost it both because your brand has moved on the environment and the, the, like

Starting point is 00:09:49 the content landscape has moved on, but some brands still want the rights to be able to, to chop up that asset and use it in various ways in the future. And you can do that if you want, you can say, look, I need the rights in perpetuity just to make my life easier. What do you mean by the half-life is minutes on TikTok? It is minutes. I think what's, this is one of the things that surprise people the most, but the average video is like zero to two minutes. It's like, I don't understand. Like that's where they get the most views is zero to two minutes. Well, it's also like one. So this is getting back to that topic of, of short form video being really different. The two mindset

Starting point is 00:10:22 shifts, I think for most brands that's hard to adopt is with short form video, really different. The two mindset shifts, I think for most brands, that's hard to adopt is with short form video, like TikTok and reels, you need to treat content like a portfolio in the sense that most things won't work. And we're used to marketers of like saying, look, I don't want to post something, you know, 10 times a day on my feed, because I'm going to just like annoy my followers. But these are interest basedbased, you know, algorithm-driven things where you post 10 things in a day, they're going to be seen by different people for the first time all over the world. And it's really rare that, you know, you'd get, you'd spam followers with that. It's like the algorithm kind of takes care of the reach. And so brands both need to post more to get more chances to be lucky. And, but also most things won't work. And then there's

Starting point is 00:11:05 a small amount that do. It's kind of like in, in life, you, you have all of these power law curves where 20% of the inputs drive 80% of the outputs. And similar to that, if you post 50 times on TikTok, like two videos will make up almost all of your views and most of them will fail. And so that's just something, it's just a mindset shift you have to get used to. But that way, you know, let's say you have a video you really believe in, you can kind of like reuse and recycle it and cut it up in different ways.

Starting point is 00:11:30 Or if something did work, you can keep like serializing that and doing it in different ways. But yeah, the wild thing is the average video just won't work and it will last like zero to two minutes and flop, you know, compared to what it might normally, compared to what it could do. But then once in a while it takes off. So it's just, you want to maximize the chance that you can get lucky basically. You know, our own TikTok account, which is I think at today in

Starting point is 00:11:52 digital marketing or today in digital, one of the two, uh, we built it to 60,000 followers within a week on the strength of one kind of shitty skit. And, uh, I haven't done a skit since, and every day we lose followers it's just been going down and down and down so 60,000 in a week is like very impressive it was crazy yeah and I I would say like that's another lesson though is a lot of brands and I still am victim to this but you know coming up in the ad agency world like my before popular pages I worked in the ad agency world and you do all this work to make it an ad you think is good and then you finally put it to market and it doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:12:30 And really you got to shift your mindset to testing and learning and just getting stuff out there. And a lot of times things that you, like you never know what's going to be successful. It's just really hard to spot winners. And so it's most important to develop like processes to develop content at a great cadence and consistently versus like bet the farm on a single post. But it's kind of like that. Like you, you

Starting point is 00:12:50 might've thought, oh, this piece of content is not really great, but it does numbers. Well then just take that concept, whatever it was, and try to make like a part two, part three, part four, and serialize it. Cause it's once you strike gold, I think the best, the best tactic is like test and learn until you get some glimmer of traction and then turn that hit into some kind of series like just do you know part two and then part three and keep it going yeah all right so i know that you folks are a tiktok content partner um i also want to talk about the popular pays platform itself though from a marketer's perspective um So when a brand logs in,

Starting point is 00:13:26 when someone who is listening to this podcast logs in for the first time, and they go to, I mean, what is the first step? Is it to find a creator? And how does it what does it look like? What is it? What how does it work? Well, it looks great. First of all, I'm biased. Well, when you log in that, so it's a really powerful platform. I mean, we've been developing it for a decade. But overall, there's a couple main platform. I mean, we've been developing it for a decade, but overall there's a couple of main buckets. One of them is searching and vetting creators. That's a main function of like searching through a community of people that have opted in.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Another is we've, it's probably where we spent the most effort is in all the collaboration tools. So you can do things like not only craft a brief, you know, an AI assisted brief in minutes to put it out to the creative community, but you can, you know, an AI-assisted brief in minutes to put it out to the creative community, but you can, you know, request revisions to content, track revision history. You can ship products to the platform. There's payment and legal built in. And there's some cool tools like, you know, negotiation tools and stuff like that that are,

Starting point is 00:14:18 there's some really deep workflows in there. Also ways to share stuff with a team. Like you can share lists of creators or content to be approved with different permissions with teams. So it's a really like heavy duty enterprise software, but really easy for small brands to do self-service as well. And then I'd say beyond like searching through a community and vetting creators with analytics on like who you should work with, the second like collaboration part,

Starting point is 00:14:40 the third main bucket is like tracking your work. So just seeing how it performed and trying to spot like what's a winner. So you can double down on that, like we talked about. Okay, I want to briefly kind of go through each of those sections that you talked about, because I think, I think, you know, the workflow is really important for things. So you said you can find creators. Does that mean like, do you have a marketplace of them where they have already come on and

Starting point is 00:15:03 they've indicated, you know, I'm interested in and then can you just like, I don't know, like search for makeup and an age range and a country and it'll give you a list? Exactly. There's over 100,000 and like in network opted in. And, you know, this partly because we're a partner with, you know, meta. So it's Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you know, Pinterest. I think we're one of the first or the only Amazon partner, for example, for content creation. But so there's all these creators with different specialties. You can both search for things they post about. You can search based on the demographics of their account or the demographics of their followers. And then you can vet the account. So you can kind of see like there's some brand safety tools around their followers and their like the health of their account. And that's a place we're continuing to develop in with some really cool stuff coming later this year because AI has made that whole

Starting point is 00:15:53 process even easier. But I think the power there is you can find who you want. And we both offer the platform as a self-serve like SaaS platform. But for our larger clients, they often opt for this managed service experience where if you're not finding something or you don't have the time, you can just tap our team to recruit for you. Mostly that's from our network, but oftentimes we get like the most strange request for a niche creator and we can go find them. So we've seen the craziest things. I mean, three or four really random filters. And usually by the way, our, our feedback would be, Hey, maybe just create some content and boost it towards that really niche audience. But sometimes

Starting point is 00:16:29 you really just need that niche creator. So you can either find them with our platform, or we have this wonderful service layer where we can help you, you know, find creators, manage the campaign and guarantee those results. I don't want to give away the secret here that you and I both know, but we are using that service. We are a client as kind of a test case. We'll talk about that a bit later. So, you know, I mean, obviously, I assume that you can see their follower count. What I care more about as a marketer are things like the engagement rate. Like, how easy is it for me to see or search by people that have got, you know, like more than X percent engagement. Is that trivial? Is it hard to do? Where does that data come from? Is it self-reported? Yeah, no, it's, it's so one, one thing that's unique about our platform too, is none of the data, all the data you get is from first party data, like as an API partner from these networks. So you can test a lot of things out there are scraped and a lot of it's wrong. And so I wouldn't trust platforms where it's

Starting point is 00:17:23 scraped because we've audited those in the past when we, before we built all the stuff we did, we looked at the market to see if we should integrate other things that are out there, but they're not accurate. We compared them with the data we're getting back from the networks themselves, and they were totally wrong in a lot of cases. So I think the first party data is a really important part,

Starting point is 00:17:41 but you can search by these things. And I agree, followers isn't as big of a deal as like, how many people are actually seeing the post? How many people are engaging with it? And in general, even deeper than that, I would encourage marketers to like, work, try working with a roster of people, see how it does, and then kind of double down on the work with the people that are performing well. And ultimately, like the platform is tools to streamline and scale your work. But it's really, it's really like the real value add you'll get from this. And it's part of what our service can teach is making this thing a process and being agile as a marketer. And it's something that's a combination of like, success

Starting point is 00:18:22 doesn't mean it's this single creator that you find with this tool or, you know, this, like, you know, specific stat you can get after they post success is developing that agile process of like, being able to see a trend on Tiktok and activate creators quickly to capitalize on it. Like that's what's going to bring you success. It's not necessarily any single feature. But certainly everything we've built is to enable marketers to be agile. So there's a brief process. You write a brief, you've got some generative AI in there that actually worked really well. I just typed in like for our campaign, I typed in marketing podcast that wants more subscribers. And it wrote like two thirds of the brief for me. And with only minor edits required. I think like years ago, people were overusing the AI word. And, you know, last couple of years, like post chat, chat GPT, it's now the case where it is honestly helpful. And one of the cases where AI is most helpful is I'd say two things, like one is kind of scaffolding your work. So people are better at editing than generating. And so oftentimes, if I'm building something, like whether it's a marketing plan, or a brief, I'll ask AI to make like the scaffold of it.

Starting point is 00:19:25 And then it might come up with some things that I didn't think of, but you know, it's not going to be like as creative or as like precise or interesting as a human, but it can give you that first start, which is huge, the first draft. And the coolest stat I've seen is before we included this AI brief builder,

Starting point is 00:19:42 the average brief took people hours to complete. And after the AI brief builder, the average brief took people hours to complete. And after the brief builder, the average took minutes to complete. So it shrunk from hours to minutes. And then also 40% more brands were launching the briefs because it shrunk that like first step to the point where they can launch it. So that was a really cool one to roll out. So you search for your influencers, you, I guess, invite a bunch or they and or they can apply to you as well. You get the brief, you hire them, you negotiate on the platform. You can do, you can do, you know, they'll submit versions. You can ask for changes and so on.

Starting point is 00:20:17 Then it goes live. Then what happens? How do I track or how do you track or do you, um, the actual results that I got? Yeah. And a lot of what you mentioned is automated. So, for example, like you said, you can search and invite creators. They can apply to the campaign you launched. You can collaborate with them, ranging from shipping products to, you know, requesting edits on the content they submitted, stuff like that, changing their due date. You can do all these cool things and you have this direct access to message them. But once they post the content, the platform knows the deliverables

Starting point is 00:20:49 that they're responsible for. And you can change those deliverables and negotiate with them even mid campaign. But once they complete those, the platform knows and it will pay them out. I think it's after, you know, two weeks to 30 days, depending on the campaign. So there's like automatic payment triggers and things like that. And, but once the, once everything's posted, most of the requirements are automatically tracked as well through these network APIs.

Starting point is 00:21:12 So we're, it's, there's kind of like a background process constantly checking when an influencer is supposed to post if they did and if it matches those requirements, like there might be a required hashtag, for example.

Starting point is 00:21:22 So it's looking for that or the brand's tag. But yeah, the cool thing is, you know, we also have this really strong support layer. So influencer marketing is messy. It's people. It's not like ad tech where it's just, you know, numbers on a sheet or, you know, impressions to fulfill. So anything that touches creative can inherently get messy. And I think the self-serve tools are super helpful, especially for small and growing brands. But the ironic part is despite like co-founding a tech company, I think what all of our clients love most is the service, which is just so funny and so human, but it's what people stay for, I think.

Starting point is 00:21:57 How much does it cost to use the platform other than the creator's fee? And I won't say it depends. So although it does, we try to make this really accessible. Like I want popular pays to be something that small startups can use as well as the biggest brands. And we've got some really cool public work we've done with people ranging from like, you know, Frito-Lays and huge clients on the like lots of fortune 500s, all the way down to small startups I went through a combinator with. But I'd say on this on the early stage, it is free to try. There's a self-serve trial you can do. And then in that case, the only payment would be what you're really budgeting for creators. And the kind of middle tier where we have all these big growing startups and mid-market companies, things like that, there's a SaaS platform where you have every feature at your fingertips and support person available. And that's about $1,000 a month. And then plus your budget for creators where it's, you know, a transparent marketplace. You can pick who you want and see their prices, etc.

Starting point is 00:22:53 And at the highest end, a lot of these brands really lean on us for executing. And, you know, so we give them guaranteed deliverables. It might look like, hey, you know, we're going to give you 25 videos for 50k on Tiktok or some some guaranteed deliverable, whether it's impressions or, or content. And that way, it's agreed up, up front, and we just execute. And those campaigns, I, they always result in like, much happier clients, it's faster, because we know we're optimizing for and we hit it. And we, you know, we

Starting point is 00:23:23 will keep doing it until the goal is hit. So clients have a lot of security, which is really important for big brands who are, you know, executing and need that guaranteed result. Well, as I mentioned, we are currently using the Popular Pays platform for an influencer marketing campaign of our own on TikTok and Instagram. In the coming weeks, we will be back with another special weekend edition to pick apart that campaign in detail, walk you through how it worked from a brand's point of view, tell you about the horrible decisions I made along the way, and most importantly, tell you how the numbers did. Corbett Drummy is a co-founder of Popular Pays. He will be back with me for that in the weeks ahead. Corbett, thank you so much. Thanks, Todd. You can try Popular Pays now by going to popularpays.com slash podcast and take advantage of their

Starting point is 00:24:11 20% discount just for listeners of this show. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Back Monday with our regular episodes.

Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: Influencer Marketing with Popular Pays

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