How Any Brand, Large or Small, Can Effectively Partner With Influencers

Ask and you shall receive! We did a survey of our audience a few months back, and the number one requested topic was influencer marketing. And for good reason! Influencer marketing has infiltrated every industry and has the ability to drive large ROI if done correctly. But many new or smaller brands are wondering if they can take part in this marketing channel. And the answer is yes! Eric Lam, is the co-founder of AspireIQ, and he is here to explain how the industry has become democratized and any brand can take part in it, as long as they go about it the right way.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he gets into all of that and more, including why he bet big on the idea of influencers when it was still a radical idea used mostly by large companies with large celebrities. 

Today, Eric says that there are certain mistakes that many companies are making when it comes to working with influencers, and he details exactly how you should go about measuring the ROI from your influencer strategy. Plus, Eric explains why he thinks platforms like TikTok are undervalued and he predicts the future of how the world of influencer marketing will grow. 

Main Takeaways:

• The ROI of the Storm: Understanding the attribution funnel of influencer marketing is a key metric to determine the ROI of your efforts. But what if there are other aspects of the partnership that should be considered, that many brands are missing?
• Can I See Your Manager?: One of the biggest challenges of influencer marketing is managing the various influencers you work with and the logistics of tracking and shipping the products your influencers are promoting. Building a platform and communication structure that solves that problem is what sets influencer community management companies apart.
• Democracy Now: Part of what social media has done is democratize content creation. Previously, brands and those with money were in control of what content was created, when, and who could see it. Now, individuals have the same capabilities in the palms of their hands, which not only leads to better content, but opens the door to revenue streams and opportunities for regular people to become influencers.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome to the Up Next In Commerce Podcast, I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. Co-Founder at mission.org. Today, we're talking all things influencers, but the co-founder of AspireIQ, Eric Lam. Eric, nice to meet you.

Eric:

Great to meet you as well. Thanks for having me.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on so no pressure, but we did a survey of our audience, and the number one thing that everyone wanted to hear about was influencers. Early, like we got dozens of responses of [crosstalk 00:00:32].

Eric:

Love to hear it.

Stephanie:

Yeah. This is the perfect interview.

Eric:

Fantastic. Well, that's really helpful for me to hear, especially for my team work in sales.

Stephanie:

There you go. Tell me a little bit about what is AspireIQ.

Eric:

We're a platform for brands to build and engage communities of influential people from traditional social media influencers to top customers and brand fans to experts and more. We actually started back in 2013. Even though it's mainstream now, back then, influencer marketing was a pretty new concept. Frankly, the idea of businesses using Instagram back then in a meaningful way was pretty rare. Of course, now 93% of brands and kind of based on your survey, it sounds like that's increasing, are using influencer marketing as a core part of their digital and social media strategies, and we're lucky to be partnered with over 300 brands on the platform from some of the biggest names like Samsung to leading [inaudible] brands like Glossier and Purple Mattress.

Stephanie:

Amazing. Tell me a little bit, how is the platform design? If I'm a new customer, what would I experience when I enter a platform and what do I get out of it?

Eric:

Yeah. Even back in the day, I think pretty much from the beginning, some of the biggest problems we've tried to solve in influencer marketing have come down to three parts, finding the right influencers to work with in terms of creating content and promoting your brand, to managing the complex workflow between your brand and potentially hundreds of influencers in your community, to analyzing the impact of these influencer communities on your marketing goals. I think that where we've really made our bread and butter is that second one, the building workflow. That's because if any of your listeners have built influencer marketing programs, and actually in our early days, probably our first two years, we didn't have our own software, so we experienced this ourselves when we were running influencer campaigns for our clients.

Eric:

The real work that goes into this is all the communication and the cumbersome project management, the data organization, the contracts, the product shipping, the payments, and just keeping track of all this stuff in one place, especially if you're working with more than, say 10 influencers at a given time, like that's where the real work is. That's where we really focused on building a platform that can provide meaningful scale to clients building this in a sophisticated way. I think at this point, we've got a range of sophistication levels from fortune 500 companies who have seven different teams working across different countries with outside agencies and the corporate office, to some of the biggest DTC brands in the world who have kind of built their secret sauce in influencer marketing, and almost need to design this customized system within our platform for how to do influencer marketing. So, it's come a long way in terms of the sophistication level that a lot of our clients have had.

Stephanie:

That's awesome. Since 2013, what kind of shifts in the market have you seen? Because when I think about influencers, especially back in the day, it's like, if you don't have a Kardashian, you don't have an influencer. Now it seems like way more about like micro influencers who have a trusted audience and people actually buy what they want. What kind of things have you seen like shifts in the market?

Eric:

Yeah, it's evolved in a lot of different, really interesting ways. You're exactly right. I think in the early days, well, frankly in the really early days, when we first started, almost no one was doing influencer marketing, which was obviously tough for our business because we were trying to go to every brand and convince them to spend even like a hundred bucks on an influencer.

Stephanie:

They're like, no, thanks. Out of budget.

Eric:

Yeah. I think that was already like pulling teeth. I think, back then, I think the only brands doing this were probably these emerging ecommerce brands where ... they can't compete on traditional advertising, so Instagram had become this place where they discovered already consumers were coming there to learn about what to buy, what to do, where to go. That was true, even though back then Instagram wasn't this kind of commercialized or sponsor place the way it is today. But even in our early days, what kept us going is that we talked to so many ecommerce brands and consistently what we heard was the biggest channel that they were focusing on was social media and specifically influencer marketing.

Eric:

Then I think, yeah, after a few years, maybe like 2015 and 2016, the industry kind of evolve to what you were talking about, where everybody was trying to work with Kardashians. It was all about working with the biggest fashion bloggers, the biggest celebrities. The bigger, the better. And you're thinking about these vanity metrics, like how many followers someone has, or how many likes they have, regardless of if they saw meaningful returns on investment. Those were the early cowboy days of influencer marketing. I think because of a lot of the mainstream brands got involved there, you started to then see an evolution of how a lot of the DTC, a lot of ecommerce brands were starting to think about influencer marketing because they were kind of getting priced out of these big macro celebrities.

Eric:

So, they started honing in on more specialized micro influencers, like you mentioned, who, they might not have as big of a following, but they were a lot more targeted, a lot more focused in the concept of created, which meant they were a great fit for more personalized experiences, more authentic content in terms of the segments they were trying to reach among their customers. I think the second thing that was really interesting about the way this evolved is that these same ecommerc