Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

As we enter 2024, I told you we were going to dial in our pursuit of changing the mindset in the influence marketing industry to help brands and agencies focus on influence, not just influencers. So we’re going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people along the way to make that happen. We’re going to kick off the year talking to one of my favorite people. Krista Neher has been a leading authority on digital marketing for as long as I can remember. She’s a six-time best-selling author and found of Bootcamp Digital, an education brand that offers digital marketing certification. Along the way, Krista has had to not only teach people about influence marketing, but dig in and practice the craft a bit as a consultant, too. But her wide range of expertise and ability, plus her focus on making digital marketing a practical and cost-efficient investment for her clients gives her that broad perspective I look for in someone to just chop up and chew through the conversations in the space. Today on Winfluence, I’ll dig into influence marketing with Krista. We’ll talk about how to build an influence plan, calculate the value of your influencer relationships and I’ll see if my assertions about influence marketing hold up to her scrutiny … it’s a perspective I certainly respect and know you’ll enjoy. This episode is presented by CIPIO.ai. Scale acquisition of user-generated content and flip those social videos into ad creative using powerful generative AI toolset. Sign up for a demo at https://jasonfalls.co/cipio Find this episode online at https://jasonfalls.co/kristaneher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been a minute. If you haven’t noticed, Winfluence has been on a bit of a holiday hiatus. Honestly, its a good thing for me … client work ramped up toward the end of the year and I simply didn’t have enough time to fit in the weekly interviews and production to give you an episode worth listening to. Instead of rushing to crank out something mediocre, I opted to step back, focus on the client work and reassess what Winfluence is and can be. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about the show. I even entertained the notion that maybe it had run its course and wasn’t worth the energy to crank out more episodes in 2024.  But then two things happened. First, I thought about the state of things. And to be quite honest, we’re not done. There’s a lot still to accomplish in influence marketing. A good portion of the industry is still falling over itself doing things poorly.  The bigger the creator, the more likely you’re going to have to deal with talent managers.  Every talent manager I talk to these days seems to be more and more out of touch with the reality brands face with budgets and return on their marketing dollar. Brand managers are still pushing influencers to just be advertising shills. And we are still thinking of influencers as the key to success, when the whole premise of this show and my approach to the craft is centered around the influence … not the influencer.  It’s about to be 2024. And most of the people in the industry spending dollars on influence marketing are still functioning like it’s 2007. The other thing that informed my thinking, I want to save for later, so listen to the full episode for that. In this episode of Winfluence, I’m going to list some things that are still broken about our industry. I’m going to carve out a few ideas on what we can do to fix them. And I’ll recommit to you that this show is not only not going away, we’re just getting started. Watch or listen to the full episode at jasonfalls.co/2024reset Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When someone says they run an influencer marketing agency, what comes to mind? I’ve asked a few brand-side folks I know that question in the last week or two and have received a number of different responses. Some people say they think of an ad agency only that only focuses on influencers. Others say a consultant or small shop that handles all that busy work for you. Another contact said they think of the team at the software company they use, like CIPIO.ai for instance, which does the cat herding as it were. The truth is none of those answers are wrong. The third party that handles some degree of influencer marketing for you is probably the right answer, regardless of which pieces of the puzzle are theirs.  But in truth, there is a difference between a software company that has managed services and a strategic consultant. That’s different than an influencer marketing agency that focuses on influencer campaigns and one that does more media buying using influencer content. The “influencer marketing agency” is a big sea of muddy water.  Brad Hoos runs an influencer marketing agency. It’s called The Outloud Group. They’re based in Detroit and they handle all aspects of influencer marketing from soup to nuts. They aren’t a software company … though they use software to help manage their work. They do more than just strategy. And they do more than just execution.  Who better to break down not just the various facets of what a brand might need out of influencer marketing, but the ins and outs of influencer campaigns, choosing the right creators, negotiating with the big (and little) egos in the creator world and such than Brad? I asked him to pay a visit to the old Influence bar here on Winfluence and chat a bit about the state of things. The Outloud Group’s approach is a little different than some agencies and they’ve got some interesting clients and case studies of course.  But it’s also an opportunity for me to bounce one of my rant-y ideas off someone who can push back and tell me I’m wrong if I am, so we’ll get into that a little bit, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve had a couple of episodes and conversations in the past that talk about gamers. The online video game industry is worth billions of dollars. Its content creators have some of the most captive audiences in any medium. Twitch is one of the biggest and most impactful social networks and it is dominated by video gamers who live stream themselves playing video games. And yet, this behemoth of a segment is still a mystery to most of us in the influence marketing space. Some consumer brands have played on Twitch and sponsored various gamers to some degree of success. But the businesses and agencies that succeed with the gaming segment are almost always the video game companies themselves.  It’s like gaming is some sort of nerd herd stratosphere few of us are able to find entry to.  Emilee Helm is the Head of Influencers for a company called Gamesight. It is an agency that focuses on helping video games and their parent companies market their products. And tapping into influencers is a big portion of what they do.  But Gamesight does more than that. It monitors and ranks top Twitch channels, as one example. In fact, data is one of the company’s leading propositions. They track and measure things I’m not quite sure can be measured adequately. Imagine my delight when Emilee agreed to come on the show. On this episode of Winfluence, Emilee and I are going to dive into this cryptic world of gaming and gaming influencers, learn about what Gamesight has that other agencies and influencer marketing firms don’t, and see what doors open to that world, plus which ones we can kick open wider by taking some of that expertise and applying it to our brands and campaigns. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/emileehelm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you know what this show is about? If you said “influencer marketing,” you’re close, but not necessarily wrong. If you said “influence marketing” you’re more right. And if you said, the exploration of how brands can apply influence in all its shapes and forms, to aide it their marketing, you’re spot-on. But if you weren’t spot-on, that’s my fault, not yours. It’s an example of my marketing and communications with you failing to deliver the point. It’s an exercise in clarity. And Steve Woodruff is probably the person on the planet with the most expertise and focus on helping business, brands and leaders nail clarity. His new book is called The Point: How to win with clarify-fueled communications.  It is a handy guide and reminder to its readers of how to get to the point and not allow your communications to get lost in translation. Or drown out by the sea of noise that is our media landscape.  I asked Steve to come on the show to talk to us about getting to the point. Why do we have so much trouble doing so, even when we’re supposed to be professional communicators? What barriers are in our way to communicating effectively? And how can we as brands, or influencers and content creators, check our work to ensure that we are always, getting to the point? We’ll ask him all those questions and more today on Winfluence. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/stevewoodruff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been talking to some talent managers of late. They play an important role for many creators, managing the business of their influencer status while the creator, well creates. Many of them add another perspective to the creative process, contribute ideas to shape partnerships into something more than they would be otherwise and are valuable to the brands and agencies in the equation as well. But allow me a moment to be rather frank. Those are exceptions to the rule. Most talent managers are in it for one thing: maximizing the take so they maximize their commission. Too many managers ask for inflated rates that show no economical connection to how many people will actually engage with the content. Yes, there is value in just the content, usage rights and the like. But if the purpose of an influencer collaboration is to get a message in front of their audience, then there has to be some attention paid to how many of said audience the message will reach and resonate with. I've also been frustrated with conversations around usage rights. But, I digress. As much as we’ve been propping talent managers up lately on the show, I feel like we need to have a different discussion about them and the practice. Just so happens Jessy Grossman also thinks talent manager roles have changed and should be changing. Jessy is the woman behind Women in Influencer Marketing. She’s got a great community and podcast, both by that name and abbreviated WIIM sometimes.  You may recall she was a previous guest on the show, back in May of 2021. We talked mostly about WIIM back then.  But she reached out recently and said, “Traditional talent management is becoming obsolete and needs to change.” Color me both curious and delighted. Now, I’m not implying Jessy agrees with my semi-rant about fees and licensing and such. But I did think it was suitable to bring her back to Winfluence to have the conversation. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/jessygrossman2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those of you who have watched or listened to Winfluence for a while know that I got my professional start in radio. I marched myself into the local radio station at 14-years-old and said, “I wanna be a deejay!” And for some reason they said, “Okay. You start Friday.” I pursued radio through high school and college, navigated the world of broadcasting and sports hoping to one day land at ESPN. I actually interviewed there the same week I interviewed for its parent company, ABC. My first full-time job out of college wound up as a producer at ABC Radio Sports in New York. My experiences included working on a nationally syndicated radio show, managing stringers and reporters for day-to-day sports coverage, producing longer-form feature pieces you could argue were essentially podcasts. But this was well before most people had access to the Internet and devices, bandwidth and such were affordable. Or even possible.  We talk about influence on this show and radio is one of those mediums that we’re quick to overlook. My mother developed a nationally recognized, award-winning communications program a few years back in my small hometown in Eastern Kentucky. It wound up being a success because she knew what most of us don’t know. In a rural community, the local morning show deejay is probably the most influential person in town outside of the county judge.  Tony Garcia knows the power of radio. Like me, he worked in the broadcasting industry back in the 1990s. He is the co-founder of a company called Now! Media. You may not recognize that company. But the other “company” he co-founded in conjunction with it is the Bob and Sheri Show. It is a nationally syndicated radio show hosted by Bob Lacey and Sheri Lynch. They’re based in Charlotte, but are syndicated on 70 affiliates across the U.S. The weekday morning show is also heard in 177 countries and on 150 ships at sea along the American Forces Network.  Now, a traditional, terrestrial radio show isn’t something you’d think would flourish in our on-demand, always connected, internet world. But the Bob and Sheri Show is different. Not only have they spun the show and segments of it into podcasts and an active social media presence that includes a Facebook Group number over 115,000 members. But they have hacked the advertising and sponsorship model for even small businesses.  When I learned that, I knew we had to have Tony on the show. Because what they’ve built is a hidden gem of influence, both online and off. And we can learn from them. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/tonygarcia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The evolution of a content creator is something brands and agencies see, but don’t watch. Bear with me on this for a moment. It’s like the difference in hearing something, and actually listening with the intent of understanding. So we on the agency or brand side of things may run into a content creator we find on Instagram who is doing interesting things around the topic we’re focused on for our brand or client. We reach out to them, maybe do a sponsored post or some other type of trial run content collaboration. We appreciate their work and their, let’s say 50,000 followers there. And then we move on to other clients, other campaigns, other creators. A year or two passes by and we think, “Hey! That one creator might make a good candidate for this campaign.” We reach out to them and chat about the possibility, then have to swallow hard when their rates have grown exponentially. Because they have changed. Now they have 1.5 million followers on TikTok or their YouTube channel exploded. Or they were hired to be the host of a TV segment for some brand. Now they have a talent manager and have turned their content into a business.  We saw it, but didn’t watch. If we had, maybe we would have kept that relationship going.  Content creators who are doing so with intent are trying to become media properties. They want to hire teams of people to do all the busy work while they create the concepts and sit out in front of the camera. They build audiences to sell advertising or brand partnerships for so they can grow their empire. It’s that leveling up that falls into the purview of Kevin Grosch. He is the founder and CEO of Made In Network. The company does a lot of things, but its core capabilities are focused on creating content and building media properties for content creators. They do the same thing for brands, too.  When I connected with Kevin recently, I had a ton of questions. When do content creators turn to outside help for doing what they already do? What tricks do you have to build those big media properties? Can you make me famous? Instead of just chatting about it offline, I asked Kevin to come to the show and help us all understand more about that evolution of today’s content creator past influencer to media property and brand. How his company helps them and brands and how we can all benefit from knowing how its done. We learn more from Kevin Grosch today on the show. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/kevingrosch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s another “State of the Industry” report out this month. It actually came last week from Linqia, which is one of the enterprise influencer marketing software companies out there. These reports are always useful, so I like to report on them here on the show.  If you want to read the full report for yourself, which I encourage you to do, you go to their website and sign up and trade your email address for their research. You become a lead in their platform … that’s how B2B marketing often works. But it’s a fair trade and, who knows? Linqia might be just what your company needs. So, go do it. We’ll certainly share the link to do so in our show notes for this episode.  But Keith Bendes, who is the vice-president of strategy for Linqia is here today to dig into the highlights of the report with us. He is also the co-host of another great podcast, by the way. It’s called Creator Economy Live. So go check that out when you have a moment as well.  Keith knows the influencer space as well as anyone. And you know what that means … we just turned on the mics and cameras and had a fun conversation I think you’ll enjoy. We hit on plenty of the report insights as well, so you’ll be informed as much as or even more so entertained today on the show.  Here are some of the nuggets the report surfaces we’re going to touch on: Influencer Budgets are increasing. 75.5% of Linqia’s survey respondents either increased or remained unchanged from last year’s spending.  Brands are using influencer content in more places. It’s no longer about organic posts with a few paid ads. Influencer creative is driving brand creative now.  Paid amplification is bigger than you thought. More than half of brands are spending at least half their budgets on media amplification. But there are still challenges. ROI is still the big one.  And of course, new topics like AI, Threads, and Creator Generated Content … which we’ll distinguish from User Generated Content makes its first appearance in the Linqia study.  We dig in more with Keith Bendes from Linqia today on the show. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/keithbendes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection. For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and work with the latter. But most find themselves somewhere in the middle jockeying around a mix of small and medium creator partners with a few big ones popping in from time to time. That same range is found in the software space. You can find influencer marketing solutions for free or close to free. And you can also sign up for enterprise solutions that run thousands of dollars per month. Then there’s the talent management segment. You don’t find many who work with creators under around 40-50,000 followers. But there is a huge difference in those who work with that level and those who manage six figure brand deals with the biggest stars on social media.  Temima Shames falls into that last category. The 24-year-old former child actor started Next Step Talent at age 21. Its employee roster is all people under 30. And they are responsible for amplifying creators to become some of the most followed influencers in the world. Their roster includes a bunch of Gen-Z creators I’ve never heard of, but that’s what makes the next tidbit most impressive.  That roster has more than six billion YouTube views, one debuted an album at No. 7 on Spotify. Another was TikTok’s biggest POV or point-of-view star. They had talent featured in YouTube’s Black Creator Class of 2023 as well. I’ll drop a link to their roster page in the show notes so you can go see who they are. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I’m certainly not their target audience.  Temima knows how to shape content creators into influencers with massive followings. I asked her to come on the show to share some of that knowledge with us, as well as talk about the impending threats to the big influencers businesses as brands recoil from inflated prices and an abundance of UGC. She’s a smart one, gang. Get ready to learn a thing or two from the queen of influencer talent, Temima Shames today on the show.  This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/temimashames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would you do if you didn’t have access to social media for a day? How about a week? What about three and a half months? How would that change your daily habits? How would it change where you turned for information. How would it affect your business?  Now, certainly for you social media content creators and brands that rely heavily on social media creators and content to drive customers, I’m sure if could be catastrophic. But really? Are there no other alternatives? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to advocate for a social media shut down, but someone did it recently and lived to tell. Meg Casebolt is a B2B SEO consultant. For a long time, she followed the crowds to social media, leveraged it for her business and her clients and did what we all do.  Now, SEO is a different discipline from social media. But it still requires creating content, promoting that content and staying relevant in the online world. That can imply staying connected on social media, too. But the perfect storm of social media fatigue, mental health concern and simply being too busy running all the other aspects of her business led Meg to do something amazing. She took a 100-day detox from social media. Cold turkey. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok. No LinkedIn. And guess what? Her business not only survived, but thrived. Her mental health issues subsided. She was happier. She reconnected with previous clients, worked referrals, grew her business.  She created the Social Slowdown Podcast from all she learned. There, she leads business conversations around the reality of not using social media as a primary tool. Business does go on without it. Meg took a lot of the conversations from that podcast and has now shaped it all into a book called The Social Shutdown as well. It documents her experiment to leave social media for 100 days and not show a negative impact on her business.  She’s here today to share those insights with us and talk about the reality of social media, where it fits and how we all … creators included … can perhaps look at social content and channels in a more healthy light for us and our audiences. I know you’re skeptical, but trust me. This conversation is worth hearing. This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/megcasebolt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve been paying attention to the goings on in the influencer marketing world, you know by now that there was a major acquisition announced recently. Sprout Social, long known as one of the top social media management solutions in the space, acquired Tagger Media. Its main product, Tagger, is one of the leading influencer marketing software solutions on the market. It was once a regular sponsor of this program as well. Tagger was actually also responsible for bringing me to the Influencer Marketing Show a couple of years ago. Pete Kennedy, its founder and I became friends with a shared vision and passion for the space. We had him on the show back in March of 2022. You can find that episode in our show notes at jasonfalls.com.  I loved what Tagger’s software could do. I used it exclusively for a couple of years. I still do for certain strategy and research projects, though CIPIO.ai and other tools are a part of my strategy arsenal as well. When the announcement came down that Tagger had been acquired, it was a personal celebration of sorts. My friends there reached the end game of the original goal of a startup business. It was sold for a reported $140 million in cash. So I have a couple of contacts who are a considerable amount wealthier now. That’s always a good thing to celebrate.  But the news and the move also leave a lot of questions.  So I reached out to Pete Kennedy and asked him to come answer them. We caught up last week and ironed out the what-ifs and what-nows of the big move, dug into the issues of the day in the influencer space, and I got Pete’s take on how AI factors into the influence space moving forward. We’ll dig into the news of the day and get one smart man’s perspective on other things, too. Pete Kennedy is coming up on Winfluence.  This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/petekennedy2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marketing automation is a topic that most people dig into when they’re in the enterprise or B2B space. It’s an approach to marketing that allows you to set up triggers and events using software to drive leads, then work those leads down your funnel to conversion.  When you think marketing automation, you almost always think of email. Set up sequences of emails for people who fill out a form on your website or register for an event. They get an initial thank you email, then you automate one that sends them an offer or interesting reason to reengage on your website a few days later and so on until they buy. Marketing automation almost always leads people to think about businesses, usually larger, complex ones, where automation can save thousands if not millions of dollars and hours in labor. But marketing automation is far more accessible and an untapped opportunity for even small businesses. Including content creators.  Adam Tuttle is the senior director of customer activation for ActiveCampaign. It is a marketing automation software platform that has over 185,000 customers around the world. Some of them are small businesses. Some are even individuals like thought leaders, speakers and even content creators from the social media space. Adam’s company, ActiveCampaign, is a sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network, but I thought it would be useful to have him come on the show and dig into how marketing automation can help content creators treat their influence and content business like other businesses leveraging tools and approaches like it.  Get ready to learn a few things and get inspired to level up your marketing today on Winfluence.  As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai. But today, we want to take a reminder moment to tell you about Adam’s company, Active Campaign. If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check them out.  ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers. With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform! And don’t take my word for it! ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star reviews on G2 from happy users.  We’ll get into some examples in today’s conversation with Adam Tuttle. But as a sponsor of Winfluence and MPN, and for a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free. When you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate, if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free.  And if you’ve worked with any CRM or email software out there, you know additional contacts are like gold.  Once you start engaging all contacts in a personalized way at scale, your subscriber numbers will start to grow dramatically. It’s easy to hit those limits. So doubling your contacts is killer.  Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today. And thanks to ActiveCampaign for their support of the Marketing Podcast Network. You should check them out even if only that they help bring great marketing podcasts like Winfluence to you each week. Links for this Episode: Adam Tuttle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-adam-tuttle/ Active Campaign online: https://activecampaign.com/activate Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The influencer marketing landscape is changing. Now, that’s not a statement many people would find alarming. It’s always changing. But when you watch the industry like I do and for as long as I have, you see the tea leaves. And when they perk up a certain way, you sense a change is a brewin’.  Mavrck is out this week with its annual Creator Compensation Report. It’s a yearly survey of several hundred content creators that asks specific questions about how much they make, what type of work fuels that revenue, what kind of brand deals are they working and the like. It’s usually an insightful measuring stick to see where your brand is trending … are you paying well enough or not enough … are you offering the types of value others are and such. I started telling you about six months ago that the brands I and CIPIO.ai were working with had started to shift what they were asking for. Many were foregoing the traditional ask for influencer marketing collaborations, opting instead for just user-generated content.  Brands want content to fuel their paid and organic social. That’s good for companies like CIPIO.ai. We go get UGC on scale for brands. But it’s not a great sign for influencers who monetize their audience as much as their content.  Now, that alone is only one tea leaf if you will. And influencers can still create content for payment and still benefit from UGC-driven campaigns.  But Mavrck’s new Compensation Report has a few more tea leaves turning up of interest. Rachael Cihlar is Mavrck’s vice-president for corporate communications and public relations. She is busy getting this handy compensation report out to folks, but took some time to visit with me to go over some of the findings and talk about their implications. Some things I explore with her include these nuggets, surfaced by the report: The rates offered by brands are lower than previous years Affiliate compensation offers seem to be on the rise More than half of creators say affiliate income is a part of their array of earnings Does this mean brands are starting shift away from sponsored content and brand collaboration deals in favor of more performanced-based compensation? Or are these numbers just a settling of the market? Only time will tell, of course, but the time we have with Rachael today gave me the opportunity to ask how she interprets the data. She and I do that on this episode. Links for this Episode: Rachael Cihlar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/influenceexpert/ Mavrck’s Website: https://mavrck.co/ Mavrck’s 2023 Creator Compensation Report: https://info.mavrck.co/creator-compensation-report-2023 Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are your goals? More importantly, do you write them down? How often do you refer to them?  Or are you like me and have vague ideas of what you want to accomplish in your head, but they kind of morph and change depending on the day? Certainly, we’re more disciplined about business goals. They typically have to be articulated in strategies and presentations, discussed in meetings and conference calls, probably ad nauseum. But they’re important to have, to revisit frequently and to refer to when making strategic decisions for your business.  Debra Eckerling is a goals strategist. She helps entrepreneurs, executives and employees identify and make a plan for personal and professional goals. She’s even got a clever methodology … the DEB Method … that is spelled out in her book Your Goal Guide. I’m familiar with Deb because her weekly live stream show and podcast, called The DEB Show, is a sister podcast of this one on the Marketing Podcast Network. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on her weekly themed discussion. It’s well worth the subscription, the links to which we’ll post in the show notes.  But Debra is also an influencer away from the marketing space, too. She’s a foodie writer and podcaster, too. Her show Taste Buds with Deb digs into her culinary side with guests to discuss and debate various food-related topics. It’s distributed by the Jewish Journal where she has been a contributor for a while. Whether you’re a brand or agency marketer, a service provider in the influencer space or a content creator, you could certainly use a refresher on goal setting and goal getting. So I asked Deb to join us this week to talk about goals, the DEB Method and her experiences as a foodie creator.  We’ll probably get hungry and set a goal of satiating that need on today’s show. Links for this episode: Debra Eckerling on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coastbunny/ The DEB Method online: https://thedebmethod.com/ Your Goal Guide on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3DepnY5 Jason's appearance on The DEB Show: https://marketingpodcasts.net/2023/05/320-storytelling-with-jason-falls-peter-markel-christy-smallwood/ Taste Buds with Deb: https://tastebudswithdeb.com/ Scale UGC at CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many ways to slice an apple. Or peel an orange. Or for that matter, there are many ways to get from your house to the office or grocery store … and just as many to get back.  There are also many ways to approach influence marketing. If you’ve been listening and following along with Winflunce for any amount of time you know that we focus on influence marketing, without the R. While social media celebrities with big followings are one way to slice the influence apple, there are many other ways to ultimately persuade an audience to take action.  Sam Katz knows this. He is an influence marketing strategist and consultant. His history of work includes stints with Edelman and Publicis One. He and I happened to share the stage at the Influencer Marketing Show in New York last month. He led a panel discussion on creators and owning their own content in the world of unstable social networks.  We got to talking backstage about a few topics and I thought his take on how businesses and brands can approach influence from a bunch of different angles would make for a good conversation. He told me one thing he sees from clients a lot these days is they don’t know what they don’t know. And that is typically that there are many ways to go from start to finish with influence marketing. I asked Sam to join us today to talk about that topic along with a few others. He also has a current top-of-mind set of advice for brands and creators about content usage rights we’ll get into as well. He’s a smart one. And we’ll dig into more with Sam today on the show.  Links for this episode: Sam Katz on LinkedIn Sam Katz on Instagram Popsixle Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From time to time people find out in conversation that I’m a published author. It’s a monicker and fact that sits in my social media bios and certainly something I say proudly on my website and such, but it’s not something that typically comes up on conversation. When it does, I get asked a lot of questions about it. Writing a book certainly had a big impact on my professional credibility and personal brand. Though anyone with an idea and the Internet, and maybe a little bit of money, can self-publish, all three of my books have been with legit, business publishing houses. For Winfluence, I even had an agent to help me shop the book around. As an aside, I love the sound of saying, “My agent will get back to you,” and having one sounds like a big deal. I love ya, Gary, but in reality, it’s not as big of a deal as you might think. It’s like having a real estate agent for your ideas. Nonetheless, people are curious about writing books. Content creators should be. For the influencer types out there, writing a book takes you to a new level of legitimacy and credibility. If you’re not an influencer but still want to write a book, the hard truth is you’re going to need an audience to market it to if you want a publisher to pay attention to your idea.  All those nuances of writing books, or at least business books, stuck in Josh Bernoff’s crawl, as they say where I’m from. Josh has three published titles to his name including the groundbreaking book Groundswell he co-authored with Charlene Li. But he’s collaborated on, ghost written or been involved with 45 non-fiction book projects.  His latest is a new how-to guide that cuts through the fantasy and makes writing a book a very practical thing. It’s called Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write and Promote a Book That Matters. Sounds a little like the advice we got from Jay Acunzo recently on the show, right? Josh is here today to share his comprehensive guide for authors to help you write a better book. Or write your first one in a better way. We’re going to dig into whether or not you should be an author, how to be a good one and where books fall into the schema of influence success for creators and brands.  This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of you may know I spent the first half of my professional career as a public relations professional in the world of college athletics. Back then we called the job being a sports information director, or SID. The industry evolved to labeling the role something like athletic media relations or athletic communications or similar, but our job was to publicize the teams, coaches and student-athletes. The first sport I was ever placed in charge of as a student assistant at Morehead State University was the Eagle volleyball team. I hadn’t ever seen volleyball in person before going to college, but was trained to keep statistics at matches by hand … now they do it on computers. I designed the team’s media guide, wrote press releases, pitched ideas to newspaper reporters and TV journalists.  While volleyball wasn’t the only the sport I worked, it was always my favorite. It was fast, the young women playing were always super athletic, jumping high and crushing the ball into the opponent’s court. I never worked at a school that sponsored men’s volleyball, but I’m kind of glad for that. It helped me appreciate how strong and dominant women can be on the playing courts and fields.  Last fall I had the opportunity to speak to a public relations class at the University of Louisville. Dr. Karen Freberg is a professor there. She and I have shared the stage at conferences and traveled along side one another a few times. She’s kind of a social media pioneer in the academic circles, building out curricula for the new world of PR thanks to social media, influencers and the like. She has me speak to her class each year, which I always enjoy doing. Low and behold one of Dr. Freberg’s students last fall was Aiko Jones. She is a star blocker for the Cardinals and was instrumental in the team’s run to the Final Four and National Runners-Up finish. UofL was 31-3 overall with an amazing 17-1 record in the ACC.  For those of you who don’t know sports, Aiko was one of the dominant players on one of the most dominant teams in the entire country at the college level last year.  She’s back for her senior year in 2023 and will no doubt make a run at racking up another string of honors. She was Final Four All-Tournament Team and All-Louisville Regional Team in the NCAA Tournament. First Team All-ACC, First Team All-Region. In layman’s terms, she’s one of the best college volleyball players in the country.  Which means, she’s well versed in Name Image Likeness benefits and parlaying her athletic prowess into brand deals and collaborations. So, I asked my pal Aiko to come on the show to share some of those experiences with all of us. We’ll learn about NIL from the student-athlete perspective today on Winfluence.   As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai. But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign. If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check out ActiveCampaign. It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers. With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform! Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have noticed I’ve been mixing in more content here recently focused on content creators. It’s not that you brand and agency folks aren’t the primary focus of the show. You are. But if you’re reading between the lines, the advice that some of our guests have had recently about helping creators build and grow their business … well, it applies to you, too.  Kind of a two birds with one stone approach, if you will.  In this episode of Winfluence, we’ll follow in that direction a bit. Dean Mercado is today’s guest. He’s a business coach who also happens to run a digital marketing agency. So he brings a couple of nice perspective to the table for you brands, agencies and content creators. His Mind Stretch Methodology to level up your business came after over 10,000 hours of coaching businesses to do just that. The thing he brings to the table that got me excited to bring all of you was his concept of clone the owner. It’s a lesson in prioritization, hiring, outsourcing, training and delegation to take the tasks that aren’t the best use of your time off your plate and onto someone who is an owner clone to execute for you. I don’t know about you, but I know in my own businesses, working a solid process and workflow that optimizes my time and energies is probably my number one problem. I thought we could all use a good lesson in how to clone ourselves and level up at the same time. As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai. But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign. If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check out ActiveCampaign. It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers. With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform! And don’t take my word for it! ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star review on G2 from happy users.  For a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free when you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate. That means if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free.  Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a growing problem in the influencer marketing space with content creators. We’ve talked about it on this show before. But there never seems to be any great push to solve for this particular problem.  The main focus of many an influencer today is creating videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. For posting Stories on various platforms and engaging their followers and fans there. But those platforms aren’t owned by the creators. There’s a significant amount of risk influencers and content creators are taking by putting their main source of income on borrowed land. Montana recently banned TikTok. I don’t necessarily think that ban will stick. Nor do I think TikTok will soon be banned across the U.S. But it’s not far-fetched for that to come to fruition. If it does, TikTok creators could be in a very bad position. The problem in the influencer marketing space is that we’ve gotten away from having our own websites. Owned channels. Creators are assuming the social networks are forever and won’t go away. They’re putting the precious eggs of their business in someone else’s basket. I hate to use this phrasing, but “Back in my day …” you wrote blog posts and had your own website. You used social networks to promote the content there and build your email lists. You owned not just your content, but your audience as well.  Creators today don’t think that way and it may come back to bite them. If you do have a website, you probably know a thing or two about SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engines like Google are the lifeblood of just about any website’s traffic. Figuring out how to rank well for certain keywords or phrases helps more traffic come to your site, subscribe to your content or buy from you.  But if these creators don’t have websites, what are they to do? Can they do anything? Kevin Roy is the CEO of GreenBananaSEO out of Boston. He’s helped dozens of companies drive growth and revenue using innovative digital marketing approaches. His company has been ranked several times in Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. I asked Kevin to join us on Winfluence to talk about the state of SEO today, how creators can leverage it to build their brands and businesses, and what they can … or can’t do … to use SEO to build their social network cache even if they don’t have a website.  We’ll talk to Kevin about that and more today on the show. As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices