Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

The most overlooked facet of marketing execution across our industry is consumer research. The large brands and agencies swear by it. But the one-percent is just that: one percent. When you drop down to the lower end of the large brand spectrum, and then to medium brands and small businesses, consumer insights are seldom even talked about.

Not enough businesses invest in consumer research. Not enough agencies sell it through the way they should.

What replaces it for those who don’t invest in consumer research is typically generic, broad statistical analysis ... hardly qualifying as research ... proliferated by software companies as linkbait content on their websites.

The reason few brands actually invest in consumer research is that good, sound consumer research is cost prohibitive. It’s tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to commission a research instrument. They also take months to complete. So they’re pricey and slow.

But where there is a gap in the marketplace, there will be someone who tries to fill it. Matt Miller is the founder of Raadz, a tool to collect consumer insights in a matter of hours, not months. And for investments of hundreds to low thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Raadz allows brands to ramp up short question, and short duration, surveys for consumers in minutes. They’re gamified to drive participation and reward those participating. The questions are structured in a way that eliminates false answers and false positives from participants.

Brands can use the survey instrument for their own private list of participants, like customers or newsletter subscribers. Or they can build open surveys and promote them to their social media followers and other groups.

So what does this have to do with influence marketing? Raadz is actually going to market with the idea that brands can use Raadz to solicit feedback directly from the audience of the influencers they partner with. And there’s money in it for the content creator or influencer as well.

Matt and I caught up recently to allow him to dive into deeper explanations of all that here on the show. I am so gung-ho about this tool, I’m discussing a more connected partnership with Raadz moving forward. I want my clients to use it. I think your clients or brand should too. I think you’ll agree after hearing my conversation with Matt today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve gotten into a little bit of a pattern here on the show. Seems like every other interview or so is with some founder or executive at an influencer marketing software company. There are lots of reasons for that.

First, they’re anxious to mention their platform to you since they know the people who listen to WInfluence are interested in and often shopping for solutions to problems with influencer marketing. That makes this group of people easy interviews.

My goal in having them on the show is to certainly talk about their platform so you might have a good idea of something else out there, but then I try to dive deeper into their worldview, at least as it pertains to influencer marketing. We discuss and debate issues and such. That gives you more than just a veiled ad for their thing and helps us push the thinking.

By the way – no one pays to be interviewed on this show. The editorial part of it is just me deciding that person has something worth sharing and talking about. Sure, I’ve interviewed Pete Kennedy from Tagger, who is our show sponsor, and some folks from companies that sponsor the Marketing Podcast Network, of which Winfluence is a member, but being interviewed on Winfluence is not part of any ad buy for them. Just so you know.

Austin Rosenthal actually caught my attention recently by saying he didn’t agree with my conclusion from an earlier conversation. If you’ll remember back a few episodes we talked to Aaron Bruce of Posse.io. His platform allows brands to tap into an influencer’s audience by targeting advertising to them with the creator’s permission, but for a CPM payout to the influencer and no need for content creation.

My headline / conclusion on that episode was “Are we doing influencer marketing all wrong.” So Austin took issue.

It’s no surprise. Austin Rosenthal is the chief operating officer at Lionize.ai. It is an influencer marketing software platform in the traditional sense. You use Lionize.ai to search and discover, then engage and manage influencer campaigns. So I could see why he would object to me inferring that we might be doing influencer marketing wrong by not focusing on just ad buys against influencer audiences.

I welcomed the pushback and knowledge about Lionize.ai, but only if Austin would come on the show and explain both. So, a new tool and a little fun discussion is in order today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influencer marketing management solution. Try a free demo at jason.online/tagger today.

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

Those of us on the agency or services side of the influence marketing industry covet one thing really: Insights from brand-side marketers, particularly those who are the decision-makers in the business. I would imagine talent managers and some creators also covet that since the brand’s investments in any of us is what makes the industry tick.

In that broad category of brand decision makers, there are a wide variety of businesses and brands. You have small businesses, often mom and pop, local shops, who are regular businesses we encounter all the time. They’re probably not often called startups, which is a separate category.

These are companies that often take on investments and try to grow to be medium to large businesses. They’re tricky because when they’re really new, they don’t have any money to invest in marketing. As they grow or take on investments, that budget grows and they can wind up being a godsend for those of us looking for brands to help who area also able to pay for that service.

And then there are mega brands ... the ones you always hear about. They have big teams, multiple brands within portfolios and lots of money to spend.

A few weeks ago on LinkedIn, one person at the latter of those three types of companies struck up a conversation that caught my attention. Kyle Peters works in the strategy and innovation department at Nestle ... the largest retail company in the world. He focuses on internal innovation, but he joined the team there after building a startup ice cream brand. So he’s been on the startup and small business side, too.

Kyle asked this: What is the value of an influencer? I was intrigued. So I jumped in and contributed to the comments, but then asked Kyle if he’d like to come on Winfluence and talk about the topic. We’d be tickled to have someone from Nestle sharing that kind of conversation with us. His perspective from the startup and small business side are helpful too.

So today, Kyle joins me to talk about his background, but then, the value of influencers from both sides of the aisle ... how influencers and creators value themselves versus how agencies and brands do.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The primary reason I like to interview people about this wild, wonderful world we work in is that I know I don’t know everything. Even though we talk about a lot of the topics that I consider myself fairly well schooled or experienced with, someone else always brings a different perspective to the table.

It’s the accumulation of those different perspectives that I feel makes me, and I suppose, you, smarter. We’re better at our jobs because we listen to someone else’s perspective, even if it’s about something we fell comfortable that we know well.

I had the great pleasure of being a guest on Lara Schmoisman’s podcast, Coffee No. 5, a few months ago. I didn’t know Lara before we did the interview, but as I prepared and then chatted with her, I realized ... here’s someone with a world of different perspectives I need to know more from.

Lara is a luxury marketing specialist which is a category I definitely want to know more about. She’s also a global marketing expert. She works with clients around the world and can bring the experiences of working in different countries, cultures and languages to the table, too. Lara is based in L.A., but is originally from Argentina.

Her take on marketing and branding has created a nice following for her in the industry, not just on her podcast, but through her work at her agency, The Darl. I invited Lara to come on the show and talk to us about all those things and give us a little different perspective.

Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally ... the file is saved to their computer ... then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices