If you're a small business and you've never really worked with influencers before, there's no reason for you to jump to big, expensive, giant influencers. Right? You gotta walk before you run. People don't want to hear all about your product's features. They want to hear how that product or service is going to improve their life. Podcasting brings a little bit more intimacy with the listener than like your social one engagement rate.
That should be way more important than how many downloads I get. If you can find somebody that is an influencer partner in your niche that's small and you're willing to take a bet on them and stick with them for the long term, that can absolutely pay off dividends. A lot of people don't appreciate any kind of content creator like even somebody making a short form 15 second Instagram reel or TikTok video. Those creators put a lot of time and effort into that. Foreign. That's good.
And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and I'm your host Brett Dyster. But if you could please subscribe to this podcast all your favorite podcasting apps. It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. But this week we're just be talking oh about good old fashioned brands and brands identity and all that and influencers as well because that's actually what we care about.
Because influencer marketing is the bread and butter of what digital marketing is right now. Even those other things as well. Anyways, I have Dan with me and he's the managing director of Get Hyped and spearheaded a dynamic team of digital marketers dedicated to ensuring I'm clients bottom line.
With two decades of experience steering businesses across diverse industries and marketing approach to Get Hyped beyond creativity with analytics ensuring every campaign is both imaginative and data driven. But welcome to the show Dan. Thanks for having me Brett. Happy to be here. And the first question asks all my guests is are you a coffee or tea drinker? All the above. I can't get enough energy throughout the day being a marketer so I like to switch up my caffeine intake.
I do energy drinks, I do coffee, do Matcha tea, all the above. So you're just an equal opportunity. Just give me the energy type of person. I don't discriminate. Yeah. If it provides me with energy I'm interested. That's fair. That's fair. But I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do? 100% yeah.
So we started as an influencer marketing specialist agency and we were doing a lot of high level influencer campaigns for corporate clients. And then that branches into like how can we take that expertise on working with content creators and apply it to help small businesses. So we're very much focused now on how do we use content creators on the most popular social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to drive results for small businesses.
And as probably a lot of your audience is aware, small businesses care about growing revenue. Right? So how do we grow revenue using content creators? That's the focus of our agency. Good God. What has been just the thing about influencer marketing in 2024? Yeah, it's getting more expensive. I feel like that's the been the trend. It's been the trend constantly. Every quarter post Covid is when things really exploded.
Just everybody going digital has driven up the demand for the highest quality content creators and influencers. It's offset a little bit by one in Gen Z now is an aspiring content creator. It feels like there's all kinds of people jumping in trying to create content, but it's easier said than done. There's a lot of noise at the bottom, like any kind of expertise and it's much tougher to build that audience and maintain that level of engagement at a high quality with a large audience.
So when I'm talking about like the best mid tier and micro level creators in different industries, there's not that many of them really out there as compared to the number of brands out there. So that drives a lot of competition for those folks and those creators, they know they can, they drive a high price point and they're capitalizing on that. Which makes it tough for small businesses that don't have a giant budget to work with those best of best content creators.
And another thing that I've seen is like AI influencers and the unfortunately the creep in AI has really hit everything but specifically AI influencers. I've only really seen kind of chatter from only fans. But I feel like this could actually become a problem for just influencer marketing in general because you said it, we're all digital so eventually we're not really going to know if it's actual person or who they say they are. I could definitely see AI being a challenge.
Honestly it hasn't impacted too much what we do up until this point. Brands do prefer to work with real people. I haven't had any clients asking for AI and when we're vetting influencers, I haven't seen any desire for any kind of clients to want to use AI type influencers to represent their brands. From my perspective, working with the A and A plus type influencer talent that's out there, there's been zero really AI creeping in and taking any of that away.
And I think it's really just what the clients prefer. I'm not sure clients have fully adopted AI. Maybe they will in the future, but very clients are very much hiding and influencing, for lack of a better word, who we're deciding to partner with out there in the influencer market. Because it's when a company or a brand partners with an influencer, that's a representation of what they stand for.
So I think some of the businesses see AI as a misrepresentation of what they stand for as a brand, then. The opposite side of it is how do you choose the right influencer? Because sometimes influencers do or say things that, well, cause controversy. Yeah, 100%. That's brand fit is the toughest part about influencer marketing. Right? You obviously you're choosing someone to be the face of your company. That says a lot. So you want to vet them thoroughly.
There's kind of surface level vetting where you can use some kind of SaaS platform to look at their social metrics and see if they're good fit. But then what those platforms can't do for you is they can't really look back at that person's content and get a good idea of what that person stands for, like what's their personal brand. And the clients really should make sure that, you know, the brand that they've developed for their business is a good fit with their influencers brand. Right?
You want alignment there. That's the most important part of choosing influencers. And there's really nothing you can do to shortcut that process besides just watching that influencer's content and say like, hey, does this seem like a cool part of my team? Does this person fit the core values for my company? And if the answer is yes, then you know, you go and do the rest of the vetting. The high levels.
Do they have the right engagement rate and do they have the right number of views on their content? Should you also. I'm spitballing this one, but could AI also actually help with vetting a little bit more? Because you could say, hey, can you give me a quick note all this influencer video content in a, in a bullet point and then they'll go through it so you don't actually have to spend hours upon hours trying to figure out the right fit for you yeah. AI is already helping with that for sure.
AI we see making the tools in the influencer marketing industry more effective. We're able to manage more with less effort on our side using those tools. That's my outlook on AI in general when it comes to really all of marketing. Is that like it's helping marketers adapt and be more effective and get more done in a shorter amount of time? I'm not really in that boat of people who think that AI is going to replace all of 90% of marketers in the next five years.
I think that it's just going to afford, it's going to force really good marketers to adapt into using AI as a one of the most effective tools in their arsenal to really driving results for clients. And have you seen like the difference in ROI between micro influencers and macro influencers? Because the strategy for influencers now is it seems to be a mix of smaller ones and bigger ones.
Because you said budget wise it is getting probably really expensive for the big ones, but you could still have impact on the smaller ones. Have you seen the difference in terms of engagement and ROI on either one of them? Yeah, yeah. It depends on the size of influencer you're going for. Depends on what your goals are. Right. If you don't have the big, I'll do the small business example first.
If you're a small business and you've never really worked with influencers before, there's no reason for you to jump to big, expensive, giant influencers. Right? You got to walk before you run.
So what I tell a lot of our smaller clients when they're first dipping their toe into the water when it comes to influencer marketing is let's work with a handful, five to 10 micro influencers to see what kind of results they get as far as driving traffic to your website, for example, and then leverage their content to run ads and things like that to get the full benefit out of that influencer partnership. Really maximize roi.
Then you get more comfortable with who your ideal influencer Persona is as a business. Then you can be comfortable with putting more budget into bigger mid tier influencers that are going to drive higher price point. Right. Because A&A plus mid tier influencers can cost tens of thousands of dollars depending on the niche per post. And you don't want to drop that kind of money as a small business when you haven't really figured out what's going to drive the best results yet.
As far as your ideal influencer Persona. And should you create guidelines for influencers that you're using because I know you can't really do really strict rules because then you're infringing on the creative process.
But could you do some like actual guidelines be like look at, we want you to avoid these types of topics preferably because we know it will cause issues and we don't want to really want to drop you and this type of thing should there those be like those types of guidelines of look at, we understand that you're creative, but we got to have some ground rules. Yes, absolutely. It always helps to set expectations. Like any kind of relationship treat influencers the same way, right?
The better you and more clear you can set expectations with your influencer partners, the better the result is going to be. Right. I feel like a lot of times brands have this, they have this ideal influencer collaboration in mind or they have an idea of what they want the creative to look like but then they don't communicate that effectively to the influencer partner and then they're they're surprised when the result isn't exactly what they had in their brain, in their head.
So if I agree you don't want to script what the influencer is doing, you want to live and leave them that creative freedom. But at the same time a good influencer brief should guide them conceptually on what kind of partnership you have in mind as the brand. Right? What do you want the post to look like? What do you want to talk about? What do you want to say? What is, what's the goal?
Because sometimes businesses team or brands team, they're what they're scripting in the messaging is conflicting with what the goal is. Right. The goal for a small business is usually for their influencer partnerships to grow their business by generating new sales or delivering more customers. But then they'll script the messaging for their influencers and talk all about product features, which really doesn't do well as far as messaging. Right.
People don't want to hear all about your product's features. They want to hear how that product or service is going to improve their life, how it's going to make a good impact on them. So we encourage all of our clients to work with their influencers about creating storytelling content, right? Where the influencers take the service or use the product and tell a story in their content about what it was like experiencing that product, how it improved their life for the better.
And then we use those usually come out to be the most effective. And should influencers really be on generational thing like Gen Z Alpha? Probably more TikTok millennials maybe some TikTok, but mostly YouTube, and then you have Gen X, but once you get too old, it eventually just becomes TV and radio. And so should, like, influencers be split up between the different types of generations? Because not every generation goes to one specific platform. Yeah, good question.
This one comes up quite a bit. I think a lot of people would be surprised that even the average person 65 and older these days is spending about an hour of their time on social media, most likely Facebook. So if you're going to target a different audience with your product or service, I recommend just learning more and doing some research about how much media your social media, specifically your target audience consumes and what platforms are in there, for example. And like, don't disc.
If you have an audience that's like, say, 50 plus, don't discount Instagram, because Instagram tends to be more popular for millennials. Because you can do things like having an influencer create content on Instagram and then using that content in paid ads for Facebook to target your audience. So you want to have a good strategy in place that meets your target audience where they're already consuming media.
So having a general knowledge of, okay, TikTok is still very much like Gen Z and Millennial, right? Instagram is older than that. Facebook is older than that. YouTube is a nice diverse mix. All the above, right?
Knowing the pros and cons and the age demographics and ranges of each social plat platform, doing a little bit of research ahead of time is really going to go a long way in making sure that you're picking the right influencers on the right social platforms for your business's specific target audience. And have you seen, like, the prices be different between Facebook or just ads, social media ads and influencer marketing?
I know you said the prices have gone up for influencer marketing, but is it still more cost effective than actually using social ads? Because I feel like social ads, everybody's a little tired of them or ignores them now. They don't work as well as they probably did in the beginning. Yeah, it's tough to compare influencers and ads. It's almost like comparing apples to oranges, right? Because when you got ads over here and you're just paying for reach, right? You're just paying for eyeballs.
You're paying Facebook or TikTok or whatever, YouTube for eyeballs. But influencers, you're paying for eyeballs in their audience, and it's not targeted, unlike ads are. But then when you're paying an influencer, you're also paying that person for their Time, their expertise, their audience, they're the talent, they're coming up with a creative strategy. So you're getting a lot when you're paying an influencer.
So if you just look like, oh, how many eyeballs did I get in ad investment versus influencer investment? Influencers are sometimes 5 or 10 times or even more expensive than ads from purely reach. Right. How many views did I get? The most effective thing when you look at influencers tends to be like, okay, I'm going to get some views from this influencer post. That's great. But the 90% of the results is from leveraging that influencer in other ways.
Like I mentioned earlier, there's a process called whitelisting where you run targeted ads through an influencer's creative run it through their post. And those that strategy performs 20 to 50% on average better than just traditional social ad campaigns. So it's like you shouldn't put the cart before the horse and like, work with influencers before you see good results with your paid social channels.
But if you already have a nice paid social program going and you have a nice roas on the campaigns and you're looking for like, how do I get a boost out of this? How do I do better with what I'm currently doing with paid social? That's what influencers really work best because then you can get a bunch of influencers, you have them post, you leverage their creative and their posts to make your paid social program do even better.
It's a Influencers is a nice piece to put into your integrated digital marketing strategy. It shouldn't be where your entire strategy is what I always tell clients. So it's almost like podcasting in a way, where a podcast episode can be turned into several different content things. Influencer and social ads are basically like a piece of the puzzle, basically. And they can be used in conjunction with one another. Exactly, Exactly.
Yep. And for any to answer your question about like, how expensive are they? We have a calculator right on our website. So if you go to our website, get hyped media.com and you go to Resources, there's a free calculator and it has YouTube, Instagram and TikTok up there. All you have to do is enter the platform and enter the approximate size of their following and it'll tell you ballpark what you're going to expect to pay an influencer for the different deliverable types that are out there.
Is there any emerging platforms or technologies marketers should be aware of for future influencer collaborations? Oh, there's so many, there's hundreds and it seems like there's 10 more popping up every single week. Especially with AI too. Influencer is so dynamic, right? It depends on what you're looking for, right? Like there's SaaS that's really good for creating content, right? UGC user generated content. There's a lot of good platforms out there.
Billo is one that's been around for a long time that we'll use from time to time, right? If we just want a quick piece of content from a small creator, it's not about their audience, it's just about the content. Then we'll use something like Billo. But then you have the total other side of the spectrum where you're looking for A and A plus quality, micro to mid tier and even larger influencers.
And it's all about the influencer's audience and how long they've been creating content and the quality of that content. Then we're going to want to use probably a more expensive but also more extensive SaaS platform that's going to do A to Z management, right? Not just sourcing the influencer, but also communicating with that influencer of making an agreement with them, doing payments even, and collecting analytics and data on the back end. Those can get quite pricey.
So I wouldn't recommend that for someone just getting into influencer marketing. But if you have a company that's a business that's more robust, you're going to want one of those bigger platforms, Creator IQ or Aspire or Maverick. Those are some of the big. Those cost thousands of dollars a month for prescription to those platforms. So it's not really something you want to sign up for when you're first getting started.
But if you have a more evergreen influencer campaign and you're working with tens of influencers every single month, posting, you're going to want something like that to manage because all those relationships becomes too much for your team. And has there ever been a discussion about using influencer marketing with podcasting? Because being in the space myself, I see sponsorship ads and everything, but I've never actually seen anybody try to dip their toes into it yet. I'm not sure.
I mean, that's from what I've seen, but I could be wrong. But have you ever seen that quite yet? Because I feel like there is some type of synergy between that and just influencer marketing. It's a little bit different because I think podcasting brings a little bit more intimacy with the listener than like your social one. Plus it's A little bit. I guess this would be newer than your traditional social influencer. Yeah, podcasting is super popular.
I would say podcasts are probably the fourth behind, behind the big three I mentioned earlier, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. There's those platforms are where most of the creators we work with come from. But we're mostly B2C as well. I should have mentioned. Right. So we're helping brands that are selling the consumers. Podcasts. We come forth on that list for us, but they also are very effective in B2B.
So I see a lot of B2B companies using podcasts, using things like X or Twitter and LinkedIn as well. There's influencers on all those platforms. A lot of times folks will get caught up in what I call the vanity metrics of looking at the following of somebody and saying, oh, why should I work with a, a LinkedIn creator that only has 10,000 connections? For example, that's not enough or even less 5,000 connections, but it really comes who's in that audience and how effective are those connections.
For example, if somebody had a podcast with only a hundred listeners and actually just came a story, a quick story. I ran into somebody at an entrepreneurship event and he had a trucking podcast and everybody in his audience were truckers. And even if he only has 100 downloads, that's going to be more effective partnering with that person, if you sell to truckers than it would be partnering with a general influencer that has a million followers.
Because that general influencer, if they're not in the right niche, maybe only 10 people in their whole audience that see that content are truckers. Right. And that person, that general influencer charges tens of thousands of dollars where you can get that trucker, which with a podcaster at a more effective price. It's important that when you're partnering with influencers, you don't just look at the vanity metrics. You don't just look at how many followers they have.
Also look at how niched down is their content, how focused is their content, who's in their audience. Right. Looking at audience demographics is super important when you're deciding who to partner with. And plus, the ROI could be significantly higher because they could have a better conversion rate. Just because the smaller the small they are, the more conversion they could have.
Because you could have a million followers, maybe get 1% of that audience, and you could have a hundred downloads, you could probably get like maybe 50% of that audience. That's still 50 people. Exactly. I mean, I think podcasts are still an Audience still a channel that's very much underappreciated and it's not getting a lot of attention because it, I think it's just not visual. The lack of the visual aspect of it being, you know, just audio, it doesn't come to mind to marketing teams.
And even small businesses, as much as social like Instagram and TikTok get all the attention in the limelight, which is actually an advantage for businesses because you can probably get more affordable rates for podcasts than you can on those other platforms because there's less competition there. So podcasts can absolutely be extremely effective channel for influencer marketing. You just have to make sure that you fully understand what the audience is like for that podcast.
They could continue to grow. Just because they're a hundred right now doesn't mean they're going to be a hundred forever as well. I think because I've run into that with some sponsorship or I'm like, they're like, I'm too low. And I'm like, that doesn't mean I'm low forever. It just means that right now, at this point, that's where I'm at. Because podcasting is a very long term, gradual uptick of downloads. Because you're. Most podcasters are not going to make it big overnight.
Most of them are going to take years to eventually grow that channel. But you're right, I do think the Vanning metrics and podcasting is a little too focused on that right now. Where everybody, what's your downloads? How many? This is how many you should have. And I'm like, what about my engagement rate? That should be way more important than how many downloads I get. Yes, exactly 100%. I couldn't agree more.
Some of the clients that I know that come to us and they have past relationships, or some clients that have been with us for many years, their top performing influencer partners, a lot of times, whether it was a podcast or a YouTube channel or Instagram or anything else, they entered into a partnership with an influencer and they stuck with it for six months, 12 months or more.
And that influencer respected that relationship with that client and kept their pricing the same, even as their audience doubled, tripled and got 10 times the same size. So those brands got such a great deal, now they're getting partnerships for a tenth of the price of a new company. Just because they got that person when they were still very much growing their audience, they got in at the perfect time. So you're spot on.
If you can find somebody that is an influencer partner in your niche, that's small and you're willing to take a bet on them and stick with them for the long term. That can absolutely pay off dividends. And this is for any marketers out there you should really look at. For podcasts, if you want to partner with somebody how often or how many episodes they've done because they've done more than three episodes, they're more likely going to continue to do it if they've done only two.
Wait, yeah, a lot of people don't get past that. That fifth or sixth rate. I forget which the stat is. Yeah, 80% of people, it's about three. That's, that's actually the metric. It's three because they won't make it past. Usually it's one because they won't even make it past it's one episode. They won't make it to the second or third because a lot of them don't understand just how time intensive it is to actually create an episode. So they think it's so easy because they listen to one and it's.
Well, there's a lot of things going on in the background that you just don't know. I know, I appreciate that. I've never started a podcast, but I have made YouTube videos. And then my appreciation after making a YouTube video for YouTubers is unbelievably high. And I think that you're hitting on a really important point that a lot of people don't appreciate any kind of content creator, like even somebody making a short form 15 second Instagram reel or TikTok video.
Those creators put a lot of time and effort into that. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. I think brands and even listeners and followers, they don't really appreciate. But a content creator is not easy or else everybody would be doing it. There's millions of people out there aspiring to be content creators, and they're not. Because it's not just that you have to be different, you have to be unique. It also takes a lot of work. And a lot of consistency and a lot of determination.
You have to be persistent about it because you, like I said, a lot of times you won't really get noticed until eventually. Exactly. It takes time. Takes time. All right, so people are listening to this episode. They're wondering where they can learn more about your company and where they can find you online. Best thing to do is check out our website, Get Hyped media. Com. I'm on Instagram. TikTok. I'm on YouTube. As Dan get hyped. You can find me there or you could just shoot me an email.
Danethyped media.com Happy to chat. Happy to help you out. All right, any final thoughts for listeners? Yeah, I would just say the best if you're a small business, the best thing you should do for content creators is try a bunch of different partnerships and start small. So if you're thinking about getting started with influencer marketing, check out one of the and you're running paid ads, for example, and you're not using influencers and paid ads together.
That's the big opportunity, marrying those two channels together. Influencers and paid social. That's where a lot of our clients are seeing tremendous results. So I would ask, I would recommend doing some research getting that strategy together. That's a really great starting point. That doesn't take a lot of work for a small business to get into influencer marketing more in their holistic marketing strategy.
Well, thank you Dan for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on influencer marketing. Thanks for having me bro. And thank you for listening as always. Please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps you have a five star review. It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing or if you want to comment on Spotify. You can now comment on Spotify on this episode as well.
But join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry. All right guys, stay safe. Get to understanding your influencer marketing campaigns or even your influencer marketing in general and see you next week later.