Transcript
[00:00:02] Paul: All right. Cool. We're live. We'll just get started in a minute or so as people trickle in. But to give everyone context, this is our second webinar. We are super excited to bring Marin here. And we've got another great set of topics for you. We're doing these webinars because we feel like there's just not a lot of up to date, high quality content when it comes to influencer marketing, in this case, whitelisting and ads and that whole marketing stuff. So goal is to, you know, have really, really smart people that we can have conversations with a couple of slides, a couple of case studies to help people in the industry learn. So we'll get started pretty soon. But this should be really, really exciting conversation. How are you doing? Marin, where are you dialing in from?
[00:00:53] Marin: Hey, man, doing pretty good. Thanks for having me. I'm currently in Croatia. Yeah.
[00:00:57] Paul: Cool, cool, nice. How is it? So it's like. What? Afternoon? Late afternoon for you.
[00:01:03] Marin: Yeah. Late afternoon. I'm just finishing my day.
[00:01:07] Paul: Cool. Yeah, just starting mine about 8 a.m. in LA, 11 eastern time. Cool with that. Let's get started. Super excited to welcome Marin. Marin's the head of performance at Inspire agency. He's managed over $50 million of Facebook ads, and I was really excited to bring him on because he's not only really strong from a quant and performance perspective but he's also great from a creative and collaboration with influencers. So given that we obviously at archive worked with a lot of influencer marketers, this is going to be a really great way for you to learn about how to optimize the paid side of things, especially on the ad side of things. We've got an awesome case study. They've worked with Vessi and the hoodie and done some amazing work. And Marin's actually scaled and executed, exited a couple of in-house brands too. So not just agency experience, in-house brands. It's going to be amazing. Welcome, Marin. Super excited to chat with you today.
[00:02:04] Marin: Thank you. Man, you put some like, big words behind my name. So hopefully I'll justify them during today's webinar.
[00:02:11] Paul: I mean, all stuff you've done and accomplished. So you've got a ton of experience for people to learn from. It's going to be good. Cool. So today's agenda, we're going to do a 30 minute chat casual and formal. But we do have some slides to walk through. We're going to talk about traditional ads versus whitelisting. What is whitelisting. We're going to learn all about that and also how things have changed. We've got two really great case studies where Marin's going to walk through some real life whitelisting examples, and why they performed well compared to the regular stuff. Why it works, how to do it properly. And then Marin's got a great calculator that he's going to walk us through to help us understand a little bit of the math behind forecasting and predicting spend and cost from an influencer whitelisting perspective. And of course, we have time for Q&A at the end. So drop in any questions in the chat. We'll be able to answer them either throughout or at the end. Cool. Marin, are you ready to go? Maybe before we start curious to hear what's top of mind, like any kind of topics that are keeping you up at night this week?
[00:03:17] Marin: So yeah, this week was like, actually for a couple of hours, Facebook had an outrage where like it started overspending. So most of the CPMs, like it felt like your, your accelerated bit. So Facebook like, started spending as much as possible, which caused like CPMs to go up to like up to 200 CPC to go like up to $10, $15. So people that are in lowest cost, they were partially affected. So basically only maybe like 10% higher spend than the, than the day before. But people that were on manual bids, they actually spent like in those couple of hours that I know one guy that like over spent $50 just because his strategy is to have inflated budgets and then a bit cap as a safety net. But then like Facebook was acting like there's no bid. So basically people spent a lot of money, like up to like 50 K without with having like crazy, crazy high CPC and like terrible conversion rate. Facebook did not issue an official statement yet about that. But I expect some coupons to be refunded to the advertisers. And I said like especially guys with manual bids were were definitely affected.
[00:04:36] Paul: Yeah, I know it's a crazy one that happens to your platform just affects your day to day, you know, goals. It's scary. I have seen a few people start posting screenshots of Facebook refunds, so it does look like you know, they're going to credit. We've seen this before. Facebook's generally pretty good at crediting back and refunding. But it is a stressful situation, so I appreciate the update there. Cool. I need to make sure that in the future we have the slides up for your background. But, you know, again, super excited for Marin. You know, he and his agency has worked with awesome companies like Vessi also Under Armour true classic. So we've got a lot to learn from today. We're going to get started by talking about whitelisting. Marin, can you maybe walk us through the definition of whitelisting? And especially I think it'd be interesting to contrast that as it relates to typical, you know, Facebook or TikTok ad.
[00:05:34] Marin: Yeah. So let's say on a Facebook site, most of the brands are running the ads through the brand page. Let's say you have a brand called archive. You have a Facebook page called archive. You have an Instagram page called archive. And that's it. That's your brand page. But what we actually understand that people believe more to certain like certain influencer or like UGC creator. But then when running the ads under those pages basically you get additional additional exposure and it feels like the ad is coming from someone who, who, you know, so basically, instead of running the ads under the archive page, you would create a page for, let's say, for yourself, for Paul Facebook page and Instagram page, obviously, like you already probably have Instagram page, you just create a Facebook page and put your profile picture. So when you when you create an ad for archive, it's coming through your personal page. So it looks like okay, it looks more genuine, it looks like if you have multiple guys like those, if you have like ad for archive coming from Paul's page, you have ad for archive coming through Marin's page or let's say for from Vanessa's page. You have a lot of people talking about the same product, and it feels like everybody is using the product and it just feels more genuine because people would people recognize when there's a brand name and like, people don't like ads.
[00:07:07] Marin: And when people see a content piece coming through a page that looks organic, like they're more inclined to click on that page. So that's on the Facebook side. On a tick tock side. It's it's even a bit more simpler because Tick tock allowed you to create a to kind of, like, generate a spark code for each of the posts that you publish on your page. So let's say if you're doing influencer just the regular influencer seeding or like you're paying for post and then the influencer post on their page on their profile, you ask them to share to generate that spark code, and then they give you that code. And then you type that code into your ads manager, and then you run ads. But again, it's not running through the brand's page. It's running through the through the through the influencer page. Unfortunately, in that case, on Spark Ads, you cannot you cannot control the ad copy. So basically what they what they posted when they published the content, that's what you have to use. But again, it serves to the same purpose that it feels more genuine.
[00:08:12] Paul: Speaking of ad copy, you've seen a big difference on meta when you're whitelisting an ad and writing your own copy versus typically with the influencers are saying.
[00:08:22] Marin: Yeah, because like influencers, when they when they post a content piece, they have to like like it's not it's not so direct response. It is like something that like suits their brand, suits their like usual language. When you change a copy, you kind of like, you don't want to, like, make it as it's. You don't want to make it as it's coming from brand page because then people would like, see that like, this is a, this is an ad. So like, you have to, like, fine tune that sweet spot between the influencer language and the brand language that actually does the selling. So when you combine that like, like it's coming from a first perspective, but it's still kind of like highlights the benefits of your product. That's what's kind of like that's what we find makes makes the biggest difference. Because you cannot be so aggressive with your messaging. But again, if it's if it's super organic, then it would not do the selling. So you have to find that sweet spot.
[00:09:19] Paul: Got it. So, I mean, as an example, you could imagine that if we're running an ad, direct response is going to be like, hey, we have a hook, we have the benefits, and then a clear CTA with maybe like an emoji pointer, all that good stuff. The influencers typically going to be like, guys, I love this product. It's so cool. A little bit more casual open tone. And when you guys are rewriting these ads it's a little bit in the middle. It'll be maybe something like, I love this product, I just found it here and XYZ reasons, but it's not going to be quite as direct response as a typical meta ad. That makes a whole lot of sense. And it is white listing new. Obviously spark adds a little bit newer, but white listing. How long has it been around? Can you give us a quick history given that? Yeah. So, you know, been in this space for seven years, right. Like when did it kind of take off? And I feel like there's almost a little bit of a resurgence recently.
[00:10:11] Marin: Yeah. So basically more and more brands started doing that. Before, before like before leveraging influencers. We were kind of like creating our fake pages, like we would create fake page, let's say Paul and just like a Facebook page. But then we realized, okay, like, we don't have to pretend we can actually leverage the influencers because they already have their pages done, they already are producing content. And it's kind of like a win win. Before that, Facebook was pushing it was like it was called branded content. So basically those were the ads that says like brand page bit, influencer name. So in our case it could be archived with Paul. But I personally do not like those ads because you have less control on the, on the, on the ad copy side, which we do not like. You cannot control what the headline is. And like when you have brand page with info page like, it's like, it definitely looks like an ad because, you know, it's a paid partnership. But when you actually run through the through the influencer page, we kind of like found a way that it is it is more genuine and it looks and it it can generate higher click through rate just because it looks more organic. We personally are using the we are using this approach for the, for the past like three, four years for most of the brands that we work with, also with our internal brand, like, I can, I can say that for our internal brand, whitelisting is like backbone of our success on the paid media. We have like probably over 20, 30 influencers that we run ads from their pages.
[00:11:57] Paul: Awesome, super helpful context. Let's go through a couple of case studies. I remember we were talking about some work you did for the Audi. Obviously really awesome amount of spend and awesome looking Roas, especially measured on the platform. So a lot of probably halo effects too. But tell us a little bit more about the concept and strategy behind what you did there, and maybe call out some of the specific tactics that worked and why.
[00:12:24] Marin: Yeah. So for example, this calculator we had, like, a lot of content and, like, we want to test all of that content. So this calculator allowed us to set up an early indicators to understand, like, okay, based on our raw target and on our AOV, we know, like what our CPA needs to be. But like, sometimes I cannot wait for my asset to spend like five times CPA because if I have a lot of tests and I wait for like five times the CPA, like I would spend a lot of money. So I reverse engineer my target per cost per ad to check out, sorry, cost per add to cart and cost per checkout. So that tells me what my target needs to be for those early indicator. So let's say my average cost per add to cart is $10. So if I launch an ad and I'm getting cost per to cart for like 17, there's a very low chance that ad would turn out to be great and hit my target Rus of three just because it's missing the first target in the funnel. Considering what I said, like, we had a lot of content to test how we were getting to that content. Apart from the in-house team and some of the agency that we work. The team did, like, a massive influencer seeding program.
[00:13:39] Marin: So basically we were sending I mean, they were sending a lot of content to the influencers. Like, it helps when the product is popular. So, like, everybody wants to have that product. It definitely helps when compared when you're selling, I don't know, bags back scrub or like some, some random product. This is the product that people actually want to post. So then we were going through like all the posts that got some traction or actually post that got certain number of likes, certain number of views. Then we would ask for approval to launch that content as an ad. First we would like to test everything into dynamic ad. So basically if I have like ten, ten girls that posted UGC picture, I would launch all of those ten content pieces to see which of this is getting most traction on the paid side. So basically, I was filtering from all of the organic pieces. I picked 10% the best one from those I kind of like tested everything on the paid side to see, which is actually getting traction. When we see that we are getting traction, then we would reach out to that girl and ask, hey, would you mind like giving us a dark posting? Some girls did that for free just because we told them, hey, we are putting money behind your profile.
[00:15:01] Marin: Like we are going to get you a lot of reach or get a lot of followers. So, like, it was a no brainer for them. And for us, it was a low chance of not succeeding because we already validated that content through our testing testing framework. Sometimes like some, some people did not want to do, like, give us content just for free. So then we agreed, okay. Like let we are going to pay you or like we are going to test it for 30 days. If we see some traction, then we can negotiate. What what makes sense? For example, I had one girl that she had like 5000 followers, like, so, like almost nothing in terms of the, like big influencer, but actually her video, like, I spend over 500 K on her video, so like she went from five K to 15 K followers, mostly because we were pushing that her video and that video turned out to be a great video. On the paid side, we spent like, as I said, 500. K like she that video alone had 7 million views. So basically it works so good. So we push the spend. She got the followers and like it was a win win situation for both of us.
[00:16:12] Paul: Yeah. No. That's cool. A couple things to unpack here. Number one, let's talk about compensation. What's you know, some people are doing it for free, like you mentioned. If you're able to align incentives. Hey, look, we're going to use your content. We're going to put some media behind it, and it's win win because we're going to help you build your audience. I think that was really popular earlier on. But now that more people are whitelisting. Just to get your take on it. But that's a little bit harder to do. And we've actually seen brands do things like even give like a percentage of ad spend being spent so that incentives are aligned. Curious to get your sense of the performance fee model for paying them out and then maybe just give a just shout a couple of other benchmarks that are examples of things you've compensated just so people can have a sense of, hey, you know, what's kind of a lot, what's not a lot, what's what are some examples there of transactions you've done to get rights to whitelisted content once the post is already published?
[00:17:09] Marin: Yeah, definitely. So we do this this way. So we tell them, hey guys, we would like like to have an ads, right. So basically that's them allowing us to use their content under our page. And then we ask we would like to have dark posting. So like when we presented that way like some, some, some influencer don't know what whitelisting is. So they're like kind of more inclined to that because ads right. Feel like okay, I don't want to like run my ads kind of corporate. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So basically they're more in favor running the ads under whitelisting page. The most that we paid for 30 day usage was five K, but that was like one girl that had like a huge following on YouTube. And we know that we knew that, like, she's an authority and like, she would sell a lot because, like, people would people perceive her as authority. At the end, we kind of like maybe an overestimated that collaboration. So, like, we were kind of like slightly above break even. But as I said, sometimes we had like usually, usually influencer like those that know what whitelisting can do. They ask for a higher fee, but usually we try to negotiate with them. Hey. Okay, let's can you like, bring us can you lower a price for the first 30 days? And, like, if it makes sense for us, I can pay you as much as you want. And, like in those 30 days, it is enough for me to kind of, like, test that content and to see whether it makes sense for me to pay a bigger sum, because I don't want to, like, pay five K and then turn out to be that, like, I spend like $200 on ads and like it did not get any sale and it doesn't make sense to put more money into it. So basically, I lost the money. So when you're paying a higher fee, like it needs to be that like you manage to scale that ad and in those 30 days I can see whether I kind of like, make sense for me to push that ad on the page side.
[00:19:11] Paul: Yeah, that makes sense. And what I like about your strategy is you're able to focus on getting really high volume of content. Right? You guys are doing seating and all that stuff, and then you're trying to optimize for speed and low cost to get to the next stage. And then if things are working well with the next stage, then sure, we can spend more, but you want to make sure that you minimize the cost of every step so that, for example, when you're getting like a ton of content, you guys are using seating instead of paying influencers, which is going to bring your costs low. And then just a ton of other examples, right? Like, hey, before you even actually getting rights, let's just see if the content's performing on Instagram and TikTok. If you've got 100 pieces of content, 100 videos, let's take the top 25% that are going a little bit viral instead of testing out all the others, and then again 30 days and then to 30 days for the rights. If it works great, you can spend more with the influencer. And then again, I think that applies on your testing funnel by looking at your earlier stage metrics before saying, hey, let's you know, get it through the, you know, learning phase. On the paid ad side, we actually don't even want to do that if the add to carts are horrible. Anyway, so really good to see that just played out across the whole funnel from seating, which is done by the influencer team. Typically to what you know you and your team are doing on the paid ad side. So good. Helpful overview for some of those folks that maybe haven't dove in that deep on those testing frameworks. I want to talk about Vessi, who's actually doing super, super well right now. They have these awesome shoes. Tell us a little bit about that project and any takeaways there.
[00:20:46] Marin: Yeah. So like here we can see like two example. One is the paid partnership which is Facebook pushing. The other is an ad coming through the influencer page which is actually white listing. So this is a brand that is like well known in the US. And so.
[00:21:05] Paul: Just just real quick to confirm, I want to talk about what we were saying. Right. So yeah.
[00:21:10] Marin: So we can see like in the first ad, we this is paid partnership. We can see like name of the influencer with Vessi. And on the other side we can see only name of the influencer.
[00:21:22] Paul: Right. And then just the whole look and feel is a little bit different. So when people are scrolling through, they initially feel like, hey, this is an influencer posting some organic content, whereas here it's pretty quickly you get that sponsored thing and it's a very, very fast for people to just react to that and be like, okay, cool, I'm seeing an ad, whereas the other one will be a little bit slower.
[00:21:46] Marin: Yeah, exactly. So like what's important to mention here, like for every content piece, we also like did a couple of variations. So like it's not just like they created a content piece that they publish on their page. And we're going to take that and launch it as an ad. So like sometimes like influencer talks lows, which is not a great for an ad or like they kind of like have five seconds where nothing is happening. So basically our creative strategies and video editor kind of like chop it up a bit, speed it up a bit. So basically it's more suitable for an ad. So basically whenever we are launching one ad, we're launching it at least three variations of that video, kind of like to amplify our chances of finding a winning creative, just because sometimes having a different hook can kind of like yield like three times better the results. So that's what's important to know that, like, it wasn't just, hey, here's a content piece and let's launch it. It's actually okay, let's try to make most out of it so it can be potentially a winning ad. So that's why we launched a couple of winning winning variations, a couple of variations to try that find that winning one.
[00:22:54] Paul: Okay. Gotcha. Cool. Let's kind of go to the next slide. I want to talk a little bit about why this works. Right. You called it out, but let's go a little bit deeper here. You're spending a lot of money for brands to help them grow drive purchases, and you're making a conscious decision to deploy that money across. Whitelisting. You know why? Why? Why does it work these days?
[00:23:17] Marin: So there are a couple of examples. One, I think it feels more genuine. It feels organic. It feels like it's coming from your friend. It's not coming from a brand. Because if you're a brand and you're advertising your product, it's it's like, hey, we are cool by our product. But if it's someone else saying, hey, this is a cool product, it doesn't feel so intrusive. It feels like like a genuine recommendation. And people are more inclined to trust third party person than the brand talking about themselves when you have. That's reason number one. When you have like ten, five people like that running there running the ads, talking about your product, it creates a sense that everybody is using your product. The the important thing to mention is like when you're running through like a brand page in a single session on a Facebook, you can see only one ad from one brand, but where you're running through the different pages, you can see like a couple of ads, you can see ad from Vessi, then you can see ad from influencer one, then from an influencer two from an influencer three in a single session. Then like you could be like, okay, like everybody, you're using this product. So it must be good product. That's reason number two. And reason number three is sometimes we leverage their followers. So basically when they give us access to their pages we can create a custom audience out of their Facebook and Instagram engagers, basically people that engage with their profile. So at that point, you have a creator under their page talking about your product while showing the ad to people we know there. We know people to people who trust them because those are people that follow them. So if like someone is interested in in like trying an archive and we have an ad where, like you are talking about the archive, they're more inclined to buy that video because they're already your follower and they're more familiar with your content compared to archive like, to which they may they never heard about.
[00:25:22] Paul: So you talked about followers and you talked about smaller creators. And then the also the bigger one on YouTube. How big of an impact does that make? If someone has, say, a million followers versus 5000 followers?
[00:25:36] Marin: So our goal is usually to use this whitelisting content for prospecting. So basically we are not even going after after that their followers unless it's like a super big brand because we know a super big influencer. We know at that point we can kind of like leverage it a bit, but our focus is still kind of like top of the funnel and prospecting. So that's more important to us. So basically it doesn't make a big difference. Whether it's like five-k influencer or like 500 K influencer unless that influencer is, you know, has 10 million followers which is the case that we someone saw that like someone who's, like, well known in the industry and like, everybody knows their name, but it's like, almost like you're advertising through a celebrity page. That's the only thing when when it has like a really big impact in terms of the followers, but again, not in terms of and that's going to be but.
[00:26:33] Paul: And, and that's going to be more expensive too. Right. Because typically if someone's got that likeness, that clout. Right, you're working with the kimkardashian. Right. There's a whole bunch of additional fees and costs. And so I think when you're you know, celebrities are still great for a lot of reasons. You can partner with them, they can help your brand get some additional, you know, likeness. But when you're looking at people, let's say sub a million followers, right? 500 K followers on Instagram. Well, a lot of people are just never going to have heard of them. So they might actually want to charge you a little bit extra than a smaller person because they feel like they have this brand, this cloud, this recognition. But what you're actually saying is like, look like, I don't care that you have 500,000 followers. We're going to show you to like 10 million people across, you know, our entire audience in the US. So I would rather just have someone with 5000 followers that doesn't have that belief that their likeness is really, really valuable. Because, again, when you're actually scaling it to that big of a network, most people have not seen that influencer. Right? So I think that's where some people get confused with whitelisting is what you're saying is sometimes the followers are helpful, sometimes you'll distribute to them, but most of the time you're actually showing the content to your own audiences. And so given that it can be better to work with a smaller people that again, just don't have this argument like, hey, I've got 500,000 followers, I have a lot of clout, like, you're going to use my name. We're in reality. Like, look, I just need great content and I just need people in the feed to think that it's a normal person posting versus a brand posting.
[00:28:04] Marin: Exactly like you hit the nail in the head. So basically, we just got to the point that we are asking influencer just to create us content. Like to some of them we said like, you don't even have to post, we just need your content and we need your page to run ads from.
[00:28:19] Paul: Yeah. And so I guess there's a little bit of a balance too, because now when you're collaborating with the influencer team. So if you're just an ads team, just working on creative, you don't really care about influencer distribution and whatnot. You could just have content partners. Influencers are typically a great way to source these content partners because, well, you know, they're probably pretty good at creating content and telling stories if they've built a following in one topic or not. But I guess the other hand is if influencer teams are already doing a lot of gifting and seeding, then it makes sense to collaborate with the ads team because, hey, let's look at these thousands of posts coming out, you know, every month. Let's figure out like the top 10%, top 25%, and make sure that we follow them in the ads because we can get extra value. Right? Because in addition of getting that piece of content being shown on the influencer page and hopefully driving some sales awareness, we can actually have a really good creative that's going to help, you know, margin like your team, for example, spend $1 million, $5 million at a lower CPA or with better, you know click through rates or whatever the metric we look at is and so that way it's win win, right? You've got that content and then you can kind of get extra value.
[00:29:28] Paul: And so for influencer marketers listening, you know, a lot of ads teams are just dying for creative. And hey, we want more creative. We want more creative. We want more creative. And a really easy thing you can do is just think about that when you're activating your influencers and make it really, really easy to, you know, for your ads team to work with those influencers to see that content by giving them, giving them tools or reports to be like, hey, Marin, I've worked with 100 influencers today. Here are my 100 posts. You know, let me send you a spreadsheet so you can go look at them or something. And then that way, Marin, like your creative team can go run a bunch of ads. So I think that integration can be super valuable, as you talked about leveraging all of those seated influencers in some of those campaigns for the Audi.
[00:30:11] Marin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly what? That's what's happening.
[00:30:15] Paul: Speaking of metrics and finances, we talked a little bit about you know, your, your formula and your spreadsheet. You've got this calculator that we've included in the deck that will be sharing out. So there's a there's a link to it. But Marin, tell us a little bit about this, why you use it. And then let's dive into some of the math here.
[00:30:38] Marin: Yeah. So basically this is not connected to the white white listing and to the like page side. This is like what our influencer team uses as a kind of like, let's say initial formula to to see whether it makes sense for them to collaborate based on the feed that influencers suggest. So basically, there are three types of collaboration. Some influencers are charging a flat fee. So basically you just pay for a post. Some people, they want the commission of every sale. Some people want both fee and commission. So in this example, if we had like 100 sale for each and we know that like let's say our AOV is nine nine, $90, we can see that like revenue is obviously 9000. So basically in the first example if we are giving them $20 commission, that means that like we are getting a Ross of five. So basically if we earn nine K and we pay them 1.8 K, and we know that our cogs are, let's say 2.2 K, we know that our profit is almost five K. So basically it's a no brainer for us. So like by inputting different commission, we can, we could like see that potentially it makes sense for us to give even maybe 40% commission because we know we'll still still be profitable because that's let's say Ross 2.5.
[00:32:03] Marin: So by this, like, we can see, okay, how much we can offer to an influencers to an influencer and still be profitable under the assumption that they, let's say, generate 100 sales. Obviously you have to like take your average number of sales that you're usually getting through influencer, not just like put 100 because you might not get 100. Then in the second case it's pretty similar. But like now we have only flat fee where we pay like let's say $1,000. And then like if they got 100 sale, Ross is nine. So basically again we can probably allow to pay them like five K fixed fee under the assumption that they will get 100 sale. And the last, last option is if an influencer wants to kind of like boat fee and and commission, we have to, like, find that sweet spot. What's the commission and what's the flat fee that we can give them to actually still be profitable? Obviously, this is like a super simple calculator, and it's kind of like a starting point in our negotiation, but it kind of like, paints a picture. What what we are offered, what we can afford ourselves to pay and still be profitable.
[00:33:15] Paul: Super helpful. Where do you typically get that number, number of sales. Right. You're working with influencer. That's a big part in the calculus. How do you predict or project the number of sales to then decide what would be a good Roas for working with them? Yeah.
[00:33:32] Marin: So we know what good draws for us is based on the our cogs. So basically we know that like if we hit 2.5 we are kind of like profitable. I mean that depends from business to business. But let's say in our case that like we know 2.5 is is good for us in terms of how much we sale we can expect. That's that's really hard to say. That's why we prefer to work on a commission basis because like, I can give you I can give you a higher commission, but like I'm not paying anything up front and like, I'm not risking any money because we, we like had some cases where we paid like 15 K and like the girl brought two sales and we thought like it would, it would crush, but it bombed. So like in cases like this, we want to like work on a commission. So like I will get I will pay you whatever you how much you sell sales you bring to us so I can give you like, even 40% commission. Just usually, usually brands are giving like 10 to 15% of commission, but we are willing to go a bit more aggressive just because we know even if we put a higher commission, those people, those influencers are more willing to put a good content because they know they're they're rewarded from us like two times more than they're getting from a competitor brand.
[00:34:46] Marin: And we are still okay with that, just because even with that 40%, that's Ross of 2.5. That's. Potentially higher than what what I can get on Facebook. Plus I'm getting free exposure because that creates a sense. That creates like top of the funnel, reaching out new people. So that's why we prefer to work on a commission basis. Obviously, you have some of those big influencers that they don't want to work with that that they request higher, higher fixed fee. But then we try to like, okay, try to get their stats like, what is the content that we publish. It's not the same if they're publishing like one IG story that's an image or whether they are publishing like a whole dedicated YouTube video. Five 15 minutes. Speaking about your product like it also depends. How many comments do you usually have? Do they usually have on their on their content page? Because we found out that like that content is assigned, that their audience is engaged enough. So basically there are different parameters that we look to evaluate look to evaluate whether it makes sense for us to, to offer that kind of money.
[00:35:58] Paul: Awesome. Super helpful. We're going to transition into Q&A. This is great. Super helpful. I'm actually going to leave this on because we have a couple follow up questions here. But thanks for walking through all of this. A couple of questions. I've already come up. Anyone watching you can drop in questions in the chat in the comments, and we'll get through them. So first of all, when you have a target of, let's say 2.5 x Roas, right? That's what's going to be good for your brand. And you're working on a number of influencer deals. How do you factor in the fact that some of these people are going to flop? Right. Do you have like a number in mind, like, okay, cool. Assume 20% just underperform and therefore you adjust your rest target. How do you bake in your almost like testing budget for influencers when you're using these breakeven or Roas targets?
[00:36:51] Marin: Yeah, that's that's hard. That's why I said that. Like, I always like to work on a commission basis, obviously. Like, sometimes you have to risk but by now we learned, like, what type of the influencer with what type of the content and what type of the channel. Is usually getting us sales. So let's say for our internal brand, we know it's an authority. We know it's like someone on YouTube. We know it's someone that creates like a longer piece of content because the product requires education. So it's not the same if they post like, hey, this is a product and like this is a story and that's it. So basically we can when we negotiating, we are trying to get them to create that type of the video because we already have proof, proof of records that this is the content that usually works. So that's that's why we are minimizing the risk. Obviously if someone wants to do like IG story, we are not going to we are not we are not going to pay so much because we know that based on the like previous 20 collaboration, IG story is not working at all for us.
[00:37:52] Paul: Interesting. What are some of the formats that are working best for you right now?
[00:37:58] Marin: So in our case, definitely YouTube. Youtube is like something that we unlocked previous year, and that is like bringing a lot of top of the funnel. I mean, maybe it's specific for our brand because our brand is like something product that requires education on the other side, on duty. We know that, like Instagram post and Instagram Story and reels were, like, doing the best on Vesey. It was like, similar. So I think it really depends on the product. There's no like formula, hey, do this and it will work 100% time. I know a couple of brands that that having success most success with the TikTok. And they're combining a TikTok influencer with a TikTok shop. But I would say that, like on TikTok, cheaper products are something that is that is like working the best at the moment. So it really depends how like how visibly explaining your product is or does it need more explanation how expensive it is and like for what demographic it is. So there's no like one answer, hey, like do this channel with this type of content and it would work.
[00:39:05] Paul: Awesome. Super helpful. Let's try to give the tip as we answer this question. Let's try to give a good little tip or framework for someone that's starting out. Imagine the brands. You're spending, you know, ten K a month, 20 K a month on Facebook. We're looking to diversify a little bit with whitelisting. Can you walk us through what the minimum bet size and first steps for testing out whitelisting. Are we going to just try to do one influencer and spend half of our Facebook budget? What's a good first step to see if things are working well or to see if it's an avenue worth pushing?
[00:39:40] Marin: Yeah. So I would say, like if you already have an influencer that you're collaborating with on an ongoing basis or like you collaborated with and, you know, they got some traction, like in terms of the commission or the or the sales that brought you to their unique link. And they're like, maybe like they love your product. You know, they're like aligned with your brand. I would definitely reach out to those people first, because those are people that like your product. They are willing to post it. They're willing to share that product with you with their audience. And you already have a good, good relationship with them. So basically, you have a higher highest chance of collaborating with those people to compare to people that, like, never posted about you. So basically you reach out to them and you say them, hey, hey, like, hey Paul, we like your content. We would like to do whitelisting with you. They will probably ask, hey, okay, what it is or something like that. And then you explain, hey, this is us putting the money behind your content piece. We want to amplify it to reach more people. And we can pay you in exchange for in exchange for that we can pay you, like, either a fixed fee or or a percentage of spend or something like that, or like we can we would like to test it for free or, like, whatever you to whatever conclusion you get to.
[00:41:00] Marin: Then if they agree usually we just like, send them a deck where it explains how to provide access, but basically they need to log on their business manager and provide like add your brand as a partner with the business manager ID and provide you access to create ads. And then when you're trying, when you're going to create an ad, you would not select your page, but you would have an option to create a page from influencer. And that's it. Usually when we are starting collaboration like those, we like to send the ad for approval to the influencer and ask them, hey, is everything okay? Like, is this copy, like, clean enough? Like we don't want them like to see their ad after two days and then, like, coming back to us. Hey, what did you post as? I did not say this or stuff like that.
[00:41:47] Paul: Interesting. Yeah, because the influencer might actually get shown their ad. Right. So exactly. Just make sure those bits are covered. I didn't think about that one. Obviously it makes sense in the spirit of a good partnership to, you know, get approvals and whatnot. But hey, they might actually see their ad and a lot of people will actually forward the ad to the influencer and be like, hey, I just saw this ad and they'll be like, oh yeah, I proved this. We talked about this last week. It's all good. You kind of got into the worst part of whitelisting, which is onboarding people and getting them to whitelist. That is a challenge. A lot of overhead. It's a lot of I think pain and makes it hard for people to scale these programs. I want to call out that Marin's got an awesome resource where he walked through all the different steps, has some screenshots and whatnot. We've actually linked to it in the deck, so we're not going to cover that today. But as we share the deck, look out for the whitelisting guide that Marin put together that you can share with influencers or make your own version based on that. That just explains every single step to get people set up for meta whitelisting. We've got a question from Brandon you. Do you have a preferred creative format between images versus video when it comes to whitelisting?
[00:43:04] Marin: So like video is what is mostly working nowadays on Facebook. So that's why I like to have video as I said, for the product that requires explanation or that requires an education or that is a bit more pricier, I think that video will do better. Obviously, when you're selling shoes, like you can just show an image, but if you're like explaining some kind of like device that like they need to like, use like this or this and like why it actually work. It has like some unique mechanism. You cannot explain that with an image. So I don't have a preferred creative format. I think it really depends on the product that you're selling.
[00:43:45] Paul: Given that we typically have a lot of influencer marketers. What do you see your favorite influencers marketing that helps make your life easier when it comes to whitelisting or just ads in general?
[00:44:02] Marin: Sorry. Can you can you explain a question again? Yeah.
[00:44:05] Paul: When you've worked with a lot of influencer marketers and there's obviously a lot of collaboration they create content, creative, all that stuff. What are some of your favorite influencer marketers doing to make your life easier? Right. Generating a lot of content, helping you find. Right. Like, what are some things that they can do to make the Ads team more successful? Obviously, influencer marketers can generate impressions, do their job day to day, but a lot of times they can have impact beyond their day to day and beyond their team. So I'm trying to, you know, get at some potential tips for what they could do to help make an Ads team successful.
[00:44:37] Marin: Yeah. So usually we find out like what? What what does. Well, organically usually has a pretty good chance if like doing good on the ad side, what does work organically is usually something that's great at capturing attention that showcase the product demonstration that explains the unique, unique mechanism and the benefits of the product. So like, you could have the best video ever, but like if it's if that video is like bad at capturing attention, like it would never work on Facebook side. So influencer that understand marketing is something that helps on the ad side. So basically they know like how to create hooks. They know like that hook needs to be either a question or like something interesting, interesting stat or like identifying with a problem or like showcasing the benefit, like showcasing the product in the first three seconds. So people, influencers that actually understand what what makes a great ad or what makes a great content piece that usually tends to work better than just, hey, this is a product. I like it because of this, this, this. So if it's like a blend, it would not work organically. It would not work on a page side.
[00:45:49] Paul: Yeah. Especially don't want hey, I just got this product from there today. I'm gonna unbox it. Yeah. Those are not the hooks that you want to be running ads. And I think a great actionable tip is for influencer marketers is you know, reach out to your paid team, set up a call with them and ask, hey, what's performing best from a creative perspective? What hooks are working? What value props, what lengths are working, what formats are working? And then you can go back and nudge your influencers in the direction that you know performs well from a performance perspective. And ideally, as an influencer marketer, you can strike the balance between on, on, on both scales. Number one, between what the influencer creatively wants to do and resonates with the audience, but also what you know works well with your your brand and what converts. And then also from a just organic versus paid perspective, you can strike the balance between some of the things that are going to hopefully some of the things that are hopefully going to go viral organically, right, because that's what you want to do, but also some of the things that, you know, just convert from a direct response perspective. And there's a lot of overlap sometimes, like a great hook that, you know, first watch rate, getting people to watch the video, that's going to be beneficial, both from an ad perspective, but also potentially from a virality perspective for organic content. So really just getting in there, talking to, you know, whoever the hopefully great Marin on your team is or at your agency and being like, yo, what is working? What do you like? Then you can actually go back to your influencers and nudge them towards creating content that not only is hopefully going to perform well from an influencer distributed perspective, but that you're going to be able to double down and double dip to make even more money on, because now you're enabling the Ads team to spend money really efficiently with some of the new creatives you're generating.
[00:47:32] Marin: You summarize it perfectly.
[00:47:34] Paul: Awesome. Well, we're just on time, so we're going to wrap up here. Thank you so much, Marin. This was awesome. Really interesting to go a little bit more on the media buying side and some good lessons there. Where can people follow up with you to learn more?
[00:47:50] Marin: So probably on Twitter I, I, I'm sharing like tips and tricks on the media buying side like on a daily basis. Recently I started posting on LinkedIn, but it's still like in baby steps compared to Twitter on my side.
[00:48:05] Paul: Awesome, cool, great. And then two things to wrap up. We're wrapping up these webinars and we've got some great new folks. We have one more lined up this month and a couple great ones coming up in March. So follow us and stay in touch on LinkedIn. If you're interested in archive, head over to Archive Comm Slash Demo, where an AI platform for social listening and UGC management. And we're trying to build the best software to help influencer marketers. So we work with over a thousand brands. We'd love to see if we can help you out as well. Check us out and we'd love to walk you through on a demo. We'll be announcing our next webinar on LinkedIn, so stay tuned and thank you all for your time. And we do have this resources slide here that we will be sharing. We've got Marin's Twitter on here, his calculator, a couple of case studies and some more resources about archive. So thank you again, Marin. Thanks everyone for tuning in and hopefully we'll see you all on the next webinar.
[00:49:05] Marin: Thank you, Paul. It was my pleasure. See you.
