The Future of Influencer Marketing: Technology and Personal Connection

Don't miss out on another enlightening episode of The Small Business Show with Swire Ho,  #thepromoguy, and Christian Brown, co-founder/ CMO of Glewee. This episode focuses on the role influencer marketing plays in enhancing brand visibility and driving conversions. Swire and Christian delve into practical strategies for harnessing social media's visual platforms such as Instagram Reels and TikTok, and their application in influencer marketing campaigns.

They also cover the fundamental attributes of successful influencer marketing campaigns and the metrics to monitor for effective campaign performance. The discussion also covers how businesses can deepen their relationships with influencers, emphasize the human element, and drive better audience engagement with strategies ranging from influencer takeovers to storytelling techniques. The future of influencer marketing is thoroughly explored in this episode, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in leveraging this dynamic marketing approach.

Social Links:

https://www.instagram.com/ohkaychris
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisfromglewee/

The Small Business Show is the official podcast for Garuda Promo and Branding Solutions. For more information visit

Website: http://www.garudapromo.com​​
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garudapromo/​​
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/garudapromo
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Garuda_Swire​
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swirehothepromoguy
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/garudapromo/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Garudapromo88/videos
Twtich: https://www.twitch.tv/thesmallbusinessshow
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/thesmallbusinessshow

#thesmallbusinessshow​​​ ​​​ #gaurdapromobranding​​ #smallbusinessmatters #smallbusinessstrong

Transcript

0:18

The Small Business show is the official podcast of Garuda promo and branding solutions. Hello everyone, you're listening to the small business show. I'm your host, Swire Ho. You can also call me the promo guy. Today we have Christian Brown. He is the co founder and chief marketing officer of Gluey, the easiest and fastest all in one influencer marketing platform that connect brands and creator food collaboration and pay social media brand deals. Chris has been named one of the four Ferdy under 30 under the marketing and advertising 2023. I've been wanting to have a guest who come on to talk about influence marketing, so I'm excited for the episode. Before that, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Chris, I have so many questions for you, but before we start, I love to dive deeper. I know that you also an influencer yourself. So how did you get from being an influencer yourself and then becoming the business for connecting content creator with brands? Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I would say that, like, in the Gen Z world, right, which we all grew up in, like, me and everyone in my friend group age circle, I'd say, like, social is just very native to us. So everything from like, Facebook coming out, Tumblr being in its prime when we were very young, all the way to YouTube picking up its notoriety, then over to Instagram, like, our first Instagram post from what, like 1112 years ago. So, like, all these platforms that came out, they were very quick and new to us. Like, this is around the time of the iPhone five. So everyone just had their new phones. We were all like 12, 13, 14 posting online, living in these, like, digital communities. Um, and then that just continued to grow. And so we use that as outlets of communication to everyone, right? Like, that was our export to the world. Um, so using those channels as vehicles of communication with people far, well beyond the small bedrooms we had or the little towns we lived in. And so, like, that was the connection piece. So using platforms like Instagram now, obviously Gen Z focuses a lot of time on TikTok. I still get all of my news from Twitter, right? So, like, we just live in these micro moments online. And so that's something that's been around for the majority of our lives. I speak for a whole generation of people here. Even breaking it down to, like, Snapchat, right? Like, how people post their lives on Snapchat and communicate with one another. All that happens in these digital sectors. And so that's just been native to us. And so as we continue to grow up and grow and develop as business individuals, entrepreneurs, enthusiasts of tech, everything. It was just natural progression to want to scale up something like that so that more people could do more deals, monetize their following and work within the creator economy to fuel something that was like so near and dear to our hearts from the jump. Thanks for sharing. And I, and I know that you also a number guys, I've talked to you before, can you touch on the value for influencer marketing? So obviously brand will connect with the influencer that they want to work with. You know, they're a deal being put together in collaboration. Can you touch on the value? And then maybe the return on investment on some of the campaigns that you found successful? Value comes in a lot of different ways, right? Like when we think about what's the value of a car, you could have a 1998 Kia Soul, I don't even know if that's a car from that year. Or you could have a brand new g wagon, right? They might do the same thing, they drive from point a to point b. But it's that perceived value. And I think that value comes in different formats when we think about influencer marketing. So there's value in the analytics, there's value in the content, there's value in Google goal setting, objective setting and driving to those goals and results. There's a lot of value. So what we see is influencer marketing having the greatest value on the top of the funnel marketing metrics, being that brand awareness, being that go to market strategy, being that vehicle to get millions of eyeballs onto a product, a service, a brand, an identity, et cetera. And so if you're looking from that level and the highest level of the funnel and marketing, the value is always going to be there. And that's something that will continue to grow. So let's take it back 20 years. If you wanted to reach a million people, the only way to do so was to buy a tv spot, whether it's local or national, and it'd be a massive media buying process. Or you could go send out a million pamphlets nationwide. Also a massive project now to reach a million people. You can work with one creator, make one TikTok and hyper localize. Whether you're doing promo, boosting it, or just ensuring they have a localized following, you can reach a million people in one day. And so the speed in which brands are eligible to elevate their brand awareness, that comes in a much smaller timeline with something like influencer marketing, driven with social. And then another portion of value, right, is the content itself. We've worked with thousands of brands over the last call it two years since launching our platform, and over 10,000 influencers, the content that's created between a brand and a creator, that content is used for much more than a single post. So if you have a new skincare company and you want to work with a female, 25 to 30 years old on the west coast, who has a following that loves beauty, if you send that product to the creator, you pay them to post it, right? Through a traditional influencer deal. Now, that creator makes a piece of content that not only are they talking to their audience, but they're talking to the ideal customer Persona of that brand. So now that piece of content, whether it's 1530 60 92nd video formatted for TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, that is now able to be owned by the brand. And now the brand can use that in social posts, they can use that in their email marketing, across their digital channels, on their website. In generalized marketing, if you own a store, maybe you want to do out of home, or you want to do in store promo, maybe you have an led screen and it's just showing influencer based content. There's all these different forms of marketing, post influencer content generation that drive value derived from a simple piece of UGC of made by a creator or an influencer. So that's part two, then part three. On the value side, right, is obviously the data analytics. So understanding the audience of the influencers, ensuring that you're getting in front of the right eyeballs, which is traditional media buying. So using technologies like Louie to understand that, or whether it's looking at the highest level, how many eyeballs did this hit? What was the total impression count across the campaign, whether it's ten creators on Instagram, ten on TikTok, wherever you want to mix it up, and then looking at the likes, comments, shares, et cetera, of those posts. So value comes around the board specifically in influencer marketing, because it plays in so many different variables. And I think that's what's so fun about the industry. We play such a big role in and growing that for small businesses and growing that for the creators alike. I think there's a lot of good information pack in there. And I especially like when you mentioned that the way that we wanted to receive our information or ads, or maybe user generated contents are different. Especially, I want to point out, like the Super bowl is coming up. I just read that Miller actually are not going to do a big Super bowl commercial this year. What they wanted to do and in my world, they are doing, I think, 1000 branded merch t shirts, and they want the fans to be wearing them and do whatever that they're planning on that day. So I think that's a different ways to do that. You know, you get brands who might be nobody who might be an influencer already to actually create content that the brand actually wants. Not sure money wise how that will relate compared with a super bowl ad to the campaign that they do. But, you know, a lot of brands are trying to try something new, right? So they could penetrate, because, you know, if you, you're like me, I watch a lot of video. As soon as I see an ad, I skip right away. But if I'm following someone who I believe and trust on social media, I spend a little bit more time, even though that I know that they are sponsored by a brand, but I at least check it out to see, you know, what are they talking about this time? You know, what? Why are they using that product? And it does create more stickiness. Right. You know, if you find the right influencer to represent your brand. Yeah, absolutely. And so going back to the Super bowl concept, right, what Miller's going to do is in, in person activation, right. They'll give out the shirts, try to get a lot of content generated. Hopefully that gets shared on social. They're just trying to steal the moment. And so for them, a thousand shirts may cost $4,000. Right. 32nd spot this year is going to run you 3.5 million before you start hiring your agencies, your firms, your ad hoc people. You know, it's just going to run you crazy money. But at the same time, we're also going to see next or this Sunday, Oreo is releasing their first Super bowl ad, and they're using Kris Jenner from the Jenner and the Kardashian family. So she's the face of that. That obviously gets split up and that gets shared on social, and people are talking about that. But, like, for Oreo, their goal is to have a moment, right? They want one moment in time. They want their 32nd spot to be remembered for as long as history can go. And that doesn't always happen. Those memories don't always happen in the big game. Right? The big game, as they call it, the Super bowl. So those moments then happen directly on social. After that, the Super bowl and influencer marketing, there's such a big Venn diagram where they sit in the middle, because that is the time that millions and millions and millions of people are glued to the tv. And any time that they're not looking at the tv, they're looking at their phone, they're, they're talking about the game, they're talking about the ads, they're talking about the commercials. They're laughing about Usher and the halftime show, which will be on Sunday. Like, it's a cultural moment. And so it's up to brands to play into these cultural moments, which they do so well with. Right. In traditional senses. But how do you tap into the conversation that happens at the real social media level, which is typically driven by influencers? That's a really good point there, Chris. But I wanted to ask, as a small business standpoint, we're not Miller, we're not Oriole, obviously. And I think the question that I get asked for entrepreneur in small business who wanted to engage in influencer marketing is we know our product, we know, kind of know what our ideal client is. We identify someone, an influencer that we thought will be worked well for the brand. Well, we have no way to reach out to the influencer, or the influencers are really popular. We can't really afford it. So how can glory help small businesses to find the right influencers? Sometimes I want you to also touch on the micro influencer to who are they and why do they actually can work better for small business out there? Here's where we're going to break it all the way down. So to lead, right, the misconceptions within influencer marketing is that you, a, need to be as big as Oreo and have the budget of Oreo, and B, need to spend all that budget on Kim Kardashian. That's not the case. Many, many years ago, influencer marketing, when you had one of the jenners, are the biggest model in the world, posting them your product for 30, 40, $50,000. Yeah, that used to happen. It still does happen, but at a different level now. So now with millions of more people online all over the nation and all over the world and new platforms, we have more creators, and with more creators in the pool, right. We have more ability to work with micro creators, mid sized creators, right. These are all the tiers below your celebrity and a list and macro level creator. Right. The mid sized creators have anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 followers, which might sound like a lot, but is doable in a span of time on TikTok to grow. And then below that, we have micro creators, someone that may have anywhere from ten to 25,000 followers or something in between, which might have 25 to 100,000 followers and so those creators exist, and there's so many of them. And they have a small micro community of people that listen to them, that trust them, that want to take advice from them, whether it's how they live, how they walk, how they talk and the products they use. They want to learn more things from them. Knowing that there's a large pool and a plethora of these creators in every single niche. Now, it goes back to your original question, well, how do I, as a business owner or a small to mid size business marketer, how do I connect with them? And so that's where our platform, gluey, comes into play. And so what we've done is created a platform, end to end platform for brands and creators. But on the brand side, we focus on SMB. So small to mid sized brands, and the large portion of our creator pool is anywhere from 15,000 followers up to 150,000. We obviously have the 150 to 15 million mark, tons of them. But the most amount of transactions we see are actually anywhere from $100 to $300 per post and per post going out to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etcetera. And so how it works on our side is brands of any size and any caliber come into gluey and in just a few minutes they create a campaign. And in that campaign they say, hey, I have a new sunglass brand and I want to reach influencers on the west coast that like to be outside and like hiking, that are male and female agents, 22 to 30 and are in these categories. After they identify their ideal creators they want to work with, they say you can get $100 or 200 or 300 and a pair of sunglasses to post about it using this campaign description on your Instagram and TikTok page. Now that gets packaged into a very cute little campaign and launched into our iOS application feed. Now, every creator that is on the west coast within that age range and that gender specification of niche will get a notification that this brand wants to work with them. And then, very similar to a deal, board creators will then apply to work with your brand. What we've done is we've sped up the process of traditionally a brand marketer would have to scroll on Instagram forever and ever and ever and find these influencers. And then they're like, okay, well, should I dm them from my account? And if I use my account, what account is it? Or should I email them? But they're never going to get back to me. We took those pain points. We focus on building a piece of technology that eliminates the pain points and shortens the process all the way down. From the time you launch a campaign to the time a creator applies can be 60 seconds. Any brand that's listening or brand marketer, brand owner that wants to start in the influencer marketing journey or scale up the efforts they currently have, our platform is perfect for that because. Because that's what we offer is that connection piece and that instantaneous ability to really get something off the ground. You don't need to look at influencers and be like, they're impossible to reach, or I can never find the right influencer for my brand because they're out there. And as much as a brand marketer wants to find influencers to work with, influencers and creators also want to find brands that they align with, that they want to share the values of, and they want products that they actually trust and use to share with their community, because that's why people follow them. And so you can make these match made in heaven instances, or you could even make these transactional instances where you have 50 people post about your product and it gets 10 million views on TikTok and you move on to the next project and scale up from there. So you could take it at any level you want. Yeah, I really like that. And I think it kind of in line with what I would say on the show. Like, if you are unique as a person or sometimes like, use me as Campbell, you're weird. If you're weird enough, they're actually brands or on the, on both sides that you could be connected with. Maybe on that particular campaign, they are looking for people who look exactly like you and do all the fun stuff or weird stuff like me, you know, with that. So that's actually really helpful. And it kind of shortens up the time a lot because if you put in all the criteria and then you could create a match on both sides, then you actually help people speed up their work a lot. And it kind of took out the guessing game out a lot. Yeah. And then obviously, on top of that, when creators do apply for campaigns, we as a platform, need to make it so easy and seamless for brands to look at the creators, to vet them, to identify that that creator does line up with their Persona and their ICP and their ethics and their pathos of how they work. So we do a lot of that in between, and it's our goal and our job to really ensure that the connection piece is there, the collaboration piece is there, and then it's up to the users to execute on the creation piece, and then everything wraps up into a bow. When you look at the data analytics and you see that you got a couple hundred thousand impressions for a couple hundred dollars, and now your product has been seen by more people in the last week through three influencer TikTok posts that, that it had in the last six months of doing evergreen traditional marketing. Going back to the super boy ads again, I saw Ben Affleck. I think he's doing commercial for Dunkin donuts, for example. Yes, he is. So for small business, obviously our budget is, will not be as big as Dunkin Donut, but we want our ads or our outreach to be more resourceful. How much does it benefit us to find the right influencer? And I know that obviously the budget are different. We can target as many ideal client. Maybe we'll just focus on one really niche sector and by finding their influencer, it might help us get through. Can you speak about that? Like using like a big time million plus, you know, influencer versus like a smaller micro influencers. Let's say that we have a new energy drink company. Let's say it's a healthy energy drink, right? Just for example here. And let's say we want to work with one of two people. For $10,000, we could do one post on Instagram with a massive live stream gamer who also is a workout guy on Instagram. Right? I won't even use names. We'll just use membership. So, yeah, so that $10,000 investment for the million followers, it might look really good on paper. Oh, we're going to reach a million eyeballs. That's not the case. Because what happens is as you grow your following and you get to that million mark and above that million mark, now, the amount of people that see your posts, it may still be a very high percentage of them, but the amount of people that actually read it, relate to it, engage with it, that engagement rate will drop as your follower count will increase. And so if you actually break down the metrics and look at how many people read the caption all the way, watch the video all the way through, clicked the link that is in the video or in the bio and or tapped the tag to go to the brand page, that number starts to diminish and drop. And that's just the nature of the game. More people that follow someone, they become more mainstream. And the followers are like, oh, that's cool, that's so and so. But you no longer have that connection piece. You're not friends with them anymore because a million people are friends with them. If you wanted to target males, that game, that are looking for a new energy drink, that have an affluent level of income, well, maybe you're going to get less of them because the million people in the follower pool now are no longer the core gaming base. It might be guys, girls, it might be people that want to follow social media news or celebrity drama, right? It can start to dilute down and spread thin. So that's what, that's the reality of what can happen at the 1 million mark for a $10,000 investment. Now, let's say we wanted to work with two creators for dollar 500 each that have 35,000 followers. So for $1,000.01 10th, we can reach 70,000 total people, as the numbers would show. Well, each of these two creators has 35,000 followers. I would say that a vast majority, 40% to 60% of them, actually have a true affinity with that creator. If that creator is in gaming, is in streaming, is in lifestyle, and talks about what's going on in their life, people have been following them for years. They've grown this following, and the followers came with that creator. They grew up together, basically, is how you can look at it. And so now you're targeting two different people with very hyper focused audiences that listen to the authoritativeness, the trust, the thought leadership, and the actual suggestions that are being given. And so now we're reaching 35,000 people per user, but maybe half of them are actually reading it all the way through. Half of them are tapping on the new product link in the Instagram post. Half of them are going through and clicking on their TikTok page and seeing who they're working with. So the smaller the creator, right, anywhere from ten to 50,000 followers that, like, micro range, those creators have a more hyper focused and hyper targeted audience. So if you find a creator in your niche that is really excelling with high engagement rates, with posting constantly, that isn't posting a million brand deals with competitors, now you've actually found your sweet spot. Working with that creator time and time again is going to show that you might have 35,000 prospective new customers that didn't even know your brand existed, all because you made five Instagram posts over a month with a creator, that makes. A lot of sense. And I think, get to the point. I would suggest, listener to find your ideal client first, because without that, you can really go on to what Chris just described. You are actually eliminating some of the factors that might not be the most important to you, right? So you gotta know, like, who do you want to reach out to, who are they? You know, where do they locate it, if that matters to you, or do they engage in a certain type of activity? Someone who doesn't match those criteria, you can actually eliminate those people and then ultimately to find the ones that what you think will work best for your campaign. So I think this is a real question, and I hope that you can answer on the show what platform work best for both the creator and the brand, or it depends on what type of business you're in. So there are a lot of factors, and there's no sure sweet spot fire that I could answer with. We're going to talk about a few of those different options. So if your product and or service has a little more flexibility and it doesn't need to stick to a 30 to 62nd script, think visual, right? Think of a physical product, a new hoodie or new sunglasses, new hats, new sunscreen even, right? Like more physical consumer packaged goods for the lifestyle industry that can do very, very well on TikTok because you're allowing that product to be incorporated into the life of the creator. And the creator already is building up massive, massive view counts, every single video. So working with a big creator on TikTok, it's not going to work if you tell them, hey, read this script, and we hope that people listen to the script because people are going to know, like you said, that it's an ad and they're going to scroll past it. But if that product is more subliminally input into the actual content itself, then how it's going to feel to the consumers is like, oh, this creator really likes this product. And they're like, just showing me very low key. Just like showing me, right? So it's like, oh, I'm going to check that out, too. I like them and they like it. So on TikTok, if you have a more broad reach and a more broad audience, then TikTok's going to be a great one for video format. Whereas now on Instagram, Instagram has proven to come back as the king for brand awareness. And the reason being is that videos are turned into reels. So any video on the Instagram feed is turned into an Instagram reel. So Instagram promotes the usage of reels, and reels have the ability to live on the feed forever. So when you go to someone's Instagram page, you can click into the grid, it'll open up the video as a reel. So now all of the followers of the creator are going to see that video in real format. And other people from the explore page and the Reels page are going to see that as well. So we've started to see more brand awareness accelerated through reels as Reels have been revived recently compared to TikTok, so they're in a competitive market. Photos are always going to be best on Instagram feed. So traditional product photos creator and the photo, because you have the tagging element. So when you tag that product or service in the post, you can tap on the screen, click on the tag. Now the consumer is brought to your brand's page. Hopefully your brand's page is optimized with a very nice bio logo in the a profile photo. And then you have a link in the bio, which is a driver to conversion. And so you can build a sales funnel easier on Instagram and you can also build a brand awareness tornado per se on TikTok. So a lot of good stuff in there. And let me ask you this question, Chris. I think it's a big question, but I think this will allow listener a good point to start. What does an ideal campaign looks like to you? As you know, after you have seen so many different campaigns, I can almost sure that it's not just about the number of lights, but you talk about the different conversion, but in your mind, seeing a lot of different campaigns, what should be your ideal campaign looks like to you? We've seen for data purposes, thousands of campaigns. And so we look at every single one that gets released. Right before I sat down on this call, three different brands had launched a campaign on our platform within like a five minute span. I was like, oh, okay. All campaigns are different, right? Same as all creators. Everyone is built different. Every goal is different, every objective is different. But the best campaigns that we've seen come at that top of funnel brand awareness level. So it's the brands that understand that they need to get their brand out there. It's the brands that are consumer packaged goods, that are Ecom oriented, that are actually prioritizing the impact they're having with their audience. Because those are the brands that understand that social media is the right vehicle to drive these reviews, to drive these posts, to drive this content, because as you have more content that exists about your product, more people are going to be inclined to buy it and then make more content. And that's when you get the perpetuating snowball that will always continue to grow. And so brands that are in Ecom, in, in consumer packaged goods, in fashion, lifestyle supplements, those brands that come on and they want to work with ten to 20 influencers and they want to pay them $250 each to post one photo on Instagram and a video on TikTok. Those are the campaigns that we love to see. Because now you have 20 pieces of content that are being created, right? Ten photo format, ten video format. Those pieces of content are given to the brand at the end of the flow and now the brand has content to post on their Instagram, to send out in their newsletters. And so not only do we love to see when the creator is driving a super high impression and engagement rate on the posts, but also that the brand is utilizing that content for where it matters most, in those own channels. And so, yeah, those are the campaigns we love. Influencer marketing is not and probably will never be a full attributable ROI funnel just because of the nature of social media. People are always going to see something and then search it in their Google browser and then if they buy it, they might buy it through that. They're not always going to click the link in the bio and be ready to purchase. You're always going to have to nurture people through different life cycles of the business and you're going to have to get them from an introduction stage to a first purchase stage. So it's not the campaigns that are like, oh, yeah, this drove the most ROI. Like that brand put an x amount of money and got out y amount of money. Because it's not a forever ROI machine, it's more of a get your business out there, show it to the world, get real reviews and drive people to want to drive conversation about your brand. And so the brands that want that, those are the ones that I favor in the history of the thousands that we've worked with. Yeah, you mentioned user generated content, especially, you know, if you have a new product or if you've a newer company. Yes, it is, you know, a pay strategy. Right. But you could actually hire people who knows how to do it to review your product. You know, these are people who do that sometimes for a living. You know, they know how to look good, they know how to get the camera setting, you know, maybe to go to the right setting that you intend for the ideal customer to use. You know, they can take it on hiking, skydiving, or whatever that you want them to do. So you can actually get a group of variable good content that you can post on your website, your newsletter, maybe to your own prospecting. You know, these are something that you can actually acquire. Right? These are acquired Adsense, something that you could do day one, once you have allocated the budget versus, you know, obviously you need real life customer, but that could take months, sometimes years to develop. Right? And so when we talk about UGC, going back to some numbers and analytics, a lot of agencies, so like ad agencies, media buying firms, et cetera, leverage our platform for their clients. And they say, hey, we want to come in. We want to get ten pieces of UGC and we want to turn those into ads. And a really fun instance is there was an agency that was working with a CPG product. So consumer packaged goods and their average cost to get a new customer through meta was$26. And what they were doing is they had these graphic design videos and they were all like cool and they looked futuristic and stuff of the product, but no one was really relating to it because people scroll by it because they know it's an ad. So they came onto our platform and they got a bunch of UGC from creators. So they worked with creators, they sent them the product, the creators made the videos, posted it, and then the brand owned that content and then the agency put that content back into the advertising buying suite. So meta Business suite, TikTok Business suite, Google, across the YouTube suites. And within a few weeks, that cost per acquisition dropped down to $5.41 just because the content was real, the ad now felt real. People now watch the ad and listen to it because it's someone like you or I talking about the product rather than some megatron animated video being like, best product ever. It's like, no, people don't come on social media for that. They come on social media because they want to listen to people and hear from humans and connect. So that human element can drive conversion all around the board. It doesn't just need to be at the influencer posting it level. It can happen way after the fact. I really like that example there. So I think that's, that's big question. Right? So assuming, you know, there's a small business professional, I thought about influencer marketing and they are kind of motivated by our conversation now. How would you advise them to start? Like how much do they prepare before they start a campaign? When should I expect results? I think, you know. So where do I start? In a big way. Yep. Yeah. So where you can start if you go to our website, www.gluey.com, which is on screen here. Thank you, Swire. If you go to that website, you can click through to creating your account. You can create an account for free on our platform and you can create, like we spoke about earlier, a campaign. It'll just take a few minutes, three to five minutes in there, it walks you through the entire process. You'll outline what type of creator you want, you'll outline what type of content you want, what social platform. You'll outline what your company does. You'll outline what type of content you're looking for. You can upload examples, you can do all these things and you can do a lot of it, or a little bit of it. As long as you're getting the point across of what you're looking for. You can launch that campaign five minutes after you join our platform and creators in the next day are going to start applying. You'll probably see ten to 20 tomorrow. So that's the real fast way. That's if you're ready to go. If you want to look at your strategy and build out, maybe it's a q one Q two approach. Well, what you can do is you can look at your total marketing budget. I would look directly in how much you're spending in digital ads and look at the results and say to yourself, how can I pull money out of meta or pull money out of YouTube and Google and TikTok, pull money out of that digital advertising spend and allocate some of that to working with influencers so they can post the content and so you can get that content afterwards once you have budget, and the budget can start at $1,000 to work with a few creators. The cost per creator minimum on our platform is $100 and we're seeing ten to 20 creators applying per campaign at that mark as brands are working towards the 200 and $5500 per post, now you're seeing creators with a couple hundred thousand followers wanting to get in the conversation. You're starting to see creators outside of the micro level. From there you can work directly with the creators, send them the product. Once they receive it, they'll create the content. And the best part is when they make that content, they submit it to the brand for approval. And that all happens in our platform. So the brand gets to say, yes, I like this or hey, here's some feedback, let's shoot it again. Once the brand approves it. Well, that post will go live on the creator side and now the brand owns that content in perpetuity. So when we think about planning for the future of marketing, it's not that you need this big heavy software with thousands of dollars in monthly fees and it needs to be this thing that you have to go through, compliance and bosses and everything. No, you can sign up for an account on our platform. You can launch a campaign today and you can start working with creators tomorrow. Yeah, you got to ship them the product, you got to go through the motions of approving the content, chatting with them in the platform. Right? You're working with people, so there's always a human element. It takes as long as that will take. You'll have content delivered and posted on social in a week and a half, two weeks, depending on how long it takes to ship, how long it takes to film the content. But you can get that ball rolling by the end of February, and I'm talking two to three weeks out from right now. And you could scale that program up rather instantaneously. Right? It's just a rinse and repeat method. More money, more creators, right? More creators, more content output, more content output, more brand awareness, more content for you to repost in your social channels, your marketing material, your advertising, your marketing. And for anyone listening, I would actually challenge you to look at the digital ads that you're putting out for your product or your service and think to yourself, do people actually want to see this? Or did my expensive ad agency that I pay monthly make this cool megatron graphic and we have crazy high cost per acquisition, and then take a piece of influencer created content, maybe add some subtitles, add some logos if you want. Make that into an ad and watch how people react to that ad. I'm willing to bet that the cost per acquisition for a new customer is going to be substantially lower than, than a crazy futuristic graphic design. Yeah, I think, you know, you're challenging people to do a b testing. I think, you know, you're not saying to cancel it, but, you know, do it side by side and see who works, who performs better. Right, exactly. And just think about the objectives. Do you want new customers? Do you want more followers? Do you want people clicking a link in bio? Do you want people signing up for a giveaway? Right. Whatever that objective is, base your campaign off that and be clear about that and tell the creators you're working with, right? Transparency is everything. Because like I said, you're working with people here, you're not working with meta and you're not working with the AI abyss of ad buying and placing. You're just working with a creator who has a following and they're excited to work with you. So think of it at the human level and the interaction level and be excited about it because it's cool, right? Get your name out there on social media. It's where you and I are going to go in 20 minutes when we're off this call and it's where anyone listening is going to go in the next hour when they have 445 seconds of free time. That's great information, Chris. What would be the best way to. Reach out to you outside of the Gluey website? You can reach me on LinkedIn. So Christian Brown Gluey on LinkedIn and if you have any questions about how to get started launching your influencer campaigns, I'm always one email away. And my email, very simply put, is chrislowy.com. So chris@glewe.com and I'm always happy to help talk with any business owners, business owner, brand marketer, anyone about what they can do to either start their influencer marketing journey, excel it, or take it to the whole next level. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today, Chris. I learned a lot from you. Thank you so much for having me and I look forward to chatting again in the future. Thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends or colleagues who might benefit from the conversation. Any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with you.

Our show is live stream both on YouTube and LinkedIn every Tuesday at 10: 37:29

00 p.m.. PST. I'll see you next time.