Cody Wittick: What’s the biggest mistake you can make in influencer marketing?

Jay: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Own Your Commerce. A couple of quick stats I want to throw out here really quick before we start. Did you know 47% of people aged 13 to 34 say they’ve purchased something online that a celebrity has spoken about or recommended. 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice. 60% of teens follow advice from influencers over celebrities. The person I have on my show is nodding right now. He knows all this. Influencer marketing campaigns earn $6.50 cents for every dollar spent. 17% of companies spend over half their marketing budget on influencers. 92% of marketers use influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is the fastest growing online customer acquisition method, and most major brands plan to increase spend on influencer marketing this year. The person I have with me is Cody Widdick. He’s the CEO and founder of Kynship. I’ll let him introduce himself. Go ahead Cody.

Cody: Managing partner and co-founder, with y business partner, Taylor.

Jay: Okay. Well, I hope I didn’t cause any riffle there.

Cody: No.

Jay: Really quick. Who are you and what is Kynship?

Cody: Kynship or influencer marketing agency. I came from the brand side before I starting Kynship. I worked at one brand that was called Qalo. They’re still around. So it wasn’t past tense. They created the silicone wedding ring industry. I was there for about five years, got to work with a lot of big time celebrity influencers, but also the micros. And so with a use case like a wedding ring, it was very wide ranging. So I was able to work with a lot of different industries, which made my experience a lot more vast and then jumped in and starting Kynship. Kynship was the name on purpose because we wanted to create Kynship with brands and influencers and all three of us kind of being a middle party to create family and really get past the transactional nature of influencer marketing today. So a lot of the ways that we do things is at a deeper level, trying to create communities around brands with influencers, trying to get their content repurposed. We’ll get into all this stuff. So that’s kind of why we exist.

Jay: So as I was reading some of those stats in the beginning there, I saw you nodding your head. Probably none of those were really surprising to you, I don’t imagine, right?

Cody: No. I was just paying attention to the ones where the brands are increasing their budgets, because that means more money for us.

Jay: It means you’re in the right business. I have a lot of questions I want to ask you. If you have, I guess, one thing before we get into it, that you want the world to know about influencer marketing, what is it? What’s your mission with the company?

Cody: There are two sides of that because I think the way that I typically like to start with brands and how I think about it is building community. The way that I see brands doing that today is very transactional. And it’s very us focused, meaning like me the brand, I need ROI. I need dollars. I’m a founder. I need to track this. So I’m just going to exploit you, the influencer to try to get as much out of you as possible and then move on. The thing I got to experience at Qalo with product that obviously is meaningful to people, like a wedding ring, but the principle, nonetheless, of building relationships on giving and not asking, I saw incredible value by doing that, by just giving the product away for free. And I saw people that were massive, massive names rally around our brand, just because of doing that. The product had a significant impact on that. The brand was strong. You’re celebrating something very meaningful to people, like family. So not every brand has the ethos, but that is something that I believe I’m super passionate about bringing to brands, is that power of building community and convincing brand owners that are so and rightfully so, they’re so focused on bottom line, but convincing them that this actually is the best long-term play. The short-term impressions and dollars and organic posts are nice, but it’s not something that you measure around a relationship. Just like I want to measure that around our relationship, if I care about something long-term.

Jay: So Qalo, just for those listening, that’s QALO correct? I’m quite familiar with them as well too. They make silicone rings, right? There are a few companies doing that now. It seems to be kind of a neat trend, I guess you can’t damage your finger. You can’t get caught on something if you work in certain industries. And there were some big names you worked with on the influencer, like LeBron James, and let’s dive into that just a little bit. How did you build those relationships?

Cody: It all started with literally getting them the product. So it was wide ranging from like just people like LeBron. We never worked with officially, we never had like an official contract. I don’t think he does contracts with brands, he just has equity, for someone at his level, but he just wore the ring. And so we use images of him wearing the ring to get into retail partnerships or as leverage for that matter. Dale Earnhardt Jr. we had a year contract with them and then we had people that we had on monthly contracts, stuff like, that to produce UGC and stuff like that. So there’s every level of the funnel and a very robust program. But building those relationships, honestly, I mean, Dale, the reason that we got to work with them is because for two years I was sending him products and he dug it.

And then by the time we worked together. I can’t give you a number of what it would have been if we were approaching cold. But I can tell you that it would definitely be a higher fee if you didn’t already love the product. And he was telling his agent, basically saying, Hey, I want to work with these guys, I love the product. So there is some credibility, especially if you’re going to work at that macro level, but how I got to Dale, just working usually through networks of different people. People that connect with him, or it’s a lot of relationship building one-on-one even with influencers. So like the same way that I would want to get connected to you or someone else in marketing who knows him and how do I get to him? Same way.

Jay: What does that mean? You mentioned that you build relationships on giving, not asking. What does that mean?

Cody: I mean, it’s giving them the product without asking for anything in return typically. So for e-commerce brands, that’s what we see best longterm for brands. And short-term, there is some ROI that we can get into for sure. But at the very basic level, it just means Jay, I’m giving you my product and it’s just because I would love for you to wear my hat. And I think it’s going to be awesome. And you are a perfect person that I think represents my brand. And that’s it. I’m not asking for three Instagram stories right away, because I just believe that the relationship is going to be of greater value to me than those three Instagram stories.

Jay: Okay. So let’s dive into that a little bit. So like Kynship is a influencer marketing agency. Is that the proper way to describe it? You work with brands, consulting them on a strategy or you actually do some of the legwork?

Cody: We execute it.

Jay: Okay. So if I came to you with my pat company, you would find the specific people, ship them the products and curate the messaging, or is it kind of like a tag team effort, where you would say, Hey Jay, here’s the 50 people who you recommend sending it to, and then I send them out or like, what does that look like?

Cody: We would handle everything A to Z, but we have incredible input from you. So on our kickoff call together, we would basically say like, what are the brand personas that are already buying your product and who are the personas that you would want to actually get the product out to? So like maybe a new category that you’re trying to break into. These are the people that are buying my product. You know, maybe this is the category that I would love for people to buy my product. And these are the influencers that represent those two to three categories.

So we’re able to populate a list and we don’t represent talent, so that’s another like influencer marketing agency, red flag. We don’t represent talent. We’re not motivated to get anybody any deal. We’re just trying to find you the best influencers on behalf of you, the brand and product. And then we have standard messaging that is built on giving, not asking messaging. So all we would need from you is basically like a one-liner to describe your brand in a very concise way when we outreach over email or DM. And then if the brands are on Shopify, then we have a Shopify app that we’re able to sync to their store, or we’re able to handle sending out the orders directly to the influencers on behalf of them. So we’re not saying, Hey Jay, here’s a list of 50 addresses. We need you to do it. We’re just doing it automatically as people respond and say, they opt in.

Jay: The app creates the order in the store?

Cody: Yeah the app works basically in same way as if someone ordered off the website, that’s how you would see it on the backend, but we’re just doing it ourselves through the app. And then as an agency, obviously we’re able to populate a list of 300, 500 influencers for someone internally at a brand that maybe is without a discovery tool or anything like that, that’s going to take a lot of time. But that’s what we do at scale a lot for our brands that we’re able to put a list in front of you, outreach, send out the product through the app.

Jay: You get 50 orders and they’re going to go out to influencers with a note in it that says, Hey, this hat is ideal for whatever, beach people, or something. Now eventually there has to be an ask or do you just wait and can you just know that 10% of people you sent it to are going to reply and say, like this hat’s actually really awesome, it dries in five seconds? There has to be an ask at some point.

Cody: Well, I would say after the fact, the follow up. Compare to dating, you’re married. Correct. I see a wedding ring?

Jay: Yeah.

Cody: If you ask your future wife or you asked your current wife on your first date, like if you’re going to ask her to buy dinner, you know, like, Hey, can I take you out or can you buy dinner? You guys could have had a good first date, but the prospects of a second day, probably are unlikely. So that’s what I refer to, like asking things on the first impression, like this influencer has never heard of you, never been to your website. So I would say that same progression of kind of like how the relationship progresses and dating, is the same thing with influencers. And so that asks comes later. So we have like on behalf of our clients, we say conservatively about 30% of people opt in to what we outreach to. And then we say 30% of those will post for free without us even asking. And that’s across the board. So like if we break down those numbers, if you’re going to even outreach to 100 or 300 people, or let’s just use even number of 100, that’s 30 people. And then that’s 10 of those 30 that are posting.

Jay: Awesome. The 20 that are interested in posting or creating content, then do you work out a price or negotiate that? Or do I set that as the brand, like, this is how much I’m willing to pay or is it, now that depends on the creator?

Cody: We handle that as well. So we’re handling basically, like any influencer that we send product to are uploaded onto a software called mighty scout. And this mighty scout software is able to track whether they post or not, because that is a variable. So they’re saying like, Hey, if Jay Myers post, we’re going to be able to track his content, the organic performance, but also it’s going to be downloadable. So it’s going to be able to scrape from like your Instagram, then, especially if we really liked the content, we’re going to say, Hey Jay, can we use this content in ads for 30 days, shared across our socials? Yeah, sure. Of course. Most of the time these are micro influencers, so smaller tier influencers. So we’re not dealing with like the macros that are going to get their agent involved and stuff like that. So that’s all we really need verbally to give us content rights.

And so then we take that content, we reformat it, we caption it and we send it back to the brand and basically say, get this live in your ad account. So we only send them content that’s usable. The final step and all that was, we’re sending out an MPS survey score basically to all the influencers that did receive product that’s just more data for them to understand how big of a fan they are to the brand. But to answer your question, is like, yes, we’re following up for content rights. And then if they grant us content rights, we’re sending it back to the brands to be able to use primarily on Facebook.

Jay: So you’d come back to me and you’d say, Hey Jay, I’ve got these 20 creators that are interested in posting.

Cody: No they’ve already posted.

Jay: Oh, they’ve already posted, what do I pay them?

Cody: You don’t pay them anything it’s free. Yeah, because we didn’t ask for anything.

Jay: Well, fair enough.

Cody: It’s like, Hey Jay, like, we would love to send you this hat. You’re a perfect fit for our brand. If you’re interested, let us know. All we need is your address. You send us your address. We get you the product through the Shopify app. You get the product. You’re like, man, this is hat it sick. Like I love it. And like you throw it up on your Instagram story for free, without us even asking. We track that content. We download that content. We follow up for you and say, Hey, can we use this content on brand’s behalf and ads? And then we send it to the brand and they get it live in their ad accounts. So they get the organic posts for free and you get the asset formatted and captioned right away. So that’s the short-term ROI that you get immediately, is like an un-conservative measure. We get 30% of people that are posting free without us even asking.

Jay: Those posts. I know you can do this with Facebook. I think Instagram too. Like if someone posts and tags the brand, there’s a check box that shows up that will say allow brands to boost this post. Correct?

Cody: Yeah. They would have to had tag it as a branded partner and the brand would have to accept it as like a social branded partner, like sponsored by.

Jay: Is that your recommended way of doing it? Or do you recommend that, you know John who’s wearing my hat, he boosts it and now we reimburse him and he does it through his ad account? If they do a post and we say, Hey, we want to now like drop a thousand bucks and boost this post to, we create an audience or use Facebook’s targeting. What’s the recommended way to do that.

Cody: We basically are doing that by just following up for content rights and downloading the content anyways and getting it live in that account. Like what you’re hinting at, is we’re not necessarily a fan of boosting posts necessarily. We liked the white listing approach much more where it’s, we’re actually getting access. It’s effectively the same thing besides the fact that we’re getting access into their audience rather than just kind of like, you have more control, like within boosting posts, when you go through the steps of the process, it’s just kind of boosting that organic posts. But with white listing, you can run any creative through that influencer’s handle. Usually it is the influencers creative, but you’re running it through their handle. So you’ve seen it a thousand times as you scroll. Jessica Alba’s with HelloFresh. Like it just says Jessica Alba sponsored by HelloFresh, but it’s her handle actually like the creative serve from her name.

Jay: Right. Okay. So that’s what I was referring to the first one. As long as they do that as a collaborative post, tag the brand, then the brand can pay to boost it.

Cody: Yeah. If the influencer does that on their own, sure, we just aren’t directing them to do that either way. Cause again, we’re not asking for anything. So this is all bonus. If they post great, we’re not directing them to do like the branded approved thing partner, so that they could white list. The brand wanted to ask for that right away. We would still recommend getting the content live in the ad account first to judge, whether this is worth going back to the influencer for white listing or for boosting, they wanted to do that. So a lot of this is just testing the creative, testing which creative is working, which creators are working to see what’s successful.

Jay: Sorry if I’m getting a little bit into the weeds on this, but I just, I find it fascinating. Well, like from a real practical standpoint, like I imagine 10 different agencies approach it 10 different ways. There’s not like a one-size-fits-all. And like, if you just Google influencer marketing platforms, there are dozens. I did it before the show, there’s Upfluence, Hashtag paid, Izzia, Ccaptivate, Influencer marketing hub, The circle, Collaborate, Indie hash, the list goes on.

Cody: There’s a lot of noise.

Jay: So that might be the way that if I didn’t know anything about influencer marketing, that’s probably how I would approach it. I would go on one of these marketplaces. You know, a lot of them have like a filter system, I’m in sporting goods. My demographic is men 40 to 50 years old or whatever. And then there’s like a list of influencers and then they all have a different rate. And it’s based off of, I guess, their followers or just what they want to pay. Like, what’s your thoughts on that? Is that a bad way to go? Or is that a maybe?

Cody: To start that way?

Jay: Or like in conjunction maybe with what someone would do with you? So like maybe you do it in tandem.

Cody: I just think that can be incredibly confusing. People think that they need all these bells and whistles when they first start, like, I need a CRM, all these other tools that you just mentioned, I need this discovery tool. The problem is, like, especially at brands internally, if they’re big enough, they might have someone dedicated to influencer marketing or they have someone that’s doing it as a part of their job that they also handle email. And they have a small team that like, they don’t really have time for all this. And so they feel like they need all these tools.

I feel like it’s sometimes more hurtful than helpful. And there’s a lot of free tools at your disposal to be able to like reach out to influencers, discover influencers, like Facebook even in itself has its own discovery tool that’s free. That you could just start out and test it, see if you have time to even, like dedicate towards using a tool instead of just forking over a ton of money for it.

Jay: Yeah. That’s interesting. Last question on the granular stuff before I want to get into the big picture stuff, but what’s the payment model like, so is it then by number of influencers or by number of posts or if someone works with your agency?

Cody: Oh, works with us?

Jay: Yeah.

Cody: We break it down in a per head that we’re reaching out to, for like something like the seeding program, we have other packages as well. But for that specifically, usually it’s like 300 or 500 influencers that we’re reaching out to and it’s just charged a flat fee per head. But then it includes everything else that we just talked about, like every time.

Jay: Right. And the seeding platform, a seed is a creator, a person who’s posting?

Cody: Influencer seeding is giving your product out for free, usually to influencers. A lot of people use gifting, but gifting programs are often confused with what we do, which is not what we do. A lot of gifting programs are guaranteeing posts or guaranteeing like the influencer is going to post about you, which we don’t.

Jay: Okay. So taking a step back, given that like, some of those stats I read earlier that 92% of marketers are using influencer marketing and almost all major brands are planning on increasing spend. And you look at all these numbers like not everyone’s going to win. What are the brands that are going to win? What are they doing differently than the ones that aren’t winning? And I guess so like, what do brands do right and what do brands do wrong, when it comes to influencer marketing?

Cody: That’s a great question. I would say the more that you can think about influencer marketing alongside your customer experience, the better. So if you can think about your customer experience like unboxing, super important, it makes the customer feel like, wow, they’re really a part of something special. Same thing for influencer. The more that you can think about like that end-user experience being really, really awesome, the better your influencer marketing is going to be as well. So that goes to the first impression, your outreach message, that goes to the unboxing that they received in the mail, that goes to like the follow-up emails, if they do subscribe to your email lists and stuff like that.

So that I think, the more that you’re investing in brand, that’s what I would say is brand, is like those certain things that are involved the better. Because that’s where I see a lot of differentiation between like the influencers that are rallying around brands versus the ones that are not. It’s just, they’re going to transactional. They’re focused too much on profit and they’re sacrificing the product. They use the Steve jobs, quote. Those are some of the things to circle back to what brands are doing well with influencers. I see a lot of people that are focusing on the content more and more, which I think is the right way to go. But still there’s the other side of the corner of that, which is a lot of brands are really so still focused on the organic performance of things, which is just really hard to actually get sales out of organic.

I mean, you hear the stories of tic talk, you know, like Hi send my product to a Tik Tokker and he blew up and I had $500 million of sales in one post. Those are all just liars still. Like that is not just every time you work, just like Instagram in 2014, when I was doing that same thing. Those are liars as well. But I see the trend of the focus being more on the content than the distribution, but there’s still a ton of focus on, I think even the biggest brands in the world are still focused on organic distribution. They’re also the ones doing TV commercials as well.

Jay: It’s an interesting way of looking at it. Like when you say optimizing the experience. So when you’re seeding your product, you want the person who gets it to share it. That’s a healthy way of thinking about your whole experience in general. Every brand should think about how do they maximize that experience from the time it’s ordered to when they receive it.

I think even like email sequences, in between there, getting them ready for it, educating them on the product, letting them know what communities they can join or other things. And then after they get it, educating them, it’s a healthy process to go through to say like, okay, we’re going to send this to a hundred influencers. We want them to try to share it, like you should be doing that every time. And your customers can be your influencers.

You mentioned before we got on air, you’re putting together an influencer marketing course. Can we talk a little bit about that? I don’t know where you are in the journey, putting that together, but I imagine that experience must be part of it.

Cody: Yes, it is part of it. No, it’s live, it’s out there in the world if people want to go learn about it. So it’s been live about a month.

Jay: Where do people find it?

Cody: Kynship.podia.com. So it’s on podia.

Jay: I’ll throw a link.

Cody: That’s the platform. We really started thinking about not only like for people that were coming inbound to our agency, that ended up cannot afford us, but they really wanted to do influencer. And we really wanted to equip them and educate them. So we put just everything that we’re talking about today and even more into that course and basically said, Hey, here it is for you. So it’s been fun. It’s a lot of work, but it was a great journey.

Jay: I respect that it sounds like you have the mindset, like give away the knowledge. And if someone wants to do it themselves, by all means. But if someone wants to hire you because they see the value and the time, like I never like when people hide knowledge and information and they have it, its secret sauce and they don’t want to tell anyone, like, you kind of seem like an open book, like, Hey, here’s what we do.

Feel free to do it on your own. But your time, like a brand’s time is probably best spent working on their product, working on their business, leverage the people that know and so. I think that’s admiral, especially that you built a course, teaching people how to do it.

Cody: Yeah. I appreciate that. There’s more than enough to go around. I think, I mean, if I’m going to preach, build relationships on giving, not asking them. I should probably live it.

Jay: You should probably be giving away.

Cody: You’re just probably giving away the value.

Jay: What are the best platforms for influencer marketing? Like social media platforms.

Cody: I will still saying Instagram, is kind of the market leader. Still TikTok is really interesting. I think the world is kind of going towards more short form content, at least somewhat. I mean, people still listened to three hour episodes of Joe Rogan. So I don’t know how short form we’re getting, but yeah, I would say Instagram is still the market leader. I don’t see that really changing ever anytime soon, the mothership both Facebook and Instagram.

Jay: I was doing a little googling earlier, and it’s like the number of success rates. It’s like Instagram post, then Instagram stories, then YouTube video, then Instagram video, then Facebook posts and Facebook video and tweets. Then Facebook live, YouTube live. Snapchat was like way down, like what happened to Snapchat?

Cody: I don’t know. We’ve never done any influencer campaigns on Snapchat.

Jay: They didn’t latch onto that?

Cody: I guess not. I would say, well when Instagram introduced stories it basically coped Snapchat, then that was definitely a big thing. You could have said the same thing about when they sort of copied, well, not sort of but copy TikTok with reels, but TicTok is still such a very obvious competitor.

Jay: It’s crazy that a year ago we were talking about, will TikTok be a thing? Literally a year ago. I think actually episode two, I remember I had Steve from MuteSix and I remember talking about. It doesn’t seem like that long ago. And some of the topics were what’s the deal with TikTok, is it going to be around? It wasn’t that long ago. You mentioned micro influencers, what does a micro influencer? Where do you draw the line?

Cody: So again, if you would Google this, you’re going to get a thousand different definitions. So I’m sorry. The market is not entirely helpful, but how we define it is just usually it’s like 5,10 K between 150 K of following, so that’s how we would define it. We just use follower count as guide rails to identify the people that is it. We’re not looking into it any further than that. It’s just specifically to just get a pool of people. So that’s how we define it.

Jay: When someone has 50,000 followers, I feel like that’s a significant amount and you would still lump them in the micro. Yeah, I get it, they’re not like millions. It’s not like Kardashians but when you send them product, I imagine they’re still probably expecting some compensation for some posts, no. Or even at that level you find they’re just happy to share?

Cody: Sure if we asked for that.

Jay: But if you don’t, if you don’t say anything about it, you’re saying that’s 30%?

Cody: Right. That goes back to like the power of the product and power of the brand, that user experience. So we always recommend like making that unboxing a little bit more special, including a handwritten note, if you can, or upgrading it for the time being for the campaign, because it definitely increases people posting. But I mean, we also contract influencers too, like on behalf of brands that we work with. We work with them and there’s a contract and we’re asking for things up front on our first outreach and stuff like that.

So it’s not just, we all do seeding, but we definitely recommend for brands outside of just working with us as an agency. If you’re going to start or trying to scale your influencer program in house, I just believe there’s no better way than doing it through product seeding.

Jay: That makes sense. And then the content, once you have them sign off that you can use it, you can then repurpose it on any of your own brands content, on your own blog posts? Can you embed it on your website? You can kind of slice that up and use it any way you want I imagine? Is that all in the agreement?

Cody: I keep going back to the delineation between my product seeding when we’re not asking for anything. But if we are contracting an influencer, there is clarity, because when we’re doing outreach to influencers on just giving them the product, we’re not sending them a contract. We’re just falling out for content rights. But if we are going to contract an influencer, let’s say like, we’ve seen their content perform really well. Or we know that they’re killer on content creation, or we want to work with Jay Myers because he’s an awesome YouTuber and he produces really good content. Then we always can track content and perpetuity across all marketing channels.

Jay: If you like the content about my kids sledding down Hills, follow me on YouTube. Is anything posted on public platforms? Are you allowed to put that on your site? Like a hashtag, for example, if you have a unique hashtag for your brand, there’s a lot of apps that can bring that hashtag into a feed on your site, is that all fair game? You don’t have to run that by brands as long as they’re posting publicly, you can then embed that anywhere you want?

Cody: That used to be the case. For sure. I believe that’s changed now. I’m not a lawyer or FTC guidelines expert.

Jay: So don’t make any decisions based off of this, check with the council.

Cody: Exactly, I will look into that for sure.

Jay: Where does UGC play into all of this? I kind of see blurred lines. So user generated content. I had Chris Mead from Spike Ball on recently. I think it was episode four or something if anyone wants to scroll back. One of the things he was very open about on the episode was how they leveraged UGC to really scale their brands. So they did something where when they sent out a cross net. Spike Balls is their competitor. Spike Ball is the one that you hit down, kind of like onto a trampoline cross that is basically a volleyball net cut into four. It’s like Foursquare, but volleyball, similar but different.

Anyways, they would send out the net, well, they would order it. And then they would have an email that goes out and say, Hey, send us a video of you using it, just record it with your iPhone and we’ll refund, you 20 bucks. And they started getting like tons of videos. And then they just turn those videos into ads. And if you follow them and start getting re-targeted with their ads, you’ll just see a lot of it is just like people playing in their backyard. It’s not professionally created content. It’s just user generated content. Where does that play into this?

Cody: The only delineation between UGC and what we would call IGC, which is Influencer Generic Content is just, there are people that do this all day long. Like if I wanted to go to a pool of people between my customers, my friends and family that brands often do for UGC and influencers, like what’s going to give me the best opportunity to get awesome, authentic content.

I would choose influencers every day of the week, just because a lot of these people have created a following one, off the backs of their content creation ability. And two, they’re doing this all the time. And it goes to the point though, that this has to be authentic. So start with product seeding, start with getting them to adopt the brand and product. That’s where I see because a lot of that product seeding packages that we went through in very minute detail, that leads to a ton of UGC. The influencers are posting. We’re getting the content, we’re getting a lot in that account and it’s the same thing, but yeah, huge fan of UGC, huge fan of getting that content and even raw, the more raw, the better, the more native to the feed the better.

Jay: Yeah, I guess it’s just better quality UGC.

Cody: Yeah, sure, like going to my cousin who is very uncomfortable on camera.

Jay: I hope he doesn’t listen to this episode.

Cody: That was just an example. But like there’s no talking. It was just like set up your phone and just start playing the game. That’s great. But like a lot of brands predominantly, like they need some talking points, to explain the product or explain like how this makes them feel or look or all that stuff. So that’s where using professionals, what I would say influencers is to your advantage.

Jay: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Like with Qalo, what are you going to do, just film the ring, laying on a desk? Like you need someone to show it. And it makes sense. Cross-net definitely lends itself to just film people, playing. It can be your kids in the backyard.

Cody: I’m sure they had content that they’re talking about it, how fun it was and all that stuff. But maybe they use influencers for those things.

Jay: Where do you think influencer marketing is going to be in three to five years from now? What’s going to be different?

Cody: I hope the vanity metrics are completely gone. That’s what I hope for. So follower count, engagement rate, likes, none of those things would really affect the way that we think about it. People went up in arms when [29:32 inaudible] and Instagram was saying, we’re going to remove likes. All these celebrities even like, I don’t know who, but Cardi B was like, I’m dropping off Instagram and all that stuff, but it doesn’t affect the way that we think because we focus so much on the content creation. That’ll be a lot healthier for people too.

Jay: I was just going to say that, if you could not see how many followers someone had and you just followed them for their content and what they put out.

Cody: That’d be a true follow.

Jay: That’s a true follow. Exactly. I agree. I want to get into a quick lightning round. Last question is on the influencer side. Is there any final piece of advice you would give brands right now, maybe on the fence or considering leveraging influencer marketing this next year?

Cody: Yeah, I would implement the strategy that we talked about. You could do that internally. If we broke it down pretty clearly, that strategy applies to one or a thousand people, in terms of products seeding, as many as possible to be sending out your product to based on your budget, based on your cogs. I would send out as many as you can. Start building those relationships because I think the community will scale you and have compounding value, much larger than even that Instagram posts that you asked for. Because now you have a community of people that you can tap on and basically say like, maybe not everyone’s an amazing content creator, but like the ones that you do identify, work with them. Have them produce UGC on a month to month basis and pay them accordingly.

Have people that you just continually seed products to and build relationships with. Have people that you sign up for ambassador affiliate programs, like whatever you want to do. Now you have a pool of people that you can tap on. So I would definitely invest in product seeding in one way or another. Whether you can send out five products or 50, and then two, if you’re not using UGC or if you’re not using influencer creative, we’ve just seen time and time again, that performs really, really well within Facebook ads and providing on average, a 15% lift in the ad accounts that we run. So getting that influencer creative into your ad account, into your paid media mix, I would definitely recommend. Testing it, seeing what works.

Jay: I know you said this earlier, the whole tracking ROI you said, kind of don’t make that at the front, but is there a way, like the products I send out, I would consider them part of my CAC customer acquisition costs. If I’m taking a budget that I spend, because this is going to be going through brands heads right now, like, well my product is $500 or my product is $200. And if I have a budget that I spend 20 grand a month on advertising through Facebook and Instagram and someone wants to experiment and say, maybe I’ll take a percentage of that. It’ll take 10 grand and I’ll put it towards product seeding. And so I’ll take 10 grand of product and send it out. Is there a way, can you track through these people or through that platform? I can’t remember the name, Might Scour. So that tracks that they did post.

Cody: And the organic performance. So you get the organic metrics.

Jay: Can it follow it through to a sale?

Cody: That’s only if you give them a discount code up front, like on that post specifically. We’re going to say track sales within Facebook. So get that content, get content rights and track it within Facebook. That’s all the attribution that you would want or need.

Jay: What does that mean track within Facebook, through their ads platform?

Cody: Yeah, exactly. Getting the content live in the ad account. I was just thinking about it in a way that even in the short-term, if you’re going to send probably to a hundred people, 30 people get the product and 10 of those posts. So how much would you pay for 10 free organic posts and how much would you pay for at least 10 assets? But on average, across again, these are averages. We see two to three assets per creator. So someone throwing up three Instagram stories at once, or they’re posting several times based on the use case of the product. So that’s 10 to 30 assets. Like how much would you pay for those from influencers that you’re basically giving for free at that point?

So like, I would think about it from a budget perspective too. Like how much are you paying for content creation and organic posting, that you’re not even paying for really specifically, you’re just sending out the product and then tracking the ROI on that once you get creative live in the ad account.

Jay: Okay. So you’re not necessarily tracking that initial posts that they do. Like, Hey, Jay sent me this high. It looks super awesome. Fits great, dries fast, but then the follow-up then, when you turn those into ads tracking from that. Okay. Makes sense. I learned a lot. So thank you. I want to jump into the lightning round questions here before we run out of time. I don’t know if you had a chance to read through them or not before, but I ask every guest this one day, I’m going to turn it into a blog post with all the answers or maybe an ebook and you know, you’ll be famous.

So I got six here. First question is what’s the biggest mistake in e-commerce you see merchants or brands make?

Cody: I’ll go back to the Steve jobs, quote, profit before product. But I would say that I would change it into the influencer and say cash before community. Maybe I should trademark that. Focused on the transactional nature versus building a relationship with influencer.

Jay: Do you have a pet peeve when you shop online?

Cody: Oh man. There are so many that came up to mind, but I would say just overall, busy-ness, like a lot of pop-ups or tons of different like landing pages and dropdown menus. Just a ton of going on. That’s a pet peeve for sure.

Jay: Yep. I agree. What’s your favourite thing about your job?

Cody: The ability to implement things after brainstorming and just doing it right away. There’s no hoops. There are a lot of advantages in your own business, so it’s like, all right, we’re going to go with this route, implement it right away.

Jay: You wake up in the morning and your day is yours, right? What’s your favourite online store? Or if you don’t have a favourite one, the last place you bought something.

Cody: Yeah. I don’t have a favourite. And besides Amazon, the last thing that I bought something, I bought something from rogue fitness, building out a home gym.

Jay: Cool, as is the rest of the world.

Cody: Exactly Rouge is doing very well.

Jay: Is that because of the injury?

Cody: Well, yeah. And basically like the gym changing.

Jay: What’s the number one thing you think stores could be doing to grow sales, but aren’t?

Cody: There are a lot of brands that are doing this, but I would say, especially with like the iOS 14 updates, having a robust email channel would be very important. So that was actually the thing that came to mind.

Jay: It makes sense. It’s that owned media. It’s the thing that no one can take away from you. Last question. Most of our listeners are business owners and entrepreneurs. Can you end with a favourite quote or any advice that’s helped you that you’d like to share?

Cody: Well, besides the phrase that I need to trademark as well, build relationships on giving not asking. My favourite quote is what’s obvious to you is amazing to others, by Derek Sivers. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier about just sharing, keep sharing, keep providing value to people. You don’t have to have a scarcity mindset. There’s more than enough to go around. And so that inspires me as like a business owner and agency owner that wants to put out content, share content. What’s obvious to me doing influencer marketing for six-plus years is really amazing to at least, hopefully, one person listening to this. And it just makes me more motivated to share. And so like for brand owners, what’s obvious to you is amazing to others. Keep sharing, keep providing value to your customers or your network. But I love that quote.

Jay: I like that too. Where can people find you or learn more about Kynship?

Cody: Yeah, I’m very active on Twitter and Instagram. That’s kind of where I put out content on influence marketing, which is actually where they can both, connecting with me would be therefore connecting with my agency. And then we mentioned the course as well. That’s on Podia for people that are interested in building out an internal program and learning a ton. We give away a ton of value there.

Jay: Awesome. And for those listening, Kynship is K Y N S H I P. And is it dot Co? I can’t remember.

Cody: .co correct.

Jay: The new trendy TLD. Thank you so much, Cody. I really appreciate you coming on.

Cody: Thanks Jay.