March 28, 2024
LAS VEGAS – Should you work with influencers to build your brand? How much should you pay and what should you expect? Dakota Morse, founder and CEO, Alt Group, Santa Monica, Calif. offered advice to Prosper Show attendees earlier this month on these topics and more.
“I found that it’s not super effective to work with influencers who have huge followings,” said Morse during a packed educational session. “I typically work with micro influencers who have anywhere from no followers up to 10,000 followers. In many cases, they are going to make better content. Ideally they have an engaged audience. You can take that content and post it on your own page and further promote it.”
Morse initially worked with 10 influencers on his Wallaby food storage brand, using ChatGPT to generate video scripts. “It’s super cheap,” he said. “A lot of influencers will make content for $25 to $100 on up to $1,000-plus. You’ll edit, measure, and iterate on that strategy.”
Morse encourages sellers to use social media to educate potential buyers on a specific value proposition, but how do you get in front of people on social media? How do you fish where the fish are?
It turned out that people were not primarily looking for food storage information on YouTube or Google, but instead on Reddit and Instragram reels. “We did keyword searches on those platforms and saw where that dialogue was taking place,” Morris explained. “Then you want to create content that engages your customers. From there, you can accelerate that with paid advertising and dispersing that content on a greater scale.”
Educational content worked particularly well for Wallaby, and Morse’s team honed in on the concept. “Instead of just posting things on social media, we do tutorial-based content,” Morse said. “We show how our products are used and how it applies to a customer’s life. We are getting all this content from influencers in the space and we are not paying a significant amount of money—$300 to $1,000 and it’s getting literally hundreds of thousands of views. You’re not going to get that type of reach on Amazon without paying a significant amount of money.”
From there, sellers can capture customer information if and when those customers go to a Shopify Web site. Morse explained: “We are capturing their e-mail, getting their phone numbers. We all know that Amazon does not let us own customer data, so it’s really important that you capture customer data when you drive a customer to your site.”
Customers may see the bio on the Instagram page, proceed to Shopify and actually buy—then go to the company Facebook page and follow. “This is how we are building up a community over time,” Morse said. “We are getting customers engaged.”
When the reels get a lot of views, Instagram and TikTok are going to push them into the Discover feeds which Morse characterized as “almost free” media. A video that cost $300 led to 300,000 views for Wallaby.
“This video crushed,” Morse enthused. “I can then put paid social media behind this. I can run ads on FaceBook and then I can get millions of views behind a piece of content that I know is getting organic views. I know people are going to engage with it. When they see that ad, it’s not going to feel like an ad. It’s going to feel like an organic piece of content that is going to keep people engaged.”
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