E23 – Micro Influencer Marketing with Zak Stahlsmith
If you’ve wanted to start using influencers to promote your products, but don’t have the 6 or 7 figure budget, Zak will share how you can start using Micro Influencer marketing at a much lower cost while still driving great results.
Discover:
- Zak’s story and how he got involved in Micro Influencer Marketing (01:24)
- What is Micro Influencer Marketing? (02:31)
- How Micro Influencer Marketing is different from Celebrity endorsement (04:54)
- Who is a good candidate (06:04)
- What is UGC? (07:52)
- How to “Be Authentic” in promoting a brand (10:37)
- How to start finding these Micro Influencers (12:33)
- Affordability (19:30)
- Budgeting/Costs for Influencers (21:01)
- Ways to make money with the influencer marketing (27:07)
To get in touch with Zak and his team:
Website: apexdrop.com
Email: zak@apexdrop.com
Transcript
00:00:34 Gary Ruplinger
Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology Podcast. Today I am pleased to be joined by Zach Stahlsmith, the CEO and founder of ApexDrop, a micro influencer marketing company. Zack, welcome to the show.
00:00:51 Zak Stahlsmith
Thank you for having me.
00:00:53 Gary Ruplinger
Yeah, I know we’re just kind of talking off camera right before we got started here and I was telling them I know for me this is going to be one of those really exciting ones ’cause I know I’ve got a lot of questions. I’m I want to know more about this topic. I know a lot of my colleagues and clients do as well, so I’m sure our listeners are going to get a lot of value out of this. But before we jump into that. Could you just give us a little bit, maybe background about yourself? How you, how you got started and how you how you came to be involved in micro influencer marketing.
00:01:24 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah so, for those of you who haven’t heard of my company, it’s called ApexDrop where North American marketing firm and we help connect marketers to influencers on Instagram. Helping them create content and engagement on social media. My me personally I’m a marketing guru, grew up on marketing I’m turning 40 this summer. So, this is all I’ve ever done since I was 18. I went to college for marketing and then just. Went headfirst pretty obsessed with it, love. Helping brands drove. I love seeing. Businesses thrive, and I just that’s what I give you my shingles at night. I just can’t get enough of it. I have a passion for specifically B to C type marketing. So, I started up my agency about six years ago. This is my second startup. And it’s really taken off. Just kind of riding the wave of Instagram, taking off and influencers taking off and really enjoying the whole thing.
00:02:22 Gary Ruplinger
Oh, very cool. So, I guess let’s jump into it then what is micro influencer marketing?
00:02:31 Zak Stahlsmith
So, the definition of micro influencers is kind of not a standard yet, but we typically call micro influencers someone who’s has enough engagement like on Instagram for example would be around 5 to 20,000 followers. It’s about right. It’s not so much influence that you’re a Kardashian or a celebrity yet, and it’s not so small that you’re considered just a customer somewhere in between. There there’s different tiers macros, there’s micros. There’re nanos even and my specialty is in. The micro space, so I’ll. Speak to them all the time and also on Instagram. But micro influencer marketing in a nutshell, is finding ways to communicate with these influential types and have them become advocates for your brand. And you know this is really helpful in creating connections with these authentic people. If you if you turn it into a marketing effort, you can build a massive amount of content which is kind of like my favorite part. The outcome of that is just crazy amount of content and you build this really positive sentiment. Uhm, get online so you can build ubiquity. You can build positive sentiment, you know, build up your social media platforms and kind of create the community around you. Products and a lot of people like in micro influence marketing because it’s authentic, or at least it’s sometimes authentic. We’ve all seen the fake stuff, you know, they’re really cheesy. I do. I have detox tea, or I wear waist trainers like the goofy stuff. We’ve seen that, so it’s not always authentic, but it’s supposed to be authentic. It’s extremely low cost. Comparatively to self-celebrity marketing and endorsements and. And it’s also it has a much stronger impact than celebrity marketing and endorsements. Mainly because the smaller you are, the more engaged you are with you. Body so when you work with micros, you’re actually getting really great engagement. So, my goal in life to help grants spend finding ways to scale that micronas into so that it gets really big becomes macro.
00:04:29 Gary Ruplinger
OK, so that that does kind of answer one of my questions and I know when you are looking, when kind of thinking about what some of the questions people are are going to have about this and I thought back to my car dealership days. Where we would. You don’t get one of the NFL football players in the area and have him on some TV spots. And yeah, it’s kind of my first thoughts is. Is this just? Another version of, like the celebrity endorsement.
00:04:54 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah, I like to think of it. If you think of celebrities at the top, you know they’re more like the cool points. You know they have that swagger and they’re more for just like. And I don’t think of incidents in marketing as celebrity endorsements. I think of it more of like getting your best customers to talk about you. And so, it’s more of like influential consumers rather than celebrities and the way you approach these people is completely different. The way you interact with them is completely different. There’re no managers you know, like a talent agency that’s trying to you know, collect commissions. The deals micro influencers. Typically, it’s a brand reaching out directly to a person who happens to have a love for their product or service and asking them to honestly share information in a way that would benefit both parties. Sometimes there’s money being exchanged, sometimes it’s just product, but it’s much more organic and there’s a lot less of a layer between the brand and the influencer.
00:05:54 Gary Ruplinger
OK, so who? Who is this for like? Who is a good candidate to get involved in this micro influencer marketing?
00:06:04 Zak Stahlsmith
I, I think everybody can get involved it might not be in the same capacity that I’ll be to see first beta be like if you’re in beta B, probably gonna do it more on LinkedIn. Your B to C you probably go on Instagram and Facebook, so it depends on the type of business you are. But everybody should be looking for people that have a voice in their industry and also. Trying to find Google best advocates in your in your marketing funnel. So, like the marketing funnel has changed a lot. Uh, many marketers on this call know that, you know, we’re all about awareness, filling that that top end of the funnel for our clients. But it’s really important to work your way down into getting action where the sale actually happens. And something that’s new just over the past. Like since social media is really hit ten years or so, advocacy has become one of the primary marketing channels and act because he comes after the sale. So, it’s this whole new space where you’re getting your consumers to spread the word instead of marketing. The marketing team I hate to say ’cause I’m on marker that’s dying. The model is dying. You don’t really need a marketing team. You what you really need is someone to orchestrate all your best consumers to talk. About you get those testimonials. Get those really great pieces of content, share and distribute all. That stuff so. Content is still kind of king, you know you. Just see is. Is the new king of marketing, but distribution I guess you would say as Queen? Distribution is getting that content out there. Getting the word out there, and that’s what I think of a marketer. Now, marketers should be the distributors of content and information and stories about the brand. And you should actually let the influencers, or the creators become your marketing team.
00:07:45 Gary Ruplinger
Interesting, just one clarification I heard you say the term UGC, what does that stand for?
00:07:52 Zak Stahlsmith
Oh, good question. User-generated content. UGC is, it’s kind of just it’s your customers or somebody, not your brand making that content. So, it’s usually a little more organic. It’s more about testing it and then showing. It all then it is about trying to get some perf photography. You know getting a model and having taken just right UGC comes from the customer. You’re on Amazon.com, what do you do you go to? Used you look at the bad reviews and you. Look for those pictures. And you go, oh, there it. Is it’s falling apart? You know, like you know. You want UGC, you wanna see the stuff that’s honest and real and not just all you know the McDonald’s hand out that Big Mac picture that looks so shiny. You want the actual the real thing. This kind of comes back to the desire to get away from this fake world we live. In you know there’s a lot of fake news is fake media. There’s fake politicians or steak, everything right? And so, the consumers have changed the way they consume. They want things that they don’t want to have to keep filtering out the fake they would like reality they like the. Anyone you know, podcasts are typically much more genuine form of media. That’s why people have gravitated towards podcasts. And, you know, like the Joe Rogan’s of the world. Who have decided to not cut out everything we’ve the junk inside of there? And some of the reality inside of there has created this whole new space of long form media. Again, we like the grainy we like. The real we want the crap you know, come, and that’s a that’s a new thing. Marketers are having to get used to this we’re so used to making everything so pretty and shiny and perfect and that perfect is no longer perfect. I always say the best review for your company’s not a five out of five star. It’s a four out of five star with pros and cons, but at the end of it says it’s still worth it. You know, there’s problems, no one’s perfect and humans have a tendency to see through perfection we go. There’s something there’s something not right. So, reality and getting rid of this fake stuff you know it’s click bait is so annoying, we’re so sick of click. They were so sick of being pulled in and then going, oh, that was.
00:10:01 Gary Ruplinger
Yeah, I know. It’s really like for me. Actually, I just turned 40 myself a couple months ago. So as somebody who kind of was raised on direct response, you know, you cherry pick your testimonials and you put a whole lot of polish together. This whole “be authentic” thing is such a. A shift to try and process as you know, think about how you, how do you promote your brand now because you’re saying you it takes, it’s taking some of the polish off of what you’re doing.
00:10:37 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah, yeah it takes some of the pulse up. It’s a great way to summarize. It, and, uh, it’s. It’s actually harder to make things authentic than you’d pay. Because, well, if you if in theory being genuine authentic. Should be very easy should just be like we’ll just be ourselves and we’ll just make it right. Marketers were actually, in the business of controlling things it’s like we need to find an audience. We need to get the word out there and you just spray. So, once we get our paws in there, we start messing with it. We actually ruin it. It’s like a catch. 22 of marketing is as soon as you start touching it and playing with. It you put an UPC it to that politically correct it. You’ll ruin it. It stops being authentic. So, my goal, part of what I do with my agency is I try and help brands disconnect themselves from this process so that it can be genuine cousin in seriousness and all serious. And the hardest thing in Tele-brand is that the bias and say look I’m biased about my company and so are you. You’re biased about your product; you buy us about your story and your company and Brand. And that is impossible to get rid of you just are. And people don’t trust brands because of that bias. What they do is they trust these influencers. They trust people that they trust. These are people that are more like them. And I found a way to kind of bridge the gap and I can teach you guys a little bit. Hopefully the audience here wants to know a little bit about how you can connect with influencers. But on the on the Big scale, it’s about bridging that gap. It’s about finding ways to get the trust from the customer without having that weird that weird level of faith that just happens. It’s just. It’s there.
00:12:09 Gary Ruplinger
Cool, so I guess I’d love to kind of dive into how you start finding these micro influencers. I know you mentioned Instagram is, I assume there’s other platforms like with Tiktok, YouTube are those also kind of the platforms for this? Sir, I guess I’ll let you answer the question.
00:12:33 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah, you’re good. So, well before we talk about how you find influencers I would. Say make sure you’re ready to look for them and I can touch on finding them too. But just to kind of prerequisite there, I would say make sure before you get started. Be sure you have a proper. Team and process in place to manage this, there’s a. There is a lot to manage with influence. So, before you go off and start trying to find them. Do you have the right team? You have somebody on staff who could manage your social media and manage these relationships. Are you already collecting feedback from your customers you know? Are you already doing the right thing with your customers? Is if you try and pull in influencers in the middle of the mess. It’s not going to make it any better. Are you inspiring your loyal customers to do things already? ‘Cause that’s kind of what influencer marketing is it’s doing the same thing you do with your loyal customers, just kind of stepping up your game a little bit. Uhm, is your social media clean that on point is your website site on point, are you? Able to convert traffic those questions you should ask yourself before you start jumping into micro influencer marketing or working with influencers. So, and also make sure you have the budget and the time in microphones marketing it might seem cheap on the cover because you go well. I’m just going to reach out to these people and they’ll just send some product or do something with them and it’s free. It’s definitely not free. There it is a time suck, and your time is valuable. And if you want to make it work, you’re going to need to scale it. Uh, to a much higher level. There’re micro influencers. Let’s just be honest. They don’t have a lot of followers, so due to their micronas, you need to get tons of them, and so you’re gonna get a lot of time investment and money in a way. And then you’re gonna also want to make. Sure, someone on your team knows FTC legal compliance, so like if you don’t know, I’m sure most of your audience does can stand. But I mean you read the FTC guidelines around influencer marketing. Not everybody has you know. So, you want to. Make sure you’re also following the law. Uhm, but so to jump in and start building your influence or a list you want to first figure out what your goals are. You know who? What are your KP? Eyes what are? You trying to accomplish so, think about some you know, are you really just trying to get more followers on your social media? Are you trying to increase your sales and turn them into salespeople you know? Do you want them to go out here and sell your product or service and figure out what you want? Because at the end of the day, if you just want content, there’s easier ways to get it sometimes, and I could just find more followers. Sometimes there’s an easy way to. Do it and if you’re trying to get more sales. Sometimes an easier way to get those. Things done, so influencer marketing covers a broad spectrum of marketing and it’s kind of sucks in a way because it’s like you’ll get six or seven really good things out of it, but none of them are at the peak of where like if you invested your money in one of those silos, you’d be better off if that’s what your goal is to figure out your goals and realize that.
Influencer marketing covers a lot more than just sales. Lot more than just follows a lot more than just content, it covers the whole media, all of media and your conversion rates across every channel shouldn’t be affected if you do it right. Planning out a budget, thinking about spending. Money influencers can be expensive. Some influencers are going to reach out to. Let’s say you contact somebody; say I’d like to work with you. I saw your YouTube video I saw your Instagram posts. I love your stuff. They might start off the conversation that yeah, so it’s $1000 of post or talk to my manager. And it turns into this like celebrity thing. Or you might get this really nice like I love your products. That’s great, I’d love to get you know, let’s do something together, it’s this. You do get a little bit of an awkward communication starting off right out of the gate with your DMS or your private messages. Is so trying to find your perfect audience and the right way to approach. Them is important to you. Want to develop a strategy and it takes a lot of work to develop the right strategy with the right influencers. So just be ready for the AB splits and the testing that goes along with this. You know what type of? Channels would I use to contact influencers would depend on the type of products I sell, but specifically we use. We use Instagram for CPG type brands or Consumer Packaged Goods. So, like, let’s say you’re selling something small, something that can be shipped easily, and you want to engage influencers. If your demographic is on Instagram, well, that’s the place to look. So, my demographic, let’s say its millennials. You know, that’s Instagram in a nutshell. But there’s other. Platforms that have you know like better, maybe better aligned demographics for you so. Like by example Facebook. It’s similar to Instagram, but a little slightly older demographic, the millennials and older, and it’s very. Well, healthy Twitter is good for like PR, unknown graphic or lead up 50 and a little bit more of like a new type of program and it’s not necessarily the best place to find all the influencers. You know Pinterest is good, but it’s a little bit older audience as well. 30 and up and it’s good for it’s good for finding influencers that can help with the generation. YouTube is also fantastic for a little bit younger and older demographic. Everybody on YouTube. If you have a product or service. That’s really. Yeah, I’m much easier to explain through video. YouTube would be great, and if you want somebody to unbox and show up your stuff but just keep in mind video is resource intensive, it’s really difficult work and it’s going to cost a lot more money.
LinkedIn is great for influencers of the older category. I would say not the boomers. But you know the Gen. X is and the guys. Like us, you know anybody on LinkedIn is probably over 40 and most of us are professionals. That’s like our resume, so that’s a great place to be, but it’s you. You know, if you’re trying to do business development, trying to build brand awareness, that’s the. Great place to find influencers. And then, TikTok is for that younger crowd. You know you want to get the Z disease or on TikTok. 100 percent and it’s getting older that the demographic even my friends in their 20s upper 20s are on TikTok. It’s starting to get a little older, and then there’s Instagram, which is my bread and butter and that’s the way I know most about which millennials and I is like Instagram because it’s got that nice balance of affordability and outcomes that you want from influencers. So, if you’re lucky enough to save my, my stuff might be cool on Instagram. Well then, I just say go ahead first into instant because it’s you know it’s a more affordable, easier place to work, and you can typically hire agency like that are pros at this and can help you for not a lot of money. I’m not sure if I answered your question.
00:18:57 Gary Ruplinger
Yeah, you did, though I think I’ve got like 5 more now, but. Like one of the one of the ones, I I’ve kind of heard you mentioning it. So, when you talk about affordability. I know you’re saying you know, influencer for micro influences. I think you said 5 to 20,000 or so followers on Instagram. I assume that. Is roughly the same numbers translate over to say TikTok and YouTube and similar ones? Where is that kind of your guidelines for all the platforms?
00:19:30 Zak Stahlsmith
Uhm, no, the followers will always be a little different on each platform. If you want to understand what a micro influencer is on those platforms, I would just Google it. What’s a micro influencer on TikTok look like most of, most move based on the amount of likes or followers they have YouTube will be completely different and TikTok which will be completely different than LinkedIn. And Instagram. Instagram is where I specialize so I can speak to the numbers very specifically ’cause I kind of help define those numbers. Make that industry, I think. But it’s always changing, so micro influence might actually change. You know, the numbers, night shift as things move on. I typically think of micros as the guys. That are a little bit above being the news a new miss. Somebody who’s right who’s just coming in to creating content. They’re just getting their hand on their feet wet. And they’re kind of. Maybe a couple years, two or three years into the creation game. Um, so, they’re intermediates. Each platform has any intermediate space, and you know that’s what we would call the white curves.
00:20:32 Gary Ruplinger
- So, when you’re looking at and we’ll just take Instagram as the example for now, since that’s the one you’re most familiar with. When you’re kind of thinking about a budget per influencer, if they have the 20,000 followers, what, yeah? What kind of investment are you? Could you know budgeting for each person? Or is it just the product free product or how? Do you? How are you going to compensate them?
00:21:01 Zak Stahlsmith
Well, every influencer is different. So, if you’re managing it in house and you have your own team that’s doing this, you should set some kind of cap for micro influencers. It can range between 100 and $1000 depending on how influential they are and their engagement rates, and I guess honestly, how much impact they can have for your brand. Some of this is test and learn. You won’t know until you. Try it, I would say you know for 10,000 followers on Instagram, trying to keep it from the 100 to $200 range. If you’re gonna pay them anything. My agency doesn’t pay influencers cache. We only compensate them with product. But most influencer agencies and most in House will get them something like a gift card or something on top of the product. So yeah, so let’s say you have 10,000 or 20. 1000 followers like you described in our system we look at $100 worth of product as the compensation quote, UN quote compensation. It’s a gift, and your cost of goods. We really do come into effect here, so let’s say you have a product that’s got insanely good margins like fashion typically has great margins. You’re let’s say it costs $10 to make a product you can sell for 120 bucks. That’s in a fantastic margin, and it’s inexpensive to ship and you should use that to your advantage to get your product out there and do some product sampling with influencers, so you have to factor in the cost of goods. And then if your retail price is high enough, you might not need to ship the additional gift card or step in additional money. But instead of thinking of it as one at a time, I usually would recommend if you’re unsure about what you want to spend on influencers per influencer, start with how much can you afford to invest in influencer marketing total? So, like. If you, what percentage of your marketing budget are you currently investing in influencer marketing? Uhm, so right now you know the rule of five says that you should spend about 5% of your revenue on marketing. In general, and if you’re a, if you really want to get digital, I will spend most of that 5% on the digital side, maybe half on your paper. Click the other half on content influencer marketing and that could be a big chunk of change. You’re talking hundreds of thousands. For some businesses, Justin influencers, when you’re talking, maybe for smaller businesses, 10s of thousands. So, it’s not a small amount of money. I’d recommend investing in influencers so when we talk about individuals, I’d say start with where. What kind of budget can you afford put into influencer marketing go out and do your Demos check with agencies, see what it costs and start figuring out the averages and you’re gonna see each influencer depends on what the dried? 100 hundred, maybe $1000 each in the micro space is pretty common. And that answer your question.
00:23:42 Gary Ruplinger
It does, I think, I think for a lot of people at least I know on conversations I’ve had the question is cool I. I think I can find them, but I don’t even know. I don’t even know what that should cost so. No, I think that, but. Yeah, it can add up. ‘Cause I think. You’re right, it’s like it’s not like it’s. It’s not like you’re on Google. You know Google ads where it says here is going to be which you’re going to pay per click or here’s the maximum there’s no published use what this influencer costs, you know you can bid on this one instead, you know.
00:24:12 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah, it’s tough. Think of it like if there’s any of our Google people here. Think of it like seasoning in your pixel, so like when you’re out there trying to get your paper click or here’s your return on ad spend up. What you do is you, you try and get your pixel season. That means you’re getting a lot of traffic to go and make purchases, or at least visit this these outcomes through your clicked Ads and what? When you’re seasoning a pixel, what you’re trying to do is. Get it to become to a standard or you can say it’s worth it or not. You know, like it, it takes a mindset of testing and learning, and marketers need to be brave. You need to be OK with a little bit of failure. The same thing applies with influencers. You’re gonna into during the time where you’re testing influencers. Your kind of seasoning the pixel you’re trying to see if it’s worth your time, I would say. Just tried not to compare Google ad spend and influencers in the same bucket because Google ad spend is direct ROI. It’s direct sales and influence or ad spend is typically not direct RLI. Especially in the early stages of those relationships, more about building content, awareness and more top-level funnel, top level funneled stuff where you’re building awareness and interest. And as you develop those relationships with your influences, you start to feed them promo codes and then you can sign kind of start getting more of the direct sales side from your influencers. But I would not recommend starting your relationships with the promo code. It’s a kinda like your neighbor like if. You if somebody moves in. Next door, you know what’s the right way to meet that person. You know you should probably walk next door with a little gift basket and say, hey, you know this is Gary. It’s nice to part my mom. Very nice to meet you I. Brought you these cookies or this basket? If you need anything, I’ll be next door.
And so, you introduce yourself. And yet, and there’s no expectations you walk away. And then and then maybe in a few weeks. If you need an egg or you need to borrow the rate, then you come back and say, Remember Me, I’m gay. I fetch a couple weeks ago, and it’s totally cool to ask for a little bit of a like favor, right? With brands it’s the same thing. Start the conversation. With no expectation, and to do that typically you need an agency to help, but. You can do it. You can start the relationship as in. I’m not expecting anything from you, I just wanna give you something because I like you and but in a couple weeks when you come back and say hey here’s promo code, if you really loved what we did, you love this program you love this thing? Would you share this with your buddies and ask? The fat is actually cool if they really liked it, they’re going to want to share it. So just make sure you do the right thing and meet them, and you greet them, and you get to know them a little bit before. You treat them like a number or a salesperson.
00:26:50 Gary Ruplinger
Gotcha, so I guess in terms of some of the results that you’ve seen from. What are there? Are there any numbers you can share? Any case studies you’ve gotten that you can kind of talk about in terms of maybe like giving people a concrete example to wrap their head around?
00:27:07 Zak Stahlsmith
Yeah, so there’s lots of ways to make money with the influencer marketing. Most people think of sharing promo codes is the only way I don’t have any examples of that working. So yeah, I’m the wrong guy to talk to about promo code sharing. It just doesn’t work, especially right out of the gate. It does work on YouTube sometimes, but you’d have to test and learn that as well what I have. Found the most success from is treating influencer marketing more like a content marketing system. And what that means is you’re going to measure your conversion rates that come from the content that you produce and use. So, let’s say you get. Influencer relationships where they’re sharing their products on Instagram and it’s driving quality traffic to your website because they’re talking about it, and people are seeing it and learning about it, and they’re interested. Uhm, those people that go to a website are converting at a. Higher rate, that means they’ll they’re more likely to buy because they’ve got somebody influential that they trust telling them it’s a good thing, so what should happen when you have good influencer relationships as your traffic should become better quality. But that typically means you’re going to convert at a higher rate on your website, so your website if you’re converting a certain amount of traffic today, you should be able to get more out of what you have coming to the website. And it’s better quality. The other thing that happens with this is you can use the content from the influencers and make sure that it’s licensed free. Most relationships you can work out license free bills or unlimited license use does get that content on your website or get it in a place where you convert your customers. This constant. This authentic content that doesn’t look like. It’s polished and perfect, does extremely well on Amazon, does extremely well in email marketing, is extremely well on websites. Just needs to be in the. Right spots, but if. You get it in the right places, you should see an increase in your conversion. Rates on your website as well. That means more people in your cart.
More people converting into a sale on your website. So, I like to say if you’re going to measure the outcomes of influencer marketing, give it time and use your conversion rates on your best performing place. So, like if it’s your website. So, what we would do is we did a study with 30 of 30 small to medium sized businesses with my agency. We ran a test over 90 days, and we installed this little widget on their website and it. It basically used our content from our campaigns that we built with influencers for these brands and they’re typically consumer packaged. Good brands, so things like sunglasses, clothing, food, those kinds of things. And we put this little widget on the website, and we measured the differences between the traffic that visited their site without art imagery and then the people that did see it and how they interacted with the website. So as a Navy split and what we found was the people that interacted with the websites that had our content or 187% more likely to convert, that’s nearly 3X. Uhm, that’s an insane job now. I definitely don’t expect everybody to see 187% increase in conversion rates. That’s at the number itself, actually, like talking about ’cause it was so good. I’m like that just makes people think. That’s like this magic bullet that’s over 90 days and it’s like 30 brands and they were. They were following a system that we developed so please keep in mind that’s not necessarily what everybody will get, but you should notice that it’s more about its effectiveness. We know it’s effective. You should be testing this. You should be working with this. Some brands getting a little bit of a conversion rate increase on their website is enough to make millions of dollars. Like big companies you know, point 1% enough to make a million bucks a month. Other companies you need to double your conversion rates even make $1000. So, you know I, I can’t really give you specifics. I can just say an average of 33 X is incredibly great. We also saw the time on site went up significantly. I think it was over 100%, but I have that number up top my head on the average and then we also saw the average cart value, the number of things that were in the car went up 17. Percent so it was. More stuff in their carts. They were staying on the site longer and they were converting at a higher rate just by seeing our content. So that’s just one little piece of the pie. So, you know, that’s one really great way to measure another really good thing to do with influencer content is to put it in your paid ads. So, let’s say you know you’re if you if you’re already doing boosts on Facebook or on Instagram, then you’re familiar with, you know, dumping money into posts.
We can work out deals with influencers where you’re they’ll let you dump money into their posts because they’re very authentic. They have a different audience, and you can boot those ads and you can get incredibly strong return, and that’s where you start doing promo. Codes and fun. And I’ve also seen people use our content in their Google ads where they take authentic content and they start doing a B split with our content and they find that their conversion rates go 50 percent, 60% on just their paper clip. So, you know what’s the return on investment of a great photo. You know you and I could sit here and speculate. You say, well, it depends on the photo quality. It depends on where it’s placed. Yes, there’s too many variables for me to tell you that it’s perfect general work every time, but I can say this. I’ve been doing this for six years. We’ve never heard of Brand, and we have a lot of people who stay with us. Agency and we have definitely seen some craziness, some of our top companies like Drops is. It is a great example. You know they’re fast growing intergy company that just have an incredible team. Incredible president. And they dumped a ton of money into influencers in the earlier days and they’re still with it like they get most of the credit of their growth, which fun nominal growth over. The past decade. 15 years, 2 influencers. So, you know if you do it right, there’s the moon. And you know, if you do it wrong, you might need to keep testing it. You know, don’t expect the magic bullet it. It’s not always perfect.
00:32:50 Gary Ruplinger
Oh, this sounds. Like you’re getting excited, I’m just I’m just thinking of all the kinds of different possibilities out there. So, I guess maybe this would be a probably good point. I think like I could just ask questions all day about this, like I think I told you beforehand we could probably. Like a mini workshop on this and. I could just talk to you all day about it for somebody who says OK. This sounds really cool. I could see the value for, you know, either one of my companies or for my clients. What would you tell them or where? Where should we direct them? What can you do for them?
00:33:25 Zak Stahlsmith
Well, I mean if they. If they want to work with somebody who’s specializes in micro influence on Instagram, my agency does a fantastic job. Obviously, I’m biased. We have over 600 clients, so I mean we’ve been doing this for a long time. We were the very first micro influencer agency on Instagram, so we got more experience than anybody. I had a team in Pennsylvania that would love to help. If you have a product that would look cool on Instagram. That’s typically the type of brands we work with, you know, so it’s CPG or something like a service industry that can have cool pictures. Makes sense, so yeah, if you have a, if you have a desire to scale up a system that you’ve already tested artist, our program at ApexDrop is really simple. Take what you do right to take the good stuff that you’re doing on a smaller scale and just blow it up with a team, a large team. It’s extremely difficult to pull in house the perfect. Experts’ dreams for you. Uhm, you know hiring that the influencer out of college. I call it the girl from a college he comes in and says I have my own social media and I’m on Instagram and they go you’re going to run our whole program, that person or that guy. He they’re not usually the best bet. They’re just not hiring people, have tons of experience in marketing. Get the idea of growing the marketing funnel from top to bottom and to do it big. You know I’d highly recommend giving us a call. You can visit apexdrop.com, schedule a demo with my team. I’ve got some experts on the line ready to do demos and they could show you if it will work or not and see if it’s a fit. I love to love. Just help some of your audience out there interested.
00:35:00 Gary Ruplinger
I love it, all right. Well, if you’re interested in some micro influencer marketing, especially on Instagram, give Zak a shot, go to apexdrop.com, check him out, tell him Gary, sent you, and Zak. Thanks so much for coming to the show. I really loved it. I learned a lot and I probably have to have you on again to talk more about it.
00:35:18 Zak Stahlsmith
Wonderful Gary had a blast. Thank you, guys.
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