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July 2, 2021

Influencer Marketing – What You Need To Know in 2021 With Paul Benigeri

Influencer Marketing – What You Need To Know in 2021 With Paul Benigeri

This week's guest, Paul Benigeri, is the co-founder of Archive.ai, an AI software startup that helps fast-growing consumer brands automate & scale their digital marketing, workflows, starting with influencer marketing.

Not sure what influencer marketing is all about or you do know what it is, but you don't know how to use this type of marketing in your business?

Then, you will want to listen to this episode where Paul discusses with Andy the benefits of influencer marketing in 2021.

Discover what a nano influencers is and how to leverage nano influencers to grow your website. In addition, this episode discusses marketing budget and how much of your marketing should be allocated to influencer marketing and how influencer marketing has changed over the last few years.

Episode Action Items:

To learn more about Paul Benigeri and Archive.ai visit www.archive.ai to learn more or information. Paul will respond to all inquiries when you mention that you heard him on the Make Each Click Count Podcast!

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal, who was recently named to the Best of Los Angeles Awards’ Fascinating 100 List, is the founder and managing partner of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series and Founder of Make Each Click Count University found at https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com.

He is a certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience and counting helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal visit https://www.trueonlinepresence.com, read the full story on his blog at blog.trueonlinepresence.com or shop his books on Amazon or at https://www.makeeachclickcount.com.

New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast and on Make Each Click Count at https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal is the World's Foremost Expert on Ecommerce Growth Strategies. He is the acclaimed author of the Make Each Click Count Book Series, the Founder & Managing Partner of True Online Presence and the Founder of Make Each Click Count University. Andy was named to The Best of Los Angeles Award's Most Fascinating 100 List in both 2020 and 2021.

New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, iHeart Radio, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts and www.makeeachclickcount.com.

Transcript

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host Andy Splichal. And today we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is Influencer Marketing – What You Need To Know in 2021. This guest is a Stanford graduate and co founder of Archive, an AI software startup that helps fast growing consumer brands automate and scale their digital marketing workflows, starting with influencer marketing. Say hello to Paul Benigeri. Hi, Paul.

Paul Benigeri 1:18

Hey, how's it going, Andy?

Andy Splichal 1:20

Good. Good. Thanks for joining us. Now, before we dive into today's topic, let's first hear a little of your backstory, and what ultimately led you to do what you're doing now?

Paul Benigeri 1:33

Sounds good. So my background is interestingly, from a marketer's perspective, in computer science, I studied Computer Science at Stanford, spent a couple of years diving into some hardcore tech projects at cryptocurrency, before I got into this human performance project that turned into an Ecommerce brand. And through that experience, I really shifted my focus from software and technology to building an you know, helping build an Ecommerce company from the ground up taking care of digital marketing, ecommerce, we had actually built her own platform and migrated over to Shopify, but really thinking about building an engineering team to support that building digital marketing teams, and building all of your digital marketing channels from the ground up. So over five years, that was really a transformative experience for me where I, you know, had to change my thinking from, hey, we just need to build a website and people will come if we make the website, really cool tech to hey, we actually need to build demand and build the sustainable growth channels, so that we can actually get people to come through that experience, we took a relatively tech heavy approach, and ended up building a lot of software and a lot of process to build out some of those channels. And through those learnings, we realized that we could deploy some of those same strategies that helped us scale Facebook ads, scale, influencer marketing, to other brands that potentially didn't have these technical teams. So that's where Archive came from. A few of the team members that I had worked with, especially on the technical side, started Archive about a year and a few months ago, and now we have over 30 people and we work with brands like forcing Matic like pros. We've built some great technology to help automate and streamline a lot of menial and repetitive digital marketing workflows. And really what that enables is for brands to launch campaigns faster, iterate faster, and ultimately get the best possible performance from you know, their assets or their influencers.

Andy Splichal 3:33

Well, that's great that your automated policy stuff saves a lot of time. But really, what I'm most interested in is how you guys specialize in influencer marketing. Now, can you tell the listeners who may not be familiar what exactly influencer marketing is?

Paul Benigeri 3:52

For sure. So first of all, what's an influencer, right? An influencer nowadays, I would say is typically referred to as someone that's maybe on a social media platform could be Instagram could even be a podcast or YouTube that has an audience, right? They could have 5000 5 million followers. And then when you tag on marketing, that really means marketing your brand through these influencers. And so they think the most common model is going to be Hey, you've got this influencer on Instagram with a million followers, and you're gonna pay them to post a pic of your brand. It's very basic. That's how it started out. Now, it's a lot more sophisticated. There's a lot more flavors ranging from giving some of these larger influencers, potentially celebrities equity, to be advocates of your brand, to doing gifting or seeding programs all the way to things like whitelisting, which means taking over an influencers, Instagram account, and running ads behind their account to your product. So all kinds of things have stemmed from this idea of leveraging these influencers in their platforms to grow your brand and generate demand.

Andy Splichal 4:57

Now I see that you also use The term nano influencers quite a bit on your website. Can you define that term as well? For the audience? As hey, you know what for me as well, because frankly, I had never heard that term before.

Paul Benigeri 5:11

You're sure. And for people that maybe have experienced with influencer marketing, you'll know that every company, every agency has a slightly different version of of that definition. Typically, nano influencer defines a segment of influencers that's on the smaller side. For us, the real difference about about a nano influencer is that they're not a pro influencer, right, their full time job is not to post about health and fitness on Instagram, there may be some cool kid in high school that got some followers, and that has a lot of relationships through their following. And they're authentic, right? Why do people follow them? It's typically because they know that person or their friends of friends, as opposed to following someone because they're a running coach or running Pro. So those people typically don't do a lot of promotions, their content is super authentic, people listen to them. And from a technical perspective, for example, on Instagram, we look at nano influencers as people in the range of having 1000 followers all the way up to maybe 50,000. But again, that definition can vary from maybe 50,000 to even 100,000, depending on who's, you know, coining that term.

Andy Splichal 6:24

Interesting. So that nano influencers, they're not typically advertising, they're not typically getting paid. And they're very niche as well. So what I'm hearing?

Paul Benigeri 6:33

So that's a great topic, some are niche, and some are broad, right? You have actually a lot of nano influencers that are maybe just a normal mom posting about her kids, and her yoga life and some other stuff. So that wouldn't be super niche, that'd be super broad, but they have a small audience. And then you also have some nano influencers that aren't super niche. So potentially, you might have a guy that does construction that posts about different tools, and he might have 7500 followers, and talks about different tools. Both can be relevant for different reasons. But at the end of the day, when someone has a smaller audience, they typically have much higher engagement. And I think from a technical term, that means that more, a higher percentage of their followers will see and engage with their content. But from a relationship perspective, it typically means that they have deeper relationships with every single one of their fans, compared to maybe a celebrity, like Justin Bieber, he has a lot of influence, but he doesn't have a direct relationship with much of his audience, right.

Andy Splichal 7:36

So why do you believe that the data influencers and that might be the reason right, right there, but do you believe that is the reason why they are the future of influencer marketing?

Paul Benigeri 7:47

So looking back at influencer marketing five years ago, it was a wide open opportunity. And so if your brand, the most effective thing is to build a relationship with an influencer with maybe a couple of influencers, that have a lot of followers, and you pay them or give them product, and they'll post, and now that everyone is trying to do influencer marketing, not just your Ecommerce brands, but but brands like Coca Cola, brands, like Pepsi, Nike, and that means that these larger influencers have such huge contracts, and they're priced to perfection, right? They're deploying assets, and they're sharing content with Pepsi budgets behind them. So if you're an Ecommerce brand, it's actually really hard to get a good deal with some of these, you know, bigger influencers, with a nano influencers, you actually there's a lot more of them, right, just because it's the it's the long tail of influencers, there's millions and 10s of millions of nano influencers, and fewer brands are working with them, because they're more sparse. And since they have fewer followers, they're harder to find. And so there's a really, really big pool and opportunity to work with that segment of the Instagram or YouTube community that are some of the smaller influencers that are untapped, right. So I think there will continue to be exciting opportunities with all sizes of influencers, ranging from celebrities, to these big influencers. But I think if you're starting out as a brand, there's really good untapped opportunity with nano influencers. And some of the interesting things there is that if you're spreading your budget across smaller influencers, well, that means you're gonna have more influencers, you're able to take more bets, instead of gifting your product to maybe one big influencer, you can gift your product 10 times or 20 times or 100 times and so you're gonna get 100 assets. And that means that there's a lot of reasons why focusing on this nano influencer segment can actually pay off in really interesting ways compared to doing one, two or three posts with these bigger influencers that are super competitive and hard to win.

Andy Splichal 9:56

So what is how do you identify? Which of these nano influencers is going to be beneficial for you to work with as an Ecommerce company? And then how do you go about leveraging the Nano influencers and influence?

Paul Benigeri:

Great question, it's gonna depend on the brand. I think the first thing is, what kind of product do you have, right? And thinking about which channel is gonna make sense? Is your product going to maybe hit really well on YouTube? Because it needs a really long explanation? Or is it something like maybe a piece of jewelry, that's going to look beautiful on a feat post, let's pick the jewelry post as an example, you're going to pick your channel, and you're going to find Instagram. So now your goal is to find the smaller influencers, on Instagram that are posting about jewelry, there's a lot of ways you can do that manually, right? You can look for hashtags and people posting there, you can look at other brands and see which influencers they're using or tagging. And so there's a lot of things you can do manually to kind of like look at these influencers and see who could be a good fit. At the end of the day, you want to look at what the influencers posting. And if you can look at the comments. Are people commenting about this lady's outfit and her jewelry? Or are they're saying, Hey, you're so pretty, you're so pretty, you're so pretty, and maybe she doesn't have that much influence with, you know, the clothes that she shares, right? So it's really, it really comes down to a judgment call of looking at person's profile. Are there going to be a good fit? And also, do they have high quality engagement?

Andy Splichal:

And how does the just get how does the negotiation do I remember, I worked for an Ecommerce company back in the mid 2000s. And, you know, we would go out and look for people with a lot of YouTube followers at the time was big, in say, you know, how much to do a product review? Is it a? Is it because if these nano influencers aren't already sponsoring people? I mean, how does that conversation go? .

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah so, again, I think it depends on YouTube, I think on YouTube, typically, it's harder to do unpaid collaborations. But with Instagram, especially the best way to approach influencers. So the conversation goes different ways. Some brands will be like, hey, I want you to post, here's my product, boom, boom, formal negotiation. And then influencers get kind of scared, just like commitment, they might not want to do stuff for free, they might not want to get paid, the right way to approach influencers is to build a relationship. You're like, hey, you know, Jimmy, or Jenna, I saw your posts on Instagram, and I think your content is great, I would love for you to try my product and just send them product, have them try it. If they like it, you can then start building the relationship a little bit more, and the likely posts are free. If they're excited about your product, you might get a free story. And then from there, you know, you have an authentic relationship with an influencer, that you can start activating different ways. Maybe you want to do a giveaway with them, maybe you want to do something else. But the right way to approach influencers is as people and thinking about building a relationship, and maybe having them try the product in a non committal way. The one thing you want to avoid right is just paying influencers that are down to do things without even trying your product, because that's not going to be authentic. Number one, if they haven't tried your product, how can they really speak about it? And number two, if they don't like your product, they're not going to be the best people for you to work with. Because it's not going to reflect as a good performing piece of content.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, that's, you know, that's the spray tip. Now, let me ask how should ecommerce brands be thinking about influencer marketing here in 2021?

Paul Benigeri:

I think there's a lot of ways to answer that question in terms of, you know, your digital marketing budget, like where does influencer marketing fit in? It's very rare that for a brand you can deploy all of your budget on influencer marketing, we typically see brands that grow really quickly spend between 10 to 30 or 40% of their budget on influencer marketing. Why? It's because influencer marketing can help a ton of your other channels. What do I mean there? Number one, if you're running Facebook ads, all of the content that's going to be generated with influencers are going to it's going to potentially perform really, really well. When you test that on Facebook, you can use these influencers and social proof on your emails on your website. And so there's this holistic aspect that it really that influencer marketing really helps you capitalize in terms of thinking about influencer marketing. The consumers are smart influencers are smart, you're not going to get away with like a free, cheap, easy deal anywhere. So it's all about building the relationship. That should be your main focus. You should think about building a community of influencers first, and building relationships between your brand and the influencer. And you can do that through gifting through a couple of different ways. Once you have that relationship. Now you can leverage them right, that could be continuing to get the influencer if you maybe have different flavors or different skews that could be paying the influencers for a post given that you've seen that their audience reacted to the content very well. It could be thinking about whitelisting it could be doing a giveaway, right? But it all comes down you're going to be a lot more successful. If you start not from a cold email, but from an actual relationship, right? And then it there are many, many techniques or marketing strategies that stem off of these relationships, thinking, think about affiliates on Instagram or on YouTube, right? If you're building a community of influencers, maybe you're you're finding 100 new influencers a month, maybe even some brands will, will run programs where we'll find 1000 influencers a month, and just build that community that's going to help you find affiliates, right. All of these influencers that have great engagement, can now become affiliate marketers for your brand. If you give them a coupon code and promo code, same thing for ambassadors, right. And so I think the way to think about it is like influencer, marketing can give you return on adspend and can be valuable by itself. But you're really get the best performance overall, and the best lift for your brand. If you're leveraging that channel in a holistic way. You know, having your your Facebook ads, leverage that content, you know, maybe your blog, influencers, people love stories, and when you've got these influencers that are trying your products for months, what are they're doing, they're telling stories, use that in your marketing.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, now we're talking, you know, you recommended 10 to 30% of the budget. And in those strategies, I mean, are, you know, taking a lot of time, whether it's the business owner doing it, or if they have to hire somebody to do it might scare somebody way, if they don't know the results, can you maybe share a success story from one of your clients that might, you know, make this all more more tempting that kind of time commitment and budget?

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah, for sure. I can talk about back at HBMN. We started this gifting strategy, where we were activating for HBMN, you know, 250 influencers a month, some that we had worked with before, some new ones are our most successful launch ever, that had the most amount of content hype, you know, impressions and revenue for a product was when we launched our hazelnut flavors of two products, keto collagen powder, and MCT oil powder to really high quality health products, thinking about like, you know, similar type of protein, but different uses. The way we sent these products to influencers was in a squirrel backpack in a plush squirrel backpack that was branded with the HBMN logo. So all of these influencers, when they got their product, they opened their box, and they saw a squirrel with an HBMN logo. And they were like, What the heck, what the heck is this?

Andy Splichal:

Can you tell ya, did you tell them you were gonna do tell them you were gonna send it first. Or you just send it?

Paul Benigeri:

We told them we had a new flavor coming out, okay, we wanted them to try it. And they opened the this, this backpack and there's a tub of hazelnut flavored of their favorite product. And we have a little card that said, you know, going nuts for these products, and it kind of like connected the whole campaign. And having that experience that delight that surprised men that instead of the one story or one feat was we had influencers, posting eight stories, for months after we had photos of these these influencers, posting pictures of their kids going to school with these backpacks, and it created so much buzz, so much excitement, that it really catapulted the launch. And you know, to this day, we never had so much content, so much excitement, so much buzz from a launch. And I think this is a good example because it it shows the power of having this community of influencers and what you can do once you have those relationships, right, if I was just a sent to 50 influencers for random brand 250 products for a random brand to bunch of influencers, they might not know what's going on. But because they've tried the products and they know the story, it ended up working out really really well.

Andy Splichal:

Let me let me ask but how many you said 250? How what percentage do you think mentioned you or or did something with it to their audience?

Paul Benigeri:

Someone asked me that actually earlier. So I have the numbers. So out of 250 boxes that we shipped, we had over 560 pieces of content in 30 days, and we had a bunch more since then, typically, we see you know 80 to 95% of influencer traffic directly posting. But again, this is once you build the community, when you're just starting out, it might be a little bit less, it could be 50%, it could be 75%. But when you're investing in the community, what you do is you have different groups of influencers. You have your new influencers that are trying to product for the first time. If they post then you can send them more product and you know they're very likely to post again, and then you build those relationships over time. If they don't post no worries. You take them off your list and you use that budget to find other new influencers. And over time, what you want is 100 200 1000 influencers that have been posting for your brand for 12 months 18 months, and all of their followers are really following the journey of your brand through the lens of that influencer. And that's super, super powerful, right? Because when you think about someone really caring about a brand and and talking about it, they're not like, well, sometimes they're like, Hey, I got this new pen, I love it. But you're really going to buy from the person that's like, Hey, I'm a diehard new balanced running shoe fan. I've been using these shoes for like, three years, I got this version, that version, I love this brand. I will never try anything else, right. And so if you can generate that with with this community approach that that's the most powerful thing.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, I mean, it absolutely sounds powerful. I do have, are you able to track ROI, I guess, if you give them an affiliate coupon code, but I mean, is that a difficulty with this kind of marketing is tracking the profitability?

Paul Benigeri:

Good, good question. So so it is in just like podcasts. And right, I think you can use coupons, and you can use codes. But typically, not everyone will use those codes. And so even when you use those codes, brands that are the most sophisticated with their attribution, typically incorporate a post purchase survey, right? And you'll be able to measure lift on certain campaigns. And so you have people say that they found out about, you know, once they complete their order, yet people specify that they discovered the brand through influencers. I think a good example, we recently ran, you know, some numbers on a brand that was running influencer marketing, and they had a 1x return on adspend using their coupon code. But by looking at the post purchase data, we realized that one in three people that learn about the brand through influencer marketing, were using the coupon. So that means that we actually had to add a 3x multiplier to understand, you know, the impact of the brand. And the program was actually running at a 3x ROAS even though if you just look at the coupon codes, it would tell you one extra ROAS that's actually a common mistake, a lot of brands will kill their influencer program, because they're measuring it wrong.

Andy Splichal:

Right, yeah, no, I can imagine that's a challenge. Now, when you get a new client, what kind of what do you just do it strict 10 to 30% of their marketing budget, you say, we want to use that as a test, or what is there $1 amount to make any, you know, Majan, if somebody is only spending $1,000 a month in marketing under bucks doesn't do much what it is, they're kind of a minimum budget to get into influencer marketing?

Paul Benigeri:

So there's not there is to work with us because we really focus on our technology to scale these programs. But if you're a brand by yourself, if you have unless you're selling maybe very expensive bikes, or something that's super expensive, you should be gifting your product, maybe 10% of your sales every month, if you're if you're selling 100 orders, maybe gift 10 A month to influencers. And that will at least generate some content and some awareness and some stories and over time that will start generating sales, right. So there is no minimum budget, apart from maybe your cogs for one product and shipping to start influencer marketing, it's really a function of time at the beginning, when you're starting out as a brand, what you need is time to build those relationships. Because again, you're going to perform well, if the influencer feels that they have a really good connection with the brand. One of the things that brands mess up a lot is they'll work with too many influencers, and they don't staff the program well enough or don't have the resources. And so the influencers are emailing and then emails get dropped. And then you know, you respond after eight days and the influence like well, this brand doesn't really care about me, right? If you're responding every day and engaging with their stories and building that relationship, the influencer is gonna be like, Wow, I'm having a really good time talking with Joe over at you know, Reebok, this is great like these, my friend now I'm going to post for him and hook him up. That's what you have to do. And, you know, that's challenging to do at scale.

Andy Splichal:

You know, you read you read my mind there. I was curious, is that the biggest mistake that you see ecommerce businesses getting it wrong? Is just not being able to stop it or not follow up not having follow through? Or, or what are the is that the biggest mistake? Or is that or others?

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah, I think that is you. I mean, I think the biggest mistake with any brand in any channel is is not having product market fit, right? And you're spending money in marketing and the product is not sticky. So once you have that is definitely a mistake to think of influencer marketing is something that is too transactional. And so that can mean different things, right? That can mean maybe not investing in the relationships enough, because maybe you don't care about them, or maybe you just don't have time, but that is definitely a big one. Because again, here's a really, really good example. I have an influencer friend. She has 500,000 Maybe 600,000 followers on Instagram. When I send her product she posts for free. She also has a $20,000 month contract to post stories for an energy drink brand. So that just illustrates the difference in value that you can get from one influencers. You know, 10s of 1000s of dollars a month versus $0, right? And so, every influencer is a negotiation is its own relationship. is on channel you have to optimize by having a good relationship, right? Because you want to be on the homie hookup side of the transit of the relationship. Not on the Hey, this is the brand that pays my bills, right?

Andy Splichal:

Oh, the homie the homie hookup. I like that. I like that. I mean, let me ask you, do you think the marketing principles of the past still apply to marketing today? Or is it just a different ballgame here in 2021?

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah, I think they apply. I think that a lot of the principles are apply, but a lot of the techniques have changed and the principles need to be applied differently, right.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, okay. Are there any business books out there that you attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah, there's two that have been really, really impactful. One of them is called Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary. He's the CEO coach. And then there's Principles by Ray Dalio. And another good one is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, what I really liked about Great CEO Within and Principle, well, when I, when I read those books, I thought I was running my business or team pretty well. And I knew that there were some challenges with management with communication. And when I read those books, and saw some examples of the techniques they shared, they're pretty actionable. They have a lot of playbooks. I was like, wow, it's clear to me that my solution was like a three out of 10. And Ray, and Matt, these authors are giving me a solution. That's an eight out of 10. And it almost gave me a shortcut for management for one on ones for thinking about like personas and sales, to really felt like I was able to go from like two to eight and skip some levels just by leveraging those frameworks. So those have been super, super valuable.

Andy Splichal:

You know, I liked that question. I don't like it. Because what it does is, after every interview, I ended up ordering a couple more books. And right now I have a stack of about 15 high to get through. So but thank you for those tips. I'm going to throw those, you know all those on there.

Paul Benigeri:

You need to you need to run some correlation analysis to see which ones get referred the most and prioritize those.

Andy Splichal:

That's right. That's right. Hey, where do you see ecommerce going in a post COVID world?

Paul Benigeri:

That's interesting. I think a lot of what's changed will continue obviously into I think some things like QR codes, shopping the SMS, I think will be here to stay and grow. There's a lot of new technology that has been built. I think some examples are brands doing live events, they're setting up zoom sessions or video sessions in their stores, and really going above and beyond to try to replicate the online store experience of trying experiencing a product. And you know, literally, if you're trying to look at some jewelry, or some electronics products, there's apps on Shopify, for example, that can let you connect directly with someone inside the retail store. And you can do a video session and they'll show you the product and you can see it and try it and all that stuff. And so I think that COVID has really helped us fast forward in terms of technology and infrastructure, and a lot of the things are going to be here to stay. I think that in terms of retail stores, as things begin to open up, there's going to be two big differences. Number one, every retail store is going to become more experiential. Why? Because people are used to shopping online. And so why would you go out of your house and drive or walk to a place, you're gonna want to do that because it might be a better experience, right? Maybe you get to there's a collab, there's an event or some other stuff, I think Apple Store is a really good experience with have all of these, they've had all of these experiences for you to really try the product and get into the atmosphere. And then every store will also be a fulfillment center. Right? Just because there's going to be inventory. And there's more and more these companies that are facilitating, you know, to our shipping, one hour shipping, same day shipping that are leveraging these, you know, I would say like micro fulfillment centers in different cities.

Andy Splichal:

And let's let's, yeah, no, I mean, I love the experience economy. I think you're right on. I like the fulfillment center. I think you're right on. Let's switch gears and talk a bit about your agency, Archive.ai, right.

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

What makes a perfect client for you?

Paul Benigeri:

So we have two products and two ideal clients. Our first product is called Archive Communities where we use our AI and software to scale nano influencer communities for brands. So the perfect customer is someone that's going to be on Shopify, are spending 100k to, you know, minimum a month on digital marketing, and they're trying to gift 250 to 1000 influencers per month. They have a product that people can try and experience and it's not like expensive like a mattress, maybe it cost between, you know, 10 to $100 or other product Archive App is a self serve Shopify app that's currently in private beta. But if you guys, you know, reach out, we can, we can get you onboard. And it's freemium. So you can start off for free at no cost. And it will automatically save and label all of the content that your influencers, your users, anyone posts and tags are branded on Instagram, right. So I think a lot of people are, you know, manually collecting stories these days on Instagram, we do that automatically, put them in a beautiful gallery, and let you launch Facebook ads right from there. So that is great for any brand that is starting to get posts on Instagram, because it'll save you time and you'll be able to keep your content forever, instead of worrying about your story disappearing after 24 hours.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, that's that sounds great. Do you have competitors? Are there other people doing this?

Paul Benigeri:

Yeah, from an influencer marketing perspective, we see two types of competitors. The first one are going to be your typical agencies. These are New York, LA based agencies that have a great rep with influencers. And they will manually build relationships with influencers and potentially have a group of influencers that they work with. We like our approach better, because we can work with 1000s of influencers much more effectively, because we have, you know, a lot of AI and software that we've developed to do that, right. The other type of competitor is going to be an influencer marketing, an influencer marketplace, right. So there's platforms where you can see a community of maybe 10,000 or a million influencers, and you can programmatically send an offer to all of these influencers. But what does the influencer get, if you use that, they get a push notification with an ad about your product, and maybe a check or free product, where's the relationship, right? You're not building a relationship with the influencer, you're not building a long term asset for your brand. And so that can be great for certain use cases. But we see a lot of brands moving towards thinking a lot more long term about the strategy, just like SEO, right, you don't want to just buy 10 articles, you want to create a machine that's going to generate articles for you over time. And that's going to work really well. And that's going to be a long term asset that's going to help you, you know, balance out some of the more difficult or variable channels like Facebook ads, and Google ads, where you're really at the mercy of your platform. When you're building direct relationships with influencers, and you're building a community for your brand. We're influencers have a direct relationship with your brand that will never go away. right? Those influencers are humans, and they will remember the brand, whether it's on Instagram, YouTube, Tiktok, via SMS and all that good stuff.

Andy Splichal:

So if a listener out there saying, well, this sounds really good. I'd like to try influencer marketing. And I'm like, what I'm hearing from Paul, what action would you like them to take today?

Paul Benigeri:

Sure. So check out our website archive.ai. That's archive.ai. Check out our two different products. Shoot us an email, there's a contact form. And I will personally make sure to respond get back to you with next steps. Even if you have questions. If you're not ready to work with us or use one of our products, just shoot them over. I'm more than happy to spend some time and reply with you reply to your email and hopefully give some advice or feedback if I can be helpful, especially as you're thinking through whether influencing influencer marketing is right for you or how to approach it.

Andy Splichal:

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Paul,

Paul Benigeri:

for sure and your pleasure.

Andy Splichal:

Well, that's it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Paul, or connecting with Archive.ai, I will put a link to it into the show notes. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business using Google paid ads request to join the Make Each Click Count Facebook group, I've been releasing some all new free live training some more will be happening soon. In the meantime, remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.