Standing Out From The Crowd Inside Social Media With Jake Hay

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the make each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and today we're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is standing out from the crowd inside social media. Today's guest is a trailblazer in the marketing world, continually seeking out innovative opportunities. As a partner of Pop Shorts, this La based influencer marketing agency has made significant strides under his guidance, securing over 35 international campaign awards and garnering billions of views for their Fortune 500 clients. A big welcome to Jake.

Jake Hay [00:01:23]:

Hey.

Andy Splichal [00:01:24]:

Hi, Jake.

Jake Hay [00:01:24]:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal [00:01:26]:

So to start, your bio says that you're an influencer marketing agency, but when I went and I looked at the website, I see you do a lot of social as well. So how do those services combine for your clients?

Jake Hay [00:01:40]:

Yeah, I think we're influencer first. Right. So at different points in our evolution, we've had different service offerings. We've done organic management, we do paid media management, but we generally operate with an influencer first mindset. Even with our paid media campaigns, we only have a couple of clients that lean on us to run meta TikTok ads for their branded content. Usually it's to support influencer content as well.

Andy Splichal [00:02:09]:

Okay, got it. Now, your bio also says that you've got billions of views for Fortune 500 clients. Do the strategies that you use, do they work for, well, I guess, non Fortune 500 companies, or do you have to be a certain size to implement them?

Jake Hay [00:02:29]:

No, I think it works for anybody.

Jake Hay [00:02:31]:

Who is looking to use KPIs based.

Jake Hay [00:02:35]:

On sentiment and awareness. Early stage companies, oftentimes for an agency.

Jake Hay [00:02:41]:

Like ourselves, influencer marketing strategies that we.

Jake Hay [00:02:44]:

Employ would not be the right fit because they're trying to spend $10 to make 20 and make sure that there's a direct correlation to their ROI. That's where you're going to use more paid media tactics rather than, like, organic influencer tactics. Organic influencer tactics. You see a lot of case studies online. It can work. It does work. But if you want to be conservative with your first ten $20,000 ad spend as a startup, I'm probably not going organic influencer. I'm probably looking at search and social paid cost per click campaigns. I think our campaigns certainly work for folks who say, okay, listen, we have a medium sized and above business. And we think that we want to scale our presence online. We want to garner positive sentiment within certain audiences. Right? I want to become popular. I want people to have a fear of missing out by not engaging with my company. I think that's the companies who do really well I would also say influencer content handedly can outperform branded content on a regular basis. So the organic is part of it. But the paid media really should always.

Jake Hay [00:03:49]:

Be a facet in your influencer marketing campaigns.

Andy Splichal [00:03:52]:

So let's go there. Organic influencer is the type. So organic is usually free. Is that what it is or are you paying the influencers?

Jake Hay [00:04:02]:

No, organic is never free. Organic means the influencer posts to their channel. So I'm influencer X. I have a million followers, I'm posting to my Instagram. That is good and that is a core part of an integrated marketing campaign. But then taking that content and turning it into an advertisement, that's where you're going to drive additional cost efficiencies, increase.

Jake Hay [00:04:25]:

Your reach, stuff like that.

Andy Splichal [00:04:27]:

And are there certain type of products that work better than others for this type of influencer marketing?

Jake Hay [00:04:36]:

No, I think it's pretty well rounded space. I would say there are certain types of key audiences that are more active on social.

Jake Hay [00:04:47]:

And as a result, if your product.

Jake Hay [00:04:50]:

Or brand speaks to those audiences, you're going to find success easier. But I mean, even my grandma's in her 70s. She's on TikTok now, right? So I think there has been this kind of movement where everyone's touching social in some way. It's no longer if they're there, it's how to reach them there because they.

Jake Hay [00:05:06]:

Interact with it differently.

Andy Splichal [00:05:08]:

Now, you hear a lot of talk in the influencer space about micro influencers and large influencers, I guess. What are the most effective? I mean, who do you work with and how does all that come together?

Jake Hay [00:05:22]:

It depends what you want. There's no right or wrong answer. Most of our campaigns are going to be a hybrid approach. So you have one or two large influencers and then a handful of micros to support them. The differences being large influencers are generally going to provide economies of scale, right? Like your cost per view basis is going to go down. Having somebody with real influence, not just followers, but real influence, when you run that paid media campaign, it's going to drive additional cost efficiencies. But clients also want more content, and you're not going to get more content by working with folks who have larger followings. That's where the micro influencers come into play. You can diversify your content, get additional assets, and then, of course, test paid.

Jake Hay [00:06:03]:

Media across all of it.

Andy Splichal [00:06:05]:

Now, I guess how do you match. Up if a client comes to you.

Andy Splichal [00:06:10]:

And said, I want to get into this influencer marketing, how do you match them up with influencers, either large influencers or micro? How does that work.

Jake Hay [00:06:19]:

It's a complicated process and I think there's a lot of tools out there that help you with the process. IBM Watson's had AI in the space since, I think, 2018. There's a lot of tools you can use and license to help you kind of do your initial aggregate of talent. I would say there's some issues that still require pretty detailed manual input, which is, one, it might not be pulling every profile, right. So there might be some emerging talent that if you exclusively use these tools, you'd be missing. Two is what are your brand safety measures? There are some systems in place that can flag content, but not on a detailed enough scale. If you have a real blue chip client, right, somebody who's a multinational brand with a very brand safe kind of IP, you're going to have to go through by hand and go through all of an influencer's post on all of their channels to make sure that you're not aligning your client with a creator who doesn't represent their values. So it starts with data and then it goes manual, I think always keeping in mind, of course, if you wanted me to find an influencer for you, I need to know a few things. I need to know your target audience, age, gender, location. I need to know what your budget is so that we can kind of identify what type of influencers make the most sense. And then if you have any kind of like if it's part of an integrated campaign, if there's an overarching creative strategy, it's great to have influencers play into that. They can operate in a vacuum. They don't have to be part of something bigger, but if they can be, you're going to likely going to see.

Jake Hay [00:07:54]:

An increase in performance.

Andy Splichal [00:07:56]:

You took the words right out of my mouth because I was thinking how important it must be to know your customer avatar before you even think about going down this path.

Jake Hay [00:08:05]:

100%.

Jake Hay [00:08:06]:

I think it's mandatory. If you are doing really small scale, like $1,000, it's interesting to see the feedback you get, I guess, is where I'm going with that, because you can even if you know your customer audience, hey, this is who we try to do, this who we work with, you might learn something about them. Once you start going heavily on social through influencers paid owned channels, whatever you're doing in the comments, you might see that actually sentiment is better with certain groups than others. And as you are more active on social, this avatar might start to tweak a little bit here and there. If you're listening to your audience online.

Andy Splichal [00:08:41]:

How do your clients set their budget? Have most of them already tried influencer marketing and so they know what kind of budget is needed when they come to you? Or are you giving them guidance based on what they want to accomplish?

Jake Hay [00:08:55]:

I've been in this game for a long time, I mean, I started in 2015 and it's changed. 2015 doesn't sound that long ago, but this is a young industry, influencer marketing, creative marketing. When you think about where I was when I started, nobody had done it yet. The word influencer got you a meeting with the biggest brands in the world just because there were no specialty agencies. I mean, there's a handful. I'm not saying no literally, but like very few today, every brand is doing influencers. Every brand knows what an influencer is. There's a lot less education involved and there's a lot of competition. Low barrier to entry to some extent, if you want to become an influencer marketing agency. High barrier if you want to be good at it, because it's not easy. I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? I think I might have lost you.

Andy Splichal [00:09:39]:

Well, I was talking about budget. So when somebody comes to you, do they have a budget set in mind or do you really guide them through that based on their goals?

Jake Hay [00:09:48]:

I need them to have a think. I think there's also important to differentiate between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing. A lot of times, folks can come to me and say, jake, my budget's infinite. If we can do this and you're proven to ROI, I'll spend millions. It doesn't work like that for us. There are affiliate marketers out there. I'm not one affiliate marketing can use creators. The best affiliate marketing does, but it's a different type of marketing. At the end of the day, as far as budget is concerned, we have a minimum spend of 50K. But there's a lot of agencies who have lower barriers to entry there. I would say identify your budget, understand what your total marketing budget is. There are some brands, like I'm good friends with the folks over at Gelblaster. They've built 100 million dollar company off, primarily influencer marketing. I mean, they do a lot of stuff. They do events and sponsorships. I'm not taking away from that, but they're one of the biggest influencer marketing brands I know they've done an incredible job, but that doesn't work for everybody. They sell a toy of sorts. So I think that would be great. But if you're selling ranch dressing, I'm just thinking of something random. You need an integrated marketing campaign, and you need to set budget aside for your influencers. Your paid, your search, your OTT, whatever you're doing, you need to kind of do all of it and touch your bases and test, experiment, look back on the results and understand what type of channels are delivering you the best results and the best cost, efficiencies for customer acquisition.

Andy Splichal [00:11:16]:

So you mentioned probably the most important word to most businesses and most listeners out there, which is ROI. How do you view ROI as an influencer marketing agency?

Jake Hay [00:11:34]:

Yeah, I think ROI is always on the topic of discussion. Our primary industry, I mean, we work across state governments and fashion you name it. But our primary industry is entertainment. So keep in mind movies, streaming and TV, they measure ROI a lot differently than again, if you want to look at like a startup who's selling some.

Jake Hay [00:11:53]:

Sort of product locally, the startup that's.

Jake Hay [00:11:57]:

Selling product locally is literally counting every dollar. I mean, they need to be tracking links utms they need to say hey, this happened and this is my result. For our clients, a lot of times they're working with us for the content that they can then turn into again, a larger paid media spend. We don't do a ton of, we do some cost per click campaigns and more kind of hardworking media but generally speaking we're delivering awareness and sentiment. That's our core value proposition. And so when you want to buy an awareness and sentiment campaign, ROI is not about specific to any dollar amount, it's about identifying how many people do we reach, how many opinions can we have changed? How many people have a better viewpoint or are more aligned with our brand as a result of what we've done?

Jake Hay [00:12:41]:

Now, let's talk about some of that content.

Andy Splichal [00:12:43]:

Can you give us an example of a client of yours that used influencer marketing and what types of content pieces they were able to bring out of it?

Jake Hay [00:12:57]:

Yeah, we have a lot of clients, a lot of them don't like it when I talk about them publicly. That's just kind of the name of the game.

Andy Splichal [00:13:03]:

Well, you don't have to name names, don't name names, but tell us what kind of content pieces they were able to bring out of it.

Jake Hay [00:13:10]:

100%. I mean, there's so much looking back again, just to go back when I started, you were really selling a lot of vine because vine had so much creativity and it was saturated with creators. Instagram was not really a hub for creators. Now there's a lot of creators on Instagram. You can have reels stories infeed posts, you have YouTube, YouTube shorts, TikTok is of course we're a TikTok agency partner. Matter of fact, you probably see little pillow I have back. You know, I think where it's at now drives great cost efficiencies, it's got a lot of creators who can be really creative. It works off a for you algorithm, so follower count matters, but not nearly as much as it does for other platforms. So yeah, I mean you can have any kind of content, you can have AR lenses. We love to make AR lenses for our clients as well. You make a lens, you have an influencer, use it, their audience can now use that lens and share it to their followers. And now you've just created a UGC campaign off the back of your influencer campaign just by launching a lens alongside of it. It can be interactive cool. You get additional data insights on meta platforms if you use AR lenses from the folks who engage with your lens. So there's a lot of different ways.

Jake Hay [00:14:29]:

To slice the pie as far as that's concerned.

Andy Splichal [00:14:32]:

What about AI? Is there any implementation of AI into your industry?

Jake Hay [00:14:37]:

There is again, I think I made a comment earlier, but IBM Watson has been using some form of AI. It's not Know, the transformer models we have now with the large language models across the GPTs and the.

Jake Hay [00:14:51]:

Know there's.

Jake Hay [00:14:51]:

There'S been an influence of AI for some time now. And it's really coming down to where you're going to see it most is in creator identification. So aligning creators alongside brands. Where we are looking forward to it most is those brand safety measures. Because on our end, vetting an influencer in its entirety, it's time consuming. It takes a lot of resources from us. So the better AI gets at scraping all of their content and not just the written text, which is really all it can do now, but, like, scraping an hour long YouTube video for Flagging, know, the F bomb, whatever it might be, so that we can then extract that and say, okay, hey, this creator is not safe. If I can do that in seconds and not hours, to me, that's like where AI would be really helpful. But you're also seeing AI on the other side of it. I'm on the brand side, the business side, you're seeing it on the creator side. You're seeing not only creators using generative AI to make incredible photos. I follow an architecture page and they almost exclusively post AI architecture now because you can't barely tell the difference. And they're just so elaborate and beautiful, the photos. Beyond that, you also have AI creators. Creators that don't exist at all. It's a person on a computer somewhere.

Jake Hay [00:16:00]:

Who's made a page for this fake creator.

Jake Hay [00:16:04]:

But it's a real creator, right? I mean, it doesn't exist outside of its Instagram feed, but to its Instagram feed. It's got millions of followers. It is not tangible. So AI is kind of touching all aspects of influencer marketing from the brand side to the data to the creators themselves.

Andy Splichal [00:16:22]:

You made a great point and it kind of goes into my next question. What does it take to be an influencer? Are some of those influencers going to be strictly AI?

Jake Hay [00:16:32]:

What does it take?

Andy Splichal [00:16:33]:

Probably great, because they don't get paid that much.

Jake Hay [00:16:36]:

They get paid a lot. The AI influencers are probably some of the more expensive ones.

Andy Splichal [00:16:39]:

Well, I meant the actual AI. Yeah, you're good, but what does it take to be an influencer?

Jake Hay [00:16:48]:

I think that answer has changed over the years too. I mean, it's a dynamic industry. And what I'm saying on this interview, I can't wait to look back on it in five years and see how my answers would have evolved again. So what does it take to be an influencer? Can mean a lot of different things. First of all, you have to be a creator. You have to be creating content on a consistent basis. You have to have an audience to be an influencer and I think there's a lot of creators out there with followers that don't have influence. Let's think about that for a second. I'm a creator. I have followers but I'm not actually influencing anything. So differentiating between the word creator and influencer which is not something you really do. But for sake of just running off your question it's a dynamic conversation. I don't think there's a right answer. I think you can have 5000 followers and be an influencer now or you can have 50 million and you can be an influencer. You can have 2 million and no one cares about your opinions and you're not really influencing anything.

Jake Hay [00:17:47]:

Right?

Jake Hay [00:17:48]:

So dynamic situation there.

Andy Splichal [00:17:52]:

Can a company do this themselves? Can they get into influencer marketing? They hire somebody and say go learn about influencer marketing and do it for the company?

Jake Hay [00:18:03]:

Yeah.

Jake Hay [00:18:03]:

There's a few reasons why many don't and probably won't. The first is bandwidth. Again it's incredibly manual process. The second is specialty. Right? Just because you have a TikTok account doesn't mean you know TikTok doesn't mean you know what's. You have to really have folks on your team who are on the nose of what's trending, not what's trending last week. Because the way social media moves if you're talking about what's cool last week you are not that cool. You have to be talking about what's cool next week and so you can totally build it out. You'd have to have the right people the right amount of bandwidth and time and investment. You need data, tools, licensing. It's going to cost you $60,000 to do it right on an annual basis. You need a lot of pieces that have to come together to make it work. And you're not going to have relationships with talent or managers or agents or whatever it might be to drive any Cost efficiencies in negotiation. You're going to end up paying a hell of a lot of money to avoid what is really a small agency fee to get it done for you. And a lot of times our relationships can sometimes make our fee a moot point. Right? We've literally had times where folks have called us and said hey we're trying to work with this creator but we can't even get a hold of anybody. How do we do it? Or I got a hold of somebody and their pricing is ridiculous. Okay let us give them a call see what we can do. All of a sudden it's a completely different conversation because it's our dedicated space. We can bundle across multiple campaigns.

Jake Hay [00:19:29]:

A manager has 100 talent, right?

Jake Hay [00:19:32]:

Well we're going to hire five of.

Jake Hay [00:19:34]:

Them for three different clients.

Jake Hay [00:19:36]:

But now we're leveraging all three of those clients campaigns against one another to drive Cost efficiencies across all of them. So you can start an internal influencer marketing team if you want I think you're going to run up against some difficulties, and you'd have to be really big. You have to be like a fashion brand that's always on and spending a ton of money in the space, in my opinion, to make it worth it.

Jake Hay [00:19:58]:

Because even our clients who know some of the biggest entertainment brands in the world, they're not doing it in house.

Jake Hay [00:20:04]:

There's a reason for it.

Hello there.

Andy Splichal [00:20:06]:

This is Andy. I wanted to take a quick break from the show and talk to you for just a minute about the new golden ticket program that I've introduced inside Make Each Click Count University. I know it sounds fancy, right? But what's the golden ticket all about? Each month, members of Makeeach Click University receive a golden ticket that they can use to access any of our certified courses. Certified courses. Include courses on Facebook, Google Ads, Pinterest, SEO and more. Look, if you are looking to grow your business by either adding a new marketing channel or by optimizing existing marketing channel just like an expert, then this program is for you. Perhaps you're looking to train someone on your team or you're looking for a career in digital marketing. Well, either way, this program is the program you've been waiting for. In addition, when you become a member to Make Each Click County University, you'll get immediate access to all of our in house courses, timely training videos, access to all three of my books, and access to our monthly mastermind meeting. All this at a recently reduced price. So go on over to www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com for all the details and sign up. I guarantee it's going to be the best decision you make today. Now, back to the show. What are some of the struggles that you've gone through over the years with delivering results, with influencer marketing?

Jake Hay [00:21:19]:

Struggles with delivering results? I don't think we've struggled to deliver results.

Jake Hay [00:21:24]:

I think our model is and a.

Jake Hay [00:21:28]:

Lot of times our models evolved too. We're now at a place where a lot of times we will depending on the client. It doesn't always make sense to do this, but we will guarantee minimum view count, right? So you're going to pay. I'm just throwing a random number out. Don't take this as, like, a baseline at all. Let's say we're offering you a four cent CPV on $100,000 spend. We're going to give you all of.

Jake Hay [00:21:49]:

Your organic views for free, and you're.

Jake Hay [00:21:52]:

Only going to pay for the paid media views. Meaning, okay, we're providing all of these in feed posts. That's your added value. We know what TikTok Ads cost to us. We're a TikTok Agency partner. We get certain price breaks and beta features that no one else does as a result of that partnership. So we know what it's going to cost us. And as a result, we don't have issues delivering results. I wouldn't say it's not something to come up against, but all of our metrics are guaranteed. So if there ever was one, then we just make good on it with.

Jake Hay [00:22:21]:

Additional posts for additional media.

Andy Splichal [00:22:23]:

What is your favorite success story that you'd be allowed to share on this episode?

Jake Hay [00:22:28]:

Yeah, success story one of the ways to describe us. I think there's a lot of ways to describe us, but one of the ways you can describe us is a creative agency that specializes in influencer marketing. Being a creative agency, applying for awards and these types of things is kind of the nature of the business. And so we've had a lot of really cool campaigns that have become very successful. I think my favorite one was when our creative director I'd never seen anything like it. At the time, it was for a mystery movie. And in the movie, this actress goes.

Jake Hay [00:23:06]:

Missing, very famous actress.

Jake Hay [00:23:08]:

And on her Instagram, she unfollowed everybody. And then she followed about 100 people who had the name of her character in the movie, and it started drumming up press. And we had nothing to do with that, but worked them up with creative strategies. And we're like, why don't we play off this? Why don't we start a mystery scavenger hunt for her character and create these different branded pages where you have to go through and find clues and photos. And of course, we're owning all the content on these pages, and the clue in the photo would take you to an influencer's page, a post or something, and then the influencer post would have another clue. And so you go through this trail of like, 15 pages involving eight influencers, a bunch of owned channels that we put together for the campaign, and eventually you would find the hidden Instagram for the missing person. And the first person to find it won like a $10,000 shopping spree in New York Fashion Week. So it's a really fun campaign. I'd never seen anything like it since. I've seen a couple of things similar. Sorry, I'd never seen anything like it before. I've seen a couple of things similar since. Not to say that they're ripping it off, but the idea is there to use the channel to create its own scavenger hunt. Very unique. Won a ton of awards for us, incredibly successful. And what's nice is when you get creative, when you're not just doing like, hello, buy this now, you're going to.

Jake Hay [00:24:36]:

Have the chance to go viral.

Jake Hay [00:24:37]:

You're going to get comments from people, and we see this a lot that say, I love this ad. Like, I hate ads, but this ad, I enjoyed it. And so for our scavenger hunt, for example, and there's a lot of examples you can use. It was a time investment of anywhere from twelve to 20 minutes that we calculated internally. I mean, not like a big science thing behind it, but we estimate it.

Jake Hay [00:25:00]:

Was about twelve to 20 minutes to.

Jake Hay [00:25:03]:

Find that hidden page. Once all the clues were released, they released in phases. So, like, you didn't have all the clues the whole time, but once all released, you're talking about twelve to 20 minutes. And I forget how people we had find the page. I mean, it was like tens of thousands of people. It took ten to 20 minutes.

Andy Splichal [00:25:15]:

Wow.

Jake Hay [00:25:16]:

Whole time they're immersing themselves in the world of this brand and the world is IP. So for me, that is an incredible success story. Beyond just the amount of views it got or whatever the time it took, and how many people actually went all the way through to completion on what was. And you know this, right? Make every click count. Every click someone has to do. You're losing a percentage of your audience. The more barriers to sign up. Oh, my landing page had one more question than this. You're losing a percentage of conversions. So to see that conversion rate that high against what was an incredibly complex process was awesome.

Andy Splichal [00:25:52]:

So who is the perfect person for your agency? If they're out there listening, they need.

Jake Hay [00:25:58]:

To check you out.

Jake Hay [00:25:59]:

Yeah, I think the short answer is anybody with a sizable but 50,000 plus, that's not a year campaign. That's just like one run of a campaign. Who wants to buy sentiment and awareness. If you're saying, hey, we're doing really well on ROI, we have all these other different channels running, but people still don't know us. We're not the cool brand, we're not the It product. Right now, that's when influencers are going to be the most impactful for you. Or maybe you want to break into a new audience segment. We're doing really well with Avatar X. We want to reach Avatar Y. A great way to start breaking into those communities would be through the use of influencers within those communities.

Andy Splichal [00:26:44]:

Are there any specific verticals that you guys specialize in?

Jake Hay [00:26:49]:

Entertainments are probably bread and butter as far as, like, makes up about 50% of our total revenue in that one category, but we are working across government contracts, food, CPG, you name it. I don't think there's a certain category.

Jake Hay [00:27:05]:

That I would typecast us to.

Andy Splichal [00:27:07]:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you guys?

Jake Hay [00:27:12]:

Yeah, I would say just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I mean, if you're listening now, feel free to send me a message. We do have like, a contact page on our site, but those emails just go to me anyway, so you might as well just reach out. I can also be reached.

Jake Hay [00:27:24]:

Jake@popscharts.com

Andy Splichal [00:27:27]:

well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Jake Hay [00:27:30]:

No, I thought it was awesome. I think just by going through the questions, I think hopefully the listeners have learned a bit about our business and the industry. As a know, I don't think I need to self promote more than I probably already have.

Andy Splichal [00:27:43]:

Well, fantastic. Well, thanks for joining us. Again today, Jake.

Jake Hay [00:27:46]:

Hey, thank you very much.

Jake Hay [00:27:47]:

Appreciate you for having me.

Andy Splichal [00:27:48]:

All right, for listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Jake or Pop Shorts, you'll find the links in the Show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information on any of the services I have discussed during previous episodes, well, that's it. In the meantime, remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

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