Reaching More Prospects through Influencer Marketing

Jeffro (00:01.846)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. There are many strategies when it comes to marketing a business. Some of them seem more intuitive than others, while some seem cool but maybe out of reach. With the rise of the creator economy, influencer marketing has grown in popularity. Many businesses are leveraging the followings of creators in order to generate more business. But how do you find the right influencers? How do you know how much to pay them? How do you track things to know if it was worth it? So to help me answer these questions, I’ve invited Enel and Teneva onto the show. 

Enelon is the CEO and founder of Vivian Agency, an influencer and affiliate marketing agency. Since 2018, they have launched over 40 affiliate programs onboard at 8 ,000 affiliates and generated over $12 million in revenue for their clients. She’s a speaker and consultant on growing businesses with affiliate programs and influencer marketing. Welcome to the show, Enelon.

Enelin Toneva (00:51.406)
Thanks for having me.

Jeffro (00:53.078)
Definitely. Now, Edelman, when it comes to influencer marketing, my brain seems to think that it’s mostly for product businesses. It’s intuitive to understand how the setup works. You send them your product, they unbox it, they try it, post videos about it, and then their followers buy it. But I’m really interested in hearing your take on how a service business can do influencer marketing since they can’t always evaluate your service. So how does that work?

Enelin Toneva (01:16.814)
Yeah, we have actually a lot of experience with services and like digital services. So, yeah, traditionally that’s true. The first thought would definitely be a physical item that is P2C, but there’s also a bunch of like subscription and services. So for example, we are working also with like, for example, insurance, which is a type of service, it works as a subscription.

And with that program, the program is currently making more than $400 ,000 in sales every month and growing with influencer and ambassadors. And how it works, pretty much in a nutshell, it’s more or less the same if it’s a B2C. I think the bigger differences has come into play when we talk about B2B and we can talk about that totally differently. But in terms of B2C,

Jeffro (02:05.046)
Mm -hmm.

Enelin Toneva (02:09.838)
It’s even if it’s a service, you can still let them to try it and that would be also more relevant. If you would do it, it would be better because that’s the only way how ambassador can actually create authentic content about you and they can actually explain their personal experience and everything and it will look much better than just a regular ad. So even if you’re a service business, make sure that your ambassadors have the ability to actually.

learn about your surveys to try it out and explain that to their audience. That’s the way it will work the best.

Jeffro (02:46.71)
Okay. And that makes sense. But that also means you’re probably going to limit your options as to who you can work with. You know, if I’ve got a landscaping company in Iowa and I find an influencer in California that has a following that I want to get in front of, I mean, I wouldn’t care about the Californians anyways, if I’m doing landscaping in Iowa, but I’m trying to think of an example where you’re not necessarily in the same place or maybe you’re in the same location, but that influencer lives in an apartment. They don’t have a yard. So how does that, does that just mean you can’t work with them? You got to find somebody else?

Enelin Toneva (03:16.974)
Yeah, so localized businesses, another topic. So there are a bunch of tools that we use in our work every day as well, where we can narrow down accounts and influencers in different media channels and everything, that they have audience more than 50 % in that location. So if we talk about like Miami or whatnot, and they are owning the business, the service only opens there, then it’s pretty big audience, I would say Miami is huge.

we can totally still find influencers who are based in Miami and whose followers are also based in Miami. And with different type of tools like Modash, Hype Auditor, and there’s bunch of them out there that we also use daily in our work. We can narrow that demographics down. Also, you don’t only have to think about affiliate marketing in terms of social media.

influencers in social media is only one category. You can also work with, for example, we have been working with one company called Paint Night and they do actually events localized and it’s sip and drink type of events and by city by city we have been figuring out where people are trying to find information about the events happening in their city. And you can also collaborate.

with local websites, local PR media, local people who live there or things to do in XYZ blog posts. So you can localize the partnerships and find out where the people, you just have to think like if you would be the target audience, the potential client, where you would find out the information and go from there.

Jeffro (05:08.15)
Got it. So it’s helpful to have those tools with all that information because then you can narrow down your search and find somebody a lot more quickly. I know there’s other platforms out there like Social Ladder or UpFluence. I don’t know if that’s the same type of idea, right? Those people, they list themselves there saying they want to partner, but what about, are those always going to be the best partners or if you find someone with a count that looks like it would match up perfectly, but they haven’t listed themselves on one of these sites, how do you go about starting out that?

Enelin Toneva (05:19.406)
Mm -hmm.

Jeffro (05:36.872)
relationship, you just reach out directly.

Enelin Toneva (05:39.054)
Yeah, we reach out directly and we also follow up many times and we use emailing tools and also we actually send personalized messages through social media account for example using our clients Instagram for example and and that way we make sure that we get in front of the right people.

Jeffro (05:57.558)
Okay, so what are some things that you should look for when you’re picking an influencer besides matching up the demographic? Is there anything else?

Enelin Toneva (06:04.494)
Yeah, many people think that the size of the influencer matters the most and so on. That’s actually not really true. And I think the best, the sweet spot is our micro influencers. So 10 to 50K followers and high engagement rate. That’s really important. You can work with huge influencers, but if they have like close to zero engagement.

It doesn’t really matter. It means that they have fake followers or just generally, they have a lot of random accounts follow them, but nobody really cares about their content. So that’s what actually really, really matters. So and the micro -influencers are good to start with. They’re easy to work with. They don’t respond to you with true agents and with expensive media kits, but they’re also willing to work more on commission.

and for product only. So if you’re just starting out, definitely just start out with micro -influencers and you can go from there.

Jeffro (07:02.934)
Yeah, and that makes sense. I guess as a following gets larger, it probably gets more diluted in terms of the follower base. And so it’s harder to be targeted in that sense. That’s interesting. So what does a typical engagement look like with an influencer? If you’ve got a particular campaign, you find someone, what happens next?

Enelin Toneva (07:12.694)
Yeah.

Enelin Toneva (07:23.31)
Yeah, it really depends, right? There’s definitely this that if you work with 100 influencers, I would say like quarter of them will succeed if everything goes well. So that’s happens a lot and that’s normal. So in that case, you just have to then learn that early track everything, analyze, use an affiliate marketing software that you can give out the tracking links.

and also discount codes or codes that they can use. So you can make sure that every moment and every partnership you have, you can track on it. And then you can learn that what is that 20 or 25 % that actually really worked and then based on that start scaling. And yeah, I mean, everything we have had the smaller influencers niche doing excellent sales or bigger one doing average and everything in between and vice versa. So it really depends.

I would also add to the metrics is what to look. Also, pick rather niche ones. So if you try to really niche down, that’s really helpful always. And just check that they actually have a quality content as well. And they do something interesting. They stand out in their content wise as well.

Jeffro (08:39.35)
Okay, now you mentioned working with like 100 influencers there. Is that normal? I think more people think small scale, like I’ll find one or two that are a good fit and work with them, but in your experience is it better to have even more than that?

Enelin Toneva (08:53.454)
Oh yeah, I mean, it depends. Like, we have clients who we have thousands of influencers. See, over the years we are working with the clients. My oldest client is since 2018 and we have literally thousands and thousands. And then you can always think that, yeah, the top sellers will be around 20 from there. And the rest ones, some of them you will sign up, but they don’t activate. So they actually will either not do the content.

or they do little sales. So those things you have to factor in, but then you have those top sellers who do like crazy amount of sales. And that’s normal to happen at the beginning if you don’t know what you’re doing, but then you can start learning also about affiliate activation, how to keep them active, how to reactivate them, how to keep them motivated.

and all that stuff to make those numbers better. And then also to learn to see those trends and analyze and scale based on already successful ones.

Jeffro (09:54.518)
Okay, so that sounds like, that makes sense if you’ve got an affiliate or commission based structure. What about if you just wanna pay someone, like hey, I really like your content and your style, can you make one of your videos about my service? And you pay them before they go do it. Obviously that would probably be a smaller pool of influencers that you’re working with, but how does that differ from that affiliate approach?

Enelin Toneva (10:17.614)
Well, normally the clients that we have, we don’t, yeah, that’s not our first choice. And also the clients normally don’t want it because that’s the beauty of affiliate influencer marketing is that you can pay on commission and that lowers the risks. But of course there are influencers who come back with MediaKit and they want the commission, they want the product and they have like some kind of production fee. So to say they want the sponsorship, especially when we’re talking about bigger influencers.

Jeffro (10:28.63)
Right.

Enelin Toneva (10:44.91)
and like YouTubers, for example, who take a lot of time and work they put into their videos. So in that case, you just, you have to, what we like to do, we definitely ask our like security questions, so to say, to make sure that the traffic we buy is really valid, it really matches our clients’ target audience. We also have to make sure that the data they give us is all correct. We use different tools.

to make sure that all those numbers match. We ask screenshots from their store reviews, Google Analytics, all of that. And then, of course, negotiate the price down as much as possible. You can always maybe a little bit give more commission versus have a bigger upfront payment. And honestly, we like to work with influencers and ambassadors who are also interested in the commission as well. And they have to believe in the product.

as well. And they have to believe by themselves as well that they can sell. And if they don’t, what’s the point of collaborating then, right? Unless the client really only needs user generated content and they want to work with specific content creators and they want like, we had one client, for example, that they only wanted like one minute videos because they were actually using those videos on producing heavy ads.

And that was their strategy. So they didn’t even bet on the commission and the sales. They just needed the content. It happens. It’s rare. It’s an interesting strategy too, but it’s better when you do it two in one and also work with someone who is generally really interested in your product and service. That would be the ideal.

Jeffro (12:22.774)
Do you find that the influencers are more interested in a flat fee per sale or like a percentage? Because obviously with services, it can vary a lot more depending on the scope of the job. So I imagine a percentage would be more attractive.

Enelin Toneva (12:35.874)
really much, it really depends. It really depends on the, what they’re eventually most interested is on a higher, like the lifetime, what’s the lifetime value of that sale, right? Because we have clients who have a subscription, it is around, let’s say, $50 per month, but they get the commission for one year. So, and if you get the, you added the 12 months up, the commission price is okay, it’s pretty good. But, or you can have a…

a product that is close to $1 ,000 and you get one time fee. So eventually what you should focus on when you talk with influencers is what’s the full amount that they’re going to get? What’s the actual money that they can get per sale? And then you make up the rules that it would make sense. And normally percentage is the best. And also if it’s a subscription business or service, this kind of thing, then it would be standard to give the commission also like up to six months.

up to one year, that also motivates them to bring you a better, more relevant traffic, not just a one -off traffic, and then you would lose the client, right?

Jeffro (13:41.942)
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So when should a business consider doing influencer marketing in the first place, and are there times when they should avoid it?

Enelin Toneva (13:49.038)
Yeah, I think it’s a very good question. I have sometimes companies coming to me and asking like, hey, I have this great idea. And they’re about to launch a business and then I normally send them back. And the reason is, personally, for me, I feel and I see that it’s very hard to convince influencers and affiliates if you don’t have even social proof yet. You need to have at least one successful sales channel.

so that I can say to ambassadors and influencers affiliates that this is actually a good product and service and they have good reviews and everything and these are the benefits and all of that. And this is the science behind it. Maybe I need this kind of social proof to go to an ambassador, influencer, affiliate and convince them to work with your brand. And if I don’t have it, it’s very risky for them to what if it’s not that good and then they can lose all their careers, so to say, right?

So that’s why the proof there is really, really, really important, especially when we talk about skin care, anything you put inside or on your food, these kinds of things. It really needs solid proof before the ambassador can consider you. It’s just too risky for them otherwise. They are easier products for them to work with.

Jeffro (15:07.35)
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, and it minimizes their risk, like you said. So it needs to be something established with proof that it’s good and a chance that you’re gonna be around. If they’re gonna put in the time and effort to make these videos, they want a chance to actually get commissions. So that makes sense.

Enelin Toneva (15:18.422)
Yeah.

Enelin Toneva (15:22.126)
So, totally it could be second channel, I would say, but not the first.

Jeffro (15:27.99)
Right, okay. Now here’s a kind of a separate question. How do you distinguish between an influencer versus a brand ambassador? Is it the type of content or is it just the arrangement of the deal?

Enelin Toneva (15:37.55)
Mm -hmm.

Enelin Toneva (15:41.486)
Yeah, so there’s many ways to see it. Many people use the same definitions for different things. How I see the influencers I see who have influence in social media, so they can be influencers in TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, what not. So social media influencers are normally considered like influencers. Brand ambassadors are normally the ones who are with one brand. They have maybe one year contract. They are like…

all the time, like really working together with that brand, they have like some kind of bigger contract behind it. And they’re they those are for the companies, these are like top, top sellers, and they they all concept they also use their faces in their marketing in their content marketing and so on. So I feel that the ambassador is already like a bigger, stronger relationship. And then there’s also traditional affiliates.

who maybe don’t have social presence at all, but they’re very successful affiliates with their website, with their blog, with their review site, or they’re successful affiliates with Inside the ShareASale, Commission Junction, Avin and so on. So those third party affiliate networks. And then there’s also referrals, who could be your current happy customers, and they want to refer.

and your product or service to their friends and family. So they have no influence, no website and no social media, but they still can bring you leads. So those are all different strategies, but the logic behind like referring logic is the same.

Jeffro (17:15.83)
Got it. So maybe what you could do if you ran a campaign with a bunch of affiliate influencers, you find your top, you know, 5%, you could reach out to them and say, Hey, you did a great job. I’d like to work with you more exclusively. Stop making videos for our competitors. Just work with us. We’ll pay you a little more. And you put together some sort of relationship that way.

Enelin Toneva (17:35.31)
Yeah, totally doable.

Jeffro (17:38.23)
So how do you figure out a balance between that greater reach versus interest alignment or demographic alignment? Because you talked about this a little bit. You’ve got the tools to figure out who you want to talk to, and you like the micro influencers. But what’s actually going on when making that decision? Does it depend on the product or service? Can you walk us through what that looks like, that decision process?

Enelin Toneva (18:01.454)
Yeah, so at the beginning, when we start with the one client, it’s very important to put together the strategy and the strategy will be about who we want to work with, what we can offer them and what we want to get return from them. So pretty much those three pillars. And so who we want to work with, it’s going to depend on multiple things.

First, we’re going to analyze also the current audience, the current demographics, who we have as clients, so our clients’ clients. So whoever are buying their product or service today, so we really need to understand that deeply. If we know that, we already have a good understanding that what is the demographics that we are looking for. That’s one thing. We also look at trends that are out there.

and what other similar companies are doing, if not even similar, but in the field. So if it’s in the health field, maybe it’s in the gardening field or health field or pets or whatnot. We also check competitors and their backlinks. So to understand, we use like social media tools. We use also SEO tools, hrefs, SEMrush for that to understand where the traffic is coming from. And based on this research and analysis, we have a strategy that, which we call a hit list.

So Hitlist will be like already like who we want to, what kind of lead gen we want to do weekly basis and who are the people exactly who we want to start outreaching. And we’re going to put the Hitlist first, it will be very first, there will be a big portion of the demographics that will match the client’s current client base. But then also,

half of it will be different kind of other tests. Let’s test out other keywords. If they have SEO strategy, we consider those keywords as well. Or they’re running ads, we will get a good idea also, like what kind of keywords have worked well for this brand. And then we put together a hit list using all this information and we start testing different ideas.

Jeffro (20:08.15)
Okay, so kind of following through with that train of thought, if we’ve got all these influencers, if they’re based on affiliates, you probably have less say over the type of content they make. Whereas if you’ve made that agreement to be more of a brand ambassador, there’s more back and forth on the type of videos they put out, there’s approval and things like that. So how much guidance do you even give to a group of affiliates when you’re doing a campaign? Is it just…

Here’s our service, go make a video. I hope it’s good, or do you put some walls around it?

Enelin Toneva (20:43.246)
Yeah, we don’t definitely tell exactly what to do because otherwise it would defeat the whole purpose of like having this authentic content and personal experience. But what we do is our goal is to make that information really easy to digest for them. We don’t want them to go on the website and get lost or whatnot, right? We want to bring out like really, we like to put together like a one -pager, two -pager for our ambassadors so they can see like what’s the essence of the brand.

What are the main features, main strengths compared to competitors? Some of the details about the product or service, pricing, so on. And some visuals, product photos, if they want to use them on their blog, website, they may use it. Social media influencers, they normally do their own photos and videos. But websites would use the ones that you already have professionally taken when they’re writing a review.

Jeffro (21:18.358)
Mm -hmm.

Enelin Toneva (21:40.686)
And yeah, and that’s pretty much, you don’t have to go crazy. And other visual wise, you can do, if you work with an affiliate network or websites, blogs who like to, or who also have display ads on their website, then we also, for them, we create like the basic, best converting these kind of visuals as well for them, together with the client. So they can put like a skycraper or this kind of like, you know, 20.

250, 250, something like that on the website. So we prepared those visuals. But that’s pretty much it. Logos, visuals, one or two pager with the most important information, and then they are good to go from there normally.

Jeffro (22:22.518)
Got it, so you’re just giving them enough information to be informed about the product, to get them off on a good start, and then just let them run with it. That makes sense. All right, well, we’re coming up on our time here, so thank you for joining me today, Enelyn. The creator economy is fascinating, and I appreciate how you’ve given us some insights into how that works on both sides with the creators and with the businesses and the influencers. So guys, check out Enelyn’s link at the.

Enelin Toneva (22:29.26)
Yeah.

Jeffro (22:47.286)
in the show notes, reach out to her. If you need help with an influencer marketing campaign, obviously she’s been through this a bunch of times and has the tools and everything to put together a successful campaign. And Alind, do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to leave us with?

Enelin Toneva (23:01.262)
Yeah, I think that everyone can use affiliate and influencer marketing either if it’s like the first thought that you talked about, the B2C e -commerce business, for example. But yeah, there’s also ways to work with the localized business, also with even with the B2B business, we would there focus more on the affiliate networks, websites, and not so much on social media, which is a little bit possible too, but yeah, there’s different strategies.

And the same with services, we have seen a lot of success. So, so definitely there’s, there’s ways and it’s, it’s, it’s highly, highly recommended. It’s definitely something that is growing. So, and if you are not, not doing it now, then you should definitely start with it.

Jeffro (23:42.966)
Awesome, well I really appreciate it. Edeline, thanks for being here and thanks to all of you for listening. Maybe it’s time to find an influencer who can help you dominate your niche. So take care and I’ll see you next time.