How to Succeed in Influencer Marketing in 2025
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Justin Moore, and we're going to explore how to succeed with influencer marketing in 2025.

Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of the amazing future content we have coming your way. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Justin Moore. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I am very excited to be joined by Justin Moore. If you don't know who Justin is, he is the founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community that helps creators develop strong brand partnerships. He's also the author of Sponsor Magnet, How to Attract Price and Excellence.

execute your dream brand partnerships. And his YouTube channel and podcast is called Creator Wizard. Justin, welcome to the show. There's a lot of wizards in there. What's up, Mike? Yeah, man, I've got to get that personal brand on lock. Yeah, well, super awesome to have you here. Justin and I are going to explore how to succeed with influencers in 2025. We're in a different world right now. And I can't wait to explore all of this with you. But before we go there, I'm

I would love to hear a little bit of your backstory. How'd you get into marketing? How'd you get into influencer marketing? So I was in medical devices before this, man. I was definitely not in influencer marketing. The quick story is that my wife, April, started her first YouTube channel in 2009. So this was way back in the day. YouTube was just starting. In fact, I

partner program on YouTube had just started. So it wasn't like a foregone conclusion that, oh yeah, you just upload videos on YouTube and you'll make AdSense revenue from that. That was like not a thing back then. In fact, she got rejected from it for the application process like three times early on. And so in the early days, it was very much getting free stuff. That was what would happen is she would make this content and brands would, hey, can we send you this free thing? And we were in our early 20s at the time and we were like,

this is amazing, free stuff, sure. Right, and so that was just how it happened for years, dude. It was like we were just accepting the free stuff. And so basically I started going to business school at night after work and I started taking these classes all around marketing and advertising and negotiation. And I just, I went back to April that night and I was like,

I feel like we're getting the short end of the stick here. Like, you know, there's hundreds of comments on all of your videos that are saying, Hey, I just went to the store and picked up this product. Thanks for telling me about it. Or, well, I've never heard about this brand. And I was like, you know what? I feel like this free, you know, $30 bag of potato chips just isn't adequate compensation for the value you're providing these brands. And so this is when I said, okay, ask the next brand. Do you have a budget?

to collaborate with me. And she's like, there's no way any brand or company is going to be willing to pay me. I was like, come on, just try it. And so sure enough, next brand, we asked them if they had a budget and they said, oh yeah, if you could include us in two videos a month.

we will pay you $700 a month. And we were just like, our minds were absolutely blown. And so from that point on, you know, over the next basically 10 years, we did over 550 sponsorships personally made over $5 million doing it. So it was like one of our primary revenue streams as creators. But basically what happened, Mike, is that in 2015, I turned to April and I was like, you know what, things are going really well for us now personally as creators, but there's no way people are going to watch us or like follow us on the internet forever.

What can we do to kind of diversify our income, frankly, as a family? And so this is when I decided to start an influencer marketing agency. And so this led me down the path of seeing this other perspective that we had never seen as creators personally, where I was now kind of in the boardrooms with these brands and advertisers now where they were saying, hey, we don't want to just pay you, April and Justin 510K. We want to spend a million dollars across 200 creators.

And so it was just like a very, very different conversation. And so this is what ultimately led me to start educating creators about the process of collaborating with brands. Very interesting. So bring us up to the present a little bit, right? Like, so the agency, it sounds like isn't around anymore and you've got some other stuff going on. So bring us into the present. Yeah. So I'll tell you the long dark night of the soul. How about that? Everything was going really well. You know, I started in 2015, had a bunch of full-time employees, uh,

nauseating payroll every month. I was high flying. I thought I'm going to build this big agency. It's going to be awesome. And then 2020 hit and the agency got crushed. Basically, our primary clients were travel and hospitality, CPG, and retail. So what got crushed during COVID? Those three things, right? And so basically, all of our contracts got eviscerated, had to lay off all my employees. It was one of the lowest...

points of my life, Mike, I'm not going to lie, man, because I thought that this agency was going to be the thing that propelled my family into the kind of the next chapter of our lives. And for that not to happen, and I was $100,000 in debt. And so it was awful. And for a long time there, I just didn't know if there was going to be a next act for me.

And so what happened was I was in this really, really low place. I was having this great wallow sesh for months. And I was like, where do I go from here? And this is when I started thinking about this kind

kind of interesting perspective that I had now, right? I've been a creator in the trenches for many years doing all these deals, but now I had this other perspective of being, understanding why brands are saying, hey, we want to work with that person, but never send us that person again. We're never going to work with them for these six reasons, but they would never say that to their creator, right? So there was all these really interesting dialogues happening behind the scenes. And so this is when I started just honestly uploading YouTube videos about

How do you negotiate? How do you behave on a phone call with a brand? How do you price yourself? And so this is what ultimately led me to start coaching creators around the process and kind of empowering them to advocate for themselves. And basically, I have this perspective that 99% of creators, influencers should not

have managers. This is my opinion. You should not have representation. And so I've kind of become this advocate for the long tail of creators and influencers who, you know, they don't have millions of followers, but they're still making money and they need help. So if I can help them go from, you know, let's say a thousand to 3000 per deal, that's really meaningful.

So somewhere along the line, you wrote a book and developed a community. Give us the brief skinny on that. Yeah. So over the last basically four or five years, I've educated thousands of creators through a course that I created called Brand Deal Wizard and a community, a coaching program that I run and decided about a year ago that, okay, now is the time to distill all of this into a book. And so I wrote this book called Sponsor Magnet really to

I don't know. I feel pulled to educate the next generation of creators, frankly, where it's take this, here's a book, 15, 20 bucks. Here's every mistake that we made, you know, over the last 15 years. And so I look at it as my service to the next generation. Love it. Okay. So this show is a marketing show and we do have creators that are listening to the show, but we're not going to spend the rest of the show talking to the creator community. We're going to spend the rest of the show talking to the marketing community and

And those people, regardless of what size they are, that maybe are considering influencer marketing in 2025 or into the future. And they want to learn something from what you have experienced. So my first question is, why should marketers work with creators today?

or influencers. What's your thoughts on that today? What are some of the benefits, the upsides, if they get it right? Well, I think what a lot of marketers have been scared about, you know, they read these articles about how brand XYZ paid a million dollars to some mega influencer celebrity something. And there was basically zero ROI. Like either people didn't

purchase the product or they just didn't care. And it was just like a bunch of money flushed down the drain. And so I think there is this caution that a lot of marketers have about working with creators to just kind of start off here. And so my answer to your question might surprise some folks who are watching or listening, which is that I actually think that there is a not often discussed goal or outcome that you can have when you work with creators. And that is actually repurposing the content that they create.

So a lot of people think that the primary reason that you'd want to hire a creator would be to get them to talk about you on their platforms, right? Their social media platforms or YouTube podcasts, whatever. But one of the things that I specialize in when I ran my influencer agency was like our clients who are the brands, they would come to us and say, Hey,

we really want to collaborate with creators, but we don't have an unlimited budget. What's the best way that we can get the most juice from the squeeze? And so I would say, how about this? How about in addition to the creator posting on their platforms, let's negotiate so we can secure the

the usage rights, the name and likeness rights from the creator so that you can take this content and use it in other ways, whether it's posting on your blog or your website, your own, you know, your owned and operated properties, or maybe your social media, maybe an e-commerce partner, or maybe heck, can we run some paid advertising with this?

And so when you start to look at the ROAS, the return on ad spend or the return on the investment of collaborating with creators in this model, it starts becoming pretty exciting because if you think, wow, if I can get a more efficient ad spend on the Facebook ads that I'm running or the TikTok ads that I'm running, maybe it starts making sense. I like that a lot because a lot of people are turning to ads out of necessity nowadays because they're having a harder time getting their organic content back.

And the idea that you could negotiate with a creator to, you know,

essentially get the rights to be able to use that content you paid them for to utilize it in your ads, to utilize it in your own social platforms is kind of cool. Just out of curiosity, any other upsides that we have not talked about that come off the top of your mind? Yeah, I mean, let me give you a concrete example. So a very large phone carrier hired my agency back in the day to employ this very tactic.

And one of the most surprising things that happened. So we hired like 10 creators. So this particular phone company there, they knew that their products resonated with people in the fire community, you know, like the financial independence retirement early. And they're like, we want to try and find some people who spoke to that message really well. And so this was the goal of the campaign to go find people who did that.

And interestingly, we got about 15 different assets, like video assets that we could use to repurpose to run as ads. And there was this one asset that was beautiful, Mike. It was like glossy. It looked like a TV commercial. Like the creator just had like really professional camera. And I was like, oh man, this one's going to crush as an ad. And then there was this other video that we got from someone who it looked like it was shot on like a potato, dude. It was so bad. It was grainy. It was just like not professional. And so I was like, okay, we got this mix of content.

Con

content. Let's try it. Which one do you think performed the best? Well, of course, the one that looked least professional. It was the potato, dude, the potato video. And I just think it's a great lesson that like sometimes it might surprise you when you try to employ tactics like this. Whereas if your brand team was used to making these super polished ads that you always run, sometimes it might surprise you that lo-fi content that creators can generate for you actually perform really well.

Okay, there's going to be a fair amount of people listening to this that have worked with influencers and had not a great experience. So what I want to know is kind of what are some of the mistakes that you see that are common mistakes that businesses have when they work with influencers slash creators that might have led to those kinds of mistakes? Wow. There's a lot of different directions we can go with this probably, but I would say probably the number one thing is not having a clear goal.

when you reach out to this creator. So this happens a lot where you as a marketer, say you read an ad week or digiday and you think I should be working with creators or you see your competitor working with creators and you're like, I got to be doing this. I feel like we're missing the boat. And then you try this, you allocate a pretty small budget to test it.

And then it doesn't go well. Either maybe you didn't find the right creator or a combination of them being not professional and it was just kind of not a good experience. And so you're colored with this belief about creators. But in reality, what oftentimes happens is that

If both sides, both you as the marketer and the brand and the creator don't really understand what you were trying to get out of this, a lot of marketers think that creators understand. Oh, well, of course they know that we're trying to get sales out of this. Or of course they know that we're trying to just generate awareness or get the most amount of views or engagement or whatever.

But those KPIs that you are using internally to measure the success of the campaign, it's so critical that you communicate that because the way in which the creator or the influencer is going to tactically execute the campaign is going to change. And so one of the things I talk about in my book, Sponsor Magnet, is something called the

ARC framework. So ARC. So basically it's the three goal types that you as a marketer should be considering when you want to hire a creator. So A is awareness. So the primary reason that you want to work with them is to spread the word. Maybe it's a new AI feature that you're launching that you want

everyone to know about. Or maybe you were only available in the UK. Now you're available in the US. That's an awareness play. The R is repurposing. That's something we talked about in the beginning, right? It's like, okay, the reason that we want to hire them is we really don't care about them posting it natively on their platforms. We want to use it in these other ways. So maybe we don't have to go out there and hire a production company or something to get us those assets, right?

And then the final, the C is conversion. So yeah, the only reason, the primary reason that we want to hire is sales, trial signups for our software program, app downloads, whatever, something measurable and attributable. And the reason that it's so critical that you articulate these goals to the creator is that

Again, the way in which they will advise to actually create this content generating the promotion is going to change. So let me give you a quick example here. So let's say you want to hire a podcaster to talk about your this AI feature, whatever. If you tell them that an awareness is really what you care about the most, then maybe having a badge on the cover art of their podcast, right?

right? The Creator Wizard podcast powered by brand XYZ. And maybe the top of every episode is going to be, this is the Creator Wizard podcast powered by XYZ. That is an awareness play. However, if it's a conversion play, that's where we come down to the kind of direct response, direct marketing, performance marketing tactics. We're going to say, hey, click on the link Creator Wizard 20 to get 20% off your first purchase. Click the link in the show notes.

That is much more of a conversion focus execution of that podcast partnership. And so again, this is, you know, we're getting into the weeds a bit, but it's so important because if there's a misalignment of the goals, then of course there's going to be underperformance. Well, I love the weeds instead of my listeners. So I get the sense you can only have one of these on the

awareness or conversion side, because it's pretty rare to be able to have both. But you could have like either awareness and repurposing potentially or conversions and repurposing, but you probably can't have all three. And some people are going to want to have all three. Is that correct? So I think that this leads to another really important part of the conversation is that it's going to be very difficult to accomplish multiple objectives in a single activation, in a single post, whether it's a YouTube video, podcast, newsletter, whatever the medium is,

This is why it's so important to have this holistic perspective of a partnership. So like, okay, if we've got multiple goals, because it's basic, you probably have multiple goals. A lot of brands do. They want all these things, right? And that's totally fine, but it means recentering your expectations around like, okay, maybe this means we need to engage this creator to do three posts or five posts

over the next five months to allow them to continue to not only hit all these objectives that we have, but to continue to talk to their audience about how they're loving and using the product. Dude, this happens a lot. I mean, even going back to the 1930s, right? You think about the movie studios, right? Where they did all these studies that found that the average moviegoer, the average consumer had to see a message about this upcoming movie seven times.

before they got their butt in the seat is the marketing rule of seven. And we just keep seeing this coming up over and over. And I think employing that same approach with influencer marketing is critical. Love it. Okay. What do we need to be thinking about before we start working with influencers? Let's say, okay, Justin, you've sold me. I want to work with influencers. What are some of the things that we need to be thinking about outside of having clear objectives?

Well, I mean, the first thing is, are your customers swayed by creators? Right. And so if you're if your primary target demographics is Gen X, then I don't know, maybe influencer marketing is not the best fit or it shouldn't be the lion's share of your marketing spend. Not I mean, there's a lot of Gen X people on social media, so don't discount it fully.

But like, especially if you are a brand that is targeting a younger demographic, you look at any study that shows that younger people are very much swayed. The opinion of influential people that they follow on the internet, they will...

see that message. They'll see them talking about it in an Instagram post or YouTube video. They'll open up a new tab and be like, you know, what is this product? They'll go check it out because they've developed this, what's called parasocial relationship with these creators. And they almost think of them as friends, like in real life. Like, so if this person recommends a product, I'm going to go check it out. I see this behavior constantly with my wife, you know, for sure. And, and a lot of people who are in my cohort, I am an elder millennial. I'll say that though.

Oh, and by the way, just speaking for the Gen X, because I'm a Gen Xer, you can see this gray hair. So we are influenced, but we might be more influenced by channels like podcasting, right? Because maybe this is where we consume a lot of our media, or we might be influenced by people on Facebook rather than necessarily people on TikTok, right? So I don't think there's a limit to the age, but I think you are right that the younger the demographic, the more likely that this is going to be

Where they live. Right. So beyond that, what else do we need to be thinking about? So I think another thing is we talked about the fear associated with hiring the mega influencer, the mega creator, the one million, 10 million plus person who's also commanding probably a pretty hefty rate if you were to collaborate with them. And honestly, my sweet spot whenever I ran the agency was I'm going to go after these smaller people.

you know, kind of nano and micro mid-tier creator who, you know, they don't have millions of followers. They might have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe even sometimes sub 10,000 because they had a very specific focus.

And their audience followed them for a really specific reason. I could share a quick anecdote from one of my longest running coaching clients. His name is Paul Jameson, and he runs a podcast called The Green Industry Podcast. Mike, you're going to love this. His podcast teaches lawn care professionals how to grow their business.

And when we first started working together, he was having a challenge actually, because he had a lot of these really, really large, you know, multinational billion dollar plus lawnmower companies or tractor companies in his inbox. And they were saying like, hey, we...

we will loan you this tractor for six months. We want you to make a bunch of content about it, but we're not going to pay you. This was the conversation for years that he was having. And he was just feeling very frustrated because he was like, I'm getting like hundreds of thousands of views on all these videos and my podcasts and all that. And so it

really took a lot of education for him, you know, doing these Zoom calls and going to the trade shows and really kind of educating these more traditional incumbent type brands who were only used to doing things a certain way and advertising in the industry trade magazine that cost $11,000 per issue or whatever. Again, like this is what they've been used to doing. So there's so much inertia to change things that oftentimes it's difficult to convince brands and companies who are used to doing...

things a certain way to change, right? Basically, I came in and I told him, I said, look, okay, when you were having these conversations with these brands, don't tell them they're stupid because this is what a lot of creators do. They say, hey, you should not be advertising in that prehistoric trade magazine or you should not be doing X, Y, Z. You don't need to stop any of that.

What if we augmented what you're currently doing with this new thing, which is social media and working with creators? And so I think having that perspective allowed him to basically finally illustrate and articulate to these large sponsors the value of working with creators. And I want to share one anecdote of what I mean. A sponsorship, I think a lot of people listening or watching might think that like, oh, influencer marketing is, it's just like, they're going to talk about us on social media. But

One of the most recent partnerships that Paul did was with John Deere, which is one of the largest tractor companies in the world. And he had a conversation with them and he said, tell me about your success metrics. What are you trying to accomplish? This is one thing that I teach my clients to ask brands if they don't know. And John Deere said, you know, Paul, we've loved partnering with you on social media in the past. That was awesome. But really what we're focused on right now is we have the largest trade show.

of the year coming up in October. It's called Equip. And everyone in our industry is going to be there. Would you come and podcast live from our booth for the entire show? Bring your friends in. We'll have people from the marketing team on John Deere come in. It'll just be a steady flow of interviews. And all the press is going to be there, all the photographers. And we just want our freaking logo in the background when you're doing all those podcasts.

And they said, here, we're going to back up a dump truck full of money and drop it on your driveway for this privilege. And so I just like sharing this example because for a lot of marketers listening, I hope it stretches your mindset of like, wow, I could get the key opinion leader, the luminary of my industry to come and kind of hang out in our booth right for the entire show. That probably is a really worthwhile thing for the right brand.

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This isn't just a conference. It's a career accelerator and it all starts March 30th. Reserve your tickets now at socialmediamarketingworld.info before tickets sell out. Virtual tickets are also available. What I love about that story, and that's a great story for a lot of the marketers that are listening right now, is the idea that you can get somebody you trust, you've worked with maybe in the past,

And the benefit for the brand is huge because basically that brand is creating content inside their booth, drawing people to the booth, getting them scheduled for the podcast interviews. And then, of course, you've got this litany of content that's going to be released over a period of likely months.

That's highly advantageous for the brand. And the podcast host is going to say, I'm at the blah, blah, blah conference recording with da, da, da. And all they had to do was set up a little recording studio and pay the influencer their fair share to create that content. And that's content that's going to last for a really long time. What about budgets? Talk to me about that. What do we need to be thinking about when it comes to money?

You know, I think that, like we said earlier, that one of the pitfalls when you first dip your toe into influencer marketing is you only devote a trial budget to it. You're like, okay, let's allocate 5K, 10K, 25K, something that's almost kind of like a rounding error relative to what the media mix is generally. You might be spending millions of dollars and then

you know, you get this charge from the executive team, like, okay, let's try this, like 25K, 50K or whatever. And if it goes well, then maybe we can consider devoting a larger budget next quarter or next year or something like that. And I constantly have these conversations when I ran the agency to help you understand that, look, if the sample size is not large enough,

with a budget and you're working with the right people to really illustrate that you're able to accomplish and satisfy some of those KPIs, you're just going to convince yourself that influencer marketing doesn't work. And this is why...

My favorite thing to suggest for marketers or brands who are in that situation is to go after this repurposing goal type in the beginning. If you are someone who's internal at a brand, or maybe you own your own brand, you're a small business or whatever, and you're trying to think, what should I do right at the beginning? I think that the ROI is much more obvious to your colleagues or your superiors when you can say, hey, look at all this content we got.

from this partnership. And so rather than blowing the entire 25K test budget on a large influencer, I'm a much bigger fan of going out there and hiring 10 people who are smaller, getting a bunch of great content. And yes, of course, they're still going to post about it. So there's going to be some

some, some nice fanfare associated with that, but being able to just like in the all hands marketing and meeting and be like, look at these awesome assets. And guess what? We were able to, you know, run these as ads and these ads perform two X better than the ones that we were currently doing with our own creative team or whatever. Like that I feel is a much better investment of a test budget to try to convince people around you that this is a worthwhile thing to double down on. Well, and I'm just thinking creatively with you on the fly here, but

if you've got a small cadre of creators that you're working with,

and you have the rights to be able to repurpose their content, what's stopping you from repurposing that content into new mediums? So for example, what's stopping you from getting the transcripts of all that, sticking it into an AI model, creating some free resources that could be lead magnets for your business, right? Or what's stopping you from like putting them into some sort of a report that you can give away for your industry? I mean, there's so many different things that you can do with these kind of partner relationships, right?

you just have to get creative with it, right? Yeah. I mean, I think the only gotcha that I would call out is just ensure that you are giving credit. You have that contractually. Yeah. You're getting like that. You've contractually, you have those rights contractually to do new media derivations and all that stuff too. So you're a hundred percent right. Ask for permission. Yeah. Yeah. Ask for permission. Of course. Exactly. Ask for permission to, so that the creator is not surprised that you're doing this. I've done so many different deal types like this, where the partnership started off as one thing, but what,

ultimately led to the creator's face being on the packaging for the product, the physical product, because it was so successful. It turned into this like ambassadorship thing where it took on a life of its own to the point where, wow, there's actually value in having this person's name and likeness on a little sticker on the shelf in the retailer.

you know, where you can scan a QR code and watch their YouTube video on our, some landing page on the brand's website. So I think once you kind of realize the power that these partnerships can lead to, it's not just about the earned impressions that you're getting or the paid impressions that you're getting when you collaborate with them. These relationships, if you are a good partner, that creator could introduce you to 15 of their friends and just shout from the rooftops that this brand is an amazing brand and we're

Those people might even start talking about you for free because their friend has been beating the drum about it. So there's just so many positive downstream things that can happen if you do it the right way. Okay. Let's now talk about how in the world do we find influencers and how do we vet people that actually have real influence? Because obviously we want to empower people to be able to go out and do this on their own without having to work with an agency. So what are some of the tools or resources that you recommend that people might

try out? There's a lot of tools out there and I commiserate with marketers for sure. Because if you go and you type in like influencer marketing software, there's like literally ads for like 19 trillion software programs that you could potentially sign up for. Ones that I've used before with success have been like UpFluence, Later.com actually,

purchase Maverick, which was one of the largest influencer platforms recently. So later is kind of making a play into this right now. There's a lot of them. Those are two solid ones that I found. One thing that I will say is that a lot of these tools are starting to add basically capabilities to assess the authenticity of

of creators platforms. I know probably a lot of people watching or listening to this might be a bit concerned that like, yeah, but I've heard all these things about people buying followers or buying engagement or buying comments. And it's a real thing. Like I, in my D I'm a creator. So like I get DMS like this.

All the time, constantly, where it's like 50 bucks and you can buy 10,000 followers and all this stuff, right? And so you have to be cautious because there's some pretty simple things that you can do when you're trying to evaluate a prospective partner as something as simple as like, okay, this person says they have 50,000 followers, but I look at their most recent posts and they have like two comments.

Like something maybe is going on here. I might need to dig a little bit further here. And so just understand that these things are happening. And also another thing is like if every single comment you're seeing is like an emoji, like a kissy face emoji or the money tongue guy, right? It's just like, I don't know. There's not maybe some more substantive comments, you know, on here would be expected. And so I think there's just like some basic stuff that you can do as a marketer to educate yourself around like, okay, how do we not lose money by...

investing in a creator or a platform or a media company even that's not authentic or is fraudulently boosting their engagement. And so again, a lot of these tools can help with that. So UpFluence and Later.com, are these marketplaces, are there reviews? So you can like look at other people that have hired these people, kind of like, you know, on Amazon, you have like a verified reviews or whatever. So you know that this person actually hired this person. Is that kind of third party social proof there with these platforms or no?

Some of them are. I can't speak specifically to Uplancer later because I've been a bit out of the game for a couple of years with these tools since I shut down the agency. But yeah, there are for sure marketplaces where you can do that. One thing I want to split hairs about something real quickly, which is that when it comes to these platforms, a lot of them have both a self-service option or a fully managed version.

like almost like a white glove tier, where basically like if you are willing to either, you know, spend a certain amount of money on a campaign, they will allocate you an account manager and they'll say, hey, we'll do the legwork for you. You give us the brief, you tell us the types of creators you want to work with, et cetera, and we'll be the one to like reach out with the creators and things like that.

And so if you're a marketer listening to this and you're just thinking, I don't have time to reach out to 20 creators and do that song and dance, that is an option for sure at a lot of these platforms. But also if you're a smaller marketer listening to this and thinking, I don't have a huge budget, a lot of these platforms have an option where you can just create an account for a relatively modest fee.

monthly or annual commitment. It's almost like a CRM where you can do the searching, you can slice and dice, you know, demographics and geography and ages and sex and platforms and all that. And you are the one who's actually using the, it's like a platform, a software layer for you to actually do this outreach. And so I think that at least in my experience has been one of the positive outcomes of influencer marketing formalizing as a tactic is the tooling has caught up.

Let's talk a little bit about the really small marketer entrepreneur listening right now that might just want to do social searching, right? On YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. Do you have any advice for them? We already talked about, be careful about understanding the follower counts and the comments and stuff, but what kind of things would you advise if you were talking to a friend who didn't have a lot of money and wanted to kind of discern he's got maybe a list of 20 different people and he doesn't know which one to reach out to?

Probably the most frequent DM or message that I've gotten from brands or marketers who have tried to collaborate with creators has been, the creators just won't respond to me. I send out this like mail merge almost, right? I BCC to everyone. No one's responding to me. What gives? And so my most sincere advice that I give to any marketer in that situation is don't do that, number one. Not a good approach, not a good look, but...

do one at a time individual outreach to creators. And it's even more than that. It's how can you craft a bespoke offer

For that creator that would get them excited real quick justin before we move on to that i'm still on the prior question where i'm trying to identify whether i should even contact a creator but i don't have access to the tools i don't have the money i've been doing my own searching you know what i mean and i i've got a bunch of stuff come up on youtube like any tips beyond just looking at their comments.

And beyond just looking at like whether they have real followers or not, any other ways that we can discern whether these people have influence before we even do the outreach? I think a big part of it is understanding their upload cadence, because you can look at

a creator's page and see how often are they posting three times a month? Are they posting, have they only posted twice in the last year? One caution that I would give to marketers is that, you know, yeah, someone might've gotten a hundred thousand views on their most recent video, but if they haven't published in a year, there's no guarantee that if you compensate them to talk about your brand, that the next video will perform similarly. So a big part of this is understanding like

Is their audience expecting them to create content on a regular ongoing basis? And that will give you, I think, more comfort that when you hire them, that this next piece of content that they put out will receive a similar amount of impressions, essentially. Well, and something I want to add in here, because for every person that gets on the show, there's like 10 that get rejected by my team and me.

And what we're looking for and what I think everybody else should look for is whether or not this person is trying to position themselves as the expert you hope they are, right? Because you could look at someone's YouTube channel and you could see that their top videos are on, for example, Instagram marketing. And let's say you have an Instagram marketing tool. But when you look at their most recent videos, they had absolutely nothing to do with Instagram at all, right? So you have to discern whether or not this person is a generalist or a specialist because I feel like working with specialists is,

Unless you're just looking for someone to repurpose content is going to be far better because that means that they've attracted that audience. What's your reaction to that thought? 100%. Man, I see this a lot where there's discontinuity between a person's brand and how they talk about themselves in their bio and their header on their YouTube channel or whatever platform it is. And they're just posting whatever the heck. Right.

on their feed and there's just not continuity there. I have an example I can share that's actually kind of funny, which is that I had a family creator come to me one time and say, why am I not getting any food partnerships? Like CPG is like a really prominent category for family and lifestyle and things like that. And I looked at her page and there wasn't a single post

talking about food. It was like her travels and her family. And there's nothing wrong with that. But like, again, if you're a marketer and you look at that person's profile, you should have a singular question. Is this person's audience influenced by them for my product? Like, will they be influenced by them when they talk about my product? Yeah. Is there a topical relevance, right? Right. Absolutely. So a couple of things we just talked about so far is you can use tools like upfluencerlater.com. You definitely want to look

At the engagement factors, like are they getting real engagement from, you know, meaningful engagement that seems to be such that they've developed a loyal connection with their community? Follower counts could be very misleading, especially if they've had a channel for a very long time. You want to understand how often they're publishing. In an ideal world, you want someone that's consistently publishing so that you know that if they've been absent for a while, that if they just come back, it's going to work.

And you also want to make sure there's relevance to the topic that you're interested in. So now let's say we've identified like 10 people. Now we can get to the outreach, right? Which is where you were going a few minutes ago. How should we reach out to people? You already said don't email blast them, right?

So give us some tips on what we should do. At the end of the day, you have to understand what is going on in this creator or influencers universe or business. And how can you craft an offer that's exciting to them that would be win-win for both sides? So the best example I can give here is that I do sponsorships actually for my business, which is not something I expected when I started it. But I have 35,000 creators on my email list and newsletter and socials and all this stuff too. And I had a lot of these creator economy focused companies

who were in my inbox and they're saying, Justin, how can we partner? You've got all these creators. We have our software tool or whatever. We want to get in front of them. But some of the offers that they were providing to me were not that exciting because I had these other income streams, these other revenue streams in my business, like my courses and my coaching that were wildly disproportionate in terms of what it was bringing in relative to the offers that a lot of some of these sponsors were bringing me. And so just at that point early on, it kind of wasn't worth my time. But now things have changed, right? Because now...

I've got my new book and I'm over here banging the drum and shouting about it all over the internet. And so if a company came to me and said, hey, Justin, we don't have a ton of money, but what if we emailed our customer base, 10,000 creators on our customer base about your new book?

Can we work out some deal here where you talk about us, we'll talk about you, and I'll be like, let's talk, right? Let's go, right? And so I think it's like understanding what is important. Like, so honestly, it's not that hard. Go and like, look at their Instagram, look at their YouTube channel, look at their Twitter. What are they talking about? Now, what's their pin posts? What does it seem like is important in their world? And oftentimes you might be able to strike a pretty advantageous deal

that gets everyone excited. Let's talk about the different kind of offer types that are normal, kind of in this space that we're in. I basically talk about the three pricing models in my book and it's called, basically it's affiliate, compensation, hybrid, and flat. So affiliate, I'm sure a lot of marketers listening or watching are pretty familiar with this. And this seems like the gold standard, the dream, right? Like, well, I'll just like recruit this army of affiliates and they'll just go out there talking about me and

I don't have to pay them anything until they generate a sale. Right. And that sounds like ideal. But I think what a lot of marketers probably have realized is like that works well up into a point up until you realize that like a lot of these people, either they're affiliates for a lot of different tools. And so a lot of brands are fighting or vying for like who can give you either the highest percentage. It's kind of this weird ecosystem where you've got these kind of professional creators not throwing shade on anyone, but it very much can be challenging to incentivize and

motivate affiliates on an ongoing basis to talk about you. So graduating from that, you think, okay, we need this to be more scalable. This is where a hybrid compensation can start getting kind of exciting to both you as a marketer and the creator where you say, hey, look, we are acknowledging that it is a non-trivial amount of work for you to generate content containing a promotion of us.

So let us compensate you with a base fee. So we're going to pay you instead of the 25% commission that we were doing previously, we will pay you $1,000 or 1500 bucks or whatever it is, plus 15% ongoing kicker on the backend. So for any sales that you generate through this promotion, you know, you'll still receive some sort of performance bonus on that. And that can get, you know, creators ears to perk up and they think, okay, now we're talking here. Like, this is good. Like,

It's kind of de-risking it for them now where like, even if it, you know, the promotion doesn't go wildly, you know, you're still able to capture some of the time that you spent, the opportunity costs that you spent generating this content containing the promotion. And also, again, you can tie in that repurposing rights potentially to a hybrid deal where, you know, even if them posting it on their platforms doesn't do super well, you still get the rights to repurpose it. And then the final pricing model is Flat.com.

Obviously, a lot of brands are leery to just focus 100% on that. But at the end of the day, if you really are trying to get the attention of some of these very large influencers who do have significant sway in their community, it's a supply and demand issue. They have a lot of brands and companies vying for their attention, a lot of them willing to just pay them a flat amount to talk about them. And so to some degree, if you want to play that game, you're going to have to pony up. So it seems to me as if

that are savvy are all going to want flat. The more sophisticated they are. Not necessarily, because if you are a creator who knows your numbers, if you understand that a potential product or service or software program or whatever is going to just be like right in the sweet spot. Oh,

of what you think your audience is going to love and you know they're going to go crazy for it. And especially if there's an offer that's a really compelling offer, a discount, a coupon code or something like that, and you know your numbers because you've done deals like this before, you may actually choose to pick the affiliate component because it's sweeter. You say, hey, I know you're offering me like 5K for this, but what if instead you just gave me like 40% recurring commission?

Some creators who've been in this long enough will actually choose a deal like that because they know, especially if it's uncapped, that they'll know they'll make more in the end. Talk to me about capping because I don't think a lot of marketers understand what that might mean. A lot of marketers and brands will try to cap potential commissions for affiliates, whether it's affiliate or hybrid models.

So they'll say, okay, we'll give you 30% up to $15,000 per year for something for commission. But again, the savvy creators, they're going to get excited and want to choose that model. They're going to want to see it be uncapped. But again, I think a lot of brands, especially if you have a smaller budget, are just nervous about there being some uncapped amount that you could potentially pay some affiliate if it went wild. But my perspective is like, look, incentivize them. Like,

I think caps are kind of dumb, candidly, for marketers. It's like, as long as it's aligned and the math makes sense, you should do it. Any wisdom on time duration for affiliate deals?

like how long the relationship should pay out for? So a lot of marketers and brands start their affiliate programs being lifetime, because that's an easy thing to say. It's just like forever, right? You're going to get paid on this if it's a recurring software tool or something like that. But I've seen a lot of affiliate programs change over the last number of years where it went from lifetime to three years, down to two years, down to one year, this type of thing. And I think it

at the end of the day, it just comes down to like understanding your LTV and your payback period. What is your CAC? Especially if you're doing other types of marketing activities, man, if I could get up on a pedestal for just a second about affiliates, like affiliate marketing can be amazing if you do it the right way, because you create this army of evangelists out there. If you treat them right, right.

And you have to be really careful because if at a later point down the line, and I've seen this happen actually recently, you can turn your Uber fans into Uber haters.

So you really have to be careful about taking care of the people that helped get you to where you are, where they propelled you, this inflection point. All these people were out there championing you, and then you change it up on them, you know, and they came to rely on this income stream every month. Really, that could have dire consequences. What I would think it'd be if I was a savvy business person representing the marketing side of things, I probably would be very transparent that it's this commission for the first 12 months and then it's open to negotiation. Yeah.

That way, at least everybody knows going into it, right? Like this is a 12 month deal and then we'll renegotiate, right? And after the first 12 months, they could go back to their best partners and they could potentially pony up a little bit more, right? And so on and so forth, just because there's, you know, it is a game. It really is a, it's,

The affiliate marketing world is just such a crazy world. I want to share this very important is that if you ever decide that you want to do hybrid or flat deals, the best place to find those people is in your affiliate pool because they already know they're already talking about, you don't have to convince someone and educate someone cold coming in off the street about your brand. Just go and work with the people who have already illustrated that they're advocates of you. Brilliant. Justin Moore, we could keep talking forever, but...

But I know you have some resources, obviously people want to learn more. So what's your preferred social platform if people want to connect with you and then if they want to get your book or work with you, where do you want to send them? Mike, I appreciate it so much, man. This has been a dream to be on. I've been listening to the pod for a long time. So appreciate you. Sponsormagnet.com if you're a marketer listening to this or a creator, but honestly, I know a lot of marketers, you might be listening to this and thinking, okay, I'm not a creator, but

But I think I've had feedback from a lot of brands and marketers who have read the book that has said it's been such a useful perspective to understand where the creators are coming from. And it's helped us design a partnership program that gets people actually excited to move the needle for our brand. So I really would encourage you if this is this conversation has been interesting to you to pick up the book. And then I'm just creator wizard pretty much everywhere on the Internet. Justin Moore, thank you so much for answering all my questions today. It was great, man.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 657. If you're new to this show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a longtime listener, would you do me a favor? Would you let your friends know about this show? You can tag me on any of the social platforms. And if you want, you can also give me a review.

And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

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