Wow.
Hello, I'm Matt Edmundson and you are listening to the eCommerce Podcast.
Now, I've been an eCommerce since 2002.
If you're regular to the show, you'll know this, but if you're new
to the show, a very warm welcome.
Like you, I run my own eCommerce business.
Has been in the trenches, been been there.
Seen that, done that, got the t-shirt, and just love chatting
to people about eCommerce.
And these days I partner with eCommerce brands to help them grow, scale and exit.
That's kind of what I get into.
And if you'd like to know more about that and how that works and whether or
not we could work together, head over to our website, ecommerce-podcast.net
or one word ecommerce-podcast.net.
Now, today, ladies and gentlemen, you'll be pleased to know.
We are talking about that most delectable and delightful conversation.
All to do with influencer marketing.
We have a go-to expert on this.
Mr. William.
We are gonna be chatting to him.
So William, welcome to the show.
Great to have you on, man.
Uh, appreciate you being here.
And I'd like I said to you before, hit the record button.
Let's just hit the ground running.
Influencer marketing.
We all screw it up.
What's the, what's the main way we screw up influencer
marketing and how can we fix it?
Well, first off, thanks for having me on, Matt.
I'm excited to dive in.
So hit the ground running.
Um, biggest thing.
How people screw up influencer marketing is their perception of
what influencers are and putting too many eggs in one basket.
so when most people think about influencers, you think of the Kardashians,
you think of these celebrities with millions of followers, right?
Yeah.
social media's changed a lot in the past decade where it used to
be the fact that you went on social media, you posted on a Monday and.
If all of your followers were on social by Wednesday, they
would all have seen your content.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And now
I remember those days.
The good old days.
Absolutely.
It was very, it was much easier, honestly, like, and, and follower base
was a very, very important metric.
that's kind of now gone out the window.
And most people, like when they're going after influencer marketing, they're
like, I'm only gonna work with the people with that big follower base.
where things have shifted is a content led strategy.
So how the social platforms have changed is that if you're not producing
really good content, regardless of your follower base, only a certain percentage
of your followers are actually going to see the content that you put out.
Um, and so what's happened is these celebrities, these people with millions
of followers, sometimes only 1% or less than 1% of their audience actually ends up
Yeah.
the stuff that they actually create, right?
What the social platforms have also done is if, if there's someone produces a
really great piece of content, they're not just gonna show that to the people who
are following them, they're gonna start showing that beyond their follower base.
And so, um, you could literally have a thousand followers on social media and
get a post that gets a million views.
And
Yep.
These social shifts have changed the playing field, and it's a big
mistake people really do is that they just focus and pay huge amounts of
money to someone with this massive follower base as opposed to focusing
on the content someone produces.
Who they're catering to, kind of the niche audience.
And it's, it's also shifted this playing field to allow much smaller
creators to become as valuable as these celebrity promotions promoters,
Yeah.
and open the gateway, we call it, democratizing the social
media or the influencer world.
Um, and it made these, what the industry calls nano or micro
influencers, much more powerful in 2025.
It's a really interesting comment because I, I, one of the things that I've noticed
will, and, and maybe you can talk to this, right, uh, I'm a big fan of YouTube.
Um, just I, I watch it a lot, right?
As a lot of people do, and I, I have my hobbies.
I like wood.
Working.
I like doing those kind of things and I will watch videos on how to, I
don't know, do this particular type of wood joint or something like that.
One of the things that I have noticed, the videos that, that are starting to come up
more and more on my feed are not the how to get a million followers on YouTube.
Um, it's more now how to make.
$150,000 from a hundred followers on YouTube, right?
It seems to be that the change has been around.
Not grow a big ass audience, but actually take what you've
got and monetize that deeply.
In other words, there are ways that you can make small audiences work for you.
This is kind of what my interpretation of those, uh, titles are, and
I'm seeing that more and more.
I'm seeing it more in the podcasting world.
Um.
On one of our, uh, sort of sister company podcasts, if you
want of a better expression.
Um, we had, um, someone was recently talking about how they made 150
grand, but only had like a hundred followers or a hundred downloads
or something on their podcast.
I mean, it was, it is crazy, you know, the, sort of the numbers.
But this is what we're noticing more and more, right?
It's less and less about the big numbers.
It's more and more about what you can do with the small audiences.
So when, when I hear you talking.
I'm hearing you say to someone like me who's an econ brand, sure.
You can go after, I think you used the example of Beyonce or whoever
it was, you know, Britney Spears.
I don't know.
Kylie Minogue, uh, would be more my era.
Um, I. But that's expensive for not guaranteed success.
But actually you can now use the micro influencers.
The whole thing is democratized.
And like you say, certainly I see this on TikTok.
I can, I can post something on TikTok with an account that's got 68
followers and it'll get thousands and thousands of views in interactions.
Um, it,
spearheaded this trend.
Yeah.
It seems to be, I, I dunno if it's tiktoks way of, um, getting you sucked
into the platform, you know, you're a new account, we're gonna give you
stupid views to make you feel like you're doing something special.
Um, and it sort of dies off a little bit.
I dunno, but I'm, I'm intrigued by this idea of micro influencers.
But before we get back into that whole topic, the smaller numbers thing,
the other thing you mentioned, so you mentioned perception, but you
said too many eggs in one basket.
What did you mean by that?
Yeah, so as an eCommerce brand or honestly any brand, right?
Um, you only have a limited marketing budget and naturally influencers
with a massive following, millions of followers, they're going to charge you.
And same thing would be for a podcast or anyone with this massive follower base.
their fee for a sponsorship or um, a promotion is gonna be quite big.
Hmm.
And the reality is, is you're putting, by putting most of your marketing budget
into that bet, you are putting a lot of your eggs in one basket in the sense
that like it could be hit or miss.
And that's the
Yeah.
'cause of how things have changed.
Like if that celebrity doesn't produce that best content for your.
first off, it's not gonna go beyond their follower base and it might
be only to a very limited pool.
Whereas if you a lot of your eggs in multiple baskets, right, like
Mm.
your risk across maybe a hundred different smaller creators, um, you are increasing
your chances of that viral moment.
You are increasing your overall engagement levels across each
one of those individual profiles.
'cause of the smaller profiles naturally.
people who care, right?
It's like
Yeah.
close acquaintances, passionate followers who are actually in their follower pool.
And it's more authentic, right?
Like when you have a small audience, you're real, you're not like truly fake.
You're not getting paid massive amounts of money for a promotion,
which about a product that you do not care anything about, right?
Um, like a lot of these smaller creators sometimes do things because they
actually just love the product itself.
They'll do it for free
Yeah.
Um, so it just becomes this much more authentic thing.
And, and just one other note to add to your note about what you're seeing
in the YouTube world, um, the social platforms, what they realized is like
when social media first developed, um, they wanted to get as many
people following everyone, right?
Like more people you followed.
I think Facebook's kind of growth hack was like, we want 10, follow
someone to follow or get 10 friends in.
Um, 30 days or something
Yeah.
Right?
And it was like the more connections you had, the more you
became sticky to the platform.
as things evolved, what happened was like you started following random
people you didn't really care about.
You know what I mean?
Like your friend was following it, it was a recommended thing.
Someone you
Yeah.
ago, like you just also, then all of a sudden you had thousand, you were
following hundreds or thousands of people that like, you didn't really.
Like their content or engage with their content, right?
And then when you went on to a Facebook, an Instagram, like you would, your
feed would then just be filled up with all this content from people that you
had followed at one point, but you don't really care about their life or
about what their story is, et cetera.
And then you just leave the platform.
And they hate that, right?
They want to keep you sticky.
And obviously there's a play of just feeding you new stuff
to kind of get you hooked.
But the real reality is, if.
There is some piece of content that someone produced that's really, really
engaging and everyone loves it, right?
odds are that someone who's not following that account would like it to
are pretty high, and so now Instagram TikTok is showing you content that
just overall has very high engagement
Mm-hmm.
gonna make people stay on the platform, and so.
I mean like the, there's this new saying, obviously it's not super
new, but like content is king, right?
And it, and it rings true, um, in the influencer world and the
social media world dramatically as well because, and it gives this
power to these smaller creators.
Um, and to your point, like gone are the days where you really needed to
have this top podcast with thousands, hundreds of thousands of accounts.
Same thing on the social side for the influencers, um, to be a
really valuable asset to a brand.
And now you can really work, diversify that budget across a much
smaller creators and, um, just get a much better bang for your buck.
That's so true.
I think it's, um, and, and also it flips what I'm hearing, which I
think is delightfully refreshing, is, is it flips the script, right?
So, um, I I, I'm a, you know, a small e-comm business, for example, I don't
have to, I don't have to worry if I haven't got 20,000 followers on my
brand's Instagram account, right?
Yeah.
I, I, I just, I can do more with a hundred well-intentioned followers
than I can do with 20,000 people that could care less about my brand, right?
That never really engage with it.
And so I think it, it, it feels like it works both ways.
It's like, as I use influencer marketing, I don't necessarily need to
be concerned about the numbers per se.
There are things I do need to care about, which we'll get into.
Yeah.
also when I'm building my own Insta, my own social media channels, my
own podcast, my YouTube channel, my own Instagram, whatever it is, um,
I think we're slowly becoming less and less concerned about the numbers.
And there are other, as in the follow account, there are things which, which
are a lot more interesting to us.
Um, which I, I think takes the pressure off, uh, in, in, in many ways for people.
Um, I read a stat here which said almost half of all consumers.
So when it says almost half, it said 49%, which I'm gonna say is actually
half, um, half of all consumers make a purchase at least once a
month because of influencer posts.
Absolutely.
Yeah,
I mean, that's a, it's an incredible stat.
I.
It is, it is, um, it is remarkable and it, it shows the power, right?
It's like, and the real reality behind it, and this is something influencers have
kind of, a lot of people have perceived them as this weird negative connotation,
like this sellout, like who's just, are all sparkles and glitter, right?
Um, but the essence of influencers is really word of mouth marketing, right?
It's.
Yeah.
A trusted referral from someone who you some affinity towards
or trust their opinion, right?
Um, and like that is the oldest and mo best marketing tactic in
the history of the world, right?
Yeah.
you trust your friends more than ads more than anything else.
And what's happened is we've this, in this digital era of social media, you become
friends with all of these different.
People across the world, right?
Maybe not a very close acquaintance, but like you trust them in some
capacity, especially the smaller kind of people who are more niche, right?
Who like you're really, we like to honestly shift the term of
influencers to passion promoters.
Like if you're passionate about something, you're passionate
about woodworking, right?
You're gonna be following accounts that are like master woodworkers.
Maybe they're not professional woodworkers who own this like multinational
woodworking corporation, right?
But.
They're in their shop, they're making really great things, and
they're teaching you how to do what you want to do best, right?
And so you trust them.
And so when they're gonna recommend some wood glue or the best kind of jigsaw
to actually use, to cut your wood, um, you're gonna probably actually trust them
more than that multinational company or that CEO is going to tell you what to do.
Yeah, without a doubt.
That's, it comes down to why now, like one outta two sales are coming from, uh,
from these influencer emotions online.
Yeah, it's, it's incredible.
It's incredible.
Ladies and gentlemen, listen, if you are enjoying this show and why would you not
be, then let me invite you to something we are calling e-commerce Cohort.
Uh, Cohort is a. Kind of, how would I describe Cohort?
It's basically where you get together on a Zoom call with
other eCommerce entrepreneurs.
We've got one in New Zealand, uh, and Australia.
We've got one in the uk.
We've got one.
So starting in the summer in the States, a new one starting
in the summer in the States.
Uh, the smallish groups come meet some fellow eCommerce
entrepreneurs, shoot the breeze.
Talk about eCommerce.
It's totally free.
And if you'd like to know more about where you can join those groups.
Just go to the website ecommerce-podcast.net.
That's ecommerce-podcast.net.
Now let's talk about the how then will, because I, I get it.
I, I, I, I've just written a series of blog posts actually, which is
slowly getting released on LinkedIn.
A small plug for my LinkedIn can follow me on LinkedIn at my Edmundson anyway, um.
I've just read a series of posts on LinkedIn about story, um, and using
story to effectively engage people and how actually Google Analytics
can't measure this that well, right?
It Google Analytics can't tell you if somebody smiled when
they were on your webpage.
One of the things that came out in that research, which I thought was
fascinating, was about 60 to 70% of.
Um, your direct traffic is probably coming from referrals, but no one
knows how to capture that, whether that's they've seen a influencer
post somewhere, or whether that's a friend telling them or whatever it is.
I mean, it's again, stupid high amounts of data, which we just
can't measure, and we just.
I think because it's not a metric we see on Google Analytics, it's one of those
things that just sort of goes down the bottom of the list, isn't it really?
Yeah,
Um, so the big question then is how, how do I get started?
How do I do this?
How do I, how do I do this?
Well,
great question.
So little backstory on myself.
Very brief.
I was actually an eCommerce seller since 2008.
Little after you in 2002.
But, um,
I.
to actually also make some do woodworking.
I sold cutting boards, handmade cutting boards,
Very popular with YouTubers.
Yes.
yeah, um, jewelry, toy products, teeth whitening products.
So the whole gambit across my own eCommerce websites, Amazon, you name it.
how I got into influencer marketing was I was using it and how I ended up starting.
The company that I have today, which is Stack Influence, that helps
brands, um, actually connect and scale micro influencers, um, across
the eCommerce e ecosystem, was I was using these tactics myself.
And so to answer your question of how.
Um, how do you start?
Right?
Um, so how we started when we were first kind of getting our feet
wet was we did the whole gambit.
And when I also talked about putting all your eggs in one basket, don't, and like
celebrity influencers can be hit or miss sometimes they can work fantastic, right?
Like you find the right creator who's really like right in your niche and,
um, you pay them $10,000, right?
Sometimes it can be a fantastic ROI, it just can be a risk.
And so.
We use the full spectrum of different types of influencers and went out
after the celebrities by finding maybe someone on YouTube or Instagram
and DMing them or finding their agent, getting in touch with them.
Right.
Um, wasn't too complex usually to, if you're trying to pay
someone thousands of dollars to, uh, get them to take your money.
Right.
Um, but what we ended up starting to realize was as this social media platform
shift happened and content became kind of more of the forefront strategy and
us realizing that like, Hey, we just sent a free product to someone who had
5,000 followers, and that post drove us more sales than the $10,000 we.
to this like person with 5 million followers, right?
Um, it was a crazy like, epiphany.
And so we were like, how do we get more of these types of people?
And the initial strategy is just diving extremely deep into media search, right?
So let's say that you are selling a yoga mat and you're trying to,
or actually, um, a protein powder.
You're trying to find people who are interested in health and wellness, right?
Maybe you search.
Um, different fitness gyms, right?
Like LA Fitness or, um, different 24 Hour Fitness, right?
Like, and people who are tagging those.
If someone's tagging that on social media, probably interested in fitness,
they're probably passionate about it.
They might be interested in a protein powder that you're selling, right?
And so then really just start.
DMing these people trying to get their email addresses outreaching, creating a,
some sort of pitch to them of what the value that you're offering is not maybe
just a free product, but maybe you're gonna give them a commission of sales.
They share an affiliate link.
Um, maybe you give them rewards if they actually certain goals
with impressions, et cetera.
So come up with a pitch.
Come up with a brief of kind of.
Give them creative control, but you wanna push them in the right direction, right?
You wanna make sure that that content is aligned with your
brand and your aesthetic.
give them a deadline and, and try to get them to do the promotion.
Takes a decent amount of work.
And it took us a lot of work in the beginning.
And part of the reason why Stack Influence our company even started was
because we started building out internal tools, um, to optimize this process.
The biggest challenge we faced was.
we were deciding to scale and we wanted to do like hundreds or thousands of
promotions for certain products and new launches, it became very difficult to
find enough people in a short timeframe.
Like I wanna, how do you find a thousand people to do promotions in a month?
Right?
I. for the most part.
But like we started to build out automation tools in-house, like a lot
of things like scraping AP or tapping into APIs on social media to kind of do
those searches to find the right people.
Auto email campaigns.
Putting people into follow up sequence, like sequences to actually reengage with
them, remind them of certain tactics.
and that really became the foundation of stack influence,
Right.
and why we started as a company in general, but very accessible for
any brand to get their feet wet.
And some people, when you're an e-commerce brand, especially if you're
just starting out, um, you think it's inaccessible, but like absolutely you can
find 10, 20 people who are willing to.
Um, if not, do something for just a free product exchange, at
least do something for affiliate commissions or a small monetary fee.
Maybe it'd be a hundred bucks per post.
Right.
Um, and test the market.
And that's a really important thing to get started, is like not every
product is promoted in the same way.
Um, and you need to kind of, different influencers do different
creative things, so you wanna.
create this initial brief of what you think might work.
Um, put it out there, start getting feedback, start seeing what types of
influencers content they're creating.
Take those results and take those learnings and then apply that to
kind of your next batch, right?
And, and refine that strategy.
Like honestly any other marketing initiative.
But it is key.
'cause social media changes so rapidly, you to kind of
consistently be evolving, but.
That's basically my recommendation for do it yourself system.
And if you're trying, if you have the budget and want to use a platform like
tapping in, there's a lot of different influencer tools out there, whether
it's a database that you could tap into that's preexisting and tools
to out do cold outreach yourself.
Whether it's a system like Stack Influence that automates everything for
you if you don't have the bandwidth to.
Be manually outreaching to every, all these people.
Um, and now even the social platforms have some portals to find people
Yeah.
interested in doing it.
Like Amazon, if you're an Amazon seller, has their own Amazon kind of influencer
portal, can find good people there.
TikTok has kind of a little influencer platform.
Um, so another great way is to kind of utilize a system to filter and
find some good people for your brand.
Yeah.
That's great.
Thank you.
I, I'm intrigued.
Uh, um.
As I think through my, sort of my own journey with influencer
marketing, so having been approached a lot, so I get approached by
people to sponsor the podcast.
'cause obviously the podcast has influence.
Um,
Absolutely.
uh, I get approached, I remember how it, I. For me how it started.
I got approached by a bike company.
Um, I bought an electric bike, um, from a company called Ampler.
They were a small brand in Estonia.
I bought it off Kickstarter, um, years ago.
And I, I, when I got the bike, I just said to the guy that was in our office,
he, the, the, one of the designers, I just pick up a camera, let's just shoot
a YouTube video on opening this bite.
'cause no one knew anything about them.
So I thought it'd be interesting.
I'll throw it on YouTube and see what happens.
Um, and I, I, I threw this thing on YouTube and it was interesting
'cause no one else had done a video about this particular brand of bike.
So it became number one.
And then I did another video and that became number two.
And it started to get thousands of views and I. It didn't take long for
that company to go, well, actually a lot of people are watching these videos
and they're making a buying decision based on what you've said in the video.
So when they did the next model ranges, they're like, can you
do some more videos for us?
We'll send you the bikes.
I'm like, sure, man.
See, it was, it was just flattering to be asked if I was honest with you.
Um, and so it, it became this really interesting sort of
symbiotic relationship in many ways.
But then I, I also think about some of the companies that we have, um, with
Econ brands, and I guess I'm thinking about some of the people that I've
connected with, whether it's through Cohort, whether it's through coaching.
It's not all I. It's not all sunshine and rainbows with influencer marketing
and, uh, the, the to listen to you talk is you go worse is a no brainer.
And it sounds all very simple.
Let's get started and see what happens, but where does it go wrong and how can
we mitigate for those circumstances?
Absolutely great questions.
So first off, not every product works for influencers, right?
Um, as a simple example, like athlete's foot cream.
Sells millions of dollars every year, right?
Yeah.
wanna go on social media and talk about foot fungus?
Probably a few of them would be okay with doing that.
But like, and if you're gonna pay someone tens of thousands of dollars, but.
It's gonna be very hard to get a lot of people interested in
Mm-hmm.
And so there's certain sensitivity to what people are willing to actually
promote to their family and friends.
An electric bike, right?
Like, fantastic, gimme that bike.
I'll create some content for you.
Absolutely.
Worth, worth my while.
Um, but other content, like especially in the product seeding world, like
where I'm just sending something free, maybe it's just not enough of a value.
Like you're like, this is a $5 product.
Why am I going to.
Do all of this effort to create a nice video, et cetera, um,
for your small product that is not giving me much value, right?
And you want to compensate people for their time, it has to be worth it.
So that's one thing to think about is like the product that you're selling needs to
be the right fit for the right people.
And that
Yeah.
of backfire because you're just gonna spend a huge amount of effort
outreaching to people, and no one's going to kind of pick up on your, um.
or really just don't do a very good job at promoting it because it's
just not that much value for them.
The second thing I would say that is difficult is, um, again, crafting, giving
people creative control, but giving them direction and in and good direction
to what you expect as quality content.
Right.
And that can be very subjective 'cause.
In my days of selling products, like sometimes we had some like, kind of not
totally blurry, but like iPhone video that wasn't super high quality, um,
that ended up converting on the ads.
We ran with
Yep.
times better than like the perfectly curated like Sony film,
like beautiful camera, right?
Um, and so it's sometimes hard to tell what's gonna work and what's
not, but at the same time, that's why it's really important to.
Um, do those tests.
Now, if you're doing the product seeding strategy, you're sending a bunch of
free products and you're doing it at scale, there is going to be content
you're going to get back, and this is an expectation that you should
understand that is not very good.
Right?
Like that you would never
I am laughing because I've seen said content.
Uh, yes.
Many times.
And you're gonna like hit yourself on the head and be like, what
was this person even thinking?
Right.
I don't like we usually, it's like there's pato distribution to everything, right?
So like you're gonna see 20% of the content outta the 2080 principle is
like going to be absolutely fantastic.
Like something you should have paid someone if you gave 'em a free product,
like thousands of dollars to create like,
Hmm.
You wouldn't have even been able to find that person is like so creative.
Unbelievable.
It converts really well, it's fantastic.
Um, another 20% is probably going to be mediocre, like not, not very good.
And then the, the rest of the bulk of the 60% is gonna be average.
And that's kind of, that is at least in the micro nano world, like a lot
of these people aren't professionals.
They don't do this for a career, right.
Um, they're doing, and this is on the product seating side of things, right?
Um, so content is something that you have to kind of settle your expectations with.
But the reality is, is going back to like that really not that great content
that we thought wasn't that great.
'cause like aesthetically and visually, it like wasn't like super popping.
It still converted really well.
And that's the surprising thing.
And you'll see this on social media.
Like you'll see these videos that like.
Are shaky and like, but like they're kind of exciting.
Um, but it was like filmed by someone like with like a flip phone and you're like,
and it has like millions of views, you
Yeah.
And so is where that diversification of risk, like spreading out a lot
of different promotions, trying a lot of things, is the goal
Mm-hmm.
upset, um, with.
Like, oh, you got some bad stuff.
Like, this is all influencers are horrible, right?
Like you gotta, you gotta let it test out and maybe run some ads with it.
Like, really Like see, time to actually implement and see results.
Now as a last follow up thing to that, sometimes influencer promotions
right off the bat don't work, but in a longer term, like one, one
promotion off, like a singular one didn't drive any sales, right?
I. But then to your point, like that person sometimes maybe is like
amazing advocate to their friend.
They're actually using the product that starts driving
sales somewhat harder to track.
But a real reality that we started to see was like, as we started to seed out
products, we'd get these initial results that we'd track from the influencer
promotions itself, but then all of a sudden we'd start to incrementally
see like our overall sales just.
Jacking up without us doing anything and like shifting
any of our other advertising, other marketing budgets, right?
And there were these massive halo effects that came from just
Yeah.
product into the hands of people.
Um, I mean, some people literally do a product seeding strategy where
you just ship products out to people without asking anything in return, and
there's value to that alone, right?
So that's something to actually really understand and to also understand that.
Maybe the first promotion, that first piece of content that someone
created didn't work out totally well, maybe it was timing, maybe it
was the style that they produced.
There's a variety of factors that can go into it.
Um, but giving them an affiliate join, having them join like an affiliate
commission program, excuse me, where they're getting 10% to keep promoting.
Maybe they promote two, three other times and this has happened to us.
And then like they became our best kind of sales.
Influencer, like they were driving a crazy amount of sales when their first
one, like didn't do anything for us.
Um, and so it's kind of like, don't give up and, but that is things
that can actually happen that are on the negative side to your point.
Like, it's like you're gonna get promotions that don't
drive anything for you.
And content that like you think really sucks.
And it's like.
Take it with a grain of salt in
Mm-hmm.
gives people second chances and try to create longer term relationships with
people and utilize content in different ways and test it out because sometimes
your perceptions aren't always what the actual mass consumer market feels.
That's super practical.
I love that.
I guess I, and, and, and listening to you talk, I'm, I'm forming the strategy
in my head, which says, right, what I should do is, um, product seed.
So, you know, it's easy enough to send, for example, our supplement business
that you, you can send product out.
That's not a problem.
You know, go, go try that product.
I. Actually don't just do that.
Actually form a relationship with them, which says, actually,
here's some free product, plus, here's a, an affiliate thing.
These are some of our content guidelines.
Have at it, knock yourself out.
We just wanna be able to use 'em as ads, right?
I wanna retain some kind of creative control over these.
Not control, but I wanna be able to use this content, right?
exactly.
and so.
That, that feels very sensible to me because the cost of the product in
some respects and sending it out to them is an expense, but it's not huge.
Um, and actually you've given free product, whether they decide to
do something with it or not is, is I guess, entirely up to them.
And you want them to be motivated.
And the ones which go, well, the first one bomb, let's try it again.
And it, it kind of, you know, that one hit home and they're
killing it on the commission.
We had one lady who, um.
With our beauty business.
She wrote a blog, a single blog post, um, which was sent, we made at least
60 grand a month in sales off that one blog post that I could track.
Um, and so we reached out to her and said, listen, do you wanna
set up this, uh, affiliate thing?
Man, your blog post is killing it and you may wanna write some more blog posts.
She goes, no, no.
I just really like the product.
Really like you guys just gonna leave it alone.
She could have made six grand a month.
She was just like, yeah, no.
I was like, I love you lady.
Love you can just, it is awesome.
And I think, um, I like the idea of the long-term relationship.
I guess one question that comes to mind Will, as I listen to you talk,
is should I start, I've got 150,000 customers on my database, um, for,
uh, or whatever the numbers are.
Should I email that 150,000 people and say, Hey, we're starting
this new affiliate scheme.
Would anybody be interested in joining, um, or influencer the
scheme, or whatever we wanna call it?
Is that a good place to start or is it better to actually start with, say,
a platform like yours where you are sort of one stage removed from people?
Honestly, I think outreaching to your customer list is a fantastic way to start.
Um, you don't know.
who those customers are, what their follower bases are, what their engagement
levels, what their creativity levels are.
Um, they also already have your product,
Yeah.
product is.
If it's a consumable, they've already eaten it.
Right?
Um, then maybe it's gone.
But if you have a product that even a beauty product that's consumable,
like, or can be used over time, maybe they still have it, right?
And so now you don't have to actually send out.
A new product as an extra expense.
Um, and there's some kind of guarantees of, this is one issue with product seeding
is, and you kind of briefly brought this up, you shive a whole bunch of products
to people with expectations of them ideally doing something in return for
it, and then a decent portion of them, platforms and agencies who do this, like
say like 30 to 50%, you send products out, you don't get anything in return.
Right.
Um.
So by reaching out to your customer base that mitigates that, right?
They already have the product.
There's no loss.
If they don't create a post, there's, you didn't lose any inventory.
Mm-hmm.
Um, we actually at Stack Influence have created a similar
model to a customer base model.
We actually before, in order for an influencer to receive a
product through Stack Influence.
They actually have to become a real consumer of the brand first
Right.
they can collaborate.
We get them to go buy the product with their own money.
And then we have a cashback system where it's like, Hey, you did the social post.
We'll give you your money back.
We'll give you maybe some cash rewards.
We'll give you some affiliate commissions after the fact.
Um, so you kind of get monetarily rewarded after you do the thing.
But if they end up not promoting for us, hey, they just.
I made a free sale.
They just became a real customer.
Yeah.
the product anyway.
Yeah.
harm with how.
Um, but it's a, it's a great way because you're, at the end of the
day, also the best promotions are real auth, like authenticity is
key and your customers are actual authentic promoters of your product.
They, they spent their hard earned money to buy your product, like they are a true
representation of who should be a great advocate for you as long as they liked it.
Yeah.
Um, so it's a great way to do it.
I absolutely just, especially to get your feet wet.
Um, not only on a cost saving way, but also honestly on a promotional way.
We've, we've had a fantastic, there's actually now, I believe a Shopify,
um, plugin that will do that.
It'll identify if you have Shopify, um, identifies your customers who
potentially could be creators and you can tap into that, um, yourself.
So, um, absolutely
That's interesting.
Yeah.
I. It makes lot.
And I guess you can segment your customer data and you can go, well, these
guys have ordered two or three times.
So actually they like us a lot.
So, um, and it's, I think it's easy to say to a customer, listen,
this is what we're starting.
If you put out some post tags in there, and then we will
send you this as a result.
Right?
And it's, there's that mutual element of trust that it's gonna happen, but you're
not really sending out product until it does, but, and you're sending out product
to your best customers anyway, and they probably deserve it, so why would you not?
Right?
So,
Hundred
um.
What sort of, um, I, I appreciate this is how long's a piece of string, but
what sort of percentage of my marketing budget should I be thinking about here?
What sort of, is there a minimum sort of amount of money I should be thinking about
spending or is, is that too simplistic?
I.
No.
Um,
it depends on kind of what your growth strategy is and where your, what phase of.
Growth you are in with your e-commerce business, right?
When you're first starting out, new product launches, getting the word out.
It's like, in my opinion, one of the best times to do influencer marketing.
Um, because you're, you're killing multiple birds.
One stone, you're getting your product into the hands of
people when you first launch.
That's giving you just also product feedback.
It's product research, right?
Like, um, so that's insanely valuable.
Someone's gonna tell you right off the bat, Hey, your product sucks.
I'm not promoting this to my audience, and you can be like, what's wrong with it?
Right?
And then you can reiterate.
And so it's a great way to just get your product in the hands
of people to give you feedback.
second, just some initial awareness, right?
Like, um, people talking about it, some initial sales.
It's like the hardest thing when you're first starting off.
Third is influencers can dramatically actually help
with SEO, especially in 2025.
Um, AI agents as Google's investing more as perplexity and open ai, um, chat,
GPT people are using it for search.
They're feeding in social posts, so the post captions and the feeds,
and it's gonna be coming even more powerful as the years go on.
Yeah.
it's.
really helps boost up your SEO,
Yeah.
and if you're doing like blog post influencer promotions, which is kind
of actually how a lot of the online influencer stuff started, um, but it's
just becoming more and more impactful now.
Fourth is you're building up a initial network of advocates that
can consistently promote your product for those commissions.
In the long run, the quicker and the longer you build that up, the
larger you build it up, the better and more successful you're gonna be.
finally, is the content that you produce, right?
Like when you first start off I, when I did a photo shoot, et cetera, but
getting actually what the industry calls user generated content or
UGC, um, it converts better on ads.
People wanna see, they call social proof on a website, like real customers
using the product, actual feedback.
So building up, doing influencers, like it's, it's a brand
building exercise as well.
And so getting a whole bunch of content of real people using it.
Using that for social media, using that for online ads, using
that to strengthen your website.
All really, really valuable.
Right?
Um, and more impactful when you first launch.
'cause that's kind of the hardest thing to get, whether you're selling on your
website, whether you're selling on Amazon, like getting visibility or Walmart.
Um, it's hard to kind of kickstart and get a punch and influencer fantastic for that.
Now I would like.
If I had $10,000 to spend, let's say, on a marketing budget, which some
people don't even have that amount of money when you're first starting,
but nowadays things are competitive.
So you gotta have something to spend.
Yeah.
I'd at least spend 50% of that on influencers to start off.
Now, as you scale up, you're going to, um, figure out what channels work for
you, whether it's social ad channels, search channels, marketplace advertising.
If you're on Amazon.
Um, you're gonna wanna obviously do cac, LTV ratio analysis of like figuring
out exactly how, what channels are bringing you the best bang for your buck.
But I think influencers always should be part of the strategy.
I'm a bit biased here, but being an eCommerce seller myself, um, we always
spend at least 30% of our budget on influencers and sometimes up to 75%.
Yeah.
at certain times, just because of the power and the multi multitude
of value it actually provided us.
Um, Unilever just came out this year an announcement that they're in moving
50% of their entire advertising and marketing budget to influencers.
So one of the largest CPG companies in the world, um, is announcing that play.
So obviously something's working in, in the ecosystem.
Yeah, I Do you know Jay from Bold Commerce?
Have you come across Jay Smears from Bold Commerce?
Yeah, I believe so.
Jay's a really interesting guy.
I really like Jay.
I had, um, breakfast with him last year at Subs Summit.
Um, I'm not sure when this podcast is coming out, but if it's coming
out before subs, Sumit and you're gonna be there, let me know.
'cause I'd quite frankly like to meet you.
Um, but, uh, I, I, subs, Sumit, and I, and we were chatting away with Jay
and I said, Jay, listen, if you were gonna start, I love this question.
I said, if you were gonna start a beauty brand today, how would you do it?
And he looked at me and he said, I'd make it a members only site and I'd
do nothing but influence marketing.
It was that.
It was, it was, it was.
And that conversation lasted two hours, by the way.
But it was just a really great, um,
approach that he had that actually, no, I'll just do influence
marketing, forget everything else.
Do influence marketing.
Make it a member's only site.
What's wrong with you?
Why, why are we having this conversation?
It's, is this really interesting?
And so I, I I, I can see why it's fast becoming, especially because
Facebook's be a, you know, the.
I was having a conversation with someone today, Matt.
My, um, acquisition costs have doubled in the last month on Facebook.
Nothing else has changed what's going on and.
Google AdWords is becoming more and more problematic in many ways.
And, um, TikTok Shop is great if you're a certain type of product and you can
discount it and you can get on it, but it's, it's not as straightforward
as maybe we would like it to be.
But at the same time, influencer marketing, it is not really, like you
say, it's not going anywhere because it's been around what, for thousands of years.
We, you know, people tell stories to each other, don't they?
So, um, get on it.
Get on it.
Well, listen,
You don't
we've.
any budget to do it is the last thing, right?
Like if
Yeah.
you can ship free product out.
You have to put in some legwork to do that.
But like going back to the budget side, like yes, to scale you need some money,
Mm-hmm.
like if you're just starting out and you want to put in some manual effort,
like you better have product when you're first selling the product, start
shipping some free product out and
Yeah.
can literally start getting sales promotions, brand
building with zero marketing,
Yeah.
zero money in the bank.
So.
So true, so true.
Um.
Question for me, will I, I, this is where I, ladies and gentlemen, if you're new to
the show, I ask my guest for a question.
Uh, they give me that question.
I will answer that question over on LinkedIn.
Now, if you've been following me a little while, you'll go, Matt, there
are a few questions you've not actually answered on LinkedIn now, and I'll put
my hand up and say, yes, I've been a little bit slack on remiss on this, but
alas, the strategy and mechanism is now in place for me to do this on a regular
basis, which is a wonderful thing.
Um, so Will, what's your question for me?
Well, great question to me.
Um, inspired you to become an eCommerce Podcast influencer yourself?
Oh, an eCommerce Podcast influencer.
I love that.
EPI.
Why are you an EPI Matthew?
Uh, that's a great question If you wanna know my answer to that question.
Yeah, if you wanna, yes, absolutely.
If you wanna know my answer that question, come follow me
on LinkedIn at Matt Edmundson.
Well, listen, I great conversation, man.
Um, how do people reach you?
How do they connect with you if they wanna do that?
Absolutely.
Um, feel free to reach out directly to me.
My email is william@stackinfluence.com.
Happy to give advice overall if you're just getting started
or wanna start scaling up.
Influencer marketing.
And if you're interested in a platform that helps you automate, and also
with that scaling of the micro influencers and product seating,
um, check out stackinfluence.com.
That's my company.
Um, you can go to the website, you can quickly sign up right
at the top right corner.
Um, find us on every single social platform at Stack Influence.
and yeah, that's basically it.
Fantastic.
We will of course, link to that information in the show notes,
which you can get along for free with all kinds of insights.
We, uh, with our newsletter, we started to really, uh, we're
just about to launch version.
2.0 I suppose.
I dunno, it's probably more like version 10.0, but it, we are
gonna launch a new version of our newsletter in the coming weeks.
We are really putting some effort into this and making, uh, adding some
real value to the whole podcast thing.
So that is available for free as well at ecommerce-podcast.net.
It will contain all of the links to, well as does the website
ecommerce-podcast.net, as does the show notes, which, let's be real.
You can get the show notes just by scrolling down on your podcast
app, so you can do that as well.
Uh, well listen, uh, it's been great having you on the show, man, and thank you
for reviving my interest in said topic.
Uh, I've got lots of notes, which is always a beautiful thing, and I will
be talking to our marketing department.
Well, not tomorrow 'cause it's good Friday.
And so we are, we are, we're off now until Tuesday, which is a wonderful thing.
Uh, but next week certainly we'll be talking to them.
Um, and that, uh, happy Easter to everybody.
By the way, if you are listening to this and I appreciate it's you by the
time you listen to this, it, Easter will have gone long gone, but I hope
you didn't get too fat and chocolate.
Um, but happy Easter.
Uh.
Let's do the saving the best till last.
So if you've made it this far and you've stayed with us, uh, wonderful
listeners, then uh, I like to do this thing at the end of the show
called Saving the Best Till Last.
And this is where I say to my amazing guests, like, will, will the top tip that
you know the absolute best of the best of the best of the information that you
can give us on this whole topic, uh, of influencer marketing For the listeners
that stayed till the end, the faithful.
The righteous, the amazing, uh, people that are still here.
What, what's, um, what's the two minute top tip you'd love to share?
Top tip, um, is influencers are one of the best tactics for
e-commerce marketplace growth.
and the reason behind it.
So think Amazon, Walmart, target, um.
All of those marketplaces are search engines, and they're
more competitive than ever.
More than 3000 people join Amazon every single
Mm-hmm.
Um, and when, those of you who search on Amazon and buy products on
Amazon, the few of you, um, when you search for something, 75% of people
don't go past the first page, right?
You got, I think it's like 45 listings on the first page, right?
With all these sellers on there, and very limited attention to only a few different
listings for any given search topic.
Um, it's very hard to break through.
You could say the noise, right?
When you first launch a product you're on maybe page a thousand, right?
Maybe more depending on what the topic is.
Why influencers are fantastic for this, and this is my best tip, is that.
When you first launch on a platform like Amazon, Amazon needs to understand data.
They have, they call it the Cold Start problem.
Um, they don't know where to place you.
It's a risk for them to put you on page one because of your product Sucks.
gonna lose out on a huge amount of sales.
It's like their shelf space, right?
You're just taking up space.
But if your product's fantastic and they're not putting you
up there, maybe you could be the best selling product ever.
And now they're making a huge amount more commission from you.
And so the only way for Amazon, Amazon tests you when you first launch.
But the testing takes a long time.
Now, if you can give Amazon the data it needs to say, Hey,
this product is fantastic.
Amazon's gonna push you right up.
And influencers are a fantastic way to do that.
By driving external traffic sales that's trusted and high converting.
It basically gives the Amazon algorithm the data it needs to say, Hey, this
product deserves to be at the top.
And we've seen listings that have implemented this strategy like 13 XRO.
I like went from doing a hundred sales a month.
To like 1500 sales in like literally a month timeframe.
and then they, if they were sticky, if they had a good product, once
they maintained, got to that growth standpoint and started
actually converting onto organic consumers, those sales didn't stop.
So it became this like, Hey, I just activated like a hundred influencers.
Drove up a whole bunch of sales, um, didn't do any more influencer marketing.
I 13 x by growth, and my sales haven't stopped because now I have
the visibility within the marketplace.
I broke through, you know what I mean?
And I was high converted.
So that's my last tidbit.
For those of you who are listening, who are selling on an e-commerce
marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, or plan to, influencer marketing's
a fantastic strategy for it.
Fantastic.
Well, thank you so much, man.
Uh, loved every part of the conversation and, um, if you, like I say, go check
out Stack influence, but, um, it's been an absolute pleasure, my friend.
Thank you so much.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on, Matt.
Well, there you go.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks to Will again for coming on the show.
Oh, I can do this thing Will, where you'll like this.
Uh, let me watch it.
Oh no, that's the wrong one.
Uh, where's, where's it gone?
Where's it gone?
Oh, it's gone off my system.
Oh, no.
There it is.
There we go.
Sorry about, it wasn't even really worth waiting for, was it?
I just, my system is all kind of messed up, isn't it, at the moment.
But, um, well, thank you for coming on, man.
Uh, it's been an absolute tree.
It really has.
Uh, but that's it from me.
That's it from me.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.
I will see you next time.
Bye for now.