How Taylor Holiday Views Influencer Marketing

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome back to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm doing something today. I don't know if I've ever done one of these. Richard is out. Our guests got moved back to next week, and I'm going solo mission. I am going solo pilot on today's episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast.

And we've been trying to sync these. Episodes lately to sort of push our content collectively around the sharpen your skills series releases last week. We were talking in that series about suffocating the giants and we were talking about how the dis broadening of distribution to Amazon. Has an effect on your marketing measurement systems and how I'm seeing brands play that out.

So we did the podcast about that this week. We had to go was in the early going and this week on the episode, we're going to wander into a territory. That's funny. I don't talk a lot about this. But this is where all of my roots in marketing began. And I actually, a ton of time and experience as it relates to influencer marketing, as I have been interacting with brands over the last year.

One of the things you'll notice about my content is that it's becoming less and less about tactical media buying. What I am finding is that the lever points for growth that are required in this moment tend to sit outside the ad account. The ad account is a by product of the distribution of some story, of some product, of some offer, and the lever in value creation happens higher up the chain.

It happens at the brand level, customer level, the product level, the campaign or story level. Even the creative production level is an area that CDC no longer participates in. We don't pick up cameras and produce with the exception of our newly launched creator content program, which we'll talk a little bit about today.

But and so, so often we are left at the bottom of the value chain with distribution and tactic as the areas where we are trying to affect brand growth. And, and what I'm just experiencing is that in many cases, there's just a lot that needs to happen further up in order to affect the ad account. The ad account is really just a byproduct of all of the things that I mentioned above.

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[00:02:35] Taylor Holiday: So today I want to talk about something that I think is a really critical component of almost any DTC brand. You may have heard me use the phrase. Before I've been asked on various podcasts before, but I ever start any commerce business right now. And if, if I were to do that, and my answer would be no, without some form of obvious leverage, unique leverage across the PNL.

And when I think about leverage across the PNL, I think about things like incredible. gross margin. So if I had some product category that afforded me just an amazing margin capture, that's going to give me a lot of room to fail. If I had some mechanism for massive LTV that would give me a disproportionate value off the customers acquired.

I see this happen a lot in subscription businesses that are continuing to drive meaningful growth. It's a really important lever. If I had some sort of organic audience capture. In the form of part of what we're going to talk about today, either owned audience or influence or, or some great SEO listing that gave me a way to acquire customers without having to pay for the acquisition of every customer.

If I had some sort of massive labor leverage opportunity where I felt like I could. Keep my OPEX incredibly lean and be successful on the basis of how the product was comprised. So without some obvious, unique and distinct in baseball terms, I would call it an 80 grade trait. So prospects in baseball are rated on a, on a set of skills on a 20 to 80 scale.

And 80 is sort of like the highest bound of skill. And so for me, I wouldn't want to enter into it without some 80 grade skill. And so one of those that I think. I've seen brands create is often related to influencers and influencers can create leverage in lots of different directions. And so I want to talk today about how, when we were at Kalo.

So my first life, many of you don't know, this is the way I got into. The position that I'm in now with CTC is my brother came to me with an idea for a company selling silicone wedding rings was his vision. And previous to that, I had worked at a company called power balance selling silicone wristbands.

And so we had a lot of manufacturing relationships in the silicone world. And so I helped my brother to create a prototype with his business partner, Ted for the silicone wedding ring. We were sort of the people that. pioneered that category. And we launched this brand Kalo and my business partner were that I founded CDC with who's going to join us on this podcast next week.

His name is Jordan Palmer and Jordan played eight years in the NFL. His brother Carson was obviously a very famous NFL player and they just had a ton of network and relationships into locker rooms, into other athletes, into sports figures. And then I had played professional baseball. And so we had this really obvious network into the sports world.

And so with Kalo we were able to say, okay, let's think about all the use cases for people who have to take off a metal wedding ring. Sports was a very obvious one. And so we were able to build a network into that to drive growth and demand for the business. And then the second one was related to fitness.

Obviously CrossFit at this time was just beginning to explode. And when you go to the gym, you often take your wedding ring off, et cetera. And so we had identified these core customers that we wanted to figure out how to influence. Towards using the product. And when I think about influencer, so often this term has been co opted to mean like a channel of organic like.

Distribution where you try and like get people to post on organic social. And that's not at all what I think influencer marketing is at all. Influencer marketing is about using humans to influence other humans towards desiring your product. And there's all sorts of mechanisms that we would use. to do this.

And so I want to give you some examples of how I think about this and how brands could use this. That's going to come back around to the ad account. It's going to come back around to driving disproportionate effect on your media and efficiency and all the things we care about in growth marketing. But this program, this underlying architecture, I see exist inside of so few brands where they really have a clear view of the role that influencer plays.

Inside of any consumer brand, really any brand generally, we can apply the same principle to be to be services as well when we would think about influencer marketing, we would build it like a pyramid. And the idea was that I think of it almost like an upside down pyramid or a funnel that goes from really wide to really narrow.

And at the top of that funnel is an act, a set of activations around getting the product into the hands. As many people as possible. You may have heard of this as like influencer seating or product seating. Okay. So, the guys at kinship, Cody and TL, both TL Cody worked at Kayla with us and helped to build that influencer program.

Then TL worked for me at CTC and Together, we sort of built the initial conception of what CT of what Kalo seating was and Kayla was a perfect product for product seating, right? It is a really inexpensive to produce high margin products. So the cost of sending the product to our customers was, or to potential influencers was really cheap.

But this isn't just sort of like a spray and pray approach to seating. Seating has a very specific set of objectives, right? So let's go back to this persona around the CrossFit community and let's say that we wanted to use seating for the sake of creating influence within the community of CrossFit.

Okay. There's a lot of different ways to do that. And sort of the most obvious ways for people to look up, like people with lots of Instagram followers and try and send them product to post. And that to me is actually like, Sort of the lowest value potential way to think about seeding. When I think about seeding, there are opportunities to affect both your paid performance.

We'll talk about how you use seeding to do that, to, to drive organic and word of mouth, to affect retail, to affect B2B, to affect every point of distribution and growth that you as a business have using product seeding. Okay. So let's talk about each of those. Seeding plays a very important role in asset generation.

Okay. This is the first function that seating has about asset generation. This is not about distribution. This isn't about posting. This is about getting people to make ad content that they will send back to you, that you can use in your ad account. So this is like creator content style program where you are targeting a bunch of people in the CrossFit space.

Now these people, it is not important. They are famous. You do not care how many followers they have because you are not. Trying to develop a relationship with them for the sake of their audience. You're trying to do it for the sake of their content. These people they look like your customer. They sound like your customer.

They can speak to the benefits of the product in a way that really matters. And so we would start by thinking about. Seeding to content creators, people that we would want to turn into a machine that's producing consistent ad content for us. And this is the thing that I think every brand in the world should have is that if you will don't have every month, some consistent inflow of net new content from creators that you are seeding product to, and we would call this the palms down methodology.

You, you send them product with no expectation of anything in return and the way you get them to. Participate in your brand is you make the experience awesome, such that they want to talk about it. So we would develop, not just send them like a a ring in a little envelope with nothing to go with it.

We would build these really cool kits that were like date night kits. We would look up their low, a restaurant that was local to their area. We'd find their wife's name, we'd give them both a ring. We'd send them a gift card to that restaurant and we'd say, Hey, we noticed you're the kind of person that would fit perfectly in the Kalo community.

We think you we call it the silicone wedding ring for the active lifestyle. We see you living the Kalo lifestyle. We'd love for you to be a part of it, blah, blah, blah. And you send them a really cool, thoughtful gift. And you know what happens? You get a really high engagement rate of people wanting to post content, to create assets that then you can reach out to leverage for the sake of turning into ads.

Okay. So that's like one engine that every month there needs to be a process of persistent and consistently sending out products to a very hand selected group of people that overlap with the persona of customer that you're eventually going to be advertising to that you want to sell product to. And ideally there's even a perfect.

Product for this. So at Kalo, what we would do is we would build our product launch calendar into four categories, quality, athletics, love, and outdoors. So we use the acronym of Kalo to divide the customer persona. So quality was sort of the blue collar workers. Athletics was obviously this CrossFit community.

Love was our charity component that we did every year and. outdoors was obviously an outdoors collection and people who would rock climber be working outdoors. So in the athletics collection, we had a specific subset of product that was designed with a little kettlebell insignia and it's certain styling that was perforated with holes so that you could sweat through it.

And these other elements where the product was actually designed for a person. So you have product, you had customer and then you had this engine of seating that was constantly going out. I'm talking about thousands of rings every month. Being sent out to these content creators. So that's like, number one is we want people that are generating an engine to fuel the ad account.

And every brand in the world should be receiving every month, tons of video assets. Like when we talk about high levels of creative volume and output, one of the things that you want is an engine of inflow of constant net new asset development from creators. Like if you don't have that, it's going to be very difficult to produce the kind of creative volume that you need every month.

And so few brands have this engine. This is such an important, powerful engine. And then, so that's like the paid point of seeding, then there is about organic audience capture, right? So this is now thinking about who are people that do have organic followings in the core aspect community that if they post, we will actually get awareness that's going to show up in organic traffic and direct traffic coming back to our website.

That's a secondary measure and intent. And the people who are good creators may not be the same people that have good audience. And maybe all you're looking for in those cases, then to post a picture of the product. You're not actually looking to turn that around into assets. Now, of course, there may be some overlaps between the group where there's both assets to be developed and and audience to be captured.

But a secondary goal is around audience and impression count. You may hear Connor and hex cloud talk about this a lot where their primary goal Of their influencer program is how many impressions can they get every month? And that's one portion of it is to measure it that way. The third point of seating, I think, is to affect the community, to find the people that hold influence within the community and to get your product onto them.

Because they, you know, that if they are wearing your product. They are going to touch 10 to 15 to 20 people every week. And if they're wearing the product, it's going to improve the perception of your brand. These are people who, if they are wearing your product, it is a positive reinforcement. Is it, is it the yeah, but okay, nevermind.

Sorry, you need to cut that Mickey. We got to deliver. I ordered erasers, just make sure they're not erasers. Okay. Sorry, Mickey, you're going to need to cut that. But this is where now we strictly talk about human influence and I'll give you an example of what we did here. We knew that there were a bunch of brands CrossFit space.

Okay. This is where this is about us wanting to be authentic to the community. And so we would, we identified all those brands and then we would send product to all of the executives at those companies. So we wanted everybody who was already cool in the CrossFit community to be wearing Kalo. We wanted to be the Kalo, the kind of thing that you're like, I see this everywhere, right?

That's the, that's the effect we're trying to create as we then go and enter into the community. So we would send it to. All of the executives at all of the coolest brands in the space. The other thing we did is we identified the top 100 gym owners in the country. Okay, now this is where if you have an expensive product, maybe you're out here and you're like, Taylor, I sell cold plunges.

They're worth 1000. We can't send these out every month, right? Like we can't send them out constantly. I get it. Well, here's an alternative strategy. What we did for these top 100 gyms is we, yes, we would send all, we would look up all their married staff. And we'd send them all Kalo rings in the colors of their gym.

Okay. So thoughtful consideration. The other thing we did is we printed these gigantic posters, like really cool. Like I'm talking like four foot by six foot giant hanging posters. Have you ever been to a CrossFit gym? You know that they hang flags. They love to put things in the rafters. It's just kind of the vibe.

And so we said, we're going to send the top 100 gyms. We're going to send all their employees rings and we're going to send them all a banner. And maybe they'll hang it. Maybe they won't. We're not going to obligate them, but you know what small business owners want to look like they're sponsored and cool and have a rad gym banner.

And we got like 35 to 40 of the gyms to hang the banner for free. So if your products may be expensive, give them something cool to decorate their space with right. And so all of a sudden we have this engine of content creators. You have this audience impression sharing to drive organic awareness. And then you also have this subtle, this more, this more underground route of like making the community that you're about to go access key players, key influencers in the space already wearing the product.

Okay. This is all just in the banner of seeding. Okay. You know what? The other thing that we do, we identified all the top retail stores that we wanted to go into. Okay. If we wanted to be in Dick's Sporting Goods or if we wanted to be in Home Depot or if wherever we wanted to be, we found the buyers of the categories and found out who was married and we would put together really cool packages for them.

Not asking for anything, just planting seeds. That's literally what product seeding is. You are planting subtle seeds for the future benefit and reaping of your organization. So that's like tier one of a great influencer strategy is all about product seeding. And if you don't have a program where every month there are countless amounts of product going out your door to people, to influencers, to potential buyers, to friends, to, to people.

And the clearer you get on the customer that you're serving and the more tight knit that community is, the more effective this, this program becomes because the more viral the word of mouth becomes in the community. After we saturated the cross community, you know what we just did next? We went to first responders and we'd go after.

The L. A. Fire department and we'd go from the police chief down and we try and go after all these communities. We would go find the firefighter wives blog and we would find that like, and you just, the, the tighter the community is, the more the word of mouth is going to spread, the more you're going to benefit from planting seeds in those spaces.

So the things that are really required here is that you have to have an engine for this. You have to have clarity of the cost and allocation of the time and resources. You have to have someone spending the time to identify the right people. And then you also have to understand who your customer is.

And for many of you, the answer here is not everyone. The more niche and the more specific you can be, the more you can affect the community. The more it's easy to identify the right people. So now that we've got the seating thing, and the reason I'm going to describe this as an upside down pyramid, and when you watch my drawing video on Friday, you're going to see it, is that the next step is a narrowing of who responds to the seating.

When you get people that are posting on your behalf, you know what you do? You reach out to them, and in exchange for the use of their likeness, Not to get them to put on the product. We had a rule. You never pay someone to put the product on. You only pay them for the use of their likeness. Now you're going to develop a set of tier of influencers that every time you have something important to say, you're going to pay them to say that thing.

So once we saw who responded really well to product seeding, who loved the product, who put it on, who would ask us for more, who would share about it, who would send their friends and ask for more product all the time, we would then go to them and say, Hey, you know what? Next week we have a launch for a new color way.

At one point we did this like teal green ring for, for Kayla, it was just a new colorway extension. And you know what we did? We got 10 influencers the day before it went live to post a teaser about it. And that became part of the promotion of the program. Every time you go to go live with a new product, a new campaign, whatever you use that band of relationships for one off pay to post.

Right. One off paid distribution. Again, bonus points. If you can also use that asset in your advertising. Now you, again, you're going to amplify the value of that, that payment and that exchange. And that becomes the second band of this program, right? You have seating, you have pay for play. And then the third tier, what we would do is every time we went into a category, we'd actually figure out who would be the team.

Okay. Now the team are the way I think about these influences is they are actually like staff. They're part of the employees of the organization in the sense that they are usually going to be on a long term paid agreement for a consistent set of actions. So we went into CrossFit. We identified a few different people.

We had Jason Kalipa, who was the winner of the first ever CrossFit games. We tried to find the people who we thought were the most authentic that align the most with our brand. Okay. So Kayla was all about family, this active lifestyle. Jason was married with little kids. They had his daughter had an incredible story where she was recovering from cancer and so that we connected with her charity.

And so it had all the, it wasn't that he was the most famous CrossFitter at the time. He wasn't winning the CrossFit games anymore, but he was the right alignment. Where what we were looking for from him was not audience. It was not access to his fame. It was story where we could produce the content and now we could create, add an element that reinforced the brand, the identity, and could create a message that reinforces who we were.

You know, he could be the product model, the model in our product photography, all these kinds of things where he is now. An ambassador, a paid member of the team on an ongoing basis. And yes, is he going to support on the days that we go to post and is, are we going to have a paid production day? Yes, we did all sorts of cool things for a long time.

Like we would use these influencers as like, if you called the customer service line and there was a voicemail, it would be that, you know, you use them in the product photography, I mentioned that you can find all these little clever ways. To, to put these people to use. But these are people that are on, usually they're on your point of sale.

They're going to make some impact on a broader basis, maybe at retail. And maybe these are famous people. This is Anthony Edwards for Adidas, right? This is Zendaya for on running, right? These are bigger long term relationships of let's say five to 10 people. There are this like team band where, where you're leveraging them.

And then the highest tier is the last step is what we would call the ambassador. This is the face of a program that's usually existing for the sake of retail. So this is a misspoke here. This is where, when you talk about Zendaya for on running or Anthony Edwards for Adidas, this is like the ultimate tier where you are going to make this person a face of the brand level, but they have to have passed through every phase of this authenticity and they likely have to have it.

Impact on some broadening form of distribution is the way I think about that. Like, usually that happens when Dick's sporting goods wants a way to help make sure Kayla is going to get broader distribution. Well, then we're going to go out and think about signing an ambassador to help support that sell through by trading off their equity as an, as an athlete or someone famous.

And so that, that's how we would think about this all the time. And how this program comes to life and affects all these different levels of what you're doing. And in almost every brand that we work with, I see like very moderate forms of this. Maybe there's a seating program. Maybe they're paying people for posts.

Maybe occasionally there's a sponsored member of the team, but this holistic collective effort has to be a part. It is an engine of the DTC world. Like. Organic influence is at the heartbeat of every brand that's growing. When I see right now, these brands like that, I was just talking with one of our clients the other day about like comfort, or we work at the brand called crop shop or, you know, heart and soil.

We've talked about a lot on this podcast. These are all brands that are trading off. The organic audience of influencers, they're trading off the authenticity of people who influence culture, who make impact on the world around them. And that is so much of what is driving consumer consumption is that in our world these days, and it's not even really the big famous athletes and movie stars anymore.

It's the sub celebrity group that are on TikTok and YouTube that are driving massive cultural Affinity towards different products. And so how you go into these communities and affect it is really, really important. I'll give you an outline of an example of how this would. So I talked about athletics.

Let me give you another example of how we would connect these dots of how influencer shows up in a campaign. Within the context of a brand within a cohesive story for a business. So when we launched what I call the Kalo quality campaign. So this is when we would go after sort of people who worked with their hands, right?

This was the idea. We want to influence this community of blue collar workers. Now that's, that's not a unified community. Right. Like you have to be more specific than that, even to really go after where you're at. And so this campaign thing that we came up with, it was called, we called it the mark of a maker.

The idea was that a maker's mark is sort of what you'll see a wood somebody who works in woodcrafting or sort of brand into a table that they make. That's their signature. That's the maker's mark. It's called like the whiskey. And so we sort of play, did a play on words that a Kalo ring was the mark of a maker.

If you saw someone wearing a Kalo and their hands were dirty, you could sort of understand that they were. A maker, someone who worked with their hands. And so we had come up with this product, which was a newly designed, something we called Calo 2. 0 that had flatter edges. It was a new material that was actually gasoline resistant because traditional silicone will actually bubble.

If you get gasoline on it, it was antimicrobial. It was a higher price point. So we had this product story again, clear customer. And we went after this, this target demo of married aspirational makers. And so who are the makers? It was anyone who sees their job as building or creating. We could narrow that down to blue collar workers in different industries.

And we would go through like people who work in manufacturing to chefs, to you know, all these two people who worked in the medical field, potentially. And so we can identify all these pockets within, within that banner. And then on a broad level, on a bigger sort of top of funnel, we would think about it as like the DIY crowd, like people who would be making things at home.

We thought about B2B, all the distribution, we would go after uniform supply and safety distribution corporate HR reps, Home Depot and Lowe's, right? Like these were the places that the product would end up getting sold if we were effective, right? And so the tagline of the campaign was Kalo, the mark of a maker.

We, if I go back to that ambassador funnel, We would work down from what we call the hot 100 send out was a custom bottle of Makers Mark whiskey co branded with custom labels that we would identify you know, all these different people. If we were to do chefs, we would go after all the most influential chefs.

If we were going to go after let's say. People in the medical field would go to the largest hospitals and find all the married nurses, that sort of idea. We, we looked at partnerships with John Deere and Ford to try and get all their assembly workers to be, that were married as a safety product, trying to go in through OSHA and try and make it actually work.

We did these really cool stories. With this guy, I'm going to probably mess up his name. He created a company called truck furniture, took a Hiko Kisei and his wife, Hiromi Karatsu. Like they, they were this really cool. They did this like high end craftsmanship. Furniture that we would, that would be part of that team of paid influencers.

And then we'd like, we wanted to go after Nick Offerman as our ambassador. And so you can see the sort of like connected dots all the way through of how this is going to show up. And again, the reason I'm going to tie this back to the ad account is whether it's the athletics campaign or this influencer campaign, the hope is the hope is by the time that the Facebook ad shows up in your feet, forget seven day click, forget one day, click, forget seven day, click one day view, forget ASC, forget anything else.

The hope is that the ad is targeted. at a married and engaged CrossFitter who is like, Oh shit, I have seen this. That's the banner in my gym. And I was listening to that podcast and I heard them talk about that. And then my, my trainer wears that ring. That's the ad once it shows up. And I call that like tilling up the soil.

And so what a great influencer program does. Is it tills up the soil? It's the source material for your ad content. It's generating organic awareness and a flywheel that reinforces everything that you're doing. And so when I come in to work as a growth partner with our clients right now, like we have no ability to like affect this, but I'll tell you the ad accounts with the partners who do this well, work way better.

And it doesn't really matter whether it's big cap, cost cap, lowest, what matters is. That the capacity to reach customers who are having a surrounding experience of your brand from people whose opinion they value and who have authority in their life changes the dynamics of success. And so one of the reasons I felt like I wanted to do a drawing video about this is because like every brand that I had built, like the first brand that I built, power balance, you know, setting aside the pseudo science related to this, this is pre, this is the pre era of Facebook ads.

I, we, we went from zero to 60 to a million in 20 months with not a single Facebook ad. And the way that we did that was entirely through product seating to influential athletes. At one point, like as a tiny little brand, I was in charge of influencer marketing and I had negotiated deals with. Every one of the MVPs of the four major sports, we were doing brokering deals with Kobe Bryant in China.

We had every like, you could go look up, go look up like Kalo, Kevin Durant, Kalo, Kalo, Cristiano Ronaldo. Like every athlete in the world was wearing the product, every single one of them. And it was strictly off of this sequence that we would describe from product seating to team to ambassador. We had a custom color way with Derek Rose when he won the thing that sold out and we would do all of this stuff surrounding this engine.

This is a incredibly powerful engine that can fuel success in every part of your business if you get it right. So check out this week's Sharpen Your Skills series, you'll enjoy it. And hopefully my little side, side quest on a solo episode here into the world of influencer marketing, which is really my roots.

It's what I come from as an athlete, as a marketer. I understand the overlap of that world and I understand who influences me and how much I care about the opinions of certain people and my influence on product purchase decisions. So he's the same. All the time at CTC, the two greatest influences on a purchase decision are price and a recommendation from somebody you trust.

Find those people that your customer trusts and build a relationship with them and watch the rest of your business thrive. Hopefully you enjoyed that solo episode. I'd love it. Let me know if you find that helpful. If you miss me and Richard going back and forth or the guests, it's always helpful to understand what format you guys like best.

Take care. Talk soon.