How We Started Influencer Seeding

Happy Wednesday!

We have started with influencer seeding for our internal brand and I wanted to share our thinking and process with you today.

Respond to this email to let me know if you’d like more behind-the-scenes content from running our internal brands and what’s working for us.

What you will learn today:

• Why I decided to start influencer seeding

• Our trifecta for blitzscaling our e-commerce brands

• What I am expecting to see from influencer seeding

• What is our math behind influencer seeding

And much more…

Bonus For You

If you run an e-commerce business and spend at least $10,000 a month on ads, we will write 3 creative concepts for your brand completely free.

We want to show you our creative process and why our clients love it.

Simply fill out this form and we will send you 3 concepts tailored to your brand.

Idea of the Week

Top Content of the Week

• Tip to avoid boring ads. See here.

• Do comments from happy customers under your ads help improve your ad performance? See here.

• How top brands are winning on TikTok. Read here.

I’ve seen the influencer seeding talk on Twitter but never paid extra attention.

I’ve been a performance marketer for over 6 years and we’ve produced tens of thousands of Meta and TikTok ads for over 80 e-commerce brands in the last 3 years.

I also went viral last month on Twitter for saying that a DTC brand making under $5 million should only focus on becoming first-purchase profitable on Meta and forget everything else.

You can read the comments under my Twitter post here.

Effectively Screening Creators

We started in a small market where you can scale paid advertising only to a certain level before it becomes too expensive and unprofitable.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but I’m already looking for new ways to invest in marketing to acquire new customers.

One of the benefits I loved about influencer seeding in our small market is the boom you can create around your brand for a few thousand dollars.

Our trifecta for blitzscaling our e-commerce brand in a small market is:

1. Scaling paid Meta advertising

2. Posting viral content on TikTok organic

3. Influencer seeding at scale

People who are our ideal customers follow certain micro-influencers. They likely saw our ads but were not convinced enough to give us a try.

My goal is to make it impossible for these people to go on social media and not see our brand and happy customers using our products.

On another note, a lot of new competitors launched similar products, so I want to strengthen our position as a leader in our market.

What am I expecting to see from influencer seeding?

Influencer seeding is another marketing channel for us. It costs money and time to find, communicate with, and ship products to hundreds of influencers.

Therefore, you should expect a reasonable return on your investment. Here’s what I’m looking to see from our influencer seeding efforts:

1. Create hype around our brand on social media

2. Add social proof to our brand from being used and recommended by influencers

3. Get a ton of new content from influencers we can use for our paid advertising

4. Make at least a 2X return on our costs to ship the products to influencers (COGS)

5. Lower our Meta CPA thanks to more content and people being aware of the brand

Will we achieve some or all of these? We’re yet to see. I will share an update on this in a few months in the Creative Ad Lab newsletter.

What is the math behind influencer seeding?

Since we don’t know what we can expect from our influencer seeding efforts yet, we allocated 10% of our marketing budget to influencer seeding.

We calculated our costs for shipping products to influencers (COGS).

We want our influencers to have the best experience with our brand to motivate them to post more content. That’s why we created a completely new fancy packaging for them.

This comes with additional costs but I’m convinced it’s well worth the extra dollars.

We divided our influencer seeding budget by cost per influencer package to understand how many influencer packages we want to ship in the first month.

We estimated a 50% take rate from influencers, which might be too optimistic and we may need to increase our outreach.

We created a list of micro-influencers and started reaching out to them.

For interested influencers, we create discount codes for free orders and they place the order on our Shopify store.

We have created a Google Sheets template to track everything around influencer seeding. I’m happy to share the template if you’re interested. Just respond to this email and ask.

Get Our Free Guide: How to Source, Qualify & Train Hundreds of Top UGC Creators

One email is not enough for all the lessons we collected over 3 years of reviewing thousands of creator applications and working hands-on with hundreds of creators.

We put everything we know about sourcing and managing creators into a full guide you can access completely free here.

Poll

How We Can Help You

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

1. If you’re looking for a creative partner who will handle your entire creative production, deliver winning ads every month, and help you scale, apply to work with us here. We have worked with brands like HexClad, BestSelf, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, and others.

2. Want us to train your internal team and implement all of our creative production systems and strategies in your business? Apply here and we will help you build an in-house team that can create hundreds of winning ads every month.

3. If you’re looking to take your ad performance to the next level and have a consistent stream of winning creative, but don’t want to hire anyone, we have created a program that teaches you our entire creative production process and everything we have learned over 3 years of creating tens of thousands of ads.