Navigating Influencer Marketing with Sarah Saffari of InfluencerNexus

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Franchise or Bust. In this episode, we have an amazing person, Sarah Safari. And a fun name to say, Sarah Safari. She is the founder of Influencer Nexus. Sarah was an absolute thrill to have on great insights as relates to what the Influencer marketing trend is in the Franchise space. We hope you really enjoyed the episode as much as Katie and I enjoyed recording it. And here it is, Sarah Safari with Influencer Nexus. - Yeah, so I'll give you kind of like the five minute rundown or hopefully one minute. I'll try to make it a little faster. But essentially, I actually started on the other side of the table. So I was helping influencers partner with brands for a longer period of time. So these were influencers or want to be influencers who wanted to partner with brands but at the same time, they wanted to build their own business. So that's everything from teaching them how to gain influence to build their following, their engagement, brand partnerships, how to go about that, building those relationships, all of that stuff. I did that for about a half a decade. And then in the process of doing that, I noticed a lot of missing pieces across brand influencer relationships. So this was anywhere from standardization. If you look, there is a complete lack of standardization in the industry. It's not a very sexy term, but it is very important in that measurements, different ways to do things. Influencer pricing, everything is on different scales and there's no standardization across any of that. Another thing was, and this is something that I refer to often, a really large level of influencer fraud, right? So as influencer marketing has grown and it has grown substantially year after year, right? Very, very large. And in that process, more people want to become influencers because they see it as a way to make money. Maybe sometimes it's a fast way to make money. And so what they do is they pay for bots, very cheap amount to make a couple hundred bucks. And so all of a sudden they go from 200 followers to 20,000 followers, but that doesn't mean much. So whether it's follower fraud or engagement fraud, that's really negative for the brand obviously because it's going to cause an upside down return. So while measurements might look great on the front end where here's a influencer, they have amazing engagement. They're reaches really high. They're following is good. Maybe they have comments on their posts. All of these things that are part of what we use to measure if an influencer is a fit with a brand, those things kind of go away because they don't matter if it's fraudulent. So a lot of brands, especially if they're not running brand awareness campaigns are going to see an upside down or a Y, but with brand awareness campaigns, often they don't know that they're seeing an upside down or a Y because it looks good, right? So we're sending all of this traffic to this franchise or this landing page or wherever it is that you're sending it because it's a brand awareness campaign where not measuring conversions to maybe a download or to a purchase or whatever it might be. It looks good on the front end, but on the back end, there is at least 30, 40 or 50% of them are not real people. So that was kind of one of the few of the bigger things that we saw. And so in doing that, I said, I'm going to start this agency. I've been doing this for a long time. I have a really good feel of what's going on. I had to become an influencer myself in the process of helping other influencers. And so I had firsthand experience in how to do it. And so that's when I kind of switched to the other side of the table after about half a decade to really helping brands partner with influencers and doing that in the right way in a way that actually brings return, brand awareness, whatever the campaign goal is. Yeah, and that certainly resonates with anyone who's a part of a franchise brand or whatever. I love how you're saying making sure that it's not fraudulent and making sure that it has real value because I think oftentimes when a franchise or any business owner really is looking at, how do I deploy my working dollars? I want to give something to an agency, but I really have to see it come back. And I have to see it come back in a big way. So you touched on it a little bit, but what are some ways that you've been able to really demonstrate and kind of show like, hey, this is influencers has been for brands that you work with? I think that's a really important question. And I think it's very important to be able to differentiate, especially for franchise owners or franchisees who are really in a place where they need to see immediate return. They need to see that immediate ROI. Understanding the way that this functions is a good like baseline to have and so when we look at influencer marketing, it is essentially word of mouth at scale. So if you think about whether it's your wife who made a recommendation or friend, whoever it might be that you genuinely trust, most of the time we're going to take that recommendation, whether it's to go see a movie or to go to ex therapist or to go and do why thing at this park that has this great restaurant, whatever it might be, we're going to take that advice stronger than we would if it came from an ad or a stranger. So influencer marketing is very similar in that way because the followers of the influencer who actually have influence, which is an important piece of this whole thing, is because you could have hundreds of thousands of followers and still not have much influence. So if you do have genuine influence, it's a very strong statement for them to make any kind of recommendation of this franchisee or whatever it might be that they're making a recommendation for and so the conversion is a lot higher. But with that said, it's not instantaneous at all times. So what happens a lot of times with smaller brands is they because they want the return immediately and sometimes they want to compare it to paid advertising, the two don't work necessarily the same even though they have some level of similarity, right? So with influencer marketing, there does need to be multiple touch points in many cases. So what that means is let's say we reach out to an audience, 10% of them purchase right away, 10 to 15%, purchase right away. You still have another 85% who haven't purchased yet, but they're gonna purchase in a week, a month, two months, six months from now, right? And what happens a lot of the time, especially with smaller, even sometimes medium-sized businesses is we always want to hit the top of the iceberg and then we kind of let go of the part where we can't see and we just let that slide when, if we were able to allow the marketing ecosystem, so to speak, to function well together, you can now be able to see substantial increases in conversion over time. So it's one of those things compared to compound interest, whatever you want that does. You do start seeing the compounding effect over time, regardless of whether that's what kind of influences work best for us, what kind of creative works best for us. What are the audiences that resonate with X type of video versus Y type of video? What platform is the platform that's gonna do well for this kind of franchise, which is this kind of franchise? So there's so many different variables that go into it and there needs to be a grace period for testing for that to occur so that you can hit that sweet spot and then once you hit the sweet spot, you can start kind of scaling from there. I think that's so spot on as a fellow marketer and somebody who owns an advertising agency, the holistic approach is what you're really getting after. It's like, yes, the influencer side has to be very strategic. It's gotta be, it's gotta fit the brand. It's gotta fit where they're at, but it doesn't necessarily live in a silo, right? You can pay all your money and put everything into Google, right? It's like, well, that's probably not gonna work. I mean, that's not the way it is, but it's a complete, as a complete program. You wanna have that touch point on the influencer side as well. I always makes me think to myself, you also said like it's a giant word of mouth platform which is so spot on because where am I gonna go and eat pizza in New York? Well, I watched Dave Fort noise pizza reviews and if he says it's good, I'm like, well, it's probably good. So I just go to it, even if it, I don't know, it could be terrible. I don't know if he knows anything about a lot of pizza. So I'm gonna go do it. Talk to me a little bit then about how you do tailor, you're misting like, we understand the power of the messaging, the power of the person potentially, et cetera, but you also mentioned kind of tailoring the specifics to, all right, this type of brand is really gonna benefit from this type of influencer. How do you go about that process and identifying what is going to be best for the brand to bring them the most return? Yeah, awesome. I'll dive into that. I also wanna kind of address something that you had brought up while you're talking about search engines and stuff like that. Even kind of considering that like the way that all of it works, there does need to be a level of cohesion. Like none of them work separately from one another and a vacuum. They work well together. So for example, while Google or any search engine is a discovery tool, it is also a tool where people go for very specific queries after they've learned or discovered about something. So that could be via a friend on Whatsapp or on Slack, which we would call the dark web. It could be via paid advertising. It could be via an influencer who they saw the post up and then they wanted to go look into it a little bit more. And so, and then paid advertising works the same way. Maybe they saw it on the ad and then they saw an influencer promote it there after or vice versa or whatever it might be. And then they saw Pinterest out in Billboard or whatever it might be. It's just acknowledging and I think a lot of people understand and know but they don't acknowledge it to the same degree of like immediate purchase isn't going to be in most cases on the first point of exposure. That just leads to a discovery process. And if you can understand that and give it the time it needs for that to lead to a purchase and once it leads to a purchase given that you have a great product there's going to be a really high LTV, so lifetime value of whatever it is that you're selling. That's when you hit the jackpot. And that's when you can continue to see growth but when there's holes in one area of your marketing or even in the delivery or even in the product, whatever it might be, you're going to constantly be striving to bring in new traffic via one method but really the issue might be here, the issue might be here in a different location. So just something to address. And then in my rant that I just went off of, I totally forgot your last question so if you can ask me that again. - Yeah, so my last question was really just more around how you're going to be kind of effective in tailoring with influencers go to which brands. So making sure that you're identifying this type of influencer would really resonate with the customers that are trying to associate themselves with that brand. - Yeah, so in most cases it's kind of straightforward but also you want to diversify your demographic to some degree. So for example, let's say we're working with, I'm just going to name a random business. So let's say we're working with a dating app. So to a degree we know we're going to be speaking with influencers who are in the dating world, who are dating coaches, who are dating therapists, who are these kinds of experts that we can target. But also we want to test other things outside the obvious. So maybe we want to try lifestyle influencers, maybe we want to try travel influencers and see how that resonates because you'd be surprised to what degree and if anyone has brand ads here is you're not always directly running to that demographic. You're running to different demographics that are somewhat associated with it that you think will resonate and then you hit, you kind of hit it home with the coffee or you hit it home with the creative. And that's similar in that sense, where you want to do the same thing. So we always start with what we know absolute will work what best and has the highest level of resonance. And then we try to kind of expand demographics where it's possible from there, especially when the brand at that time is trying to scale. So start kind of with the specifics and then just really try to expand from there. The other thing is the creative matters, right? Like the creative really matters and how the influencer speaks about it really matters and how the agency works with the influencer really matters. And so what I mean by that is I have a show it's called Behind the Scenes with influencers. So I interview influencers who typically do brand deals, have partnerships, have had them, it's kind of what they do for a living. And countless times I've heard them say some variation of, well, you know, the brand kind of scripted me. They gave me like all these things and it was, you know, this skincare product and then I had to read off every single ingredient that was on the label because they wanted me to. And like, sorry, but that's not going to resonate with their audience. Like maybe their audience wants to feel young or their audience wants to feel really fresh before they go to bed or whatever their reason is, it's not going to be the ingredient. So it's whatever oftentimes when it's our business or our franchise or our product, we become so attached to what we know to be the value proposition that we detach from what the audience sees as the value proposition. And in doing that, you create a really big disconnect and that's going to affect your conversions, going to affect your reach, it's going to affect your engagement, all the metrics and KPIs that are going to be necessary and important to measure. So I think it's giving the influencer enough creative freedom while also guiding them on what your value proposition is. And oftentimes like creating a strong storyline, right? Like people don't remember facts, they remember stories. We know that it's like a famous quote or something. So if we know that, that's just how the human psyche operates really kind of leaning towards that and giving them some ideas while also allowing them to be themselves because if it's an influencer, it means they're influencing the audience, which means their audience knows them. They know what they eat, they know how they act, they know how they talk, they know their tonality of mannerisms, their friends, their boyfriend, they know all of that about that influencer. So if you all of a sudden tell them to act like this and do this, that's going to come across a super and authentic and because it's not paid advertising, that's going to create massive issues. So just really making sure of those components are there. - I love that you bring that up because genuineness is your greatest sales tool and it always has been, if you are a competent salesman, which a lot of times these influencers are really presenting themselves in that vein, they're kind of selling themselves at first and then they switch onto helping to sell other products. But that genuineness is where it really shines through. If you didn't actually believe that Joe Rogan was really into fitness and brand, you wouldn't care if he was promoting cold plunges and stuff 'cause he would be like, he doesn't do that. But because you know this person, you know the genuineness, I was like, I believe it. And if he's using it, then I believe it's probably pretty healthy. - It's actually a really important point because one of the other biggest complaints with influencers is that the agency or the brand that's reaching out for a potential partnership, often they do minimal to no research on what the influencers are all about. It's the same thing. I make a lot of comparisons that are similar in case someone doesn't know about influencer marketing. But it's the same thing as sending thousands of cold emails with a very low level of personalization for the sake of getting a one to two percent response, right? So now you're reaching out to all of these people with do not resonate at all with whatever your product is, right? And so like if you're a fitness influencer and then all of a sudden you're talking about vacuums all day because you've got a partnership with a vacuum-blad brand that's gonna be a lose-lose. And I think that's where even the brands sometimes don't consider is that it's a lose-lose because the influencer now is losing trust with their audience because just like you said, Joe Rogan, we know he's big into fitness. So he promotes things that are in fitness, supplements that are in fitness, brings on guests in fitness. And so we know that's real. We know it's part of his lifestyle. Just like the followers of the influencer know what's part of their lifestyle, what they like to talk about and what they feel passionate about. And so if they're now doing that, they're going to lose trust with their audience, which is bad. And then the brand is not going to get the outcome they're looking for. So whether that's direct sales or whether that's brand awareness or whether that's classic, whatever it might be, it's not going to do well because the audience isn't following that influencer for that particular reason. Could they still get some sales? Sure. But to the degree that they would if it was someone else who resonated more so with that particular niche, of course, no. You know, the old way of some of this stuff, so in the past, your influencers were the people who were on television, the people who were on the radio, these were the infamous people. And they historically in the past didn't feel the need to have that genuineness because once they went off the radio, nobody knew who they were, nobody cared anymore. They just had a radio personality. Whereas now, if I look at Katie's Instagram, I can tell right away, she's a mom and she sings like a majestic goddess, right? Because that's what we know. And she may even, you know. I want to have to be on mute for the chainsaw. So otherwise, I would totally would. Yeah, yeah. But anyways, seeing that kind of peer, completely into those people's lifestyles is so different because that, you know, an example I always think of, like, if I'm listening to Howard Stern and Howard Stern, so I'm talking about Zip Recruiter, I'm like, you don't know anything about Zip Recruiter. You're not using that, get out of here with that. But he's just doing a radio talk up because that's the old life that he was used to. Whereas, you know, now, like you say, the effectiveness of genuineness is so paramount. Yeah, it's interesting because you just now mentioned Howard Stern. And I'm not sure if you know this person, but she's a pretty famous psychiatrist, Esther Perrell. And I was listening to one of her podcasts on a Saturday walking inside the park. And, you know, an advertisement came up and it's what I do. So I'm very critical and I listen to what it was. And she was advertising a mattress company. And in advertising mattress company, that wasn't even kind of like the worst part. It was that I could tell she had never used the mattress because in the advertisement she had said specifically, and I asked for this kind of mattress and they delivered it. She didn't say anything about what the mattress felt like. She didn't say anything about how it made her have a better sleep. She didn't say anything about how great the pillows were or how adjustable there was no features or anything that she liked about that mattress that she mentioned. She just said, hey, here's this mattress company. Here's a steal and here's, you know, the one I ordered, right? And so there's a, and while because she has a lot of viewers and volume, of course, you're still going to get some level of response. But it's not going to be nearly as good as if it was someone who would pretend maybe a sleep expert or a health expert or whatever it might be that has some relationship with getting a good night's sleep. Yeah, absolutely. And so I find it fascinating that you are able to much more scientifically kind of come to a full, you know, solution for somebody to say, okay, this isn't just about so and so on. Instagram has a million followers. It's like, that doesn't matter. What really matters is we've got to make a linkage between the brand and person who can be genuine. And then we also have to make sure we're looking at things holistically as a marketing solution. You know, the job of any marketer is to drive revenue. That's why a client gives us money. They give us money so we can get on those steps. I think it's super helpful, you know, for a franchise or in particular, because, you know, for a lot of franchise or this is still a relatively new thing. And a lot of that is because when they were, you know, when they were coming up, this didn't exist. So they're kind of using their same methodology that, you know, was successful for them over years and years. How do you help kind of help those type of folks break down their, you know, maybe they're just lack of knowledge about the impact that influencer marketing can have. And you've kind of touched on a little bit of it here and there as we've been chatting, but just some radio ads and some television ads and some Google ads and some Facebook ads. But let me slide this in there for you as well. Yeah, I think, I think that's a really good question because that's very common. Typically, they're running some level of paid advertising. They see think like, oh, influencer marketing, that sounds kind of sexy, but they're not really sure what that looks like. And so I think it's an education factor for sure and just kind of showing numbers in terms of what that looks like. Everyone loves numbers. And I think it brings a level of a solidity to the whole thing. And so like, insane that like basically on social media as it stands right now, about 50 to 60% of consumers make purchasing decisions off of Instagram and TikTok. And so like, that's a lot. That's over half of consumers making purchasing decisions off of social media. The other thing is like the trust factor, right? Like the trust factor on paid advertising is somewhere between like 20 to 30%. But the trust factor on via an influencer is something between 60 to 70%, right? So the percentages here are a lot different now. And that doesn't mean paid advertising isn't great. It's great. I use it to scale my companies in the past. And I think it's a great tool to use. However, another thing is just learning how to integrate those with one another. So we've talked a lot about like they don't need to work in isolation from one another and they should work together. But we haven't really talked about what that looks like, right? So we talked about search engines and how that can relate. But if we're talking about paid advertising, knowing that a lot of franchisors do that, and that's like a common form of advertising for them, it's how can we combine this so that we get benefit from both at the same time and that paid ads perform even better while we bring in a new source of traffic via influencers. And there's two ways to do that. One way is going to be via user generated content. And there's studies out there that show that user generated content is 60% more powerful using paid advertising than it is if it's like any kind of other models, like a generic branding, whatever it might be, right? So that's one thing. So now we're using influencer marketing, but we're also getting usage rights so that we can now take that creative that they made. Whatever they did, whatever they did that promoted the brand that wasn't really unique because that's what they're good at. They're good at creating that's their job, right? And so now we can put that on a paid ad. We can increase the return, we can increase the lead generation, all that stuff. The other way to do it is just through data, right? So let's say we are sending people to a landing page via influencer marketing. And so now we're collecting so much data that's coming in maybe they added something to carpet they didn't purchase or they landed on the page and they scroll for whatever a certain amount of time, whatever it might be, now we can take all that data and we can retarget them via paid advertising. And all franchise owners who have done paid advertising know that retargeting does very, very well. And it's typically half, if not less, the price of just running cold ads. And so now we have traffic coming in from influencer marketing alone, but we have traffic coming in from retargeting and we're reducing our cost per lead or cost per conversion by switching how we run creative, by running UGC content, because we know it performs 60% better than other forms of creative. So there's just an example of, hey, you're doing this thing, it's working well. Keep doing it, we're not saying don't do it, but how can we integrate it with this other thing that also works really well? That brings in a new source of traffic but helps your other sources of traffic at the same time. - I'm totally with you on that. And the holistic approach to enhancing campaigns, it's just, it's necessary at this point. It's no longer like, oh, that's cool if we can get, somebody maybe it's like, no, these people are willing, this is their job. Their job is to be an influencer and they can promote a brand, generate revenue. I mean, that's what they're wanting to do. Talk a little bit then about the future. Do you feel like AI is gonna have any type of influence? - Actually, right now, I'm not, this is, I am AI, right? I'm not even a part of Katie wrote a script for me to just be Trevor's, the franchise or bus host. Amazing, amazing job by Katie. I seem very life-like, but do you feel that there's any, yeah, just anything on the horizon there that might be interesting in terms of just being like, I can AI generate that such and such as, you know, saying that something is good or whatnot. Is there any future there? - Yeah, so it's actually interesting because I had a old colleague send me this page of this AI-made generated girl. And I don't know if it was on TikTok or OnlyFans, which platform it was on, it was one of the two. And she was making something like $10,000 or $20,000 a month as an AI person. So I think that that already is here and that it exists to a degree, but to what degree it will influence, I'm not sure, but I think that it will have an effect in the sense of, if we're at the place already today, where AI-generated influencer is making six figures online by posting photos, then we can probably have AI-generated influencers that create creative for brands. How long it will take for us to get there? I'm not quite sure, but something tells me we're a little bit closer than we think because once it started, it moves very fast, scary fast. - Sure, I saw, I don't know if you saw yesterday the newest robot that Elon Musk built with Tesla, but it is like, I mean, it has like fully functioning hands and it's like moving around and it's a little, it's gonna be fast, like to your point, it's gonna be like this technology now is just moving at rapid speeds. And so to be interesting, stay on top of that. - Mm-hmm, and it's, I'm not sure if you heard like the whole open AI and how the founder left and then he came back, it was a whole Microsoft stuff. So anyways, and we found out why he had, why he was already kicked off the board and stuff and the reason why he was kicked off the board is like somewhat scary, right? Like the fact that we are now generating essentially a human with AI and they're able to critical think and they're able to analyze and they're able to make decisions the way that we do and they're able to have emotions and all of that stuff is, and that's today. We already have that today, right? It's just, and I think if it was to be regulated, that would have been, I think we're a little bit past regulation, which can be somewhat scary, but like you said, and I do agree that it's way sooner that we think with the rate that it's been increasing since it started, it's been. - Now, this has been a wonderful conversation. I just have to ask Katie, how influenced do you feel right now by what we've been talking about? - 10 out of 10. - Very influenced. - I have to say, as someone who owns an agency, this is an underutilized resource in the business world right now. And I feel like meeting someone like Sarah understanding more about what you guys do, how it's not like, you know, just throw it out there and to eat there for some person that, you know, randomly has a bunch of views and things like that, but it's truly targeted, it's up to massive enhancement into what companies are kind of traditionally and currently doing. I think it's fantastic, and Sarah, really excited for you and excited for your business model. And yeah, leave us with some parting thoughts. - I appreciate, I had a really good time being on it, I usually just, I think I had spoken with Katie before, I usually just do best when it's going with the flow more than anything else. So it's been fun for me. I think just kind of to hit it home, I think if you're considering doing influencer marketing, just two things, like one, you have two options, you can do it with an agency, you can do it internally, both are good and have different benefits of what it looks like. One has a learning curve, and so if you're in a place where you can take that learning curve and learn from it, then that's absolutely good. And if you decide to do it regardless of how you decide to do it, just making sure that you're giving it appropriate time to see results and setting standards for what that time period looks like and what that plan for that time period looks like and not kind of freaking out after a couple of months. So, and I say that even just with paid advertising, and so I think if franchise owners have done paid advertising, it's somewhat similar, right? Like you can't spend on two weeks and freak out if there wasn't a return after two weeks, right? You have to give it time to tweak, you have to see what creative works, what copy works, you have to change one variable at a time and keep testing until you hit that sweet spot. And so it does have those levels of similarities, it can be compared and make it not feel so foreign, if it does feel foreign right now. And so if you can allow yourself to do that and understand the process for how it works, for me, education works. For me, if I understand how something works, regardless of whether it's personal or business or whatever, I can handle a lot better because I understand the process. So, find what that is for you, whether that's education, whether that's something else, whatever it might be, and then just stick to it throughout that time period until you do see the results. - More fantastic. Sarah, it's been a true pleasure to get to know you and get to understand a little bit about your business and how it can be extremely helpful for franchise brands as they are consistently interested in how they are driving their business forward and what solutions are gonna make that happen. So, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. I am now influenced to try and use your business when I'm talking to companies in the franchise space because I really do see the value. So, thank you so much. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)