The 100M+ Impression Strategy with Influencer Seeding feat. Josh Durham of Aligned Growth

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Today we are joined by Josh Durham, who is the founder of Align Growth, which is an agency that helps DTC brand scale through influencer partnerships and performance UGC. So Josh, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in the space and what led you into starting Align Growth? Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah, super sick to be here. Thanks again for the invite. Yeah, I basically was an in-house marketer for most of my career. I started in DTC in 2015 with a weighted blanket company. I scaled that out of my parents' garage and scaled it up to 6 million a year, 60 employees. And then that tanked overnight. I went bankrupt. And then I hopped into a in-house role at its head of growth at a company called Groove Life. And yeah, there I basically managed seven figures a month in ad spend. And so I've just always been a performance marketing guy. I watched Align Growth in January of 2021 just doing, you know, performance marketing, paid social email marketing, but really was getting bored of that. And then all of a sudden I became my greatest fear, which is a brand marketer. And I was someone DM me like, Hey, do you ever, have you ever tried, do you ever like offer influencer marketing? And I was kind of like, I've done influencer before as like a, you know, part of the marketing mix at the in-house brand, but never, you know, kind of just focus on it. I took it on and I just really enjoyed it. And it was just way more fun, just like way more creative. And we just had like all these crazy results for clients. And so ever since then, influencer marketing, you know, creator businesses, like all that fun stuff, I just, I just feel like it's way more of a fun play box, sorry, sandbox to play in, then performance marketing and it just, you know, adds to the rest of the business. So yeah, that's been doing it ever since. Sweet. And one thing I'd love for you to break down Josh, maybe for the audiences, maybe the difference between all those different things. Like you mentioned, you've got performance, you've got creator, you've got influencer, and they're all like related, but like they're slightly different. So how do you think about all those different, you know, motions for a company and how they how like just characterize them for us. If you would, yeah, for sure. So I would say that's a great question because there's so many buzzwords around influencer, there's influencer, there's creator, there's affiliate, there is, there's ambassador. You're like all these different buzzwords that we can kind of chop it up. And so I like to use the word influencer. I feel like it's the most all in cup, the thing of what we do at someone on organic social who has a sizable following primarily on Instagram and TikTok. And but not every, I would say every influencer is a creator, not every creator is an influencer. So I think, you know, just some last few years with UGC, we've seen all these like micro influencers, micro creators, or making UGC content just for the sake of paid social. And so, but we really specialize in influencer versus like UGC content creation. So we are working with creators who have a following that are posting it organically on their page and then brands can then leverage that. However they see fit on their own organic social on site on paid social. And they're also getting the benefit of a top of funnel brand awareness played that ultimately is just beating the rest of the funnel. Yeah, because any of these creators can be used for three different verticals within a company which is for sourcing creative, for bringing awareness of the brand or for bringing sales and revenue growth. And so it seems like you really lean into the performance side of things. And I think most brands probably do awareness and don't do it as performance. But that's also because of a lack of understanding of how do you, you know, measure and use influencer as a channel of performance. Yeah. So I'm curious which of those of you guys focus on and it's like your bread on butter. Yeah, for sure. So how we measure influencer is we really measure it as an attention channel. And so I think that people are measuring, try to measure influencer like it's 2015 where you just sponsor an influencer, you pay them $1,000 and then you see $5,000 come back as a direct response. Like they're trading influencers like paid social where influencers should be treated much more like TV. And so where influencer is really there to drive top of funnel awareness, top of funnel traffic at cheap CPM. So we have clients that we will drive a hundred million organic impressions a year at, you know, $8 CPMs for the year just because number one, we're sending out tons of free product. We're also sponsoring creators post and negotiating rates on a CPM basis. And then we see that performance translating eventually into sales through post purchase surveys and seeing, you know, seven figures plus of post purchase surveys coming in. But I think that like as myself as like a performance guy moving into brand, you know that I want every single influencer to be driving sales via discount code or an affiliate link. But I often think that there's so much going on, especially if you're an eight figure night figure brand, there's so many marketing activities that those links are getting lost. The discount code is getting is getting scooped up by retail, me not. And it's off to the races from there. So those are kind of like the KPIs that we use to measure and how our most successful clients think about influencer as a channel. They're super interesting about the post purchase survey as like attribution because, you know, a lot of companies will do it even before, you know, or while you're doing the purchase, how did you hear about us, et cetera. But you're just adding more friction into the funnel. They might just select one of, you know, the multiple choice just to get it over with. So how does that work? How does that work for post purchase? Like what are they getting? And why would they share that info with you? Yeah, for sure. So I mean, it's actually pretty interesting. I think number one, like we, a lot of our clients use no K&L like post purchase surveys and they're, you know, they're selecting that as an actual channel in post purchase. And then they're referring to a specific influencer. But one of the things I was actually just talking to a brand like three weeks ago, he basically attributes 40, 40, the exact number is 42% of his revenue to influencers right now. But his affiliate links only attribute 20% of his total revenue to influencer. And there's this major drop off because because of what I just mentioned, you know, you see influencers post on Instagram or TikTok, then you go to Google and then you type it in. And you click on the brand search, Google gets the purchase. They didn't track it with a link or code or of you through a conversion. Nothing got tracked. So, you know, he's lucky in the fact that he's a medical device sales and medical device sales. And basically it's a pre purchase survey kind of like what you were mentioning is that when they're signing up for this prescription, they, they answer, you know, where did you hear about us? And influencers like which influencer and that's how they're actually tracking back a still the revenues per influencer. So I don't know. And do you manually reward those? Yes. He manually rewards and a month and reconciles sales versus like what the affiliate links, which is good because then he get doubled out on those efforts because he's new. They're working. But like, I think that's like a missing piece is almost like this middle of the funnel, where people are dropping off our landing pages and going into email flows and then converting versus click the link to purchase. - Yeah, and I love the manually the rewarding because at the end of the day, you want to incentivize the influencer as much as possible. Then they might want to voluntarily just shout you out and continue working with you. And so before we get into further on expanding relationships with influencers, I'm curious, you mentioned CPMs. And so that's sort of like the golden rule for you to decide which creators to activate. But I'm curious, how do you define the quality of those impressions? How do you sort of vet for the quality of those impressions? Because a creator might have really low CPMs, then you look at them on the TikTok creator marketplace and like half their, more than half their audience is in Philippines, et cetera. So I wonder what your vetting process for those impressions is. - Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, ultimately we're looking at the consistency of those views. So like over the last, like when we're negotiating a deal with a creator, we're looking at the last 10 videos. We're not just going off. Like if you look at TikTok, you'll see one video that has like 10 million plays or 100 million plays and they have like all these likes, but all the rest of their videos have 1000 plays. And so there is some nuance, like, but we're doing it at such a high volume of creator partnerships that oftentimes, in terms of like where their following is coming from, like we're not always going to every single creator and double checking where their audience, as long as they are in this specific country that our brands are in. So that's how we look at it, but it's really about the consistency of volume because I think I don't think there's any true metric to use other than CPM and looking at the total views of that content over time to actually come up with an incredible number. Otherwise, you're a lot of brands have just been burned like in the last few years of, I pay $5,000 for an Instagram reel and nothing happened. You know, I paid $1,000 for a story. They had a million followers, but nothing happened. And so I think at the end of the day, we have to think of ourselves as performance marketers. We're not magicians or marketers. And so we need a testing budget and we need to see what the results are over time. And so starting with the loads of budget that has $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month to start sponsoring creator content and seeing what the results were over time, you know, kind of looking at the comments, seeing who are the type of people that are commenting, making sure those aren't people just bots or people with the Philippines but getting a better understanding of who they are. - You know, you mentioned that you look at the last 10 and then say one might have popped with 10 million views. I'm curious what your thoughts are on. Well, if we, you know, if we look at the last 20, every one out of four hit a million plus views, whatever, let's, you know, initial performance was okay. If let's just pay for four for this creator. Or do you just sort of say like do one off engagements with each creator? Does the math make sense there? So I think that like number one, how we like to approach most creator relationships is always through free product first. And so our clients typically 80% of like each brand partnerships is through product gifting. It's such an efficient method, the generate awareness, the cogs are gonna be so cheap compared to the influencer typical rate that we're able to get tons of content and awareness for a deep discount. So number two is in terms of approaching those larger partnerships. Yes, we, number one can like bake that into a retainer. So we might do like a three month contract with a creator. So instead of a one off post, there's like a three to four month engagement where they're posting several times a month. And is that whole kind of methodology of someone needs to see, needs to see content, you know, six to seven times on average before they purchase like that kind of whole methodology. It's actually true. Like I feel like people just say that and you're kind of like, okay, this guy's so fake, but I actually just had a client who they started out with a really well known famous surfer last year. And honestly like in the first two or three months, they were only driving like, you know, $800 a month, maybe for, you know, an eight figure brand, which is just nothing. And then over time as they continue to use the product and kept showing up consistently, they're starting to drive $60, $70,000 worth of sales every single month. So I think that it makes a lot of sense to start on three product first, but then having, you know, a retainer style engagement is always available, but each deal is different. And I think that there's different things that you can pull like creative rights and usage rights over a certain period of time of six months or a year that kind of help you get the contract to achieve a rate. - Yeah. And so to make that work, you need volume, right? Like you need volume in terms of responses of creators. And so there's so much lift, heavy lifting to get a machine like that going, especially when it comes to sourcing, right? Like most people, if they, if sourcing is up to them, they think of their competitors, they go look, which influences are promoting their competitors and they run out of sources or worth to source from immediately. And then they go and pay like a ton of money for an influencer database, but not everyone in the database is gonna want to work with them for free product. So how does your agency ensure that there's gonna be enough volume for the brand? - Oh man, that's a great question. I think number one is what the brand is, right? Like what we found is number one, there's never, there's, there are plenty of female creators who are in like a women's apparel niche. We, there's like infinite volume for that. Like there's just like, there's so many influencers out there that they're so, we can just like keep working with them. But if you're in the men's apparel space, that volume is gonna be way less. Like there's just not as many. Like we've worked on that space before and it's so challenging to get the right volume just because like if you think about influencers as tam, like there's just not as many. Like there just aren't. And so I think you have to reset expectations per brand. So like we've actually worked in the outdoors space in like kind of like survival, prepper type niches as well. And that was just another niche that, though that's very few and far between. There's probably only, you know, maybe 300 total time. Really quality influencers in that space. And so how we think about that is instead of, you know, mass seating out product, then I would take a small budget and go work with the biggest players in that space. Like that's, that's how I would approach that. And so you just have to like see, think about that like what's the total tam of your current market and, um, of like those influencers and then, instead of sending out product, like how can you introduce like payment terms that makes it for them? Because at the end of the day, most influencers walk consistent income over a one-off hit of a post. And that way they can like maintain integrity. They're working with the same brand over time. Then they start building a stint with their audience 'cause they've been pro-loving the same one over like, over a year versus like, shilling out random, you know, products and random brands like every other month. And so yeah, thanks for your question. Like every brain is different. And so I would kind of go more small ball and using a small budget to go with like more intimate relationships. Josh, if you're at the level, maybe you're a little bit before, um, you know, approaching an agency to handle this whole play. And imagine you're running your own brand and you want to top into influencer. Like what would your, what would your strategy be if you were launching your own brand and you were like, you know, I've got a little bit of budget. Maybe I don't quite have like the five or 10, 10 grand a month. Like how many creators are you working with? How much, like how much product are you seeding? I know some of it, like you said, depends on the market that you're in. But like, how would you structure it yourself if you were a brand? Yeah, for sure. So how I like to think about it is, well, number one, if you're not at seven state years yet, I would just invest into paid social and email marketing and search and shopping before I even touch influencer. Like that's how I think of building a brand first 'cause a lot of times these influencer posts are gonna be a one off hit where it's not gonna be super consistent unless you're, you know, like white listing through their page. So if you're not at seven figures yet, just stay focused on paid social and email and get to, you know, one to three Nell. And so at that like one to, I would say like one million year to five million a year, if we're talking about like kind of buckets for this, is I would really focus on just product gifting. Like I would just work on, number one, I would have a social media manager who is, you know, managing your TikTok, managing your Instagram, and managing your influencer partnerships. And so what I would have them do is I would, you know, get an out of the box tool, there's a lot of great tools, we use a spire and we also use a great tool called Story Clash. And so I would use an out of the box tool like that. And I would have them basically hit a KPI of 100 to 200 influencers sourced per week. Now it would really just work on how can I efficiently generate as much content and awareness as possible just for free product weekly. And I would really focus on the lead measure of for how many influencers I reach out to, how many are opting into the campaign and want to work with us because you really need to, you know, maybe it's a landing page, maybe it's the type of creators that you're reaching out to, but you need to really find product market fit when it comes to influencers and just focus on getting products shipped. Like I would just focus on, you know, getting 10 shipments per week. So 40 a month going out and then you're probably going to get 30 posts a week that's like one a day. Sorry, 30 a month and like that's like one a day. And then you're then going to be able to take all that content, you know, put it onto your own organic social and then also use that for paid social, use it for on site conversions for optimizing the landing page. So that's just how I would be going is instead of taking three K pay creators, I would take three K of cause of good soul and just focus on efficiently generating new content awareness on the market. Yeah, because if you're in the early stages and you're a solo founder, it's just way too much work. So it makes total sense why do the page channels like somebody might listen and think, you don't get motivated one day, start reaching out to some influencers and start getting responses, just a process of constantly sourcing, constantly reaching out, having, you need the volume. So you have the leverage in the negotiation and the patience to like understand, you don't have to say yes or everything. You probably have to say no to most, you know, responses you get with rates and all that. So yeah, whereas like if you don't have the what's up, I said, it's going to be a grind. Yeah. So in understand that that you're going to get so much back and forth that you're going to be demotivated. So you might as well delegate this to someone on your team to figure it out. Yeah. So your entire premise basically is, let's say get 5,000 top of funnel like influencers to reach out to 30% or so are going to reply and then 20% or so are going to be down to do it for gifting and then you just do that over and over at mass scale, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I would say start with 100 to 200 creators a week sourced and then your opt and rates shown vary between 10 to 40% depending on the type of creator, what kind of product you have. And then I would just focus on optimizing that opt in rate so that the product is going out and you're getting those posts back and then following up, right? Like they're going to help another great thing that we've done is like we'll follow up via SMS, we'll follow up via email. And I think yeah, to your point of moment, it's just about like delegating this to someone who it's just a part of their role. Like if you're a solo fighter, you don't want to be like relying on motivation. This is just something that just needs to happen automatically each week. And so we're helping build that system. And we've done this for brands. We'll coach their teams in house and we'll just train them and plug the system in so that you know, they can just get what they need. Most brands, they don't have enough content to test and pay social and across organic. And so all of a sudden they're going to 40 new pieces of concept that they didn't have before and just makes their media buyers happy makes your organic social teams happy and then they're off to the races. We are really excited to announce that DTC pot is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show bringing you guys amazing guests and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork. What is your take on like the platforms? I feel like, you know, it's kind of a booster and a helper, but most people think, okay, I want to do influencers. Let's get on a platform and not to say that the platforms don't work at all, but you know, I just think there's so much through this process and terms of like operation. At least so I'm curious. You mentioned some platforms. So it's interesting to me that not only do you do it in house, but you also leverage the platform. What's your overall take on existing platforms? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I think that is so helpful to have a great tech stack. I'm kind of biased. I don't have a problem with, I don't have any affiliate links to send you guys. I promise, but no, we want to hear that. Yeah, I've been through so many. I've been, I've like, I usually pay like $50,000 a year, just in software costs. So I've tested all like everything and in my book, our favorite tools are top two tools right now are a spire and story clash. And I want to talk about, so I'll talk about the first one. I'll talk about story clash first because it's the first, it's the best sourcing tool that we've found. And the reason that it's the best sourcing tool that we've ever found is because they don't have a good relationship with meta. And so there is any any influencer software tools that we have an amazing relationship with meta, we have an amazing relationship with TikTok. The the tool is usually way worse because they depend on their API and like, that's the problem. It's like they're benefit in their curse. Yes. And so instead of the API, they're typically scraping the data and the data is way better. Because you know, meta TikTok, they're all going towards this first party, creating your data to hide, you know, where they're following is from how fast they're following grew, whatever. But story clash, they're, you know, they're based in Austria and they're, you know, they're part of like the EU data privacy kind of stuff. So number one, the data is super clean, but they don't have the relationship with meta, which makes their sourcing tool way better. So I can go in, I can look at, like I can actually search brands in there and I can see every influencer that they've worked with in the past year and I can export that as a list. So that's just like such a great advantage when a new brand is onboarding and I can go look at who their competitors are working with. And then maybe even just look at their current existing influencers and make it look like off of that audience. But I'll say that that is the best sourcing tool where aspire has been the best and in my book, like the most affordable management tool. So, you know, number one, building out campaigns to centralize where influencers are coming into apply. So we always set up an evergreen campaign of just, this is essential application for influencers or affiliates to apply. But then creating larger moments throughout the quarter where we're building out campaigns around new product drops, promotions, maybe they're doing something at retail that we're like going to have 30 to 40 influencers actually go in store or paying them to go make content about their experience going into target or Walmart. And so aspire just has a ton of awesome capabilities there that make it super easy to make new campaigns to, you know, ship product through Shopify store or WooCommerce. So yeah, those are, I guess in terms of like, do you need to use a tool? No you don't. I think you can get by on some spreadsheets and doing it through DMs. But if you want to really scale it out, then I think having a solid tech stack is super helpful. Yeah. So Josh, I want to move over to talking about type of results when this is done right. And so like the biggest cost for someone is for a brand owner is the opportunity cost of, you know, wasting on the potential of this, wasting the potential of this in a year, trying it in house, et cetera. Yeah. So when done right with a system like yours where you just plug it in, you start the machine, you're running it. What can a brand expect? I assume you probably work with brands that are, you know, high seven figures, eight figures, et cetera. What type of results have you generated for them? Yeah, for sure. So like I mentioned, like last year we had a large brand that we generated over a hundred million for panic impressions at eight dollars CPM. And so just like really, really cheap eyeballs on product that then is leading to sales. And then that's also including 2000 influencer, like tag influencers post just for my team's ability. And so 80% of that is just through free product. And then the other 20% of that is through like paid partnerships. And so that I think, you know, if you're, you know, let's say a six million dollar a year e-commerce brand that's just getting into influencer, like I think in three months, you can sign a hundred creators and expect to start seeing five, 10, 15 posts per week coming in consistently. Like I think that's a great benchmark is do I have consistently 10 posts a week coming in from the last seven days? Like that's a great start. And then focusing on generating awareness, like what type of, what type of content is hitting the algorithm and doing well from like a viral standpoint. And then really directing those creators on this is a type of content we would like you to emulate so that, you know, we're hitting it. We're getting into the algorithm and that it's performing from an awareness standpoint. It's not just content numbers. It's also awareness. and so what we'll do for our clients is really just building out creative briefs and they're not scripts. We're really just giving them content that we've seen do well from a paid perspective on paid social or organic social that then that creator can then emulate not copy, but just like like emulate maybe the structure of that content will give them examples in that brief of, you know, this is what we like to see. And so eventually, you know, we want to see, you know, a million organic impressions in a given month at an $8 CPM. Can we beat your Facebook CPMs? They're at $30 and can we get that down to 10 to 15 dollars? And then also how's that content performing from a paid social perspective, getting your feedback from your media buyer? So yeah, those are kind of like some of the results is like 5, 10 posts a week, getting up to a hundred creator sign total, getting up to a million organic impressions of mud, and then just continuing to feed that funnel. Josh, one thing that you just mentioned that I kind of want to go a little deeper on was the importance of creator briefs, right? What are you sending to the creator? So they have all the relevant information, like you're saying there's content they can emulate. What type of swipe file from the brand? Do you see work best where the creator has what they need to create content and be authentic to the brand without being super overwhelmed and being like, oh my god, this is way too much for me to deal with. Yeah, 100%. So I'll just say at a high level, we're not giving them a script, we're giving them guardrails, right? Like, especially if you have a sensitive product that, you know, especially in like the medical device, kind of bro or something like that, you want to like, you want to make it super quickly and clearly say, do not say this. So like, here's the things that you don't want to say and then get to the point because, you know, essentially if there's an influence or doing this for free product, they are not going to be spending an hour reading through your creative brief and going through your five different intro hooks that you would like them to sell and the seven different product benefits. We want like three big call outs that ideally we like you to hit and here's some examples of content that have done well. So at the end of the day, we want to let the creator create and let them do their thing versus coaching them to like read off a script. So I don't know, just just know that like, they are going to read it for maybe two minutes, like their attention span is just as short as ours is. And so don't ask like over the moon in those briefs. And you're not going to nail it every time, right? Like, even if you send guardrails and examples, then you'll get the ones that literally just copy the example and there goes that campaign and you know, lost products, et cetera. You really have to think of mass scale in order to be able to have a successful campaign. I'm curious. Do you guys measure, you know, when you talk about there's two sides here. There's the operations and then there's a strategy as well. How does your agency engage? Do you guys like layer it? Or it's like, well, if you just want the machine and the operations, or do you think it all needs to be cohesive and it's a whole thing in order for it to be successful? Yeah, that's a good question. So like the measurement and like refining and you know, besides from just running the whole thing. Yeah, for sure. So I think it's super important to have. Yeah, number one, your tech stack dialed, but I think so top level, we basically have three phases that we break down of what we call the influencer roadmap. So the first phase is what we call the design phase and we're really going to design the foundations of your influencer program. So number one, who are the type of influencers that we want to go after? Like there's probably three to four to five different types of markets and different types of influencers that we can actually go after and that we can a b test. We go for a week to see who has a higher opt in rate versus the next guy. So we'll kind of like staying that niche. So maybe, you know, if you have a female, blood brand, maybe you're going into fitness, maybe you're going into cooking, maybe it's a stay at home mom, maybe there's like all there's all these different like types of demographics that we can think about an a b test and then we're going to go build out an essentialized hub like an aspire, like a grand as essentialized tech stack and then we're going to have a creative breach. And then the scale piece really comes through team. So what we have on our team is we have a dedicated account manager for strategy and then we also have a dedicated influencer specialist who's going to do all the sourcing and outreach. And on top of that, we just have a VA to support on like email replies. So we have, you know, responses ready to go for when people are responding to our emails. And so we're, you know, sending out 200 influencer emails per week per brand. So it's just a really, really high volume per brand. And then we're measuring those authentic rates and we're onboarding and shipping product. And then the last thing is just optimizing the program. So grabbing that content and doing the reporting. So we want consistent reporting week over week of how many creators we sourced, how much product was sent, how many people applied, how much content was posted or gain a breach. But here's all that content that the media team can use. So it's just like there's just so many layers. And then you can get into paid budgets. And then that's a whole another ball game where, you know, you're negotiating with an influencers agent, your redlining contracts. You're going back and forth via email. They're super difficult. They want $10,000 for a real. It's all super exhausting. And but also fun because of the other day, they come back with this, you know, when that one piece of content hits, like we had one piece of content last and that actually in February that had like 10 million, like 10 million views. Like that's when I get excited is like all this hard work was really worth it. And so there's so many layers to this. But at the end of the day, it's when that content comes back and it's and it's firing off. Like that's what when it really gets on. Yeah, totally. I know, you know, when it comes to the you mentioned, you have the VA on on the replies. And when it comes to negotiations, which is what goes down on the email, you know, I wonder if brands that are looking to work with you, etc. They're like, ooh, like free product. Like we don't want our brand to be damaged and thinking we're trying to take a vantage of creators, etc. I've seen you on Twitter, get shade for like people saying, you know, you're you're giving creators sampling, etc. So, you know, I'm curious what you take us on that. And you know, for brands that are thinking that like they need to pay up to not damage their brand reputation and quotation. Yeah. I don't know. I think that like it's pretty commonplace now for free product. Like I just think that it's just part of the game. And there are like the reason you need to do a lot of a high volume of outreach is because of all the influencers who think they need to be paid for that content. And the last thing that they shouldn't be, but I feel like before payment comes dating, which is sending free product. And so and sometimes like if it's I think that also the product needs to be good. Like if people are willing to do it for free, maybe it's because the product sucks. Right. Like I don't think that Lord people want another moisturizer in the man. Toid, dude wipes toilet paper. Yeah, exactly, but like my friend Dakota, he just sent me a pizza oven in the mail. And I was like, this thing is amazing. Like the wood fire pizza oven. And I was so stoked about it. And I started filming content in my backyard. Like just like I was like, you know, hoping that he would like it so that he can use it on a ladder, whatever he wants to use it for. And he texted me and he's like, dude, this is the most high quality content I've seen in a while because you just have the hard time with like customers actually making good content. And so I just think the product needs to be great. So if I want to send you guys, you know, like your favorite men's apparel, you're going to be like, yes, like please send me that sick hoodie here. Please send me that like new pair of shoes. People will get excited about that. Still like I get excited about that. I get stuff sent to me all the time. I've got cold plunges. I've gotten supplements. I've like, all this free stuff just from being on D to C Twitter that I get so stoked about free product. I think it's the same for influencers still. I just think that you need to have a roadmap to that getting them paid. So that was like the first step is maybe one off post. But then you have these other campaigns throughout the quarter. We're going to be a paper post where maybe it's a longer term engagement on running white listing ads, like the monitor, tanner to post every month. So I think that you just need to make that clear for the influencer. Josh, one of the last questions I had for you is kind of like the overlap between like you're saying like the influencer content. If you can get the rights to it and publishing it and you GC, I think you GC like traditionally is always done really well because you can test it really quickly. It's like cheap to generate comparatively. But like one thing that we've noticed in some of the creative that we're running and sometimes when we like took a piece of creative, that like was done by a real influencer who's like a really solid creator and like let's it rip, it's just like eating all the budget compared to the UGC we're putting out. So is that something that you see as well where like you know where before maybe there was in as much content now, like you really have to hit one out of the park to put performance budget behind it. I don't know. I feel like part of it too is like we've had videos that will just be part of the mashup that keeps getting repurbished through that next holiday sale. But at this point, that one video has done seven figures. But it's a part of a mashup. It's not even a singular video. And so I don't know. I feel like he can sit here and tell you what the answer is of what's going to work and what's not going to work. I'm not an ad whisperer like David Herbinez. But I think that just having that content that you can then edit and making sure that you get the creative rights upfront is the most important piece is like because if you have to get them afterwards, the rate's going to be way more expensive. So just establishing that upfront that you have that six month length and creative rights is going to go a long way. Well, Josh, I know we've peppered you here with questions. My last question is around the editing. How much is editing the content play a part in the whole process? Yeah. So we have our in-house editors that were able to turn around that raw footage into more direct response style content. But a lot of brands have their own in-house teams. So I think it's like a big part of it. I think having captions like most people are watching Instagram with their audio off. So just like putting in captions, putting in some music to make it feel a little bit more upbeat. But sometimes just throwing in the raw footage can help to making it feel like it's not an ad so that people stay on and then they realize it's an ad. I think it's kind of the name of the game because I don't know about you guys, but nowadays I just I just feel like most UGC creators just feel so fake that you just know it's an ad right away. And you just like go on to the next thing. So I feel like, oh, this is so cliche. But making it feel as native and as authentic as possible is going to help you win. And the algorithm at the end of the day. But again, sorry for the cliche saying, but it's true. No, and that is why you don't give a script because that's when it just looks like like a commercial that was pre-planned. So Josh, thank you for coming on the plot today for anyone who's listening that might want to learn more about aligned growth and keep up with all your stuff. Where can they find you? Yeah. If you use number one, follow me on Twitter @ JoshJ during on Twitter. That's where I'm most active. And then you can go to our website at aligned growth management.com. And you can check out some case studies and feel free to book a call with me and we can chat about strategy, whether or not you work with us. I'm always down to just have a conversation. But yeah, that's those are the two best places to find me. Sweet. Thanks for coming on the show Josh. Yeah, thanks Josh. Thanks Josh. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of DTC Pod. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love your support. A rating and a review would go a long way as we continue to host the best builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter. Visit us on DTCPod.com to join our founder community and access resources from every episode. We'll see you on the next pod.